Amma >>>

If technology has given us conveniences like mobile phones and folding umbrellas, it has taken away some too. One of them is the joy of travelling by low flying commercial aircraft. In a December morning of bright sunshine, my wife and I changed plane at Chennai and boarded a made-in-India Avro. There were no hatches above seats, all hand luggage was dumped at a corner and secured with a net. The cabin was small, but the windows weren’t. In Kerala, our plane flew low over a lush green sea, barely metres above the serrated fronds of millions of coconut palms. Through occasional gaps in the foliage, we saw meandering rivulets, red tiled roofs, schools with playgrounds from where children lustily cheered at the aircraft. We also saw steeples-domes-turrets of churches, mosques, and temples with glistening sandy compounds. Trivandrum—long before the name was formally Indianized to a seven-syllable Thi-ru-va-nan-tha-pu-ram—was a city more beautiful than what I could have imagined. Most of the houses were one-storey bungalows in large compounds full of leafy trees, often guarded by a fierce looking dog. There were hardly any high-rise buildings. The roads were not wide, but were wide enough for the population and the rare personal vehicles, that is, Ambassador cars. There was no trash anywhere. At all times the roads seemed to have been just swept. A beautiful perennial river flowed through the town. It seemed a wizard had turned a picture postcard into a living city! Back home, when I had landed myself a job in the capital Kerala, I took out an atlas. Putting one prong of a large compass on my hometown Kolkata and the other on Trivandrum, I drew a circle with Kolkata at the centre. The circle included Lahore, the Yangtze River, Nom Pen, and Hanoi, but no part of India except for the tip of Kanyakumari a little of Pakistan occupied Kashmir. In the distant, beautiful city of Trivandrum, we found a part of a house for rent in Manacaud through an acquaintance. The house owners, Saraswathi Amma and her husband Kunjukrishna Pillai lived in the main building in the same compound with their daughter, son-in-law, and a younger daughter. Saraswathi Amma’s five-year-old grandson Kuttan filled the house with his chirping. His sister Rani was a baby then. Sadly, the family had no dog. Traditionally, the Nairs of Kerala are a matrilineal community, which explains why Saraswathi Amma’s son-in-law lived with them. Her son Vijayan was with his in-laws, referred to as “wife-house” in a literal translation of a Malayalam compound word. Over time, the practice has been abandoned and Nairs have switched over to the patriarchal structure of kinship and inheritance. This story is about a time when the past overflowed into the present. This story is also about Saraswathi Amma, a materfamilias extraordinary. For every individual, there are a few strokes of fortune that make their lives worth living. For Arundhati and me, meeting Saraswathi Amma, who we would shortly start calling Amma, was such a blessing. An exceedingly pleasant person, she had a commanding personality beneath her soft exterior. She was the fulcrum around which her family revolved. Her husband, Kunjukrishna Pillai was a happy-go-lucky ex-army man. His face, criss-crossed with innumerable lines, was always radiant with a cheerful smile. He had seen action in many theatres of war. And as it often happens, varied and trying experience invested him with a calmness and self-assurance that nothing could upset. He soon became a friend and guide to me. I remember when he took me to a Kathakali performance which continued till early morning. The four walls of our living room were decorated with 43 framed photographs of Saraswathi Amma’s forebears and members of her extended family. I found it rather strange. But as I lived in the house and thought about the pictures, I realized that as someone from a family that had been displaced during the Partition of India and splintered into many tiny units, I didn’t know what he word “family” meant to Indians in general. Perhaps, in a desolate village in what is now another country which I had never seen—I imagined—there was a house with a similar array of snapshots of people with some of whom I bear a striking resemblance. Although it was not part of the deal, a cup of coffee soon started coming to us every morning. And on Sundays, the breakfast. Soon, we would join Amma’s family for the Sunday breakfast. Other days in the afternoons, Amma would often call Arundhati and they would have their meals together. Human relationships develop in imperceptible silence, like dewdrops falling on a meadow. I thought maybe, one evening on returning from office, I would find the forty-fourth framed photograph on the wall: yours truly and his wife flanked by a beaming Kunjukrishna and a stiff Amma. It is amazing how I got to have a strong and special personal bond Amma although we had no common language. She was an epitome of affection, which can be expressed without language. Amma expressed it through a gentle glitter in her calm eyes, and in the countless ways she showed how much she cared for us. Rabindranath Tagore wrote, So many homes you’ve put me in, Made me know the unknown, You’ve brought the distant close, my Friend, And made strangers my own. On rare occasions in your life, if you are blessed, a stranger may even become a mother. * The picture of Amma with her granddaughter is courtesy Rani. When we visited Thiruvananthapuram in 2018, our friends KTR and Bhawani drove us to Amma’s home. The house hadn’t changed at all, but it was a sad homecoming for us; Amma and Kunjikrishna had left. But sadness is a coin the other side of which is happiness. We were delighted to meet a young Saraswathi Amma in her granddaughter Rani. The little Rani had grown up into a happy wife of a handsome young man and a mother of two lovely girls. Blessed be Rani and her family! Thank you Rani, for this priceless photograph. Bengaluru / 03 Dec. 22

My Second Day at the Bharat Jodo Yatra

There was a damp breeze under an overcast sky when our march began from outside Ballari at 6:30. Our destination was the village of Moka, near the Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border. The distance between Ballari and Moka is 19 kilometres. From Santiniketan, where I did college, the district town Suri is 19 kilometres away. I never dreamed of walking the distance. What was unthinkable at the age of 17 is doable at 71. That is the magic of social uprisings. 

