Two visitors and a mystery solved

The people at Gemini admired Gandhi and wore khadi, but they knew little about politics beyond that. They were all against 'Communism', though they did not really know what it was: to them a Communist was someone with no family ties and no fear of God.

In 1952, a group from the Moral Re-Armament movement, a kind of international counter-movement to Communism, visited Madras. They were about two hundred people from some twenty nations, and they performed two plays. The studio gave them a warm welcome. Their two plays, 'Jotham Valley' and 'The Forgotten Factor', were so impressive that for years afterwards, almost every Tamil play had a sunrise and sunset scene in the manner of 'Jotham Valley': a bare stage, a white curtain behind, and a tune on the flute.

Some time later, an English poet visited the studio. Who was he? No one knew. He was received with great courtesy and gave a talk, but nobody could understand his accent or what he was talking about, and nobody knew why The Boss had invited him. His visit remained a mystery.

Years later, the author was reading about a short story contest run by a British periodical, The Encounter. He looked up its editor, and found the name: Stephen Spender, the same poet who had visited Gemini.

Later still, he bought a book called 'The God That Failed': essays by six famous writers who had once believed in Communism and then given it up, disillusioned. Stephen Spender was one of them. Now the mystery was solved: The Boss had welcomed the poet not for his poems, but because he was against Communism.