The global bankers of Asansol

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.

Not peacenik, Austria never had a childhood

The lease family, in all likelihood, was not aware of the elite neighbourhoods of London. 

Not so among Communist Indians with aspirations, they probably got their intelligence support from privileged areas of London.

But places like Belgravia or Chelsea or Kensington, these were merely names to Antara. Neither had she travelled abroad and come across such places nor did those names ever come up at home.

Antara's childhood encyclopedia, however, had a photo of Peter Pan's statue, probably at the Kew Gardens in London. Fascinated by the photo, Antara had borrowed an abridged copy of JM Barrie's 'Peter Pan' from her school library. 

(JM Barrie's elder brother David had died in an ice-skating accident just before his fourteenth birthday, sometime in 1867. The reference had come up during the recent plane crash on the Potomac River in Washington DC, in January 2025, which killed a contingent of young figure-skaters.)

Antara used to read aloud from the 'Peter Pan' she had brought from the school to her parents. No one had a choice if Antara wanted to read out something, it was the only time she could prevail at home over the others. As it turned out, Antara's parents loved the story of Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. 

However, till recently, Antara didn't have a good idea of what they thought of Captain Hook, the archenemy of Peter Pan.

ii. It would seem that the US Navy ought to have been the archenemy of Antara's parents, given the landmass around Cape Cod was shaped like a 'hook', the site close to many shipwrecks and disappearances including USS Thresher. 'Hook' had become interesting in a different way in early 1988, when Antara and her sibling had been afflicted with an outbreak of chicken pox.

The moment the two sisters were unwell, Anjali had sent the domestic maid on leave, out of courtesy. "It was a contagious disease, why should she catch it from our girls?"

However, in a sudden change of tone, Ajit suddenly withdrew from the household. He didn't ask after Antara or her sibling, their fever was furious, it didn't subside for almost ten days, their skin covered in rashes and boils. 

Ajit would come back from work in the evening, glance at the two sick girls, not even enter their room or ask how they were doing, no longer use the clothes rack or the almirah/cupboard but chose a 'hook' in another room to hang his clothes. 

Anjali raged and ranted at his behaviour, called him names, an ingrate, but Ajit remained indifferent. "I've seen such things before," he'd sometimes say, in a callous tone. 

Physicians had to visit at home, Antara and her sister were too unwell to go to a clinic. The rest of the time, Anjali cooked and cleaned by herself, swept and mopped the house. By the time she was done, it would be around 5 pm, when she sat down to lunch by herself. "I'd remember these days, these lunches," she'd say out loud. 

iii. Till date, Antara hadn't managed to figure out what Ajit feared in the US Navy, was it the Gates' family's influence or was it the Today Group. But in the late 1980s, one could identify them, call them out, stay apart from their Captain Hook assertions. From the mid-1990s, such things were no longer possible, because the survival capacities of the legit lease had been drastically curtailed. 

Ajit lived another 15 years after 1995, he couldn't rectify what had been done from within the US Navy, which meant Antara's experience would take a terrifying turn, which Ajit's never did. 

Antara had never made any mistakes, she was not responsible for this situation.

June 6, 2025. 

Defence is the best offence

Those trying to make a career out of Ajit's belief system need a bit of forewarning. 

Antara was safe, she was friends with her father but didn't altogether trust him. As everyone saw, he failed to keep his daughters' safety within the scheme of things, both his girls. A mathematical mind pretending to be insipid and indifferent, that was Ajit. 

Antara turned out to be correct, look at the lurch she was left in.

The increasing incidence of Indians hosing down their scooters was apparently because Harris, probably Obama as well, had released large amounts of information on Ajit. That was bound to become some ridiculous misadventure. Some British firm that manufactured Vickers Wellington, Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes? Aircraft manufacturing that started out from Jesus Green in Cambridge?

Did anyone know what 'Jesus Green' was called in the Asansol-Burnpur area of Bengal? It was an annual Kali Pujo/Goddess Kali worship venue, popularly called 'Jishur Kali' or Jesus Ink/Inc/Incorporated. Antara grew up visiting it through her childhood, 'Jishur Kali' or Jesus Inc. It was a known den of rotten Agency.

The last time Antara met her mother before the latter passed away, it was in 2009, they had visited the 'Jishur Kali'/Jesus Green area. "They sell jalebis by the kilos, not by numbers", Anjali had said. Antara and her mother had stopped by the roadside vendor and bought half a kilo of jalebis and gone home. 

Think of jalebis, syrupy and twisted, so were these so-called British defence firms. 

ii. These Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes, Vickers Wellington apparently had two garages, the second one was called the 'Airport Garage'. 

'I cannot tolerate garage food," Ajit would say while in Kolkata, referring to the roadside shacks that sold Bengali meals, rice and a curry.