As I walked, I heard Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Haryanvi, and an Indian language I could not identify. Among the diverse men and women were qualified professionals, working people, peasants, teachers, and students. That is, people from both urban and rural India, and of all ages. There were lots of young men. In our group of Swaraj India volunteers, two men in their twenties, Suheil and Arunoday were the principal coordinators. 

This picture shows Vinayak Rao Patil and Ganesh. Eighty-one-year-old Vinayak Rao from Maharashtra (Latur) would be one of the oldest civil society activists still walking the path of inqilab in India. He was with the Congress, and later, with Anna Hazare movement, and AAP in its initial phase. Many a time his dreams have been shattered, but he keeps on, undaunted. Ganesh, 21, is a student from Mangalore who supports Congress. He has taken a train to join the yatra at his own initiative. The yatra has brought together Vinayak and Ganesh.

Virendra Bagodia is a political worker who was jailed multiple times for his firebrand activism. He is a landless peasant from Haryana whose son is an engineer, and daughter, and MA. Bagodia ji carries the tallest national flag in the yatra, a flag post is so tall that he has to be careful not to touch an overhead electric wire. Mahendra Yadav, who is with me on a selfie, is from Gazipur, UP. Mahendra ji has literally “do bigha jamin”. Both Bagodia and Mahendra, who are in their sixties, are walking 3,500 kilometres from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. They have been with Swaraj India, the political party led by Yogendra Yadav for many years. Neither has much formal education, but when we talked politics, I was amazed to see how well-informed they are and the clarity of their views. 

Virendra from Haryana, Naushin from Kolkata, and Mahendra from Gazipur U.P.

Mahendra Yadav and me

The 118 “National Yatris” are walking from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Besides, there are state yatris, and others like me. People in the yatra stay together in a community living area, share rudimentary amenities without complaint. Treat strangers as friends. At our camp in Moka this afternoon, I sat between Mahendra Yadav and a handsome young man. When I asked the young man what he did, he simply said, ‘I’m a Congress worker.’ An erudite man, he was a pleasant conversationalist. After the meal, Mahendra ji told me he is the son of a former chief minister. If Congress returned to power in his state, my companion at the lunch table would be a candidate to become the chief minister. 

On both days, I saw local people coming out of their homes to greet the yatris. Waiting for hours to meet Rahul Gandhi. Their goodwill for the yatra and its leader was palpable. They waved at us, smiled at us. It was a new experience to observe such goodwill from people I had never met, nor I ever will. 

Waiting to see Rahul Gandhi

I have written that the distance between Ballari and Moka is 19 kilometres. However, we began outside the town, and we would have walked only about 14 kilometres this morning. The yatra is not a well-knit procession. As people walk at different varying speeds, they get split into small groups. At the head of the yatra is the leader, that is Rahul Gandhi, who walks admirably fast, and the people who can keep up with him, plus the police cordon around them. Behind them are scatterings of yatris for two to three kilometres.  Another procession of high-end SUVs was a pain in the wrong place for the staggered walkers. They belonged to the out-of-shape Congressmen who could hardly walk, but were obliged to show their face to Mr Rahul Gandhi.

As I gradually fell behind, a local person stopped his motor bike and offer me lift. We didn’t have the bond of a common language, but the bond of Indianness was enough. I didn’t have the heart to say No to him, but I didn’t wish to cheat either. So, I got off after about 500 metres. 

On the way, I came across a temporary shed from where villagers were distributing apples, water bottles, tender coconuts etc. to the yatris. I stopped and checked with two men in the kiosk separately. Who organized all this? Congress? The answer was an emphatic “No!” from both. They said villagers had joined together to give some relief to the yatris. When I pointed out at the Congress banner behind, one of them said it was a gift from the local Congress unit. I am inclined to believe them because if a Congress leader had organised it, there would have been large flex banners with the man's portrait announcing his generosity.  

Does the spontaneous expression of love say something? 

Why Bharat Jodo?

Why did I, a person with no political affiliation except for a strong desire to reclaim a liberal democracy join the yatra? In the following lines, I will try to answer myself

Over the last eight years, a poison has taken hold of a lot of Indian Hindus. They believe that Muslims, who are 14% of the population, will somehow destroy the Hindus who are 80%. This is their core belief: Hindu khatre mein hai. Therefore, for their safety, they must pin down the Muslims now. This silly fiction—which has no evidentiary support—has divided India down the middle. It has also divided families and friends.

On one side of the divide are the people who believe they are in danger (the 37.36% of the electorate who voted for BJP in 2019, they are often upper caste Hindus). The group has been created and led by an efficient RSS-BJP machinery. 

On the other side of the line are Hindus who do not buy the “Hindus-are-in-danger” rubbish, along with Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, plus everyone else. The latter have no formal organization / leadership. After every government misadventure like demonetization, or CAA-NRC, or the Farm Bills, the second group protests. They also hope that as their agitations gain momentum, the opposition parties, who have not seriously challenged BJP-RSS, will defeat BJP through the ballot box. 

It will not happen.

