Just the shining armour, as of now

"Why wouldn't Antara's short stories create such a stir? As earlier allusions had mentioned, you could not become US President without being an expert on Pologround Housing of Asansol.

And if you were such an expert, you'd know that through the second half of the 1980s, electricity was unmetered and free of charge at that housing society. At the ground floor level of every building, there were several meter boxes, some worked and others didn't, but one didn't have to pay a penny. An infernal challenge right there, as yet unsolved.

One explanation would be that while cities like Kolkata received a steady, dependable supply of German intelligence, places like Pologround Housing received information only on the Tagore activity in Hollywood. And if that was the case, it was European royal information, no one else bothered about Tagore influence inside Hollywood.

One who had been raised from age 7 to age 16 at such a place, someone like Antara, who had an entirely different existence, separate and exclusive from Asansol AG Church, should not have been treated by Hollywood as a target of ridicule just because some Third World movie personalities from Mumbai wanted her persecuted.

Let's use an example: say the year was 1987, Antara's term exams had ended, the local movie hall (close by) was showing a movie portrayal of the Indian epic 'Mahabharata', the last show was slated for that day. 'Want to catch the movie for the night show'? Antara's father had asked her. They had dinner, Antara's mother and sibling stayed back, and an eight-year-old Antara and her father went for the 9.30 pm show, the two of them walking along the deserted, moonlit street. 

The movie hall was largely empty, who'd watch 'Mahabharata' for a late night show?

You would, if your child had to tackle Tagore Terror through Trump 2.0, because then she'd need a different kind of training. Such a child arrived home at midnight, after the late-night movie, and polyandry tendencies in society wouldn't fell her when she was grown-up and facing envy from within an elected govt.

Nor would the shenanigans of the White House that had publicly split with the Pentagon. 'The White House was turning Prussians against the legit lease, having secured the global financiers. The legit lease heir wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the US Govt, hence the economic uncertainty.' 

What kind of alliances were these? Those that had felt nothing but contempt and rage for the Prussians till a decade back were now hooking them up with global financiers? Nothing was adding up in White House's politics, it was incredible they needed such an elaborate plan for Prominent Personality.

ii. Make no mistake, no matter what Hollywood and the White House thought about it, Indians were not so easily fooled. Antara's World War II credentials were strong; as long as she wrote her blogposts, almost every Indian group would encourage her.

Otherwise, Indians were 'burned' by the Abraham Lincoln assassination. The memory of that betrayal sat deep in the Indian psyche, fearful of speaking out because of the Bengalis of Kolkata. They were such experts on America, the Bengalis. 

Once Antara's narrative was over, you would find it impossible to locate an Indian lobbyist near a US Senator or a military general.

'Sound was an awful thing, it killed the legit lease, people feared a Holocaust frenzy. Then who was creating the demand for such a White House extravaganza around a fraudulent lease?'"

May 7, 2025.

Then tragedy, now farce

Some of the problems Antara would face if she was to assert her identity and seek a new life:

i. The lease family would forcefully insist that Antara not seek out the Austrians till the European Union came clear on Honved, the former Hungarian militia. 

Orban was a loyal ally of Putin, Trump had been praising Orban for years now for "doing many things right".

Wagner, Redut, Patriot, which one was Orban's work and connected to Honved? These questions would have to be settled before looking for Austrian allies. 

ii. No matter who said what, the Hispanic-origin Marco Rubio would have to stay at the US State Dept, given the way the Shili-Lokkhi episode had become intertwined with the Daniel Pearl murder case. Any other candidate and the western world order would collapse.

iii. When Trump's excesses began to seem the permanent nature of things, Antara was likely to be left alone, discarded without ceremony, to figure out which blackmail among the thousands of battle episodes of World War II might have created such a mayhem.

It was the moment the RSS was waiting for, the sameness of being left alone to tackle a crisis. Except that Krupp's German agents were in the hallways when the the lights were going out on the RMS Titanic.

Strange, so much information collected by the Krupp agents on the proposed House and the emerging Indian State but no desire to save themselves from a sinking ship?

iv. We must be thankful for Merz's humiliating second vote to become German Chancellor. Else things would have moved at a pace not possible to control through daily news, blogs or social media.

v. Both Pakistan and Sound personalities had bothered for no reason to prevent Antara's contact-corroboration.

