Three Men in a Boat

It did not seem ironical to me that the subject that would probably be most useful to us in our post-MBA life was taught by the most incompetent.

Rather, it seemed like fun, for the three characters who taught us Personnel Management and Industrial Relations (as HR was then called) were unintentionally comical.  They were as different from each other as chalk from cheese, yet the glue of incompetence held them together; about the reality of their subject, they knew nothing, about the theory, well, even less, if indeed that was possible.  The two who taught me were gentle, possibly gracious, with their grading of the hurriedly incomprehensible stuff that was written in the tests held, so even as this is written, there emanates a feeling of gratitude.

The first of this triumvirate was a small, fair, chubby, bald fellow, with a genial air and a charming smile, called Lele – a name that undoubtedly led to hours of fruitful speculation on variations, opposites (‘Dede’), alliterations (“Lele lekhak leke lao” for instance) and puns (“Le le le Delilah” from Tom Jones).  His entire demeanour was apologetic: he’d shuffle into class with some papers and smile up at the diligent ones who had deemed it necessary to attend (most didn’t).  Then, with an air of “Terribly sorry to have woken you up before lunch”, he would proceed to lecture with a firm, valiant air.  Nobody, of course, paid him any notice.  Occasionally, he would deem it useful to bring in some humour that he had used with every class since 1982 and these were moments of joy for us, for it enabled a release – I’d laugh more than necessary and go back to idle speculation.   Our senior batch, of course, had given us the low down on Lele’s exams: easy, routine, hence focus on other subjects and that was, shall we say, the last nail.  

The second fellow was Sampangi Ramaiah, whom I nicknamed SamRam.  He apparently taught us Industrial Relations, having worked in some public sector or the other.  Now, this should have given him the early ropes, for industrial relations in the public sector are notable by their absence and the subject could have been lightened up with conflicts, broken glasses, politics and intrigue, which would have, no doubt, gripped our collective attention.  Yet, this sober, taciturn fellow would turn up with the most boring – and by this I mean mind-numbingly tedious, frustratingly dreary, horrendously useless – theory, speaking largely to himself and the absorbing projector that seem to take much of his attention.  The feelings of the audience, if those were indeed feelings, were mutual.  He would cling to his material, as if a bear hug would facilitate knowledge transfer, and this attachment was only countered, sadly, by the class’s collective detachment to the same piece of academic drivel.  It did not help that a number of these classes were in the afternoon in a cool classroom. 

SamRam seemed to wander through the classes with little aim, and it was comforting to know that all not-so-good things also come to an end.   I once asked my friend Sampi, who was a mimic beyond compare, to imitate SamRam and let it be recorded for posterity that, for once, Sampi struggled to perform, for such was the perfection of ordinariness that SamRam had accomplished. 

Yet, the numero uno of this trio was clearly Bijoor.  In incompetence, of course, it would have been hard to judge if indeed he took the cake (or, more accurately, dropped it), for such things are perceptional, but clearly he was in many ways in a class of his own.  Much of the impressions I have of Bijoor are from my mates in another class, for he did not (thank God for the mercy) inflict himself on Section A, where I was.   He taught Section C and it would hardly be out of place to note that what he did was a C-section on them,  making unnecessary incisions on an unsuspecting public.  Bijoor had views (often extreme) about everything, and expressed them apparently with ferocity, and the rather cold fact that he taught Personnel Management hardly seemed to constrain him on expressing opinions on more pressing world matters.  Each class, of course, meant discussions amongst us subsequently about his current perambulations, and in that sense the classes were undoubtedly more engaging, but no one ever had a clue to this venerable gentleman’s course.  He was, I remember, a member of every committee in the country that would have him and those meetings provided the odd relief to the class that otherwise, in a word, reeled. 

The collective influence of the threesome was to inhibit any molecule of aspiration that might have existed in any student to pursue Personnel Management (admittedly, those molecules to begin with had been scarce).  We had a bunch of guys who taught us Organisation Behaviour as well, for this was seen as quite distinct from Personnel Management, the distinctions no doubt enriching many an author.  The OB guys knew their subject, but were as idiosyncratic as a Papua New Guinean with a hernia, and we shall leave that story for another day (though on SKRoy, I have written with feeling).  

