PolyTicks, DeMocKrazy & MumboJumbo: Babus, Mantris and Netas Making Our Nation by Avay Shukla

Author:Avay Shukla [Shukla, Avay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913738037
Google: jXbZzQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1913738035
Publisher: Pippa Rann Books & Media
Published: 2020-08-19T18:30:00+00:00

Kejri played a little game

Known as five-year cricket;

Who gives a damn about the runs

When you can get a ticket?

Having exorcised my guilty conscience, I plan instead to go to Kaka di Hatti for their naan and rogan josh – I can always fast the day Neerja decides to try her hand at cooking.

DHAN KI BAAT

Saturday, 16 June 2018

I should have listened to Mintu, ten years my senior, way back in 1973. If I had, I wouldn’t be living in a village near Mashobra, waiting with bated breath for my pension every month, hoping the Treasury Officer doesn’t question my Life Certificate which states: “brain dead but still breathing and smoking Wills Flakes.” I’d be rubbing shoulders in Kensington Gardens or a Bangkok penthouse with the Modis and the Mallyas of the world, handing out lavish tips to ravaging beauties, all debited to the Bank of Punjab or Baroda, as the (suit)case may be. I’d better explain.

In the Delhi university of 1973, you couldn’t take a girl for a “band omlette” to the Khyber Pass unless you had a Jawa mobike between your knees, its exhaust sawed off in some reverse phallic ritual. Lumbering through my final year MA (no, Mr. Narendra Modi was not my batch mate), I therefore petitioned my nearest living ancestor for a loan for a bike. Now, my Dad sold oil (Burmah Shell) for a living and was harder to pin down than an oil slick. Like Nitish Kumar, I kept hoping for the funds but they never came. Fed up of waiting and seeing a life of enforced celibacy awaiting me, I decided to take matters into my own hands and sat for the SBI Probationary Officers’ Exam. To everyone’s great surprise I made it, but then developed second thoughts: I’d always wanted to sit for the IAS. Enter Mintu, to whom I went for advice. Now, Mintu was the hot shot in the extended Shukla tribe, a go-getter in a multinational company. “Take it!” he ordained. “Why?” I sought to know.

“A bank job,” said he of the unlimited expense account, “is worth dying for. The fortunate guys can play around with their own money, but only the blessed play with other people’s money. That’s what you’ll be doing for the next 35 years, you know (give or take a few years of suspension). You can borrow as much money as you want. Remember, a borrower never dies – he just loses interest.”

I didn’t heed Mintu’s Delphic advice and now have the next 15 years in village Puranikoti to regret it. I have an aversion to taking loans, believing implicitly in the old adage: Neither a loaner nor a loanee be. A mistake which I ascribe to a double promotion between Nursery and KG II, which made me miss the other adage which Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya and Lalit Modi, et al. learned by heart in KG I: “A buck in the hand is worth two in the Bank.”

I have had this great suspicion of loans ever since my Dad visited me when I was posted as SDM Chamba in 1976.

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