There were only two aspects to BT's life in India: he would get no intelligence on the Stanley Lord blackmail. Also, every effort to contact the West, in the 1930s, about the plight of European Jewry would cost him.

It was an experience familiar to Antara. What further corroboration was needed?

May 6, 2025.

You don't have the right to remain incognito

"By 1990, when Antara was 11 years of age, both her high IQ and writing skills had set her apart as an intelligence analyst of the highest order.

If she was held back at all, it was because of the Hitler blackmail. Also, the French were not kind to a female child with exceptional skills.

In society, no one talked of the Hitler blackmail or misogyny. Hence, the use of Bengal politics to constantly isolate the lease family: if CPM ruled in Bengal, it was CPUSA control. If Trinamool Congress ruled, Israeli politics would dominate the scene.

It might seem that Antara's adversaries used the above situation to devise maximum advantage against Austria. In reality, her topmost adversaries constantly foraged for information, what aspect of western existence had the Treasury saved for the lease family, what had the NRIs missed out on.

Having exceptional skills from a young age and then being ignored such that the skills rusted was a tense situation. Indians have criticised Antara in vivid terms: "low people skills", "easily excitable", "unpredictable behaviour", "looked like a hare caught in the headlights".

It meant that till Sept 11, 2001, Antara was a quiet, shy, diligent student. After the 9/11 attacks, once New York had fallen to Indian Communists, Antara constantly worried about Donald Trump's agents. Were they around her, were they trying to commit her to certain ideas and ideologies, did she have an exit option?

It was not an easy life, Antara's, democracies rose and fell with her.

Antara's worst fears were when the French and the Jamshedpur honchos cranked up the pressure on the Trump machinery. It would either be at the start of the Trump reign, the initial days, or when Trump's excess became indistinguishable from Tagore terror. That's when either the French or the Jamshedpur honchos would hark back to the original assessment of Antara's intellectual profile, from when she was 10-11 years old. "So what do you make of all this?" they'd ask.

Rather let her have a couple of blogs, preempt any 'calling out' by Trump and his friends.

Had Trump and his Israeli friends, including Netanyahu, 'called out' Antara's bluff, they would have used BT's House for the purpose.

So grab and occupy BT's House, destroy Gaza, then show affinity with the Grand Mufti al-Husseini's extremist ideas, ignore the Grand Mufti's Prussian problems and make sure contemporary Prussians were not outraged and remained loyal to Bengali economists.

It required a smart analyst like Antara to survive the unbelievable evil that had become world politics."

May 5, 2025.

You don't have the right to remain silent

One would wonder, when the citadel that was Austria was compromised, what would those conspiring against it have to say?

Why did you support the arts and culture?

Why did you pursue scientific and technological interests as well?

What would you prefer if you had to choose, the arts or the sciences?

Antara grew up hearing all of the above questions, hence she could guess them.

Hopefully, Austria wouldn't be asked if it liked talking to boys or if it was always studying at home, with books, "outside books as well?"

The interrogation of Austria was the troubling aspect of what might turn out to be a war of civilisational values. Hollywood was an expert of special effects; before computer-generated images and AI took over, it created miniature replicas (of buildings etc) and worked on those, giving it a life-sized effect.

Why did it not try the same with Austria? Get a pluralistic, multi-ethnic crowd, let it pursue both the sciences and the arts to the best of its ability, make sure no distortion of historical truth was allowed and then wait for the outcome, if it bothered anyone, if Communists took umbrage, if Kolkata felt offended.

That would have been the approximation of the Austrian experience.

Had such an experiment taken place, Austria would have to field a single question after that. "Really, you wear lipstick as well?"

After the last century, not only did Austria want to survive or maintain its political borders, it wanted to join the global mainstream and make up for lost opportunities as well.

What a free world! How free its trade! Why don't we all weep that it was being disrupted, with the Trump administration leaving the WTO and NATO.

May 4, 2025.