Because of the poison I mentioned. The people who support the present regime see the economy tanking, they have seen dead bodies floating in the Ganga during the COVID pandemic, their nephew or niece may be unemployed for years, yet their faith in BJP is unflinching because they think only that party can “save” them from Muslims. Psychologists like Daniel Goleman say when your mind is in the grip of hatred and anger against someone, you cannot think straight. Your baser caveman instincts take hold of you. This, roughly, is the state of mind of the people who abuse Muslims day in and day out. In that state of mind, it is possible for women to garland a gang of criminals who serially raped a pregnant woman, smashed the body of her three-year-old daughter, and murdered her 14 family members for no reason other than hatred against Muslims. 

If we wish to regain our secular India, we must detoxify those people. But we can achieve little by arguing with them. What we need today is affirmative action to bring people together, to spread love.

Democracy is not self-executing. We must make it work, particularly at a time when the forces of hatred, divisiveness, and violence have taken root in our country. Bharat Jodo Yatra is an attempt to precisely do that. <>

16 October 2022

Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY)—My first day

Last evening in about eight hours, we covered the distance of 311 kilometres from Bangaluru to Ballari, a mining town in western Karnataka that was earlier spelt as Bellary. The motley crowd of six yatris consisted of an exceedingly soft-spoken activist politician, an environmental activist and author, a tailor who's doing MA, an engineer, a young college prof, and me. Regarding the age profile, we were between in early twenties and early seventies. The six of us, who speak four different languages at home, have come to join the Bharat Jodo Yatra. As you might have guessed, a tiny bit of jodoing has already happened!

It was 10:30 PM when we reached the KRS Function Hall at one end of the town, our camp for the night Throughout South India, we have marriage / function halls which usually have three main sections: a big hall with a stage on one end, an equally big dining hall plus kitchen, and some bedrooms for people who would stay overnight. The main hall often seats 1000 or more people.

As we walked in, we found an empty ornate sofa on the stage at the far end of the main hall. More than 200 basic beds had been spread on the stage and the floor: cotton mattresses covered with garish bedsheets with designs in all the colours the human eye can see. Columns of plastic chairs were piled in a corner. At one end—somewhat unexpectedly—a large man in a dark T-shirt sat hunched before an equally large 24-inch computer screen, engrossed in work. Enormous fans fitted outside at the ground level blew in air through a grille. Although it was past 10:30, the lights were on. Few had slept. They were the yatris of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the political Kumbh of our time. The men and women would have walked at least 30 kilometres during the day.

The adjacent dining hall had been divided into two parts. Half of it contained a similar array of beds, and the other half, two long rows of narrow dining tables covered with aluminium sheets. We quickly joined the few men and women who were eating. The simple vegetarian meal was piping hot and excellent.

As the halls had been full, we got a small room on the fourth floor. There were five of us in the two-bed airconditioned room with three beds on the floor. Enormously comfortable. 

The breakfast that I had next morning at 5:10 consisted of steaming upma, chatni, and kesar bath. A tall gentleman, who was possibly from the management of the function hall, was supervising the operations; he made us feel we were his personal guests. I silently saluted the famous Kannadiga hospitality and also, the Congress Party, which is organising the yatra. 

*

Inqilabs, that is, revolutions, are “the locomotives of history,” said Karl Marx. According to his most well-known follower Lenin, “Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited.” Nobody knows if the Bharat Jodo Yatra will turn into the locomotive that will ferry us from the present-day dystopia back to a civilised India, but when we were ferried in a van to the starting point of today’s yatra in the tenebrous light before sunrise, I did think I was witnessing a festival of the masses. 

The absolute exhilaration among people was to be seen to be believed. At the beginning of the long procession, local artistes in ceremonial attires—many of them wearing huge masks—presented a pageantry with the accompaniment of drums. They were followed by Congress Seva Dal Volunteers in white. Then came groups of yatris raising slogans. The slogans were surprisingly creative and nonviolent, like, Jodisi jodisi, Bharata jodisi in Kannada (Join, join, join India), or in Hindi: Hum Bhagat Singh ke diwane hai, hum nahi rukhne walle hai (We love Bhagat Singh, we aren't going to give up!) There were NO murdabads, hai hais, or down-downs. 

Except for the Seva Dal volunteers and the performing artistes, the rest of the participants didn’t form two neat columns, as if to highlight that their participation was spontaneous, voluntary, and free from regimentation. A festival, in short. 

My friends Kamlendra Pratap and Jeevan had warned me that when Rahul Gandhi arrived, he would be accompanied by a flood that would throw away anything in their path. The flood arrived soon. 

Rahul Gandhi, who walks really fast, sets the pace and the rest of the people walk / run with him. He has his security men in black safari suits around him and then an outer ring of close associates and registered yatris. Around all of them, state policemen in khaki made a moving cordon with a thick yellow rope and walked along. The mobile yellow ring was the nucleus of the yatra. Beside, in front of, and behind it, there were thousands more walking cheerfully, shouting slogans. 

Can you see Rahul Gandhi? If you can, you'll know how much risk he is taking.

Many of them were local people and curious onlookers. They were keen to get a good glimpse and maybe, a picture of Rahul Gandhi. Some went into the ring and close to Rahul Gandhi after getting a nod from the people in charge of security. Rahul smiled, shook hands, and spoke with each one of them, as people took selfies. But most of his fans were not so fortunate. They would walk as close to the yellow cordon as possible, and try go ahead of Rahul Gandhi to get a good look. 

