The consecutive blogposts on Camp Myles Standish contractors and the Kansas Clutter family incident (CLASS ACT) ought to have disturbed certain readers, including Antara, who had to write them.
For it would seem that the contractors of Camp Myles Standish had a problem, especially regarding the lives Antara's parents led in Kolkata more than half a century ago, and that they were alerting the NRIs about it.
The NRIs were extremely powerful right now. They could decide who could enter the US and who ought to be deported. They could prevail on who was allowed into Harvard University's premises and who wasn't. The intolerant, authoritarian streak of a strange interest group was now altogether visible.
A similar concern by the Camp Myles Standish contractors, about Antara's parents stay in Kolkata around 1969-70, had earlier been raised. It was the late-1980s, when SS Ray (the one supposedly connected to Helene Curtis) was Governor of Punjab, from 1986 to 1989. As one would remember, even as SS Ray was in Punjab, the London-based PR firm was set up in 1987, while the French set up their own version, a 'tech park' in 1988.
Even in the late 1980s, the G7 was available for encouraging the Camp Myles Standish contractors as well as nurturing anti-democratic forces within India. It was cleverly done, SS Ray himself was tackling the last embers of militancy and secessionist tendencies in Punjab, you couldn't accuse him outright of an anti-India agenda.
The 14th G7 summit, held in summer 1988, was therefore provided a mandate. Bengali women of Kolkata were finding it difficult to immigrate to western countries and adapt themselves to a western lifestyle because of a town called Asansol. This Asansol had past European association, it had extensive Indian Railway properties and it allowed the town to disobey the Communist instructions of Jyoti Basu.
Within Asansol, there were individuals or families with information on Bob Dole of Kansas and the Clutter murders.
All of it together was causing an apparent problem for the females of Kolkata's schools, from La Martiniere to GD Birla, from Ballygunje Shiksha Sadan to Modern High for Girls. They were suffering because of Asansol.
No one actually knew why the G7 met in beautiful locales every summer or what it discussed. Say given the rush of world leaders Trump met every day and signed free trade deals with, wasn't his economic agenda largely over within the Oval Office? And yet the G7 had been meeting annually since 1975, the Year of Intelligence Failures in the US.
Did the G7 have any responsibility at all for the burgeoning narcotics trade across the world and its excessive pressure on national economies? Discussing Railway properties in Asansol and how it was affecting Kolkata was one thing, did the G7 ever discuss ways to launch a global war on narcotics, to the exclusion of everything else?
Let's say that for the last decade, Antara had regarded the annual G7 summit with trepidation, how much further could it empower the Camp Myles Standish contractors and Bhagalpur?
Antara's aspirations were humble: she used 'Naxal troubles' in Kolkata and Mannesman AG to make sure that her husband could still visit his loving relatives in Bengal, so that they didn't have to talk in codes about 'the House being almost empty'. (Antara herself had no one left in Bengal.)
However, if Mannesman AG had indeed backed 'Naxal troubles' in West Bengal in the 1970s, it was during SS Ray's stint as Chief Minister of Bengal, from 1972-77.
Thus, SS Ray could have been the progenitor of the G7, what if his 'activities' around Bob Dole and Kansas had led to the formation of the G7 in 1975?
One thing was certain: if SS Ray created the conditions for the formation of G7, neither would the NRIs weaken as an interest group nor would the Camp Myles Standish contractors and Bhagalpur change their stance nor would Antara ever visit Asansol again.
(SS Ray's nickname was 'Manu', he was called 'Manu-da' in Bengal politics. The relative talking about the near-empty House was also called 'Manu'.)
May 23, 2025.
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