Is there ANYBODY out there?

About thirty meters from my study here, is the Officer’s Club, known popularly as the Kailasapuram Club, KC for short. KC is or at least used to be a major component in the everyday entertainment/leisure activity/hobby pursuing centre/ (the reader is urged to add similar words or phrases that convey a sense of) relaxing after a tiring day’s work or after a not-so-tiring day’s work. KC is replete with a library, a reading room, a swimming pool (Olympic size, of course!), a pool room, cards room, a mini gym, a cafeteria, a mini conference hall, a lawn, a badminton court ,a kid’s playing arena and an OAT(open air theatre, for the uninitiated). Oh! and did I mention the swimming pool (Olympic size, of course!).

I still kind of remember that lazy Sunday morning. I think I was five years old then, maybe six and my dad said -‘say, why don’t we go to the library and find something for you to read.’ I vaguely recollect asking him in all my five year old innocence, what a library was. I don’t recall his reply though. Before long we were on his Bajaj Super (then we stayed about a mile from KC) on our way to the KC library. After about twenty minutes, we took two illustrated children’s classics (if my memory serves me right, they were The Gingerbread Man and Three Billy Goats) and went home. Of course you would not want to know that I finished both the same afternoon (signs of things to come! More on that later), would you? I mean, I told it just in case you would.;-)

That was the first time I had been to KC and to say that I was madly excited would be an understatement. However for a long time KC remained to me, just a library and the place where we went for the Saturday movie. The movies were invariably kitschy 70s/80s stuff and being the cosmopolitan (!) place that the Township was, there was a good mix of Tamil, English and Hindi movies with an occasional gult or mallu movie thrown in. I don’t remember most of them but do vividly remember the patient explanations that my parents had to give me between every scene in Aaraadhana, or was it Sholay or perhaps both, actually all Hindi movies that they dared take me to.

Soon enough, I had Enid Blyton make way for Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, who were in turn replaced by the likes of Agatha Christie and A.C.Doyle. For the sheer kick that I got out of reading a six hundred odd page book, I switched to reading Archer, Robin Cook and the like. The madness thankfully did not last for long, and it was time for PGW!KC was always There!

I was soon learning to swim and it was the KC schwimmbad that had the privilege of catching me in suspended animation. When I was tall enough to reach the Billiards
Table, it was KC again (you would never have guessed!). (And now the mandatory senti line!)KC has seen me cursing, at my loss and on a greater number of occasions, seen me in high spirits, having won a game or some kind of quiz.

OK so you get an idea of the steeped past and if I might add the significance of my beloved KC.

So it is to this KC that I went to some time back with Kashyap, a school friend of mine and (need I say) who has fond recollections of KC. What we saw there was appalling to say the least. It was heartbreaking for us to see that the TT tables had vanished and some crazy dress exhibit taking its place, that the badminton courts have now become the scene of some marriage reception, that the OAT has stopped screening English movies, claiming a lack of audience while most people whom I know are sore about missing their regular Saturday fair, that the swimming pool is a shadow of it’s past self, that there are no more quiz contests at KC and what used to be monthly events have now been relegated to being held on special occasions like Children’s Day! The whole place looks eerie now. So deserted that one would not realize that one is in a club when just about the only sound one could hear is from the blaring FM radio in the canteen. Actually, I found it very tempting in a perverse way to shout the title of this article out, just to see if there was anyone there. I fail to understand if it is the lack of patronage or the lethargy and creative inability of the management that has lead to the once splendid KC, my KC, to its present state of affairs -a far cry from the halcyon days. Call it bigoted if you wish, but I tend to think it is because of the latter! Anybody out there?