Powers of Ghost

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One sunny morning at 8 AM, Rinku, the eldest daughter of RSS, appeared in our spacious Hall of Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP.

She was in her Class IX at the KV (Central School) then. She had a ball-pen and a rough paper in her hand.

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Rinku: Uncle, jaldee se ek English poem likkhe deejiye

Me: Kya baat hai?

Rinku: Mere ko Assembly mey padhne ka hai 9.30 pe

Me: Topic choose karo; try karengey

Rinku: Agar topic milta tho pappa hi likh sakthe hai

Me: Aap ka school mey sabse bada joker kon hai?

Rinku: Hey..hey..hey...hamara Prinipal hi hai!

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That was the first piece of ghost-writing in English I had to do at KGP.

Title of the poem was: "The Prince"

By 8.30, the ten-line poem with rhyme and fairly good reason was in her hands. She thanked me and went away. Apparently it went terrific well and the Prince was all smiles and seized her paper for safe-keeping.

English is a powerful language and the meaning you extract from it depends:

"His head is like a green coconut" may mean it is sooooo sweet and delicious inside; or that it has water in place of grey matter.

Whenever the demands came from KV, I insisted that the student at least choose the topic. It never happened. From this I conclude that it is the choice of topic that is half the battle.

One evening my son and I had to take out our push-bikes and go round the Campus angling for a topic. The Hiji Station yielded nothing; but on our way to the Tech Market we saw a large number of members of the Technology Angling Club, busy fishing single-minded in the Lake with umbrellas covering their heads; and so the poem: "The Angler" got composed by the time we reached home.

But it required an overnight effort from 9 PM to 3 AM to compose an 80-line Theme Poem parodying Vikram Seth's "Frog and the Nightingale". It was titled: "Ms Buffalo & Dr Crow" and I think we still have a soft copy on my son's hard disk.

These are merely 'ghost-writings'.

Then come the several pieces of prose we all had to compose when, let us say, the the Dean asks the HoD for a ghost-write-up and the HoD dumps it on you.

These come under the head of 'ghost-ghost-write-ups'.

One morning at 10 AM at KGP I got a call from my eldest brother-in-law, Sri G Ranga Rao, IAS at Madras asking me to fax a two-page write-up on the current literary scene in Bengal by the evening.

Apparently, the tiny but cute Probasi Bengali Association in Madras chose him as their Chief Guest for a function of theirs. He had his schooling in Cuttack and so was very proficient in Oriya, and picked up very good spoken Bengali during his tenures in Bengal which was why he was chosen.

That was a little too much even for a super-fiction-writer like me, and I was wondering what to do, sitting under the mango tree at the Co-Op Canteen, when I spotted Mainak Sengupta passing along. I beckoned to him and asked him to do the job for me by the evening. He was the Culture Vulture I knew very well and was the reigning Secretary of SPICMACAY at IIT KGP. He did a Project under me in 'History of Science & Technology for Research Scholars' and has a lovely paper titled: "A Brief History of Radio Astronomy".

He said he would deliver it by 4 PM.

And he did.

Apparently it went off so well that GRR had a few kind words for me, which I at once passed on to Mainak.

Mainak smiled and said he would pass them on to Aparajita, his betrothed co-Research Scholar in EE.

You will find their names in my Schindler's List. The charming couple with two cute kids are now Professors of EE at the Deemed University BE College in Howrah, where myself and my whole family have a standing invitation.

That would be 'ghost-ghost-ghost writing'; no?

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