Aamchi Chennai

All ACJ students wanted to be investigative reporters. Antara was an exception. 

The only thing worth investigating in India was the enduring rule of the Indian National Congress and the orthodoxy of the supposed alternative, the BJP.

Indians hated democracies that foisted dynastic rule. They hated orthodoxies. Anyone who has lived in India knew that. Yet both parties somehow won elections, because of 'captive vote banks'. 

Antara voted too, along expected lines, in favour of a free market with some welfare State features.

There was nothing great about the welfare State except that it made you feel special, lower rates than market rates, a householder would understand the logic.

ii. However, everyone at ACJ wanted to be an investigative journalist. The moment a lecture was over, more than a hundred students rushed to collect the email ids and mobile numbers of the guest lecturer. (ACJ had teaching faculty, but also dozens of celebrity academics from India and abroad.)

What kind of an investigation proceeded with email ids and mobile numbers of the Establishment? Those that had made it big in life would give you the INC or RSS line, at most an anarchist line approved by the INC. Else, it would be the White House line. So the kind of investigation that pleased the bigwigs?

As the crowd of ACJ batchmates surged towards the lecture podium, Antara sat back. She didn't cut a fine figure, her parents in financial distress, her father in the process of buying a house in Asansol without managing to sell two houses in Purulia. Thus, Antara's father had three houses to his name but the bank accounts were emptied out, he had received little on retirement.

Antara's parents kept up appearances. They had a pet dog, he was fed on home-cooked meals, chicken and rice for daily lunch, none of the dubious pet food that came out of packets.

"Chicken for the dog?" the poultry-seller would ask, looking for bones and entrails.

"We don't distinguish, same as what people eat," Antara's father would reply. 

When there would be an avian flu scare, Antara's parents got small fishes from nearby ponds for the dog. "We do feel bad, it's so nutritious, you don't get anything healthy to eat in Chennai," Antara's mother would say over the phone.

iii. Thus, Antara couldn't shop for clothes before going to ACJ Chennai, three houses and the dog took care of it. Hence, she didn't cut a fine figure. 

The ACJ authorities had asked her to reconsider her decision, not because of her somewhat frayed clothes but because she was a college lecturer in Purulia and such people were not meant for Indian cities. 

"Just not the right fit, you know," the ACJ administrator had said. Didn't she know Antara's narrative? So Washington DC and its Treasury had had a chat with the ACJ administrator, how only NRIs would win, everyone else would lose out?

iii. Getting rejected by the United States Govt in 2024-25 was not disturbing if one had prior experience of getting rejected within India, by a journalism college administrator!! No place in your own country, having topped the ACJ written test and interview.

Antara had ignored the jibe. She'd never left West Bengal before 2005, she wanted to see what posh Indians were like. Around 1994, she had sent an application to a coaching centre in Mumbai, for some extra study material for her ICSE Board Exam. "Sorry, we don't serve Asansol" had been the reply to her request. What unity, what coherence, within the country.

Antara, therefore, had considered ACJ to be a place where she could gawk at students from Mumbai and Pune, those who could get the ICSE Physics and Chemistry Model Question Papers if they wanted them.

But when these same ACJ students rushed to know celebrity academics who'd make them investigative journalists, Antara felt sick. It happened every day, she felt worse with every such incident. Once the lecture was over and the celeb lecturer had left, everyone rushed downstairs for coffee and cakes at a nearby kiosk.

Only Antara sat alone at a vast lecture hall, her pocket money didn't allow for such expensive snacking.

May 12, 2025.