Reinventing memories

Biswaranjan Ghosh

2012-02-15T22:49:00.003+05:30

Biswaranjan Ghosh passed away on 8 Feb, 2012 at Kolkata after just a day’s illness.

How easily I have written these harsh words! For Biswaranjan was not only a dear friend to hundreds of people in Trivandrum, but also the very personification of life itself.

He joined Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Trivandrum in 1973 as a rank-holder from Bengal Engineering College. In later years he made a significant contribution to welding Technology for steel; a technology that is still being used for all launch vehicles of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

He was one of the most active members of Trivandrum Bengali Association. He was there everywhere in most of the activities. Endowed with a God-given voice, he has regaled us with his songs on numerous occasions. His Rabindra Sangeet in a resounding voice mesmerized people here for over thirty years.

He sang folk songs very well too and his ‘Hey Dola, Hey Dola’ is remembered even today. When he sang ‘Jago Tumi Jago, Jago Durga …’ (an invocation of Goddess Durga) hearts stood still for a moment. Such was the magic in his singing. His last song in Trivandrum was ‘Peyechi chuti biday deho Bhai, Sobare ami Pronam Korey jai.’ (The toil is over, it’s time to go. As I leave, I bow to you all.)

Biswaranjan was also a regular in all the dramas enacted by the Association. His playful leg pulling of friends made rehearsals a lively event, often better than the staged drama itself. Our Puja Pandal lit up with joy and laughter whenever Biswaranjan made his entry in the Pandal. Children chased him shouting ‘Kaku, Tombola! Kaku, Tombola!’ His humorous banter while he conducted Tombola made it the most enjoyable off-stage events in any Puja. Biswaranjan also conducted Mukta Mela (a food fest) most regularly. His great one-liner comments evoked peals of laughter and added so much fun to Mukta Mela.

He left Trivandrum for Kolkata after opting for voluntary retirement in 2007. I haven’t met him since and it pains to think that I never will. However, Heaven will now be a very lively place indeed!

Santanu Dasgupta
Trivandrum Bengali association

[Biswaranjan Ghosh was an exceedingly lively person, always smiling, ever-ready to break into laughter. It is difficult to accept his sudden and most untimely death. Thank you, Santanuda, for sharing this. Santanu]

Stories for Haroun: A fishy tale

2012-02-07T09:31:00.005+05:30

In the lake in front of our house, the water is clear and shiny. When you stand beside it, you can see your face, like in a mirror. And you can see lots of fish in the water. There are so many fishes: red, blue, green, yellow, pink, black, white …. There are some with long pointed tails; they are the “sword tails”. There are some with black and yellow lines on them, the “tiger fish”.

In the morning, lots of children used to swim in the lake. Some of them were such expert swimmers! They swam across the lake and came back. They shouted and laughed and had a lot of fun.

The birds in the trees around the lake woke up and joined the children. They said twit-twit, caw-caw, and so on. The whole area was filled with happy children, happy birds, and the happy noises they made.

In the beginning, the fish were scared of the kids. When boys and girls jumped into the lake, the fish dived deep into the water and went right near the bottom. They would hide there in the weeds and wait for the swimmers to go away.

But over time, the fish lost their fear. They came near the children and began playing with them. One day, a pink fish bit Haroun as he was swimming in the lake. Haroun was not hurt, he was just tickled. Slowly, the other fish also started nibbling the children. For the fish, it was great fun. But all the children were not like Haroun. Some of them started crying.

Some of kids were so scared that they stopped coming to the lake. And you know, fear spreads from one person to another, like cough and cold. After some time, there was no one at the lake in the morning.

Their parents asked them, ‘Why don’t you go to the lake? You love swimming, don’t you?’

The children said, ‘The fish bite us! We don’t want to get into the water.’

So one day, the parents of all the children sat down in a big meeting. They drank tea, ate boring thin-arrowroot biscuits and decided to put a net in the middle of the lake.

The following day, hundreds of workers came in with miles of metal nets. Two divers went into water and chased away all the fish to one corner of the lake. And after that, the men fixed the net right along the middle of the lake.

The children came back. They swam on one side of the net and all the fish were on the other side. As the little boys and girls swam, the fish watched them from the other side, their faces very, very sad!

Do you think the children were happy? Yes, they were, at the beginning. But soon, they started missing the fish. They realised, the fish had never hurt them.

They had just wanted to play.

The boys and girls were so sad that they stopped coming to the lake. One morning, the lake was all empty. Not even one child came.

So the papas and mamas sat down once again. They drank tea and ate biscuits and talked and talked. In the end, Malu’s mother, Mrs Nair, came out with a brilliant idea. She said, ‘Let’s put a door on the net. Let the fish come in through the door and play with the kids. If they bite, we will push them to the other side and close the door.’

Akash’s father jumped at the idea. And Avana’s mother! And everyone else agreed.

The next day, workers came again and fixed a door on the net.

The fish came in through the door, played with the children. And the pink fish even nibbled Haroun and his friends once in a way. But no one was ever scared of the fish any more. They knew, to become good friends, you have to fight at times!

This happened many years ago. Akash and Haroun and Malu are big men and women now. But even now, if you go to the lake in front of our house you can see a net with a door. It’s right across the middle of the lake.

Photo: Courtesy Wikipedia

Kolkata

7 February 2012

Immersion of governance?

2012-01-01T20:10:00.000+05:30

On 6 November 2011 in Kolkata, a noisy procession is on its way to immerse a Jagaddhatri idol late in the evening. It has a disc jockey playing loud music, contravening anti-sound-pollution laws. After the group burst firecrackers in front of Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Institute, the biggest government-run cancer hospital in Bengal with hundreds of critical in-patients, police intervene. The people in the procession attack the policemen and chase them into the nearby Bhawanipore police station. They also pelt stones and bottles, damaging vehicles.

The Act 2 of the drama has been telecast, though not live. The policemen, most of them in mufti, but wearing helmets, were trying to close the collapsible gate of the police station from within, but the mob was trying to open it and get in. There were several women in the group that attacked the station, proving, if proof was necessary, that women of Bengal have arrived. The rabble kept throwing things at the cops within, but the latter were strangely subdued.

After some time, some policemen rushed out, wielding lathis. The TV footage didn’t show them seriously hitting anyone, but the mob was scattered all the same. Then the chief minister of the state walked into the police station, shouting and gesticulating, her face glistening in sweat. She could not be heard in the commotion.

Two days later, The Indian Express reported: “Bhawanipore police station in Kolkata had an unusual visitor. It was Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who came storming in, blasted the police and reportedly got two youths, who had been picked up for rioting during an immersion procession earlier, released. … the youths … were Trinamool Congress activists.”

It was also reported that the puja was managed by a veteran offender with several criminal cases against him, who is also a crony of one of Mamata’s brothers.

The news was virtually blacked out by most of the vernacular media, who are in an extended honeymoon with the new state government that came to power in May 2012. The spin followed soon in the shape of a police report. According to the same newspaper, an inquiry report prepared by a senior police officer “is learnt to have indicted officers of the Bhawanipore station for the violence and their failure to control the mob, and criticised them for being rash with those leading the procession. … An officer of the police station has also been booked for misbehaving with the mob …”

The CPI M that ruled Bengal for 34 years was guilty of many misdeeds, the principal one being they replaced the rule of law with a rule of the party. The inevitable question that arises is: What then is the difference between the old government and the new?

Well, even the worst communist chief minister won’t be so unwise – to use a parliamentary word – to personally storm a police station to rescue arrested party workers. They would find malleable police officers and silently work behind the scenes to achieve the same result without making headlines. Communists actually managed to keep things under wraps for a long time in Bengal, until overconfidence led to their misadventures in Singur and Nandigram, besides botching up the Rijwanur Rehman case.

The fact that the new ruling party acted so stupidly perhaps offers Bengal a tiny window of hope. They won’t be able to “manage” the bureaucracy or police with much finesse, and might make fools of themselves repeatedly in similar situations. And it should take the electorate much less than the 34 years they needed to show the door to the Left Front government.

The last period of Congress rule in the state, 1972-77, is etched in the collective memory of Bengal as the hoodlum years, when Youth Congress leaders called the shots in public affairs. Muscle power was their only strength and a rather thin line would set many of them apart from professional thugs. I remember a public meeting where a so-called leader was delivering a speech wearing a short kurta. As he spoke, he raised his arms repeatedly to lift his khadi kurta and show two pistols strapped to his waist.

Later, their descendants, the Trinamool Congress (TC) organised numerous bandhs and countless road- and rail-blockades to disrupt public life in the name of political action. Throwing stones at trams and buses was a regular feature of TC bandhs. At least on one occasion, they even threw a petrol bomb at a bus in Tollygunge in Kolkata. Once, a leading light of the party – presently a minister – personally beat up an ordinary citizen whose only sin was to board a public bus during one of these bandhs. Let us not forget that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee too earned her spurs as a firebrand student leader of the Congress in the 1970s.

The second question that arises is: Does the Bhawanipore incident foretell a return to the hoodlum years?

We do not know the answer yet. But it has been proved beyond doubt that in a democracy, even in a flawed one like ours, a determined electorate can check political dadagiri. It is therefore imperative that people register their protest against the CM and her party for what happened on 6/11.

Although I voted for Mamata in the last election, there were several question marks about her, given her political baggage and methods. She hasn’t really disappointed me. But people like me did have faith in the leaders of the amorphous collective called the “civil society”, who exhorted us to bring about a change in Bengal. Their eloquence helped us make up our mind in the heady summer of 2011. Now that the winter is around, there hasn’t been a murmur of protest from them even after the person elected to uphold the rule of law subverted it with such disgraceful disdain for governmental propriety.

The West Bengal chief minister is no longer a student leader. She led the people’s struggle to excise a malignant government from her state. Her personal integrity has never been questioned and it does seem her heart beats for the poor. But she is also the inheritor of the hoodlum politics of the seventies. If she cannot decide herself on which side of the law she should be, her electorate must force her to.

Murder of crows!

2011-12-25T17:40:00.011+05:30

Crow on a branch - Maruyama Okyo

Often, the innocent and helpful are also the most unloved. Crows, for example. No creature is more helpful to humans than the crow. In my city, they clean up more garbage than the municipality does, although unlike the municipality, they do not make you pay taxes.

Contrary to popular belief, crows are non-aggressive and even friendly. If you host a buffet dinner for a mixed crowd of birds, you will see other birds clean up the grains much faster than the crows. Crows don’t have binocular vision. They look at each grain carefully with one eye, then turn their head and observe it again with the other eye, and by the time they are about to peck, the grain has been eaten up by some other bird.

My dear friend Wiki says: “Recent research has found some crow species capable not only of tool use but of tool construction as well. Crows are now considered to be among the world's most intelligent animals.” What Wikipedia doesn’t mention is: crows are democratic too. They practise a form of direct democracy that was in vogue in the ancient Greek city states. At the end of the day, they sit around on the parapet walls of a large terrace to discuss the day’s happenings. In a way, they are similar to our parliamentarians, all of them speak at the same time. It might turn a bit noisy at times but it also shows that freedom of speech is enshrined in the crow constitution too. Since childhood, I have seen with admiration these meetings taking place in the evenings. I watch them even now, in the evening of my life.

Indian Crow

Contrast crows with parrots. In spring, when the peepul tree outside my window blossoms, large flights of noisy parrots arrive from nowhere, drive away all other birds, polish off the fruits in no time, and fly away. They aren’t seen till the next spring. God knows where they spend the rest of the year.

Yet, poets, who are by definition illogical blokes, routinely compose paeans about parrots. The Bangla rhymes for children are full of loving references to them. Crows are absent in literature, except as symbols of death and other miscellaneous dark forces. In Bangla children’s rhymes, so far as I can remember, the only reference to crows is in: Saatta kaake daanr baye / khokonre tui ghare aye. Seven crows row ahoy! Come home, little boy.

Have you noticed, Dear Reader, the crow has been assigned a subaltern role in these lines? It is not surprising; in the caste-ridden mindset of the so-called upper crust of our society, a dark-complexioned person is instinctively associated with “Dalits”. In Cyrus Broacha’s TV show The week that wasn’t, which is intended to be funny but end up being disgusting most of the time, the person representing Mayawati always has a blackened face! What chance do crows have? “Kaua” is an epithet in Hindi used for the inelegant and the supposedly ugly. The collective noun for owls in English is, surprisingly, a parliament of owls. And for crows? A murder of crows! To cut a long story short, crows are the most unjustly treated living beings.

Since our children grew up and flew away, and particularly since our cantankerous but lovable dog Chorki went to meet his Maker last year, my wife and me live in an empty nest. Alongside crows, mynahs and sparrows give us company. They too are non-aggressive and friendly, and when some food is on offer, they all come down to our kitchen windowsill. They wait for their turn and never fight. The crow is the shiest of them and the sparrow is the most chipper.

Of all our avian visitors, the most timid and defenceless individual was a mynah. His feathers were unkempt and he had a tired air about him. He would fly on to the windowsill of our kitchen at lunchtime – morning is the lunchtime for birds – and almost lie down. Other birds would eat much faster, leaving him without any nourishment. But he would wait patiently. When everyone else had had their meal and flown away, my wife would offer him something special, which he would accept with an obvious expression of gratitude. If no one paid attention, he would call out loudly and demand food. Over time, he would hop into the kitchen and admonish us if he wasn’t served promptly. My wife concluded he was a senior citizen and deserved to be treated with respect. He too would reciprocate the affection and would eat out of her hand, literally.

Since last month, he has stopped visiting us. A Dios, my feathered friend!

Kolkata, 5 October, 2011

Acknowledgments:

A phrase used by my friend Christopher Hickman in a message worked as a trigger for this piece. Thanks, CH.

The last photograph was clicked by me. The remaining pictures are all courtesy The Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Sunday, 25 December 2011

Meeting Joe after long

2011-12-16T14:46:00.008+05:30

I met with Joe last night. It was during the yuletide under a starry sky, with Santa hovering unseen somewhere in the background. Curiously, Joe gave me a leather-bound copy of the Bible as a Christmas gift. Equally strange, I felt it was a perfectly normal gift to have from Joe.

And of course, it was normal to dream about a friend who died a few months ago.

What is curious about the gift of a Bible at Christmas? Well, although religion was a subject we never discussed, I don’t think Joe was seriously religious. While we lived close to each other in the same city, I never saw him going to church on a Sunday morning. In short, in the real world Joe giving me a Bible would be as absurd as me gifting him a copy of the Geeta.

Joe and Catherine got their elder daughter admitted to one of the finest Jesuit schools in Trivandrum, a school where securing admission was tough, and parents would consider themselves lucky if their children did manage the feat. Aarti was a lively child with curly hair and sparkling eyes, and I wouldn’t imagine any school refusing admission to such a bright five-year old. But Joe said, ‘You know, at times like these, I turn into a devout Catholic. It helps!’

As I write, lots of insignificant memories flash through my mind. I know not if they would be of any interest to anyone else, but let me write, simply because I love to recollect them.

Once, I went to Joe’s family house in Changanecherry while he was there. While returning from Trivandrum to Calcutta, I reached Changanecherry in the morning with a plan to board a long-distance train from there early afternoon. In those days of glorious uncertainty without mobile phones or Google maps, I had just taken a chance. After getting off the train, I started enquiring about Joe and his dad, a retired professor of English. Soon, I was walking through a drizzle in a laterite country with quaint tiled houses peeping out of green foliage on either side of the road, accompanied by a man in a lungi and followed by a pack of suspicious stray dogs. Joe had to be woken up.

The morning went past like a flash of electricity, and we started waiting for the lunch with a tinge of sadness. It was still drizzling, and getting rather late for my train. After enquiring in the kitchen, Joe came back and said, ‘Looks like you will have to make do with vegetables, the chicken is still alive.’

Instead of a salt cellar, on the dining table there was a small bottle of saline water with a curved nozzle. I don’t remember if the chicken had been dead by then, but I do remember Joe’s mother laid out a fabulous lunch for us. A kind of lunch for which one should gladly miss trains. Later, a couple of times, she sent us home-made fish and prawn pickles through Joe. They were heavenly.

She must be quite elderly now. Why did she have to suffer this cruel blow?

There was a time when many of our friends were posted in Trivandrum at the same time. All the offspring of our friends were great fans of Joe, who reciprocated their affection in abundance. I do not how Joe struck up such easy friendship with kids. Maybe, he had kept the child in him alive and would let the young fellow out when he was in company of children.

One day, Joe came to our home with Aarti on a Sunday morning. My children, Doel and Tatai were in primary school then, and Aarti was yet to begin schooling. Joe had planned to take the children to the zoo, but wanted to give Aarti a surprise. So he told Doel, ‘Get ready. We are going to the Ized-o-o’, imitating the Mallu pronunciation of z to make sure Aarti didn’t get the drift.

On another Sunday, Joes (his second daughter hadn't arrived then) and us went to the backwater lake at Veli in the outskirts of Trivandrum. After the usual boat ride and fun and frolic, Aarti got over-friendly with a puppy and picked up a scratch in her hand. It was just an affectionate nibble and nothing serious, but we couldn’t take chances. Joe consulted a doctor, who advised him not to worry. Still, Aarti’s parents continued to feel uneasy, naturally. The next Sunday, Joe and me drove down to Veli once again in Joe’s elderly green Ambassador, armed with two large packets of thin-arrowroot biscuits. We gathered all the mongrels of Veli that afternoon and after making sure that Aarti’s friend was hale and hearty, returned home, relaxed.

A few days ago, I was in Bangalore. We had just moved into a flat on the fourteenth floor, facing the east. On the first morning, I woke up early and went to the balcony. As an icy wind ran a shiver through me, I saw the blue darkness giving way to a dull light as the sun rose gingerly through a mist over a huge city dotted with countless buildings. Numerous windows were still throwing out light. It was a panorama where the day met the night, life met death. I thought it would have been great if Joe had been behind one of those windows. He could have been.

My mother

2011-12-02T07:57:00.008+05:30

Mani Menon

[After reading Shamsur Rahman’s poem "I never heard my mother singing", my friend Mani shared with me his reminiscences about his mother. I found it fascinating for two reasons. Firstly, it is a beautifully written account of a very special person. Secondly, after reading Mani’s story, it seemed Shamsur Rahman of Bangladesh wrote not only about his own mother, but also about a woman from Kerala who lived in a different time and space. I am honoured to share Mani’s story with my readers. If you haven’t read the poem, I would suggest you scroll down to read it first before you read this.]

Reading your translation of Shamsur Rahman's poignant poem brought back memories of my own mother. She passed away in 1989, leaving my father, me and my wife totally devastated. Especially my wife. My mother and she had shared a relationship that transcended the conventional 'saas-bahu' one. They were good friends.

My mother's education, like many young girls' of her time, had come to a screeching halt after she passed her 6th form (Matric). At the age of 21, she came to Bombay as a bride. Having been brought up in Kerala and Madras State, Hindi was a totally alien language for her. Alien, yes. An insurmountable challenge? No! Though she was never a movie buff, she was a walkie-talkie encyclopaedia of old Hindi film songs. You just had to hum a tune and pat would come the name of the movie, the lead pair, the music director and the playback singer/s!

Till date, I haven’t seen anyone read a newspaper the way she did. She would devour ‘The Hindu’ from the masthead to the last page. Naturally, her general knowledge was very good.

She loved to play Scrabble with my father. My father spoke excellent English. My mother spoke just passable English. But evening after evening, she trounced him. When she had free time, she would open the old Oxford Dictionary and learn new words. My father used to be amazed by her victories. I guess he must also have been proud of her. But he never mentioned it.

She was a pure vegetarian, but that didn't stop her from trying out non-vegetarian recipes for us. My wife still refers to my mother's file of exotic recipes cut out from various magazines and also, recipes written in her neat handwriting.

A few years ago, we were watching an old Hindi movie where the eldest 'bhabhi' lets slip to her brother-in-law that she not only speaks fluent English but has even gone to college. She makes him promise that he should never reveal this secret to her husband as he was illiterate! It was quite a moving scene. My wife commented that it reminded her of my mother. When I asked her why, she asked me if I ever knew what my mother had secretly yearned for. I had never thought of asking her.

Had she wanted to pursue her studies? Had she ever asked her father? After marriage, had she ever asked her husband? I knew her as a woman who didn't like going out on her own. But had she secretly wanted to do so? Had she wanted to see the latest Hindi movie starring Shammi Kapoor and Saira Banu? Did she ever need a break from her kitchen and ask my father to buy dinner from a nearby restaurant? Did she want to visit the Taj Mahal and travel all over the country?

It makes me feel so guilty that we had never asked. Not once. “Such a long time I lived with her, but never found out.”

[Would you like to share your memories of your mother? I will be delighted if you do.]

I never heard my mother …

2011-11-25T16:03:00.010+05:30

Shamsur Rahman

[Shamsur Rahman, who lived in Bangladesh, was one of the finest Bengali poets. He was also an important voice of reason in Bangladesh, and once suffered a near-fatal assault by Muslim fundamentalists. I sent this translation to him, seeking his permission for publishing it. But when I wrote to him, I didn't know he had gone into a coma. He died a week later, on 17 August, 2006 at the age of seventy-six.]

I never heard my mother singing.
Did she ever sing a lullaby as she tucked me in
In those far-off childhood nights?
I wish I could remember …

Even before her figure reached the fullness of spring
When she was closer to the season of
Picking up mangoes scattered in a storm
In lonely afternoons, evenings,
No tune ever grew up on her like a silent creeper
Lest the elders should hear …

And even in her husband’s home, my mother
Remained far too silent, far too much in the shadows,
And so far as I know, never fell for music.
In between chopping fish or grinding turmeric
Or perhaps in the afternoon, after swabbing the courtyard
And scrubbing bell metal plates sparkling bright
Bending down on the sewing machine, darning a torn shirt,
Hanging clothes on a clotheshorse,
After sending me off to playground with a kiss,
In her moments of solitude, as she pretended to do her hair,
Did she ever hum a tune?
Such a long time I lived with her, but never found out …

It’s as if throughout her life she stored all her songs
In a wooden chest that reminds us of our sorrows.
Presently from its dark inside exudes but rarely,
Not tunes, but the pungent smell of naphthalene. Y

Kochuthresiamma Joseph

2011-11-10T23:30:00.014+05:30

Kochuthresiamma Joseph (KTJ to her friends) passed away in the night of 8/9 November. Although her husband Joseph Mathew and I were colleagues, I never met her. Yet, when I opened a common friend’s text message carrying the news of her death in the small hours of the morning yesterday, I felt a deep sense of bereavement … a sense of loss made more poignant by the stillness of the night.

