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Dear Prof.
Kabir,
I am most grateful to you for your kind enquiries and kindest
sentiments expressed by you regarding my health. I have now been practically three months
in bed, and am slowly coming back to something like normal. As I write this letter, I am
very much struck and reminded by the beautiful expression that you had used in one of your
earlier letters regard- ing the gap between the progress of medical Science and the
progress of diseases. My case was diagoni- sed first as T.B. of the bone and later as
cancer, got operated for obtaining blocks for pathological examination, and I have been
given deep X-ray treat- ment for well over one month, for one part of the body or the
other. I am just beginning to have some regulated movement and have been permitted by my
doctors even to come to Delhi by train on the 14th March for attending one or two
important meetings in the C.S.I.R. in which, as you know, I am most deeply interested.
As I think of the nature of my illness I should like to repeat what our
noble Rajaji wrote to me a month ago: "Do not be dejected by what doctors say in
their wisdom. There is an all-pervading power that wills its own will, and no marvel can
beat the marvels of that will". It was Abraham Lincoln who said: "Without His
will I cannot succeed, and with His will 1 cannot fail". And there I stand with all
faith and a prayerful hope that the future has still something in store for me, and more,
my educational institutions at Karaikudi.
After dilating at such length about my personal affair, I wish to
convey to you my feelings on the news that I read in yesterday's papers regarding your
resignation and your likely entry into Politics. Permit. me to say, Mr. Kabir, that with
your scholarship and with your broad outlook and abiding consideration for others, the new
arena that you have chosen to enter will give you ample opportunities to serve the
country, particularly in the field of education where you have such great talents I wish
you, on the eve of your new career all my prayerful good wishes for your great and eminent
success.
As I have written a little earlier, I have arranged to leave on the 1th
March from Madras for Delhi, and shall be in Delhi till the 22nd. If you happen to be at
Delhi during that period, nothing will give me greater pleasure than to call on you and
convey my good wishes in person, and also thank you most heartily for what help you have
been rendering to my educational institutions when you have adorned the Chair as Secretary
of the Ministry of Education. I am sure you will kindly introduce me to your colleague,
Sri Saiyidain, whom I have the privilege of just knowing.
I have been reading " Science, Democracy and Islam" with
profit. Your essay on "The Welfare State" impressed me much.
With best wishes and kind regards, Yours Sincerely, Sd.. RM. Alagappa
Chettiar.
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