Some people say yes to scammers. Not knowingly at first, but later when the information is brought to their knowledge, they go into denial and justify their faith in the scammer. Let me tell you a scam of a story. We were invited back in 2014 to a poetry conference in a Northeastern city I will decline to name. The invitation was backed up by the Sahitya Akademi, so there was no reason to doubt there might be anything shady about the conference. Taxi from Kohima to Dimapur, an uneventful train journey to Guwahati on the Nagaland Special and another taxi ride later, we were there. We booked ourselves into the hotel where our hosts had registered us, and waited for them to eventually turn up and welcome us. The lady who had invited us was a Professor at the university and sounded very busy on the phone. By evening she arrived with a number of guests and an important looking gentleman who was introduced to us. We guessed he must be a Sahitya Akademi official because the lady Professor was gushing as she introduced him. Sher expected us to have heard of him. Of course, we hadn’t. Nothing about his name or countenance was familiar to us. “He is the President of the International Women’s Poetry Association,” she further gushed and added that we mere mortals should feel highly honoured that he had acceded to grace us with his presence. We successfully hid the fact that we were not really all that impressed and attempted to at least look interested.
The gentleman in question had brought two thick volumes with him saying that these were the latest publications of the women poets in his organization. He encouraged us time and again to read the contents of the books. Our curiosity sufficiently aroused by now, we browsed one of the two books. There were lots of photographs of smiling sari-clad women. In one of the albums the caption read, ‘The International women poets conference in Bangkok.’ Again, it was the same gaggle of women this time with Bangkok city in the background. In every photograph the President and a young woman, who was introduced as his daughter, were present.
The said poems were featured after the albums. One of them was on the association’s first conference to Dibrugarh by an enthusiastic woman poet. By the way all the members of the association are women, it being a Women poets’ body. The said poem ran thus:
Welcome welcome Welcome welcome welcome welcome welcome Welcome to Dibrugarh Welcome welcome.
Oh man! If that was supposed to be a poem, then we were Franciscan friars!
The other poems in the collection did not get any better than the Welcome poem.
The next morning there was a meeting only for members before the conference began. We were not included but we were constantly urged to become the first members from Nagaland and help them to recruit more members. The incentives were that women poets who had never gotten a chance to be published would get it via the association. Why they might even apply to go to Bangkok or Indonesia or wherever the next international conference would be held. As the first members from Nagaland, we would receive many privileges. We very politely declined the invitations saying we would think about it and discuss it privately before taking a decision.
It was quite obvious the poor Sahitya Akademi had been fooled by the high-sounding theme of the conference and the presence of a University Professor into becoming a partner for the conference. Women poets came from the other Northeastern states and a rather distinguished poet came from Calcutta, but she admitted she had not had any dealings with the organization before.
So there it was - a beautiful scam that promised much and attracted gullible women with the carrot of a trip or many trips to international conferences on poetry, and of getting their poems published because the President believed that every poem ever written by a woman deserved to be printed. At the last count, about three years ago, they had more than one thousand members. Think of all the sweet little membership fees that are coming in to finance those oh so important international conferences in international venues. And how many are the numbers willing to be scammed! That the President is a man who insists that all he wants to do is to help women because he has the highest respect for women should be a big warning signal. Not that there aren’t any men like that. They just don’t advertise themselves like that! Anyway, the question of the day boils down to this: Madam may we scam you?