I came to know her long after Joseph Mathew and I ceased to be colleagues, through her somewhat mysteriously titled blog “Pareltank”. Later, she wrote she had named the blog after the road in which she had lived with her husband and children in Mumbai: Parel Tank Road. Maybe, when she named the blog, she was in that phase of her journey when one prefers to look back, rather than looking ahead.

She taught English at college(s) and wrote beautifully about her friends, relatives, acquaintances, neighbours, tailors, in short, the ordinary people she came across. And they came so alive through her writing! While reading her blog, I would be touched by her sensitivity, eye for details, sense of humour and her candour and courage.

She also wrote about the colossal social evils that we have agreed to live with, without losing much sleep. And in these pieces, she came out as a different kind of writer: tough, no-nonsense, and brilliantly incisive. I didn’t agree with her always – needless to say – but I was always impressed by the well-informed analytical mind that was behind the fingers on her keyboard.

I didn’t know Kochuthresiamma Joseph personally while she was alive. Now that she is no more, I know that Mother Earth has lost one of her wonderful daughters. I bid adieu to you, my unknown friend! And my heart goes out to your husband, children, and other close relatives.

=========================================================================

Here are the links to three of KTJ's many lovely articles:

Autograph / Fair & Lovely / Narendra Modi's letter to Anna Hazare

To be a Muslim in India

2011-11-07T00:38:00.008+05:30

Yesterday's Indian Express carried these stories.

“Nadeem Saiyed, a key witness to the Naroda Patiya massacre during the 2002 Gujarat riots, was brutally killed on the main street of Juhapura on Saturday. He was stabbed 25 times, just steps away from the anti-terrorism group headquarters.”

Saiyed gave evidence in the Naroda Patiya mass murder case, which had been a ghastly incident even by the standards of Gujarat riots. The official death count was 39, but it was actually much higher. Tehlka magazine’s spy cameras caught some of the mass murderers gleefully boasting – with gory details – about how they had killed defenceless people at Naroda Patiya Housing Society. On Headlines Today, I saw a similar footage, but I am not sure if it is their in-house footage or that of Tehlka.

Saiyed was under police protection since 2009. The newspaper added, “But it is not clear why the PSO [personal security officer?] and another guard assigned to protect him were not around at the time of the incident. … A few days ago, Saiyed met Ahmedabad police chief S K Saikia and sought more security.”

The second story is actually a positive development, but distressing if viewed in totality. A Special court granted bail to all the nine men accused in the 2006 Malegaon bomb blasts in which 37 persons were killed and hundreds injured. The blasts had occurred in and around a mosque in Malegaon in Nashik district during the afternoon prayers on Shab-e-Barat.

The accused, all Muslims, had filed fresh bail applications after a Hindu priest, Aseemanand confessed in late 2010 that the blasts had been set off by Hindu extremists. Indian Express went on to add that the NIA [National Investigation Agency] said that after the confession of Aseemanand, it reviewed the evidence of other investigating agencies and then collected fresh evidence before arriving at its decision not to oppose the bail plea. The families of the nine men insist they are innocent and were framed by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad which first handled the probe, and later, by the CBI, which took over the case.

Gujarat government has systematically, blatantly, and shamelessly tried to derail the process of justice for the 2002 riot victims, including arresting whistle-blower IPS officer Sanjeev Bhatt. The murder of Saiyed is possibly the latest paragraph in that long, sordid saga of sabotage. If a key witness, supposedly under police protection, can be killed, what are the chances that the Naroda Patiya killers would be brought to justice?

As regards the second case, who will pay for the lost years of the men framed by the state?

It cannot be proved mathematically, but there are strong indications that in both cases, the state has proactively hurt a community which has no protection other than from its own tormentors. At least in parts of India today, being a Muslim may guarantee that you won’t get justice from the state.

Fortunately, the Indian story is neither so simple, nor one-dimensional. The same paper carried the following report too.

Nineteen year-old Sweety Abdul lives in a tarpaulin-covered shanty beside the Cross Maidan in Mumbai, where she grew up watching boys playing cricket. She helps her sister run their small unauthorised shoe shop in nearby Fashion Street, a Mumbai flea-market. The shack that she shares with her ailing mother and sister — her father died when she was nine — has little space and no electricity. Sweety dropped out of school after Class VII.

Yesterday was the proudest day of Sweety’s life because she was selected to play for the senior Mumbai cricket team. The Mumbai under-19 coach said she had bailed out her team several times, including against Gujarat when she hit a 50 with her side five down.

Sweety told the newspaper, “(But) when batting, sometimes my worries are not about tackling opponent bowlers, but about the municipality vans which routinely come and try to clear away the stalls. If they raid our shop, it is tough.”

During the monsoon, she prays for rain to go away, as otherwise, her cricketing gear would get spoilt: “Hum dua karte hain barsish zor ki na ho.”

For every game she is paid Rs 2,500, from which TDS is deducted, says Sweety. The difference with men’s Ranji team is stark. The men get over Rs 1 lakh per match. The reporter added, rather poetically, “But there are days when everything seems possible, like when she boarded a flight to return from Ahmedabad or when she gets to stay in an actual room with walls during hotel stays for cricket matches.”

Sweety hopes to find a job, though she knows it won’t be easy. And she wants to see her family in a proper house where they don’t have to worry about thieves and junkies. In the India of Infosys, Sachin Tendulkar, and Narendra Modi, it will be tough, but not impossible. Let’s wish her luck.

[Photo and information - courtesy The Indian Express]

Ordinary Indian, extraordinary Indian

2011-10-23T11:29:00.004+05:30

Deepu has been driving our car for the last two months. A young man of around 30 years, he is reasonably punctual, hardworking, and never says no if he is needed to go to the railway station or airport at odd hours. At the end of the day, he gives me an account of how much has been spent on parking and toll tax, and unfailingly returns the surplus of what was given to him in the morning. In short, he carries himself with dignity.

Yesterday, Deepu had to report for work at 12 noon. He was late by ten minutes and was given a sermon by yours truly. On reaching our destination, I offered him the customary lunch allowance. It was not part of my original deal with Deepu, but it is only fair that I reimburse the expenses if he has to eat out while on duty.

Yesterday, Deepu politely declined the money saying he had had his lunch before coming to our house. ‘That’s the reason I was late’, he added with a shy smile.

Deepu doesn't read newspapers. If he did, he would possibly take the money, keep it quietly, and invest it on his son’s education.

Hasn’t Ms Kiran Bedi, one of the conscience keepers of the nation, done the same thing? She lectures people on value and ethics (I guess in every city that’s connected by air) and her hosts pay for her travel and stay.

The Indian Express has recently reported that she has been travelling Air India paying one fourth of the normal fare as she was a gallantry award winner as an IPS officer, but has been claiming full fare, at times, executive class fare. In some cases, after travelling economy class on private airlines, she claimed business class fare. In one instance, she travelled from Delhi to Hyderabad to deliver a speech and then went on to Chennai to speak at a meeting held by another group. Ms Bedi claimed full fares from Delhi to Hyderabad and Delhi to Chennai from her two hosts! So in effect, she claimed reimbursement for ghost journeys.

Her defence? (A) She did whatever she did with the full knowledge of her hosts and (B) She hasn’t put the amounts into her pocket, but into the pocket of “her” NGO, which uses the money to educate children.

Both arguments are disingenuous, to put it mildly. Firstly, the claim that her hosts know everything is subject to verification. Secondly, and most importantly, the 75% discount that the government of India forces Air India to sacrifice is meant to help a gallant individual. It cannot be used to make a profit for anyone, even if it be an NGO with noble missions. Also, politicians caught taking money can say that they took it for their party! Could that be an excuse?

Thirdly, the tax payers’ money keeps the loss-making Air India alive, and very few of them, beside Ms Bedi, would like their money to go into an unverifiable NGO through fudged accounting.

So who is a better role model and conscience keeper? Deepu Paik or Kiran Bedi?

PS. On 21 October, a former IAS officer and Team Anna member, Arun Bhatia appeared on CNN IBN. He told Rajdeep Sardesai and the rest of the world that many government officers travel economy class and claim business class fare. Nothing happens to them, it is quite normal. I couldn’t believe my ears. Can you, Gentle Reader?

Sunday, 23 October 2011

Soumyajit Basu

2011-10-08T23:32:00.003+05:30

Soumyajit is a common Bengali first name, but Soumyajit Basu’s wife’s name is rather unusual: Swachhotoya. A bit of a tongue-twister for people unfamiliar with the Bengali language, the word means a river of transparent waters. His son’s name is even more remarkable, Aranyak, which means of the forests. At home, the boy is called Roddur, Sunlight. Aranyak is also the name of a beautiful autobiographical novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. A forest is the main character in the novel. Soumyajit was fond of Bibhutibhushan and Jibanananda Das, the finest writers on Nature in Bengali, respectively in prose and verse.

Soumyajit grew up in the teagardens of Assam. Since childhood, he was fond of plants, animals, birds, and butterflies. As a child, he had a pet deer. His love for Mother Nature didn’t end after he grew up. Once, when he saw an owl with a broken wing, tears came to his eyes. Owls were his favourite birds. He would nurse birds and squirrels with broken limbs back to health. Even now, there is a tailor bird’s nest in the front veranda of his house, and an old beehive. These were some of the collections from his numerous trips to remote places.

Fond of travelling and trekking, he earned his living by teaching geography in a school, an apt profession for someone who lived with a river and a forest at home. Last October, he went to the Ayodhya Hills of Purulia to watch full moon from the top of the hill. He never came back.

In the treacherous terrain of the Ayodhya Hills, steep peaks hide tiny hamlets peopled by the wretched of the earth. For outsiders, the unmarked alleys, narrow passes and small streams are quite a maze. The Indian government is irrelevant in the area; it is ruled by Maoists.

Partha Sarathi and Soumyajit

Soumyajit and his friend Partha Sarathi Biswas – both in their thirties – went to trek in this dangerous valley. Partha Sarathi was a police-officer. In the night of 22/23 October 2010, after crossing the unseen border into Maoist land, they were abducted by Maoists.

According to newspaper reports, the reason for their abduction was not clear. Police said Partha and Soumyajit were both involved with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on wildlife conservation and tribal issues. They had not informed the local police and administration about their visit.

Five months later, two decomposed bodies were found from a jungle near Ayodhya hills in Purulia. The bodies were identified to be that of Partha and Soumyajit through DNA tests.

Why did the Maoists kill them? Partha Sarathi’s police identity would certainly have gone against him. Maybe, the Maoists presumed he was spying. Even if he was, he committed no offense. He was doing his duty. It doesn't justify his murder. If it did, the government forces too would be "justified" to kill suspected Maoists.

While condemning state violence, how do we deal with Maoist counter-violence? How could they kill someone like Soumyajit Basu? Perhaps a group of people can kill, in cold blood, an unarmed man who hasn’t committed any offence only when they cease to be humans. Shorn of their rhetoric, the Maoist movement is exactly that, an exercise in inhumanity. That doesn’t mean the social and economic inequities that breed such violent rebellions are any less inhuman. But let’s keep it aside for another day.

Police often torture and kill politically inconvenient people. State violence against rebels, whether in Kashmir or Chhattisgarh, must stop. In a civilised society, the government must follow its own laws. This is more or less a settled principle. No one, not even the staunchest advocate of the state would say otherwise, at least in public.

But there is a lot of vagueness when it comes to reflecting on Maoist violence. There are sections of intelligentsia that tacitly or openly support the Maoists, which means their violence too, because you cannot think of Maoists without their wanton violence.

No one can fight a war unless they believe they are fighting for a just cause. And the support that Maoists get from well-meaning Left intellectuals certainly helps them to keep their faith alive. Sooner this moral support ends, the better it is.

Bengaluru, 08 October, 2011

Two poems

2011-10-02T10:00:00.004+05:30

Kinship

Octavio Paz

I am a human, my transient life is
Cocooned in an endless, everexpanding night.
Yet I look up to see
Stars writing on the wall of sky.
I don’t follow their language, but I know
My story too is being written there,
And at this precise moment,
Throughout the sky
Someone is reciting
The letters of my name.

A song of wonder

Rabindranath Tagore

I’ve found my space
In a sky filled with suns and stars,
In a cosmos brimming with life.
From a spring of wonder
Flow out my songs.

In a surge of endless time,
The universe rolls on a tidal wave
And the torrent is felt
In bloodstreams deep in my veins.

Walking on a jungle trail,
I’ve stepped out on grass
My mind leaps out in joy
As a waft of flowers drifts by.
Bliss is scattered all around!

I’ve tried to hear and see
I’ve poured my life out on this world
Looked out for the unknown in the common.
From the spring of wonder
Flow out my songs..

[The Octavio Paz poem has been translated from a Bengali translation of the original by my friend Soumya Shankar Mitra]

Buy shoes and mess up the world

2011-09-23T09:59:00.006+05:30

Have you seen this TV advertisement?

A pretty young woman is in a store to buy shoes, along with her husband or boyfriend. She tries out a pair, doesn’t quite like it and decides to go elsewhere. The man drives her to another shop, she isn’t satisfied. Another drive. On the way, the pretty woman takes fancy in a store and asks her partner to stop. Not good enough … another drive. They apparently visit different corners of the town in a smart new car while the sunny day turns into a diffused evening. At the nth store, she decides to go back to the first one.

The ad isn’t trying to sell no shoes. It’s for a new small car that runs on diesel. The punch line is: Drive India, khulke!

A recent newspaper report said that of the 25 lakh cars sold in India in 2010, 30% were with diesel engines. Industry experts predict that by 2017, when the yearly car sales are expected to cross 56,00,000, 50% will be diesel cars. The share of diesel cars has been increasing over the years because the subsidised diesel is becoming progressively cheaper compared to petrol. (A litre of it costs ₹44 against ₹71 for petrol in my city.) So people prefer to buy diesel vehicles although a mid-size diesel sedan costs Rs.1,00,000 more than its petrol variant.

The government subsidises diesel to keep the cost of rail and road transportation low; and of agricultural products, as farmers need diesel to run irrigation pumps. But the unintended beneficiaries, owners of diesel cars and fuel-guzzling SUVs, are cornering more and more of the subsidy that goes into diesel. According to the report, cars have already become the second biggest user of diesel. Cars use 15% of diesel in the country, as against 12% by buses and agriculture each, 10% by industries, and 6% by the railways. In absolute terms too, the subsidy is astronomically large. The government charges excise duty of ₹14.35 on a litre of petrol, but only ₹4.60 on diesel. This means it pays every Indian, including Mr Mukesh Ambani, ₹9.75 for every litre of diesel purchased. (Whether there should be any subsidy on petrol either is another question.)

Notionally, the poor, many of whom wouldn’t see the inside of a car in their lifetime, are paying the price of the subsidy as otherwise the amount could go to some poverty alleviation programme. Should this go on?

There are two other reasons why this should stop immediately. Diesel is a dirtier fuel than petrol. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), diesel engines emit toxic air contaminants and human carcinogens. So, the environment too is paying the price for some people buying fancy shoes.

Secondly, global warming is a fact we are living through. Summers are distinctly hotter than what they were in my childhood, that is, fifty years ago. The monsoon rains are erratic, and many more cyclones hit us than earlier.

As automobile emission is a major contributor to global warming, governments (including local governments) are expected to introduce disincentives to reduce the use of personal cars. In an article in New York Times (26 June 2011), Elisabeth Rosenthal writes, “many European cities are … creating environments openly hostile to cars.” Cities like Vienna, Munich, and Copenhagen have closed vast stretches of roads to automobiles. Barcelona and Paris have widened bike lanes to reduce space for cars. If you drive a vehicle in London or Stockholm, you pay huge charges just to enter the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon emission may enter. “The methods vary, but the mission is clear – to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation”, writes Rosenthal.

One wonders if Indians live on the same planet. Although queer people like our former environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh make contrary noise from time to time against fuel-hungry big cars and Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs), the Indian ruling elite seems deaf and blind to the need to discourage personal vehicles and encourage zero-emission traffic. There are no bike lanes in Indian cities. Forget bike lanes, you don’t even have footpaths in many cities, particularly in the newly developed areas. You are forced to take an auto even for a short distance which you would otherwise walk.

On the contrary, governments offer cheap – if not free – land and tax breaks to car manufacturers so that they may flood our roads with low-priced cars. As small diesel cars become popular – they certainly will – there will be a lot more auto emission. Both central and state governments must make a beginning to turn the tide.

There is a simple way to do so. According to the Centre for Science and Environment, an NGO that has been fighting for the environment, in Denmark diesel cars are taxed higher to offset the lower cost of fuel. And so it is in Sri Lanka. If the Indian government follows suit, it can recover the subsidy paid on the lifespan of a diesel car / SUV upfront. This will also work as a disincentive against environment-unfriendly vehicles.

There was some noise on this issue a few months ago. The government reportedly considered differential pricing for diesel to be sold to cars. Our finance minister declared it was not practicable. He hasn’t told us why diesel cars and SUVs cannot be taxed higher.

[Photograph courtesy Wikipedia]

20 September 2011

The Corrupt Indians

2011-09-17T00:21:00.004+05:30

I know, the combination of the heading of this article and the picture above is rather jarring. In this short essay, I am going to connect the two. Let me begin with a few true stories.

Sometime in the late 1990s, a remote town in the USA: Two Indian students are booked for speeding. They quickly offer a bribe to the police officer. After a long hard look, the officer says, ‘During my twenty years in this job, I’ve been offered bribe thrice. On every occasion, it was an Indian.’

If there has been one Bengali political leader above controversy, it was late Benoy Krishna Chowdhury. A minister for about 20 years since the first Left Front government in 1977, he was the chief architect of the land reforms and Panchayet Raj of Bengal. Try as you might, you won’t find one news report that questions his integrity. While Chowdhury was alive, one day, a friend of mine was on a local train where three young men were chatting.

One of the boys said Benoy Chowdhury and he were from the same village and his family was close to the leader. Chowdhury used to visit their house often. When he became a minister, the boy’s father took him to the former and requested him to find a job for his son. The boy went on to add, with a sense of injury, ‘Would you believe it? He told us on our face he wouldn’t be able to help.’

Hearing this, the passengers who were following the story were upset. The general consensus was that the minister had done something morally wrong. My friend joined the conversation and asked, ‘Do you seriously believe it is a minister’s responsibility to find jobs for people known to him?’

Everyone around thought it was.

The third incident, circa 2006: My wife has applied for a passport. A police inspector is in our Kolkata residence for verification. We have furnished all the documents required as per rules, but the inspector isn’t satisfied. After asking several irrelevant questions, he insists that my wife produce proof that her late father indeed worked in the city mentioned in her school leaving certificate.

We protest, ‘Do you know any married woman who carries her late father’s employment records? Can you prove where your father worked?’

The inspector says nothing. He drinks tea and leaves.

For us, it would have been better to pay him the money he expected. Maybe, two hundred rupees would have sufficed. Because of our pig-headed response, we had to run around different government offices during the next two months. We paid over five times the amount on taxi fare alone.

*

Barring exceptions of people paying under the table to get illegal benefits, no one pays bribes unless forced to. Greasing the babus’ palms is almost mandatory in government offices like the public vehicles departments, property registries, commercial tax offices, offices that issue life support systems like SC/ST certificates, ration cards etc. The last story is about one such department. But the other two indicate the extent of corruption among the Indian middleclass in general.

A vast majority of our people is too poor and wretched to be corrupt. Things haven’t changed for them. In contrast, a market driven aspirational change defines our middleclass today. We have started believing “Greed is good!” Men haven’t become hedonistic in the literal sense that they are only after wine, women and song, but, they are certainly after wealth and more creature comforts. This “maximalist” lifestyle is surely a breeding ground of corruption. When everyone wants to be rich in a poor country, the competition is intense and value and ethics have to be thrown out of the window. Arvind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger brings this out in morbid details.

Commodification of education and healthcare has made things worse. People belonging to the erstwhile “noble” professions of teaching and medicine are the worst mercenaries of our time. Everything can be and has to be bought. Cutting corners has become a way of life. We pay illegal donations to get our children admitted to engineering / medical colleges and brag about it. We have no qualms about currying favour with the powerful people we know. We would rather pay the traffic policeman Rs.50 than pay a penalty of Rs.100.

Further, as there is no moral peg to hang our thoughts, we don’t even realise that we too are corrupt. The same people who do these and much worse things also support Anna Hazare and demand that an elaborate structure be set up to catch and punish the corrupt.

In India, there exists massive angst particularly after a series of mega scams of 2009-10 and a cavalier central government’s reluctant, half-hearted efforts to book the guilty. (Some state governments like Karnataka are equally bad.) The Anna team – the core team has only 22 members – deserves acclaim for giving a concrete shape to the anguish of millions. A young friend of mine, Anirban Dasgupta writes that the good thing about the Anna movement

"… has been that people in various places (yes, only urban though) have come out to speak about a system that ails our society. … we, the common people of India, have raised our voice and have lent strength to the movement. Had we remained indifferent (like we are to the fast of Irom Sharmila in Manipur), Anna would have gone nowhere.

"The very belief that yes we can change a system or force our parliament to adopt a law which gives more power to the common man can give a lot of confidence to the people."

Yes, it is certainly a triumph of democracy. All talks suggesting that parliamentarians can do as they please until the next election are pure hogwash. Also, if this movement led to a more efficient system to tackle corruption, it would be a big step forward. (In Karnataka, Mr Santosh Hegde has shown what a Lok Ayukta can do.)

But as many have pointed out, the Hazare group is strangely quiet on corporate corruption, the mother of all scams. Also, they are only against politicians and governments, without taking any ideological position on other serious issues. The massive erosion of values of our time doesn’t seem to be on their agenda. I do not know how the value deficiency in our society can be addressed, but I believe without that there is no emancipation. This is the crux of the matter. We have to change the way we think.

Let us recall that in 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) began a movement against corruption and poor governance. It shook the country, led to the Emergency, and ultimately, the end of Congress rule at the Centre and in many Indian states.

Have things improved in the last 37 years? The economy has become bigger, we have many more billionaires today, and the middleclass is much better off. But the poor continue to live a life of misery. Instead of going down, graft has increased manifold. With every passing year, the quality of governance is becoming worse, despite some welcome changes like the Right to Information Act.

In many ways, the situation now is worse than in the time of the JP movement. No, I don’t say that limitations of the JP movement are responsible for the downward slide, although some of JP’s lieutenants have metamorphosed into big time thieves. The slide is mainly due to the model of “development” that our rulers have chosen. What I am trying to say is that changing laws wouldn't make a difference. We need to change our society as a political unit at a much deeper level, in a more fundamental way.

