When Antara moved to Delhi in end-February 2008, she had moved without any surety of finding a job in the media. While in Kolkata, her spouse had received an appointment letter from a Delhi-based media group. Antara's Close Female Relative had advised her to move to Delhi. "In life, the man always leads, women follow. The husband's career was far more important than the wife's."
The feminist in Antara couldn't accept such an argument. Her job in Kolkata (news bureau correspondent) was better (and busier) than her husband's job with the Kolkata Telegraph, she earned more than him as well.
However, after the Nov 2007 incidence of violence in Kolkata city (Islamist protests against Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, what was known as the "one-day intifada"), the situation at her workplace had overnight changed. No one deferred, no one cared about Antara anymore. She was eager to leave Kolkata, you couldn't work at a city where anarchist violence was gaining, the violence at Nandigram (in the Bengal countryside) was apparently meant to indicate Vietnam War blackmails against the Pentagon.
To add to it, Ajit repeatedly kept saying, "I've been there, I've been to Nandigram." In hindsight it would seem that he was talking of the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, when Ajit lived and worked in Kolkata.
The spouse's friends had wondered (they were already living in Delhi), how would Antara and her spouse pay for the shift to Delhi? Antara spent her savings from her two years as a reporter and the workplace's yearly bonus, which she had received in Oct 2007. Thus, the cost of shifting to Delhi was entirely borne by Antara, it came to between Rs 50,000-60,000.
If Antara had been enjoying free meals and shelter since 2016, she had done more than her share in the past, shifting to Delhi being only one of the burdens placed on her.
ii. Antara's job at IE was confirmed after she moved to Delhi. It involved several demotions in rank but she signed the contract, apparently that "took away the right to complain". So Antara accepted whatever she got, she was not an egotist, she showed flexibility, she accepted the decision of the Delhi media bosses. (She was also told that she'd be shifted to reporting at the earliest, which never happened.)
Antara was asked to join the Pune Desk, it had neither infrastructure nor employees, it was being set up. That Antara didn't have the slightest idea about Pune was not considered to be a problem. Even the newly-appointed Pune desk head kept saying, "But we were not from Pune, how would we edit their news or feature stories?"
That was March 2008, and it was while working on the Pune Desk that Antara figured out the city had a cantonment as well, online resources in the present day indicated that the cantonment had a war cemetery for Indian soldiers who died during the War of 1914-1918. (In Pune, it seemed, they didn't call it World War I.)
In the demotion she suffered, had Antara been punished by Indian families that lost their loved ones in the War of 1914-1918? Did these families begin the process of ruining Antara's career, thinking it was Austria that had plunged Europe into World War I?
Now that we knew that the Germans had probably withheld the information about Belcourt Seminary, a supposed lease-based House in the US, that it was Germany and the Prussians that plunged Europe into World War I, would the Pune people apologise to Antara?
Would the Pune people pursue NS Road, purportedly of German origin?
This blog was not a myth or a fairy tale or a way of passing Antara's idle moments. Those who maintained the war cemetery in Pune were called the 'Bombay Engineer Group'. Did it owe nothing to Antara for ruining her career 2008 onwards?
August 16, 2008.
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