"Why not go to a proper restaurant, have noodles or maybe a dosa for a change," Antara's sibling would say. "Why this bizarre obsession with rice?"

No, Ajit wouldn't do that, he wanted to check the quantity of rice these shacks were serving on their stainless steel plates. Who would have known that defence firms thrived under the patronage of the Federal Bureau?

"Who could eat so much, what an excessive quantity of rice, you can't even see the steel plate anymore," Ajit would exclaim once he had been served at one of those shacks in Kolkata.

iii. A new kind of STEM insult was in town, if the spouse had access to STEM research facilities. 

Antara had heard such defence research stories all her life, it bored her father as well, only the Smileys of British intelligence never seemed to tire of it.

There was a comic story in Bengali Antara had read in her childhood, about Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes, about air raid sirens and blackouts in Kolkata during WWII. Antara read it out to her father on a daily basis, it was around 1986-87. 

She'd wait for Ajit to return from work, he'd settle down with a light Bengali snack (puffed rice and cucumbers), and Antara would balance herself on the headrest of the sofa and read the story down to him, every evening. 

Ajit had to laugh along, air raid fright in Kolkata, it was one funny story. 

June 5, 2025.

Please tell us all about the currency

The time has come to shift the focus to women in Economics and Management, enough apologising for who studied STEM for what reason and who didn't. 

After the USS Maine explosion in 1898 (and the Partition of Bengal a few years later, in 1905), the western world was suddenly teeming with women studying Economics and going all the way, writing their theses on currency.

Let's say we were talking about Eleanor Lansing Dulles, not yet Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. These Radcliffe sorts were champions against themselves, since there had never been females involved in currency matters before Eleanor Lansing Dulles gave deep thought to the French franc in the 1920s. (Sarcasm? Possible.)

ELD was an innovator, she set trends, maybe she knew Indian women, the latter were taking a lot of interest in whether the US was going to have a foreign intelligence agency and what it would make of Indian women. 

Oh, by the way, where was ELD's dissertation on the French franc? Has it been published, was it widely available? Was it taught at universities, in India and abroad? Antara herself had been trying to research the French franc for a while and the way she was attacked, with furious storms and disruption of water supply to stopping bowel movement. Where was the crisis, was ELD's work on franc/currency so great that Antara ought to get scared? It was complete by itself, Antara couldn't even add some of her wisdom to it?

Think how interesting it would be if we could have a forum dedicated to ELD's thesis on the franc. These were interesting times for the currency, so many alternatives being considered, cryptocurrency a dime a dozen, not merely bitcoin. We could discuss ELD's thoughts, see if it influenced the other Dulles family members, how else would the crisis resolve? (For decency's sake, we'd assume they were her thoughts on the French franc.)

Otherwise, the Indians would keep filing fraudulent leases for decades and Antara would watch the 'tamasha'/farce and remain unemployed?

ii. If the above was unacceptable, we were establishing new rules in 2025. Those who have secret dissertations on the currency were more powerful than those who could publicly discuss such matters and provide information on a daily basis.

If your thoughts were unknown, you were a big deal. If you publicly and coherently argued, you were weak. 

The above argument would be popular in Bangladesh, West Bengal and the 'Bartaman' newsroom. They loved the Tagores, and the Tagores provided gainful employment and lengthy careers to women who wrote on currencies. No Tagore-approved employment? No discussion on currencies please, we're Bengalis.

So now we have a better idea how the lease was being pursued. Women were employed if the Tagores wanted them employed and they were the best--in such a case, what did it matter who studied STEM and who didn't?

Sandhurst, on the other hand, provided privileged Mykolaiv Houses to those loved by the Tagores, maybe ELD. 

Wow, so Sandhurst, the military of the erstwhile British coloniser, could enter a discussion of the American currency, using nice girls like ELD? No threat to national security, since the national security apparatus of the US was also provided through Sandhurst and its Mykolaiv Houses? Who would agree in DC that the British have eaten up the United States?

It would be a kind of first, the Sandhurst fraudulent lease and when it fell apart? What if no one touched that currency? Oh yeah, the above was tried in the early 1990s, an effort to make sure Antara didn't finish high school or go up to junior college. You shouldn't Boorda a second time, should you?

June 4, 2025.

The 1987 endgame, all over again

Joe Biden might be able to take those Indian boys and girls to the US for any number of reason. Who could get you a meeting at the White House, where you could start a discussion of David KE Bruce of OSS? 

Who could remind the White House that it was the latter's privilege to have the David KE Bruce narrative, what if the narrative was also with the lease family, either as 'Bishwer Itihash'/World's History or as allusions? 

What made the White House different? Was that what you ran, what one could compete with or defeat, based on a paltry existence in India?