Like the JP movement, the Anna movement too ignores the bigger issue of value deficiency in the society. It too may lead to just a change of regime and no change in substance.

Kolkata, Friday, September 16, 2011

The dream is over

2011-09-09T18:39:00.025+05:30

Meri prem kahani khatam huyi
Mera jeevanka sangeet gaya
Mera sundar swapna beet gaya

My love story has come to an end,
So has the music of my life.
The beautiful dream is over.

In the no-man’s land between boyhood and manhood, we had only boys for company. Having studied in a same-sex school and given the social norms of the 1960s, my friends and I had hardly any feminine companionship outside family. So we often fell in love with film actresses. In The picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde said that everyone falls in love with a film star at some time or other. I guess we did so once too often … with the beautiful sexy heroines of Hindi films, where there was an abundance of beauties.

When we began watching Hindi films – of course on the sly – Madhubala and Nargis, the two most beautiful women to have ever walked this earth were no longer on the scene and Meena Kumari, who would die in 1972 because of alcoholism, was past her prime. But those who were there were no less ravishing. The reigning divas were Waheeda Rehman, Nutan, and Sadhana Sivadasani. We didn’t ignore the lesser stars either – like Nanda, Saira Banu, and Asha Parekh. Each one of them was beautiful in their own way and radiated charm and spirit. And one cannot forget the vivacious Anglo-Burmese actress Helen, who was the permanent cabaret dancer in all Hindi films of the sixties!

Describing feminine beauty has been a challenging task for writers over the ages. Only the best in the business have made a decent job of it occasionally. The lesser ones have made a hash of it regularly. Therefore, instead of trying your patience, Dear Reader, I’ve pasted some photographs above. In the unlikely event that you don’t recognise them, they are, from the left: Nanda, Waheeda, Helen, and Sadhana.

I fell in love with them and a few others regularly, one at a time, depending on who was the heroine of the last film I’d seen: Sadhana in Mera Saya, Nanda in Ek phool do maali, Waheeda in Guide, and so on …. They exuded charm and sexuality and filled my personal sky with a pleasant amorous glow. (Incidentally, while reviewing Mera Saya, a a film critic of The Statesman chose to disambiguate that the film had nothing to do with women's underclothing!)

A few days ago, a friend forwarded a recent picture of these beautiful women. This is how they look now. Believe it or not, these are the same persons, Nanda, Waheeda, Helen, and Sadhana.

It hurt that my former lovers look so pitiably unglamorous now. What the picture shows are not just ineluctable signs of aging, but something much more complex. In it, Helen looks spritely, although a touch overweight. Waheeda is barely passable, but not a shadow of her past. The other two beauties of yore have turned into worse than overworked working-class women, ravaged by time, devoid of beauty or spirit. Life would have taken a heavy toll on them. I couldn’t help reflecting that many of my female acquaintances of their age, who are ordinary middleclass class women, are a lot more beautiful today.

The present appearance of the past stars possibly reflects the stormy lives some of them have lived. Underneath a world of glamour and wealth, there would be stories of broken relationships, exploitation by male colleagues, loneliness, incompleteness, and alcoholism. Far from the madding, cheering crowds, they would have had to deal with the haunting silence of personal tragedies.

Of the four women, Helen, who is Salman Khan’s step mother, seems a happy woman. What about the rest?

There were many suitors for Nanda, but she turned them down. In 1992, a middle-aged Nanda got engaged to film director Manmohan Desai, who committed suicide in 1994 by jumping off his own building. Nanda has remained unmarried. Today, she lives in Mumbai and is accessible only to family and close friends.

Sadhana married film director R.K. Nayyar in 1965. The couple had no children. Since her husband’s death in 1995, she has been living alone in Mumbai as a tenant in an apartment building. Recently, she has complained that a builder is threatening her to vacate her ground-floor flat.

Guru Dutt, who made brilliant films within the parameters of popular Indian cinema in the 1950s, was born Vasant Kumar Shivashankar Padukone. His tumultuous relationships with a Bengali singer, the numero uno of the time, Geeta Roy, and the Urdu speaking Waheeda Rehman from Hyderabad, destroyed the former.

Since her marriage with Guru Dutt in 1953, Geeta Roy has been known as Geeta Dutt. Although the hugely talented husband-wife team produced some of the finest Hindi songs, their paradise was to be lost soon. In 1956 a little-known Telugu actress Waheeda made her Hindi debut in Guru Dutt's C.I.D. Dutt, who was extremely disciplined in his professional life, was thoroughly undisciplined in his personal life. He smoked and drank heavily and kept odd hours. Dutt’s affair with Waheeda drove Gita Dutt to alcohol. Guru Dutt didn’t discover bliss in infidelity either. He committed suicide in 1964, reportedly in his third attempt, after Waheeda had drifted out of his life.

It’s poignant that Geeta lent her voice to Waheeda who sang some of the achingly romantic songs to Guru Dutt on screen. (The song used as the epigraph of this article is not one of them.)

Geeta Dutt was shattered after the death of her estranged husband. By then, she had destroyed her career and had been virtually out of work. Her attempt to resurrect her singing was only partially successful. She, like Meena Kumari, drank herself to death. She too died of cirrhosis of liver in 1972, four months later.

Life could not have been easy for Waheeda Rehman either. Her second film with Guru Dutt, Kaagaz ke phool was about a successful film director's decline after he fell in love with his lead actress. Over time Waheeda drifted apart from Dutt, although they continued to work together into the 1960s. She played the second female lead in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam "under some strain". They broke up after the film failed to get critical acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in 1963. Guru Dutt was to die soon.

A decade later, Waheeda married a relatively unknown actor, Kamaljit and the couple had two sons. Kamaljit too died in 2000.

Whatever I have written above has been sourced from the Internet. Part of it may be inaccurate, but there is no denying the fact that Waheeda, Nanda, and Sadhana lost their lovers/husbands early. And their faces are the best testimony of the struggles they have gone through. It is sad that the women who kindled warmth and desire in a million hearts had to live with heartbreaks and lack of warmth.

They remind me of a line of the Bengali poet Sukanta Bhattacharya: You are like those who turn on the street lights every evening, but have to live through long dark nights in their own homes.

Friday, 09 September 2011

Change in the air?

2011-09-03T11:15:00.002+05:30

In the long-distance state transport bus my seat was behind the conductor’s. As it hit the highway, I tapped the conductor on the shoulder and asked him to stop in front of the college where I work three days a week. I always do that and fall asleep for the remaining two hours of the journey.

‘Do you teach there?’ Asked the conductor.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Sir, please take this seat.’ So saying, he moved away from the window seat next to the door and offered the place of honour to me. It was embarrassing, but I couldn’t say no.

My father often quoted a Sanskrit adage: Swadeshe pujyate raja, vidwan sarvatra pujyate. The king is worshipped in his own kingdom, but the scholar is revered everywhere. It was dad’s way of inspiring me to take studies seriously. Values have changed since I was a child. One’s worth no longer depends on how much knowledge one has, but on how much one has in bank. But the delusion that teachers are scholars has survived. The bus conductor obviously believes both.

‘Sir, what time do you return?’

‘Shortly after five thirty in the evening.’

‘While returning, I should reach the college around that time. Please note my phone number. When you are free, give me a call and check where I am. You know, buses don’t sometimes stop at that place.’

I was amazed. In West Bengal, you are delighted if government employees do what they are paid to do. Extension of such courtesies is unheard of. As I called his number to save it, I came to know his name is Tridib Datta. An enlightening conversation followed.

I asked, ‘How are the long-distance routes doing? I heard they are profitable?’

‘That depends on how we run them. We have screwed up the corporation. People used to run buses when they felt like. But things are changing.’

Well, the flavour of the season in West Bengal is parivantan, change. We have just shown the door to a supremely inefficient, corrupt and self-serving regime and brought in a brand-new yet-to-be-tested government. I got interested.

‘What exactly is changing?’

‘You know, drivers and conductors would take buses on long routes. Instead of coming back the next day, they would take a day off and return the next day. No one would question. Such things have stopped.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. We get fat pay packets these days. We have no excuse not to do our work.’

‘It is a pleasure meeting you, Tridib Babu, but do many of your colleagues share your views? Is it becoming the norm?’

‘I have just heard this from a colleague in CTC (Calcutta Tramways Company). A conductor had been promoted to the officer’s cadre. Over time, he became a key man. No purchase order would go out without his approval. Last week, he was handed back his conductor’s bag. His promotion had been illegal. He is trying to protest, but he can’t escape.’

Later, in the evening, my phone rang while I was packing up. It was Tridib Babu. He called up to check if I had finished.

Those who write on current affairs like I do, have written thousands of articles on how incorrigibly evil government servants are. Through this true story, I salute a wonderful government employee and a fine gentleman. He gives us hope that things might actually change!

Saturday, 03 September 2011

For your good health

2011-08-13T18:35:00.001+05:30

How I wish this convenient tool for good health was still available! (Photo courtesy a friend)

Sunrise over the Tiger Hill

2011-08-04T22:02:00.009+05:30

Rhododendrons grow on mountains. Like many Bengalis from the plains who had never seen them, I had an emotional bond with the flower because of these lines of Rabindranath Tagore:

We have not a nook of golden bloom
Or an alley strewn in the jungle gloom.
Swiftly in the evening draught
A nameless flower spreads its waft
On arrogant branches of a plant
Rhododendrons with regards scant
Look right through
The sunlit clouds in the morning blue.

(It must be recorded here that the original in Bangla is infinitely more beautiful.)

When I visited Darjeeling for the first time, we went on an excursion from our university, more precisely, the Physics department.

It was November. The air was nippy and rhododendrons were in full bloom. The first thought that came to my mind after reaching Darjeeling was that for once, one couldn’t accuse Tagore of poetic excesses. Rhododendrons are big, pinkish read, and unlike most flowers, don’t look delicate. There is something bold and beautiful about them. They seemed to be wild flowers that deigned to be around in a human habitation, as incongruous as an eagle in an aviary!

We stayed at Shailabas (The Mountain Abode) which was at a higher level of the hill town. After a day of fun and frolic, we would wearily trudge the last stretch of the ascent, eager to get under the four blankets allotted to each one of us. There was no heating – nights were cold, to put it mildly.

On the morning we were to visit the Tiger Hill to see the sun rise, we had to start early, maybe, around four. The place was 11 kilometres away near Ghoom. At 8,500 feet (2,600 metres) it was the highest point in the area; we had to go uphill all the way along a road on which only jeeps plied.

We had organised seven jeeps for the entire party. Six of them arrived in time. When we enquired about the seventh, none of the drivers gave an answer. No assurances, no excuses. It was too early to get another vehicle.

A few of us, self-appointed "leaders", had to pay the price of leadership. While the rest of the team left, we had to stay back. Cursing the unknown driver and shivering in the freezing cold, we looked out from under the hotel portico, hoping to catch a glimpse of headlights on the winding road below. There were none.

Minutes trickled into an hour. The only bright spot in the dismal story was that Amitabhada, a few years my senior, had very thoughtfully saved a bottle of brandy for such contingencies. We took swigs in turn, and soon, stopped feeling the chill.

When the jeep finally arrived, it was too late for the sunrise. A stout Ghurkha staggered out from behind the wheels. Thoroughly drunk and reeking of country liquor, he could barely stand.

When the jeep hit the road after a heated exchange between the driver and his clients, we realised our folly. Our man was not only drunk, but also mad. The sharply winding, steeply ascending road had a precipitous chasm on the right. But the driver seemed to think it was a highway during a bandh. He didn't look ahead; instead, he put his head out of the window on the right. Watching the edge of the road with bleary eyes, he drove at full throttle.

Icy wind rushed in through the open window and hit us like shrapnel. We thought we would not only see no sunrise at the Tiger Hill, but nowhere else either. However, there is something called destiny in everyone’s life. You were destined, Dear Reader, to read this story.

When we arrived at the Tiger Hill observation deck after covering the distance in a quarter of the usual time, it was still dark. The deck was a big semi-circular green patch with a railing, flat as a table top.

As we trained our eyes towards the east, darkness was reluctantly making way for light. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. On turning back, what I saw was worth risking one’s life for. The western sky had horizontal bands of myriad colours: grey, purple, orange, golden, inky blue … a combination of colours that you see nowhere else. The mighty Himalaya was waking up for yet another day, like he had done for millions of years. The Kanchenjunga caught fire with the first rays of the sun. There was no mist. We could see the Everest far behind. It looked much shorter because of the shape of the earth. In a few moments, countless peaks of the Himalayas started glittering in all their glory. The mighty mountain stood before us in silent grandeur.

At moments like that we know how insignificant we are, how meaningless our concerns are. Without knowing, we bow to the great Force of which we are but infinitesimal fragments.

There are a few things that you must experience if your life is to be complete. Sunrise over the Tiger Hill in a clear morning is one of them.

Kolkata / Thursday, 04 August 2011

Paul Allen, the Idea Man

2011-07-12T18:38:00.009+05:30

Alongside a few colleagues, I started fiddling with personal computers (PCs) in 1987. The first IBM PC rolled out of a plant in a small town, Boca Raton in Palm beach, Florida in 1981 and soon became the industry standard. Later, only “IBM compatible PCs” would see the light of the day. These machines would reach our corporate office in a small town in India within a few years of their launch.

After having used the typewriter for many years, I found the new machine fascinating. Typing, correcting, editing, everything you could do by looking at a screen; you could chisel your language to perfection. You could store tonnes of text and take any number of clear prints. That was not all: A few hours of tinkering with a utility called dBase III, and you got a system that would do in one hour what an army of clerks would do in one week.

We, who used the machines, were the beneficiaries. The benefactors were many, who developed PC hardware and software on the other side of the globe, in the US of A. Paul Allen, 21 and Bill Gates, 19, were entrepreneurs who, with tremendous prescience, dreamed of putting “a computer in every home” at a time when computers were huge, unwieldy, monstrously expensive machines that were accessible only to governments and top research institutes. It was an arena reserved for scientists, where a few passionate hobbyists, aka nerds, sneaked in from time to time. Let alone common people, even commercial houses hardly used them in the 1970s.

IBM PCs and their clones changed it all. Originally known as microcomputers, they were first built around the microprocessor or microchip called Intel 8086. Subsequent models were based on Intel 8088 and Intel 80826. With every new avatar, we experienced exponential increase in data storage capacity and speed of computation. As users, we were a tiny part of a revolution that would later change the way people keep in touch, buy movie tickets, gather news, fall in love, in short, the way people live.

We saw these changes as audience in a grand theatre. Paul Allen’s autobiography, Idea Man, gives us a glimpse into what happened backstage, and in the greenrooms. The story is extraordinary and the book, particularly the first half (174 pages), which covers the two young men’s tryst with destiny and the setting up of Microsoft, is as riveting as the finest thrillers by Agatha Christie.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates were together at an exclusive private school (equivalent to public school in India) in Seattle. For them, it was a stroke of fortune that the school decided to install a terminal link to a General Electric mainframe computer at a distant location. The two friends used the terminal to teach themselves programming and begged borrowed and stole to get as much computer time as possible, wherever and whenever available. Before he was twenty, Allen had

“working familiarity” with ten computers, ten high-level languages, nine machine-level languages, and three operating systems.

A brilliant student and a rather conceited young man, Gates went to Harvard to study maths and got a rude shock to discover that he was not the smartest, but just one of the top students. One of his maths professors “got his PhD at sixteen.” He shifted to applied maths. Allen got a “dead-end job” nearby, but their obsession with programming continued.

In 1975, an unknown New Mexico entrepreneur Ed Roberts launched the MITS Altair, the world's first microcomputer. It was based on the microchip Intel 8080. But the world's first microcomputer was less than a fancy toy as strangely, Ed didn’t have a clue about the software that could run the machine. Allen and Gates, assisted by a freshman Monte Davidoff, worked like mad to write the software, technically known as “the interpreter” that would enable the machine to run programs written in the BASIC programming language.

The genius of Allen and Gates made it possible although they were at the other end of the continent and had no access to the Altair computer or even the 8080 chip. Their experience of working on a failed previous project helped.

The day Allen flew down to Albuquerque, New Mexico to demonstrate their software (Altair BASIC), he knew it might not work on the Altair machine. Also, he had forty dollars on him and no credit card. Ed Roberts had booked him in a hotel that cost fifty dollars a night. But in the knowledge industry about to change the world, what you had in your head was more important than what you had in your bank. The software worked, Allen bagged the contract and Microsoft (MICROcomputer + SOFTware) was born.

In 1980, when IBM was looking for an operating system (the basic software on which computer programs operate) to run its new personal computer, they approached Microsoft. Microsoft hadn’t developed any operating system earlier, but they didn’t let go the opportunity. A small Seattle based company had developed a rudimentary operating system, QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Allen bought it at a throwaway price and developed it into MS-DOS. It was not easy. The Microsoft team sweated blood and delivered. The rest is history: the IBM PC became the benchmark in an ever-expanding industry and DOS became its operating system. As is commonly said, with MS-DOS, Microsoft acquired a licence to print money.

Underneath the teamwork, there was tension. Bill Gates, a ruthlessly focused man who would reach his goals at any cost, was not an easy person to get along with. He could be rude and cantankerous. In their team, Allen was mainly the thinker and Gates, the doer. Allen did the research and scanned the horizon for new opportunities. Gates ran the business. Their partnership, which began as with a 50:50 sharing of profits, became 64:36 in favour of Gates in course of time. The greed or jealousy between the two men could have been between any two bania partners. Yet, the story of the friendship and competition between these two brilliant men is no less absorbing than the story of Microsoft itself.

After spending eight feverish years in developing Microsoft into a behemoth, Allen was down with Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 29. Although he recovered, he never went back to an active role in the company.

The remaining half of the book deals with the other half of his life till 2010. A 30% ownership of Microsoft meant he is an enormously rich man. He hasn’t used his wealth like any other eccentric billionaire. Rather, he has used his wealth like an eccentric billionaire who has a genuine, umbilical connection with science in particular and knowledge in general, and who has varied interests ranging from basketball to rock music to wild life.

Although being from the third world, one finds the idea of owning a seven-storey, longer-than-a-football-ground yacht ridiculous and put-offing (Paul Allen has got one), one cannot but bow to a man who spends millions to map the brain and the spinal cord and puts the findings in the public domain, and sets up libraries and museums, and funds SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Paul Allen is a brilliant entrepreneur who played a key role in a technology revolution which will surely rank as a watershed in the history of our civilization. He is also tremendously inquisitive about the frontiers of science, and wants to be a part of any project that might achieve a breakthrough into the future. And he says, “From my youth, I’d never stopped thinking in the future tense.”

Paul Allen - Idea Man, published by Penguin Books Limited, London, 2011

Joe

2011-07-04T00:46:00.024+05:30

Joe (Joy Joseph Manimury) died on 19th June. He needn’t have. He was only 59. But accidents don’t care how old their victims are.

Since I write a web log more or less regularly, I cannot but share Joe with my readers. At the same time, it is hard to write about someone whose absence bleeds your heart. I haven’t written a sentence since I heard of Joe’s death. I must, now. The catharsis must be, if I have to move forward.

Joe was of medium height. But when I met him first in 1975, he looked much taller because of his slender frame. With a shock of black hair, a half smile playing through carelessly grown whiskers, and bright eyes piercing through metal rimmed glasses, he would stand out in a crowd. He had worked in the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi before we joined the same bank and became friends. He told me that before the ministry, while he was trying to find his feet in Delhi, there was a time when, as he woke up in the morning, he was not sure where he would find a bed to sleep in after sixteen hours. He would hit the road with a bag. Then he added, ‘I always carried a toothbrush in my pocket.’

He described the situation casually, as if it is common for every young fellow out in the world not to have a roof over his head.

Amongst us, a group of thirteen newly recruited probationers, two things were common between Joe and me. While the rest of the gang had outstanding or near-outstanding academic records, we two were the only “second classes” and neither had done Masters. I have mentioned this elsewhere, but what I failed to record is that the similarity ended there. Joe had a sparkling intellect and a breadth of reading that often left me awestruck. I secretly dreamed of matching him in acquired knowledge someday, but I knew I had no chance of matching his razor-sharp mind. An hour’s conversation with him would light up my horizon, like the first rays of the sun in Darjeeling set up a stunning Kanchenjunga.

The second similarity between us was a shared love for literature. All our friends had varied interests and were well-read. But none, I think, had such a deep and enlightened interest in serious literature as Joe had. I recall having spent many evenings with him talking about books and authors we had read. Our interests were eclectic, but there was not much common ground, except for Hemingway, Steinbeck and Graham Greene. That was in the late 1970s, before Marquez swept us off our feet.

He wrote brilliant English and his letters were always a treat. Having lived a peripatetic life, I haven’t been able to hold on to many things that were of real value. And Joe’s letters would be among them. Here is one of Joe’s rare forays into creative writing, which I quote from memory:

There was a young man called Roger Buck
Who once courted Lady Luck.
His horse came last,
And he let blast
Something that rhymed with duck.

It was he who introduced me to the game of Scrabble. A common friend and fellow Scrabble aficionado, KTR has written how Joe used to knock him out with punches like sitcom (long before the TV hit us Indians) and syzygy, whatever that might mean. I too had a similar experience, having learned awning and jamb in some of the first few games that we played. I am sure I never beat him in Scrabble. The question wouldn’t arise.

Once I asked him how he had learned English so well. Did his father, who was a professor of English, help?

‘No, I don’t discuss English with old man.’

‘Do you consult a dictionary often?’

‘No, never.’

I was flabbergasted then, but now, after teaching English for ten years, I know, you can have that kind of vocabulary without opening a dictionary only if you read tonnes of books and have a top class analytical mind to back up your reading.

Joe had a wacky sense of humour and was capable of springing a surprise or two. The second aspect first.

We worked for the same bank for twenty years, but never under the same roof. We were not even in the same city most of the time. Once when my wife and I were moving from Trivandrum to Calcutta, Joe arrived unannounced from Ernakulam ostensibly to help us pack, and lit up the dim evening. Packing we did, but it was before our children were born and our entire household fitted into two boxes and Joe knew it. He called Arundhati didi and she loved him like a brother. Those two days in Trivandrum were among the happiest days of our life. After reaching Calcutta, we found Joe had also slipped in a set of beautiful German silver salt and pepper cellars in one of our boxes.

On another occasion, he came to Hyderabad from Kerala for a weekend.

