Drawing a line

Apropos “‘Love contracts’ after #Metoo” (June 29); intimate relationships between superiors and subordinates are frowned upon not just in the United States and not merely in businesses.

In the early 1990s, the doyen of Indian steel industry reluctantly handed in his papers, the ostensible reason being that he did not fit into the scheme of things envisaged by the new group chairman who was showing the door to many old satraps. The cognoscenti kept the grapevine abuzz with whispers about the said gentleman’s major misdemeanours that included promoting a younger executive to exalted positions in the company for reasons not related to the latter’s corporate performance.

When I was in college in Pune in 1959, the then said city was agog with outrage when a handsome young lecturer in the venerable Sir Parashurambhau College resigned from his position because he was romancing a student. They got married shortly thereafter and the lecturer had a very successful second career as the promoter of a flourishing coaching class. In the early 1970s, a famous Indiaspecialist economist at Cornell University had to quit because of his affair with a married graduate student. They both got divorces from their respective spouses, got married and moved to Washington DC to become prominent members of the foreign aid policy establishment. That marriage too fell apart rather acrimoniously because the wife accused the husband of carrying on with his secretary.

Moral of the story: Bedrooms and boardrooms/ivied lecture halls do not mix well.

Shreekant Sambrani Baroda