Pedestalism

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IIT KGP: 1995

We watched a cute new couple with a new-born kid occupy an FTA across the street from our Heavenly Qrs B-140.

Give it to KGP for naming her Qrs with an oomph...FTA stood for Faculty Transit Apartment....much like the seat in a Transit Lounge at the Moscow Airport for those who didn't have a Transit Visa (unless you were a Fellow Traveler).

I know of newly arrived Calcuttans who occupied our Dandakaranya-Outpost FTAs resign and go back to Cal when they heard what they fancied were the outlandish howls of foxes, vixen, and wolves; and laughs of hyenas...pure bunkum and fevered imaginative excuses to get back...

On the other hand, there were many who loved their cute li'l 1-BR FTAs and overstayed their welcome declining routine offers of regular (non-transit) fabulous 3-BR Qrs and preferring to pay instead the whopping Penalty Rent as long as they could....till the mother-in-law arrived to stay...we even heard fake guls of employed couples renting more than one cute FTAs (one for the hubby, two for the missis and M-i-L; baa..baa..black sheep)....

Coming back to our real cute couple, they made themselves at home very quickly possibly because they were returning Home from a more desolate Campus in the US...

On our walks along the Gate # 5 Road, my wife and I used to smile at them and they warmly reciprocated.

One fine evening after a month or so, we found the couple, Dr and Mrs JK, at our door with their kid ringing our door-bell demurely. As soon as they stepped in, Mrs JK apologized to me profusely for not having known all these days that I was the gps of the Phy Dept, almost accusing me for not carrying a Placard round my famous neck to that infamous effect.

It turned out that her elder brother, HR, was our student 25 glorious years back when all my world was young, lad, and all those (Bengalee) lasses queens...

And HR, now at Delhi in a rather Plum Post, asked his sister to locate gps of Phy as soon as they set foot in KGP and convey his best wishes etc.

But HR didn't know that a young couple with a cute kid settling down in a new un-Delhi god-forsaken campus have more compelling business than hound an old hag. And HR was asking everyday.

And when someone told them that the regular old goon they meet daily with their sweet son was himself THE gps, their joy knew no bounds.

And we became fast family friends...stone's throw across the street...

On return from their next Winter Vacation at Delhi, Dr and Mrs JK called on us; and Mrs JK said that HR didn't believe they hit upon the RIGHT gps.

Apparently HR asked if the said gps they met smoked cigarettes with both hands, was a sworn bachelor, lean and hungry-looking like yon Cassius, and was discovered one night by HR and his classmates swigging Golden Eagle in a cubicle in Anarkali all by himself in Gole Bazaar....and stuff like that....

To all of which his sister rebuked: "Pagal hai!...He is a most respected non-smoking vegetarian teetotaler Professor with a Golden Wife and a Platinum Son".....

...Upon which HR stuck to his guns and lamented that his old gps is perhaps dead from lung cancer or worse (bless his soul!) and is faked by a pretender-gps...like that fake Golden Deer of Ramayan...

.......And HR was inconsolably forlorn ....

And Mrs JK confronted me point blank with all her brother's foolproof watertight claims; and I had to request her to go rather easy on the Anarkali Golden Eagle stuff but the rest was all in the Public Domain of my Wife and Son...

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Being the sole elder son with six young sisters, I postponed talk of my marriage till most all of them got married....

And when that eventually was happening, as my good luck would have it, I spoke to my mother discreetly asking her to hunt a suitable bride to this suitable boy of 36.....which she did.

Upon which my younger sister (by a decade) wondered to me privately:

"I never knew you were the marrying sort...."

Upon which I asked her what was wrong with me?.......

....I was of average build, average pay, average complexion, a li'l more than average age, a li'l less than average virtue...

She said that was all ok but she never ever THOUGHT!......

....almost as if I betrayed her and broke her sisterly heart...

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A couple of years ago I was sadly written off by all my well-meaning relatives wholesale as a Gone-Case after I was laid low for 2 years from Post-Retirement Depression.

But they couldn't dream that IIT KGP trains her Physics folks to reinvent themselves as IAS Officers landing Governorships of Reserve Banks, Quantum Financiers, Wholesome Biologists, Software Professionals and just plain lazy limericists.

They rather expected me to stand to reason, shrink, shrivel, shut-shop and die...

And are surprised.

Here is the verbatim excerpt from my IAS B-i-L's Foreword to my Famous Booklet: Limericks & Light Verses (2009):

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"....Life’s wonders never cease. Miracles crisscross our paths so often that we fail to notice the out-of-ordinariness contained in them.

One such wonder is Prof. GPS. A well-groomed Theoretical Physicist drops off Physics: his erstwhile bread and butter, seductress, companion and ‘What have you?’; and takes to limericks, the veritable word-toon jingles. A solemn Don transmutes into a mischievous, no-harm-meant tongue–wag and an iconoclast blasting anybody that is somebody or anything that is something. Poking fun at one and all seems to be his staple daily diet. What better marvel can there be than a solemn and erudite egghead of an elitist IIT taking to limericking as a full time occupation using Deccan Chronicle as feedstock… As a result, there are 100 and more ditties of myriad hues and flavors, and they are all impregnated with plethora of innuendos and puns..."

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Why do we install people on our own sculpted pedestals; and feel upset or surprised when they step down and scoot without our permission?

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