Picknick

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"...Today's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution...The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street....a man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under the 'great elm' and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was absurd...Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Paudus, the Po, 'a river wider than the Rhone,' and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters..."

...Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

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I joined IIT KGP on the May Day of 1965 (it was not yet a Govt Holiday). Everything was new, strange and somewhat fearful for me. The lingo was absolutely unintelligible, food weird, customs unfathomable, etiquette ambiguous...Culture Shock.

And before I could settle down, there was this 'compulsory' Departmental Picnic to Kolaghat. Later it turned out to be not at all compulsory, but Professor SKDR, who was the youthful organizer, knew that I was the goat in the department and put the fear of God into my soul...I was afraid that my CR (yes, we still were under the Govt of India rules) may be blotted.

So, I woke up early (against my nature), finished my ablutions in a hurry and reached the Lovers Circle where I was supposed to be picked up by the IIT Bus at 5 AM...sharp...as SKDR threatened me. The bus came at 7 AM. And I had only standing room...all the Senior Professors were allowed with families...wives and kids.

The bus dropped about 50 of us at the KGP Railway Station. And we boarded the KGP-HWH Passenger. It steamed and tooted and trundled and chugged and dropped us at Kolaghat at 11 AM.

I was dying for a cup of coffee and of course there was nothing like it anywhere en route.

SKDR started bargaining with the couple of boatmen who saw the crowd and raised their tariff I guess by a factor of 3. Intense haggling went on for a good half an hour, SKDR threatening that we would all walk; and the boatmen seeing the ladies and kids knew that he was posturing...

Anyway, I had the misfortune of being pushed into a crowded corner where the 3 wisemen of the Dept, HNB, SKDR and GBM were quarreling over (as far as I could make out the few English words) Operating Grant, Equipment Grant, Senate Norms and such money matters...the three led the Research Labs.

So the breeze, the water, the boatman's song, the sky, and all else that Roop Narayan River could offer a young and wistful soul was completely lost on me. And to add to the discomfiture, the only lady RS of the Dept, about my age, was flirting with that Dev Anand of the Dept at the other end of the boat where they were squeezed willy-nilly...I never could figure out the technique.

By the time we arrived at the R&B Guest House which was booked for us, I was famished, and breakfast was certainly subtending a much larger visual angle than that lady scholar.

All that that Lady and BKM (of the Ukridge fame) could offer us was a plate full of raw bread slices and cut tomato pieces to be picked up and passed on...I could have devoured the whole plate but it just happened that I had yet to develop a taste for bread and salad...was worrying that that yellow patch on the bread slice was mold and that tomato looked rotten...I passed the plate on.

And it was followed by lukewarm tea poured out into strange-looking mud pots from the frayed spout of a jet black kettle...BKM explained that the log fire was buffeted by the swaying north wind.

And I was too scared to smoke in the company of Senior Profs who were all smoking but...

Roop Narayan was rippling and sparkling in the winter sun but the approach was muddy and there was this stench that forever engulfs river beds abutting populated Indian Villages.

BKM called me aside and asked me to accompany him to watch some fun. He took me to an ample figure sitting alone on the roundabout under a fig tree nearby and lost in thought apparently. And asked him:

"Why don't you share your problems with youngsters like us?"

The figure woke up from his reverie and grimaced and replied:

"Why should I? I can do my problems myself without your help"

BKM smiled and took me back into the crowd waiting for the arrival of the lunch packets ordered by SKDR, and said, when we were out of earshot of the old man:

"He is the most kanjoos intellectual in the Department...shame on him!"

Many years later I got to know that his name was SDM.

The lunch baskets arrived and as is the custom, kids were fed first and then ladies and then old profs and at last shy guys like me.

I opened my packet by the side of BKM who devoured his, licking his fingers and saying he never ate such good river fish...perhaps from Roop Narayan.

I offered mine to him and he thanked me immensely and said he would compensate by and by.

I don't know what happened then...maybe I dozed off...

BKM woke me up around 4 PM and asked me to walk with him to an incoming boat...we two walked over to the makeshift jetty, pants in mud and mud in pants...and climbed up...and BKM said something in some lingo to who looked like the Supplier who opened the cover of the aluminum degchi...and BKM picked up half a dozen singaras...hot hot...piled them on a leaf plate and asked me to sit down at the bow and help myself...

Till today I swear I never ate anything tastier, wholesomer, and heavenlier...

That degchi subtended a visual angle ten times larger than the stout and lonely figure under that fig tree...



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