Some years later, I opened an old trunk and took out a Personnel Management book, looking at it with some surprise.  Opening it and leafing through, I could remember nothing at all.  I was in the same boat as the triumvirate and it was then that I realised my true potential at teaching the subject.  So, look, I say, for a silver lining, and you will find it somewhere, sometime. 

May Day - 2017

 A pleasant and instructive morning, as Sir PG would have written.
  
Ananda, the repository of all forestry knowledge, and I set out early morning into the forest at Jawalagiri in search of the Adenanthera Pavonina (manjadi) tree, which we did not find.  What we did find were elephant tracks - the same male that had been at the farm and its surroundings last night and caused much local excitement. Anand suggested that we follow the elephant and find out where he was.  
Now he does this all the time, of course, so I concurred, but it isn't an exercise calculated to strengthen anyone's nervous system (I am happy to suggest other less taxing options, should you doubt). 

The footprints of the elephant (if you could call large craters, with lava creeping in at the bottom, footprints) were clearly headed into the forest, after a night of crop raiding and local duels with villagers.  At places, these footprints were indistinct on the caked ground, which often made the heart skip a beat (for Ananda would look around with a furtive air of one caught stealing fodder from under Mama's trunk).   We walked carefully past the small lake bed, on which there were signs of chital, gaur, wild boar, a lone leopard and jungle cats, and then reached a rock clearing that I had some years earlier christened Fragrant Rock, for, from the  soil here rise a number of Jalaari trees (Shorea Roxburghii).   
Then we stopped.

Ananda pointed to the valley below, "That's where he is," he asserted with authority; you can be assured, I was unlikely to be the Verification Manager.  
And, indeed, the faint smell - that distinct pachyderm odour - wafted upwards to where we were.  We waited for a while to hear him at work, for elephants are noisy fellows when they lounge around, but without luck.  

We wished him Good Day in absentia and headed back to a patch where a menagerie of bird life - blue bearded bee eaters, parakeets, babblers and mynas and bulbuls and robins, ioras and white-eyes and other birds in the higher canopy - were chirping, whistling, shrieking and calling, and took it all in with enthusiasm, for we were not in Jumbo's vicinity anymore.  In the early sky, the crested serpeant eagle sailed overhead and came to rest on a Terminalia Bellerica; an ominous figure of great size and fine beauty, the yellow on its cheek resplendent in the morning air. 

Our search for manjadi could wait.

A Couple of Minutes in a Lifelong Friendship

The routine would never change. 

Every year, at the onset of my summer vacation, Dad, Mum and I would begin the three day journey: drive up from Digboi to Dibrugarh airport, that is charmingly called Mohanbari, then fly in an Avro to Calcutta, stay overnight with Babymama at 112, Southern Avenue -  enough time to see just how much my cousins hated each other – travel from Howrah onwards to Chennai by the Madras Mail (and later Coromandel Express) which journey took a couple of nights, stay there for a few hours and then catch the Cochin Express to Ernakulam, another overnight journey.  We travelled First Class, not the modern airconditioned one, but the older version with glass and serrated windows that could be lifted up, and with the compartment pretty much to ourselves.  At times, we had the company of VS Menon Uncle and Indira Aunty for some part of the way, at other times we were by ourselves, but never really alone, for one can never be alone when travelling by train. 

I loved the journey as most children do, while Mum hated it as most mums do.  She had to manage much of the rations and hated using the bathroom or indeed leaving the comfort of the coupe, so she’d spend all her time reading or sleeping.  Dad – well, he had loads to do on the journey: he would bathe, shave, pack and repack with neatness and precision, apply generous quantities of talc on himself and on me to ward off the summer sweat, read, write letters when the train was stationary (a favourite preoccupation of his, written carefully in classic, printed handwriting), get down at all junctions to post his letters or to fill up water (which, I conjecture, gave me considerable early immunity),  make friends easily and peruse the timetable with curious vigour.   When VS Menon Uncle travelled with us, I would watch him light a cigarette with a mix of awe and inquisitiveness and wonder just how that smoke travelled inside him.    Much of the talc in the bag was then shaken into in a rolled up piece of paper to get the same effect, but it never seemed to work as well as the real thing: the talc would blow all over the compartment, and Mum would condemn this valiant effort at early childhood smoking.  On one occasion, I inhaled deeply on Cuticura – the original Malayali icon – and coughed until we had reached Waltair junction.    

