Those interested, particularly Stephanians of my generation, are invited to read the unabridged article on this book’s

Happiness is lazing … in the December sun on the lawns outside Allnutt South. With a blade of grass between my teeth and my hands beneath my head, elbows akimbo, I gazed into that blue, blue sky decked with fluffy clouds and was certain of two things…. that the world was mine for the asking and that to be old meant to be forty. I am forty now—and not at all sure anymore that the world really is mine for the asking.
But then we were all cocks of the walk. Nothing could faze us … There were the endless arguments that went on through the night. We really thought it all mattered, we really believed we could change the world: all that was needed was to understand it. And thus the intellectual awakening, the mental jousting: scampering along as a first year acolyte in the shadows of M.A. Final gurus like Kaushal Kumar Mathur and Kish Rana and Mahapatra as they strode up and down the Ridge, arms flailing, throwing out big, big words—Kierkegaard, Gide, “existentialism”, “the categorical imperative”; awed, slightly scared, understanding little, but overwhelmed with the sound of the polysyllables and overwhelmed with gratitude that such noble minds let one even trot along in their shadow.
My first ragging: Chandrasekhar (Shekhar) Dasgupta bearing down on my frightened little mind, “Do you believe in democracy?” Actually, I didn’t but didn’t dare say so; so, I squeaked a tiny “Yes”—and worshipped the ground he walked on as he thundered on about how it was all a bourgeois fraud. Dasgupta and Mazumdar (old Muzzy) feeding me with the China Development Review until I learnt to recite (cooked up) rice production figures with a reverence my ancestors brought to bear on shlokas; and watching the Bangla duo leap on to chairs as they declaimed from the Communist Manifesto—why, till today l remain convinced that Karl Marx pronounced, “A spectre is haunting Europe …” in a definitively Bengali accent. (I met Muzzy again in London, where like all good lapsed revolutionaries, he had taken to pin-striped suits and chartered accountancy. He gravely invited me to dinner—”to meet all those Stephanians you had hoped never to see again”)
For a more sober underpinning in political economy, I turned to Nand Kishore Singh (or Pseud Psingh, as his crueller friends called him). His pockets bulging with unpublished mimeographs filched from the Planning Commission, a copy of Encounter – the definitive symbol of being an intellectual – tucked under his arm (with the cover turned firmly outwards to catch the full glare of publicity) took me through the paces (the “Concept of the Margin”, the “Application of Indifference Curves — but how is one to apply oneself to curves that are indifferent?) and gave me large dinners at the “Khyber” in exchange for which he demanded only worshipful silence. He has grown inevitably into the most influential civil servant of our day, still large-hearted, still warm and still generous—and still, fortunately, pscintillating! (On returning from Cambridge, I heard the line about him attributed to one of the College humourists: ‘NK went to Japan for six months – and returned with an Oxford accent!’)
And above all Deepak Lal, frightfully twee, but with a giant brain: to match wits with him was like taking a knife to a grinding abrasive: painful in the extreme, but you emerged with an intellect honed to a remarkable fineness. The kind of person with whom one could argue the distinction between culture and civilization till dawn broke over the dreaming spires: A poor man’s Wittgenstein.
But it was not all philosophy and politics. There was literature too. The chapel in the late evening stillness of November, the first chill of winter biting the edges of one’s ears, and the gorgeous lusty voice of Michael Jones mingling with Bhaskar Ghose’s warble:

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom brings logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail.

Eliot caught our imagination: Prufrock and his coffee spoons; the woman in Gerontion “poking the peevish gutter”; the quote from the Duchess of Malfi: “Thou has committed fornication/Yes, but that was in another country and besides the wench is dead”; “the second turning of the second stair” (Ash Wednesday); “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract” (Murder in the Cathedral) There was that wonderful word “remembrances” picked up from a D.H. Lawrence poem we had to learn for the Wright Memorial Elocution contest. (I won the top prize and asked to buy as my prize Cheiro’s Palmistry for All. Scandalized, Doctor Ghosh summoned me to the Staff Room and said I was not to be frivolous but purchase something improving. I remained adamant and replied that as I had after all won the prize, I had the right to choose my book. At which Doctor Ghosh glanced furtively around him and, seeing that no one else was about, stuck out his palm and asked if I would read it!)
I was mesmerized by Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. He wrote English as if he were writing Urdu:
“I felt as if heaven lay close upon the Earth/ And I between them
both, breathing through the eye of a needle.”
“The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs”.
“She looked like a statue of pride hanging her head”