Joe lived by his own rules and didn’t care for many things. He spent like mad until he ran out of cash. He was famously absentminded too. Once, alone on an official tour in Bombay, he decided to give himself a treat at an up-market restaurant. After the dinner, he discovered his wallet was empty. And it happened before the invention of credit cards. Joe wrote to me, ‘For the first time in my adult life, I prayed to God. And God appeared, in the shape of Madhusudan Rao.’

Rao was an officer in another bank and we happened to be together during a training programme ten years before.

V. T. Thomas a.k.a. Toms, who created the impish cartoon characters Boban and Molly, has been a household names in Kerala since 1961. He was an uncle of Joe (on his mother’s side, if I am not mistaken). Joe told us this story about Toms. Once, as a child, Toms was taking a geography test where one of the questions was a fill-in-the-blank:

___________ is the longest river in Kerala.

Toms tackled the question this way:

Which is the longest river in Kerala?

Joe’s sense of humour, which was obviously genetic, was legendary among friends and colleagues. Once, he had gone for an interview for a position on the faculty of the Bank’s training centre. The selection would not help him financially: it was just another position at the same level of hierarchy. On the contrary, it was not considered a great career move by many.

I met Joe just after the interview and found him a little fidgety. When I asked him why he bothered about something so inconsequential, he replied,‘Santanu, even if you went for an interview for a barber’s post in the bank, you’d feel bad if you didn’t get it.’

One of our perks was that we could travel home once in two years from our place of posting on company expense. And we could travel by air, a rare privilege those days. Once, when he was posted at Ahmedabad, Joe came down to Kerala as he had some urgent work at his home in Changanacherry. He met us in Trivandrum and said smugly, ‘Since I didn’t have money to buy train tickets, I flew down’, meaning he had utilised the home-travel facility.

I have written about Joe’s intellectual prowess and his sense of humour and his flair for doing the unexpected. He was also a brilliant officer and a top-notch achiever at work. On the lone occasion when I happened to work on a project with him, I was impressed by the quality of his work and his ability to think out of the box. And he was fastidious about everything he did. If he had been a barber, he would have tried to be the best barber in town. Once he said in some context, ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well.’

Joe should have lived much longer. I am sure after he had retired and returned to India next September, we would have found some occasions to play a few games of Scrabble and drink a few bottles of beer.

PS 1: I met Joe last fifteen years ago. And we spoke over phone but rarely. If his death affects me so immensely, I wonder how it would be like for his wife, Catherine and his two daughters, Aarti and Nikhila. I can only believe they have the strength to bear the loss.

PS 2: If you wish to read about some other facets of this wonderful person, please click here.

[The photograph at the top is from Joe's Facebook page. The picture above was sent by Joe in April 2010 from Comoros Island with a terse note: “Look at the sky!”]

Is 13 a lucky number?

2011-06-22T09:16:00.003+05:30

Re-posted in memory of Joe (Manimury), who passed away on 19th June

Joe (extreme right) at an office meeting

On my first day in the bank, I met Raji and Venks, who remain my friends after 34 years during which the earth has become warmer, the world less quiet, and people more bitter.

Over the next few weeks, I met the rest of my batch. We were a some-what cosmopolitan group of thirteen. Seven of us were Malayalis, four spoke Tamil at home, one Kannada, and one, Bangla. There were three lovely girls, Raji, Mythily, and Sindhu, though not necessarily in that order. Only two of us, Gopes and Raji, were from Thiruvananthapuram. The rest were fresh imports.

All of them were well-informed, if not well-read. They could discuss anything under the sun and tried their best not to talk shop outside office. Mythily, brought up in New Delhi and LSR College, spoke at a fast clip. I followed her with difficulty, like I did Vivian Leigh or Joan Baez. But our colleagues at Puthenchanthai branch hardly understood her English. She was a small, slender, serious girl with a sunny smile and ate one apple for lunch.

Nija was the tallest among us, an adorable, happy-go-lucky fellow who loved food and films. He often sang – out of key – “Hawa mein udta jaye, mera lal dopatta malmalka, hoji, malmalka.” He and Mythily – who were seemingly opposite in every respect – fell in love during the first few months in the bank and married a few years later. They were the first to desert us for greener pastures, although our pasture was quite green at the time.

For some reason, there were a disproportionately large number of physics graduates among us. Gopes was an engineer from the IIT and Sindhu had done her MA in English. Gopes and Damu were products of two different Sainik Schools; their English didn’t have the usual Malayali twang. In fact, the only thing visibly Malayali about Gopes was his moustache; Damu didn’t even have that. There were two budding economists, Sriram and Mythily. The second named has almost fully budded now; she is a top-notch editor of a leading economic daily. Sriram was a warm young man with strong opinions and a hearty laugh that -- like a sparkler -- lit up the people around him. Most of us had done masters or equivalent and had been either toppers or very near the top of our respective classes.

The only black sheep in the group were Joe and me. We were not only mere graduates, neither of us had a “first class” under our belt. During our head office training, a venerable senior officer, KC Oomen took an avuncular interest in us and enquired each of us about their backgrounds. (Being a meticulous person, he would also jot down the details in a notebook.) I still remember the look of sadness on his face when I said I had a second class. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for my academic record and thought I ought to have spent less time chasing girls at college.

Joe has a wacky sense of humour. After confirmation, he and Damu were posted at our main office in Bombay. Joe got a letterhead printed for them both. It read:

Menon and Manimury
Assistant Accountants

Many years later, when we were living far apart in course of our peripatetic careers, once all of us had to gather at Thiruvananthapuram for something, possibly an interview for promotion. I reached a day earlier and took a room at Baba Tourist Lodge or maybe, Bhaskara Bhavan. Early next morning, when it was still pitch dark, there was loud thumping on my door accompanied by the announcement that tea was brought. Irritated and still asleep, I said, ‘Chaya venda!’

There was silence for a few minutes. Then further thumping and: ‘Caapi saaré!’

Stretching my Malayalam to its limit, I yelled, ‘Chaya, caapi, unnum venda!’

Silence for a few more minutes, followed by more banging of the door: ‘Saaré, naarenga velyam (lemon squash)!’

As I opened the door, ready to knock off the impudent hotel boy, I found Joe with a broad, mischievous smile on his bearded face.

A few weeks after we met, we were invited for tea to Raji’s home at East Fort. Her siblings were youngsters with sparkling eyes, for whom academic excellence came naturally. Their sparsely furnished house with its sparkling red cemented floor and white walls with few windows was in sharp contrast with the elaborately furnished Christian houses of Kerala. As I walked into their home, I felt I was entering an RK Narayan book, an impression confirmed by the later day TV serial Malgudi Days.

A few months later, I felt the same way when I visited Sriram’s house in Chennai, although from outside, his house looked quite different from hers. Sriram and Raji are in different corners of the world now, and each of them has done exceedingly well in their diverse fields.

Besides learning about different lifestyles, there was so much else to learn from friends. Gopes was, and still is, an epitome of balance and maturity. Raji would talk straight; she had a healthy irreverence for authority. Thomas is personification of sincerity, loved by all who come in contact with him. About twenty years later, I took over from him as the head of our main branch office at Kolkata. He was held in such high esteem by the staff there ... it was to be seen to be believed.

Just as sincere is Venks, who makes absolutely no attempt to mask his views to please people. Roy, Mr Dependable, is warmth. From Sriram, I could have learnt how to work hard, but I didn’t. But from Damu, I did try to learn something: not to complain about personal difficulties. He never does. If – God forbid – one found him floating on a plank on the sea after a shipwreck, he would still smile and say, ‘Oh! I am fine.’

Good friends are one’s best teachers.

[A note to those mentioned here and those who aren't: If you happen to read this, could you please pass it on and jot down your reflections to compare your notes with mine?]

Bangalore, 23 September 2009

Education for the highest bidder

2011-06-15T00:42:00.003+05:30

A report in the Statesman, Kolkata on 12 June 2011 carries these nuggets.

Kerala health minister Adoor Prakash purchased a post-graduate seat at Pariyaarm Cooperative Medical College in Kannur for his daughter for Rs 80,00,000 because it is “the responsibility of any father to ensure a better future for his children.” The minster runs a chain of liquor bars which I guess somehow qualifies him to be the health minister of a state that has overtaken Punjab as the biggest consumer of alcohol.

Unfortunately, the doting father had to give up the seat because of criticism even from his party, Congress, which as we all know, believes in austerity and value-based politics!

The comedy of ironies doesn’t end there. The seat was sold to him by a college controlled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI M) and headed by party leader AV Jayarajan.

Prakash's colleague, education minister Abdu Rubb is under pressure from his party, Muslim League, to return the MBBS seat which he got for his son at the Jubilee Mission Medical College, Trissur. The Christian management of the college charges Rs 50 lakh (5 m) to Rs 1 crore (10 m) for an MBBS seat, but cynics allege that the seat has been gifted to the minister for supporting its stand that it can sell even government seats. (I presume this refers to the seats allotted to students who find themselves in the merit list prepared by the government.) But to his credit, the education minister hasn’t yet succumbed to the pressure.

The DYFI, the youth wing of the CPI M, marched to the medical college demanding that the minister’s son not be admitted. The commendable protest by the DYFI against the sale of medical seats lost a bit of sheen when it was revealed that its state treasurer, VV Ramesh, too had bought a seat from the Pariyaram Medical College for his daughter under the NRI category, which costs Rs 50 lakh.

Ramesh, poor fellow, had to forego the seat at the instance of CPI M leadership. He said he had been driven by a father’s instinct when he had sought the seat rather than the discipline of a comrade. “The moment I realised my flaw, I corrected it by giving up the seat. For a communist, the party is above everything,” said he. It is sad that the people of Bengal and Kerala, who have seen the comrades closely, do not notice these simple virtues among them. BTW, the said Ramesh is also the director of the college.

In Kerala congressmen, communists, the Muslim political elite, padres, you name them, have their hands in the education pie. It is worth noting that these political parties / pressure groups have ruled the state alternately since the 1950s.

The situation is no different elsewhere. In Karnataka, possibly all the private engineering colleges are owned by congressmen and politicos other than from the BJP, who are Johnnies come lately in the state. The BJP chief minister therefore has developed a soft corner for the aspiring engineers of the state. When the private engineering colleges wanted to hike their fees recently, he instructed them to charge Rs 30,000 for those who qualify through the common entrance test (CET). The colleges demanded they be allowed to charge between Rs 50 and 80 thousand. Ultimately, the chief minister arm-twisted the private colleges to accept the following fee structure:

45% of engineering seats [will go] to students who have cleared the CET for Rs 35,000 and the remaining 55% seats under Comed-K and management quota for Rs 1.25 lakh. In addition, a supernumerary quota of 5% mandated by the All India Council of Technical Education will provide free seats [to] economically backward students. (Deccan Herald, Bangalore, 3 June 2011)

In West Bengal, most of the private engineering colleges were set up by the CPI M leaders and their cronies during the second half of their 34-year regime. (Engineering colleges and cold storages were the only businesses that flourished in rural Bengal, both cornered by comrades.) In 2010, the reds read the writing on the wall. They knew they would be thrown out in the assembly elections in 2011. So they did something neat. They increased the annual tuition fees of private engineering colleges from Rs 56,000 to Rs 70,000. No protests, no wrangling, and no arbitrator to decide what the fees should reasonably be! Today, a student studying at a private engineering college in Bengal may reasonably ask why they should pay twice as much as their counterparts in Karnataka.

Lots of good things have happened in our country since independence. And lots of bad things. The worst perhaps is commodification of education.

When we were young, a bright young boy or girl considered higher education their right, as college education, including at the IITs, cost next to nothing. One only had to be smart enough. The situation has changed. Higher education is now something that the rich can buy for their children so that they qualify for a job.

If you can afford it, you can buy a comfortable future for your offspring, just as you can buy a house or a car. Is anything wrong with that?

Well, till the other day, young Indians, who had neither houses nor cars, had the option to work hard and arm themselves with technical education to make a decent living. That option has been taken away, for all practical purposes, the official sop of 5% supernumerary quota notwithstanding.

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen has said a time might come when one part of India will resemble California and the other part will be like sub-Saharan Africa. If that ever happens, privatisation of education, rather, making business out of education will contribute much to the process.

The King’s Gift

2011-05-30T09:15:00.001+05:30

Santanu Dasgupta

By early afternoon, the air had turned hot even in November. I wearily bid farewell to my last guest of the day – the day of our house-warming in Trivandrum. It was a big day for a small mortal like me to finally be able to move into our own house. Bye-bye landlords! No more threats and tantrums please!

Children promptly started playing in the open ground in front of the house. The gates were yet to be fixed and it made their work of fetching the ball from our compound that much easier. My wife and I sat on the floor of our new house, fondly admiring the glitter all around …

‘Bring me my share of food’, a voice boomed from the court-yard. Startled, we went out to find an old woman squatting on the yard. She had tied her hair in a bundled knot. Even in tattered clothes, she had an air of authority about her. A dusty sling-bag was her only possession, a garland of dried flowers hung loosely around her neck.

Children playing outside ran in to shoo her away. (It was not their fault: that’s what we had taught them all along – don’t trust strangers, don’t allow trespassers, and so on …). I dissuaded them and asked the new guest to come under the shade of our portico. After all, with all her rags and dust she still was a guest on that auspicious day. I served her food on a platter and politely bowed to request her to have it and bless our new home.

At once, tears welled up in her eyes. She had a hasty meal with tears still streaming down. I stood in silence.

As she finished her meal, she muttered something to herself that I believe was a good-wish in Tamil. And then, she dug deep into her sling-bag to fetch out a broken comb, a handful of peanuts, some rags, and finally a very well-dried coconut. The coconut was by far the best thing that she had in her possession.

When she offered me her gift of the dried coconut, someone in me had already started to recite Tagore’s poem Kripon (The Miser). [A beggar once met a King. Strangely, the King, instead of giving the beggar anything, begged to have something from him. Surprised, the beggar offered him just a grain of rice from his rag bundle. After returning home, he found that one grain in the bundle had turned into gold].

But here was my “King” who had given me, in return for my gift of just a few morsels of food, the best of all that was there in her possession!

After uttering a few more blessings, she broke into a light laugh and trotted away gaily, the garland swinging on her neck like a flag of timeless benevolence.

An obituary to a selfless drunkard

2011-05-25T13:36:00.002+05:30

Drunkards occasionally beat up their wives, sell family silver, don’t take care of their children and so on. But despite the bad press, they are usually the most genial of men. And perhaps wise too. A news story that I read this morning reminded me of one of them.

He was the husband of a nurse who looked after my mother while she was terminally ill. The nurse’s name was Suchitra, but we never got to know her husband’s name because she always referred him as “the Drunkard”. Whenever she found a pair of receptive ears, she would pour down her angst. The Drunkard, she said, contributed nothing to the family, while she slogged seven days a week and saved for her daughter’s wedding. She had already bought some gold, a few silk saris and even some teak wood at an auction, to be converted into furniture, an essential part of dowry in a Bengali middle class wedding.

But to be fair to her husband, he was hardly a violent person – he wouldn’t even quarrel with his wife or two offspring, who were young adults. On the contrary, his wife would often give him an earful, as all wives do. Generally, he was exceedingly nice, and everyone except Suchitra seemed to like him.

The Drunkard – we were told – was a skilled hand, who worked in a plywood factory. He would go for work only if he needed money. Fortunately, he needed money often and hence, would report for duty quite frequently. He would be away for days, and at times, weeks and return home for rest and recuperation only when he was exhausted by his binges. While he was at home, Suchitra used to be tense; she never knew what he might do.

Their home was in a cluster of cottages that had a common electricity connection. Every month, the residents of the cluster would pool together and pay the electricity bill. For a few months, the Drunkard, during one of his extended sober phases, volunteered to pay the bill. One day, the residents of the cluster received a disconnection notice from CESC, the Calcutta Electricity Supply Company. By then, Suchitra’s husband had vanished. She borrowed money to pay three months’ electricity charges for all, together with the penalty.

On another occasion, a day after he returned home, Suchitra came to our house beaming with joy. She was somehow convinced there had been a profound change in her husband. Said she, ‘The astrologer has done the trick. He’s promised not to touch a bottle in the future: not even a milk bottle.’

A few days later, her husband vanished again when no one else was at home. ‘And do you know’, she told us the next day, ‘the Drunkard took away all the teakwood from under my cot on a rickshaw van. When a neighbour enquired, he said he had fixed Rani’s marriage and was taking the wood to a factory to make furniture.’

When Rani’s marriage did happen, we were invited and I got a chance to meet him. To be honest, I found in him a charming man with a fine sense of humour. He was well informed, read the newspaper meticulously and could talk on many subjects. We kind of became friends. Later, he met me a couple of times to “borrow” money to tide over some dire necessities.

I always thought men like him who keep away from the rat race and live life on their own terms deserve our admiration. These are the people who laugh at the meaningless toil that the rest of the humanity goes through, and knows that in the end, everyone ends up in the same place.

Going back to where I began, this is the news that I read this morning in the Deccan Herald.

Nagaraj, a shop owner and neighbour of Muthyalappa at Krishnanandanagar spotted a cobra in his shop on Sunday evening. He and Muthyalappa [55 years] caught it and decided to release it in a forest. They put the Cobra in a bag and rode towards a forest on Nagaraj’s bike. On the way, the snake bit Muthyalappa. Nagaraj stopped and hurriedly released the cobra.

He gave Muthyalappa Rs 500 and advised him to go to a hospital. But instead, Muthyalappa went to a liquor shop, got drunk, went home and slept. He died in his sleep.

Both these gentlemen are heroes in my eyes, particularly Muthyalappa. (Nagaraj perhaps had an obligation to justify his name.) How many men will take the trouble to carry a cobra on a motorbike to release it in a forest, instead of just killing it cruelly? Secondly, how many, like Muthyalappa, will go on a pilgrimage to the temple of Bacchus instead of visiting a hospital?

May his soul rest in peace.

Witnessing history being made

2011-05-15T17:25:00.017+05:30

[Dear Reader, I was off-blog for a long time as I was suffering from a serious bout of teaching. You can count on regular posts here from now on. That’s a promise signed with blood.]

An army of lensmen in front of the new chief minister's house

On 13 May 2011, I stayed glued to the TV since morning to follow the election results in four states including West Bengal, the fourth largest state in India in terms of population, with more people - 9 million - than in Germany. The writing had been on the wall for some time. By midday it was confirmed that "one of the most entrenched political machines in the world", the Marxist government, was on its way out. It was hardly a surprise. But political truth, like God, lives in details. What was surprising was the scale of their defeat. The mighty rulers were reduced to 62 seats in the state legislature, from 235 five years before. Almost all the ministers were defeated by known and unknown upstarts, including a motley collection of fading film-stars, retired government bigwigs, doctors, and so on. The opposition combine of Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Congress came to power with 227 of the 294 seats.

On an awfully humid day, as temperature soared to stifling 36 degrees in shade, people danced on the roads of Kolkata under a scorching sun. It was Holi, the festival of spring, in summer.

In West Bengal, people had started resenting the government of the party, for the party, and by the party. Over time, resentment turned into odium. Ultimately, the common man’s desire found expression in one feisty single woman in her mid-fifties: Mamata Banerjee.

Mamata has neither a political lineage nor much to show for herself except personal integrity, courage and determination. And these qualities she has in abundance. Not long ago, her party’s strength in the parliament was down to one, she being the only MP from TMC. While pundits wrote her political obituary, she kept working towards her goal, undeterred. In 2006 she went on a twenty-six day fast to protest against forcible acquisition of land in Singur. Has anyone else attempted such a thing in India after 1947?

Most of the dancing and merrymaking happened in front of the leader’s house. This is another shift from the past. For the monolithic Marxists, individuals do not matter much; celebrations would happen only in front of their party office. We do not know what this shift foretells. Does it presage an administration with a human touch? Or does it portent tyranny of one person? We will have to wait for the answer.

As the day wore on, temperature soared and a deluge of people visited Mamata’s house, which turned into a place of pilgrimage. In the evening, I along with my friend Gautam walked down to the epicentre of the political Tsunami that swept the left away. A little before reaching our destination, we crossed the famous temple at Kalighat, which had far fewer visitor that day compared to what Mamata's home had.

Traffic was blocked at the junction near her house. The place looked more like a village fairground. In the palpably lower-middleclass neighbourhood, the narrow lane leading to the house was chock-full with people. Going by the age and gender profile, it didn’t look like a crowd of only political workers. The crowd consisted mainly of ordinary folk like you and me.

Green in Bengal stands as the counterpoint to the Reds

After a short distance, an even narrower alley branched off on the left. We were close to our destination. The ground beneath was covered with a spaghetti like confusion of cables drawn from television OB vans kept in a parallel road some distance away. We stopped in front of an unpretentious house with a tiled roof in front of which dozens of cameramen had gathered under a marquee. The CM elect was away at the Governor's House, a public address system announced. There were thousands of men and women, hope and relief writ large on their faces. I could understand their feeling, because I shared it. It is possibly something that those who haven't lived under a totalitarian regime wouldn't quite fathom.

This tiled building is the address of the new chief minister of West Bengal

A small business close to Mamata's home

On our way back, we came across a shop in a shanty close to Mamata's house. As things stand, it is almost an authentic representation of the state of industry and commerce in Bengal today. Will things change?

A sweat-soaked BBC cameraman

Quite a few foreign journalists were in Kolkata on 13 May to report the end of the elected communist government that lived 34 long years defying all logic. We met one of them on our way home. Will they visit the city again to report something substantially good? Let's hope they will.

Not a pie in the sky

2011-05-10T10:04:00.004+05:30

[Hi folks! I was off-blog for a long time as I was suffering from a serious bout of teaching. I am yet to be fully fit, but recovering. You can count on regular posts here from now on. That’s a promise signed in blood.]

Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “The earth can provide for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.”

The greatest sage of the modern times has been forgotten in his own country, not to mention the rest of the world. We haven’t accepted the minimalist lifestyle preached by Gandhi. Rather, we unquestioningly follow a lifestyle that helps industries grow, but tends to exhaust the limited resources of the earth. Let me give a few examples.

Our government pays lip service to checking global warming but quietly encourages the car industry. There is not even a thought to check the proliferation of fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles (SUVs) run on diesel subsidized by picking the poor man’s pocket. The environment minister of the country, Jairam Ramesh said, “Use of SUVs and BMWs in India is criminal” (Economic Times, 13 November 2010). But his government carries on with the criminal activity, unconcerned.

On the other hand, we no longer have pavements in our cities to walk on. Pavements are hacked down to widen roads for the ever-increasing and ever-bigger cars.

