Right from the word go, everything spun off the
track at the conference. The organizers
had booked me on a train which arrived at midnight. A huge family got into my
cabin with a whole load of luggage and kids, dropped them – the luggage as well
as the kids – all around me and debated for a good one hour in the thick of
night how the cargo should be strategically arranged. When the job was done,
the 2-tier cabin was a virtual luggage van with the bodies of the family,
sprawled all over the luggage, adding a touch of animation to the luggage. I
lay sleepless until I got off at 8 o’clock in the morning.
At the railway station, the pick-up arrangement
failed. After a half-hour agonizing wait and several phone calls, a
doleful-looking English professor from the university arrived at 8.30.
Evidently, he liked neither chauffeuring nor English; and the conference seemed
the last thing on his mind.
I was worried sick. I had been invited to play
two crucial roles at the international conference the English Department was
organizing – as a guest of honour at the inaugural ceremony, which was
scheduled to start at 9.30 in the morning, and as a plenary speaker later in
the day. And I had barely twenty-five minutes to shave, wash, change and have
breakfast.
When the first three were accomplished, it was
9.25. Deciding to skip breakfast, I called the conference secretary and said I
was ready. ‘Sir, please wait,’ he said. ‘Once I hear that the Chancellor has
left for the conference venue, I’ll come and pick you up myself. Before that,
I’ll call you.’ Or, something to that effect: the English language and the English teachers
in the university seem to be poles apart.
It was 10. There was no call. I called the
organizing secretary and asked him whether I could go to the conference venue.
He said, ‘Oh, no, sir. I must come and pick you up myself. I’m waiting for a
call from the Chancellor’s office. I’ll get back to you.’
The time was 11 now. The stomach growled a
protest. ‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘I’m in no mood to think about creature comforts; I
may have to leave anytime now.’ I called a fellow plenary speaker staying in a
different room on the same floor in the guest house. She said she had made
several calls and got the same reply as I did.
To cut a long story short, when, at last, I was
led into the conference venue at 12 o’clock, the inaugural ceremony had been
over – without the guest of honour! The head of the department of English was
proposing a vote of thanks in unhearable English.
My immediate impulse was to walk out on the
conference, registering a protest. Inviting a senior professor and a well-known
conference/seminar leader as a guest of honour and keeping him away from the
ceremony where he was to play the role he had been invited to play was a grievous insult, not just a faux pas. That it was done by a
university which was cocking-a-hoop about its having been ranked No. 1 among
institutions of its kind made it even more grievous. Resisting the impulse to
walk out on the conference, I stayed on and listened to the keynote speech by a
professor from a reputable university. It was a drivel – a scripted drivel
which he was reading out with some difficulty.
In the afternoon, I decided not to be part of
the conference anymore. The conference, I said to the organizers, could do
without me. The university authorities were apologetic, and tried to persuade
me to stay on, but I left.