Our 'friends' in Argentina

At the very least, if you were bent on signing the lease, you could use a new term, Hollywood had said, back in the 1920s. When the Old World and its royalty existed, you could sign a 'lease' for the New World. When the Old World was ruined, why not call it a 'spot of land' to nurture military arrogance?

It was in the backdrop of such remarks that German-origin Americans had understood that their stay in the US was not meant to be permanent, that they would be chased around the world, just for the sake of it, or so it seemed.

Before Hollywood and the Colorni gang decided to bring Antara to her present residential block in Delhi, they had studied her life and work and ideas in detail. For historical purposes, why did her interest in German Nazis stop with the end of WWII in 1945? Did she not care about the fugitives, the Holocaust perps escaping the law and hiding in Argentina? Why wouldn't she want to follow up on those cases? Did moving away from Germany mean loss of German-ness to her?

The questions seemed to be coming from the beer barons of England, but still Antara would provide the answers. She was genuinely fearful of rightwing dictatorships, which seemed to be the post-retirement option for the Nazis in South America. 

"Not retirement, superannuated was the correct word," Anjali would often tell her daughters. 'Anu' was atoms in the Bengali language, Antara wouldn't want to guess if those retired Nazis also worked on 'atoms for peace'. After all, she lived in New Delhi.

Most of the former Nazis in South America were also small arms traders, a group Antara reviled. But mostly, all movies and fictional accounts of such Nazis had a born-again/waiting-for-the-messiah characteristic about them, and given what Antara's people underwent, she'd try to avoid those reminders.

On the Nazi Holocaust, Antara preferred the linear, minimalist narrative. It didn't win awards or accolades because it didn't exist as yet. Maybe the British beer barons and Hollywood interpreted Hitler's manner of death as the need for an overwrought Nazi narrative. 

It was clear now that the Prussians had switched sides to the Bengali developmental economists, willing to go down with them rather than be seen as loyal to the Allied side.

As Antara and her classmates had known since school, Ukraine would be altogether absent during the lease-signing in Washington DC, busy with reconstruction work (or maybe extracting rare minerals.)

Imagine the plight of the person who'd have to finalise the lease: a single WWII narrative, compiled by a bunch of no-gooders at MI6 and the fiction-writers of Hollywood.

May 3, 2025.

Reflected glory

Classicism was unknown to Antara. 

From her early childhood, she had always been warned by her mother, "Remember, we were bourgeois, that's who we were." Antara knew she was 'bourgeois' before she knew she was an Indian or a Bengali. 

Maybe in some long-forgotten past, Antara's ancestors had known or shaped classicism. But it was not encouraged at home.

The above was not difficult to accept. If 1980-Mykolaiv, by definition, was mercantile, how much classicism would be required anyway?

Thus, both the Treasury and the US military needed to ponder why requirements of classicism from the lease family was used against the US Govt, particularly the Treasury. Did Treasury work require playing an instrument or the ability to peruse documents in a dead language?

Despite such arguments, if the insistence on classical knowledge persisted, it could imply that between the German Nazis and the Bengali financiers of Kolkata, there existed an agreement for suppressing certain episodes and intrigues from WWII and the Nazi Holocaust. These could be kept hidden within Classical Studies. 

Would the Agency be aware of such a situation? Find the opportune time to turn the table against the US Govt, start supporting Trump and Vance?

Classical studies were popular when Antara was at university, 2001-2002. 

An MA degree in Classical Literature, some Greek and Latin courses thrown in for free. How neatly we emerged into the Buckingham Palace-Marco Rubio era, Antara had the best quarter century possible, since 2001!

For the US Navy: Hollywood's Merchant Navy intelligence desk probably used the above German Nazi-Bengali financier-Agency arrangement to bury your fighter jets at sea. It was impossible that desk had supported the Abbottabad raid in 2011, why did the famed Situation Room clear it?

ii. Hollywood, however, was built on a nouveau riche aspirational mould, its classicism might not be as genuine as Kolkata wanted it to be.

The enthusiasm of teenage boys gave way to the sober behaviour of grown men, except Hollywood never managed to leave behind the Kiel mutiny days.

Apparently, Antara moved into her present residential block in 2021 because Bengali developmental economists and Paris imposters wanted her to have a feel of Hollywood's classicism, from the decor to the neighbourhood. 

