“You are the kind of
fellows,” he said, leaning forward, his face intense “who would barter your
sisters for a promotion.”
And having made this
apparently pernicious, entirely provocative allegation, the Professor – a short
fellow, wearing a sweater in the middle of a summer day – leaned back with satisfaction and waited
for us to react.
This was typical
of Skroy, which is what we called him. He was the
senior professor amongst a bunch of Organisation Behaviour teachers, each of
whom, when he was not opening a Johari Window, could have been a
founder member of a loony bin, no questions asked. And in that bunch of demented stars, Skroy was Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry.
Skroy used to shuffle
into class with a flask in his hand, which was most intriguing: I spent the
first couple of classes asking around just what was in that decrepit flask and
it was most disappointing to hear that the flask contained just hot water (How boring is that? Yeh dil maange more). But the water – or possibly its temperature –
seemed to galvanise him: he would take a sip from the flask and move into
missile-launch-countdown position, following up with utterly outrageous statements. If
Skroy had any compassion for his students, any thought that they were
part-human, he hid the emotion well and, in the few classes in which he inflicted himself on the unsuspecting public, allegations, insinuations and impertinence
ruled. Oddly enough, every institution has such fellows, with strong views, who are anti-establishment - even when they are the establishment - and make provocative statements that excite and irritate everyone.
Some years earlier, Skroy had apparently had a couple of heart attacks (my sympathies are entirely with that organ) but the fire of some long-misplaced idealism continued to burn: we were the pampered bourgeois , the wavering nouveau riche
proletariat, the faltering scum, the greedy rampagers, the harbingers of
capitalist anarchy. You get the
picture.
So, when Skroy spoke these words – the ones at the beginning of this article - each of us had mixed
thoughts ranging from indifference to annoyance; we were yet to grasp his
provocative nature. It was early days in
our IIM tenure and I, for one, was way too timid to stand up to this incitement
(in fact, I was far from affronted and did have a pesky cousin brother up for
barter at that time, if Skroy was interested).
But, Arpana, an intrepid classmate took this all rather personally – she
stood up and walked out of class, followed by a couple of other girls, while
the guys – who were the target of Skroy’s ire in the first place – blinked in
silence and pondered on just what they were expected to do. Arpana was (and remains) a quiet, unassuming
person, but in that moment, she exhibited the guts to stand up to an anserine
bully and this was the subject matter of much discussion in the months to
come.
The predictable post-script to the walk-out was that Skroy did tone down his vitriol and
we were spared much of such nonsense though attendance in his classes increased in the hopeful expectation of more drama and the back benchers were deeply disappointed that he seemed to have had not much more to allege.
Skroy did not live
very much longer after the trimester with our class (no, not because Arpana and others walked out. Correlation and causation are two different things). Had he lived for another twenty seven years
and strolled through the Management Development Block on the night of August 13th
or 14th 2016, he might have seen fifty of the most pampered bourgeois,
some of whom were delighted to be wavering nouveau riche proletariat (wavering,
because gravity and lightheadedness were going at each other), a mass of
faltering scum having a whale of a time in each other’s company, a
handful of greedy rampagers as they raised their twenty-fourth toast and the
captains of capitalist anarchy in boisterous mayhem. …and he would have nodded his heavy head,
sipped his hot water with a I-told-you-so look and possibly got into
missile-launch-countdown mode.
So, as they say, all’s
well that ends well.
