i know what you did last summers-delhi

Posted on | July 10, 2008 | Comments Off

Summers is a beatific experience for most MBA students, if they work in a marketing role, and especially in strategy, it is even more beautiful. And so I was for a pharma major. You let the consultants do most of the work, and relax and report to your boss every weekend. So I sat in the air-conditioned office, surfing the net, ostensibly checking out the latest and most relevant breakthroughs in marketing strategy being dreamed up by those Harvard types, and, as purely as a matter of interest, some work that had been done in the Indian rural marketing field, fulfilling my task of devising a new rural marketing plan for our new animal health product. I would do this for 8-10 hours every day, with valuable strategic supported by my vast collection of fiction in pdf form, in summers I caught up on my reading like never before. And the weekends I could go visit friends for regular parties.
So, life was beautiful. At least for the first one and a half months of the two month project. But all good things, they say, come to an end. The marketing program I had assisted devise between reading novels had, finally, to be implemented in the field, and horror of horrors, my Boss wanted me to go visit and make a report encompassing evaluations and recommendations. And so a travelling plan was prepared-Delhi, Aligarh, Muzaffarpur, Indore…you get the drift. For two weeks!! I knew I was not going to enjoy this.
Anyways, I reached Delhi around midnight, took and auto, and since I had never stayed in Delhi in a hotel before, asked the autowallah for a recommendation, because summer interns are lowly people and do not merit the Marriot treatment. He says Paharganj, and he will find me a hotel. As The Kid, who has stayed in Delhi for a fair bit had also, I will be charitable now and assume it was in jest, recommended Paharganj, I felt happiness. I was tired and now would get rest in a good hotel and good food and refreshed for the tough day tomorrow.
And so we land up in a back alley of Paharganj, in a front of a tall slim structure looking only very slightly shady and going by the modest and fitting name of The Presidency. At check in, I unfortunately decide to write my name as Dr. Y A Blogger, and so, am treated to an impromptu description of a ghastly condition that the desk clerk’s nephew has and his travails in the hands of the agile and honest medical system in India. I assume he does not like doctors very much. Very intellectually stimulating all this discussion, specially at midnight. If you are the type. Not me. And so I somehow manage to escape and am directed by a bellboy; who could is definitely NOT a ‘boy’ and has left his ‘boyhood’ far behind in the dusty lanes of memory, and who carries my small travel bag as if he was Atlas; up a very long series of very winding stairs till, huffing and panting, we reach the fourth floor, and I mentally bless the airlines people for all the cigarettes that I DID NOT smoke during the flight. I do remember reading somewhere that physical exercise at midnight is good for health.
And so I throw my bag aside and order a beer and some food, to be informed that for beer I have to pay cash with a thirty percent markup because all the shops are closed and he will have to get it from the “back”. I obey, and dispatching him, enter the shower. And just as I am all soaped up, with remarkable agility for something that was very tough to get, I hear the ‘boy’ arrive with the beer. Anyways, how I coped with the warm-by-the-time-had-it beer and cold-by-the-time-I-ate-it food is a sad story not be pondered upon, but soon as I finish my food and settle down to watch some TV, I hear a knock and another ‘boy’; this one very much a boy, a skinny fellow with oily long hair and a desperately bone-hugging T-shirt; enters.
“Sir, would you like to me to play a movie for you?”
I silently point to the TV which is running HBO.
“Not that shit, Sir. I mean something really entertaining, if you know what I mean.”
I know what I mean, as my mind immediately goes back to the compulsory pastime of most virile, young Indians of a certain age, and remember the days of the VCR when in the hostel when everyone slept off, a group of us would engage in the enjoyment of a type of cinema the more respectable of movie critics never have the fortune of making the subject of their attentions. I remember the group of eager young faces bathed in the blue light (from the night light, not the TV screen, which would be anything but blue) and the wide eyes hungrily taking in the activities of pairs, or sometimes more, of men and women; and also sometimes women and women, but never men and men; engaged in activities which some have recommended should always be private. The highest form of art. Yes, I do know what the boy means by really entertaining. I decide to probe a bit, and ambivalently question him.
“Here I am watching The Rock. What would you offer?”
He is experienced. And more nonchalant than me.
“Depends on what you like, sir.”
“I mean, what do you have on the menu”
“Sir, my concern is your pleasure. I will have whatever you would like.”
After this wide raging reply, I do not see much point in more probing. I say that I am fine with The Rock, thank you, and I don’t really watch that many movies anyways.
That’s totally all right, Sir, he says, and leaves. But as he closes the door I hear something which sounds suspiciously like “prudish prick”. I switch to 9XM and go to sleep.

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