Editorial»
Make it an occasion
JAN 05 - The other day Bunny and I went to Getanjali’s annual bash. Getanjali is Getanjali as in the TV newsreader, and Bunny and she grew up together as neighbours
in Wellesley Mansions, Calcutta. With the shared traumas of adolescent angst in the form of pimples, Loreto nuns, inadequacy of pocket money and superfluity of boyfriends behind them, Getanjali and Bunny have over the years maintained one of those easy and unforced friendships that seem to come so much more naturally to women than to men. They mightn’t meet too often, both being busy careerists, but Bunny wouldn’t miss Getanjali’s annual get-together for worlds. Me neither. Anything else apart, they’re so reassuring. All the familiar faces are there, besides a few unexpected ones to add an element of pleasant surprise. Other parties might be bigger, noisier, more ostentatious, but Getanjali’s yearly gatherings are uniquely personalised; no one but she could arrange them in quite the same way.
Columnist Sunil Sethi, who is married to Bunny’s cousin, Chhoti, was present. Sunil gave Bunny a well-deserved wigging for having neglected to keep up with that part of her family tree for ages. I agreed with him absolutely, and managed to slip in a few remonstrances of my own regarding such remiss behaviour.
Novelist and social diarist Anurag Mathur was much in evidence — as indeed where is he not? And could that be ...? Good Lord it couldn’t, but of course it was, Tarun Roy, the customswalla whom I had last seen in Calcutta, when a video tape of mine had got hauled in during a raid on a video parlour which allegedly stocked sleaze films, and I’d had to go get it out of custody from Tarun. I’d assured him that my seized tape was not in fact of the hard core variety, and he’d looked at me with equal measures of disappointment and reproach and said: I know it isn’t, you disgusting fellow; I watched the bloody thing, hoping that it was.
Tarun told me he’d enjoyed a particular column of mine, from which he quoted a line or two, and everyone, myself included, chukled and agreed how I was such a funny chap, and I felt no necessity whatsoever to point out that the column in question had in fact been written not by me but by Mani Shankar Aiyar. But seeing as how Mani was one of few anyones who is anyone who was not around, someone might as well take credit for his piece, which I gladly did.
The reason for this long-winded preamble is not to try and do what Sunil and Anurag do so much better than I ever could, namely, demonstrate to the reader how many high-profile people they know. The point I’m trying to make is that there are certain recurring occasions — like Getanjali’s once-a-year party — which become one’s personal calendar landmarks and provide a sense of reference and orientation the way geographic landmarks, like India Gate or Victoria Terminus, do when one is negotiating space instead of time. If I’ve got to IIT crossing, I know where I am in relationship to where I want to go and where I’ve been coming from. Similarly, if I’ve got to Getanjali’s party then not only do I know that it must be January, or that there have been several such Januarys before and hopefully many more to come, but I am also re-affirmed in a sense of identity arising out of shared experience of a common rendezvous: I’m one of the regulars at Getanjali’s party and am recognised as such by other regulars.
Often at such get-togethers you meet people whom you meet only there and there alone. Somehow it never occurs to you or the other person, much though you may mutually enjoy each other’s annual company, to meet elsewhere and elsewhen. Probably because both you and the other suspect that if you did it might in some way detract from the uniqueness of the occasion when you do meet once a year. Acknowledging that the collective in such cases is of more significance than the sum of its individual constituents, you keep otherwise apart and thus keep the annual tradition alive.
Such calendar landmarks are like temporal milestones, and after such occasions I hear myself delivering a familiar monologue. Gosh, did you notice how gray XYZ has grown? Any grayer and he’d be a platinum blond. And has ZYX put on weight, or lost it, or done something to his weight? And wasn’t ABC looking positively ... And any qualms I may have of being uncharitable to my fellow beings are resolved in the certitude that even at that moment XYZ, ZYX and ABC are all telling themselves very much the same things about me. It’s like being in a hall of talking mirrors with its multiplier effect of reflected images.
All of us in our own circles have such occasions. We also have them as an even larger collective called the nation, when we get together notionally for Republic Day, Independence Day, Christmas, Id, Diwali, whatever. The government is proposing to cut down the common public observance of such occasions from 17 to three. If I were them, I wouldn’t. If anything we need more such expressions of commonality rather than fewer. So think about it, guys.
And in the same spirit of the more the better, here’s wishing you many happy returns once again, Getanjali. Posted on: 2004-01-05 02:10
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