We couldn't always stop for Aunt Bea

Did Antara have an idol? No.

Did she have a writing idol? No.

Did she idolise her parents? No.

Did she criticise everyone? Almost yes.

How did her parents react to the above? They pleaded, "you have to tolerate some people".

These were the stringent demands made of Antara since her childhood, they'd never change, the sheer number of people who died in the two World Wars of the 20th century meant she didn't focus on any byline except her own. 

When Antara read foreign publications, she skipped the bylines, the names of whoever had written the news reports.

When Remnick etc came to JLF in 2012, she had to search online for who Remnick was, she had never looked at the names of the staffers of a magazine nor would she ever do such a thing.

Thus, the importance of Ray Cave to Afghanistan or even to Indian tycoons was not the same as Ray Cave's insignificance to Antara. He had passed away in Aug 2020, during the pandemic lockdown.

Certain bosses at various newsrooms had tried to alert Antara about Ray Cave, was he a danger to Indians in some way?

For example, Ray Cave was supposed to have a "keen sense of design". 

A senior colleague at HT (not Hazra) had taken a foreign magazine (business mag), showed Antara page after page of that magazine, its astounding design skills. 

"You think we could do it here (in India), with our design teams, what did you think?" he had said.

"It would be difficult," Antara had said, wondering if anyone would ever go home if pages had to look like that.

"Think about it, one might need it someday," he had told Antara, the latter had sincerely promised she'd do so.

In designing her own apparatus, Antara was now close enough to those intricate designs shown to her at HT in early 2012, it meant it could be done in India but she'd have to do it alone, the allusions were hers, what would others do? Follow up on what she was doing? Discuss it with common Indian folks? Report on their narratives? Would NRIs and Silicon Valley allow that?

Another boss in a different newsroom had brought up Ray Cave's "sharp eye for writing talent" which meant Antara would be attacked with Nazi Holocaust denial, Numbers blackmail, Weimar Republic intrigues, the last one was being discussed as people would know.

Ray Cave's "use of colour photography"...well, at HT, Antara and her departmental head had once spent Rs 10,000/- on a single lead photo for the Book review page (you had to buy it from Getty etc), and then, they took it on a greyscale, think of that, such expense and then to get rid of the colour.

[In Kolkata and its suburbs, many wives still thought that Nazi Holocaust research could be thwarted by using defence firms to control the photos from the Nazi camps. Think of that, what those wives had done to Antara.]

April 14, 2026

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