Monday, 19 January 2026

Prepping for G7

People worldwide had understood that the constant threat of instability was not according well with the aspirations of the small towns of West Bengal as well as Kolkata.

Bengal towns and Kolkata had needed the instability to impose draconian measures, like withholding Aadhaar etc, but their aspirations were unlikely to be seriously considered till the crisis was solved, the events since 2012 discussed and understood, certain criminal prosecutions undertaken as well.

Through it all, Antara had kept submitting her work. What would the western officials tell her? 

"Those that had thwarted and ruined your life now wanted to move on? We'd need some scapegoats for criminal prosecution because those actually responsible wanted to be rewarded for what was done to you? That could you believe it, given the way you performed in Science, scoring excellently, your ruination was arranged by the Obama administration through nuclear legislations, which sort of evolved proliferation to a new level? That your paternal grandparents were used as an excuse, if they didn't get ALSOS Mission information, why keep her informed of what the US Govt did with nuclear technology?"

Do we always lead the lives of our grandparents? 

Was Barack Obama's grandparent President of the United States? 

We'd have to assume it was so, given north Kolkata, how else could two decades be taken away from someone's life and no US official even suggest, "Was it legal? Has anyone ever been punished for their grandparents, the grandparents' lack of education and resources, the way Anjali described BT and Pratibha?"

It seemed US officials had been compensated in certain ways. In the decade following the 9/11 attacks, probably surprised that Antara was not getting the message that she was inferior to her relatives (and later her spouse), they had considered her slow, "Which woman didn't realise that her family members wanted her to be lowly, defeated, submissive? Going to university, journalism college, where were all these aspirations coming from?"

These US officials had made arrangements for a safe future for themselves, such that Antara's desire to succeed didn't come in the way of their comfortable lives.

If your US Congress had authorised the "US President to pursue bilateral and multilateral international agreements to establish an international framework for determining the source of any confiscated nuclear or radiological material or weapon",

if Americans had repeatedly decided that Donald Trump was the right individual to detect the sources of nuclear or radiological material,

then why should American news personalities throw a tantrum if Donald Trump wrote to Norway, maybe he was trying to detect the source of some confiscated nuclear material, or trying to establish an 'international framework' by annexing Greenland?

Did American news personalities not want the US president to remain loyal to American legislation?

January 19, 2026.

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ii. The US President's formalised powers to search for the sources of nuclear and radiological material had great uses. 

For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) officially concluded its withdrawal from Yemen on January 2, 2026 (also the birthday for the likes of Chetla, Supriya etc).

Yet Antara was not alerted to it, how would Antara know the significance of that event 18 days later? 

And if Antara was not eligible for such alerts, who was 'running' her blog, if it was supposed to contain commentary on military matters?

How would Antara know the 'status' of her blog at present? 

Given the hysteria-driven politics of Washington DC, what if a Trump executive order had 'downgraded' her blog, if it was now merely journalistic assertions on random topics? Antara would never find out if it had been 'downgraded', except in the vicious behaviour of those around her.

Yet, it seemed like just the other day that Antara had been alerted that it was the Port Hodeydah Agreement of 2019 that had come in the way of Antara's employment, "You could have very well taken the job offered by The Hindu newspaper in summer 2019, it was that defence wife/former classmate of yours that had wreaked havoc in your life in her rush to the Treasury".

What happened in the course of these years that the UAE withdrew from Yemen but the supposed instability within India didn't cease? Antara's sources of information came under attack, she no longer received relevant news alerts or notifications, she had to unsubscribe from DoD newsletters given how insulting they had become, how would Antara write to others in India?

Antara's word of advice to the defence wife/former classmate: everyone in India was aware that the instability should have been over, Chetla lived abroad, you have been identified as one of the main instigators of trouble (with some political backing), everyone knew whose support you were flaunting, what dreaded name you were trying to involve.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) had made one mistake. When the Governor of Hadramawt alleged about weapons cache and secret detention facility at Riyan airport (even after the UAE had withdrawn), about underground operations rooms and fortified shelters that were allegedly used as prisons, UAE didn't realise that it was being reminded of the Qala Jangi prison riot at Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan, Nov 2001, what was purportedly not against the Agency, the Agency being a 'front'.

Was the prison riot at Mazar-e-Sharif in Nov 2001 against the UAE?

That could only imply a WWII reference, nothing from recent times.

It was an attack on Antara of stupendous proportions. Antara had few UAE references from her school days, except the cricket matches played at Sharjah in the 1980s, the Indian cricket team didn't always perform well, there'd be notorious gangsters in the galleries, watching the matches. 

UAE's involvement in WWII seemed to have been about providing a crucial "logistics hub and staging post", thousands of Allied aircrafts refuelling at the Sharjah Airfield/Al-Mahatta, as they flew towards India and the Eastern Theatre.

If the defence wife/former classmate was conflating WWI and WWII, it was possible she was accusing Austria of making sure the RAF expanded the Imperial Airways strip at Sharjah into something viable for a World War.

It was not possible to continue the blog without identifying the Goering-Luftwaffe interest that was dictating how some of the former classmates behaved. It was not a crime for Austria to be friendly towards RAF, Austria had been annexed, it didn't have to be loyal to the Nazis. 

Why was Luftwaffe using instability in India to further Goering's agenda?

January 20, 2026. 

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iii. Did Antara ever think of impacting legislations as exalted as those in the European Parliament?

No, if you remember, Antara had written the Civil Services Exam in India, she was interested in impacting legislation within India, which ended up going to random legislative research centres set up by Gupta and friends. 

The point was missed in hiring lawyers from south India for India's legislations. We've had bureaucratese, India had excessive legal jargon, we needed less lawyers in drafting bills for the Lok Sabha, not more legal teams. 

Who had the intent to listen to such arguments?  Some worthies had visited New York, where there was a plethora of law firms with surnames hanging on to each other, never consider if New York needed law firms like that, then bring the concept to India, shove it on an unprepared country. 

Had Antara's relatives or in-laws' ever visited her, she'd have enacted how this country, our India, was broken in 2008, how no one said, "How will we live here?" Antara had tried writing about it to others, they sent abusive replies.

--Oh, okay, wow, did Antara ever think of visiting Europe, forget impacting its legislations or trade deals?

Antara wanted to scour every inch of India, she already knew her favourite would be Hampi, then Golconda Fort, travel all over the northeastern states, then take the train along the scenic Konkan Railways. She had memorised every map showing India, that was her hobby till the torture started, from railway networks of India to agricultural production to rainfall patterns to what crops and vegetation grew in semi-arid regions. 

What a turn of events, Antara who loved India so much, to be so disliked by Indians. 

Antara didn't know how to get Paytm and UPI else she would have got the friendship of Indians. She was thinking of buying Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', prepare for the next embassy event, could it be Kazakhstan? 

--Okay, so how was Europe present in Antara's life when she was at school?

Oh, that. The lunch-box was compartmented, the sweet or the slice of cake was at the narrow compartment on the side, the rest of the lunch-box was puri-aloo sabzi. That's how Antara understood Europe, excessive Indian influence of a certain sort, hardly any European involvement in decision-making.

--Were the likes and dislikes of Antara because of the neighbourhood she grew up in, which abjured the Tagores? Surely designating a few families to 'manage the Tagore agenda' meant its rejection?

Antara never knew that people had agendas. On summer evenings, when her mother and sibling joined other females from their building, all hanging out and conversing loudly, she'd stay back with her father in their flat and complain, "Could you believe them, how loudly they were chattering?"

"They were like that," Ajit would say, "why don't you sit with me at the verandah?" and they'd sit and swap stories, how Antara wrote the blog.

Hence, Antara wouldn't know if the women were discussing a Tagore agenda or something against it or if they were aware that their information came from German soldiers who fought on the Eastern Front during WWII. So many Germans were taken POWs, paraded in Moscow, what was the credibility of their information? Yet, Bonn seemed to have made much of it, and back then, India's economic prowess was considerably less.

--So Europeans didn't have any say in how Europe was managed, Antara avoided where women and girls gathered in her neighbourhood, she feared they had Moscow information. Why did Antara think she was being interrogated and harassed after a decade of unceasing torture?

Antara was always left to herself, allowed to read and think, write and wonder. No girl bothered her in her neighbourhood, no boy came after her either, she could keep to herself and read even at relatives' houses. As she was reminded in later years, "That was the best education, learning and enjoying, keeping the child free of forced routine (except attending school)". 

Antara never went to a dance school or any sporting academy, no art school or music lessons, hence she learnt to appreciate what was around her.

January 21, 2026.

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iv. Antara ended up in a newsroom, she had never wanted to be a journalist. Her decision to become a journalist was taken over a few days. 

Antara's Civil Services exam results had been declared, she was hoping for an interview call, her mother accompanied her to a cyber cafe at the other end of Purulia town (where they lived in those years), the cycle-rickshaw fare for either way was Rs 20, she logged into one of the computers, found that her roll number was not listed among those who got called for the interview, came back home in what seemed like the longest cycle-rickshaw ride in human history, sat down by the side of the bed and loudly cried over the years lost in prepping for the Civil Services, her parents sat on either side on the floor, "now don't you weep like that etc".

In later years, the rock band 'Kiss' was sometimes blamed for Antara's Civil Services debacle, it had been active in New York City for half a century, from 1973 to 2023, it apparently managed the politics of BT's House, it was supposed to take care of all of Antara's relatives except her parents. The rock band allegedly had the support of a Brazilian aerospace manufacturer, Antara didn't know how to verify that information.

However, through her life, Anjali had frequently recounted an anecdote about a Bengali woman who had got married in Sao Paolo, Brazil (to a Bengali man living there), the aerospace manufacturer also happened to be based in Sao Paolo. The woman was disconsolate every time she left for Brazil, "It was not the flight to New York, on which there were enough Indians, but the connecting flight to Sao Paolo, she knew no one on it and it tore her apart." 

Everyone could sympathise with the plight of the young woman, dreading the change in New York for a longer haul.

Thus, it was possible that neither Anjali nor the Israelis had suffered any intelligence setback, they were fully aware that Antara was to be deceived with support from the American media, they had known what kind of Indian support was provided to the 1960s counter-culture movement in the United States, that it was impossible to live in India and also solve those problems.

Antara was a fiction writer, so Anjali had assumed it would be easier for her to discuss these matters.

Antara could finally state that

--the 1960s counter-culture and how NRIs took advantage of it was the basis of the torture against her,

--there was considerable American media support for it,

--Antara's connection to Batanagar (the town) made it worse, where the 1960s counter-culture and its resultant immigration had been expertly managed,

--Antara didn't need metaphors, mentioning Chicago would be enough to get the US honchos excited,

--if we understood what damage the Chicago Trials did, how it might have led to the Kiss rock band, we would realise that despite all that loyalty to NS Road, Ajit-Anjali were never considered as 'one of their own'.

Antara's allusions had stated that NS Road and AT's family united through the 1990s, because of the Rockefellers. It now seemed that the Carnegies and the Rockefellers might have merely provided the cover, that the actual understanding between NS Road and AT, why they were devoted to each other, lay further back than the 1990s.

January 22, 2026.

