The biggest high I have, post-retirement, is escaping the tyranny of the telephone. This piece is about that tyranny. In Police, the requirement of the job is such that the officers need to be contacted without any loss of time – crime and law & order issues don’t wait for the officer’s convenience and need to be attended to urgently. So much so that we needed to keep the phone close to our beds while sleeping too. In Calcutta Police, during pre-cellphone days, Deputy Commissioners needed to inform the Control Room their location and possible means of contact whenever they went out anywhere on off-duty hours or even on holidays. I remember, once I was watching a film with family and they flashed a slide on the screen asking me to rush to the control room immediately.

I had just joined Calcutta Police when Mother Teresa passed away. This was a very solemn world-event and many Heads of State or their representatives rushed to Calcutta to pay their last respects. Just a week before that, Princess Diana had died in a car crash and the world saw an outpouring of grief on television where swarms of people went to royal residences to reportedly lay 60 million flowers at the gates. This and the presence of international media led to seriously huge crowds (bigger than it would otherwise have been) at and around Park Street off which a building was chosen for lying-in-state for Mother Teresa. My days were divided between standing at Park Street trying to manage the unmanageable crowds and Calcutta Police Control Room which was manned by senior officers round-the-clock during the period. The control room duty tends to be boring but does have its moments. I picked up the phone ringing at around 8 PM and the following ensued:

Another time, another phone call.

When I was Sub Divisional Police Officer (SDPO), the town saw a monkey menace for a while. The monkey had gone insane and used to attack people without provocation. I thought it didn’t concern me or my department but Police, while being criticised for a lot of things, does get looked up to as the saviour of the last resort. One day, I received a phone call from the local MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly):

When one is an SDPO, one is essentially starting one’s career in the Civil Service the pinnacle of which is the post of Chief Secretary (CS). Until recently when the politicians woke up to their powers, this post was practically where the buck stopped and for an SDO (Sub Divisional Officer) or SDPO, he represents God or higher. When a CS visited a sub division, the SDO and SDPO would run around like headless chicken, attending to every small thing official and demi-official so that the visit passed off without a hitch. A particular CS decided to pay a visit to the sub division where I was SDPO just before his retirement, it being a scenic place and a remote one. He was a very simple person with austere habits and very fatherly so the SDO and I didn’t have much problems However, late in the afternoon, I received a call from the SDO:

Every whim of CS was our command. These were pre-computer, video cassette player days. In that small place, no one watched English movies except movies of a particular hue which were euphemistically called “English” movies. No one there would have heard of a movie called “The Gods Must be Crazy Part I” even, let alone its sequel. However, I put my SHOs (Station House Officers) on the job and they searched high and low. Finally, one enterprising SHO found the movie across the border in Bhutan and I proudly sent it over to the SDO.

The next morning, I visited the Guest House where the CS was staying, all puffed up to have achieved the impossible and saved the sub division from hell and damnation, and I saw the SDO patrolling agitatedly at the gate. To my anxious query, he replied that everything was ruined and he didn’t know how it was all going to pan out. Apparently, although the cover of the video cassette said, “The Gods Must be Crazy Part II,” inside, it was the same old, same old, i.e., what passed euphemistically as “English” movies in that sub division. Suddenly I remembered a very important (albeit non-existent) engagement elsewhere in the sub division and rushed off. Dunno why, but my relation with the SDO was never the same again.