Businessmen of repute?

There were ways of dealing with the accusations being made and the severity of those accusations.

At Brabourne's undergraduate dorm, on the first floor, where Antara stayed around 1998, certain individuals had indicated that it was 

"at such a dorm within Brabourne (implying the Junior College Brabourne dorm of which Antara had been a resident) that Barings Bank had been vanquished because of the activities of its operatives trader Nick Leeson of the Singapore office, those that were supposed to maintain order (implying the higher defence establishments within the US) did nothing."

Barings Bank went bankrupt on February 26, 1995, Antara's Junior College classes began in August 1995.

However, two US aircrafts had come under attack in Cuba on February 24, 1996, exactly a year after Barings Bank had collapsed.

The enormity of the accusation ought to be clear now. 

It seemed Junior College Brabourne dorm had benefitted from the collapse of Barings Bank because all of them were working for Cuba, which was a den of intrigues against former European monarchies.

We needed to be careful.

The first suggestion of commercial activities in almost everyone's life was through a game of Monopoly.

It was no different for Antara.

However, Antara didn't have her own Monopoly set in childhood, say around 1984-85, she played a Bengali version of it called 'Byabshayi' or 'Businessman', at a house next door to NS Road, where her childhood friend Foochoo stayed with his four older siblings and parents.

It was not altogether accurate to say that Antara and Foochoo got to play 'Byabshayi', they were barely five-six years old, and it was a group comprising those in their mid-teens to late teens/early 20s that played, including the sibling, on a huge bed in the upper-floor of that house, for hours, through prolonged power-cuts in the evenings when oil lamps and candles were brought in. 

Antara and Foochoo either sat around watching 'Byabshayi' being played or they took playing cards to a different room and played Beating the Donkey/gadha-petapeti with each other.

Had the original version of Monopoly been played, it would have the likeness of German-born American investment banker Otto Hermann Kahn (1867-1934), who was apparently called the 'King of New York' and reorganised/consolidated the railroads. 

However, in 'Byabshayi', Otto Hermann Kahn was not depicted.

Those playing 'Byabshayi' on that large bed was what we called 'NS Road', they were part of a Bengali attempt, if it had neither the support of Otto Kahn nor the railroads, whose support did NS Road have?

It was one of the reasons the NS Road wives had been mentioned in a previous 'Class Act' blogpost (May 14, 2026). 

The elder NS Road wife was there 1985 onwards and would often quit these games halfway to get her special 'muri-makha', puffed rice, mustard oil, fried potatoes, "my specialty was the fried potatoes, which no one else added to the 'muri-makha'," she'd say.

At least it acknowledged that "those of you who had quit the legit lease had done so because of the drubbing the Democrats received, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, Mondale won his home state Minnesota and Washington DC, Reagan and George HW Bush took everything else".

It was not about AAP in 2015 but that Democrats had lost back-to-back, 1980 and 1984, "you have assumed a White House crisis and switched loyalties to Kolkata".

If the above was known to Indians, who had accused Brabourne Junior College dorm and higher US military for a complicated collapse as that of the Barings Bank in 1995?

It was obvious the accusing individual disliked Germans or their 20th century involvement in the two World Wars but with the focus on the Bakhmut lease, that individual also disliked the 1898 visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Jerusalem.

Almost every allusion pointed to a moviemaking family, apparently known for arson-related skills from the 1930s, an allegation that it needed to go past, for which it had needed a powerful marriage between a Bengali man and a supposed banking heiress in a western country.

Sir Francis Baring founded Barings Bank in 1762. His older brother John Baring was a 'silent partner'. They had decided that Sir Francis Baring would tackle the information on tropical diseases that the British East India Company collected from Asian and African countries.

John Baring would keep his focus on the activities of the Austrian Empire.

Thus, it was impossible that Barings Bank was not aware of the nitty-gritty of the lease document as it existed in the 1780s, after American independence.

Kolkata had severe problems but was still pursuing the lease politics.

May 18, 2026.

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