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v. As most of us knew, families that had been provided currency information by the British in the aftermath of WWI were trying to prevail in the financial/currency scenario.

It was about being ahead of others, even if the currency information was outdated, irrelevant, incorrect. The fact that the British had wanted to harm Austria, that the British wanted to destabilise the global financial system, that the British were neither 'propah' nor showed adequate caution or responsibility, it enlivened people worldwide.

"Such a source of support for the Tagores, the Communists, that the British had a vitriolic hatred for Austria" was how it had been interpreted.

Thus, what the British had done was to initiate the military (in any part of the world) to currency information, and militaries came armed with cannons, gun carriages, artillery, rifles etc while politicians were civilians, they didn't have a huge arsenal of weaponry at their disposal. 

Currency was the domain of unarmed civilians, it was the British who allowed armed men to enter that domain. 

The Schutzstaffel/SS of Nazi Germany was an inevitable consequence of the above British behaviour. European Jewry was not attacked because it had currency information, it was attacked because the SS had got currency information as well. Thereby it became a competition, a rivalry between two groups with currency information and those that were armed obviously defeated those that weren't.

What did the above argument achieve? Those in the Class of 1995 had been taught that the way to be known worldwide, to leave a lasting legacy was to use financial instruments, create situations and then become a player in that situation. 

If Unit Trust failed, then small savings were bad. What was preferable? Transfer of direct cash in small amounts, for consumption and other expenditure. Thus, everyone lived well and were happy, no one had to reduce immediate gratification or show fiscal discipline, salaries/earnings were saved, national savings didn't drop either.

The only challenge: you were not supposed to ask what SOFR was about, why should there be direct cash transfer at all, who was rewarding you and why, and why were you unwilling to spend your salary?

What Antara had known since her schooldays was thus holding true in 2026 as well. 

Between Delhi honchos, Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger and the Treasury, there was possibly a Numbers agreement regarding Auschwitz, that's why SOFR proceeded without hindrance, what the 'boardgame' calculated every single day. When Bessant said the United States was 'back', he probably meant it was back in the late 1930s, or so it seemed to Antara.

If the above agreement between Delhi honchos, Treasury and Eagleburger was correct, it showed in the workings of the OTT/Over The Top channels with direct internet usage, given it avoided traditional cable, just like SOFR avoided the scrutiny of the traditional economy. As the OTT channels rose and fell, as the content they generated changed, you'd know the Numbers agreement was changing accordingly, thereby affecting SOFR.

Antara had been allowed to declare that OTT internet usage was directly connected to the vulnerability of Jews worldwide, yes, it was 'breaking news', at least for the blog.

In her childhood, Antara had loved aquariums, they were popular in the small towns of West Bengal, most families kept one in the living room. The number of vibrantly coloured fishes declined through the 1980s, till most aquariums had one big fat fish, with the fish feed resting on top of the aquarium in a small bag.

We knew what the big fat fish symbolised, but then, in a particular family's aquarium, Antara came across an underwater commando/soldier, kitted in his special diving gear, bubbles rising from the oxygen tank on his back, crouching behind a rock and underwater vegetation. 

That aquarium had no fishes at all, not even the big fat one. Antara has never been to Norway.

January 23, 2026.

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vi. Mildred Gillars was one of the American broadcasters employed by Nazi Germany for Axis propaganda, she was one of the 'Axis Sallys'. 

Apparently, Gillars had volunteered for the Nazi job knowing that she wouldn't be acknowledged but was captured and convicted of treason. Her trial took place at a US Federal court in Washington DC, in early 1949, presided over by a district court judge. Gillars was sentenced to 10-30 years of imprisonment, she was paroled in 1961. 

It was regarded as some kind of weakness within the American judicial system, the inability to resist the capture of the so-called Axis Sally. 

One of Gillars' Berlin nicknames was 'Midge at the Mike', it followed Antara through her schooldays. At debating competitions, the microphone would be removed before Antara spoke, because Antara was soft-spoken, it would make her seem weak. One didn't know how Gillars felt but for Antara, 'Midge at the Mike' was an insult, 'midge' meant flies that swarmed marshy areas, it was not a healthy way to regard a batchmate.

As far as Antara could understand, Mildred Gillars had left the United States in 1933 (first for Algiers, then to Dresden, Germany in 1934), with adequate financial information on the US Govt, to be provided to Nazi Germany. 

Ajit often recounted anecdotes about ghosts and hauntings but before we went there, we ought to describe the Rashmela house in Purulia that AT-BT inhabited. It was probably a one-storey building in the 1940s, given the second storey was built in the 1960s, by Ajit himself, just before Antara's parents got married. 

Further along in the neighbourhood, they had another property, a house they called 'Baithak-khana', the Bengali term for a formal living room. It was there that they received their visitors, away from where they lived. Since there were several boys between AT and BT, the boys went to sleep at the 'Baithak-khana' at night.

Whenever Ajit mentioned the 'Baithak-khana' as haunted, Anjali would reject any such notion. "Sure it was not a female ghost?" she'd say, indicating Antonin Novotny of the Czech Communist Party, Novotny had probably given them a scare during the Cold War.

Separately, Ajit would recount, "Your mother was correct, it was a female ghost. As soon as we boys fell asleep at the 'Baithak-khana', she'd make her presence felt. She sat on the chest, it was so heavy, one started gasping for breath/air, one couldn't even shout out, sweating profusely, till the other boys woke up. She attacked all of us, one by one (including Ajit)."

What did you do to free yourself, Antara would ask.

"Oh, she had to be forcefully removed, and then you should have seen us, all AT's sons and Ajit, we'd run out into the neighbouring Rashmela field and we all started running around in circles. 'Let us go, you ghost, let go of our chest', we'd keep shouting. We simply didn't stop, we kept running in circles through the rest of the night."

January 24, 2026.

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vii. If the American elite (mostly Communists) wanted to know what kind of upbringing Antara had, what she understood of German-ness, what was the most significant German personality for her, it would have to be Hyderabad.

For the birthdays of her male cousins (of Asansol, usually two decades older than Antara) were not celebrated, at least Antara's parents were not considered for the celebrations. Antara's maternal uncle would visit Ajit-Anjali's household, riding his scooter, on their respective birthdays, carrying a steel tiffin box with payesh/kheer inside it, an Indian dessert. It had either been prepared by Antara's maternal grandmother or her aunt, the cousins' mother.

However, on the female cousin's birthday, Ajit-Anjali and their daughters were invited to dine. 

As we knew, it was not about the female cousin, it was about CIEFL Hyderabad (now known as EFLU), an institution that was supposed to challenge the legit lease, which would be a gathering place for foreigners that wanted to oppose the legit lease, where INC would display its hold on the global elite and contrast it with Antara's scrappy and financially unsupported efforts to defend the legit lease.

CIEFL Hyderabad had apparently been established on November 17, 1958. The biggest draw was supposed to be the military top brass from across the world, how many detested and opposed the legit lease, Poland and Austria?

Thus, if Hyderabad was the biggest German event of Antara's childhood, the biggest German for her would be Aino Maria Kuusinen (1886-1970), a Finnish Communist who worked for the Comintern through the 1930s.

Aino Maria Kuusinen was not some wild guess, she had worked at the Ophthalmology Hospital in Helsinki in the first decade of the 20th century. Most of Antara's relatives (on her side) and acquaintances got their ophthalmological treatment from Hyderabad. 

Aino Maria Kuusinen's husband had been a railway engineer and there it began to get complicated, for Antara had a relative on her father's side, a female who was a railway engineer, her name was supposed to indicate Champa/the Hindu-Buddhist past of Vietnam, her family followed the intrigues of Mount Lebanon, Delhi media honchos had used railway nurses around Antara from her childhood to indicate Washington DC's desire to annex eastern Europe and the Balkans, then contact Antara, which brought us to the question,

was it enough to gather Communist trivia in hedonistic Washington DC in order to have the right to annex eastern Europe?

What had been the Obamas' contribution to the Communist cause apart from their knowledge of trivia?

January 25, 2026.

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viii. As far as Antara remembered, her parents spent three years in Bankura, from early 1981 to early 1984. Initially, they lived at a rented house, later they shifted to govt accommodations.

Had Antara wanted to solve her problems in a hurried manner, she could have written about Bankura on a daily basis, staving off both the attacks on organised religion and those against the nation-State/democracy that have arisen since 2012.

But no one had been able to figure out what Chetla wanted, what agenda women's colleges in Kolkata pursued, were they contented and hence aggressive or did they have grievances and thereby indulged in ceaseless intrigues?

Antara had been interrogated for a decade, it was obvious she hadn't understood her batchmates at all, if they loathed western education, what traditional kinds of education systems did they wanted to revive?

One of the interesting anecdotes in Bankura involved Ajit being invited to a game of dice or 'pasha' as it was called. Ajit had been taken by surprise, he probably didn't like being threatened with Turkey or the Ottoman Empire. 

Anjali's favourite Bengali adage was 'Pasha/kormonasha', or the game of dice (what was also called 'pasha' in Bengali) destroyed work atmosphere or work ethics. What did it imply, Turkish intelligence on the Nazi Holocaust? The Turkish awareness that the Calvinist ethos was under attack during the genocide against the Jews? 

The women (including Anjali) had sat separately while Antara watched the game unfold among the men, it was probably 1983. The die looked polished, of expensive material, the game played on a spotless white linen cloth.

Antara recently read about the raids during the Normandy beach landings in 1944. One particular battery outpost, managed by Polish prisoners of war on behalf of the Germans, had surrendered, waving white flags. It had not been a successful day for the British, setbacks elsewhere, thus by the time Ajit was casting his die in that game in 1983, the British had withdrawn, as had the Polish groups, nor was it that his wife Anjali was supportive of such a maneuver.

Who had organised such a game?

Antara understood the above situation in the following way. 

A situation had arisen by the early 1980s that "satisfied no one", lessons were derived from WWII, especially from Manstein Plan/Case Yellow/Fall Gelb. 

It fit most of the 'game of dice' situation, being dissatisfied and constantly improvising, attack the weakest part (as the Allied line was in the Ardennes), except, unlike the German victory in 1940, the outcome of the game of dice was not quite certain. Antara didn't remember that her father lost yet by September 1984, when Antara had taken admission at Asansol AG Church and was yellow with jaundice, her parents had carried her to the school in an auto-rickshaw.

"This was a proper high school, it was her first birthday after taking admission there, why would she be at home with jaundice?" Of course, Antara's parents timed it wrong, Antara reached school during Hindi-Bengali class, distributed lozenges to half her classmates and went home with her parents.

Two and a half decades later, sometime in 2008, Ajit suffered a fall, he was on the terrace, taking his evening walk, and fell on his back without any impetus. Anjali had called up both their daughters, "Toughen up, Ajit wasn't with us for long". 

As it happened, Anjali passed away in 2009, Ajit briefly outlived her.

Thus a 1983 game of dice involving Manstein Plan (without the British or even Poland) had continued in 1984 as Case Yellow and revived in 2008 as Fall Gelb. 

Wasn't it different names for the same German military offensive against France, variously called Manstein Plan, Case Yellow or Fall Gelb? 

If the British had been thrown out, who were we fighting?

