A flask of vitriol

“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.  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. 

As they walked out, Skroy spoke to their retreating backs, "Are you afraid of the truth?" he said, or words to that effect.  But I could see that he was shaken, for this was an unexpected development in his otherwise self-absorbed script.  

If your question is,  Did the boycott change Skroy? (which you ask, probably with a shake of the head), the answer is, surprisingly yes, it did to an extent.  He did tone down his vitriol and we were spared much the infliction of charges from someone who lived on the margins of Cuckoo-land.  

The consequence of the allegation-walk out episode was, of course, that the class strength saw a surge: we had many worthies who believed in leading pure lives and Attendance was on Page 1 in their Handbook-of-Sins.  But their hopes of more drama and deeply memorable experiences were dashed, for he seemed to lose his touch for being outrageous in his allegations.  

Skroy - that infuriating, provocative, Marx-infused, intellectually-corpulent Bong - 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 thirty-odd years and strolled through the Management Development Block on a fine night in August 2023, when our batch had a long-delayed reunion, 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 avaricious 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 the Bongs would say, all’s Bell that ends Bell.

(...and there's a pun somewhere there.....)