Bombay Days 11 : Morarji Desai Taught Kashmir’s Top Man Punctuality

Nostalgia

Morarji Desai and My HMT Watch

ZGM

Someone has said it, and said it beautifully ‘everybody owns a piece of Marine Drive’; it greets everyone with a smile, asks none; if he is a puritan or sinner, a maharaja or mendicant. Like millions of others, whose stories are preserved in its depth, I too have my share of stories about this great seashore, once known Kennedy sea face.

In my childhood, much before having visited the city as a visitor, my impressions of the three-kilometer long seafront that ‘sparkles golden’ at sunset had come from the black and white films. It was Johnny Walker’s famous song of the 1956  movie CID ‘Yeh Hai Bambai Meri Jaan’– that had left an indelible imprint on my receptive mind about the Marine Drive and romances around. Like, many of my friends, sitting in a barber’s shop in our Mohalla pasted with lots of pictures of film actors I too might have yearned to visit the dream city and see matinee idols Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Johnny Walker in flesh and blood. Moreover, enjoying strolls on the Marine Drive, Chowpatty, and Juhu.

Speeding, through the Marine Drive, for attending my assignments, and spotting young men and women walking leisurely heedless of the happenings around, and old lolling on the permanently fixed benches mostly donated by the Parsees in memory of their dead, I on occasion got envious of the freedom people enjoyed then in Bombay.  

The life on the Marine Drive; the rolling waves against the stones, the entrancing moonlight, the fragrance of rajnigandha flowers mixing with the sea breeze,  the giggles of the old couples and the chuckles and chortles of young couples had its romance- that on occasioned waxed me poetic.  During my initial days in the city, I had an impression that the boulevard was an exclusive rendezvous for middle-class boys and girls and couples. It was on a Sunday at 6 PM; when my christen maid Mary in her typical Keralite accent told me, “sahib hum jaya Marine Drive’ hum koo boyfriend koo milnay ka ha,”  that I realized it had become part of the culture of the city. On this road, it was a mind-stirring billboard outside a restaurant, perhaps the “Talk of the Town” that often caught my imagination- its wording changed every day. In fact, for its grip,   I made it a point to take a mental note of the writings. For a long time, I did not know just a few hundred yards from the restaurant in an apartment lived former Prime minister, Morarji Desai. I discovered it only when I visited him in the Oceana Apartments, where he lived as a tenant for fixing an appointment for the Chief Executive of the state who was in the city. The appointment was fixed for twenty to thirty minutes at 6 PM. The Chief Executive, could not make it in time, he was late by about twenty minutes, On his entering into his humble drawing room the former PM displayed his watch and told him that you are late, you have just ten minutes to talk- and dismissed him exactly after ten minutes.  Auch, a disciplined man, will not lie about Kashmir, like his predecessor in officer Pandit Ji, as many supporters National Conference called Jawaharlal Nehru. So,  I thought of having an interview with him about the scene happening in Kashmir in the fifties.  A few days later, I visited him again and fixed an appointment for recording an interview with him. On the day of interview sitting with him in a dimly lit room, I took out my notebook and switched on my tape recorder, before I would start asking questions, he spotted my gold colored wristwatch and asked me about the brand of the watch. And when I told that it was an HMT watch, and there was an HMT factory in Srinagar. Surprised! He  retorted,  “When I visited Srinagar as Prime Minister, they never told me that there was an HMT factory in Srinagar.”  Then, he asked me about the number of people that had got jobs in this factory and if there were more such major factories in the public sector in the state and what was employment scenario in the State. Suddenly, a smile appeared on his otherwise wooden face, and he told me, “ I might not have given factories to your state, but at least, I made your people taste democracy for the first time by holding free elections in 1977”. Then the Q&A session began….