January 26, 2026.

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ix. Jewish men in western countries often chose destructive ways to pivot their careers because the lease family wouldn't share its intelligence with them. 

Somehow, they concluded it was their identity that was the problem, "Had we been in the military, they'd (lease family) have been more forthcoming." 

Their grouse should have provided them the answer they were seeking. 

If Europe was constantly ridiculed over IG Farben, Krupp and other war crimes-tainted corporations, if Europe's private sector could still survive (they didn't have knowledge of Ukraine either), why American Jewish life was such a strain, why they couldn't manage without full explanation of what happened in Ukraine, was surprising.

Any discussion of the Ukraine years was a discussion of political instability, including a surfeit of fraudulent leases, would you rather discuss it with the military or with random American men and women?

However, misdemeanour and crimes did cause serious damage and became a setback to the lease family. It was especially harsh on Antara, who had been solving the problems of adults since the 1980s, when she was quite young, so that someday, she'd be able to tell her father's story and then join him on the journey to discover their identity.

The war crimes-tainted European corporations could never be part of the legit lease but they'd join the Agency and create the worldwide narrative of the Nazi Holocaust. OSS intelligence had been saved for a reason. Thus, the legit lease, European corporations, and the Agency managed to survive January 27, 2026, they might live again.

Of course, Antara travelling with her father in search of their identity was easier said than done. The introduction of Harrow and its politics into the Indian scene was meant to hinder such a scenario. Harrow had felt challenged when Antara navigated both private and govt educational institutions in India with an ease that negated the need for British support. "So one could pick up manners, become educated and stay fond of one's parents" within an Indian format?

It had seemed that Antara's experience of school and college life was diametrically opposed to an influential person, who had neither absorbed the foreign manners nor liked his country of origin.

It was not surprising that German intelligence would bend over to accommodate Harrow and its intentions, all that Harrow apparently wanted was those born in 1985 or after, such that their lives began with the 1985 Plaza Accord and Trump, not even the 1983 Ronald Reagan-Bruno Kriesky meeting. 

(These Indians, born in 1985 or after, formed the bulk of those that tortured Antara, using the surveillance.)

What was surprising was that Harrow would wait for the 9/11 attacks, actually till December 2001, then start attacking Antara and her parents, using children living in the slums in Purulia. 

What was surprising was that these slum children would have nicknames for Ajit and Anjali, 'Englis Bura'/elderly English gent and 'Englis Buri'/elderly English woman, Antara was 'bilati murgi'/foreign chicken.

That was Harrow's grievance? Was it believable, they were accusing Ajit and Anjali of being pro-British? Who went to Harrow then, who were they loyal to, if not the British?

And Antara? If you had studied and stayed in India and preferred simple Indian meals, how could you be a 'foreign chicken'?

Of course, WWII families were supposed to stand apart from such verbal assaults and other kinds of mischief, even if it included jibes about the Nazi Holocaust. But then something strange happened, as the harassment of Antara and her parents kept increasing in Purulia, around 2004-05, the police in the US started taking formal interest in the complaints in the Epstein case (though abuses had been reported from the mid-1990s.)

"This was not a mere old British establishment network, these were Britishers who had utilised the RMS Titanic sinking, going straight back to the American Revolution to establish closeness with the United States's founding fathers. They've denigrated the nation-building of the 19th century and gone back to the 18th century."

Thus, a double-pronged Treasury grab had been in place since 2001, based out of Britain, one harassing the lease family in India, the other pursuing the Treasury in the US. 

"They've got the concept of the legit lease heir wrong, it was not a fresh approach, it was not about feeling good about oneself." Why had they listened to Dhaka, what would it know of the legit lease?

January 27, 2026.

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x. Antara chose to discuss what was interesting and topical, but they were not always a realistic depiction of the life she had led.

There was no way to put an advisory on the blog, there were few readers as of now but Antara would advise that later discussions might get tough to endure.

For example, the 1985 Plaza Accord, no matter how essential for the Agency and the US State Department in managing their daily activities, keeping in mind the interests of those aged 40 and under, did have a disastrous impact on Antara.

As stated earlier, in the early 1980s, Antara and her parents stayed in Bankura. The govt accommodation was a fairly large two-storied house, they occupied the ground floor, spacious rooms with two baths and a verandah. Antara's parents bought some furniture there, to fill up the rooms. 

The first floor was also theirs to use but there weren't that many family members (or furniture) to fill it, it remained locked and not in use. 

Through those years, Antara's sibling stayed at NS Road with the relatives.

Antara would come back from school in the afternoon, kindergarten (or Nursery as it was called) was 10 am to 2.30 pm. On returning from school, Anjali settled down for a nap, Antara played in that large house by herself, there was no one to watch her. 

The housemaid was a girl in her late teens. Once she was done doing the dishes, she'd ask Antara, "Come, I'll show you the 'au-wa/au-wa' dance steps so that you could do it well." (This was a reference to the popular Hindi tune 'Koi yahan/nache nache', influenced by 'Video Killed the Radio Star'.)

Antara and the housemaid would go into the stairwell of the house, "I've seen the movie so the steps were accurate", the maid would say, and they practiced it together. At such a point, Anjali would get up and the maid would go home.

On certain weekends, Ajit would go to Asansol to visit the sibling, so that she didn't feel neglected, to check on how she was doing. Anjali had a strict ritual for those days, if Ajit was away, Antara would have her dinner on the dining table, she wouldn't sit on the chair.

So the four-year-old Antara would sit atop the dining table, at its centre, Anjali would serve her fragrant rice, knobs of butter, posto/poppy seed paste, mashed potatoes. Antara was too young to understand why it was a treat if her father was away.

Every time he went away, however, Antara would ask, "We'd have the same treat?" "Obviously," Anjali would reply, "your father's not there".

By late 1985-early 1986, they were no longer living in the spacious house in Bankura, they had moved to a rented house in a squalid neighbourhood of Asansol, the dining table remained packaged, there was no room to set it up, everyone had to sit on the floor and eat, rice-dal-sabzi, most days Antara couldn't even finish her dinner, Ajit no longer went away anywhere.

That was the Plaza Accord year, by the way.

By 1988 and ETSI year, everyone else at home had shifted to roti-sabzi for dinner, Antara had to accept it as well. The worst happened on an evening when Anjali was not at home, she returned late, there was no time to make dinner, she took the day's cold leftover rice from the fridge and a fritter (called 'chop' in Bengali), bought from some roadside kiosk, and gave it to Antara.

"How could I eat rice and a fritter?" Antara had asked. That night, Antara had protested and skipped dinner. 

So those American defence firms and railroad information from Ukraine you're after? Antara rejected them in 1988, so why don't you get a life, instead of bothering Antara or trying to give her a scare?

January 28, 2026.

****

xi. Why would anyone be afraid of the US Navy? Wasn't it existence itself? Else, why would life be so disordered since 2012, there were no jobs, it was "too scary" to work, people scanned a puzzle and paid, what was being transferred, between a puzzle and a mobile phone?

Antara was reminded earlier in the week, "Remember how the girls at Brabourne Hostel would secure the small change, the metal coins, to pay for fares or small purchases?" It was correct, back in the day, everyone was always making sure they were carrying enough change/coins on themselves.

It now seemed that if Kolkata always managed to have the last word on the US Govt, including its currency matters, it was because certain groups had noticed the tendency among Brabourne girls to preserve small change in metal coins, alerted Finnish defence firms like Patria, the latter had apparently consulted the Denel Land Systems of South Africa. 

Once the Qala Jangi prison riots at Mazar-e-Sharif (Nov 2001) had reduced UAE's clout within Afghanistan, its ability to look out for currency matters, the above-named defence firms had apparently advised the US military (operatives, private contractors?) about introducing the concept of digital, cashless transactions, what we knew as UPI in the present-day.

"That would take care of Bengali women and their craze for paper currency, for preserving metal coins, it would solve their small change problems." It was quite true, people in Bengal had never seemed happier than Antara found them in the last couple of years.

Thus, what was a forbidding introduction to the US Navy, as if it was only for the distinguished and the successful, as if it gave out severe punishments for the less successful and often without any reason, had turned out to have an informative banking aspect to it. 

"If you came to terms with the grief felt on seeing visuals of the Normandy landings, then the narrative of Caen had interesting banking insights as well," Ajit might have said. 

"So what if you didn't have a first-person involvement with the War on Terror, unlike your esteemed former batchmates? WWII was quite a serious war as well, with endless anecdotes, though it didn't last for two decades."

January 29, 2026.

****

xii. As some of you might know, BT had asked for dowry when his son got married, what created a lifelong hostility in the marriage of Antara's parents. 

(Clarification: Antara had always been firmly opposed to bridal dowry. As far as she knew, dowry was also prohibited by India's legislations.)

Anjali's displeasure owed to the fact that she was the youngest daughter in a family (of one son, followed by four daughters) where the father (Antara's maternal grandfather) had passed away several years before Anjali's marriage. 

"Surely he (BT) noticed that it was a widow and her son trying to arrange the marriage (of Anjali), he could have shown some consideration. Bronze utensils were expensive, were you such a household that nothing less would do?"

As all of us could figure out by now, the allegations were about contact-corroboration, it was about the Bidens who had enough leisure to create two devastating wars in Ukraine and Israel but not enough inclination to arrange a researcher's job for Antara. 

You couldn't wrap up your life's work with a Board Exam, all of us have written our Board Exams as do millions every year, neither was it an excuse nor would it allow you to escape the allegations of war-mongering and war crimes

The Bidens thought Antara was not part of the successful elite within the Indian State. The Bidens thought Austria was weak within the European Union. The Bidens knew that Hotel Lux blackmails defined the United States under the Obamas.

Why did Communists go after Communists at Hotel Lux? Why do Americans go after Americans? 

That logic that the world was not as peacable as the Obamas had wanted it to be was missed by US officials, who didn't bother to pick up their cudgels against the Hotel Lux blackmails. Who did they support, the one doing the purging or the purged?

One couldn't afford to forget bronze was the third place in the Olympics, therefore 'expensive bronze utensils for dowry' meant averting the Cold War and straight to the War on Terror. Antara was not certain why it was so, the allusions indicated that it was because of China that the Korean War and the Vietnam War were not considered. Elaborate 'coalitions of troops' was allowed only after the Cold War had ended and yet even the First Gulf War (1991) was not meeting the criteria. 

BT had specified the bronze utensils to be provided as dowry, how many plates, bowls, tumblers for drinking water. These utensils were kept locked at the Rashmela house, they didn't travel around with Antara's parents, except occasionally used for dinner when they were visiting Purulia. 

"And not that it came of any use, such an expensive dowry," Anjali would say. (Antara remembered struggling to lift the tumbler, it was so heavy.) 

The biggest item was the bronze 'kalas', a large round pot with a narrowed neck for holding water. That pot was used when they visited Purulia, only Anjali could lift it once it was filled with water. "That's what we would be drinking out from, the dowry items were being put to use," she'd say.

Thus, in understanding the career of Joe Biden, the Ukraine War and the Israel War would have to be understood as the conclusion of what has been a warring political career, with uncertainty over how Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait (1990) would be categorised.

