Presidency College in Kolkata in the late sixties was an intense sort of place. Nothing happened in moderation; the cautious and circumspect were looked down upon. If you had not seen the light then you were a reactionary and deserved damnation far more absolute than might befall any non-believer. With students on the rampage around the world, to protest was also to wave your flag of solidarity with a way of being.
In this milieu was a group of contrarian students who refused to swear by the gospel according to Chairman Mao and stood up for the right to be different, embrace a credo of individual liberties and the right to ask questions. The two groups gathered under the alphabet identities of SF and PCSO and were led by Kaka on one side and Saugata and Amit on the other.
In that contest, the libertarians were no match for the professionalism and manipulative electioneering of the believers. The latter won all the student union elections under the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all Westminster-style system. Though, in keeping with the political alignment of West Bengal as a whole, the others consistently polled just under 50 per cent of the popular vote.
In keeping with our belief in individualism, Saugata and Amit came under the same banner but were far too different from each other. Culturally they were as poles apart as those of us from English- and Bengali-medium schools. The English-medium school-type did better with the girls and the Bengali-medium-type called the others ninnies who were mostly seen in the company of girls.
Few could match the sarcasm that Saugata heaped on the social mores of the English-medium type. Fewer still could equal the suavity with which Amit dismissed the vitriol of the non-Anglicised type. Looking back, I cannot decide which divide was greater — the political or the social.
Amit was rare in combining a grass-roots political family background with great communication skills in English. The Presidency College debating team seldom lost an intercollegiate competition with Amit in it. Conversely, a Presidency College quiz team with Saugata in it rarely lost, powered as it was by his photographic memory. If BBC’s Mastermind were to run in India, no need to guess who a formidable contender would be.
An abiding image is that of entering college when it reopened after a three-month strike, to find on display at the foot of the flowing main staircase an incredible array of debating and quiz trophies which, for the most part, Saugata and Amit had won for the college during the shutdown.
Entering through the portals of the college was difficult; getting out respectably even more so. The likes of me almost never made it. There were more distractions than you could handle in your late teens. Some, of course, delivered in politics and academics with equal distinction. Who can forget a unique name like Nepture? It was made all the more unique to me by my father, who one day told me after I returned home, “Your friend – what’s his name – Jupiter, had called.”
Sorry results or good, the permanent takeaway was a compulsion to engage with ideas. What began with a pure pseudo-intellectual name dropping in Coffee House conversations over time transformed into something durable — a need to grapple with the intellectual controversy of the day.
My reward came several years later when on landing on British shores, I put on the TV to find historian Eric Hobsbawm being interviewed. Having acquired a copy of his The Age of Revolution not so long ago from that little shop in an alcove in the Grand Hotel arcade, I felt greatly reassured that I was not arriving at a metropolitan centre from some provincial backwater.
We proudly recalled later: Whatever be our flaws, we were real. We took public issues seriously, we argued and sometimes came to blows over them. And we forged life-long relationships. So many of us fell in love. I have to scratch my head to decide who, of the duo Partha and Shubhalakshmi, is my greater friend from college days.
And those of us deeply into political battles, including fisticuffs, wanted to make a difference in the public domain. Politics was, of course, the highest order that one could aspire to join. I thought I lacked enough of the superior skills needed for it and opted for journalism. The other Partha stayed on the fringes, not too far from the centre of politics, and became an accomplished lawyer. Friendships also stretched across the political divide. Gautam, the soft-spoken outstanding soul, stuck to his academics and recently, courtesy the Internet, we have agreed to debate why the leftist dream was a god that failed.
Saugata got into politics proper right after college and Amit’s time has come now! After 40-odd years both are in the saddle! It has taken that long for the ideology of the Left to be tried and found wanting. In those early days the Left was so pervasive that it was difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel when you could take public policy in the right direction and deliver what society needed and deserved.
But now that those who held the faith have arrived and secured a chance to make a difference, there is a new question and issue: Will it be possible to deliver? If getting a chance to do your act was the journey that determined the better part of professional life, there is, you realise, yet another journey ahead — making something of that chance. You never arrive, but there is joy in travelling.