As soon as the cordon approached where I was, a deluge of people threw me away from the road. And once the deluge went past, Jeevan and I fell back and followed the yatra at a relaxed pace, lending our voices to whoever was leading the slogan near us.  

I got a strong feeling that the yatris aren't going to give up even after the yatra ends. <>

15 October 2022

Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY)—Day Zero

On the way to Bellary with a group of wonderful people. To walk in the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

My participation will mean little to the Yatra, but the yatra should make a world of difference to me. The picture below has been sent by a friend. It is a picture of the Yatra today somewhere in the remote Chitradurga District of Karnataka.

 Let the mainstream media ignore, let the ruling dispensation and their cohorts try to mass-produce hatred, Bharat is joining herself … and erasing ugly lines that have been dividing her children in the recent past.

 Love spreads, quietly, but unquestionably, just as the sapling grows in front of your eyes but without you noticing it. Away from TV studios and troll factories.

 Watch this space for updates.

 

14 October 2022

Little boy with a young mother in burqa

 

Little boy with a young mother in burqa,

Please look at me, I want to talk to you.

You see, I’d be older than your grandpa—

Long ago, my eyes too had wonder

Just like yours, but

That’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Old men often lose their way,

You’ll soon find out.

 

I wanted to tell you that when I saw you,

A vague, overpowering fear gripped me

As I tried to see you ten years into the future.

Will you be in a school that teaches you

To love every human

And hate nothing, except

Selfishness, violence, and blind faith?

 

Will you be in a school

That teaches you to question

What everyone believes is true?

A school where you’ll learn

That humans, whales, and butterflies

Are all made of atoms,

In fact, particles even tinier

That might have been parts

Of stars and galaxies once?

That you and I are no different from

Moondust or the fiery sun?

That is a brief summary of human knowledge,

But please don’t take my words for it.

Read, think, and find out.

 

Fifteen years into the future,

Will you be in a college

Where fools won’t try to teach you

About borders, barbed wires,

And why you must build walls?

 

Fifteen years down the road,

Will you have lots of friends,

And maybe, a girlfriend too,

Whose religions or kinships won’t matter

In the relationships you make?

 

Will you grow up to live

In a middleclass mohalla where

Narayanans, Kalams, Mukherjees, and Murmus

Live side by side? And no college

Bars entry to your sister

Because of what she chooses to wear

On her head? Or maybe, she will

Choose not to cover her head?

 

Little boy with a young mother in hijab,

A vague, overpowering fear gripped me

When I looked into the future

And tried to find you.

In your journey through the years

Will you rediscover the land

Where your grandpa and I lived

Long, long ago?

It was

A highly flawed place even then,

But those days, hatred wasn’t state policy,

And nobody had to wear

An invisible yellow badge on their chest.

 

Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu

15 September 2022

 

 

 

 

 

Swapan Sarkar >>>

Goodbye Swapan-da, my friend for over fifty years. 

I haven’t met anyone who was more handsome than you. If I had been a woman (or gay), I could have easily fallen in love with you. 

Neither have I met many people who have such intense passion for life. 

We hadn’t met over the last five years. I missed you then. I miss you now. I will keep missing you. 

*

Swapan Sarkar, who lived in Bolpur and Kolkata, set up a small-scale industry, Fresseynet Prefabs*, on (I think) a two-acre plot of barren land at a distant corner of West Bengal in 1974-75. The factory manufactures prestressed concrete poles and concrete pipes. 

He was a charming young man of our generation from a small town with ordinary college education, a few thousand rupees in his pocket, and NO godfather anywhere. Yet, he dreamed of setting up an industry in the moribund economy of West Bengal. He would go on to fulfil his dream. 

Although he came from one of the most illustrious families of the district, I have just come to know from an obituary written by Bharatjyoti Roychowdhury that his father Narayandas Sarkar had been a communist who used to sell Marxist literature on trains. So, it would be reasonable to say that Swapan-da didn't get any worldly wealth from his old man. His mother had passed long ago. Swapan Sarkar was a self-made man who had to make do without father’s support or mother’s love and nurturing. (Although he and I spent hundreds of hours together and talked about everything under the sky, he never mentioned his parents to me even once.) Incidentally, like his father, he too was a communist in his youth which showed—if Bernard Shaw is to be believed—he had a heart. After leaving the Communist Party of India (Marxist), he joined a group of communist revolutionaries. And that brought us together. 

I saw him from close quarters when, in 1973-74, he was trying to find his way in the killing mazes of government offices and banks to secure the necessary permits and funds to set up Fresseynet Prefabs. His grit and self-confidence were to be seen to be believed. (*If you are stumped by the name of his firm, Eugène Freyssinet was a French engineer who invented the technology of prestressed concrete, a process that uses much smaller quantity of steel to give equal or more strength compared to conventional concrete.) 

His passion for new technology wouldn’t ebb. Much later, he would set up a factory that manufacture bricks from fly ash, something that thermal power plants produce in thousands of tonnes and is a perennial environmental problem around thermal plants. It was possibly the first such unit in Bengal. 

Swapan-da went to China several times before importing the brick-manufacturing plant. Generally, he was fond of travelling and went to lots of places including to Siberia on the trans-Siberian train. One of his trips was to Venice when the (only) film produced by him (PAAR, directed by Gautam Ghose with Shabana Azmi and Nasiruddin Shah) was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Incidentally, Swapan-da’s finances bottomed out by making the film.