Thanks to the eight-to-ten percent annual growth in GDP over two decades, the government coffers are overflowing. The government employee’s salary was doubled in 2006. Many government pensioners today earn a lot more than what they used to while working. The white collar employees in the organized sector too make a lot more today.

But we continue to spend only one percent of our GDP on education – one of the lowest in the world. We have some of the finest institutes of higher learning, and also the largest illiterate population in the world. The primary school system is in a shambles in India. We have many world-class corporate hospitals, but the poor in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere die for want of basic antibiotics.

There is a method in the madness. The economic model adopted by our government requires a huge middleclass with disposable income to support industry and commerce. People have to spend more and more to support industry and business to “grow”. In the process, two things are happening: the poor are largely forgotten by the policy makers, and we are using up natural resources thoughtlessly.

It is not new. The so-called first world has been following this economic model for long. Many social scientists have calculated the consequences of this use-and-throw economy on the global resources. There are credible calculations that show the earth just cannot carry on with the burden for more than a few decades.

How bad is the conspicuous consumption of the West? Here is a case.

Marina Bay Sands, a resort facing the Marina Bay in Singapore, is advertised as the world's most expensive stand-alone casino hotel. Besides the usual trappings of a luxury hotel meant for the super-rich, this place has a special attraction. The complex is topped by a 340 metre-long “Sky Park” and a swimming pool, set on top of the world's largest public cantilevered platform supported by three towers. At 200 metres (656 feet), it is taller than the Eiffel Tower. The Sky Park opened in 2010 looks like this.

When I first saw the pictures, it struck me as a great piece of engineering. And I also thought: Good heavens! Does one have to climb sixty floors to go for a swim? What next? a snow-capped mountain two hundred metres below the earth’s surface?

What do you think of the sky-park: an engineering marvel or a grotesque waste of materials and energy resources?

10 May 2011

Homeless house sparrows

2011-03-29T05:22:00.007+05:30

House sparrows (Passer domesticus), once abundant in human habitat, are hardly seen these days. They usually build their nests in crevices in tile-roofed houses and in the small openings in walls that serve as ventilators. When my sister and I were kids, we would worry a lot about the safety of the tiny sparrows that used to hatch out regularly in a ventilator in the northern wall of our house. Thanks to the change in architecture and the style of construction, house sparrows have lost their “natural” habitat.

We now live in a building that doesn’t have any opening on walls above the windows, no recent building does. Every morning, a few sparrows still come to the window ledge of our kitchen, eat whatever is on offer, show their displeasure if the food isn’t up to their expectation, and thank us if it is. Over time, they have shed their fear. They keep on eating even as we watch them through the window. Amongst them is one that is particularly old. He doesn’t leave anything behind.

My wife leaves water in an earthen pot every morning on our terrace. In summer, the pot gets empty before it’s ten. Not only sparrows, but crows and shalikhs too are regular visitors to our home. Shalikhs are small brown birds that are slightly bigger than sparrows. I don’t know what they are called in English.

When a friend forwarded this appeal, I thought I would share it with you. It says you could help in conservation of sparrows by feeding them daily. You could also provide clean water for birds to drink and bathe in. You could plant some native species of plants which attract pests and birds, the former being food for the latter. If you are from Bangalore, you may SMS Mr. Kiran Boal at 98803 93743 for a free bird feeder.

The Magical Spell

2011-03-10T14:33:00.001+05:30

Santanu Dasgupta

[In popular perception, rocket science stands for the ultimate, unfathomable, and mysterious frontier of science. If we wish to convey something is not really complex, we say: It’s not rocket science! By extension therefore, rocket scientists are amongst the most brilliant, profound, and creative people. Thanks to my years in Thiruvananthapuram, I have come in close contact with some rocket scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). And I believe they belong to the intellectual cream of their generation.

Dr. Santanu Dasgupta, one of them, is highly regarded by his peers. But unlike most of them, he wears several other hats too. He is an accomplished singer, a brilliant story teller (a field in which his wife Shyama gives him a good run for his money), and regularly pens plays that are staged by the Trivandrum Bengali Association. After retirement from the ISRO, he has been teaching at an engineering college in Thiruvananthapuram.

Here is a sample of his writing. I thank Santanuda for allowing me to publish this story.]

Whenever Tagore songs are being talked of, it is a cliché to say: “Oh! There is a kind of magic in them.” Much has been written and said about the magic of Tagore’s songs and poems, but I have been fortunate to have witnessed real magic woven by a Tagore song.

It was the morning of Rabindra Jayanti a few years ago. Even in Trivandrum, we could feel music in the air. Duly dressed and armed with books like Geetobitan, Sanchoita etc., we, the Bengali families had gathered in Tagore Theatre in Vazhuthacaud for yet another celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary.

Children ran up and down the dark aisles of the auditorium chasing each other. Mothers sat in groups, most of them in animated conversation. Men moved around looking bored and showed interest only when their wife or children were on stage. All waited for the next event, politely clapping after every song or dance. … Generally speaking, Tagore was far from any serious thought of most, except one ….

As I learnt later, his name was Ashokan. Of about seventy years, he was very frail, had unkempt hair and he carried a small book of Geetanjali with him. He had translated it himself from Bengali to Malayalam, he said.

I had heard of translations of Bangla literature into Malayalam by many eminent scholars and poets of Kerala. Ashokan was certainly not one of them. Had he learnt Bengali? I wanted to find out.

‘A little, just to translate some of the poems,’ he said apologetically. Would I care to read his translations?

My knowledge (rather, ignorance) of Malayalam even after being in Kerala for over forty years is well-known. But courtesy demanded that I accept a copy of the book offered by the author himself. And I did.

‘I see that many of you can sing. Will you please sing one particular song for me?’ Ashokan was very polite in his request. The song he wanted to hear was Ami rupe tomay bholabo na (I will not entice you with my looks, but with my love). Rupe tomay is a difficult song to sing and I was not surprised when none of our singers could oblige him. I explained to him that without proper notations this song cannot be rendered and hence the reluctance of our singers to sing it in public.

His face paled and I could almost hear one of his ribs crackling in pain. He had come here hoping to hear that particular song. ‘Where can I go to listen to this?’ He despaired. Turning to me he said. ‘Will you please come to my home and sing it for me? I have the notations in Bengali.’

A stranger invites me to his house and wants me to sing one of Tagore’s most beautiful compositions for him. ‘Trust not’ said my intellect, for he is a stranger. ‘Why do you feign love and admiration for Rabindranath if you can’t fulfill this humble request?’ said my soul.

Soul prevailed over mind and soon I was ushered into a small dingy room laden with books and dust. Amidst the clutter and papers strewn all over the place stood a harmonium. It was an ancient piece in desperate need of overhaul.

Ashokan fumbled his way through the clutter. He was in a state of excited anticipation, much like a child about to be handed over an ice-cream. As I turned the pages of the book of notations to trace the right page, his eyes lit up. I bellowed the first two notes of the song which were a serene sa ni corresponding to the words ami …. His eyelids slowly came together and by the time I reached bholabo na … tears welled up behind those closed eyelids. I knew only the first few lines of the song but I sang them repeatedly for him. Tears rolled down his chapped, wrinkled cheeks in meandering lines.

For a long time after I had finished my song, Ashokan sat in a trance. We sat in silence until he woke up with a smile of bliss written on his face.

As he held my hands to bid good-bye, a realisation dawned upon me. What chord the song struck in Ashokan’s heart I may never know, but what I did witness was a magical spell that can only be cast by a Tagore song!

One city, many separate journeys

2011-02-11T11:40:00.006+05:30

While walking through crowded roads, bazaars, or fairgrounds, I have often thought any stranger around me could have been one of my best friends. Only a few amongst the multitude actually become our acquaintances, and fewer still share their lives with us. Among those who don’t, there are surely many wonderful souls we would love to meet. On the other hand, the person we cannot think of living without could have been a perfect stranger to us. Call it Fate or chance, our relationships are shaped by an invisible hand over which we have little control. How wonderful it would be if it were otherwise!

Imagine the story of a young village girl in the film Dhobi Ghat, who has just got married to someone in Mumbai. She meets the city, its crowds, incessant rains, and the sea with wide eyes brimming with happiness as she looks forward to her new life with a man who has all the trappings of “success”, like a nice flat and a video camera. Before she has time to fall in love with her man, she falls in love with the city, and her people. She feels sorry for her domestic help when the latter’s shanty gets flooded, quite unaware of the disaster that is in store for her. What begins as loneliness with her husband being away on work turns out to be an abyss after she discovers that he has just been using her. The happy smile in her eyes turns into painful sadness. She has access to the phone, but doesn’t inform her parents about her predicament. We don’t know why, but can guess.

It doesn’t matter whether the girl is Yasmin or Tabassum or Geeta, there is nothing new about her story. What is new is that – quite by chance – Yasmin shares her story with a perfect stranger, Arun, to the very end. Arun, a successful painter and a divorcee, has his own lonely furrows to trudge. He is deeply disturbed by Yasmin’s story, but is in no position to help her.

Another young girl Shai is new to Mumbai. She too discovers the city, but her journey couldn’t have been more different than Yasmin’s. If Yasmin’s helplessness takes us back to the past, Shai, an investment banker based in New York, is an alien visiting us from the future – confident, and free from the shackles that held back our women for centuries. Don’t both the past and the future live in the present?

Having come to Mumbai on a sabbatical, Shai spends her time taking pictures of the different moods and manners of the city. The photographer and the painter, both of whom have the city at the heart of their work, discover a kindred soul in each other. As the film begins, Shai has a fling with Arun, but their relationship remains undefined and inchoate till the end.

Also, Shai, brought up in an environment where a manual worker is not automatically considered socially inferior to a painter or a banker, makes friends with a dhobi, Munna. For Munna, the principal difference between his village in Darbhanga and Mumbai is that in the city, he doesn’t feel hungry all the time. He is a dhobi by day, a municipal “rat killer” by night, and an aspiring film star at heart. Munna’s second occupation is unknown to Shai till the end, and so is the fact that at his station in life, it would not be unnatural for him to be friendly with drug peddlers, just as for Shai, it wouldn’t be unnatural to have junkies as buddies.

Munna is drawn towards Shai, but has the sense to realise the hopelessness of such a relationship. The unlikely triangle of Shai, Arun, and Munna has all the usual spices of sexuality, joy, and jealousy. And as the story unfolds, the city looms large in the background. In one scene, a few days after the Ganesha festival, Arun, trying to retrace Yasmin’s journey, is on the seashore. Like her, he too is alone. As he looks out, a tiny plastic Ganesha drifts towards him. Shorn of the pageantry, the god of wealth and success seems pitiably lonesome when he returns to Arun as the symbol of the solitude that is at the heart of city life.

Thankfully, when the film ends, all the stories don't. There is a hint of Munna giving up his dreams about Shai, but we don't know where she and Arun end up. Perhaps it is not necessary. It is the journeys that are important, not the destinations ... not only in literature and films, but in life in general.

That Aamir Khan would bring out the shades of Arun’s character with all the subtlety at his command is no wonder. It is the other three main actors whose brilliance amazes us. Among the audience, those who were old enough to see films in the 1970s and 80s are likely to form an emotional bond with Prateik as Munna, because he is the son of Smita Patil, one of our most talented actors ever, who died at the age of thirty in 1986.

The film has a fifth principal character, the city of Mumbai. Grandeur and filth, selfishness and warmth, liberality and Shiv Sena, New York and Darbhanga, Mumbai has them all. It has a character like perhaps no other city in this country has. Apart from presenting a fine film, debutant director Kiran Rao would make many of us fall in love with the city all over again. Not a mean achievement, one feels.

Anirban's Rajasthan

2011-01-23T08:47:00.028+05:30

These pictures were taken by my friend Anirban Dasgupta. He wrote to me: ‘I am sure you would agree [Rajasthan] has a unique appeal. Along with its natural beauty, it has an extremely rich history. ... If you love history then surely Rajasthan is a must visit. In fact, I do wish to return to the forts once again, especially Chittorgarh. Walking through the ruins there is an overwhelming experience. I felt as if I could visualise the night when thousands of women jumped into a huge well of fire ... the whole area illuminated with the light from it ... their shrieks ... the next morning with the sun rising in the east, the main gate of the fort is opened and thousands of men in saffron robes rushing to battlefields below shouting “Har Har Mahadev”. ... what a morning it would have been!’

Amber Fort, Jaipur

Adinath Temple, Ranakpur

In Rajasthan, the barren landscape has been complemented by exquisite creations of men.

Chittorgarh

Meherangarh Fort, Jodhpur

A Courtroom, Meherangarh Fort

The Meherangarh Fort in Jodhpur was built in the fifteenth century by a Rathore King, Rao Jodha. His descendants fortified the structure over the next centuries. I found this interesting piece of information in Wikipedia:

The foundation of the fort was laid on 12 May, 1459 by Jodha on a rocky hill nine kilometres to the south of Mandore. This hill was known as Bhaurcheeria, the Hill of Birds. According to a legend, to build the fort, Jodha had to displace the hill’s only human occupant, a hermit called Cheeria Nathji, the Lord of Birds. Upset at being forced to move out, Cheeria Nathji cursed Rao Jodha: “Jodha! May your citadel ever suffer from scarcity of water!” Rao Jodha managed to appease the hermit by building a house and a temple within the fort very near the cave the hermit had used for meditation. Jodha then took an extreme step to ensure that the new site proved propitious; he buried in its foundations a man called Rajiya Bhambi, a Meghwal, alive. You’ve guessed it right! Meghwals are amongst the scheduled castes in modern India.

Rajiya was promised that in return, his family would be looked after by the Rathores. To this day Rajiya Bhambi’s descendants live in Raj Bagh, Rajiya's Garden, an estate bequeathed to them by Jodha.

A slice of history: In the fort, you can also see hand imprints of some women who committed Sati. I would request you to left-click on the image twice to see the details. You'll see that the hands belonged to women of different ages. At least one (extreme right in the second row) looks like the hand of a little girl.

What went through the minds of these women when they placed their hands to get the imprint?

In the picture below, you see the Sun Temple at Ranakpur, which was built in 14th/15th Century. This temple in Pali district (between Jodhpur and Udaipur) reminds one of Halebidu in Karnataka and Konark in Orissa. Who says India is a country that was stitched together by the British colonialists?

Please left-click on the picture to see the details

Anirban, an amateur photographer, lives in Kolkata and runs a software firm with his friends. Thank you Anirban, for allowing me to post your beautiful pictures on this blog.

And to my dear Readers, let me repeat: to see the details, please left-click on all the pictures. They look even more gorgeous when expanded.

Winners take it easy

2011-01-18T08:45:00.009+05:30

All great sportspersons perform well when the stage is big. If it be true, Rafael Nadal (born 3 June 1986) ought to be amongst the greatest tennis players of all times. He has won 82% of the 11 Grand Slam finals he’s played. An astonishing statistic!

Nadal lived in an apartment in his hometown Manacor, Mallorca with his sister and parents until his parents separated in 2009. The trophies that have been in his home include nine Grand Slam titles, three Davis Cups, and an Olympic gold medal. A little away from his home, a Main Belt asteroid discovered in 2003 was named after him: 128036 Rafaelnadal.

Rafael Nadal won the last three Grand Slams he played: the Wimbledon, the French Open, and the US open in 2010. If he wins the Australian open that began yesterday, he will become only the third man in history to win four Grand Slams in a row, after Don Budge and Rod Lever. In an article in The Independent on 16^th January, Paul Newman writes:

… but Nadal himself insists that he feels under no more pressure than normal. “This may be the only opportunity in my career to do this, but that’s not the reason I will feel any pressure here,” he said yesterday. “The pressure is just the same at every Grand Slam event. You want to play well in the important tournaments. Whether I win a fourth Grand Slam in a row is not something that’s on my mind. What’s on my mind is trying to play well ….”

So here is a young man – not even 25 – at the threshold of making history. And he seems unconcerned about its significance. While reading this amazing statement, I felt that a true champion takes it easy. If you want to win, you have to shed the fear of losing.

Newman goes on to write that Nadal considers the task of winning four Grand Slams in a row to be “almost impossible”. Asked how special it would be, he replied: “I think it’s better if we continue with another question. Seriously, I can’t answer this because I haven’t thought about it.”

What areas of his game would he hope to work on this year? “Everything,” he said. “My serve can still improve a lot. I think I am serving better, but it's never going to be enough. You can play more aggressively. You can play more inside the court. You can go more times to the net. You can return a little bit more aggressively. You can play longer. You can play closer to the lines. … In tennis you can improve all your career. …”

That Nadal, one of the greatest sportsmen of all times, thinks that nothing about his game is good enough is food for thought for ordinary mortals like us. When we set targets for ourselves to excel in any field, how much do we aspire?

Also, in every field, you have champions – from V S Naipaul to John McEnroe – who are bursting with conceit and arrogance. But people like Rafael Nadal, whose humility matches their enormous talent, have a special place in our heart.

Nadal played at Chennai Open in 2008. He was upset after experiencing abject poverty first hand. Since then, he has supported charitable causes from Balearic Islands in Spain to Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh. He has an academy there. His foundation has also worked in Anantapur Educational Centre project. Nadal and his friend and closest rival, Roger Federer have joined hands to support charities the world over. I wish our champion cricketers, who roll in money but can think of nothing better than opening expensive restaurants, thought the same way.

Nadal suffered from a viral infection during his first tournament this year at Qatar. According to Newman, he has been feeling better since arriving in Australia but could not be sure how he would feel once he started playing matches. “After what I had in Doha, I’ve felt a little bit more tired than usual when I’ve been practising and I’ve been sweating more than ever,” he said. “I’m feeling better, but I don’t think I’m perfect.”

I join his countless admirers in wishing him all the best for the tournament and beyond.

Postscript: In February 2010 Rafael Nadal was featured in the music video of Gypsy, with the Columbian Singer Shakira, a household name after her Waka Waka song in the last Football World Cup. The still from the video is courtesy Wikipedia. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCE-QdWd1qQ

Remembering Binayak

2011-01-17T11:21:00.001+05:30

I came across this letter to the editor in the Statesman two days ago (15 Jan 2011). I feel I must share this with you.

SIR,

In 1969, I went to Vellore for the treatment of our month-old son. The day after our arrival, a group of medical students in the Christian Medical College and Hospital entered the paediatric ward. Among them was a bright young man aged less than 20. He spoke to me in Bengali and said he was Binayak Sen.

At once I felt that I had met a younger brother, more so because my maiden surname is also Sen. During our week’s stay in Vellore, he helped us in every way, even took us for sightseeing.

While walking along the streets in the town, he stood in front of the post office and said, he would send a telegram to his younger brother to wish him on his birthday which fell on that very day, 7 February 1969. One afternoon, as we were packing our bags to leave our hotel for the return journey to Kolkata, a beaming Binayak had come to see us off. He carried our luggage to the taxi, accompanied us to the railway station and helped us to board the train. I still vividly remember him standing on the railway platform waving us good-bye.

I have known him only for a few days. He is now in the news and I am shocked to learn that he has been sentenced to life imprisonment for sedition. He is a kind-hearted, sympathetic, amiable, polite, soft-spoken and helpful person.

Binayak and sedition, Binayak and life-sentence. I simply cannot co-relate. I am 79 and terribly sad over the news. I hope and pray that everything will move in the right direction very soon and that wonderful person will be hale and hearty and smiling as ever before.

Yours, etc.,

Dipti Dasgupta, Sodepur, 7 January.

Dr. Binayak Sen

2010-12-29T00:10:00.013+05:30

The Christmas this year brought the shocking news that Dr. Binayak Sen has been sentenced to life imprisonment for “sedition”. The prosecution case is that he passed on three letters from a Maoist leader to someone. Sometime in 2007, he had gone to a Raipur jail as a physician to examine the Maoist leader. Naturally, he met the latter under the supervision of jailors. While returning from the jail, he was arrested at a railway station. Two other persons too were handed down life sentences along with Dr. Sen by a Raipur court on 24^th December 2010.

You would certainly have read about Dr. Binayak Sen, but let me jot down some essential facts here. A brilliant student and an alumnus of the Christian Medical College, Vellore, Binayak Sen is a paediatrician. Instead of practising in the comforts of a city and making money, he chose to provide medical assistance to the poor and marginalised adivasis of Chhattisgarh. He has been working there since the early 1980s. The impact of his work has been recognised by many and he has been awarded several international honours.

Mineral rich Chhattisgarh is one of the poorest states of India and is also a major centre of Maoist activities. In 2005, the state (BJP) government set up a vigilante army Salwa Judum to fight Maoists. According to historian Ram Chandra Guha, Salwa Judum “spread terror through the districts of Dantewada, Bijapur and Bastar. In the name of combating Naxalism, it burned homes (and occasionally, whole villages), violated tribal women, attacked (and sometimes killed) tribal men who refused to join its ranks. As a result of its depredations almost a hundred thousand adivasis with no connection to Maoism were rendered homeless.”[i] Activists like Arundhati Roy and Gautam Naulakha put the figure close to three hundred thousand.

Dr. Sen has neither been a part of a Maoist organisation, nor their sympathiser. On the contrary, he has condemned Maoist activities as “an invalid and unsustainable movement.” But as a national vice president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), he was also amongst the first to document the human rights violations committed by Salwa Judum and police.

That indeed was crime enough to send a 60-year-old internationally respected social worker and doctor to prison for the rest of his life. The verdict looks even more grotesque if you consider that in India many parliamentarians are mafia dons, and the major political debate of the day is how much a central minister cheated the exchequer in a single deal – fifty thousand crore or one hundred and seventy thousand crore!

The Raipur verdict has been condemned by a wide cross-section of informed voices, from the Amnesty International to Amartya Sen. Retired high court judge and the president of PUCL Rajinder Sachar called the judgment as “ridiculous and unacceptable”. [ii] In an uncharacteristically strong reaction, Professor Sen says, “To turn the dedicated service of someone who drops everything to serve the cause of neglected people into a story of the seditious use of something — in this case, it appears to be the passing of a letter, when sedition usually takes the form of inciting people to violence or actually committing some violence and asking others to follow, none of which had happened — the whole thing seems a ridiculous use of the laws of democratic India.”[iii]

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 was taken away from his home sometime in 2009. But it was not until nearly one month later that the Chinese authorities confirmed his arrest. He had a one-day trial in December 2009 and was sentenced to 11 years a few days later – on Christmas Day. Some suspected the Chinese authorities had chosen that day because most people in the West would be on holiday, and not notice.[iv]

Binayak Sen’s trial dragged on for three years and during the period, many, including 22 Nobel laureates, condemned the politically motivated and patently fake prosecution that was not backed by a shred of material evidence. But in the end, Binayak Sen got life imprisonment, compared to 11 years that Liu Xiaobo got. The other similarity is disturbing too. The verdict against Binayak Sen was announced on the Christmas Eve.