Waltair was where I got my annual wooden cooking set and Russian dolls, toys that kept me engaged for the rest of the trip.  That part of the journey was possibly the most exciting, despite the heat, for the train seemed to travel over the Godavari for ever, even as I dropped the usual ten paise coin into the river and begged Mum for another one, without ever understanding why we did so.  And, then, we’d cross the Krishna for a repeat performance a few hours before we reached Madras Central.  Next to this station, of course, was Moore Market, where I had to be held back in chains else I’d have bought the market lock, stock and double barrel. 

It was when we were on the last leg of our journey that Dad would get all excited; his home was in Palakkad, but we’d not get off there now.  Instead we would get off at Cochin, and then, in a week or two, travel up to Palakkad by car.  When the train stopped, first thing in the morning, at Olavakkot Junction, as Palakkad’s station was unflatteringly called, he would hop off and buy tea, halwa (yellow, red and maroon), idlis and chutney for breakfast and two newspapers, one being the Mathrubhumi, in an effort to pump up the local economy.  During this buying binge, he would look around at those who were getting off and getting on (he knew about seven-tenths of the Palakkad population of his age or older) and, in general, become animated, with a gleam in the eye, for he was the quintessential Malayali at heart, waiting to get into a mundu.   

But, it was when the train began to move out of the station that the animation, the fidgeting, the gleam-in-the-eye would reach a sort of crescendo. 

The next station, about fifteen minutes away, was Ottapalam, on the banks of the beautiful Neela river (Bharatapuzha) and Dad would be all ready. 

As the train neared Ottapalam – a two minute stop -, Dad would be at the door scanning the landscape.  He had planned this out – as he always did - by writing a letter a month in advance, enough time to receive a response in confirmation. 

And always, as the train came to a halt, Mum and I would look out of the window and see him alight quickly, walk up to a small, elderly, spectacled, mild-looking man waiting at precisely the right spot, shake his hand and give him a bear hug. 

“Vasu!”, CN Nair’s gentle face would break into a smile, even as, in his happiness, the emotion would threaten to run over and overcome him.  He would hurry forward to talk with Mum, who is a couple of years older than his oldest daughter, and hand over a breakfast packet for all of us.  While accepting it gratefully, Mum would insist that this should not have been sent, that it was a lot of work for Chechi (CN’s wife) and in the next sixty seconds, the three of them – CN, Dad and Mum - would have exchanged all the news that anyone in Kerala needed to know.  As you can imagine, much of the conversation centred around who-was-where and matrimony: marriages, proposals, proposals that didn’t quite have the requisite CGPA, weddings attended at Guruvayoor (a favourite Nair pastime, if you did not know).  I often wondered if the only two things people in Kerala did was to get married or to attempt to get others married off, and, of course, as I am now older and have a better understanding of these things, I know that I was right then. 

Dad would then enquire if CN was getting his pension alright, and, if not, whether there was anything to be done at his end.

For, you see, CN Nair Uncle and his wife, were possibly the first Malayalis in Digboi, reaching there at the time of the Second World War, and finding a place for themselves in an alien culture, far away from home.  They were the courageous, cerebral, dedicated expats of yore and they took, under their generous wing, all those who followed from their home state.  To Mum and Dad, they were foster parents: CN was the wise counsel and friend, while Mrs CN's cooking was, by all accounts, divine. They were, in some way, I recall dimly, related to us, but then all Nairs are related to each other in a web of complex quantum theory that defies normal understanding.

I wonder if CN missed his life in Digboi.  Dad send him regular letters that kept him informed of the comings and goings in the little town, but, remember, that was a world in which nothing ever changed.  And, in these two minutes, of course, there was little time for nostalgia. 

The whistle – that marvellous steam engine whistle that I now yearn to hear – would blow, and Dad would hop back on and wave from the doorway, while Mum patiently explained to her son - who seemed stubbornly incapable of understanding relationships and connections - just who this gentleman was (for the sixth time).  And, as the train steamed away towards the precarious bridge over the Neela, I would press my head against the grill and stare at the lonely, dimunitive figure on the Ottapalam station who was waving back till we could not see him anymore.   

And Dad, of course, would get back to the coupe and write out his next letter. 

Hunger Be Hanged

Dear men-who-matter,

India, as I am sure you have now read, ranks 97^th on the latest Global Hunger Index published last week.  Such top-line data is provided by rather dubious organisations like the International Food Policy Research Institute, with the obsessive intention of shaming us; never forget that there are many envious folks who have looked at our GDP growth with increasing despondency. 

