Kishore Singh: Or even a fancy education?

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I used to blame the lack of higher education on my parents who showed unnecessary haste in getting their most loved son out of home and their way, but it seems that it was the genetic coding of the clan they in turn were scared of. It wasn't that we Rajputs didn't study enough or hard enough, it's just that we seemed unable to do anything once the institutions of higher education were through with us.

While others went on to become surgeons or town planners, winged off as diplomats or flew commercial jetliners, my clansmen, it appeared, were happiest at home. They took their degrees and their certificates, perhaps even signed up for employment, but you could be sure that within the year they'd be back saying the world outside was not befitting of their old world graces and status.

Probably they were right, but what was an educated young man to make of life back in the homestead with nothing but history "" and whisky "" to occupy his mind? True, the villagers might roll over every morning with obsequious salutations before these lords in their crumbling manors, but what with administrations sweeping down on shikar, and ceilings on farmlands, and the lower classes getting above themselves, it was a losing battle to hold on to one's sanity.

There was the story "" and no, it isn't apocryphal "" about the IITian who returned home to boredom and frustration. To pass time until sundown, when he could legitimately call for his peg and soda, he'd gather a group of villagers, give them cakes of Lifebuoy, and ask them to strip down and bathe in front of him "" just to see who among them was fastest in wearing down the soap to a sliver. What might have been amusing as an occasional hoot became tedious when undertaken daily, making our young aristocrat reach faster and earlier for his hooch.

Over the years, tourism and heritage hotels gained them a second lease of life. Now they could legitimately dress up in their regalia, have their evening tot in the company of their guests "" and bill it to them in the bargain. It certainly beat getting on to a horse and going off to battle over imagined slurs, like their ancestors had done.

But it seems these halcyon days were a mere hiccup in matters of indulgence. Why else would the raja of a former kingdom waste away his youth on drinking binges? Fellow clansmen and friends attested to his humility, to his humbleness in schooldays just gone. Yet, here he was, his Rottweilers growling at even the suggestion of imagined slights, ordering the attendants from a detox centre come to take him with them, to pick up hockey sticks and break every window in his palace.

Did they do it? With the dogs growling something fierce, it appeared they had no choice, so they did what the raja had ordered them to do: they broke every single pane of glass in that residence, but the true-blue was not mollified. He wanted them to set fire to the bags lying on the floor. This the attendants did not comply with, choosing instead to throw them out in the rain "" these, after all, were their own clothes.

In the event, the former prince found himself in the detox centre all right, but he was royal, he insisted, and they could not stop him going out if he so chose, so he would set out every morning, visiting the city's bars as soon as they had opened, to return to the institution to sleep the sleep of the drunk every night. Which just shows that working up a lather of Lifebuoy might not have been such a silly thing to do after all.