I was a little amused by the abrupt March 17 resignation of Atanu Chakraborty—a Gujarat cadre IAS officer of the 1985 batch who retired in 2020—as chairman of HDFC Bank. Much of what may have led to his decision to quit this ostensibly high post—actually a non-executive, part-time role—is by now well known. I followed most of it online with considerable interest, partly because I had interacted with him umpteen times during my stint as The Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar from 1997 to 2012.

Following  my recent blog on Dalit cuisine —where I argued, citing several studies, that it is deeply shaped by the caste system and the history of untouchability—I received an intriguing response on a private WhatsApp chat from a retired Gujarat-cadre bureaucrat. A likeable and thoughtful official, I have known him since the early 2000s, when I was covering the Gujarat Sachivalaya for The Times of India.

“What has gone wrong with the Congress? Why is it making such stupid demands? That’s the only reason why none trusts the party,” exclaimed someone close to me after reading a Gujarati daily report that the Congress had demanded the cow be declared India’s national animal.  

  A few week ago, I was forwarded an article that  appeared  in the British weekly  The Economist . Titled “Caste and cuisine: From honeycomb curry to blood fry: India’s ‘untouchable’ cooking”, it took me back to what I had blogged about what was called a “ sattvik  food festival”, an annual event organised by former Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Anil Gupta.

  The other day, a discussion broke out among ten friends on love marriages—a contentious issue in Gujarat following moves in the corridors of power to regulate them by making parental consent mandatory. One of us claimed that, unlike in the past, nearly 70 percent of weddings today are love marriages. Another person, who had eloped to get married years ago, remarked, “Problems exist everywhere, whether it is a love marriage or an arranged one.”

  This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.