“I used to visit Taganka Theatre. I would stand ten hours in the frost, twenty-five degrees below zero, for tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. I could name all the Russian Impressionists in the galleries. Moscow was very free and open back then. It was imbued with perestroika, glasnost, and Gorbachev, Gorba. Forbidden literature began showing up. Say, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Literary magazines were published. We printed books on computer printers at the university. Those were massive machines back then, and we used them to print Alexei Tolstoy on huge sheets of paper. We used the university computers to print his forbidden books.”
“I slept at the train station in Jeseník, and there was smoke everywhere. Smoke forms my base impression of Czechoslovakia of those days. Coal, burnt grease, and cigarettes. Three basic smells. From chimneys and pubs. I liked it.”
“We switched the lights off and the children broke into wails. The opera singer, who was in the hostel with us, gathered the children around and started singing. The older children joined in and sang with her. The little children carried on crying, hidden under the mummies’ skirts. Firecrackers banged outside, and some children giggled in hysterics. They saw their school teacher outside. Their friends.”
“The light is not just in the sky, but inside each of us. Light does not have to come from the sky to set fire to the souls on earth. There is light in each of us, and that light is good. Perhaps the flame is weak in some, stronger in others. Certainly. But we all have that light within us.”
Kumar Vishwanathan was born on 15 November 1963 in Quilon in the Indian state of Kerala. His mother came from a rich rural family, his father was an expert at building and operating coal power plants. In 1983 Kumar Vishwanathan left to study physics at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. While in the Russian capital, he met his future wife, who was a student at Palacký University in Olomouc. In autumn 1989 he witnessed the civil unrest in East Berlin. He experienced the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia among students in Olomouc. In 1990 he completed his studies in Moscow and settled down in Olomouc, where he taught at a bilingual grammar school. When large parts of the Czech Republic were hit by vast flooding in summer 1997, he went to Ostrava to help Romani people from areas afflicted by the deluge. He has been active in Romani issues and the reconciliation of Romanis with the majority of society ever since. In 1998 he received the František Kriegel Award from Charter 77 Foundation.
