Antara sometimes wondered if she should visit the US embassy in New Delhi. Its offices often had facilities for weekly movie shows, probably proclaiming that if the US Govt was still running its embassies across the world, it was because the lease family remained trapped in India, and no US agency would take corrective steps to redress that horrifying hostage situation.
The weekly movie show was the US embassy in India doffing its hat to the Indian royals, "without you, we wouldn't have been able to pull off this heist".
What if there was time travel? What if we could go back in time to the early 1960s and then visit the US embassy in New Delhi? John Kenneth Galbraith was the US ambassador at that point, maybe say a casual 'hi' to him, "Hey Ken, there's a country called Poland, heard of it?"
Galbraith, Chester Bowles, such hallowed names in New Delhi. Their memories evoked in Indian elite circles, with quiet reverence, a certain wistfulness, those US ambassadors who taught Delhi how to subjugate Europe, how to punish Poland and Ukraine, those that would help reduce the Pentagon to smithereens.
Galbraith was not even an American, he was apparently from Canada. Maybe even Chester Bowles wasn't one, the name sounded like a Nizami intrigue from Hyderabad. You understand what we meant that most Americans have not stayed in the US before 1918? That was the United States Govt, recently immigrated to the US and completely unaware of American history. Anything before the 1940s, and you'd get that look of incomprehension on their faces.
So Galbraith and Bowles, American or not, valuable as long as they could manipulate the US Govt.
ii. Let's say, like Galbraith, Antara was not an American. Antara sets up an office and starts instructing the locals on how to cheat the United States of its lease or any other serious financial arrangement. Would she get a warning, a legal notice, a severance information or what? Would the local cops show up at her door? And yet the local cops never warned Galbraith, 'don't use the US embassy grounds to conspire against the United States'.
Antara had studied English Literature. Like Rathindranath Tagore, Galbraith had studied Agriculture. Not really a 'scientific' subject and yet Antara's blogs were not worth a dime but whatever 'truth' came forth from Galbraith's mouth was worth celebrating.
iii. Galbraith was the support system of NS Road and several Close Female Relatives. What made the Canadian Galbraith so special, those that regularly kicked Ajit around like he was some joke? That Ajit was an engineer and technically qualified, a STEM professional, and Galbraith studied the easier Arts subjects was not a factor?
Well, Galbraith apparently camped at Harvard for several decades. What was he doing there, using his intuitive powers to figure out the 1858 lease-signing, which took place at Harvard? Galbraith was born in 1908, there couldn't have been intelligence on the lease left at Harvard by the time he started living there.
(The way it was managed, you signed the lease, within a few years, the building where it was signed was demolished, the few people involved dispersed. No intelligence was ever available on the lease, as a result.)
That was NS Road's ticket to glory. An agricultural graduate, who managed the American version of FCI godowns and warehouses during WWII, a couple of years in New Delhi as US ambassador.
In India, we didn't have agriculture graduates who could manage godowns and warehouses? We had to get Canadian heroes, and then warn Antara, "Gupta was seriously going after the Treasury and the Pentagon?"
June 17, 2025.
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