Until there is a bhadralok

A visit to a State Bank of India branch is hardly ever an enjoyable experience, especially if the branch is not one of the new-fangled, air-conditioned, coffee-dispensing ones. And yet one such recent foray proved to be unexpectedly rewarding, if not a unique, experience.

The branch is Kalighat, one of Calcutta's oldest localities, dominated, as can only happen in India, by a very holy Hindu temple the sanctum sanctorum of which is supposed to contain a severed-finger of no less than the Goddess Kali, a red-light district and quaint, ancient Victorian markets called Kataras that sell, as can be expected, cloth and spices.

The bank has been serving the area's denizens for more than a century now, dating from SBI's Imperial Bank of India days. Its premises are old and were almost inviting with a decrepit, period charm until it suffered rude modernization in the wake of competition. The competition came mainly from the ATMs of Johhny-come-latelies like ICICI and ABN-AMRO banks, which surround the old behemoth like a shoal of piranhas massed to launch a killer attack on a beached whale.

I dropped in at about six thirty, a time in these dark days of winter and liberalization when even the Babus of SBI have to work. I found the manager, whom I wanted to meet, sitting in his cabin with a customer. The manager waved me to a chair and indicated that he would finish with the other customer before he attended to me.

The customer was an elderly, very-obviously-Bengali gentleman, dressed in a sparkling, white, starch-pressed silk shirt the kind of which must have been popular in the 70s or even before. Yet it looked new. This he had complimented with a pair of pyjamas, clean but un-ironed and topped it off, or bottomed it out, as one might say, with leather slippers.

He was chewing paan, mildly sweet smells of which were wafting all over the manager's cabin and and was sitting with a very aggrieved expression, head bowed and hardly talking to the manager. It seemed that some moments had passed in this apparent state of non-business for it continued for a minute or so after I entered.

The Manager then gently entreated his customer to accept his advice and reminded him that although the bank would have liked to accede to his request, the computers simply wouldn't allow it.

At this the man looked up with baleful eyes and said in a half-whisper, seemingly blaming fate as King Lear might have done when he discovered the rascality of Goneril and Regan, 'So you'll make me a new customer.' After a pregnant pause, he added, 'And after half-a-century of growing old with you.'

The Manager seemed chastised by this, for he lapsed into an apologetic silence that lasted for over a minute after which he renewed his entreat in his softer voice by pleading 'But, Mr. Banerjee, we don't have a way out (kono rasta nei).'

At this, Mr. Banerjee's eyes suddenly twinkled and his face became flushed with colour and he almost rose from his chair to tell the manager, 'No Way Out!! Do you know when I heard those words the last time in this branch? Do you know?'

The Manager looked baffled and slightly disappointed too for he must have been entertaining some notion that he had managed to guide the interview to a successful, if not a particularly happy, close and it now seemed evident that that was not to be the case for some more time.

Mr. Banerjee, though, it was plain, was clearly on a new high. 'Bishwanath Babu, whom I shall never forget, for he was a cashier here for twenty five years, was the person who last said No Way Out in this branch,' he was saying expansively, 'and do you know when? It was the late sixties, Calcutta was in the grip of the Naxal terror, a bank dacoity was in progress in this very branch, and Bishwanath Babu was standing spread-eagled in front of his strong room, telling the armed dacoits – No way out – Kono rasta nei!'

The Manager mumbled his ignorance of Paleolithic history which poured some more fuel into the by-now-raging fire in Mr. Banerjee's bosom. 'How would you know? Were you even born then', he demanded of the manager in his single sly aside of the evening, and continued, "The robbers fired and Bishwanath Babu took the bullet. He had the sense to duck at the last moment and so the bullet, instead of killing him, just grazed his left hand. Some months later, when a grateful management asked him his choice of reward for his act of bravery, Bishwanath Babu expressed the simple wish of being allowed to serve in this branch and asked for nothing more."

Mr. Banerjee ended his story triumphantly, satisfied that he had made a telling point but the Manager looked frankly bewildered, unable to link the story to his customer's banking travails. This was eventually understood at the other end of the table and necessitated an explanation which went: 'And you sit there and tell me – No Way Out! In this branch and that chair, you should think twice before you say those words – kono rasta nei – again!' He did not quite come out and say 'O tempora! O Mores' but he came very, very close to it.