Bengali economists had assumed Antara came from an impoverished socioeconomic background, an ice-cream parlour close by or plush furnishings would make her switch allegiance to the Paris imposters.  

Antara didn't like what she saw at her present abode: "Where have you brought us, to a dumpster?" she had asked her husband.

You see, Colorni's work was heavy-handed (too much US Congress), it lacked finesse. Else who still struggled to solve Nephuse Israel, given it was well-known that it was about emancipation of women and if Poland had the political might to see it through?

Antara would not degrade herself by discussing Anders Breivik of Norway and US elections, she'd shudder to think what Hollywood made of it.

But worst of all, Hollywood should not have planted these many morally dubious scientific theories on those around her.

Antara may not always remain a hostage. She might win her freedom. At such a point, what if the Auschwitz research merged with Hollywood's passion for amoral science, what Antara underwent for these many years?

Wouldn't it be obvious that Hollywood's Merchant Navy-intelligence desk was always against the Treasury, right from the 'movie palace' days of the 1930s?

May 2, 2025. 

Palace dreams

 A 'movie palace' was a large, elaborately decorated movie theatre, built from the 1910s to the 1940s. 

They were apparently built in the US as a response to BT's move to India, for American moviemakers had understood that the demise of the imperial European dynasties was imminent, that it would favour Buckingham Palace.

However, the efforts by American moviemakers to popularise glamorous women didn't create any political connotation in the minds of the movie-goers. The latter adored the screen stars, but not as replacements for the former royal personalities of Europe.

Hollywood saw BT's move to India as a retreat, an admission of defeat. By the time it became clear that the lease family would retain the lease, that Indians had merely needed European support against the British and therefore BT's presence, Hollywood went berserk. 

Between 1925 and 1930, hundreds of 'movie palaces' opened all over the United States. 

The arrival of television and multiplex formats led to the decline of the 'movie palaces', many were later razed to the ground or turned into performing arts centres. It was the failure to render the lease family obsolete that encouraged a support for authoritarian rule in Europe and India among the Hollywood crowd.

Indians were well aware of the above situation. In her only visit to Mumbai more than a decade ago, Antara had spent some time opposite a performing arts venue, and all she saw were vendors selling sliced raw mangoes.

Back at junior college Brabourne, Antara's hostel mates had a strange passion. They'd scan the movie listings every week, choose a movie at a hall they'd never been to before, get a taxi for a group of girls and head off to watch the movie. The way they assailed Antara to accompany them, but Antara was a quiet, diligent girl, she didn't miss college classes to watch movies. (She was not yet an adult, alone in a city.)

Just fyi: Prominent Personality was never approached for these 'adventures', though she lived at the hostel through junior college.

In the end, Antara had agreed on one occasion to accompany her batchmates. (There was some cultural event at the college, so there were no classes.) Several girls packed into a taxi, the driver objecting it was illegal to carry that many passengers, "The cops will get me for this". The movie was called 'Hindustan', the movie hall was called 'Hind'.

Not that the movie was suspect but it was the idea of constantly seeking out an unfamiliar genre movie at an unfamiliar place that gave Antara the creeps. Antara returned subdued, she remained quietly upset for some time, then convinced herself that they'd tear down the 'Hind' movie hall.

Till a decade or so ago, when Antara and her husband drove past the 'Hind'. "I had come here once, in the 1990s, I didn't like it," Antara had said, to no response.

ii. It was believed that much before the rise of Nazism, at a phonograph store in New York of the 1890s, those who would build the 'movie palaces' to celebrate the demise of the Habsburgs had started plans for sinking the RMS Titanic. 

The blueprints for the shipbuilding were already in place with Harland and Wolff, the construction of the Olympic-class liners were to start soon at the Belfast shipyard.

Harland and Wolff filed for bankruptcy in Sept 2024, after being listed at the junior stock exchange for years. Its 160 years of shipbuilding experience was not considered, no shipping company was willing to invest in it. 

That was how the fate of a legendary shipbuilder was worked into the constantly changing political environment of a country like India, where some of its worthies were always taking a taxi to some new locale, for a new movie.

May 1, 2025.