Just as time couldn’t wither Cleopatra’s beauty, it could do little to Swapan Sarkar’s handsomeness. Neither could wealth change his persona. He remained the same person, his warmth and wit undiminished. Always ready to share a drink till late into the night as a quiet music filled the background. (He was someone who frequently changed his caller tune with beautiful clips of Rabindrasangeet or Bengali folk songs.) The only difference that I saw in him over the years was that his circle of friends expanded manifold. He could make friends easily. Till the very end, he was filled with what the French call joie de vivre. 

On 29 August, some of us old friends were to meet Swapan-da and his second wife Nasreen at a common friend’s place. As I hadn’t met Nasreen, I was looking forward to the meeting for two good reasons. But they couldn’t come as Swapan-da’s condition turned for the worse.

Swapan Sarkar passed away in his sleep two days later, in the early morning of 1 September 2022. 

Bengaluru 05 

September 2022

History however, is ruthless

 West Bengal is at the cusp of a change. Ms Mamata Banerjee and her party have failed the people who pinned their hope on her as opposed to the brutal rule of the aging Left on the one side and the hatemongering BJP on the other. If the news and social media show us the writings on the wall, in 2026, a new government will come to power in Bengal. At least should!

We must try to understand what has been happening in Bengal. Here is an article by a leading public intellectual who has held his head high through the murky currents of Bengal politics, Kaushik Sen. The original was published in Ananda Bazar Patrika on 3 August 2022.

Translated into English by Kaushik Chatterjee

*

A convention was held on the 2^nd floor of Calcutta Information Centre in 1990. It was organised by the Left Front Government. All the intellectuals of the times had converged there. The then Information Minister, Shri Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was also present. It was necessary to convene such a meeting at a time, when, thanks to a few serial events that rocked West Bengal, the credibility of the Left Front Govt had been considerably shaken in the perception of the people at large.  It is now on records, that, quite surprisingly, all the intellectuals present on that day, barring a few exceptions, strongly and concertedly denied any sense of frustration or misgivings majorly troubling the society; rather, they felt, it was after all, the product of an orchestrated anti-left propaganda, of the vanquished crying hoarse or even that of a bourgeois mentality gone paranoid. We come to know that, among others, even Utpal Dutta, with a clear voice and firm conviction, held on to the ground of the majority.

The poet Sankha Ghose was also present in that meeting. He read out from a small chit of paper. Everyone must have listened to him carefully but didn’t quite feel the urge to dwell upon the deeper anxieties voiced by the poet seriously enough.

The enthusiastic readers can easily retrieve the exact contents of the page from where the poet had read aloud in that intellectual-studded convention, organised by the Left Front Government on 11^th September, 1990. All I can say is that all those grim forewarnings which the poet had prophesied in his pithy but insightful write, were the subject of intense discourse and deliberation, following the electoral eclipse of the Left Front Government in 2011—disconnect with the masses, induction within the party of persons of dubious credentials, corruption, criminalisation, etc. The seeds of decay were all there for the people to take note of. But a large majority of them couldn’t or didn’t quite like to.

I am pretty sure if one goes through its contents today, there wouldn’t be any line of distinction between the parties that have been in governance in Bengal. You could easily swap the label of ‘Left Front Government’ with that of ‘TMC Government’ in that piece of paper. The issues of ‘dangerous laxity or irresponsiveness’, which the poet highlighted then, to have led to a series of ignominious incidents thereafter, were no accidents or conspiracies. They were not then and are not now either.

It would be impossible for the reigning TMC government of West Bengal to write off the instance of naked corruption and embezzlement of funds which has recently come to light, as a non-event or even treat it as conspiratorial. It is not possible for one Partha Chatterjee to commit such a ghastly crime single-handedly. The tentacles of the evil are enmeshed within the nooks and corners of the organisation itself.

The month of July of 2022 will either be remembered or consigned to one of the most inglorious episodes of the socio-political-economic history of West Bengal. The relentless agitation of those aspiring for the teaching posts of Classes IX to XII  for more than 500 odd days now, shall too be etched in the pages of history. A whole new set of questions and agitational dynamics would be scripted on the tales of dogged defiance they showed amidst sufferance of so much deprivation and misery. It is time we understood how this heinous crime had affected us all, beyond those who have been directly harmed by it. While complementing the perfectly professional and thoroughbred role performed by the Officers of Enforcement Directorate (ED) in unearthing crores of rupees from the different flats of the accused, it may be a sobering reminder at this stage, that barring, of course, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), none of the mainstream political parties of India are currently breathing free, thanks to the extraordinary clout and sweeping powers commanded by ED. The recent Supreme Court rulings may also add on the anxieties of the principal opposition parties in this regard, for everyone   knows how BJP can effectively weaponise the ED in bringing the entire Opposition to an uneasy standstill. And it is in this context, that the TMC, through this murky Partha Chatterjee episode, had significantly blunted the anti-BJP, ultra-Hindutwa campaign being taken up at the national stage. The recent events have only helped the party in power to get a firmer political foothold in the map of India; the same party, which operating through the smokescreen of whataboutery and subterfuge, has no qualms in defying the constitutional norms, openly threatening to decimate the minority community with bulldozing of their home and property, through a process of selective  targeting.