The point now understood, the Manager resumed his supplicatory manner and started mumbling his faint entreaties. 'What can I do, Mr. Banerjee, if my systems don't allow it? I would have liked to delete your father's name from the account and let you continue as the account-holder, but the software simply does not permit it. If the first account-holder expires, the account has got to be closed and a new account opened in the name of the survivors. Please do that, Mr. Banerjee, you will not suffer any financial loss and you shall see that with Core Banking, our services are better than ICICI and ABN-Amro.'

Mr. Banerjee sat and listened patiently, for I imagine that he had by now become resigned to his fate, and said – 'Yes, but you don't understand, do you now? If you close my old account and open a new one, you will be making me a new customer then. But I am not new, I have been coming here for fifty years now!'

And then he got up and shuffled away - the living embodiment of W.B. Yeats’ ‘An aged man is a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick’ - having given up all hope of a just world in the time of core-duo chips and nanotechnology.

I do not think that I have ever heard a complaint made with such passion and resignation together, or even a more relevant and poignant one. But till the day that the bhadralok survives, I live in the hope of hearing some more!

Taj Mahal or Tejo Mahalaya? And other lies perpetrated on the unsuspecting world.

Recently circulating on the internet is a very convincing piece of reasoning (replete, if not flush, with photographic evidence), claiming that the Taj Mahal is really a Hindu building, named Tejo Mahalaya. Here it is:

BBC (?) says about Taj Mahal:

Hidden Truth - Never Say It Is A Tomb

Read text at end of mail.

Aerial view


Interior water well

Frontal view and dome

Closeup of dome with pinnacle

Closeup of pinnacle

Inlaid pinnacle pattern in courtyard

Red lotus at apex of entrance

Rear view of the Taj and 22 apartments

View of sealed doors and windows in back

Typical Vedic style corridors

Music House - a contradiction

Locked room on upper floor

Marble apartment on ground floor

OM in flowers on walls

Staircase leading to lower levels

300-foot corridor inside apartments

One of 22 rooms in secret lower level

Interior of one of 22 secret rooms

Interior of another of locked rooms

Vedic design on ceiling of a locked room

Huge ventilator sealed shut with bricks

Secret walled door that leads to other rooms

Secret bricked door that hides more evidence

Palace in Barhanpur where Mumtaz died

Pavilion where Mumtaz is said to be buried


NOW READ THIS...

No one has ever challenged it except Professor PN Oak, who believes the
whole world has been duped. In his book Taj Mahal: The True Story, Oak

says the Taj Mahal is not Queen Mumtaz's tomb but an ancient Hindu temple

palace of Lord Shiva (then known as Tejo Mahalaya). In the course of his

research Oak discovered that the Shiva temple palace was usurped by Shah

Jahan from then Maharaja of Jaipur, Jai Singh. In his own court ch ronicle,
Badshahnama, Shah Jahan admits that an exceptionally beautiful grand

mansion in Agra was taken from Jai SIngh for Mumtaz's burial. The

ex-Maharaja of Jaipur still retains in his secret collection two orders from

Shah Jahan for surrendering the Taj building. Using captured temples and

mansions, as a burial place for dead courtiers and royalty was a common

practice among Muslim rulers.

For example, Humayun, Akbar, Etmud-ud-Daula and Safdarjung are all buried
in such mansions. Oak's inquiries began with the name of Taj Mahal. He says
the term "Mahal" has never been used for a building in any Muslim countries
from Afghanisthan to Algeria. "The unusual explanation that the term Taj
Mahal derives from Mumtaz Mahal was illogical in atleast two respects.

Firstly, her name was never Mumtaz Mahal but Mumtaz-ul-Zamani," he writes.
Secondly, one cannot omit the first three letters 'Mum' from a woman's
name to derive the remainder as the name for the building."Taj Mahal, he
claims, is a corrupt version of Tejo Mahalaya, or Lord Shiva's Palace. Oak
also says the love story of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan is a fairy tale created
by court sycophants, blundering historians and sloppy archaeologists Not a
single royal chronicle of Shah Jahan's time corroborates the love story.

Furthermore, Oak cites several documents suggesting the Taj predates
Shah Jahan's era, and was a temple dedicated to Shiva, worshipped by
Rajputs of Agra city. For example, Professor Marvin Miller of New York took

a few samples from the riverside doorway of the Taj. Carbon dating tests

revealed that the door was 300 years older than Shah Jahan. European

traveler Johan Albert Mandelslo,who visited Agra in 1638 (only seven years

after Mumtaz's death), describes the life of the cit y in his memoirs. But he

makes no reference to the Taj Mahal being built. The writings of Peter

Mundy, an English visitor to Agra within a year of Mumtaz's death, also

suggest the Taj was a noteworthy building well before Shah Jahan's time.