And, above all, Durrell’s translation (transcreation) of C.P.Cavafy, the Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, where he wrotemy all-time favourite:
The City
You tell yourself: I’ll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be –
Where every step now tightens the noose,
A heart in a body buried and out of use.
How long, how long must I be here confined
Among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Wherever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
(To which the poet replies):
There’s no new land, my friend, no
New sea, for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house grow white at last –
The city is cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall,
And no ship exists to take you from yourself”
and               
       The god abandons Antony
“Do not be tricked and never say
It was a dream or that your ears misled.
Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints.
Let all such useless hopes be shed,
And, like a man long since prepared,
Deliberately, with pride, with resignation
Befitting you and worthy of such a city
Turn to the open window and look down
To drink past all deceiving
Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng
And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving”

It serves as an anthem to my life – but I did not know that then. Indeed, in all honesty, I must confess that the mythical Justine was the first woman I ever fell in love with!

Then there were the debates. My favourite memory is of a pixie from lndraprastha who thought fit to start reciting in her speech those worn-out lines from Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear….
And the entire audience in one voice rising to a crescendo repeated with her:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Well, today she’s a Member of Parliament (and a close confidante of the Congress President)—so the last laugh is on us!
The other story of my debating days I cherish is the time Chandrashekhar (Shekhar) Dasgupta and I went to Aligarh to debate the subject, “In the opinion of this House, Man should go to the Moon.” I was speaking against the motion. It was Shekhar who gave me my opening line:

“Mr. President, Sir, after having enjoyed the hospitality of your University, I believe Man should not go to the Moon: he should come instead to Aligarh!”

Cat calls; whistling; pandemonium; four-anna coins being thrown on the stage; flying kisses from the audience. It could only have happened in Aligarh. Of course, we won the enormous silver cup hands down. And Shekhar insisted on our keeping awake the whole night as we took the train back to Delhi: one, to save the cup being stolen and, two, in view of the flying kisses, to ward off any ardent Aligarhian. Twenty years later, I was posted to Karachi. The phone at my desk rang and a hesitant voice at the other end asked, “Sir, excuse me, sir, but are you the Mr. Aiyar who came to a debate in Aligarh in 1959?”

A third and last memory. Chirpy (Yogesh Chandra) and I set off to the annual declamation contest at the Military Academy in Dehra Dun. We spotted the two prettiest girls (from Lady Irwin) and concluded that even if it was no go with them the teacher sent to chaperone them was a stunner. He snuggled up to one of the girls. On the other side of the aisle, I snuggled up to the other. Fourteen years later, one cold January day in 1973, that one became my wife. The true purpose of the debating hall is to serve the ends of woomanship.

My earliest venture into trade unionism was at St. Stephen’s. The Reverend Jarvis had always been most gracious and kind to me. It was he who gave me my first opportunity to step on the stage. But the imagination of all of us neo-thespians had been caught by Rajan Chetsingh who had directed us in Love’s Labours Lost in 1958 and the following year in The Merchant of Venice. (For me, the immortal moment in that play came when I was standing in the wings next to one of our foremost cricketers watching Zahid Baig’s Shylock advance with the naked blade of his dagger glittering in the light to cut his pound of flesh from Antonio’s breast. The cricketer, innocent of all Shakespeare, gasped in terror, “Array yaar, he’s going to kill the bastard!” Straight out of the Globe Theatre circa 1590!) So, when in 1960 it was decided that The Merry Wives of Windsor would be directed by the Rev. Jarvis and not Mr. Chetsingh, we rose in revolt and decided to boycott the play. I cannot now recall who or what put it into our minds that skullduggery was afoot; certainly not Mr. Chetsingh who pleaded with us that he had relinquished the director’s wand voluntarily and would we please do him the favour, if we really and truly did adore him, of cooperating with Mr. Jarvis, Well, we all did eventually. Which taught me that invaluable lesson in trade-unionism: always look for the tail between the legs of the revolutionary.