No, I am not insane enough – not yet, anyway – to compare our judicial system with that of China. But surely, there are many people in power in India who would love to have the kind of unfettered powers that the Chinese authorities enjoy. It is significant that for several days after the verdict, none of the mainstream political parties except the Communist Party of India (CPI) have spared one word to condemn the verdict, nay, even question the validity of the monstrous judgment. Some of them might, sooner or later, if they perceive the political cost of silence unacceptably high!

Considering the facts, it would be reasonable to demand that Dr. Sen is set free. Hopefully, that will happen once the case goes to higher courts. But what has happened to our justice delivery system? If this can be done to an eminent person despite international protests, what chance do ordinary citizens (like the two convicted alongside Dr. Sen) have against mighty governments in our law courts? Doesn’t this verdict reinforce the extremists’ claim that India is not a democracy?

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, the Supreme Court has recently stated: something is rotten in the High Court of Allahabad. The former Chief Justice of India (CJI), who is now the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission is involved in a public spat with a sitting high court judge. One of them is lying. There have been reports that the same former CJI’s daughter and son-in-law amassed Rs.7 crore while he was the CJI.[v]

Politicians have failed us and bureaucrats have largely proved themselves to be spineless yes-men. The judiciary may be the last hope for the Indian democracy. After the Raipur verdict, one wonders if it’s much of a hope.

Postscript: I think every Indian who cares for the future of this country should do something now. You can do something easily, almost without any effort. Please cut and paste the essential facts about the case either from here, or from a better source, onto an email and send it across to whoever would care to open and read a mail from you. Let this message reach every Indian who uses the Internet. Let us inform others; let us register our protest.

[The photograph of Dr. Binayak Sen is from Wikipedia; Liu Xiaobo's picture is from BBC.co.uk]

[i] Hindustan Times, 27 December 2010

[ii] http://www.indianexpress.com/news/will-challenge-sens-conviction-justice-sachar/730147/

[iii] The Telegraph, 28 Dec 2010

[iv] Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11492131

[v] Hindustan Times, 27 December 2010

Kolkata, 29 December 2010

Where have all the pavements gone?

2010-12-19T22:39:00.001+05:30

In the government school I studied at, fans were not switched on from November to February, or maybe, March. This was as per some government regulation, and those days, fans were not used in any government office in Kolkata during these months. Air-conditioners were rare, and were savoured by the hoi polloi only in cinemas.

Although I can recall some warm November days, we didn’t need fans in November. Compared to that, the November this year was unusually hot and humid. Global warming is no longer a matter of academic discussions. We are living it and making it happen. Last month, we read weather forecasts in the morning, fumed and fretted through the day, and switched on our ACs at night.

But it all changed yesterday, the first day of December. The morning was ushered in by a cool breeze blowing in from the north. There was a real nip in the air; as darkness gave away to light, a haze hung over the lake in front of our house. The park around it – a place packed with morning-walkers every day – was almost empty. Only a few brave men and women had come out, swathed in sweaters and scarves. Being highly susceptible to cold, I take pride in the fact that I am the first person in the city to put on a sweater every winter. That pride got dented.

Many things about this city you may not like, but it indeed has a glorious winter. Kolkata is perhaps one of the best places to be in during its brief winter. The sun is bright and crisp, one doesn’t smell sweat in buses and the metro; people are less aggressive on the roads. In The Summer of Forty-two, it was said, “When there is love in the air, no burden seems heavy.” When there is winter in the Kolkata air, life seems fun!

In my childhood too, winter was the happy season. It meant visits to the Botanical Garden and the Zoo, a picnic at Baruipur, circus shows at Park Circus. The icing on the cake was the annual cricket test match at Eden Gardens.

After we outgrew zoological and botanical gardens, for some of us, afternoons were reserved for long walks through quiet, spotlessly clean neighbourhoods in Alipore or Ballygunge. Some of the lanes had exotic names like Lovelock Place, a narrow alley with quaint bungalows on either side, where I smoked my first cigarette under the expert guidance of my friend D. D in fact had voluntarily taken up the task of mentoring me in those difficult days of early adolescence. It was he who handed over the first girlie magazine to me on a deserted road.

However, our walks ended at a less carnal destination. We would spend hours in the National Library reading room, which had a lovely section for young readers. The other favourite haunts were the Indian Museum and the Birla Technological Museum in Gurusaday Road that had lots of working models to fascinate us. If we felt lazy, we just stretched our legs and watched cricket matches on the CCFC ground or Deshapriya Park.

We went to all these places on Bus No. 11, as we were fond of saying. Walking ten kilometres was considered perfectly normal. And there were roads on which you could walk.

Sadly, footpaths have been stolen from the city dwellers of a “shining” India. Whether it is Hyderabad, Bangalore, or Kolkata, walkways have been hacked down mercilessly to widen roads for the ever-increasing number of vehicles. The footpaths are so narrow and badly paved that even for a short distance, one has to take a taxi or auto rickshaw. In Bengal, It’s been a double whammy. Thanks to competitive populism of political parties, hawkers have taken over our pavements completely. The situation is worse in small towns, where roads and railway platforms have been turned into bazaars.

This is kind of funny. On one hand the government lecture us to reduce carbon emission to arrest global warming, and on the other, they make it impossible for people to walk or use bicycles in cities. I don’t know of an Indian metropolis that has earmarked some space as pedestrian zones or cycling zones. The likely-to-be chief minister of Bengal promises to turn Kolkata into London. Even if one ignores the colonial hangover implicit in the promise, one must tell her that we don’t aspire so much, Madam. Give us back our pavements, and Kolkata will be happy to be Kolkata.

Ahimsa in the time of madness

2010-12-14T12:48:00.001+05:30

[I posted this story some time ago. I am posting it again for my new readers.]

In a sweltering summer afternoon, I was on my way to the Sanchi Stupa from Bhopal, alone.

The public bus I boarded stopped minutes after leaving the bus stand. The driver killed the engine and got off, along with the conductor. After a while, the conductor reappeared, issued tickets, and vanished again. The next time he showed up, I asked him what time the bus would start. He didn’t seem to understand. So I asked him, in the finest Hindi that I could muster, what the scheduled time for departure was. He gaped at me blankly. I realised there was no schedule. A bus starts when it is full. Period. Salman Rushdie once wrote: The people who use the same word for yesterday and tomorrow cannot be said to have a good grip on time. He had a point.

Emperor Ashoka, one of the greatest rulers of India, embraced Buddhism circa 258 BCE. His dharma was non-violence, tolerance of all sects and opinions, obedience to parents, respect for religious teachers, bigheartedness towards friends, humane treatment of servants (there were no slaves in his time), and generosity towards all. He built thousands of stupas, the most distinctive monuments of Buddhist India. The Great Stupa of Sanchi was one of them.

The bus driver obviously believed that the journey was more important than the destination. The bus crawled slowly through deserted plains past sleepy hamlets in simmering heat. Hot air blowing in from the arid fields singed the passengers, most of whom covered their faces with the multipurpose piece of cloth that our village folk often carry.

I got off at an open ground flanked by some tiny eateries and shops. Ignoring the importunate skinny tonga-wallas and their skinnier horses, I started walking towards the Stupa, which was atop a hillock about a kilometre away.

But I underestimated the odds. Even a short walk in that heat could kill if you are going uphill, particularly if you are foolhardy enough not to carry even a hat or a water bottle! When I reached the top, I felt I was going to have a cardiac arrest soon. Fortunately, there were rows of taps dispensing ice-cold drinking water. I drank to my heart’s content and splashed water all over myself. Then I lay down on a concrete bench in the pleasant shade of a tall tree with thick foliage. The relief was immense. I drifted into a happy slumber. …

In the battlefield of Kalinga, Emperor Ashoka, riding an elephant, is surrounded by enemy horsemen. They are aiming their spears at the emperor. But he is smarter. He pulls out a pistol from his holster and starts shooting. As bursts of staccato gunshots rend the air, I get up. The place is as peaceful as ever, but I did hear gunshots! … Suddenly, the penny dropped in the shape of a bel, the common Indian fruit with a hard shell. One such fell nearby and exploded with a thud.

I was in an orchard of bel trees with thousands of ripe fruits ready to fall. Looking up, I saw one poised above my head, gently swaying in the afternoon breeze. Had it fallen while I was asleep, you wouldn’t have read this wonderful story! I ran to the safety of the open sky and then to the Stupa.

The return journey was infinitely more pleasant. The bus started after sundown. A pleasant breeze and a full moon greeted us as we went past immense fields. There was a forest in the background. The vast flat tract of land seemed submerged in tranquillity and peace you would expect in the Buddha’s land. I also saw a small tent far away; two people were cooking something over a fire.

Two days later, I saw this in a local newspaper: “A French couple camping on a field near Sanchi were lynched by villagers. They were … (27) and … (23). A mob had taken them to be dacoits. The young woman was gang-raped before she was killed.”

Compensating the riff-raff

2010-12-01T14:51:00.002+05:30

Soumya Sankar Mitra

On the night of 2nd / 3rd December in 1984, water leaked into a tank containing methyl isocyanate gas at a pesticide plant of the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) in Bhopal. UCIL was a subsidiary of the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), one of the biggest multinationals at the time. The chemical reaction that followed raised the temperature of the gas to above 200° centigrade (392° F). The concomitant rise in pressure forced the valves open and methyl isocyanate and other deadly gases spread over the city of Bhopal.

Over the next week, around sixteen thousand people, including two thousand children and a similar number of expectant mothers, lost their lives. Later, sixteen thousand more died. Almost an equal number of animals perished too. In a vast area around the plant, the soil and the drinking water sources have been permanently contaminated. Several other tanks containing toxic chemicals are still lying unattended in the factory premises.

It was the worst industrial disaster in recent history. The Canadian government hadn’t permitted this plant to be set up anywhere in Canada, a sparsely populated country with millions of acres of uninhabited land. But in 1969, the government of India allowed to set up the same plant at Sanand, almost at the heart of the city of Bhopal.

Although we were intermittently agitated after the tragedy, with time, our indignation died out and the issue forgotten because those who died in the catastrophe, the survivors whose lives were devastated, and the deformed babies that were born afterwards generally belonged to the riff-raff, the dispensable stratum of the humankind. It was not an attack on a symbol of global wealth, the World Trade Centre, by some traders in terror. It was the death of the helpless poor in a transnational game in which rich businessmen try to become richer. Consequently, no war has been fought over the incident; what has happened can be called an international farce. Although many in the US and elsewhere consider the recent judgment delivered by one of the lowest Indian criminal courts in Bhopal after twenty-five years of procrastination as “just”, the dispensable people of this country think it was a monstrous joke. This article is an attempt to briefly record what followed the disaster.

How did it happen?

Till this day, the UCC hasn’t clearly revealed how exactly the gases escaped. None of their excuses, namely, sabotage by disgruntled employees, mistakes committed by inexperienced workers, etc. have been proved in subsequent enquiries. On the contrary, every investigation has shown that the preventive systems that had been put in place in similar plants in the US by the same company did not exist at Bhopal. Time and again experts had pointed out that the process of manufacturing the pesticide Sevin in the plant, which required production of methyl isocyanate at an intermediate stage, was dangerous. But the company had steadfastly refused to introduce safer but costlier processes. It has also been established that the principal causes behind the disaster were poor maintenance of tanks and pipelines and reduction of staff.

The curious case of the prosecutor and the accused

Immediately after the incident, the American chief of the UCC, Warren Andersen visited Bhopal. He was arrested by Madhya Pradesh government. But thanks to some invisible hands that we know so well, he was released on a bail of two thousand dollars and sent to New Delhi by the state chief minister’s private aircraft, accompanied by a senior bureaucrat. The same evening, he boarded a flight to his fatherland and hasn’t been troubled in the next twenty-five years. Although the Indian court hearing the case issued several arrest warrants against Andersen, the governments of both India and the USA did nothing to enforce the warrants. The helpless court declared him as an “absconder”. After the recent judgment by the court on 7th June 2010 stirred up public conscience and the media, attempts have been made to make the invisible hand even more invisible by setting up a core group of central ministers. These worthy gentlemen have begun thinking about new steps!

The government swings into action

On 29th March, 1985, i.e., in less than four months after the incident, the Indian Parliament passed The Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, which conferred on the government of India the “sole right” to represent Bhopal victims. The Act took away the rights of individuals to sue the company in India or abroad.

At first, the UCC agreed to pay US $ 350 million, that is, the amount for which the factory had been insured, although the Indian government had demanded hundred times more. The UCC claimed that the mishap had occurred due to sabotage by disgruntled workers and the company was not responsible for such acts. As mentioned above, the company was unable to produce a shred of evidence in support of the “sabotage” hypothesis and what they suggested as possible modus operendi of the so called sabotage was proved untenable in an experiment subsequently conducted by experts. After haggling for fifteen years, in 1999, the Indian government and the UCC arrived at an out-of-court settlement for US $ 47o million (insured amount plus nominal interest). Immediately thereafter, when the UCC wanted to dispose of their shares in the UCIL, the Supreme Court allowed it to do so with the proviso that the company set up a 500-bed hospital in Bhopal to treat the gas leak victims. The hospital was set up in 2003, but what relief it has provided to the survivors is debatable.

Therefore, after allowing the boss to flee, steps were taken to let the capital flee too. In the mean time, the UCC had sold its Indian subsidiary to Eveready Limited. Before Dow bought the UCC, the Indian government publicly stated: “UCC has no liabilities in India any more”. Till now, neither Dow nor the UCC has accepted their liability to remove the hundreds of tonnes of toxic materials still lying in the factory premises, or to detoxify the area. However, “the doyen of Indian industries”, Ratan Tata offered to clean the premises by setting up an Indian consortium, although that proposal too hasn’t fructified.

The compensation

If we leave out the small amounts of cash support, primary healthcare, and some interim relief, the quantum of compensation provided by the Indian government to the disabled as “final settlement” was Rs.25,000 ($ 830). The heirs of the deceased got Rs.62,000 ($ 2,058) each. Till 2007, ten lakh (1 million) compensation applications were submitted. Half of them were rejected because the applicants couldn’t prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that they were indeed victims of the gas leak. Calculations show that even out of the pittance received by the Indian government from UCC, Rs. 100 crore (1 billion) still remains in their coffers.

Miscarriage of justice

After consideration for twenty-five years, a trial court at Bhopal sentenced the Indian Chairman of the UCIL and six of his senior Indian colleagues to two years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs.1,00,000 each. They were promptly released on bail, paving the way for possibly twenty-five years of further consideration by higher courts. One cannot blame the trial court for this bizarre verdict. In 1996, the Supreme Court of India changed the Section under which the case had originally been filed, and instructed the investigating agency (CBI) to file a charge for “causing death due to negligence” against these officials and Anderson. The trial court has awarded the maximum penalty stipulated for the offence. Let’s recall that within the country, for deaths caused by a fire in a cinema at New Delhi and later in Stephen Court at Kolkata – although the magnitudes of these tragedies were smaller – the state governments have filed cases against the owners for murder, and the Supreme Court has not objected to this

The prognosis

The trial court’s verdict suddenly stirred up things in India. Many people began saying that the injustice that had been happening for twenty-five years was indeed injustice. As a result, the ruling party, the Supreme Court, and the CBI started talking about new steps to douse public anger. The central ministry, after setting up a core group of ministers, started spinning yarns about a Rs.1,000 crore (10 billion) compensation. Who will get it and how are “under consideration”. The Indian foreign minister tried to meet with Dow Chemical officials but failed. The company couldn’t spare the time because of their prior commitments.

In response to demands made on Dow to accept their liability, the company stated that although they were prepared to foot the bill for the acts of UCC, they were not obliged to do so for UCIL since that company had been purchased by Eveready. Significantly, although Dow hasn’t agreed to compensate Bhopal victims, they have compensated the victims in a case that had been filed against the UCC in the US for asbestos poisoning, in which 75,000 people were affected. They have already paid $ 687 million, and have undertaken to pay $ 839 million more. That means human life in the third world is less valuable. The arrogant transnational company, the government of India and the Indian judiciary have joined hands to stifle the cry for justice by the third world’s riff-raff. After this, everyone will recall the famous statement by George Orwell, All are equal before the law, but some are more equal than others.

What can the victims hope for and what lessons have our rulers learnt from Bhopal? Please decide after considering two facts: (A) In a week’s time, the lower court’s verdict will have been six months old. What the group of ministers set up with so much fanfare has done for the victims during the period is a closely guarded secret. (B) In Nandigram, West Bengal, there was murder and mayhem in 2007 when the ruling party desperately tried to set up a chemical hub in collaboration with the same Dow Chemicals and its even more notorious sidekick, Salems of Indonesia. Although Nandigram has been thwarted, the plan to set up a chemical hub on the geologically unstable Nayachar (literally, The New Sandbank) at the mouth of the Haldi River has gone far ahead through the joint efforts of Bengal and central governments, ignoring opinions of geologists and environmental scientists. One such opinion is: This chemical hub “is in essence a declaration of war against coastal resources and livelihood, spelling disaster for marine life, food, and nutrition security.”

[This is a slightly abridged translation of a Bengali article by my friend Soumya Sankar Mitra. I decided to translate this piece and share it with the readers of my blog primarily because I felt it was necessary that we knew the details. Secondly, I think my friend has told the sad story of Bhopal with rare clarity and comprehensiveness. Soumya teaches physics at a Kolkata college.]

In defence of "the mediocre"

2010-11-23T05:56:00.003+05:30

[This essay has been written by Anindya Ghose Choudhury and me. The basic idea came from Anindya]

In the USA, there is a saying: “About everything that some Americans have achieved in life is to send a son to Harvard.” Replace Americans with Indians and Harvard with IIT, and you see that the adage holds good for us too. Come July every year one sees anxious parents pushing their children across the country in search of admission to top-notch engineering and medical colleges, which are considered magical doors that open up a dazzling future for the children of greater gods! Most of the remaining students too get absorbed into medical and engineering colleges of varying standards, some good, some indifferent, some without teachers or basic infrastructure, run purely as education factories. At the very bottom, like the dregs, remain the colleges for basic sciences and humanities. No one goes there if they have a choice. For example, in Karnataka this year (2010), no student has enrolled in dozens of such colleges. In a place like West Bengal, where there are not enough even substandard medical/engineering colleges to meet the demand, thousands flock to the “general” colleges.

We are indeed proud of the bright young Indians who, after graduating from premier Indian institutes, have proved their worth on the frontiers of technology and commerce in many parts of the world. But still, let’s stop and think: does the mad rush for the best of higher education have anything to do with pursuit of excellence or knowledge? Can we, by any stretch of imagination, claim this is a continuation of our age-old tradition of learners trudging hundreds of miles in search of a gurukul to pursue knowledge and enlightenment? Or is it a naked pursuit of lucre, a six-figure salary and the trappings of the neo-rich?

Satisfaction glows on the faces of proud parents, secure in the knowledge of having obtained a comfortable future for their offspring. The young heroes are feted and showered with accolades. Amidst the din, we not only forget those who haven’t made it, but also, brand them as “mediocre”, a patently unjust and untenable label, as most labels are!

Indeed, there are a significantly large number of bright and intelligent students who refuse to submit to parental pressures and/or societal conditioning to become doctors or engineers. It is also a fact that the few who go into the best technical and professional colleges are not necessarily the best products of the system of secondary education. On the contrary, many of them are beneficiaries of a highly commercialised mechanism of private coaching that is available only to people with deep pockets.

This article is in defence of those who prefer not to be a part of the rat race and who are courageous enough to stand up against the imposed prescriptions of dubious merit.

In the eighties and nineties, the pursuit of humanities was considered such a waste of time and effort that it simply wasn’t recognised as a worthy pursuit. Technology was making great strides and anyone with an iota of intelligence was expected to be a part if the new world. (After years of recession, the enthusiasm has ebbed a bit!) Philosophy, ethics and poetry were passé. Study of political science, geography, and even history was relegated to the backburner. Basic sciences, well, they were for either the queer folk with super intelligence or who weren’t good enough to be techies. No one spared a thought for the plight of a society fed on a diet of only bits and bytes.

In this hustle for technical education, no one questions the perpetuation of a system where on an average 40% students fail in any public examination. More importantly, the dichotomy of a country having some of the finest educational institutes (IITs, TIFR, IISc, ISI, AIIMS, and so on) and the largest population of illiterates in the world troubles none. The pathetic systems of basic and secondary education plods on backwards, unnoticed.

In this overpopulated country with scarce resources, mere survival requires a higher degree of intelligence and emotional maturity than in affluent countries that offer much wider opportunities. We have far too many problems and we badly need people who are not only intelligent and skilled, but also morally strong and intellectually honest to improve our squalid systems. And yet, we have an education system that relies more on rote learning than independent thinking; a system that in its misplaced sense of nurturing excellence, crushes even the feeblest of new ideas in their infancy. To wit, the system has the temerity to brand all those who haven't fallen in line, as failures.

To summarise, on the one hand, we have some high-cost, exclusive institutes that prepare students largely for the global commercial world, and on the other hand, there is a shamefully neglected basic, secondary, and higher education system that doesn’t equip students with the necessary skills to survive in this increasingly competitive world. It should also be mentioned that the vast majority of undergraduate colleges offering “general” courses are no better than the “general” compartments of the Indian Railways, overcrowded and stifling. In sharp contrast, the high-end colleges and institutes thrive in glorious isolation.

The fundamental facts of life don’t change, and they haven’t in India, notwithstanding the hoopla about nine percent GDP growth and the concomitant widening chasm between the rich and the poor. Education should bring out the best in every person. It should not only equip people with knowledge and skills, but also ensure that they become strong individuals with impeccable values. Our education system should ensure that individuals don’t grow into selfish creatures in pursuit of corporeal comforts alone, but contribute to the best of their ability to their respective fields of endeavour. The nation needs good agriculturists, teachers, nurses, policemen, economists, mathematicians, scientists, writers and artists, not just technocrats and managers. Nature has endowed humans with multifarious talents and aptitudes. And no society can sustain itself with uni-dimensional human resources. Therefore, we should encourage people to bring out their best in whichever fields they choose to excel in, instead of putting them in straight jackets of irrational expectations. The dubious debate on mediocrity will then stop troubling a vast multitude of our younger generation who are brave enough not to conform to imposed standards of an unthinking society.

Money makes the world go round, but it doesn’t build national character!

