Ever since I can recall, I have never been much of a political person. For the purposes of this essay, I am not talking about petty office politics (the proverbial gossip at the water cooler) or even more petty family politics, but the national political scene – the biggie. With elections well and truly upon us, what else could it be? For myself, I lean neither to the left, nor to the right. My school motto was ‘On Straight On!’ which explains my somewhat ambivalent position on the issue of taking a political stance. I believe the proper term to describe such an individual is apolitical. Which reads like a spelling error, but there it is. The naysayers might characterise such a stance as akin to one ‘sitting on the fence.’
That is all very well, but in this day and age, and given my age, it becomes very hard to sit quietly in mixed company, sipping my fruit cocktail and declare that I am not in the least bit interested in politics. Fifty years ago, I could have done that with impunity. Congress, BJP? Who dat? An indifferent shrug of the shoulders, while I whistle Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head in a distracted manner. Right now, I should be so lucky! With the raindrops, I mean. Rain man, where are you? To get back to the subject on hand, I was not an uninterested animal when it came to politics, more disinterested, if you get my meaning. I could not have cared less, one way or the other. I was not ideologically driven. Make of that what you will.
All that has changed. It matters not a whit who you are spending an idle hour with these days. Your own kith and kin, close friends, strangers whom you may have just run into while waiting for your flight to be announced – you simply have to mind your political Ps and Qs. I was recently embroiled in one such situation, when I ran into an old acquaintance from my university days. While I cannot claim that we were bosom pals, we certainly belonged to a group that nursed pretensions towards the finer aspects of art, literature and music.
This person, of whom I speak, was one of those who invariably saw himself as something distinctly apart from the rest of us. Bit of an effete snob, a pain in the nether regions, but truth to tell, that was the case with most of us at college. A clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. Ostentatiously displaying J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, these rubbing shoulders with our armful of text and exercise books. Humming Don McLean’s American Pie to casually impress the girls. The ubiquitous packet of Charms (or something even more mood-enhancing) being passed around the while.
Still and all, we were good friends, frequently seen to be plucking the gowans fine, to draw on an ancient aphorism. I did warn you that we were a sickeningly pretentious lot. For the record, I understand the expression has P.G. Wodehouse’s imprimatur and no one else has laid claims to it. Do I hear you ask, ‘What does it mean, plucking the gowans fine?’ I shan’t spoon feed you. Look it up, like I did. Putting all that to one side, this character from the dim mists of time started chatting with me, and our conversation went roughly along the following lines. Being sensitive to his feelings, I shall employ a nom de plume and call him Montu, a name not calculated to raise exalted visions of a litterateur, but Bengalis (I grew up in Calcutta) loved names like that. Pintu would have done equally well. Not being a natural-born Bengali I, perforce, will be referred to in the first-person singular. No name, no pack drill.
‘I say Montu, my old friend, how’s tricks? All going well?’ Seeing as I had not met him in years, I thought the hail-fellow-well-met approach would hit just the right spot. ‘Flying to Calcutta?’
‘My dear fellow, we are both sitting at the same gate awaiting the boarding call to Calcutta. Where else would I be flying to? I should be grateful you didn’t ask me that after the plane took off.’
I guess I asked for that. ‘Montu at your sardonic best, I see. Just making conversation. Something to break the ice. Anyhow, it’s been ages since we last bumped into each other. What are you up to these days? Last I heard, you were heading up the HR function at ITC or Shaw Wallace or some such, weren’t you?’
‘If you must know, it was Metal Box. They called us boxwallahs for a reason. In fact, pardon my showing off, Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul made reference to “the boxwallah culture of Calcutta” in one of his novels. All that is so much water under the bridge. We are both retired from corporate service. I remember you in Dunlop putting out all those clever advertisements. At least you seemed to be having a bit of fun. In HR, all we ever did was figuring out ways to sack staff.’
‘Oh come, come, surely it was not all that dreary. I know it was impossible to sack unionised labour, particularly in red-flagged Calcutta those days, but managerial staff was fair game, were they not? And there were all those bright, young lady secretaries to brighten up your day.’
‘As was the case in your company as well, but things started to change as you know. What with advanced computers and rapid changes in technology, the office secretaries were rendered hors de combat. An endangered, if not extinct, species.’
We then went on to chat a bit about how we missed the Calcutta club culture, decadent as it was, but the hooch was cheap. I had just taken the conversation to a higher plane with casual references to Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Goddard, Miloš Forman and others of that ilk. Just then the ‘higher plane’ took a nose dive as our own flight to the City of Joy was announced. As we got up to join the queue to the bus, I put it to Montu that we could quaff a beer at The Saturday Club at a time of mutual convenience. ‘For old times’ sake?’ I added for good measure. ‘I don’t think so,’ was Montu’s lugubrious response. ‘I have had my fill of Calcutta’s musty clubs. The rats are feasting on the carpets. Trying to recapture the past is a mug’s game. If it’s all the same to you, I shall give it a miss.’ So saying, he wandered off towards the jam-packed bus that would ferry us to the plane. A sad, forlorn figure.
I decided to let Montu board well ahead of me and hoped we were not seated within coughing distance of each other in the aircraft. A pity, because I was about to engage him in a bit of political chinwag. You know, stuff like how is our old friend, quizmaster extraordinaire -turned feisty politician Derek O’Brien getting along with Mamata Di? A far cry from the days when we worked closely with him at sponsored quiz programmes at The Dalhousie Institute Club. All that will have to wait for another day. Or perhaps, another echo from the hoary past that was Calcutta née Kolkata- a Jiltu, a Khokhon or even a Bapi. I had given up the ghost on Montu. At least in those days, we fought over film directors, cricketers, authors and musicians. We did not care two hoots which party ruled the country or the state. Why the indifference? Elementary, my dear you-know-who. My father, who art in heaven, paid for everything and petrol retailed at a rupee a litre. We were young, impressionable idealists, dreaming of Oxbridge and Harvard, who could afford to give politics and politicians the good, old heave-ho.
Dear reader, if you heard a deep, nostalgic sigh, that was me.
Suresh's Corner 