‘No Vote to BJP’ was the key slogan rallying which most of us openly mobilised ourselves in the last Assembly Elections. Without casting any disrespect on the TMC leadership or their foot soldiers who made a robust electoral show in the last Assembly elections, it may be averred that this inglorious event in the Bengal political chapter is a frontal betrayal of whatever bit of resistance that the apolitical segment of the societal space was trying to organise, in its own way, against the destructive and totalitarian regime of the BJP.

It is to be noted that TMC had cast their chessboard very astutely and expediently, both within the realm of the Parliamentary politics and outside of it, after a thorough calculation of their political payoffs. They had welcomed with open arms all of those discredited and defeated BJP leaders who had spewed communal venom. It is true that the issue of admittance or otherwise of any persons within a political formation is well within the prerogative of concerned political entity; and yet the 2021 Assembly elections in Bengal assumed a different dimension altogether. Most of us didn’t quite perceive it as a mere allocation of seats among different political dispensations. A large section of the citizenry, casting off the colours of political partisanship, had come out in the open and had in their own way, scripted verses, play-acted, composed songs, made intense parleys in both urban and rural locales, unitedly against a dominant political ideology which loved spewing communal hatred. The corruption that has come to the fore is a frontal assault on the generous faith that inspired such a great endeavour. Mere expulsion of Partha  Chatterjee cannot absolve the party of its moral responsibility.

People in this country now flaunt their masculinity in openly valorising Nathuram Godse. In the current year, in the ‘International Press Freedom index’, India is placed among the trailing 30 countries among the 180 contesting nations. The Modi Government had appropriated every means possible to curtail media and press freedom. Even more than its political contenders, the Bharatiya Janata Party seems to be deeply wary of the enlightened citizenry. Most of the alternate political dispensations are in a pitiable shape at this stage... some are suffering from organisational weaknesses, others are rudderless in absence of a decisive leadership, some have turned maniacal in the rush for political power and the rest of them, which raised a semblance of hope in the initial days, are so deeply mired in corruption, that unless some ground-breaking, far-reaching changes are made, it would indeed be difficult to believe that that they would be able to sustain a formidable and credible challenge against the communal forces.

In the realms of parliamentary democracy, it is the underlying urge of every political order worth its name to cling to power as long as possible. The TMC had scripted massive triumphs in the last three Assembly elections. And yet, in the last few elections, be they the assembly/parliamentary by-elections, Panchayat or the municipal, its relentless efforts to keep its political adversaries in check through an open display of muscle power, had raised serious misgivings and sent shivers down the line. And we have the well entrenched memories of how, thanks to the courageous and formidable resistance shown by the current Chief Minister, the entire political architecture of the Left Front and the CPI(M) came crashing from the height of its political brazenness to a nadir of nothingness. No political dispensation has been able to sustain itself in the long run merely scoring on its numerical strength. If the people lose faith, no material or muscular power can ever redeem a political party. TMC too is no exception. History always has a tough call to take. <>

*

You can read the original Bangla article here:

https://mepaper.anandabazar.com/imageview_64859_5412792_4_71_03-08-2022_4_i_1_sf.html

A memorable journey

[I am sure that in school, you wrote an essay on this topic. I did, more than once. Here is the last piece that I will ever write under the heading]

One of my most memorable journeys has happened just today. No, I didn’t go to see the sun rising on the Kanchenjunga, nor did I see any canyon, nor the Taj. I didn’t even drive through a quiet countryside in the mysterious twilight. I just took a flight from Kolkata and came to our second home in Bengaluru. 

Let me begin at the beginning. If you you’ve caught a flight at the Kolkata airport recently, you would know that their trolleys are physically challenged. So the first stroke of good luck was that I got one that had all the four wheels. 

As I was at the tail of a long queue for checking in, a young girl who was womanning the farthest of the Jet Airways counters—who no one seemed to have noticed—came out from behind her desk and asked me and a few others behind me to move to her counter. She didn’t have to. I felt she was not just doing a job in the service sector, she was actually serving people. If all the employees like her in airlines to banks to post-offices believed that they were in the business of service, life would be so much better! It is a shame that I didn’t read her name tag. 

There was no queue for security check, and unlike a few other times, I didn’t forget to collect my laptop on the other side. I bought a handful of magazines and newspapers and settled down in a comfortable chair near my departure gate. As I was debating with myself whether I should buy a coffee for a hundred bucks, I was stunned!

Deepika Padukone walked in casually pulling a leather trolley-bag and went past me. She was in a striped top, black jeans, with a light blue jacket casually thrown around her shoulders. She exuded charm and confidence, in fact, an aura of beauty, just as we have seen her on screen. She was being looked at from 360 degree around! As I watched her carefully and tried my best to look disinterested while my 65-year-old heart trembled, I felt something must have been wrong. Dipika Padukone wasn’t expected to take an all-economy flight with ordinary mortals like yours truly.

Slowly, the penny dropped. She was  actually not the diva. But she could have been Deepika’s twin sister lost in a fairground. Rarely do you come across two people so uncannily identical. 

After boarding the airplane, I took an aisle seat and forgot Dipika as I watched the Bengali mom seating next to me combing her twelve-year old son’s hair with the undivided attention of a neurosurgeon during brain surgery. As she was going through the procedure, she loudly complained that the boy hadn’t even learned to comb his hair. (How on earth would he, with such a loving mother? No wonder lots of Bong boys never grow up. They move from under their mother’s wings to their wife’s and thereafter, the two women fight over their possession till the cows come home.) And then Deepika Padukone boarded the aircraft! 

