Prime target

Here’s a bit of information about the new principal secretary to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that is just too delicious not to share. In St Stephen’s College (which has given more to the IAS than any other institution) in Delhi, Pulok Chaterji was known as Alfie. During his ragging in college, a senior who was pursuing English Honours found ‘Pulok’ too much of a mouthful and called him Prufrock (as in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot that begins with “Let us go then you and I...”). Of course, Prufrock was too much a mouthful as well, so after wrestling with it for a couple of weeks, it was reduced to a simple ‘Alfie’. That name has stuck and even now, Chaterji is known to his friends as Alfie Pulok Chaterji.