We are celebrating the 25^th year of Economic Independence (liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, as the new wave was called), that has unleashed entrepreneurial magic, created Gurgaon (though we do apologise for that) and propelled the Sensex to twenty seven thousand (and counting).  Our per capital GDP has grown from $324 to $5730 and, among other accomplishments, we are now the diabetic capital of the World. 

It is critical therefore that we ignore the myopic presentation by the IFPRI, sieve through this data carefully and arrive at fair conclusions.  In other words, we must look at the resplendent bright side.  So, here goes:

    a)       There are 21 countries whose hunger is worse off than ours. 

    b)      One of them is Pakistan. 

    c)       Liberia, our biggest competitor for world market share in software services and business outsourcing, is slightly behind us as well.

    d)      Zambia, which also got independence from England, though later, should have done much better than us, because it is a smaller country.  Their Hunger Index is 39 and we must cheer that we are at 28.5 (the bigger the number, the worse the hunger), though we were about the same when liberalisation set off in 1992.    

    e)      Mali, with a GDP per capita (income per head per year) of about $2300 – which is less than half of India’s – is only slightly better than us in hunger, not significantly better.  Given that they have just waged a nasty war with extremists, many hungry people must have died which improved the average, else they’d be behind us.

    f)       The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos – which is, in reality, neither democratic nor a republic – has the same ratio of Hunger to GDP per capita, which should give us much cause to cheer, because, you see, we are both a functioning republic and a democracy.  Our country is one where you have unrestricted freedom to go hungry.    

   g)     Rwanda has (percentage-wise) fewer hungry people, but don’t look down on India.  Our GDP is over three times theirs.  We should focus on GDP per capita, not on hungry people.  Also, remember that we belong to the BRICs trading block, while Rwanda can only have modest dreams of, at best, exporting feathers to South Africa.   Another oft-forgetten point: we have a 5000-year old culture that has included a form of hunger in it called fasting.  More people fast in India than go hungry in Rwanda and these things matter – they add to the Hunger Index.  

    h)      You should be relieved to hear that, despite the best efforts of DreamWorks, Madagascar’s hunger situation is alarming.  So is the hunger in Zambia and Chad.  Yes, don’t forget Chad and thank your stars that you live in a country like ours which has only 28.5 points stacked up on the Hunger Index.  The only thing good about Chad is that it isn’t Zimbabwe.

    i)        So what if Tunisia is only 5.5 on the Hunger Index; it’s a really dangerous country to live in and you could die of other reasons than hunger (Travel Mortality Score of 61.5).   Likewise for Ukraine, that just got part taken-over by Russia.   In India, we are much safer and many only die of hunger. 

    j)        Data released by the Thai Rice Exporters Association suggests that India has beaten Thailand to become the largest exporter of rice in the world. According to the reports, India has exported 10.23 million tons of rice in the year 2015 as compared to Thailand's 9.8 million tons. In terms of imports, China remains the number one importer of rice.  As China scores only 7.7 on the Hunger Index, India has done much, no doubt, to ameliorate hunger in that deprived country.  Other countries we have hugely helped are Nigeria, Iran, Malaysia and some in the Middle East, all of which rank better than us in the Hunger Index.  

    k)       Djibouti – which country's name we should all learn to pronounce correctly and learn more about, as it is one of our largest competitors in laundering money – is much worse off as far as hunger goes, I am pleased to report.  They speak French there and are not very good at cricket or kabaddi, and therefore, will stay behind us for a while to come.

    l)        At least two countries that play cricket are worse off than us – Pakistan and Zimbabwe – and, while, in the others, hunger is less prevalent, their Cricket Boards have much less money than ours, which is something we should be deeply proud of.

    m)    Mukesh Ambani, who has been named India's richest person for the ninth year in a row with a sharp increase in net worth to $22.7 billion, has a fortune that is equal to Estonia's GDP, says Forbes India. Estonia scores less than 5 on the Hunger Index, but that is pathetic in comparison to Mr Ambani – he scores 0 on the Hunger Index.  And, that is again something, we should all be proud of, but why does no one focus on these things and go on and on about hunger?  

    n)      We have set one record that no international organisation - damn them - gives us any credit for : as per the response of the Food Corporation of India to a request for information, at least 1,94,502 metric tonnes of food grain was wasted in India due to various reasons between 2005 and March 2013. 

