The lack of a cafeteria at Asansol AG Church continued to puzzle Antara. There were employers in Indian offices who either offered free lunches or even a one-rupee-lunch. Of course, some also struggled to keep their coffee machine clean but that's another story.
There were multinationals in Kolkata known for their lavish lunches, Mumbai firms reputed for their wide array of breakfast options. You didn't even have to be highly educated, the Kolkata firms admitted anyone with a college degree, found them a job description just to hold them back, kept them employed and well-fed.
Antara was an Indian citizen.
Asansol AG Church went the entire way, it chose choristers among students, got western set designs and costume manufacturers for the concerts and dramatic production, typical of the theatre and garment scene as one would find in England. Then why did the girls eat paratha and pickle from their plastic lunch boxes? After hobnobbing with British bankers and financial analysts in London, were the Asansol AG girls supposed to come and dine in the Indian part of town, at some restaurant from the Indian subcontinent?
You'd say that Asansol AG Church would have a tough time keeping Antara out of the cafeteria. It was a school, not a government, it couldn't control four or five shops and keep them emptied out or closed to starve Antara.
Even Asansol AG Church could find a reason to prohibit Antara's entry into the school cafeteria, it did keep her out of the school drills and the annual parades and debar her from further quizzes and ignore when she auditioned for the concert and refused to consider her when school prefects were chosen in 1993.
Not a stranger to bigotry then, our Asansol AG Church.
During their stint at Asansol AG Church, Antara's sibling's batch went for an educational tour of Reckitt, the one which made the bleaching agent called 'Robin Blue'. Back then, it was apparently the only Reckitt factory in India which made 'Robin Blue', so quite a big deal.
Oh, wait, now we were making a connection. Antara would go with Robin Cook, former British politician, died in the Scottish Highlands of a sudden heart attack while out hiking, had collapsed and fallen off a 'ridge'. Get it, the 'ridge'?
Robin Cook died a couple of weeks after Antara joined ACJ, so the only connection between Asansol AG Church and ACJ as of now was Robin Cook.
It should keep Pune-Nagpur and ACJ off Antara's back for a while. Antara was an Indian citizen, no matter what the INC had thought or done about it.
ii. Over the last decade, Antara had been furiously discouraged from any research on Reckitt Benckiser and she had obeyed the embargo.
In 2025, was her life in danger or was it not, the way her medication was being prevented from working?
Should her extensive currency-related information fail/be destroyed because of the tupenny worth of dubious information on currencies collected by some aged Indian female politician?
Did the British politician Robin Cook know that Antara's Asansol AG Class of 1995 was never chosen for an educational tour? You should have seen Asansol's suburbs back in those days, bustling with factories, from glass-making to paper mills, from silicate factories to various kinds of metal-refining. Nothing was worthy of a visit or was it considered too close to the 9/11 attacks?
Some guy called Khilnani apparently managed the Class of 1995 back in those days. Maybe he made these peremptory decisions, else Antara, deemed not fit for writing or editing by Delhi, could have at least had a metal and welding workshop.
But Khilnani and NATO honcho were close friends and given they were important without any reason, they might try to land Antara in trouble.
June 7, 2025.
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