Biden had thus managed to keep the world at war through much of the last 35 years.

The futility of Antara's existence, how costly the War on Terror proved for her, if she could tackle the DoD honchos would never be discussed again.

We would discuss the military intelligence from Biden's Wars, we would all drink out of that bronze 'kalas' and find what bothered him, then we'd find out the beneficiaries of those wars, what they had in mind for themselves. 

(Anjali sold the bronze utensils when they moved to Asansol, around 2005. "Sold every last item," she had told Antara.)

January 30, 2026.

****

xiii. How was your day after the previous blogpost, from Jan 30, 2026, on 'bronze utensils for dowry' as part of Antara's parents' wedding?

We had to remember that NRIs supposedly had the support of second-gen weapons systems, NRIs found employment within the DoD, they engaged as private contractors as well. Thus, the NRIs were in a position to impose strict penalties or order punitive measures if they read something that they didn't like.

However, if the DoD employee status or the private defence firms they were part of survived on blackmails connected to the Katyn massacre, then they'd obviously dislike discussions of wars and their carnages after 1940-41.

Given the above, Antara had quite a regular day, she managed to get a Bengali lunch through an online delivery system/app, even as the 'minders' kept discussing the options, how would the NRIs wield their defence firm support if the firm itself was a beneficiary of a WWII massacre?

Antara was always questioned about her popularity, how did people regard her through various stages of her life? This was how it went,

--at Pologround Housing, Antara's playmate Mitun had said that they'd be friends at least till "Class 9 or 10" if not later, this was in 1987, Mitun and her parents left for Kolkata in 1988, Antara never heard of her again. Mitun's family was close to the Birlas.

--At school, D**na and Antara walked hand in hand during the lunch hour, they also made sure their steps matched, as if it was a parade, "Friendship between two girls always got complicated", D**na had said in 1987, before leaving for another school in 1988. By 1990, they had left India. 

--At Brabourne's English Honours class, no one in the class (of 22-23 students) spoke to Antara, except two or three girls, two of whom lived at Brabourne hostel, the third was from the collieries around Asansol.

--At Jadavpur University, Antara had only one friend, she was still married to him.

--At ACJ, the students gathered in the auditorium on Convocation Day had loudly cheered when Antara was declared one of the toppers, but it was apparently 'fake cheering', it was impossible they'd like someone like Antara, ACJ merely wanted to lead her on, so that Antara would assume she was any other Indian. 

The above was useful information, quite instructive, so that no one ended up mistakenly associating with Antara, given the DoD employee-private contractor status of the NRIs.

As ought to be mentioned by now, Antara's father Ajit had no stint with the defence forces, as far as Antara knew. However, Ajit had been part of the National Cadet Corps/NCC, the exact years were not known to Antara but obviously after Antara's paternal grandmother had passed away, "it was imposed upon by the school, I had no choice," Ajit had said. 

Ajit's NCC stories were usual, the bugle sounding off at 4 am, followed by drills and parades, setting up tents, lighting a fire, learning the sailor's knot, using the penknife. By that time, the raging Antara would ask, "Why didn't you join the Boy Scouts as well?" To which Ajit would shake his head sideways and say, "Never".

Antara spent her growing up years considering conscription was right ahead but the years passed, no such initiative was introduced in India. She didn't know they wanted to join the American DoD, not our own.

Of course, things vastly changed under the torture-surveillance, the jokes and abusive satire at the expense of Antara's parents, "Oh, he (Ajit) served in the Korean War, he went as a teenager, didn't you know?"

Antara had thought hard, there was a lake called 'Shaheb Bandh' in Purulia, a wide freshwater body, 'shaheb' meant foreigners/Caucasians. 

"That's where we went swimming, it was cleaner than the other ponds and tanks, we could do seven or eight laps (either way) and still didn't feel tired, we were so young," Ajit would say.

Antara couldn't believe it, the lake was the size of several Olympics-sized swimming pools, you'd have to be better than swimming champions to do seven or eight laps in it. "We were a different sort, the things we'd do, you'd never believe it," Ajit had said.

The 'minders' had concluded that 'Shaheb Bandh' in Purulia was the Korean War (1950-1953). 

Where was the opportunity at organisations like HT to discuss such anecdotes? There was a daily deadline, meetings sometimes digressed to other topics but Antara didn't have her narrative, and she'd have to stand up and hold forth, "Now let's discuss the dowry of my parents' marriage".

In the early 1980s, Antara had been provided jewelleries made of sea-shells, white with red gemstones on it, they wore these for a while, then they languished in a part of the dresser. 

One of the HT colleagues had developed an allergic reaction to shellfish while on a vacation, her face had swollen up, that was 2011.

By 2014, Antara's mother-in-law, vacationing in Pondicherry, was buying sea-shell jewellery for her, she had accepted them as gifts but never worn them, who knows if those accompanying Supriya had forced her to buy them, what if they worked for Denel Group? 

"Wear them at all times, always on you," Supriya had told Antara. "Was Antara wearing the sea-shells," she'd ask her son.

Sometimes, these defence firms showed up and indicated their priorities even if you stayed in India, you didn't have to become an NRI for it.

January 31, 2026.

****

xiv. Antara's resource base from Brabourne was quite different from what Bengalis worldwide had perceived.

When Antara was in Class 11 of Brabourne Junior College, she was familiar with BA/BSc 2nd year students (undergraduates), living in the same hostel. 

When Antara was in Class 12, these students had gone up to BA/BSc 3rd year.

When Antara returned to Brabourne as BA 1st year, these senior students had graduated and left. Hence the Alamo Girl didn't know any of them, they were mostly from India, a few were from Bangladesh.

One of them had given private lessons to Antara while the latter was an undergraduate. 

It had happened quite by chance, one of these older students had put up a hand-written note on the Brabourne hostel bulletin board, that she was willing to teach those studying English Honours. Antara didn't mind extra reading or reference material, she also wanted to stay connected to those that had been senior to her at Brabourne hostel. 

Antara had called up the landline number provided and they agreed on an arrangement. The Alamo Girl had resented the connection, "She was studying MA and was capable of teaching BA students?" 

To Antara, it had seemed that it was bothersome if Antara knew people within Kolkata city, if those people lived in posh areas (as the tutor did), were willing to come down to Brabourne hostel twice every week, sit at the visitors' hall and engage with Antara on topical matters. 

There was no way to muddy those waters.

Several months into the private lessons, the tutor had discussed Antara's postgraduation prospects with her. "If you do your postgrad at Calcutta University, as I was doing, and given your grades, if you were among the top 25 students, your postgrad certificate would be from Presidency College, not from Calcutta University. It was a privilege, I've got it too."

Antara had later mentioned it at home, her parents were startled, for them 1925 meant 'Pink's War', they didn't know that 'Pink's War' enabled you to live in the Presidency towns of India, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and later New Delhi. Maybe Ajit-Anjali could have lived in these cities too.

"Just go for it," Anjali had excitedly said. Antara was self-assured, she had a good idea where she was ranked within the university.

It was the same tutor/Brabourne senior who had advised Antara to enroll for a film appreciation course at Nandan, a movie theatre complex in Kolkata.

"The film appreciation course was run occasionally, it was rigorous, six to seven avant-garde movies a day with short breaks in between, along with discussions etc. Most people dropped out of the course, though it lasted only a week, but you'd be comfortable with it, you'd enjoy the rigour, I could say that for you."

February 1, 2026.

**** 

xv. To clarify the intent of the blog, the elaborate attention being given to Antara's parents and Antara's life would always remain the focus.

It had nothing to do with how Indians regarded the Epstein case but that Antara joined Jadavpur University in July 2000, the al-Aqsa intifada started soon after, in September 2000. 

By October 2000, Antara became friends with the Jadavpur University classmate she'd eventually marry. Antara never lived again, the life that she had known was lost to her forever.

It didn't imply that Antara disliked her spouse. But he came with a tremendous amount of previous friendships, and these people were unlike anyone Antara had known in her life. She didn't know how to understand such individuals. Thus, it was best not to discuss the spouse, nothing from his life was worth the risk.

Antara didn't consider the anecdotes she shared to be information that was difficult to get. That had been her life, "you father could solve complex Mathematics while shaving", Anjali would say. 

For some, it might imply that trying to solve the Srinivasa Ramanujan aspect of the lease would obviously involve a reappraisal of the DoD's performance.

It was true as well, Antara would get up weekend mornings, this was around 1987-88 and find her sibling and a female cousin at the dining table, furiously solving their Mathematics as Ajit shaved at a washbasin adjacent to it, explaining the way to solve the equations without any book or notebook close at hand. It was information, it was also reality. "How did he remember so much, all of it," the female cousin would say.

Nor did Antara's parents' flat at Pologround Housing have a sophisticated appearance. 

Antara and her sibling studied hard, they were notorious among relatives and neighbours for that reason, "the girls studied all the time and the parents were proud of it," they'd say.  

If you saw the sofa at the Pologround Housing living room, its upholstery was frayed, the drawstrings that kept it in place had come apart such that the fabric stretched to the floor, both Antara and her sibling's textbooks were all over it, nor did they ever clear up when they were done studying.

"At least any visitor who came to the house would know what exactly went on there," Anjali would say, ruefully looking at the disorderly sofa.

"Very studious girls, he he," most visitors would say, as they found the single sofa that was empty enough to sit down.

The journalism school that Antara attended discouraged sentences like "experience was lived reality". All reality was lived, it would say, else why would it be called reality? Did we know of a reality that was not lived? Thus, Antara didn't live the 'lease' reality, she lived the 'nation-State' reality and knowing her parents, no matter which country they stayed in, it would always be the same. 

Given certain men in the United States would constantly demand Ukraine information, their lives wouldn't have been that different either.

However, Antara didn't know any of the above, she thought her parents devoted excessive attention to the older sibling, she understood the household would collapse if the older sibling didn't become an engineer. Antara resented being neglected, she withdrew into her own world of reading and thinking and understanding, a world in which her parents and sibling were not allowed entry.

Antara didn't understand how the Trumps felt about women engineers till she went to Brabourne in the mid-1990s.  By that time, it was clear the older sibling wouldn't be an engineer, at which point, Antara found out that 

JE had opined that Antara was lagging with respect to Ukraine compared to her relations,

JE knew that the DoD could suddenly create situations such that the US Congress was unable to help Antara when it was needed,

that all women engineers would always be supported by the Trumps as well as the Prussians, even if JE didn't allow the Prussian females to become engineers.

And all of the above was achieved by JE without any information on Ukraine. Then who needed the Russia-Ukraine war?

February 2, 2026.

****

xvi. The mention or discussion of the spouse had been debated among NRIs because of his Israel trip in early 2012. He had taken photos of the Mediterranean Sea, through the glass facade of the dining room at his hotel. It was a blistering cold day, a deserted seashore with waves lashing.

The NRIs got excited because the controversy about the US Navy's Mykolaiv House would start soon after that visit, we must remember that if there was an actual House by that name, Antara had never seen it mentioned in news reports or elsewhere.

The nature of Antara's work was, "What would you do if there was a Mykolaiv House within the US Navy, if someone had gained illicit entry to it?" Antara would have to gather information and evidence (at least close enough to evidence), then come up with arguments why it was dangerous, how it could be prevented, what were the implications felt within Indian socioeconomics had such an illicit entry taken place.