    o)      We must also be deeply respectful of the ability of the FCI’s bean-counters to keep detailed information – down to the last tonne - of such wastage.  Our records of people who have died of hunger are sketchy and exaggerated though – the Iron Lady from Bengal is absolutely certain that no tea garden worker in the closed gardens of North Bengal has died of hunger or malnutrition.  And, since the Iron Lady is always right, those who recorded such data – journalists, fact-finding missions and others –are liars, with mendacity bordering on the criminal.

    p) India has also engendered the most extensive body of original research on hunger, which has resulted in the most books published anywhere on the subject.  Books such as "Hunger and Famine in Kalahandi: An Anthropological Study".  Such research has provided valuable employment to a number of doctoral students. 

If you are reading this, the chances are you do not know anyone who has died of hunger.  No one who has a Linked-in or Facebook account in India has died of hunger as well.  So, should we not wonder at IFPRI’s objective in publishing this stuff?

2016 Global Hunger Index

The Maths Teacher I never knew

The tall, thin and shy young man seated at the dining-cum-study table had the thick spectacles and genteel demeanour of an earnest khadi-clad socialist; he looked briefly up at me – then a little boy of ten – and went back to the Maths text book in front of him, while my brother, who was studying for his IIT entrance exams with the assiduity he normally reserved for his tennis, concentrated on the entirely unfathomable heavy book in front.  

The young man was good at his subject, of this there was no doubt; indeed, if anything was his world, it was the arcane planet of formulae and he had a good Brahmin’s brain to negotiate the treacherous pits that math sums (as problems were then called) hid in your path.  

My parents were delighted at having him teach my brother maths, of course, and my mother, as moms are prone to do, alternated between praying for the IIT seat and praising the maths teacher every day, though she hadn’t the faintest clue to what was being taught (she would, however, announce to the world that Calculus was not for the faint-hearted).  For in Digboi, the World’s finest little town, nestled amidst the tea bushes of Margherita and the oil fields-and-forests that stretched to Burma, a maths teacher of his competence was quite a dream come true; possibly, the only thing that might have bettered this would have been an invitation from IIT on a bone-china plate with a lemongrass, rosemary-and-thyme dressing (but, of course, one must be realistic, particularly about the lemongrass, rosemary-and-thyme dressing). 

Purkayastha did not set out to be a professional teacher; he was studying Chartered Accountancy and had a modest job in the Finance Department at Assam Oil, where Dad was the head of Internal Audit.  He looked up to Dad and had volunteered to teach my brother maths when Dad had passed the question around.  And, so, that was that.

When my brother got into IIT, I saw Purkayastha for the second time (I was banished from the dining room when he normally came in to teach, as ten-year olds are deemed a nuisance to society in general and to older brothers in particular).  Purki (the name that stuck with him for life) had a broad smile on his face, and his quiet tone conveyed satisfaction.  And one can only speculate that this early success was a deciding factor in his decision to become a high-school maths teacher at Carmel Convent, the local ISCE institution.

He never taught me: a couple of years later, we left Digboi for good just after I had finished my sixth standard. Family friends who visited us in Bangalore said that, while he had left his finance job at Assam Oil, he hadn’t quite left finance; his goal to become a Chartered Accountant had only been strengthened, and he prepared twice a year;  CA exams, I will add, may be termed the most arduous of all punishments invented in the Twentieth Century. 

Occasional reports informed us that he hadn’t yet cleared CA, though he came close, even as his reputation as a Maths whiz began to grow and everyone spoke of him with a touch of awe.  And then, the odd report from Digboi stopped coming and I assumed that Purki had probably moved out of the town, possibly to Calcutta or elsewhere. 

In 2012, I went back to Digboi, thirty five years after I had left it and met with my old – and among my dearest – friends, Rajiv.  We had much catching up to do (and some ribbing, for the water that had flowed under the bridge over the years had taken a lot of our hair as well) and then, the conversation inevitably moved to our teachers.  When Rajiv spoke about Purki, his normally-genial expression underwent a change and he turned grim and forthright.  For Purki, he said, had been a terror, a monster of sorts, for my old classmates when they reached their tenth standard and had remained one ever since.  He would set problems in tests that were harder than the hardest and was harsh and relentless in his assessment; often, only one student – Vineet, acknowledged now to be quite a genius – consistently met his grade.  For the others, there would be vitriol, scathing sarcasm and nasty predictions of failure and it seemed that many in the class were deeply emotionally impacted by what was said and, more, by who said it (a maths teacher is a touch below God in the Hindu pantheon).  A few years of personal failure – that damn CA exam -  seemed to morph this genial, shy, young fellow into a dark, embittered man.  Rajiv ended his possibly justified tirade with a mild warning – he has retired from the school and is still somewhere in Digboi, he said, but meet him at your own risk. 