After the above exchange, the NRI would come out in a huff. Pulling off the altercation was Moscow's responsibility.   

ii. The above was Moscow in its 1987 mode. That year, West Bengal and Bangladesh had agreed that for material benefits and immigration, they'd refuse to remember the savagery in Europe in the 1940s. The fiasco did not elicit a whimper from the lease family, Ajit too beholden to his West Bengal govt job and Anjali, who couldn't believe that Morgans and Germans were both gone from her life. 

Write down the names of railway stations in your notebook? They were intelligence desks Anjali, the history of the world for several centuries, from warfare to politics to society. Given the way your sort leaves descendants, you didn't care about their well-being? Just keeping your younger daughter imprisoned in a disgusting Bollywood culture was so important to you? You have offered front-row seats to the entire world for your younger daughter's humiliation, starvation, malnutrition? 

No one would ask what you got in return?

So whenever the Austrian-ness of things reared its head, Moscow would bring up 'apathy and lack of care' for those who were not good writers. 

Oh, that was no interest group, it was merely a not-so-subtle reminder of the years 1938-45, and how the White House could have prevented things and did not. The same in 1987, every single act of aggression by the Kolkata CPM, what Antara had spent the last year writing about, could have been prevented by the White House but it wasn't. 

Every time the White House publicly agreed with the Kolkata CPM about ignoring the Nazi Holocaust and the Jews, the torture increased on Antara by leaps and bounds. 

What was left of her? Because Prussians always opposed Austrians, or because of some railroad mystery. To leave your daughter to such a ghastly fate because of some half-forgotten tales from hotels in the US and taverns of Europe.

Where was the proof, Anjali, that such animosity had existed between Prussians and Austrians? How many of those from posh hotels in the West wrote to your family at NS Road? No one? Then why were you so worshipped in India, one who didn't have any proof?

iii. Oh, don't worry, there would be glamorous intelligence desks on the Nazi Holocaust, set up by the White House. Only, it wouldn't have Antara in it. The focus would be on Holocaust photography, an easy thing to manage for those not educated, also lucrative. 

"Antara, she fought too hard for Ukraine. The Agency had made commitments to the Vatican, the latter represented Bengali economists."

Those who "fought hard" for a Jewish cause were debarred from researching the Nazi Holocaust, the biggest crime against Jews? But the British would not allow us to go further than Holocaust photography, and there we have arrived at the real problem.

iv. The individual Moscow had chosen to take angry NRIs for a discussion at the White House was a female State Dept employee, with two famous older high official brothers. People like her had terrible disregard for Poland, eastern Europe, Ukraine, the lease family etc. To individuals like her, Europe meant France for France was culturally very much like Bengal. 

France was not afraid of getting up early to start the day but like Bengal, it was scared of evenings and nighttime. "Kolkata didn't have a nightlife," its publications moaned for decades. Why not, did France and Bengal ask itself?

These American State Dept sorts usually approached Sandhurst to solve their fear, the latter offered any Mykolaiv House that was available with them for use. It could then be used for cushy NRI postings within the White House or its highly select national security apparatus. So Sandhurst responded to suffering and need? When it didn't respond, it meant its fury was difficult to control.

Antara was fit to be an Indian citizen, you may not be fit for military work. 

Antara avoided STEM at Brabourne, which was known for its arts/humanities departments. But she always followed up on STEM, she never missed any development in any scientific field. That's called 'over and above', you didn't even do your day job. 

You have sat back and watched a worldwide hawala economy calling itself 'information technology'. Your fury? Really? 

June 3, 2025.  

How the race was run

Was it some kind of a crisis question? What was Antara and her peers competing for? Antara got her 'story' long after her parents were gone, no one wanted to know her even after she learnt her narrative. 

Well played CPUSA, but where was the competition? Antara was not even part of society.

i. Let's pick the topics and sort them out. The monthly fees for Asansol AG Church school were deposited at the local branch of a nationalised bank. Since the bank kept regular hours, which coincided with school hours, it meant either of the parents would have to deposit the school fees and the get the 'fees book' stamped. 

Antara's father had great difficulty remembering which class she was in, which section, he frequently wrote it wrong, often the bank clerk corrected him, "No, Antara has now gone up to Class 6A, she was not in Class 5, she had never been in section B."

If we were in the wrong class and any genocide against our people was not being considered, we were surely not competing for banking careers and privileges.

ii. There was no cafetaria or canteen at Asansol AG Church, so no way could one have a meal or even buy a snack. Also, no arrangement for a soda fountain (introduced in India by 1991) or plastic cutlery or paper tissues. So we were not competing over etiquette either.

iii. There was a golgappa-seller and an ice-cream cart outside the school gate. Either of Antara's parents fetched her from school, and they wouldn't let her eat from these food vendors. Anjali was of the opinion that the golgappa-seller was a drug peddler, and apparently he used the water from the nearby gutters to make the golgappas.