Once Antara was done with the above, she was provided the next assignments, "What if someone had planned..." or "What if the DoJ suddenly released millions of Epstein documents, how would we understand the DoJ's motives?"

The spouse's trip to Israel in 2012 had not yet been assigned, hence there was no need to discuss it.

It was not very different from the way journalism had worked for Antara, when she was a reporter at a one-reporter news bureau in Kolkata. It was not a huge newsroom, there were no large reporting teams, there were no designated beats/sectors like reporters tended to have.

Antara was supposed to report for work at 1 pm. Once she reached her workplace, she went to meet her departmental head, his desk would be strewn with press releases and news alerts and invitations to events and press conferences. 

He'd start throwing them at Antara, who'd be seated across his desk, "There's one, there's another, take a look at this, see if you can sense any meaning from that, oh, this one's just down your line (usually sarcasm), this one's close by so why don't you just walk down and see if it was real or what they were saying, hmm this might be a possibility, you think you can use your superior sniffing skills and find a story that met our needs?"

And it ended with, "So what do you think, I've got to send the story list to Chennai, what were we doing today?"

Antara sat under the deluge of paper, choosing one or the other, arguing with the departmental head. It was not that different from what she did in the present day.

How would the above discussion connect to the debate over the First Gulf War and how it should be categorised? (FACSIMILE, January 30, 2026)

One way would be to use the 'Yeh hai...' as a tactic, 'Yeh hai Dilip' in the given situation, for Ajit had bought insurance from a guy named Dilip during the First Gulf War (1990-91).

"It was part of the War Effort," the females of Antara's family had told her. "You were not going to battle Saddam in Iraq, at least you should get to knit a muffler." Antara felt too intimidated by those females, she didn't ask which American soldier would wear a woolen muffler in the Iraqi desert.

Back at the reporting office in Kolkata, as Antara was having assignments thrown at her, an employee called Dilip would enter, carrying rolls of news agency reports. "There's Dilip," Antara's departmental head would exclaim, "with his chicken roll and his mutton roll."

For that's what they looked like, rolled up news feed from the machine, which one had to read like a scroll. The electronic version was available but apparently, it was "great fun" to read the printed version.

Thus, a reason was beginning to emerge why Ajit never visited Kolkata after 2005, not even to visit Antara and her spouse once they married and set up home.

Brabourne had a myth about an older student, in the hostel, who'd turn off the lights in her room and the shine the torch/flashlight on herself. No one knew who she was, it was always someone older, from the past. 

Why did she do that, someone had asked. (Operation Torch etc, from WWII.)

There were apparently two observers in the neighbourhood, they were nicknamed 'chicken roll' and 'mutton roll'. 

February 3, 2026.

****

xvii. They were asking you, Antara, why Russia had not exited BRICS as yet.

How would you know?

Russians had to remain loyal to their monarchic-aristocratic past, that's what Washington DC demanded of them. Since former Russian aristocrats were unavailable, they remained loyal to Golden Fleece, and you saw what that turned out to be, seeking a toehold in the Gaza Board of Peace in order to maintain secrecy around how it felt about the Class of 1995.

Sometimes, Antara, you saw Russians flitting past in your allusions work, they were always moved away using some pretext or the other. Actually, even the pretext was known, "You were getting too close to Wall Street corporations". 

Antara, have you ever felt like a Wall Street corporation? No? That's the world we lived in, they wouldn't even say that Golden Fleece wanted the Russians to maintain their distance from Antara, or there was pressure from the Class of 1995. 

No, Putin wanted the Russians to keep their distance, the same Putin that knew that DoD had used the War on Terror to sort out the upper-strata of the US Navy's Mykolaiv House.

They were also somewhat excited over the 'Yeh hai Dilip' tactic that was used in the previous blogpost (Feb 3, 2026). British intelligence had created elaborate lies about Ajit-Anjali's friendship with that particular family, would Antara be able to solve what these friendships were about?

These were friendships imposed upon by the Ray family of Kolkata, it was about the French Grand Sanhedrin and how it influenced the formation and functioning of the Federal Reserve. The Fed's banking operations info were generously provided to your parents, the entire universe of relatives knew that Ajit-Anjali had beaten the odds that befell BT after WWII, that they had found their way to Washington DC.  

The relatives didn't know the Fed was a Tagore House, they didn't want to know. However, Ajit-Anjali didn't enjoy the privileges, the rest of the relatives immigrated to the United States around 2017-18, as the Britishers informed you, they no longer lived in Jharkhand, West Bengal etc. 

However, it was not clear if the Ray family had stipulated that the French Grand Sanhedrin gossip implied that Antara had to be excluded from everything and abandoned in India as the relatives ran away. But you do remember the procession of shaved heads from the Dilip family, you were playing outside with Mitun, so you were supposed to conclude that you were excluded because of the Nazi Holocaust. 

That put considerable doubt about what would have been done to Ajit if he had survived and immigrated to the US.

The way to Washington DC didn't require a House. It was about extensive questioning/interrogation about what one had witnessed regarding the Soviet Kommittee of Information (KI), what had been its impact on immigration and hawala worldwide, what were the topics of your work. Certain people bribed to go as well, we'd discuss them later.

Immigration and hawala had been the bane of every financier, what considerably increased the capital (since no investment was possible) and made intelligence/allusions crucial to the financial world. 

How would you invest, Antara? One invested in people, in employees, and they were here one moment and Americans the next day. 

Worse, if they went to Europe, the latter was called Schengen, where was my former employee with considerable information on my company and knowhow on R&D? Was he in the Nordic countries? Was he in Greece or Italy?

You'd set up companies and create a loyal customer base, a sudden trade deal might kick you out of business. It was not debated upon, not opposed, no one's opinion was sought, except that Antara was not paid her salary, her marriage was fragile, her relatives were disloyal to her.

Therefore, a possibility was beginning to emerge that with his ability to solve the Srinivasa Ramanujan aspect of the legit lease, with his extensive knowledge of how WWII and the Cold War had reshaped the world, had Ajit managed to reach Washington DC, he would have taken his knowledge base with him, it would have become a globalised commodity, the intelligence would no longer be connected to any specific locale, situation, nation, historical reality.

At some point, mortality would put an end to him, and the reality that his parents BT-Pratibha had faced in Purulia, would be altogether replaced by a concocted narrative. 

It was hatred for BT-Pratibha that had surrounded Ajit from all sides.

You'd notice, Antara, despite the above discussion, no one would be perturbed in the least, they'd proceed as planned with the Bosco crowd. It implied that there were arrangements in place within Washington DC to change the BT-Pratibha narrative, even if Ajit and Antara didn't cooperate.

February 4, 2026.

****

Saturday, 20 December 2025

Lobbying in DC for 'Austrian neutrality'

We must introduce the government circuit house in Kolkata that was often a "second home" for Antara when she studied and grew up in that city.

It was part of her gratitude, no matter the ideology, the belief system of its staff and employees, Antara wouldn't have survived Brabourne Hostel if she had not got the occasional respite when her father came to visit, or when he came to collect her for the vacations.

The employees had once been proud of Antara, "Well, we kind of raised her, didn't we?" Recently, that narrative had changed, it had seemed to western officials that the government circuit house employees had been threatening Ajit, in clever ways.

The government circuit house in Kolkata would be a recurring motif if Antara kept writing her blog. If you were allotted one of the rooms towards the back of the building, the glass windows covered the entire length of the wall, providing a broad view of the neighbourhood.

Thus, how the increasing clout of the Washington State-based tech family was affecting German intelligence would have been known to Ajit.   

There were posh apartment buildings nearby, Marwari or Sindhi families. As soon as it was evening, they parted their heavy curtains, entire families sitting down on their plush sofas to watch television, for the next several hours. Thus, by the mid-1990s, Ajit knew it was all headed towards Ukraine and a SOFR-dominated global economy, he was not taken by surprise by rise in wealth and prosperity, as Antara's relatives had assumed.

There was an attic at the top of the building, adjoining an apartment, an individual ironed clothes in that attic, beginning around 4 pm, continuing till way past midnight. 

"What was it, did the family have a laundry business?" Ajit would say, standing at the circuit house glass window and staring at the attic. "Else who'd have so many clothes?"

"And yet it was just one person, did his arms not fall off, ironing daily for 10 hours, year after year?" Antara had said.

Did the above establish where Ajit was wrong? That he didn't connect the windows, its impact on German intelligence to the exceptional amount of outfits being pressured, probably for the purposes of Chetla alone, and no one else?

There was a high school for boys in that neighbourhood, it changed its name from 'Hindi' to 'Birla' in the early 1990s. Ajit had studied under the Bihar Board of Secondary Education, his matriculation certificate was written in Hindi, if 'Hindi' changed to 'Birla', it was self-explanatory. 

What Washington DC wanted us to believe about Ajit's weakness was actually a crisis around a tremendous number of intelligence outfits being diverted for a certain use.

ii. Was there a possibility of Antara not having her narrative but being more forthcoming of the upheavals the world was going through in the 1990s? Antara was shy and introverted. The parent she was fond of, Ajit, was neither articulate nor forceful. If there was a retort from Anjali, he usually nodded and withdrew. Antara's sibling's higher education had been attacked in a complicated way, she didn't like discussions of the crisis in college-level education in Kolkata.

Thus, while it was true that the National Assessment and Accreditation Council/NAAC was established in 1994, that Antara's entire stint at Brabourne was about "NAAC aschhe, NAAC aschhe"/'NAAC team was coming for college inspection', that how the college was nationally ranked would determine its funding status with the Indian Govt, Antara didn't associate it with any Washington State-based tech family or Chetla.

Brabourne was somewhat old-world back then, students cleaned their classrooms for NAAC, the working staff cleaned the corridors and the premises, computer facilities were still primitive with a single 'computer lab', Brabourne didn't organise campus placement fairs. As Antara's stint at Brabourne was ending, the NAAC assessment was published, Brabourne scored low on tech and campus recruitment/career options.

"This was not fair," Antara had thought to herself. "Brabourne was being compared to St Stephen's College in New Delhi, where the Doon School-Scindia School Gwalior sorts studied, they were from INC families, they'd either become diplomats or Union ministers. Brabourne had students from the Sunderbans, from the steel towns of India, the Northeast, all females, many without privileges."

NAAC was apparently based in Bengaluru, so the tech family of Washington State in the United States had reordered the higher education scene. Did NAAC imply knack? Antara had a knack for writing, editing, reporting. 

What an approach, study junior college Brabourne for a couple of years, then use American tech to push the college towards irrelevance and challenges, on the way, embrace the INC culture of New Delhi!

The need to denigrate an educational institution of which you had been a part for a couple of years could be explained if Brabourne had attacked Chetla, and the latter had responded with the might of the United States.

However, Brabourne hadn't attacked Chetla, which meant the banking families of Great Britain, which had betted on her, had asked her to report on how educational institutions in Kolkata were reacting to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Did they show willingness to share Cold War details with western financiers? Did they develop a distaste for the Chinese Communist Party's grip on Kolkata?