I decided at that moment to meet Purkayastha.  It was an impulsive thought, of course, and strange, for I had seen him just a couple of times, had smiled at him once thirty five years ago, had never been taught by him and knew nothing about him.  A silly decision?  Perhaps.  Or perhaps, I believed that a word of appreciation on my brother’s behalf would make a retired teacher’s day come alive.

 Events conspired interestingly.  I met a lady with the same surname as his, asked if she knew him and, voila!, I had his number.  When I called the next day, the voice was non-commital and hesitant; he would be ok to meet me, he said.  Walking up to the busy market area of Charali, I sipped a cup of tea at a ramshackle little hotel and then strolled down a nondescript street asking passers-by for the way to Purki’s home.  It wasn’t easy to find and I lost my way a bit but, when I did get there, the tiny little house on a narrow by-lane presented itself.  I stood for a moment to contemplate if I was indeed nuts to do this and then rang the bell.

This was the second time I had met Purki and, of course, he had changed; he had put on more weight and had a heavy chin, but, above all else, I saw a tired and unhappy man.  After we had sat down and exchanged small talk, I spoke of my father, whom he remembered well, and passed on the compliment I had come to deliver.  

It was as though I had opened up a tap of turbid – and complex - emotions.  Purki began to ramble, with more than a trace of dejection, his rant reserved for Carmel School that had been his life but had in the end treated him badly, even as he recalled some of his students fondly while being indifferent to others.  He spoke of his integrity as a maths teacher, of how he had hardly ever missed a day of school in decades of teaching, and of being isolated by other teachers and of the hurt caused by this loneliness.    He spoke of his frustration with the CA exam, the abandoning of which had sealed further opportunity.  And, he spoke of his son, a bright student he said, but languishing in the Government College as there was no money to pay for private education.  

I listened. 

Isn’t it true that beneath many exteriors - many sustained exhibitions of hubris, derision, harshness and criticism – there is a great sadness?  Anger masks sadness and nostalgia enlivens it. And for many who do not see a different tomorrow, this sadness offers the meaning they once were seeking.  

After a while, the conversation, as it unwound, began to seem forced and it was time to say goodbye.  He asked for help for his son and I promised, leaving my number behind, but knowing that he probably would not call. 

As my palms came together and I said Namaste, I knew that we would not meet again.  Some meetings are meant to be this way.

 

  

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.....)

The Fox

The face that looks back at me from the photograph in our Year Book is youthful, of dark complexion and sits lightly on a thin body.  The hair is neatly combed - indeed, I rarely saw a tousled head of hair on him in the two years on campus.  He is wearing a T-shirt and his trademark skin-tight jeans many years before it became fashionable to get your daily exercise and leg-muscles massage by battling with the denim trouser on the bed.  But what is most arresting in the photograph are the smile and the eyes: the smile is benign and teasing and the eyes have a hint of mischief, a trace of childlike naughtiness that we see in some truly special children, who are as troublesome and non-conforming as they are sharp and wonderfully deviant.   

When I got to know him on campus, the first image that came to mind was of an endearing, rather saucy fox, one who would be up to no good because, well, he wanted to be up to no good.  I shall therefore refer to him hereon as the Fox.

He was with us at D Quarters, being a Bangalorean, and, when the two of us compared notes, we found that I had actually spent a few months in his class in the 7^th standard, before switching schools.  Later, when I spoke to our common friends about the Fox, they would immediately have a mildly startled air about them, as if I had suggested that their house had been selected for the forthcoming landing of a payload satellite. 

It took me, and the others who spent our happy two years years in DQ and G-top together, very little time to find out why.  For the Fox was the mimic of our batch, an outstanding, exaggerated imitator when in the company of friends (which included a diminishing Old Monk), and a careful performer when in not-so-comfortable company. 