Antara had argued, wasn't it easier for him to carry a bottle of water from home than dredge the water from the gutters? But it was an obvious scare tactic, and Anjali would reply, "You eat there once, you'd keep going back, that was his trick". 

Most of the students who rode the school buses from far-flung areas ate that food, after school hours. Being wealthy and becoming US citizens didn't change who you used to be. Nor were we competing over support systems.

iv. Antara studied at Asansol AG Church for more than a decade. 

On one occasion, Anjali had allowed her to have the golgappa, "obviously, you'd be sick, have it on Friday, get well over the weekend." By Friday evening, Antara was down with fever, by the next morning, the physician had diagnosed paratyphoid. She missed school for a week. 

A few years ago, when Antara had read the biography about the strange life and death of Heinrich Himmler, she found out that he had once contracted paratyphoid. 

Thank goodness Antara didn't have golgappas ever again, it was one thing to be AAP's victim, quite another to be associated with Himmler. Anjali's scaremongering had worked, so no question of competition there.

v.  Because they came from faraway, colliery school buses often stopped at Asansol market. Students, sometimes teachers, often picked up their groceries, bought clothes or other necessities, did their shopping on their way back from school. 

It was not unusual that say, the school had given over at 3 pm, Antara had reached home soon enough, had gone with her mother to Asansol market around 6 pm, and would come across AG schoolgirls and even her classmates, roaming around, still in their school uniform. 

For some reason, NS Road felt it should not be allowed, "Why in their school uniform? They could keep a change of clothes etc." Most Asansol schools didn't allow evening shopping in school uniform, so who was surprised that gradually, Asansol AG was becoming altogether different, attacking Antara because she was isolated, while they had active military support on Operation Market Garden? 

Antara cannot possibly compete over military/WWII blackmails.

vi. What Antara was offering was a fair and somewhat blinkered view of a certain way of life. She was a quiet, shy sort. The colliery buses had boys and girls travelling from four or five English-medium schools based in Asansol. Romantic affairs on the school buses were rampant, Antara shunned such details, hence the distorted reality. 

Imagine end of school, some (possibly Himmler) golgappa, the occasional shopping at Asansol market, being driven to the boys' schools to pick up the boys, then a couple of hours ride home, as evening drew near, without any parents' or teachers' scrutiny. Surely it was fun growing up that way, what's the rage about?

June 2, 2025. 

Stopped short of false claims

The average guy or girl might want to know, what were we reeling from?

How was it relevant to the blogs you were writing?

Well, Antara was trying to put together the narrative of what led up to World War II, and it had not been a pretty experience till now, she could assure everyone of that.

Why not, you'd ask? Was it because of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the atom bombs dropped on Japan? Antara didn't know enough about the Japanese surrender to answer that question.

But it was clear that David KE Bruce (OSS) blackmail had been a surprise, it had been pulled too close to the end of WWII. It made the D-Day landings, and the subsequent fighting at Normandy and the Bocage just one more episode in the World War, not the definitive one. 

All wars end someday, what was the meaning of that act of triumphalism where the basic strategy was to hurl endless men into incessant gunfire?

ii. There was good reason why Antara had brought up the Shabbos Goy and the two teachers (World Bank-normalista) he had possibly recruited around 1993. 

Both the teachers supposedly enacted the David KE Bruce (OSS) blackmail, it was impossible for Antara to understand the implications, given David KE Bruce was not a known or familiar topic.

For example, at the end of every term exam in school, 'normalista' would be the last to hand over the corrected answer-scripts before the report cards were finalised. She would be a sight, hair dishevelled, clutching dozens of answer-scripts to her chest, some checked, others not, telling the students, "I'd make it, don't worry". Well, what choice did you have, which schoolteacher got away without turning in the corrected answer-scripts?

Unless someone passed away while in office, 'in harness' as they called it, as had happened with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his corrected or uncorrected work would no longer be available. FDR might have felt that a lot of Communist US officials were passing through his office and while some were obviously on the Stalin/Soviet mode, there were others who were not.

It made the relation between the White House and the legit lease a disturbing one, for BT might have provided all the support to the White House but the other side was failing him, and not always deliberately.

At the least, the White House ought to have informed BT about what kind of Communists were coming for his son, the young Ajit. It would have made the legit lease less precarious, as then, so now.

Now imagine David KE Bruce of OSS discussing the various kinds of Communist US officials, no matter where (and if) he was questioned. 

"Forget OSS', his interrogators would say, "there's only one intelligence problem in the world, World War III, everything about it was known, it would be fought without the lease". 

(In case WWIII was the War on Terror 2001-2021, it was also fought without Antara knowing the 'narrative'.)

"Now", they'd tell David KE Bruce, "why don't you discuss all the officials you've seen pass through the White House in DC".

June 1, 2025.