Santha Rama Rau: The prolific wordsmith who wrote for the ‘New Yorker’ and was wooed by a mafia don
In her peripatetic life, the accomplished writer got many opportunities to observe major events and changemakers from up close. Courtesy: The Nikhil and Dottie Wagle Family Collection.
When she was six years old, Santha Rama Rau left India for the first time. Her father, Benegal Rama Rau, a civil servant, moved to England as the first Round Table Conference to discuss constitutional reforms in India got underway in 1930. For her, it was the beginning of a lifetime of travel, during which she wrote books and journalistic articles, had a ringside view of global events and met the changemakers of the time. Rau once told a newspaper that she lived in three-year cycles, spending “a year in New York, a city I adore, a year in India, and a year travelling”.
It’s not often that a supporter comes along and is the catalyst of transformative change.
Gurdon Wattles used to sit with me in the galleries of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and review draft sketches of a reimagined campus as we talked about our shared goals for visitors and our desire to increase learning about the region’s important history.
His ideas exemplified his care and concern for the visitor’s experience. “How do we say hello?” he once said to me when we were dreaming through changes to our entrance.
Gurdon literally and figuratively transformed the Museum through massive endeavors like the four-story Wattles Jacobs Education Center and the Wattles Family Gallery (our fine art gallery). He routinely and quietly funded our college internship program, improvements to technology, gallery acoustics, and made our ambitious strategic planning possible.