Accordingly, the tech family of Washington State would show complete disregard of the United States' history with Israel, the tech tycoons would turn Israel into the most highly valued US ally, American Jews living in America's coastal cities apparently dictating Israeli demands to Washington DC, the latter accepting these demands without feeling affronted.

It was about an entire generation growing up with a false geostrategic doctrine, even its clever ones like Antara accepted it without question, it never occurred to her that if she had performed exceedingly well in International Relations while at ACJ, why were the foreign embassies in New Delhi, including Israel's, only interested in knowing her spouse?

Antara, when you were working as a journalist, when you had all relevant documents including a passport, when you earned a salary, when you had banking facilities, why did these foreign embassies invite all journalists of New Delhi to their events, except you?

Antara, who had witnessed the last week of Ajit's working life, the day he retired, that night when the phone didn't stop ringing (CLASS ACT blogpost, 'AT&T, Kurdistan, Cooch Behar', Nov 22, 2025), 

"Were they not getting tired of constant dialling?" Antara had asked.

"You didn't realise they were calling from different places?" Ajit had replied.

iv. As some of you might know, Antara had suffered a setback. Some of her former ACJ and JLF acquaintances, those furiously opposed to her, had been nominated as Austrian contacts for her, Antara was debarred from any direct contact with any Austrian, it was her punishment for discussing the 'Malayali football boom' in the Persian Gulf region over the last decade.

It followed that those who made such decisions were aware of the political certainties of the day, what were the benefits of the Los Alamos Project as interpreted by the Tagores and Asansol AG Church.

That political certainty stated that "those of European royal background, with currencies in their name, projected a respectability that immigrants to the US would never have. It was never about Roswell or the balloons, but that after decades of Tripura and north Kolkata rule in Washington DC, naval intelligence had reached a crisis that would always work in favour of the NRIs."

What Indian Communists didn't consider was that a crisis in naval intelligence, if acknowledged by Obama-Biden-Clinton-Trump officials, was the formal beginning of Nazi Holocaust research.

December 20, 2025

****

v. "Everyone was going to Vellore nowadays, for medical treatment," Anjali would often say in the 1990s. That was a problem with her, it was never clear what she meant, did she want to come under the patronage of the Vellore hospitals, or would her Prussian understanding of the United States, while distinct from the legit lease one, not be able to tolerate how Vellore regarded the US?

For example, Vellore obviously knew that after the Nazi Holocaust, contact-corroboration would take a while, it wanted that waiting time to be sombre, a resentful attitude towards the Russian victims of Stalinist purges, with hardly any discussion of the Obamas. 

"That's the problem with Communists," Anjali would say, "it always started with a list of dos and don'ts, you can't eat this, you cannot do that, followed by a lecture about life." If she meant Life magazine and the British, she might have indicated the narrative of Lightoller, who had taught him to lecture so well aboard the RMS Titanic? Did it explain why European dictators later could speak with such vehement passion? 

Thus, waiting for contact-corroboration followed some of the Vellore norms, it was marked by instability episodes, since Antara didn't like the western countries (under NRI influence), she wasn't particularly grim. Antara's allusions work was indicating that Vellore had wanted relatives and friends to keep turning up, to bother her about contact-corroboration, where reality diverged. 

Certain individuals had considered ostracisation a better alternative, "what if snacks were offered to the relatives, if the evening passed in enjoyment, as if Antara was leading a successful life?"

vi. The British had little to fear when it came to Ukraine

The government circuit house in Kolkata had a dosa (south Indian cuisine) shop close by. It was called 'Sharma's', a single masala dosa cost Rs 18, but you had to stand and eat, what both Ajit and Antara disliked, it seemed like an insult. "It was meant for the office people," the Sharma who owned the shop had said.

Two masala dosas from 'Sharma's', at Rs 36, usually sufficed for Ajit and Antara, in case the dining facilities at the circuit house were not available.

On one particular occasion, even 'Sharma's' was closed, Antara got worried about where they'd get dinner in Kolkata. "I'd go up to Gowardhan's (another vegetarian restaurant)," Ajit had said, "I'd get the masala dosas from there, you don't have to step outside, you stay indoors." 

Antara sat alone at the circuit house room, she knew Gowardhan masala dosas cost Rs 33 per dosa, she disliked the high cost. The thought of her father, walking alone, quite the distance, along a shady dark lane in the evening, tormented her. Ajit came back after almost an hour, they sat down to dinner, he was unusually quiet, his head bent low over his food till the first drop of blood landed from his chin on the dosa.

"What happened?" Antara had screamed.

"Nothing, it was dark, I fell down on my face, my chin hit the concrete."

Ajit never spoke up, he just didn't know how to, Antara had arranged for some first-aid.

Did that solve the Ukraine imbroglio for the British, who had alerted law enforcement for the 1957 Apalachin meeting? It seemed to have been the Nazis, the Vellore sorts had scored a considerable victory, they had bargained their way into the Ukraine-Treasury politics, "When Ukraine was out of the Soviet Union as an independent country, those like ACJ would have a considerable say in Ukraine-related matters."

Why shouldn't Antara have the right to reject ACJ as an intermediary to Austria? If you knew US history, why would you pretend weakness? 

vii. Had Antara's relatives followed the Vellore diktats and bothered her about contact-corroboration, then all of the above would have been discussed at length. It was not important whether every relative knew every anecdote before moving away for ostracisation, but whether they were willing to learn after Antara left HT. 

Being older than Antara, they'd have realised that the Nazi alert about the 1957 Apalachin meeting might affect how and why newspapers published instability reports. 'Gowardhan' suggested Dairy Farmers of America, they would have understood that more than Antara quitting HT in 2012, it was important for her spouse to have changed his workplace. (The spouse had gone berserk in 2012, he had desperately tried, he didn't receive any response from other media offices in New Delhi, such was the year 2012.)

Not any of the above would have led to any setback for Antara's relatives. The stances on the legit lease had been determined in the 1950s, as soon as J Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance had been withdrawn

"All Prussians would always support Antara. Ajit and BT would always support Batanagar/Pal family. The Treasury could not be the sole responsibility of Austria and Ukraine, it was everyone's burden."

viii. The British faced the following problems 2012 onwards.

Indian Communists challenged and denigrated Lenin.

They would not allow discussions of the Dairy Farmers of America, given the newspaper content on instability that had been published.

And a certain individual within HT, representing the global navies, was certain that the Nazis who raised the alert about the 1957 Apalachin meeting ran a school in Purulia, "it had American sponsors, Italian investors, Ajit-Anjali didn't even know that the school was run by those who had wrecked the 1957 Apalachin meeting."

At that meeting, they were neither discussing Lenin nor weapons nor the RMS Titanic. Indians had shown interest in studying engineering in the US, they had said it was important for legit lease purposes, that had been the topic. "But Indian involvement in the legit lease was already represented by Batanagar, what further need could bring them to the US? Were they trying to disprove it was a Jewish lease?"

December 21, 2025

****

ix. Antara did not discuss her work often enough, for obvious reasons. It was always managed under pressure, how the NRIs and their tycoon backers across the world would react, she worked in a legitimate but surreptitious way.

Right now, as 2025 was ending, it would be enough to know that there were endless promising trails, allusions/blogposts that might have secured Antara from threats, research that had to be abandoned. One of these was about the Bocage, after the Allied soldiers had broken through the Normandy beachheads in 1944, a crucial and strenuous battle had surrounded them, what was known as the Bloody Bocage. 

"You thought they'd let you research the Bloody Bocage?" Antara had been told.

Antara hadn't realised it was a move against the Treasury, given the Nazi Holocaust was underway even as the soldiers were landing in Normandy. The Treasury's soldiers, the Treasury's victims. Antara didn't understand that it was about the eventual Ukraine ceasefire talks, where Bloody Bocage would be used, it was Bengal that would pay the price.

Antara had been warned, almost two decades ago, when she was a reporter in Kolkata. Her assignments included checking up on Jadavpur University, if it was doing advanced research that could be featured in a newspaper. "You live right next door to the university, why can't you drop in on your way to work or when going back home?" Antara did as told, Jadavpur University yielded many published stories for her.

On one of those days, Antara had an appointment in one of the engineering departments. It was an evening appointment, after which Antara would go home. Taken aback as she was shown the way, Antara entered the building, its corridors and rooms overflowing with indoor plants, ferns, so overgrown that it was like walking in a forest in the evening. (Antara neither had the Bocage in mind nor had she heard of Vernal/Fern, the circus artist who knew how to manage the White House, who was also acquainted with the von Richthofens.)

Summon up courage. Go to the room designated for the appointment. Sit down on the chair. Opposite the desk, where the engineering professor should have sat, there were two legs visible, coming up from beneath. Antara peered to the other side. The middle-aged Bengali gentleman was doing yoga, his head was on the floor, legs raised straight, he was also reading a book in that upturned position, unperturbed.

Antara wouldn't complain if the Treasury prevailed in the Russia-Ukraine ceasefire but whose Treasury was prevailing? If you inflicted endless Nazi Holocaust blackmails against the Treasury but didn't allow Nazi Holocaust to be researched or discussed, the Treasury belonged to the INC? 

It was turning out to be quite the situation, where the Nazi genocide against the Jews was returning profits, while the vulnerability of the Jews was increasing.

Australian Hanukkah massacre, Treasury releasing investment options for unborn children, Ukraine ceasefire, all within a couple of weeks, how many of us read it together? It was civilised discourse?

Back in that engineering department, Antara's interviewee had sat up. "Where you were sitting now, on that very chair, New York Times's Barry Bearak had sat and interviewed me, day after day."

Antara considered whether to shift to the next chair, then decided to keep sitting where Barry Bearak had sat. 

"He wrote the story, NYT published it, it was 13 pages long."

No, that cannot be so, Antara had thought, you had probably taken printouts from the web. Online stories have no restrictions, you could write as much as you wanted to, the scroll bar at the side got shorter, those not comfortable with online introduced 'pages'/next page. 

The Carnegies and the Rockefellers might have provided inputs to the lease, but we lived in a digitised age, there were no limits to how much could be written, in how many ways the Carnegies or the Rockefellers could be understood or criticised, their business tactics discussed. If scroll reduced, that was not our problem. 

Welcome to the Digital Age. Bengal shouldn't pay. 

December 30, 2025.

****

x. Would Antara trust Kolkata, it provided the occasional help, without any guarantee whether it was meant as help or entrapment?

Antara had never been accepted by any other city, the question was irrelevant, with which city would Kolkata be compared? Kolkata was traditional, as of now, when it came to currencies, probably why it felt less scary.

Everyone spoke Bengali in Kolkata, which was assuring, Antara had been told that westerners wanted to learn Bengali and speak it well, because Antara never managed to immigrate.

At least Kolkata had the decency to recreate the frenzy around Madonna Ciccone's controversial tell-all book, when it was published in October 1992. With its explicit content, Madonna Ciccone's book was the cover story of many Bengali magazines/publications, these magazines were purchased by Antara's parents, prohibited for Antara, which meant furtive and quick reading when the parents were not around. 

That was Anjali's advice anyway before any school-level quiz contest, "If it was western music, just say Madonna Ciccone." 

