What He's Poised to Do

THE ACADEMY LASTED ONLY A DECADE, THOUGH THE BUILDING that housed it, a former boomerang factory, still stands on the border between India and Australia. It is a modest edi-fice, low and long, built in 1912 by the firm of Eyre and Ananthanarayanan, which is today best known for its construction of warehouses throughout Asia but which was at the time interested primarily in erecting a structure for the manufacture of the company’s flagship product. Sections of the factory were rebuilt several times during its first decade, but the façade has been preserved unaltered since 1920. It is a distinctive façade. There is one window shaped like a boomerang and another shaped like the head of Markandeya, and midway between them a large iron door, above which is inscribed the official slogan of the Kaybee Karmic Boomerang Company, “We’ll keep you coming back for more,” which was coined by Andrew Eyre, the son of one of the founders, in 1914. Above the door on the inside are two signs, one above the other, that were installed soon after. The top sign bears a picture of a piglike man surrounded by what looks like fire. No one understands that sign. Below that, there is a sign that says, “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?” This same question appeared, printed on a small laminated card, in selected boxes of the company’s first shipment of Karmic Boomerangs, which were sent to toy stores and Hindu bookstores. Other questions in the series included “When a thief is robbed, should you laugh or cry?” and “How long must the good man wait for his lifetime good deeds to redound to him?” Govindan Ananthanarayanan, also the son of one of the founders, composed eight of these questions in all, and affixed one to the longer arm of each Karmic Boomerang. The question above the factory door was his favorite of them. It was the one he kept coming back to—“as you might expect,” he joked, to the very mild amusement of his family and colleagues—and for that reason he had it turned it into a sign.

The question was interesting to Govindan mainly because he could not answer it. Karmic Boomerangs, which sold slowly at first, became, in the middle years of the decade, a huge hit in both Sydney and Bombay. You could see them everywhere in public meadows and beaches. One writer noted that “these chevrons of virtue fill the sky like a child’s drawings of birds fill a child’s drawings.” Their vogue was short-lived, however. They were considered novelties, though Govindan Ananthanarayanan insisted that they were in fact “functioning ethical devices,” and as quickly as they rose to prominence they fell away into obscurity. Both of Kaybee’s founding families had made small fortunes with the ethical boomerang by then, and while the Eyres went on to become tycoons in the construction industry—taking with them the Eyre and Ananthanarayanan name, which allowed them to do business in India as well as Australia—the Ananthanarayanans, and particularly Govindan, embarked on a more scholarly course. This was not entirely surprising. Before Govindan had composed the eight questions that were packaged with the Karmic Boomerang, he had briefly attended Oxford University, where he had begun to assemble research for a thesis on James Harris Fairchild. Whether Govindan was inspired directly by his father’s company’s boomerang has been lost to history, but what is known is that following the conversion of the company to a construction firm, he reopened the factory as an academy of ethics. Initially, the curriculum was restricted to only nine courses, eight of which were based on the questions from the Kaybee cards. (The ninth was a late addition entitled “Should you ever lie to a man who tells you that he has always told the truth, but whom you suspect of untruth?”) Govindan himself taught “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?”