This anecdote is best enjoyed if you have some knowledge about the socio-economic, cultural, and political context of Pune, India, around two and a half decades ago. Back then, Pune could still lay its claim to the sobriquet ‘Oxford of the East’ in the sense that the spurious race for academic institutions to get graded by some hyped national commission was yet to catch up. Honestly, it didn’t matter much either. Marketing of education in the modern sense was an unfamiliar te