BIRABAR NANDA

This was in the late 1970s. A relative of mine, who lived in one of the poshest localities of Delhi, had been educated at one of the best boarding schools in India, and whose father had held powerful positions in the government, joined JNU to pursue a PhD. I saw him one day in the canteen and walked across only to find him look right through me. A few months later, at a family dinner, I was taken aback when he came up to me and told me, almost apologetically, that he would prefer not to associate with me in any way at college. I was not to let anyone know that we were related. I would occasionally see him arrive on a Vespa scooter, dressed in a shabby kurta and pyjama, and head straight for a dhaba or canteen, where he would sit for hours with a few others like him. I was subsequently told by another cousin that his driver, an absolute luxury in those days, would follow him on a scooter to a designated point. There, the driver would hand the scooter over to our budding proletarian and take the car back home. All this charade only to establish his credentials. Cut to a good twenty years later, at a family wedding. He greeted me with great warmth. By then, as the family grapevine had it, he wasn’t doing much beyond occupying one part of the house his father had built and renting out the other half. When he caught up with what I was now doing he caustically remarked, “So, you run a business, is it?” “Yes. I work hard and generate a livelihood for around sixty people, who work equally hard.” “Well, some of us have to do bigger and greater stuff,” he had replied. My husband later told me that if looks could kill, the man would have been reduced to cinder. I have to say that if I have great disdain today at big bindis, shabby kurtas, dirty feet and stubble, sported by people who, in those days, could be found chuffing away at imported 555s or sipping single malt while posturing as champions of the proletariat, it is because of him. He left me with a lifelong allergy to hypocrisy passed off as ideology.