Prof Oak points out a number of design and architectural inconsistencies
that support the belief of the Taj Mahal being a typical Hindu temple
rather than a mausoleum. Many rooms in the Taj ! Mahal have remained

sealed since Shah Jahan's time and are still inaccessible to the public.

Oak asserts they contain a headless statue of Lord Shiva and other objects
commonly used for worship rituals in Hindu temples Fearing political
backlash, Indira Gandhi's government t ried to have Prof. Oak's book
withdrawn from the bookstores, and threatened the Indian publisher of

the first edition dire consequences . There is only one way to discredit or
validate Oak's research.

The current government should open the sealed rooms of the Taj Mahal

under UN supervision, and let international experts investigate.

Now, if that superb piece is true, then surely the following are as well:

1. Biriyani is not actually a Muslim dish as victims of mass-delusion believe. The name is derived in part from the Hindu invention of a cheap form of cigarette (Biri) and in the other part from the Vedic name for the vagina (yani). The name Biriyani is therefore meant to suggest a rare combination of the extreme pleasures of simultaneous smoking and sex. Canny readers already know that there is no other food in the Muslim cookbook that ends with yani. There could be no more conclusive proof - if more were needed, then the UN should be asked to waste its money by conducting an universal poll to establish this point.

2. Mohammed Ali Jinnah secretly renounced his faith at an early age in a simple ceremony at the friendly Jain-temple next door, in order to be able to wear three-piece suits, eat pork-chops and remain chained to the joys of serial monogamy. Alert readers will have noted that there are no other leaders of the Muslim world who, all at the same time, wear 3-piece Saville Rows (the Shah of Iran, who was also a closet-Jain like Jinnah, only ventured as far as the two pieces), relish pork-chops (the frontrunner in this categoy is the crypto-Hashemite, secretly-Jewish King Abdullah of Jordan who, when dining in full public view at Claridge's in London asks for his ham-steak to be disguised as fine Chateaubriand) and has just one wife (the late Yasser Arafat tried, but gave up what he thought was a losing game when at last count he discovered that he had 743 grandchildren). Ergo - Jinnah, because he did all three, wasn't a Muslim! Therefore the Islamic state of Pakistan is a huge lie and only the political version of a massive optical illusion. One day it shall cease to confuse the clear-sighted (read - Hindus).

3. The reason for which Bob Woolmer's murderer cannot be identified is that the deed was done on the sly and as a personal favour (Question: to who?) by a specialist hangman (area of expertise - hang infidels from ceiling fans and make it look as if they fell on the slippery bathroom floor) last used by General Zia-ul-Haq to do the dirty on Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Nothing else can be revealed until the CIA and Scotland Yard has been fully bribed by General Musharaff when brave, lion-hearted Hindu journalists (of whom Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward, both having distant 43rd Hindu cousins, are good examples) shall finally solve and expose this mystery.

Article in the NY Times

An indication of just how important India has become to the US can be found if you look at today's NY Times. The frontpaged photo-captioned story today is about Rahul Gandhi campaigning in the U.P. - which is not even a 'news-event', as it were, but more of a feature-article. Of course, the India-as-the-land-of-princes-and-consequently-snake-charmers motif runs through the story with the words 'heir apparent' and 'dynasty' popping up in the first paragraph itself and Rahul Gandhi referred to as 'Crown Prince' elsewhere in the article. I guess that the fairy-tale-packaging makes the story instantly appealing to American readers, but the analysis is astute enough. Certainly much better than some of our own newspapers who are exclusively and fanatically interested in sound-bytes to the exclusion of anything that a demented fifth-grader would consider sensible, or anything beyond.

Was it what - two years? - ago that this could not be even imagined? Wonder what's next....perhaps looking up the Los Angeles Times to find out whether phuchka sellers are still allowed on the Maidan? Thank God in Heaven, though, that Mamata hasn't made it to any Times except of India yet, though, and here's wishing that some things never happen. We must be allowed to keep our deepest embarassments as our darkest secrets from the rest of the world. Lest all the foreign investment, our only hope-in-hell-to-get-out-of-hell, decamps overnight.

Nothing in the NY Times about China, significantly enough. A prominent article entitled "Radical Pakistani cleric threatens suicide attacks in capital."

Portents of the future or wishful thinking? Time will tell, I guess, although you could try too, by clicking on the 'Post a Comment' link below.