Indian sentiments had been considered before extracting from Madonna Ciccone's book but what was obvious from the published material was that the former Nazis of Germany were supposed to manage the transition from the Russia-Ukraine War fervour towards the Romanian hostel blackmail, the latter would be dominating global discourse soon enough.  

Davos might set the agenda, Antara recently got involved in an animated discussion, "If the Swiss couldn't influence policy-making, what was the purpose of Davos?" Apparently, they 'waited', Davos was the gathering place of 'waiters'. 

Frivolity aside, Madonna Ciccone's tell-all book and Princess Diana's BBC Panorama interview were standout incidents from Antara's early adolescence because of coverage by Kolkata media. If someone grew up in Kolkata (or Bengal small towns like Antara) but didn't feel the pulverising impact of these two events, well, Antara didn't know how to respond to that.

When Antara first met the Alamo Girl and the Monsoon Girl in the late 1990s, she had suffered a psychological setback. "Oh, these were Bengali girls who could speak Bengali but didn't know Bengal. They grew up in Jamshedpur and Bokaro respectively, both towns in Jharkhand, they read Hindi through their school years, they were not familiar with the media products from Kolkata, what Antara had voraciously consumed till the mid-1990s."

Antara would have to find a different way of understanding them, they didn't share Antara's upbringing. Both disliked Kolkata and its cultural values, Antara kept quiet, she was not in the conversion business

All of us assessed our immediate environment in our own ways, that was the definition of freedom.

If Antara didn't defend Kolkata with the Alamo Girl and the Monsoon Girl, it followed that she wouldn't bring up Junior College Brabourne either. 

All allusions on Junior College Brabourne over the past several years had been incorrect, except one, "What was Chinsurah doing there? Had she come to supervise? Was she supposed to keep others informed? Was she meant to detect Imperial Russian influence on the 25-30 girls who stayed in that dorm, all aged around 16 years?"

(The allusion ended with 'What was Chinsurah doing there?', Antara put together the rest, from her work on other topics.)

Antara was repeatedly asked when Junior College Brabourne would come up for discussion on the blog. 

Never.

What if the Communists planned large-scale 'immersion' of Agency idols, the Donovans and Wisners and Lansdales?

Okay, so this was how the world worked, stay unemployed, don't ever meet your close relations, but accept responsibility if the developmental studies-sorts were feeling fidgety around Agency honchos of the past.

Antara didn't want to write an 'Open Letter' to the Alamo Girl and the Monsoon Girl, as instructed, yet

Dear Alamo Girl and Monsoon Girl,

In August-September 1995, at Junior College Brabourne dorm, a group of mid-teen girls faced a challenge that separated them from the rest of humanity. They were never able to connect to anything, anyone after that. Their lives took on a vastly different significance, it was top-grade classified secret, what happened there could not be shared with you by Antara. It was about wars, only wars.

Yours, Antara

December 31, 2025.

****

xi. Antara never had to study hard to do well in her exams. Her parents never engaged any private tutor for her either, except for Mathematics in classes 9 &10 and Economics in junior college, the former for exhaustive practice, the latter to complete the Economics syllabus.

Anjali had two approaches to Antara's education. "Read loudly so that no matter where I was, in the kitchen or doing other household chores, I could hear you. Remember, you were not an MA student that you'd have to read silently."

The Pologround Housing flat was compact but small, making oneself heard was not a problem, Antara shouted out her lessons through school. 

What was that thing about 'you were not an MA student'? "I'd have to keep reading loudly till my postgrad, then what would that woman (Anjali) say?"

Did it mean Antara was not a student of Massachusetts, hence 'loud reading' was essential for her? One would have to leave it at that. 

Antara's school (Asansol AG Church) was off on weekends, Antara never had to study on Friday evenings. That was Anjali's second approach, "You do enough, there was no need to diligently sit down on Friday evenings, with your textbooks."

Anjali and Ajit interfered in Antara's lessons only if there was a conceptual problem, something that needed further explanation than what was taught by schoolteachers. Hence Antara enjoyed the vast syllabi of different subjects, it was a learning experience, with some exams thrown in. 

On occasions when Antara didn't top class or didn't score the highest in certain subjects, her parents never scolded her.

Antara was thus not prepared for Junior College Brabourne, the time spent at the Junior College dorm for the first six months. Half the girls would be up at 5 am, there was no natural light that entered the dorm, electric lightbulbs (without shades) were turned on. 

What were they doing, all sitting up on their beds and intently looking at their textbooks?

They were studying, someone had explained to Antara.

For what, do we have a test, classes have barely started, Antara had asked.

Whatever had been taught, they were studying that.

Antara decided that she had a personality, she would not be swayed by the herd, till by 6 am everyone was up, given tea and breakfast were served at 6.30 am

How would it look if the entire dorm was abuzz with activity while Antara lay sleeping/pretending to sleep because it was not yet 6 am?

At college, Antara found out that the weekly tests for junior college would start soon enough, one test every Monday, the schedule would be posted on the bulletin board. "I'd use that as an excuse, say that I was not a habitual early riser but the weekly tests have forced me to get up with the others," Antara had thought. It turned out to be successful, Antara joined the 'early risers' in the dorm.

The term 'Auckland' apparently derived from 'a land where oak trees were grown'. One of the students at the Brabourne Junior College dorm was from Oak Grove, Mussoorie, some posh boarding school.

"She didn't belong here, she did her schooling from a posh boarding school, her parents were bureaucrats in New Delhi, they sent her to Brabourne to be close to her grandparents," Chinsurah had told Antara.

'Then why was she at Brabourne Hostel, why did she not stay at her grandparents' place in Kolkata," Antara had replied.

"She'd go away, she hated every moment of being at Brabourne," Chinsurah had said. (Chinsurah and Oak Grove had their beds next to each other, at the far end of the dorm.)

Within a few days, Oak Grove returned to Delhi, leaving a lifelong challenge, "when the Aucklands departed under 9/11 pressure, what was left of your lives, your existence?"

There were all kinds of waking up in life, all kinds of reality that emerged when the night's darkness had receded. 

"When my mother (Pratibha) passed away, they woke me up and told me, but didn't take me for the cremation, it was probably quite late in the evening," Ajit had told Antara. 'Next morning, when I woke up, I had forgotten she was no longer around, I went looking, 'Ma, Ma, where were you?' AT's family reminded me that she had died."

Recently, Antara was reminded of that anecdote, "it would hold true of BT as well". 

Apparently, BT had forgotten it all, till he was a young boy and given his narrative, and told that everything was lost for BT, everyone gone forever, WWI had probably started.

January 1, 2026.

****

xii. That Antara would mainly be used as a bulwark to hold down her generation, that she was not meant to represent her country or any organisation, that she'd never be a national asset in India, not something Indians had to acknowledge or take pride in, had been decided by the early-1980s. 

It had apparently formed a substantial part of the Reagan-Kriesky discussions of 1983, "Indians would need an alternative once the Aucklands departed under 9/11 pressure, something less fuddy-duddy than the British but don't inform Britain, London was quite an attractive destination for immigration from Asia."

Reagan had asked for further details, to which Kriesky had supposedly replied, "Well, as Indians get higher profiles, the WWII conferences, especially the Cairo and Tehran conferences of 1943, would keep coming up in discussions. Both sides (Indians and those discussing with them) would be aware that these Allied conferences were shaped by suggestions from the Third Reich. The Egyptians had also kept the Third Reich informed about the outcomes. How would the Egyptians maintain their status as a major North African power if FDR's and Churchill's stature as visionary statesmen came tumbling down?"

(Antara had always thought that MENA needed greater focus, it reminded Egypt where it belonged on the global map. Even when employed, Antara was always excluded from the Delhi newsrooms' frequent and serious meetings, Indian journalists crowding around in the conference rooms, sombre faces and chewing their nails, while the likes of Antara looked on from outside. Had she known her narrative, she could have put up a notice at her workstation, 'It was only MENA, get a grip on yourself'.)

Towards the end of the Reagan-Kriesky meeting, Kriesky apparently mentioned that since criticism of the SHAEF commanders, their humiliation and rejection, was part of the Asian aerospace offer (Asia's demographic advantage+ western R&D in science and tech, go figure who was providing what), how could Antara be anything except a hostage? She'd try to defend SHAEF commanders, not grind them to dust as the Asians had been taught.

It was not about WWII, it was not about military strategy, it was a group of indoctrinated men and women who had to assert, quickly at that, and derive maximum advantage out of it.

As we knew, Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, a decade after his meeting with Kriesky. It was often hinted that his wife Nancy ran regular checks to see how much he remembered. An audacious Communist proposal from Kriesky, had, therefore been known to a single individual in the West, it had also been forgotten.

That was all there was to what was now being described as the 'Western Intelligence Failure of the Millennium'.

That the 1944 Normandy landings (and probably the Bloody Bocage) were the reasons for Kriesky's proposals was made known to Antara at Brabourne Junior College dorm, in the mid-1990s. 

One of the girls would often saunter down to Antara's bed (that girl's bed was exactly opposed to Oak Grove), asking, "Have you read the Bengali novel 'Ekushe Pa'?" ('Ekushe Pa' meant Turning 21, Ecouche was also a place in Normandy.)

Antara had hurriedly read 'Ekushe Pa', but she knew it was a rage in the Bengali-medium schools, it had been televised as well, those girls that were her age at Pologround Housing and went to Bengali schools worshipped 'Ekushe Pa'. 

Antara didn't want to be dismissive, girls like Chinsurah and Noida wouldn't engage with Bengali-medium schools, so she had said, "I don't remember all the details but I love 'Ekushe Pa'."

"That's all right," the Brabourne dorm girl had replied, "as long as people were willing to discuss 'Ekushe Pa', that's all we needed." 

She'd sit down at the foot of Antara's bed, they'd chat about 'Ekushe Pa', those Bengali girls (Manimala Girls' Asansol, you too, Antara always looked out for you), Antara didn't want to return defeated by Delhi, those Bengali girls were forcing her to stay in Delhi, "don't you come back because you were not needed there'.

Oh, Bengal!

January 2, 2025

****

xiii. With discussions in public places centred around the metal/bullion, it was time to reassess the War on Terror.

Under extreme pressure over the weekend of January 10-11, 2026, which culminated in a near-deadly accident, Antara had said, "I will tell you about the conclusion to the War on Terror investigation, I'd fill the details later. My report would say that the War on Terror lasted one year, from Oct 2001 to Sept 2002, that it ended the moment Agency was done with it. You sit and figure out how you'd describe 2003-2021, I wouldn't let you call it the War on Terror. Cultivation purposes, probably?"

To the above, Antara received a fitting response. General Dostum (of Northern Alliance) had used silk maps to demarcate targets and locations where the Taliban was hiding in Afghanistan, back in late-2001. 

"That's the way they'd play if necessary," Antara thought, "Dostum would say that the gold came from ancient Cathay/China? The dinosaur population in Cathay liked the metal, was it?"

Antara should have anticipated the above. When Indian students had started rushing to the United States for higher education 2002 onwards, they had emphasised putting all their savings together (savings of relatives included), to convince US immigration that they were from financially well-off backgrounds, that they had no intention of settling down in the United States.