Ours was the generation that started Kooler Talk — in honour of the water cooler that had been installed in the college. The censorious authorities wouldn’t let us christen the magazine by its obvious name, “The Blacksmith“, in commemoration of the one song that all true Stephanians know better than they do the national anthem. Sarwar Lateef’s was the brain and organizing genius behind the venture and Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s the rapier wit. Financing came, we suspected, from the tea and coffee king, Peter Philip. (When I was invited to write a memoir of Kooler Talk on the completion of its Silver Jubilee, I got out just two lines: “Kooler Talk was founded by Sarwar Lateef, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Peter Philip. If it strikes you that they were a Muslim, a Sikh and a Christian, you are no Stephanian”!)

My contribution to the first few issues was muckraking. My obsession was girls and I had been denied the opportunity to meet them by Miss Sajnani of Miranda House first offering, and then withdrawing the offer, to let me act in the annual Miranda House play. So, I pitched in with a vicious little piece called “Inside Miranda Today by John Munther” in the first issue of Kooler Talk about how all the others who had been offered the role after me had turned it down, ending with the words, “For an institution that is famed for its gardens, Miranda House seems to be growing only wall flowers now!” Well, I suppose I was horrid, and the girls would have turned me down anyway.

Another fragment from Kooler Talk inspired by the Steward, Mr. Marr: “The Rubaiyat of O Marr Kya ham”:
Alike for those who to Cafes Repair

And those who to the Dining Hall do dare
A Mess-Committee Man from Somewhere cries,
“Fools! Your potatoes are both here and there!”
Mine was also the Age of the Trouser Bottom Revolution. There was this weather-beaten old tailor in Model Town, Kalia & Sons, who made a fortune snipping all our billowing pants down to a respectable ankle-hug- until Duke Walia invented the neat little zip at the heel which even creased the down on your calf: to sartorial Stephania the equivalent of the discovery of the wheel.

The elections to the Union revealed to one both the gory world of chicanery and the glorious world of uncompromising integrity. The chicanery was mine. A day or two after I first joined college, terrified at each monster who descended like an Assyrian wolf to rag me, I was so relieved that this giant —Vinod Dikshit — was only asking most politely for my vote that I promised it to him immediately and wholeheartedly. A few days later, when the world seemed less full of people wanting to drag me through the slime with my clothes off, along came the rival candidate, Ravi Dayal (Bonzo) with his wonderfully persuasive charm. I chucked my earlier commitment and crossed the floor. (My only extenuating argument is that he really was a charmer. The story goes—apocryphal or not—that when Bonzo went in for his I.A.S. interview, nattily turned out and the prominent Dayal beak firmly held in the air, Sardar Panikkar, then at an advanced stage of his cantankerous dotage, rumbled, “Mr. Dayal, do you really believe that with your coat, your tie and your trousers you can talk to the Indian peasant?” And Bonzo replied with a dazzling smile, “I’ll take my coat and my tie off, Sir, but I’d like to keep me trousers on.”) My defection was deservedly punished – Vinod Dixit won by a mile. In fact, no one I ever supported ever won an election and the only candidate I sponsored got only 26 votes and even lost his seat in the Criterion (the college Parliament), so I ended up as leader of the Opposition.

But that didn’t stop me from deciding to run myself. And it was that experience which exposed me to the rigours of uncompromising integrity. I asked Sarwar Lateef to publish a comparative table of my rival’s qualifications and mine, convinced that as Sarwar was my supporter he would tilt the balance heavily in my favour; but he refused to lend his

Kooler Talk to this kind of underhand partisan politics—which left with me no option but to withdraw from the race and go elsewhere for my M.A. studies.
And, oh, yes, we did go in for studies occasionally. Dear old Doc Ghosh on Five-Year Plans:
“The Five-Year Plan is a plan for five years. Samjhe na?”
“The Industrial Revolution was made possible by the spinning jenny—not to be confused with Marx’s Jenny”. (Balbir Singh)
History subs. with. Mohd. Amin, the immortal phrase maker: “He smelled a rat and nipped it in the bud”; “A chain of events stabbed him in the back”; “He had him by the throat when he put his foot in it”.
There was Thangaraj, whose extraordinary accent, combining Boston with Basavanguddi, tended to make one’s mind wander from the Japanese economic history he taught straight out of Lenin: “Imperialism is the last stage of Capitalism”. And Kurian (later Economic Adviser to the Namboodripad government in Kerala and a member of the Rajya Sabha) who taught me much of my Economics and penned the most eloquent testimonials, about which my tutor at Cambridge rasped, “Good testimonials, yes, but why must the man write them on pink toilet paper?”