Good English, bad English

2010-11-14T22:14:00.007+05:30

Anil Babu, a fine, formidable, and fearsome teacher of our school once narrated this story.

Two men got into an argument on a public bus. One of them was a dignified elderly gentleman, whom our teacher labelled as a professor. The other was an arrogant young fellow who, once again according to Anil Babu, could only have been a junior clerk in a merchant firm. Minutes after the argument began, when the professor was clearly winning the contest, the young man switched over to English. It was a common practice then, if Indians wished to sound authoritative, they spoke the king’s language. Perforce, the professor had to respond in English. And that turned the tables against him. He spoke in correct, grammatical English, but haltingly. And that was no match for the torrent of terrible English the clerk churned out. Finally, just as a drowning man clutches at straws, the professor said, ‘Have you read Wren and Martin?’

If you are an Indian over thirty and you've been in a school, you'd get the drift. For the rest of humanity, M/s P. C. Wren and H. Martin were the venerable authors of a grammar book that was a combination of the Geeta, the Koran, and the Bible for English teachers in India for generations. And it was the nub of a serious problem. Each chapter of the book contained a set of prescriptions about how to frame sentences. And the examples and exercises that followed usually had lines that no one would use in their lifetime. Indians were also taught that speaking "incorrect English" was sacrilege.

But English is such a funnily unfettered language! Speaking or writing it correctly is challenging to even educated non-native speakers. To make matters worse, out of the hundreds of hours of English classes in school in our country, not one was devoted to teaching how to speak. (Unfortunately, the situation hasn't changed in most of our schools even now.)

So, generations of educated Indians could hardly express themselves in the language, even when they needed it. And those who could treated the rest of their countrymen as dirt.

English is important in this integrated world, we can't live without it. But should we think of committing suicide if we made a few mistakes here and there while using the language? How important is it to speak/write correct, flawless English? Let me quote an authority on the language, David Crystal:

Many people now realize that labels such as ‘sub-standard’ and ‘broken English’ are just as insulting and out of order as any set of racist or sexist names. We have seen a move away from the linguistic subjugation of the prescription era, with people asserting their right to be in control of their language rather than to have it be in control of them. For many, prescriptivism has come to be seen as a bad dream from which we are only now beginning to awake. The operative word, in all these sentences, is ‘many’. We are only half way along the road, and not everyone is persuaded that it is the road that they ought to take. But … it is only a matter of time. A major step has already been taken in schools, where a renaissance in linguistic study has already begun to produce generations of school children who are aware of the importance and relevance of Standard English without seeing any need to dismiss or condemn non-standard English. – The Stories of English, Penguin Books, Page 534

How do you gather news?

2010-10-02T10:00:00.009+05:30

On a mysteriously named blog Pareltank, I just read a brilliant article by PJ Kochuthresiamma about the way our electronic media function. She recalls:

In 2006 January when Arjun Singh tried to raise the reservation quota in the IITs and other premier educational institutions, the coverage of the issue by Rajdeep Sardesai and his channel was dangerous and objectionable. The visual of the burning Goswami (the self immolation in protest against Mandal) was played over and over again as though to invite some misguided youth to take cue …. Sardesai was literally jumping around with excitement – like a predator which had a taste of blood and was waiting … for some prey to take the bait.

She goes on to say:

Looking back, I feel that if the media was totally banned from the precincts of Taj – nay, if there was a total ban on reporting the updates on the terror attacks in Mumbai, the NSG would have done a much more efficient job without the media taking away the surprise element from the rescue operation. Remember, Arnab Goswami got vicious and nasty at the government’s move to block the media from reporting? And the government buckled in to the ire of Times Now!

Expectedly, the article recommends that our electronic media be reined in.

TV news channels thrive on disaster news and gruesome visuals to increase their audience. To this end, they display a streak of single-minded ruthlessness that is matched perhaps only by the finest gangsters. They have cast away things like dignity, restraint, sensitivity, etc. One must hasten to add that the news channels have done wonderful things too. Let’s not forget the brilliant NDTV coverage during Gujarat riots. They presented the true picture, helped create public opinion across the country, and stopped the saffron killers before they could destroy many more families. And the same Sardesai played an important role in the campaign.

That was the age of innocence. Compare 2002 with the electronic media’s campaign against Maoist violence now. At the core of the conflict is the survival of a pitilessly exploited indigenous people against the tyranny of intruders like you and me. Should anyone brand this adversary as criminals? I heard a more loyal Barkha Dutt pleading with the king, that is, P Chidambaram, to deploy the army and air force against them. The near fanatical Times Now brands anyone who sympathises with the Adivasis as Maoist. I also heard Sagarika Ghosh (of IBN Something) tell Arundhati Roy that she was “sleeping with the enemies of the country”. Arundhati gave her back royally, but that’s beside the point.

Even in times of peace, our news channels (both English and vernacular) scavenge disaster sites until the last bit of flesh and blood are wiped clean. Let me offer a few examples. In a train accident, an unfortunate young man was squashed between two berths. He was seen through the window, gasping and screaming for help. TV journalists documented his painful journey to death for posterity. Dear Reader, Think of his old mother, wife, or little children who would most probably have seen the visual in real time. In another case, after a plane crash, a gentleman was waiting at Calcutta airport for his brother’s body. A plane carrying it had just arrived. A journalist asks him, ‘Now that the body has arrived, what do you plan to do?’

In April 2008, a fire raged in a multi-storeyed building in Kolkata, Nandaram Market for about a week. During the period, TV channels kept on predicting “The building is going to collapse any moment now.” The underlying message was: don’t switch off your TV, don’t miss the opportunity to watch live another 9/11. (And let our Target Rating Point increase!) When the building didn’t oblige and the supremely inefficient West Bengal Fire Brigade put out the fire, some reporters nearly broke down.

You might argue that the fault lies with our people, not the system. After all, many American channels and the BBC are more balanced, less strident. One feels it is so only because the Western market economies are older, more mature, and a touch complacent. They have arrived. They have even produced men like Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who now look for something more meaningful than profit maximisation. Comparatively, Indian capitalism is young, arrogant, abrasive, and dying to bag their trophies. Also, the Western media too show their fangs if required. Let’s not forget the “embedded presstitutes” of Iraq war.

Coming back to the article I began with: can the electronic media ever be “reined in”?

After declining for centuries and stagnating since independence, the Indian economy has “taken off” during the last two decades. The development model followed by our rulers has created many billionaires, and made the middleclass enormously richer. They had to be, their newfound disposable income keeps this consumerist economy going. The totally unexpected and huge increase in the government employees’ pay scales under the Sixth Pay Commission was possibly not by accident, but by design. And it had a cascading effect on other sectors too.

That’s fine, but the problem is that the new economy has made the poor poorer. We have reached a state where Pepsi is available where drinking water isn’t. There are possibly more cellphones than sanitary toilets in the country. This development has turned India into a stupendously poor country with countless rich people, an aspiring superpower with an army of underfed.

Our electronic media are an important cog in the wheel that has brought us here and they in turn are driven by advertisers, who naturally try to maximise their reach.

For this simple reason, I don’t see a ghost of a chance that the electronic media will be reined in in India. But let’s not give up. Let’s fight the battle the way we can. Let’s stop watching Indian English news channels and read newspapers instead. Let’s also look for gems like Kochuthresiamma’s article on the WWW.

Saturday, 02 October 2010

Dubare: The elephant country

2010-09-30T17:12:00.089+05:30

A wide river met the road at right angles and stopped us. A shopkeeper at that unusual T junction asked us to turn right. ‘The Tourist Lodge is a few hundred metres ahead ….’

After less than half a kilometre, our taxi stopped again as that road too ended. This time, a forest blocked our way. There was thick foliage in front and on our right, and on the left, the Kavery flowed on indifferently. No sign of any tourist lodge …. It was past lunch time, and after a five-hour drive from Bengaluru, we were not in a frame of mind to appreciate the shopkeeper’s practical joke. But before we could curse him, a young man in a jungle-print shirt and khakis greeted us with a broad smile.

Meet Sattar, a tourism department employee, a boatman who would take us to the other side of the river, as all boatmen do. The Elephant Camp Tourist Resort across the river is new, but the “elephant camp” is old. Elephants were trained and kept here by the Forest Department for logging. The animals lost their jobs when the government banned using elephants for manual labour. At that point, some brilliant mind thought of setting up a tourist resort at the place with a unique selling point: tourists would have the novel experience of “interacting with elephants”, like bathing and feeding them.

Despite our protests, Sattar helped us with our luggage and put us on a motor boat that had been hidden behind a tree. The place is not far off from Talakaveri, where the river begins its 765 kilometre journey. Thanks to good rains, the Kavery was full to the brim at Dubare.

On the other side, Sattar handed us over to another smiling young man in jungle-print, Uday. The resort had ten cottages beside the river, not built on a line, but scattered randomly, just as trees grow in a forest.

Given the backdrop, the cottages were surprisingly well appointed. Although there was no electricity, the rooms had AC machines. A generator supplied electricity after sunset.

Uday in our room

Behind our cottage was a slender pathway, on the other side of which the bank sloped down to the river. A profusion of trees covered the place. Under an overcast sky, the place was dark even in the early afternoon. There was no sound except for the flowing water and chirping crickets.

The dining hall begins on the river bank and goes almost into the river, standing on concrete stilts. Its thatched roof stands on beautifully carved wooden pillars. There are also a few tall trees in the dining hall, coming in through the floor and leaving out through the roof. The underside of the roof too has intricate wooden rafters. This architecture is typical in Coorg or Kodagu district of North Karnataka. The hall has no walls on the riverside and the two adjoining sides – only banisters. As we had a late lunch of lovely Kodagu food, we felt we were floating on the river.

It was raining when we boarded a jeep for a guided micro safari, which was a bit of a let down because the only wild animal that we came across during the one-hour drive in the jungle was a stray dog; we saw many elephants, foraging, accompanied by their mahouts. There were three couples and two children in the jeep besides us. Two of the women talked continuously. One of them narrated to the children how a certain uncle, when he had been a child, had peed in a bottle of coke and offered it to a particularly difficult teacher.

In the evening, as we watched a film on Karnataka wildlife in the dark dining hall, a waiter asked if we would like to have beer. Of course, we would .... He produced some chilled beer. My daughter took a few sips more to make a political statement; I enjoyed the rest. Outside, a magical darkness filled in every corner of the planet ... millions of fireflies glimmered in the bushes and in the sky. The place would have been absolutely still but for the orchestra by crickets and cicadas.

Pachyderm - a type of animal with a very thick skin, for example, an elephant.

The next morning, we understood what this really meant when the mahouts brought the elephants to the river bank one after the other. Their mahouts too were supposed to be government employees. But unlike the nattily dressed employees of the tourist lodge, they were in dirty clothes, with unkempt hair. They were tribal men who traditionally tended elephants. They laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy their work. The elephants too laughed and joked with the tourists.

The elephant skin is surprisingly tough and coarse. And the huge animals are surprisingly gentle and tolerant. They took the hundred odd overenthusiastic tourists in their stride. We had a once-in-a-life-time experience of scrubbing the elephants as they were being bathed. Each one of them had a fifteen minute bath after which they walked up to a designated place for their breakfast consisting of a ball of jaggery. An elephant needs two hundred kilograms of food every day. They were given about two by their keepers. They rest they would have to forage.

Breakfast

Trivia: amazing nothings!

2010-09-20T09:04:00.011+05:30

A highly intelligent and well-read friend of mine has a serious interest in non-serious matters. He does handle solemn things too, and handles them well. But tell him about something that has no earthly value except having an unusual angle about it, my friend will lap it up like “mishti doi” (sweet curd, the technology to manufacture which is known only to Bengalis). The disease is infectious. I've got hooked to interesting trivia thanks to this friend of mine.

This morning I found a mail sent by another friend with loads of trivia. I'm going to paste some of them below. If you care for amazing nothings, please read on. And if you have a point to add to the list, please do write to me.

Although I have edited and added to the original message, and also sprinkled a bit of spices on the piece, let me add a caveat. The owner of this blog is not responsible for the authenticity or otherwise of what is below. If you want to sue anyone for misleading people with incorrect information (or for copyright violation), please tell me, I will furnish the email ID of my friend Sanat Kumar Banerjee who sent me all this.

You know that you are living in 2010 when ...

You accidentally enter your ATM PIN on the microwave.
You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.
You have a list of nine phone numbers to reach your family of three.
If you are at a seminar, the moment a break is announced, you reach out for your mobile.
While returning from office, about five minutes before you reach home, you ring up your husband/wife to tell them that you are on the way.
Leaving the house without your cellphone, which you didn't even have the first 20, 30 or 60 years of your life, is now a cause for panic; you go back and get it.
You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.
Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.
Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.
You get up in the morning and go on line before you brush your teeth.
You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

Idioms are born …

In the 1400s a law was introduced in England that allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence we have “the rule of thumb”.
Once upon a time in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled “Gentlemen only... ladies forbidden”. Thus, GOLF got into the English lexicon.
In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase: “Goodnight, sleep tight!”
It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.

The number game

Question: If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter "A"? Answer: One thousand.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987, 654,321

Literary trivia

The first novel to be written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer. (It has survived beyond the life span of the typewriter, and hopefully, will outlast computers as we know them!)
The great novelist of our time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez struggled for many years to become a commercially successful writer. During the period, he went through rough times and once reportedly collected bottles on the streets of Paris.

A bit of geography

The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28%.
The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%.

Miscellany

It is impossible to lick your elbow.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
Question: Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what? Answer: Their birthplace.
Question: What do bullet-proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laser printers all have in common? Answer: All were invented by women.
Approximately 89.25% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow!

Niyamgiri in West Bengal?

2010-09-03T11:52:00.003+05:30

The dispute between dismally poor Adivasis of the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa and the powerful multinational Vedanta Resources is a hugely asymmetric conflict, particularly in view of the central and state governments’ eagerness to bend over backwards to help industrialists. Scrapping of the Vedanta aluminium mine has been a rare victory for the marginalised poor. Another David has tamed for now, though certainly not killed, a Goliath.

The reasons given by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in support of their decision to scrap the project has put an official stamp of approval on the concerns of the people who oppose such projects, namely, destruction of forest dwellers and irretrievable damage to ecology. The ministry and its head, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, and a section of the Congress party including Mr. Rahul Gandhi deserve to be congratulated for this.

But the question that comes to the mind is: does this one swallow make a spring? Does this mean some day in the future, our policy makers will believe development means water, food and shelter for all, instead of more highways, glitzier malls and bigger airports in a country where half the children go to bed hungry? Does this mean industries that pollute and slow-poison people will be scrapped in other parts of the country too? Let’s discuss another case.

In West Midnapore, Burdwan, and Bankura districts of West Bengal, many sponge iron factories that have sprung up during the Left rule have been causing massive damage to the environment.

A retired teacher of economics of Calcutta University, Subhendu Dasgupta has given some startling information in an article published in a Bangla newspaper today: production of 100 tonnes of sponge iron requires 1.6 lakh tonnes of water, (an equivalent amount is consumed by 80 thousand humans per day). 100 tonnes of sponge iron also produces 180 to 200 tonnes of carbon-di-oxide, 26 to 30 tonnes of waste, and 100 tonnes of dust. The fields and grazing tracts around the sponge iron plants have turned black and water in tanks has been contaminated. Agricultural productivity has reduced: from 36 to 45 sackfuls of paddy per acre to 21 to 24 sackfuls. There is also black stain on the rice and the rice mill owners refuse to buy such paddy; Mangoes fall off before ripening, saal leaves are turning black, and even fish have developed black stains, and cannot be sold. Domestic animals too are harmed; cows give birth to stillborn calves. [Ekdin, 3 September, 2010, article by Shubhendu Dasgupta on edit page]

I checked with a friend, a chemical engineer by training, who currently works on industrial pollution. My friend confirms this is actually happening and one can see buildings and roads covered with black soot in wide areas around Durgapur and Asansol where there are about forty sponge iron factories.

The government of West Bengal has reacted to the crisis by arresting the people who have been protesting against this wanton destruction of Nature and her children. Members of Jhargram Block Environmental Pollution Resistance Committee, Hemanta Mahato and Upangshu Mahato were arrested and charged with waging war against the state. Naba Datta, of Citizens’ Forum, who has been studying the effects of industrial pollution by sponge iron factories, too was arrested. Twenty cases, including waging war against the state, have been slapped against him. [Ibid.] Perhaps even the worst criminal in the state would not have received such attention and honour from the government.

Will anything be done to protect the poor villagers affected by sponge iron plants in West Bengal and elsewhere?

Meeting Mrs. M.

2010-08-13T06:19:00.013+05:30

When dim-witted people try to act smart, disasters happen. When lazy fellows suddenly turn active, ditto. This afternoon, I’d just had a splendid lunch at a friend’s house. The dark sky foretold an imminent deluge. I was to meet Mrs. M. at a college that is ten minutes walk from my friend’s place. I hadn’t met her earlier, all the interactions having taken place over emails and phone calls.

Normally, in similar situations, I would sit back and relax. But this afternoon, I didn’t listen to my friend and his wife and left, foolishly hoping to beat the rain by walking briskly.

As I stood under the projected balcony of an old building, it felt good. After how many years did I stand by the roadside in pouring rain? Shabby buildings were getting smudged with the grey sky … waves of rain hit the road like whiplashes … rivulets of water swirled down the gutter into a grating in front of me. Looking up, I also saw the joists holding the balcony over my head were rusted and withered. I didn’t want to find myself underneath a pile of rubble or in tomorrow’s newspapers. I moved under the awning of a shop.

Splashes of rain soaked me as I stood in the deserted North-Kolkata lane. Two boys in dripping school uniform walked past, talking and laughing, as if that is how they returned from school every day. They were evidently "loving it"! When I was their age, I too loved to wade through water-logged streets through heavy showers. Perhaps every child loves it. But today, as the gutter filled quickly and water rose with much flotsam, my skin twitched at the thought of walking through the fetid green water. It continued to pour; it was time to worry about how I’d reach home at the other end of the city. I decided to give the meeting a miss; it wouldn’t be a great idea to meet Mrs. M. and her principal looking like a mop just out of a bucket. There were no taxis … no vehicles at all.

Suddenly, an angel flew in from the sky in an auto rickshaw and offered to drop me at Girish Park metro station for a small consideration.

When I stood before a pedestal fan on the platform and phoned Mrs. M., there was a touch of desperation in her voice, ‘Please don’t leave. It’s important that I hand you over a letter and take the one you are carrying. Please wait, I’ll take a colleague’s car and reach the metro station in five minutes.’

Fifteen minutes later, she called. More desperation: ‘Where are you?’

‘On the platform, in front of the escalator.’

‘I too am in front of the escalator. What’s gone wrong? Please look out! I have a brown envelope in my hand. In fact I’ve been waving it at every gentleman on the platform.’

‘And I have a white book in my hand. But are we on the same page? I mean, are we at the same station?’

A brief pause was followed by, ‘I am extremely sorry. I’m at Mahatma Gandhi Road station.’

She covered the distance between the father of the nation and the father of Bengali theatre in five minutes. We exchanged pleasantries, apologies, and letters, but the story didn’t end. She was sorry to trouble me, but could I please meet her principal to conclude a few details? Ah! If all our teachers were as stubbornly committed, our education system would score ten on ten. Mr. Sibbal would have little to do.

We took another train to MG Road, because the car was there, which incidentally was not there. Mrs. M asked me to look for a green Maruti Zen. It would have been embarrassing to declare that I am colour-blind and can’t distinguish between green and red. So I took a chance. I saw a red Zen, and hoping it would look green to the rest of the world, pointed at it with a winning smile. She gaped at me in utter incomprehension.

We found the car, but the driver was not to be found. He materialised ten minutes later, a bit pale, and panting. He had been looking for Mrs. M. in the station. His intentions were peaceful: he just wanted to tell her she had been brought to a wrong station. But the alert policemen guarding the station thought he was "moving about in a suspicious manner". He was released only after being frisked and grilled.

I wonder what else could go wrong this afternoon.

Kolkata, 12 August 2010

Fun, frolic, and a bit of violence

2010-07-04T20:53:00.009+05:30

[The photos are from Calcuttaweb.com. The old Howrah Bridge seen above had vanished long before I was born. The other three buildings are still there. In my childhood, the roads in front of them were not so empty or clean and the carriages were not drawn by horses, but the city did not look very different from what you see here.]

As if to prove the adage A watched pot doesn’t boil, the shadow of the petrol station portico would take an eternity to reach a keenly watched point to tell me it was four o’ clock. I had to wait till that magic moment for going to Kalighat Park, which has stopped being a park and has turned into a water treatment plant.

Occasionally, after a game of football or cricket there, we bought ice cream from yellow push carts sporting the Magnolia logo. Magnolia meant authentic quality; there were fakes too: Mangolia, Magnola, and so on. The pretenders used the same colours and font to paint their logos. But we were smart; we learnt to spot imitations as soon as we learnt the English alphabet. And to distrust ...

Memory acts like a sieve. Unhappy experiences pass through and disappear, but the happy ones remain. If, after reading so far, you felt everything was proper and pristine in Kolkata in the 1950s, it wouldn’t be my fault. That's how memory works. But I do remember a few sad things vividly.

Bengalis are not a martial race, but are quite prone to violence. Those days, it was common for teenagers and older boys of one locality to go to war against boys of another area. These young men wouldn’t always fight face to face when forces were balanced on the opposite sides. Rather, they would look for an opportunity to capture a lone soldier or two from the enemy camp and beat them to pulp. I was a witness to such cowardly violence many a time. It has had two impacts on my psyche. Firstly, I don’t think I will ever be able to hurt a defenceless person, not only physically, but even otherwise. Secondly, I have always had a mortal fear of being a victim of physical violence.

Sport primarily meant football: East Bengal, Mohan Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting. We were prepared to kill and be killed for our team. Even if a goal was scored off a corner kick against our team, we would be convinced that the scorer was off side! But even in those days, the glamour sport was cricket, which was restricted to a solitary affair of an annual test match. And the enduring memories of a test match are a Kanhai hooking with disdain or a helmet-less Roy or Contractor ducking away from Davidson bouncers in an ethereal Garden of Eden.

The spectators were serious and knowledgeable. Once, there was a controversy about the Australian left-arm fast bowler Ian Meckiff. Many thought he used to throw, but Indian umpires, possibly because of a colonial hangover, wouldn’t call him. During a test match in which Meckiff was bowling, a spectator shouted from the stands – and the rest of the crowd heard him in total silence: ‘Mr. Meckiff, next summer, the English umpires will tell you that you chuck. A chucker is a chucker is a chucker!’