Antara should have understood that a unified Treasury was emerging to rival those in the West but then it wouldn't serve her well to merely publicise it.

As their postgrad course at Jadavpur University in Kolkata was coming to an end, around March or April 2002, Antara needed certain documents signed and attested by the departmental head, two other classmates had accompanied her for the same purpose, both male, one was the spouse. The departmental head was an elderly female, on the verge of retirement, she graciously signed the photocopied documents of the men, to Antara she said, "You have to show the original, else I wouldn't sign yours."

Antara raged later from the humiliation but the intended Asian aggression was becoming clear, "If the Pentagon had been threatened by General Dostum with Cathay and its mythical gold, then the combined Asian Treasury might demand that the US Govt show the original amount of gold deposited in 1790. Civilisational status would be determined accordingly, who would be the global policeman, who would be the subjugated".

(Let us all take a deep breath and remember the moment Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger apparently convinced China back into the global stage, it had been so upsetting, the absence of the Chinese all around us.)

When Asia showed such aggression on currency matters, it usually pointed to the Balkans. US officials posted there often betrayed the legit lease, denied its existence, and information extracted from the Balkans made their way to Asian governments.

One such official was Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Yugoslavia from June 1977 to January 1981, covering both the Iranian US embassy hostage crisis and any possible 1980-Mykolaiv arrangement. 

Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger became US Secretary of State on December 8, 1992, two days after the Babri Masjid had been pulled down in India. Eagleburger's tenure as Secretary of State lasted a little over 40 days, it brought revolutionary changes to the Class of 1995 and the way it behaved and within Antara's parents' household. Antara's surroundings, everyone she knew, changed overnight, things would never be the same again.

Why was it so crucial to distrust the 1790 deposit? One explanation might be the close cooperation between Britain and the European Continent in preserving precious metal, what Indian textbooks (describing Indian kings) referred to as "...conquered and amassed a vast fortune...".

Not unlike Venezuela.

"By the above logic, 1980 and 1983 would make perfect sense, religious scholars like Myles Coverdale helping the Europeans to protect what was precious asset," Antara had thought.

And if such was the case, why would the US Govt have to "show the original" to the Chinese Communist Party, no matter the flurry of dignitaries to Asian countries?

January 12, 2026.

****

xiv. Antara had certain freedoms which she enjoyed when no longer with her ACJ batch. 

For example, she liked having as many accounts as possible with online social networking sites. However, she did so only after leaving ACJ, she didn't want to be told "So now you have a Gmail account but you wouldn't accept my invitation when I sent you a Gmail link". 

It sounded like an argument between Asian and Eurasian countries about the timing of the Bolshevik Revolution, "You couldn't rebel after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, when the balance of power had been altered in East Asia."

The above seemed to assume civilisational differences and warfare, it had been part of Indian thinking from the 1890s, then there would be no problem in discussing the metal/bullion controversy in terms of Asian Treasuries

For example, when Antara opened any one of her several social networking accounts, she'd post a photo, maybe write something and then get caught up in the drudgery of working life and forget about it. Hence multiple social networking accounts indicated 'I was there' for Antara whereas for her former batchmates, multiple accounts might imply 'I own it somehow or the other and therefore it gave me the right to do whatever I wanted'.

Antara's approach let others live, the adversaries' approach created situations that were often beyond 'recovery'.

The word 'recovery' implied forgotten passwords and the online world would have been filled with the debris of Antara's long-forsaken blogs and long-forgotten Twitter accounts except that Twitter (not yet 'X' then) prohibited Antara from accessing her account since November 2020, from the very day that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had been elected to US Presidential office. 

Not just the Twitter account she used but every Twitter account she had ever opened was blocked as well. Blocking her active Twitter account had been an algorithmic mistake, as was evident from Twitter's email, but what about the other accounts? It was not about keeping the online space free of hate or preying tactics, someone had compiled a list of Antara's Gmail accounts, found the corresponding Twitter account and blocked them all. 

Antara had committed no offence, it was the fury of the incompetent that had suppressed her freedom.

As anyone acquainted with technology would know, the purpose of holding multiple social networking accounts was to categorise content, what was proving popular, what was avoided. In Antara's opinion, veiled political satire was a winner, which meant there was public discontent with the world since 2009 and while Incompetent Fury caused fear and concern and kept people subdued, the demand for political satire continued to flourish.

The other purpose of maintaining multiple accounts was to observe advertising content, it was wonderful to find out that while Antara was one individual (age and gender unchanged), how different were the advertisements targeted at her as she moved from one social networking site to another. Even the real estate ads changed, why would Antara buy property in southern Indian towns she had never heard of?

If we tried to derive a Treasury argument out of the above, it implied more than targeting any Host Country through an account, it was about what that country might have to offer, what it wanted to promote, how it wanted to project itself, in a way that was independent of north Kolkata's cultural values.

Antara had been duly warned as well, "The road to hell was paved with forgotten passwords of multiple social networking accounts", one of the warnings had said. 

They'd attack you separately for every account you held, for it allowed a nation-State to remain true to itself, not be erased by north Kolkatan cultural dominance, along with a redefining of what the Occident ought to be.

Antara's advice to the US officials and agencies, "Those that depended on automobile-makers of Lombardy-Venetia region in Italy for their existence, whether it was ACJ or California, ignored the region's history before 1866, when Lombardy-Venetia was part of the Austrian Empire. 

Backed by the Peshmergas, Incompetent Fury and others were coming at American Civil War blackmails, also from the 1860s. 

Why would US officials have to cede anything at all? Surely they knew their own American Civil War."

January 13, 2026.

**** 

xv. "Any trying experience, what Antara underwent since September 2012, was meant to lead to the Russian narrative, what formed the base of BT's House.

There was one anxiety, if the Russians never revealed who they were (whereby the narrative would be missed) or if it would be a feint (which would endanger the former constituent states of the Soviet Union) or if we would get the actual story.

Thankfully, it turned out to be the last one.

There was no need for the Maduro abduction, the Clintons could have testified in the Epstein trial, no one was forcing the Russian narrative out of Antara, it would have started once the War on Terror had been described as a "currency war", of which only the events of 2001-2002 had been significant. The US military could have left Afghanistan by 2003.

People worldwide made the mistake of assuming that the Russian narrative would be the story of two friends, Willy (Kaiser Wilhelm II) and Nicky (Tsar Nicholas II), that it would somehow explain the deadly Aryan supremacy theories that destabilised the world and killed hundreds of millions, for which we received globalised homogeneity but lost the freedom to maintain our cultural identities.

The Russian narrative, however, would be about what circumstances created the Oleg Gordievskys of the world, what made Anjali such an indifferent mother, how indifferent mothers led to individuals like Antara with their extreme need to please everyone, for if you had understood the logic of the Nazi Holocaust decades, nay centuries, before it took place, why people had to die in cramped and closed spaces while the outdoors remained free and spacious and well-lit for people to thrive in, then you'd realise that certain groups believed our world deserved no financiers at all, not a single one, no financial transaction, no metal coins or paper currency notes, nothing of value.

Many of Antara's former classmates assumed that an emphasis on maps and charts pointed to a future military career or at least a military purpose in their lives. Had they grown up in Russia, they'd know that maps allowed the landholders to control the serfs/slaves, the military merely assisted the landholders. 

They would also have known that Russians, bound by such a gruesome history, couldn't be as antithetical to Washington DC as Bengalis of Kolkata wanted them to be.

In Washington DC, Russians were the lowest, those that didn't know any manners, who were clumsy and had once contributed to BT's House, who went around looking for Nazi Holocaust information on the sly, who never shared intelligence because then it would become obvious how little the Russians knew of the world.

We have to find those that somehow survived the Nazi Holocaust, the Russians told themselves. One such myopic individual was known to Asansol and Kolkata, collecting information on which academic course would lead to a paying career, how she'd be able to quickly earn a living, moving to Delhi for higher pay, Delhi which was loyal to Moscow and known for its journalism and newsrooms.

In Delhi, Antara didn't find anyone practising journalism nor loyal to Moscow."

January 14, 2026.

****  

xvi. It was not important who could solve puzzles on their own and who couldn't. If it made your editorial meetings lively, so be it. It ought to be lively, Venezuela was in the same continent as Argentina. In the latter, fugitives of a certain sort found shelter.

What should have been important? 

If a certain individual was meant to be Stateless and homeless and living on the pavement and quickly perishing of cold and hunger and fatigue, where was the need to hold back everyone else around her for 15-20 years?

Antara could have remained in touch with everyone till 2019-2020, when they could have gradually retreated, leading to the Stateless-homeless status. 

Antara had the details of what apparatus (all of foreign origin) held back which relative or friend. Let's say Antara was no longer around, would such a foreign apparatus, which provided daily instructions of behaviour, retreat or merely fade away? 

If it had linked a close relative and a classmate since 1993 (neither had managed to visit the United States as far as Antara knew), then after 33 years (from 1993 to 2026), they'd be suddenly released from servitude? How many of us found the world to be such a friendly place?

Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of geometry would know that Antara could connect to one point of the circle, like the radius, but the close relative-classmate were a team of two individuals, they could become the diameter, connecting to two points on the circle, splitting the circle in half.

Antara knew what all of you were thinking, "This conversation couldn't take place in a living room, this argument never found an audience that could be convinced about what was happening to the planned distortion of the WWII narrative?"

Let Antara describe the outcome to you. They'd listen, nod thoughtfully, with that faraway look in their eyes, and then rush out to their real support system (the wives). 

There, the very mention of the word 'geometry' would cause alarm, there you couldn't say 'diameter' without vicious abuses, and then the advice, "Who talked like that, circle and diameter and radius etc? Just tell them what was going on."

Who was 'them'?

Antara's mother-in-law? Her friends? Did we know who they were? One of them had a daughter who sought a divorce apparently because she was asked to clean a bowl of small fishes. "Humiliated, she had ran out, took an autorickshaw, went to her parents' home and filed for divorce."

So we were listening to women who divorced if they were asked to do household chores.

It was pointless to criticise the Israelis for formatting the global intelligence environ or creating the global intelligence lexicon. Their existence meant following the wishes of the White House. Antara had been reading about one of those Israeli honchos, he grew up in a place called Netanya, it reminded Antara of an anecdote about her paternal grandmother that Ajit (his nickname was Nitai) had recollected.

"My mother (Pratibha) would give us sweets during Durga Pujo, these were made at home, called 'mithai', we didn't buy sweets from stores. They were big and round, filled with dry fruits. 'Here, Nitai, take two of these, give one to Puchi (Gorakhpur aunt) and you eat one for yourself'."

(It had to be Durga Pujo 1945, where were the 'mithais' for Shili and Lokkhi?)

"What I'd do was keep one in the pocket of my pant, then tell Puchi, 'Well, we have just the one 'mithai', she wouldn't give us anymore. Let us split and eat it.' Puchi believed it, the poor thing, I felt so sorry for her when I grew up."

And what did you do with the one in your pocket, Antara would ask.

"I ate it later, all by myself," Ajit would say.

January 15, 2026.

Prepping for G7

People worldwide had understood that the constant threat of instability was not according well with the aspirations of the small towns of We...