Our Head of Department was Prof. N. C. Ray who was so upset when I stole away a first from under the nose of his favourite student that he refused to even congratulate me. Well, he was right, and I’ve been proved the poacher: the student I nosed out was none less than Arun Shourie, arguably the most brilliant columnist in Indian journalism today and destined for far greater glories than are dreamt of in my poor hopes. (This was my view in 1981. I have since revised my estimation)

But the last thing we cared for were our studies; life, real life, was not to be found in musty libraries and careworn classrooms. Life, real life, meant only one thing—girls. Oh, the exquisite moment of taking a girl to the University Cafe and returning in the gathering dusk to College, a faint blush of achievement on one’s cheek, to that greatest accolade of them all from one who had seen you there with Her: “Killer,Yaar!” Those were the days, an aeon before this permissive age, when we fretted our adolescence into painful manhood, brushing away our Malthus and Marshall and Keynes, our energies and attention riveted on that pinnacle of all sexual achievement: the purchase of two cups of coffee!

The nostalgia trip ends as it began with one’s friends. Gate crashing the Teen Age Christmas Dance at the Gymkhana Club through a rear toilet door obligingly opened for us by Ranjit Chib. The impecunious Nikhilesh Prasad always short of money:

“Yaar, lend us a buck.”
“No”
“Eight annas then, yaar.”
“No”
“O.K., a charzie.”
“NO!”
“In that case, may I borrow your toothpaste?”

Vinod Suri (with an unprintable nickname) who was at the centre of so many of our japes that when, a few years later, he lost his memory in a car crash, it was truly said of him that “to the regret of his many friends” he recovered it again! Shankar Menon, with that enormous white smile on his darkling face (which led to Arif Qamarain – Q – remarking on seeing him disappearing down the unlighted corridor of Allnutt South, that one now understood what was meant by the vanishing grin of the Cheshire cat). Shankar used that remarkably fertile imagination of his to play Neville Cardus to Stephania’s hearties. He edited a wallpaper devoted to sports which, famously, mentioned a great pole-vaulter called Moss who was wrongly suspected of having a stone in his gall bladder: ‘A rolling Moss,’ noted Shankar gravely, ‘gathers no stone!’  Jagdish Khanna, captain of hockey, obligingly naming all the ten others of us in his Third-Year hockey team as Vice-Captain so that we could claim some kind of extra-curricular distinction in admission forms we are all frantically sending off to universities overseas. There was Roshan Seth, the most gifted actor of our day, his soliloquy as Richard II in Pontefract prison tearing at one’s tear-ducts; Tony Jaitley bringing a touch of West Side Story to David Summerscale’s production of Twelve Angry Men (we saw the Henry Fonda/Lee J. Cobb film together at Cambridge and decided that the St. Stephen’s production was far superior!); and Zafar Hai in the same play, smooth as silk in his sharkskin suit (“I never sweat”) from where he has puffed his way on his long cigarette holder to the very summit of the advertising profession in all India…. Twenty years on…. “Golden lads and girls all must/Like chimney sweepers come to dust.”

I return to that December afternoon as we lay in the sun on the lawns of Allnutt Court. There were six of us. Someone bestirred himself and asked, “Yaar, after you leave college what do you want to do?” Five out of the six of us answered, “Join the Foreign Service.” And all five of us are now in the Foreign Service. Which tells us all we need to know about what is right with St. Stephen’s – and what is wrong with the country. A random selection of five, competing with several hundred thousand others, and all five of us emerging successful: it shows how narrow is the economic and social base in India from which the privileged elite of the country breeds others of its kind. It also shows how narrow are the horizons of our ambitions. We are deliberately deploying all our great good fortune and all our many talents on securing an assured job where the ladder of success is firmly embedded into our careers at age twenty-two. St. Stephen’s acquired its civil service orientation—becoming a kind of brown man’s Haileybury—in the days of the ICS when to rule and to run things was one and the same thing. In a parliamentary democracy, bureaucrats only run things; it is the politicians who rule. And a healthy democracy needs among its rulers ‘sensible men of substantial means.’ Had Walter Bagehot lived in India in the last quarter of this century, he would have perhaps shortened his famous phrase to just “Stephanians”. But there are virtually no Stephanians in politics, which is what makes me wonder whether the Class of ’61 has not betrayed its generation. By keeping out of the fray, we have perhaps ensured that we will neither dangle from the hangman’s noose nor be shot at dawn—but do we risk going down in history as The Group that strangled itself in red tape?” Quotation ends.