She walked straight towards me and smiled, ‘Sir, I think you are in my seat.’ I had noticed that my seat number was 16 D, but somehow, it had become 14 D in my pickled brain. I always mix up numbers and dates and names and faces—my students have some entertainment on the side as I often call Bipasha Vishakha and Jagtaar, Jagdeep. Anyway, for a change, I thanked my dysfunctional memory as I got to get a ten-million-dollar smile thanks to it. The flight took off before time.

The food was good. Jet Airways goes out of its way to cater to food preferences of their finicky customers. Besides the usual veg and non-veg fare, they had low-fat, gluten-free, and Jain meals. And the two stewards, Subhashish and Saif who served us were exceedingly polite and helpful, like their colleague at the check-in counter. 

It is common knowledge that the quality of service is inversely proportional to the size of an organisation. Of all the airlines I have flown, British Airways perhaps has the snootiest air-hostesses. At home, Indigo was super when they started. But as the airline grew bigger, the smile on the faces of their employees became shorter and shorter, until it vanished completely. Anyway, coming back to today, during the flight, Saif and Subhashish continuously moved up and down the aisle, bringing a paper to someone, a coke to another and so on, with a professional but genuine smile pasted on their faces all the time. And the pleasant experience didn’t end there. 

My bag was the first to come out on the conveyor belt. And as is usual at the Bengaluru Airport, I got a taxi without immediately. But the icing on the cake was the unjammed roads – I covered the distance of forty kilometres in an hour, something that you usually do in your dreams in Bengaluru.

My stars chose to shine brightly on me today. I ought to have bought a lottery ticket after reaching home.

Bengaluru / Tuesday, 08 August 2016

A carnival of music

Dhriti, who enrolled in a master’s degree programme at our university, had been an air-hostess in her previous birth. And she did look like an ex-air-hostess—tall, slim, and gorgeous. As far as dress sense went, Dhriti was roughly two generations ahead of her time. She was often seen in economical shorts and spaghetti tops, not to mention faded jeans and see-through white shirts.  

Soon, she formed an apparently deep friendship with her classmate Keshav, who we called Keshav Da because he was a married man in his late-thirties. The liaison disappointed many, needless to say. Keshav, was short, dark, and fat, but had an intelligent face with piercing eyes and bushy beards. The last object, along with his circular  metal-rimmed glasses made him look like a nineteenth century Bengali intellectual who had just materialised form a Rabindranath Tagore novel. He wore parachute pyjamas and white kurtas. When Keshav and Dhriti were together, aesthetically and sartorially, they were a study in contrasts. The odd pair was always seen together, on the campus and outside. Actually, they were a threesome, they had a sidekick too, a thin guy of vague features. But lackeys are not remembered by history, not even as footnotes. I’ve forgotten his name. 

Keshav was a touch snooty; normally, he wouldn’t deign to talk to lesser mortals like yours truly. The first time when I had the good fortune was an evening when both of us happened to be customers at Raju’s hooch shop in Goalpara. In winter, Raju sold excellent tadi made of date palm sap at his dimly lit open-air tavern. When we both were sufficiently tipsy, Keshav spoke to me at length. He was an erudite man, I discovered. The light friendship we developed that evening when we were drunk continued in times when we were both sober, unlike what had happened in Chaplin’s City Lights. 

I don’t recall who I went there with, but I clearly remember that Ganesh, a familiar Bihari rikshaw puller, was a fellow drinker that evening. I remember Ganesh’s presence because suddenly, he burst out singing a familiar Tagore song, Badal baul bajay re ektaara. Bauls are a sect of wandering minstrels in Bengal; the song is about a baul cloud playing the ektara, a one-stringed instrument, as the matted hair of the sky darkened the world at the onset of a storm. The song was a tad incongruous under a cloudless winter sky lit up by a trillion stars above and a hurricane lantern below, but Ganesh sang it beautifully. His diction was a little rustic, but the tune was perfect. It was one of those unforgettable snippets of time that remains with you for ever.  

A few weeks after the Goalpara rendezvous, my friend Dibyen and I were on a bus on our way to Jaydev Kenduli on the bank of Ajay. The local people believe—without evidence—the village Jaydev Kenduli is the birthplace of the thirteenth-century poet Jaydev, who composed Geet Govinda, a landmark on the Bengal literary landscape, in Sanskrit in the 13th century. Jaydev Kenduli is also a religious centre with old temples and several ashrams where thousands of bauls congregate in the Bengali month of Poush (December-January), at the end of which a fair is organised over three days. The fair is actually a carnival of bauls, and it was also believed the best of Indian hemp was found there in happy abundance. 

Dibyen, my partner in minor crimes, was thrilling company. A charming fellow, he had interest in almost everything in life. (He is very much alive today. The past tense just indicates I’ve lost touch with him!) He and I wanted to get a taste of baul songs at their authentic best. We also looked forward to smoking grass. 

As it was the last day of the fair, we just about managed to find seats on the last row of a bus, which filled quickly. Soon, before us was stood a solid mass of human bodies, mostly male, some of whom were smoking. Because of the freezing draft, the windows had been shut. The cocktail of smoke and human smell created an interesting ambience in the bus.  