We read nowadays a great deal about method-acting; actors observing others’ mannerisms and then duplicating them on screen.  The Fox needed none of this, for it came to him easily, just as dismay came naturally to an academic topper on knowing the grades of others, just as revulsion came to me when double beans were served for dinner, just, indeed, as cows belch.  He was, in other words, a Natural and would choose some daring moments to display that ferocious talent.

In the first year, we had an Economics professor, whom I shall simply called Bala; there is no point in identifying someone you intend to describe (hopefully) to comic relief.  Bala had the most astonishing mannerisms and, in the rather arduous pursuit of the subject, most of us missed these gems of idiosyncrasy.  For one, he would snort at frequent intervals, rather like a wild buffalo that is cross with its next meal, - the poor fellow, I suspect had asthma or certainly something else that blocked his air passage and the snort had begun as a determined effort to keep the engine going; over a period of time though it had become a habit and now, even when the engine was purring away and conforming to Euro 4 standards, the snort ensued at regular intervals.  His second habit, and this was so fascinating to watch that I nearly failed in the subject, was to swing a leg (alternating between the right and the left) to and fro, in the manner of an elephant contemplating its next course of action.  When he had to smile, the muscles around the lips seemed to cause indefinable agony and he kept the effort to the minimum. 

Well, the story is that, on a particular occasion, before the class began, the Fox walked up to the podium of a semi-empty class and began to snort and swing his legs.  Now, you see, we can all snort and swing our legs, but few can do it in precisely the same way that Bala did.  The observers erupted into laughter, even as the Fox turned to the board behind to begin a mock session and observed Bala watching him with a rather puzzled air. 

In the brief silence that followed, I am told, the Fox gave Bala the same smile – the agony of muscular strain exemplified – and quietly walked up to his place in front.  That he passed Economics implies that either the good Professor did not catch on, or, if he did, is worthy of canonisation.

But the Fox's best acts – his piece de resistance, as it were – were the imitations of the many couples on campus that were dating or certainly of fellows who had set their eyes on a girl.  With uncanny precision, often with us discreetly watching, he would walk past the guy or indeed the girl, imitating the mannerisms of either or both parties.  There would be no advance notice, no ‘watch me do this’, just a natural slippage into a role that he would click out of in a minute, as we rolled over laughing at the sheer audacity of the whole thing.  To this day, of course, most of those subjects have no idea of the Fox’s manoeuvres. 

When he mimicked each one of us at G-Top – his best friends (if such chaps can actually retain best friends) – it was to much merriment, generally after we had downed a measure of warmth from the bottle in regular State of the World Round Tables.  As the evening progressed, the Fox would warm up, his rendition of the day’s ordinary events, embellished with rip-roaring imitation.  Godfy, whose endearment for the 555 cigarette is the stuff of legend, was one of the Fox’s favourite subjects.  He was always, with exaggerated panache, imitating the Godfather’s style: he would pretend to puff away, walk with an air of supreme importance, looking out at the sea of humanity and drawing the conclusion that on him depended any improvement in the national average.  He made fun of me regularly of course, but it was impossible to be offended.  The trademark of genius is when you have the subject helplessly laugh in disagreement.

The thing about the Fox is, we could take his ‘trip’ as well, and did so in considerable measure, for the small of his back – his bottom, in other words – had been constructed generously and the tight jeans made it all come to life. 

On campus, he got himself a marketing job, and we re-lived much of his mischief when we met later in 1992 and, perhaps, 1993 (the way I get dates mixed up, there is reason to suspect prefrontal cortex decay), but you know how it is: you lose touch and people go their separate ways, some in pursuit of a dream,  others a livelihood, yet others, in search of meaning.  At times I think that we should have had today’s mobiles on campus, to capture this hilarity for good, but perhaps, all in all, it’s a good thing that it is what it is. 

I have been staring into space for much of the last few minutes, and I now look down with a start.  Is it my imagination or is the face in the photograph now sporting a Bala smile, of gentle, momentary imitation? I feel a surge of emotion and, I will confess, a lump in the throat – for those days, for those moments when a sportive, naughty, mind would put on an impressive display because it was fun, because it was mild, perhaps even because it needed to be there.
But one cannot go on and on, isn't it?  It is time to turn the page.

Sampy, when we all meet in a few days time, those who knew you well will miss you and your splendid, warm, enchanting company. 

But some of us will try to imitate you, that is for sure.