Fortunately for Meckiff, he was left out of the Australian squad to England in 1961. But two years later, an Australian umpire no-balled him in South Africa four times in his first over, and that was the end of his cricketing career.

Only some people actually saw Pankaj Roy, Allan Davidson, or Ray Lindwall in flesh and blood. (I was among the few because my Gandhian dad, who always wore khadi, was crazy about cricket and tennis.) The hoi polloi had to be satisfied with the running commentary given by Pearson Surita, Berry Sarbadhikari, and Vizzy in English and Kamal Bhattacharya, Ajay Bose and Pushpen Sarkar in Bangla. The last named trio were icons, they added to the five days of a test match an aura that was perhaps matched only by Durga Puja. Mr. Ajay Bose was a class by himself. At times he would start describing a flotilla of clouds sailing across the azure winter sky, and so enchanted would he become with his own eloquence, that he would forget all about the match for a few overs.

Besides sports, there were not many sources of entertainment for children. Movies were rare gusts of happiness limited to Ben Hur, Ten Commandments or Do aankhe baara haath.

These days, one doesn’t often see Bengali brides crying when they leave their parents’ home. In 1962, my mother’s youngest sister got married at a wedding hall in Harish Mukherjee Road. The next morning, she left for her new home in Shillong. A large retinue of family members trooped to Dumdum Airport to see them off. (Those days, among my relatives, only those going abroad, or to the North East travelled by air.) The airport terminal was a small one-storey structure then, perhaps with an asbestos roof. She and her hubby checked in with little fuss. There were no policemen around. No one stopped us as we accompanied her beyond the check-in desk to the door to the tarmac. There we stood, right on the tarmac, waiting in the crisp December sun for the Dakota standing a little away to be ready for boarding.

My aunt was crying copiously through the process, holding my hand the way a drowning woman would clutch at straws. I said, ‘Enough is enough, I think it’s time you stopped crying.’

She snapped in unadulterated Sylheti, ‘Sup kar! Amar ki fattharer pran?’ (Shut up! Is my heart made of stone?)

The Calcutta in which I grew up had clean roads, less noise, and lesser crowds. Roads were swept and main thoroughfares washed with jets of water every morning. There were hardly any taller than three-storey structures; the sky was bigger. The footpaths were paved with rough stones. There were hawkers, but they were yet to take over the city. It was a joy to walk the roads of the city. In the evening, gas lights would be lit in lovely little parks that were seen perhaps only in a dream.

Children were not at the centre of the family. Elders wrote letters and the postman delivered them at least twice a day. A man would be measured by what he had in is head rather than how much he had in his bank. It took longer to travel across the city, but people lived closer to each other. Usha Uthup sang at Trincas. Even the rich went to government hospitals for treatment. Some of the best schools too were run by the government. The metropolis, known as Calcutta to the rest of the world, was still one of the finest cities. People thought things would become better.

In the last fifty years, more gadgets became a part of people’s lives than what had in the previous fifty thousand years. More than anything else, technology has irrevocably changed the way people think. For example, no one will ever write, like the Bengali poet Naresh Guha,

If, upon return to Kolkata

As I whispered her name,

The evening mail brought in her letter –

If she herself came?

[This brings to an end the memoir covering my childhood: Fragments of a broken mirror, posted intermittently on this blog.]

Printed letters - A postscript

2010-07-02T09:44:00.003+05:30

For most children today, printed letters have been replaced by moving images on a TV screen, at least in our country. Very few fortunate children develop the habit of reading. After reading my remark “When I gave a book to a nephew … I saw a shadow of disappointment cross his face”, a reader, Sujith has commented that it is not so in at least one first world country, the USA. He writes:

… let me tell you how different (it is) here in NY. Kids are groomed to develop the taste for reading. My daughter is in kindergarten and it’s amazing how much emphasis is given to reading. Every week her teacher sends a book home and we have to read with her. Also parents are encouraged to buy books from a company and the company donates a book to the class library. Whenever I travel, I see Americans always reading something, on the flight or train or at airports. Now I know where it comes from.

I am obliged to Sujith for sharing this piece of information with me. My wife and I were in the US when my grandson was born at Yale University Hospital. Immediately after his birth, several counsellors visited his parents and urged them to read to the infant right from day 1. In fact, the reading had begun even before that. Researchers have found that babies in womb too respond to reading and would-be-parents are encouraged to read aloud for the benefit of the baby even before s/he is born. I also found their system of public libraries amazing and wrote about it in my post titled Libraries in the US.

It was the time when Barrack Obama was trying to become the president. One of the main planks of Obama’s future plans was to make American children better students, so that they could compete with Indians and Chinese. Here in India, as opportunities are limited, some children study hard because they know they have no other choice. But I am yet to recall an election speech by an Indian politician in which education is mentioned even peripherally.

Coming back to the children who grow up with the TV as their main companion, I am sure their world is a lot more colourful and things happen at a much faster pace there. We used to gather information slowly, by reading. These days, children directly interact with the world beyond their immediate surroundings with two senses, eyes and ears. Also, they get to receive a lot more information than we did. As a result, they are vastly more well-informed than we were. And smarter.

But they miss out on one aspect. They “see” stories, mainly cartoons. We didn’t see things directly. For us, eyes were just a tool to decode the enormous wealth of information hidden in printed letters. We actually saw with our mind’s eyes. Whether it was a journey to the moon or the centre of the earth, every child in my childhood travelled to their personal imaginary destinations. Each young reader had their own perception about of Fagin’s brutality or Dr. Livesey’s gentlemanliness.

Many children of the twenty-first century, though rich in information, do not have the luxury of imagination. The see the way TV producers want them to see things.

Printed letters

2010-06-25T09:31:00.007+05:30

“That morning, I was reading ‘Jal pode, pata node (Water trickles, the leaf trembles.)’. To me, that was the first poem written by the Original Poet. … water kept trickling and leaves kept trembling on my whole consciousness through the day.” – Rabindranath Tagore (Jeevansmriti)

I was introduced to the fascinating world of printed letters through a comic depicting the Ramayana. Those days, every Bengali child began with a few books by Upendra Kishore Ray Chaudhuri: Tuntunir Boi and Chhotto Ramayana. After a few years, they would read Abanindra Nath Tagore. Dakshina Ranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandma’s bag) and a few more books with similar eponymous names were collections of fairy tales that smelt of the earth and waters of Bengal. Generations of Bengali children read the books, until a gust of “English medium education” – long after the Englishmen had left – changed their language, and to an extent, their cultural moorings. According to oral history, Thakurmar Jhuli was originally told by a village drummer or dhuli in a remote village in the district of Mymansingh, East Bengal.

Sona Dhuli sat under a pipal tree and narrated the stories to his bemused listeners. He became famous, but as he stopped drumming to tell his tales, he also became poorer. It happens if you leave a secure career in search of the esoteric. Sona Dhuli didn’t have enough to eat, but told his tales till the end. Dakshina Ranjan heard the stories during his visits to Dighpait, his mother’s village. [Dayamayir Katha, Sunanda Sikdar, Gangchil, Kolkata, 2010, pp 64-65].

Dakshina Ranjan did a great service to Bengal by recording the tales for posterity. One would never know how many such gems have been lost forever. It would be inevitable in a society where knowledge is passed on through speech. It reminds me of the Thomas Gray lines that my father was fond of quoting:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Till I reached the sixth standard, my school used to be over by 10.30 in the morning. I returned to an empty home as sister studied at a day school and mother too would be in hers. I spent the afternoons alone. The long solitary hours helped me create a world in my mind which I venture into even now, although not very often. As the languid street cries of the men offering many domestic services floated in from the deserted afternoon streets and crows cawed to accentuate the loneliness, I spent hours watching ants undertaking trans-continental journeys in the cracks and crevices of the parapet wall on our terrace. The room on the terrace had all kinds of junk, but it was also a space ship that explored galaxies.

I would also read a storybook lying prone on a mat with a pillow under my chest. The books in our house helped. More importantly, ma introduced me to the treasure trove that was her school library; in the evening, I would search her bag to check what book she had brought for me.

Dickens, Jules Verne, Robert Luis Stevenson and Alexander Dumas were my favourite. I read Bangla translations of The treasure island and the adventure stories of Jules Verne many times over. Captain Nemo was the obvious childhood hero, more so because he was an Indian who ruled the depth of oceans. Bibhuti Bhushan’s Chander Pahad (The mountain of the moon) was another book I loved. (I rate it among the finest in the world literature for children.) Besides, there was Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol (Abracadabra), a collection of nonsense verse which I think remains unmatched to this day in the two languages that I seriously know, even after taking Edward Leer and Ogden Nash into account. And of course, Sukumar Ray’s prose: Hajabarala (Abracadabra again) and Pagla Dashu (Dashu is nuts) etc. Sukumar Ray was Upendrakishore’s son. And his son, Satyajit Ray, created the legendary Feluda and Professor Shanku. Children’s literature would have been poorer but for this trio.

I was a subscriber of the children’s magazine Ramdhanu (The Rainbow). It was a matter of pride to see the periodical delivered at home with my name printed on the cover. The editor of the magazine was Kshitindra Narayan Bhattacharya, who also wrote lovely stories for children, particularly science fiction. (I read an article on him recently. He was a topper in M.Sc. in applied chemistry from Calcutta University and taught at Ashutosh College.) The magazine-office-cum-printing press-cum-the editor’s-residence was near ours, in Townsend Road, although the place was no longer at the town’s end then. (One of my best friends, Damodar Menon lived there too, although unfortunately we met only as adults.)

Kshitindra Narayan was the first author I met in flesh and blood, and naturally, I was a nervous. But he put me at ease in minutes and talked for quite some time as if he was talking to an equal. Besides, there was another magazine, Suktara (The evening star) that our newspaper supplier, Master Moshai delivered. In Suktara, there were many mushy stories that described orphan boys, badly treated by guardians or masters, run away and return years later after they made it big.

My friend Ashish Sarbagya ran away from home when we were in the sixth standard. Ashish had been afflicted with polio and walked with a limp. He lived near my house and we walked to school together after we were promoted to the secondary school. He walked fast and was none the worse for his physical challenge. It is not known if he made it big. No one has heard of him since.

The yogi and the bureaucrats

2010-06-18T20:17:00.000+05:30

There was nothing feminine about the thin sadhu I saw on TV. He has a shock of silver hair, sunken cheeks, a flowing white beard and sharp, penetrating eyes looking out of deep, dark sockets. Yet, 82-year-old Prahlad Jani is called “Mataji” by his disciples. But that is a relatively unimportant mystery about him. His claim to fame is that he has neither eaten, nor drunk, nor relieved himself for the last 76 years. According to Mataji, when he was eight, Goddess Amba Mata appeared before him and touched his tongue with a finger. Since then, he hasn’t needed any nourishment, says Mataji, who reportedly survives on “solar energy”.

His is not one of the thousands of bogus claims made to sell magic potion or nirvana. In fact, Mataji has nothing to sell. I discovered from a newspaper report (The Hindu, 9 May 2010) that in 2003, the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) conducted extensive tests on him and didn’t find his claim phoney. DIPAS repeated the tests in 2010, with more sophisticated equipment. Top scientists of DIPAS, aided by 35 “super specialist” doctors kept him under the constant surveillance of CCTV cameras at the Sterling Hospital in Ahmedabad for fifteen days.

According to the director of DIPAS, during the fifteen days, Mataji did not eat or drink anything and passed no urine or stool, although he took bath and gargled occasionally. During the observation, the doctors did not record any appreciable change in his medical parameters, which is expected if a normal person fasts for long. What intrigues the doctors and scientists most is not that he survives without taking food or drink, but the fact that he doesn’t pass water. As yet, they haven’t found out what keeps Mataji ticking; they are trying to unravel the mystery. One does hope they will succeed.

The defence ministry, it is reported, wants to understand the process so that it might be replicated for jawans serving in remote areas where it is difficult send supplies.

That, in my humble opinion, is a ghastly exhibition of bureaucratic short-sightedness. We are at the threshold of solving the biggest problem of humankind, but the babus in Delhi can think of nothing better than saving on soldiers’ rations! If scientists figure out how Mataji survives and can replicate the process in other humans, if they can invent a solar battery that can power humans, our civilisation will start moving in a different direction. Hordes of people migrated from one continent to another in search of food and countless wars have been fought over the commodity. All that will have become history, finally.

As the first of the basic needs of roti, kapda, and makaan is struck off the list, people will be free from their biggest bother. They will also have much disposable income to buy clothes and shelter, giving a huge boost to the economy. Producers of food grains, poultry etc. will be hit initially, but they won’t have to worry about feeding themselves and will have the breathing time to look out for alternative careers. Maybe, they will start producing cotton, rubber and bio-fuel plants. People working at restaurants and pay-and-use toilets will become unemployed and will demand redundancy benefits. But even they will not be very badly off as they will have no mouths to feed.

The municipalities will have no solid waste to manage. Sewers will be empty. Cities will be clean and won’t reek of garbage. When we travel across the country, we won’t have to suffer the spectacle of people defecating on fields.

When all that happened, only one question would remain unanswered. Why was Goddess Amba Mata so horribly parsimonious about dispensing favours? Why couldn’t she take time off and meet at least a hundred poor men, women, and children every day and put a finger on their tongues?

[Kolkata, 10 May 2010 / Published in the Statesman on 3 June 2010.]

The company I kept

2010-06-10T07:58:00.015+05:30

When we were children, parents had little time for their offspring. Except on Sundays, I saw little of my father, and my ma was always busy. I grew up in the company of domestic helps, much like Rabindranath Tagore, although unlike Tagore's family, ours was enormously middleclass. A friend, Dilip Paul later summed up the scenario neatly when he said, “We grew up like weeds.”

My first mentor was Motilal-da. A tall bony man in his fifties sporting a toothless smile, he walked with a slight stoop. He was always in a clean white half-sleeve kurta and dhoti, but was a colourful man otherwise. A vegetable vendor in the morning, he was father’s handyman for the rest of the day. He read, wrote in a neat hand, bought our provisions, maintained accounts, and fudged them. He lived in a tiny one-room hut alone, but often talked about his other house in the village, which incidentally was a mansion. He also spoke about the fish that were aplenty in his pond, his fields of golden wheat and the glorious cows that produced tanks of milk. Besides, he was in intimate terms with some leading film stars.

With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think he lied. Rather, he lived in two worlds. And who can say that the world that can be touched and seen is the only real world? Motilal-da enlightened me on many things, from Yuri Gagarin’s visit to the space to how people lived in villages to how biscuits are made.

Once I called him a son of a pig, which is a popular abuse in Bangla. Motilal-da left our house, never to come back. Under interrogation, I admitted what I had done and got the thrashing I deserved. Father went to Motilal-da’s house, apologised, and brought him back.

A carpenter, whose name was possibly Sukumar, was a regular visitor to our house. Father was fond of tinkering with whatever little furniture we had, and Sundays would come alive on our terrace with the sound of sawing and hammering. What had been a cot before turned into a partition one day courtesy Sukumar-da. A few months later, the same thing might be reborn as a bookshelf. In the hugely wasteful world of today, children are taught in school the three new R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Fifty years ago, they were axiomatic ways of life.

Sukumar-da was hard of hearing. While he worked, from time to time, he would imagine someone was calling him and would shout back, ‘Eije! Aami jachchi.”

While Sukumar-da worked, I watched with fascination sweat dripping from his brow and the deep concentration on his face. He became the work he was doing. Much later, one evening, while I was seeing Ali Akbar Khan play the sarod, Sukumar-da's image flashed through my mind.

At times, I would volunteer to help by holding a piece of wood he was working on. Overtime, Sukumar-da took me as an apprentice and would allow me to first scrape things with sandpaper and later to use the plane to smoothen a surface, and so on. Later, when I had to learn carpentry in high school, I found the work easy.

But more than learning how to use a chisel and saw, seeing him, I began to respect manual labour. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), an African American leader said: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Americans learnt the lesson long ago. During my visits to that country, I felt four things separate them from us: honesty in everyday transactions, hard work, discipline, and respect for manual labour. There, the people who work with their hands are not considered intrinsically inferior to those who work with their head. The plumber who cleans the gutter of your house speaks with no less assurance than the architect who designs your building. It is perfectly normal for an American woman college teacher to marry a bus driver.

In our country, Gandhi tried to spread the same message through his life, but failed. Even today, we hear “educated” Indians with swollen heads calling IT workers “cyber coolies”. There is little doubt that our intelligentsia’s aversion to and disdain for physical work – a throwback to our caste ridden social order – keeps pulling us backwards.

Rajen-da was my first nurse, Sudha-di’s husband. He had been a signwriter in baba’s firm once upon a time. When he became old and frail, he did odd jobs – like mentoring me – at our house. The childless couple lived near our house in a ten by eight feet room with a solitary window looking out into a crowded road where girls played hopscotch and women collected water from a standpipe. One of the four walls in their room was hidden behind a neat pile of Betar-jagat, the fortnightly periodical published by the All India Radio giving schedules of their programmes and a few short articles. Rajen-da’s only earthly possessions were those periodicals and a radio, of which he was an avid listener.

In our house, Ranjen-da had little work and used to read most of the time. He would read aloud poems of Rabindranath. When he came across an unknown word, he would say there was a misprint and replace Tagore’s writing with a word that he knew. Rajen-da was fond of speaking English. Elders often had a hearty laugh – behind his back of course – at his many malapropisms. But my English being more or less at the same level as his, I didn't see what was so funny about them.

Once, when I was slightly bigger, I hurt my leg while playing football. The last three toes of my right leg got bent and I couldn’t wear shoes. The injury was not considered serious enough to be reported to parents. Rajen-da massaged my foot for months with hot mustard oil until everything returned to their rightful place. Neither the patient nor the physiotherapist had heard about dislocation of a bone. Or maybe, the therapist knew, but didn’t mention the word in order not to frighten the patient.

Reaching out

2010-06-02T08:06:00.007+05:30

For my sister and me, visits to the zoo and a circus show were almost mandatory in winter. Once a year, on the bare stage of New Empire theatre with the uncovered wall clearly seen on the back, magician PC Sarkar made a red Impala convertible filled with beautiful women smiling and waving at us vanish in a trice. Then he would himself disappear from the stage and materialise at the last row on the balcony before one could close one’s gaping mouth.

In December 1957, Prime Minister Nehru inaugurated electric trains at Howrah. The EMU coaches with their big doors, green and beige exterior, and no toilets, were no less magical. They had no stairs and would stop only at stations with high platforms. Unlike steam locos, these would pick up speed within seconds and zoom out of the platforms as passengers and onlookers watched dumbstruck.

Father used to take Ruby and me for short journeys on EMU trains on Sunday afternoons. (Taking one’s wife out was yet to become fashionable.) As air rushed in through large windows and swept our faces, we would go past the suburbia to green villages and watch men ploughing, women tending babies, and children playing under a boundless sky. We would get off at any station that caught baba’s fancy and walk down to a roadside eatery to eat rasgullas. Baba used to say it was always safe to eat rasgullas outside, they could not be made with stale cottage cheese. One of his many business ventures had been to run a canteen. He ought to have known!

Those weekend outings are some pleasant memories that will remain with me till the end. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I must add that the middleclass children of the twenty-first century, for whom good times mean taking some convoluted rides at an amusement park or buying unnecessary trinkets at a glitzy mall or eating out at overpriced restaurants, are deprived of many simple wonders that abound in this world for free.

Like Colonel Aruliano Buendia, I too was taken by my father to discover ice on an autumn evening. An American troupe of ice-skaters had come to town to perform a programme named Holiday on Ice. As the red, purple, and blue beams of lights reflected from the resplendent floor, young men and women in gorgeous costumes wove brilliant patterns on a temporary ice rink, with equally polychrome sashes flying from their arms and waistbands. It was a brief journey to another world. For the month or so while the troupe was in town, and for months thereafter, people talked of nothing else.

Bhawani, a friend whom I met much later, had shared the city of my childhood. After reading one of the many drafts of this, she reminded me of an experience that was in a way more fascinating than the Holiday on Ice. It was called Circarama, but I am not sure how it was spelt. It was a circular theatre in which the audience stood and watched images projected on multiple screens all around. The images had been captured by 360° cameras. As part of the audience, we felt we were travelling on a bus in the city of New York, with the Hudson and the Empire State Building whizzing past us. This would be old hat for the people who use Google now, but back then, it was a technological marvel beyond compare.

These days, when heads of states visit India, they usually give Kolkata a miss. Some years ago, beside a handbill promising cheap and hassle-free abortion in a public toilet in Hazra Park, I saw a hand-written poster: “Go back, Bill Clinton!” I wondered why whoever stuck the poster chose that particular place. There was no chance that the American president would pass water anywhere in Kolkata.

In my childhood, every dignitary visiting India would come to our city, and at times, hold public meetings here. Nikita Khrushchev came along with Bulganin. So did Zhou En Lai and Dalai Lama. These visits caused new ripples in a city that was not short on excitements even otherwise. The biggest ripple happened when Queen Elizabeth II came in January 1961. A big crowd had gathered on the terrace of my pishemoshai’s office in Ganesh Chandra Avenue to see her. It was a three-storey building. Below, footpaths were packed with eager onlookers. The queen, in her mid-thirties, looked exquisitely beautiful in a pink dress. She stood in a roofless convertible saloon, smiling and waving, as the car moved slowly by. The bald headed prince consort in funeral black stood beside her and waved too, but no one cared much for him.

Pishemoshai had, and still has, a penchant for doing the unusual. As refreshment for the crowd that had gathered on his office terrace, he provided extremely hot peppery chanachud in a jumbo paper cone. I could watch the queen only through my tears. There were “oohs” and “ahs” all around.

Another event that had left an impression on my young mind was Yuri Gagarin’s voyage to the space on 12th April 1961. The next day’s newspapers brought the news. I would have missed the school bus that morning. Motilal-da took me to school. As we walked the two miles, we discussed what exactly was meant by going to the space and how it could happen. I am sure that that morning, we discussed some hypotheses that would not come to the head of any space scientist. Incidentally, Gagarin too visited Kolkata towards the end of the year. So did Valentina Tereshkova, who piloted a spaceship for three days in June 1963. Her visit was an inspiring moment, partly because of her gender and partly because hers was a journey from a textile factory to the space. She had been a factory worker before being chosen to be the first woman astronaut. Students of many schools, particularly girls’ schools, lined up the streets of Calcutta to greet her.

Calcutta has not only become Kolkata. She has also lost touch with much of the world that speak other languages.