About half an hour into the journey, I had nodded off when there was a sudden commotion. It seemed everyone was jumping towards the front and left of the bus. Fortunately, any force applied within a moving bus doesn’t have an impact on the bus as a whole, thanks to what Sir Isaac Newton called his Third Law of Motion. Otherwise, the bus would have overturned. What was the matter, had a pickpocket been caught? When I asked someone, the excited man said in the local dialect, ‘Bitichheleto bidi keche go!’ (Oh Dear! That female is smoking!)

Dibyen and me wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, and what did we see? The troika mentioned at the beginning of this story had seated themselves comfortably on the corner seat beside the driver. And Dhriti, in faded jeans and a white shirt, was calmly smoking a bidi, the indigenous cigarette made of unprocessed tobacco and leaves. she was gracefully unaware about the commotion her simple act had created. … Incidentally, that was the last time I saw Dhriti. For some reason, she would leave Santiniketan a few days later, never to return. 

*

 

Darkness descended soon after we walked from the bus stop to the river bank. Ajoy is a mighty river during the rains, but in the winter, water was nowhere more than waist-deep. The wide expanse of sand with a few slender streams were waiting for the holy dip to be taken by a few thousand faithful a few hours later. In the tenebrous twilight on the fairground dotted with trees, shacks, and small eateries, there were thousands of people. All of them  except a few like us were children of Rural Bengal. And there was something else. 

As I grew up in post-Partition West Bengal through years of refugees, floods, draughts, and near-famines, I thought I had seen poverty, but that evening I realised that I hadn’t. Everywhere in the fairground there were shallow holes of say six by two feet, crudely dug and covered with hay, twigs, and leaves. I had seen nothing of its kind before, and at first, I couldn’t understand what purpose they might serve. The penny dropped after a while. They were temporary homes, not of the bauls who stayed at the ashrams, but of  the beggars, who had gathered there in hundreds hoping to cash on the pilgrimage-induced generosity in the minds of the people taking the holy dip. In the biting cold of the Birbhum riverbank in mid-January, they had made themselves the most wretched homes one could imagine. But those wretched of the earth were a side-story in the carnival of music. 

The soul of the fair was in the many circles formed by bauls in colourful clothes, who were singing with the accompaniment of an instrument with just one or two strings, and sometimes, keeping the beat by holding ghungroos in hand.  Except for the singer, others were smoking grass from earthen pipes, which were passed on to the next person after a l-o-o-o-ng, unhurried puff. The pipe went around; the air was heavy with the captivating aroma of hemp. 

After walking aimlessly for a few hours, when Dibyen and I were tired, we sat down in one of the circles and received the smoky prasad when our turn came, no questions asked. We listened to songs by rustic voices that recreated the smell of the Bengal earth and sky. In the dark new moon night, anything outside that circle of holy bliss meant nothing. Gradually, the world beyond receded from our consciousness. What bliss!

The singers were poor men rich in happiness. The exact opposite of the money-rich-time-poor young business officials of our time. The night grew older, but no one noticed.  <>

 

Bengaluru / 22 July 2022

 

From ONE RANK, ONE PENSION to NO RANK, NO PENSION

 A friend of mine who I respect a lot has written on Facebook: “I think the Agneepath recruitment scheme is excellent. One retires young with about 12 lakhs in his/her bank account. At 25 the retired Agniveer remains eligible for a wide range of jobs.”

For those unfamiliar with the beautifully named scheme, Agnipath is a plan is to recruit men between 17 ½ and 21 years in the armed forces. The recruits, called Agniveers, will be a distinct rank, different from all other existing military ranks. So far so good, but the catch is they will serve for 4 years and no more, although 25% of them will get the opportunity to join the regular forces. After drawing a fixed salary for 4 years, they will go home with Rupees 11.71 lakhs. No gratuity, no pension.

Moving back to my friend’s post, I do not know if he has lost his mind or is being deliberately provocative. His opinion is grossly untenable for the following reasons:

(1) The 25-year-old will be ready for jobs, as my friend says, but jobs won’t be ready for him, particularly in the current economic scenario.

(2) Hand over 11-12 lakhs in cash to 10 twenty-five-year-olds, 9 of them will either blow it away in months or invest in assets like a house, which unfortunately cannot be eaten. People with much better experience with managing funds find it tough to manage a corpus to yield enough for their monthly expenses, particularly when interest rates are falling steadily. Ask any retired person except the blessed government pensioners, you know how the cookie crumbles. Do you seriously expect a moderately educated 25-year–old with natural cravings for the good things in life—fast bikes and fancy clothes, not to mention wine and women—learn to invest astutely or begin a successful business in a decaying economy? You must be kidding!

(3) The Agnipath scheme is also called “Tour of Duty.” Does it allow us a Freudian peep into the minds of the Gujju idiots who consider the army a “tour”? Last night, I was hearing a retired Colonel’s opinion that the Indian Army needs 5 to 6 years to make a jawan battle-ready. Therefore, this bizarre four-year “tour” will not only make the armed forces weaker, it will also destroy the ironclad discipline and efficiency of the Indian army, which is one of the finest in the world. The traditions and discipline built over centuries of blood and sweat will be destroyed in a stroke of a failing government which doesn’t have money to pay pension. But has money for projects like the Bullet Train, the tallest statue in the world, PM’s fancy residence, and a subway for him to drive to office, and so on.

(4) When they are out of the army, how will these unemployed young men with incomplete military training (and discipline) be used by a religious fascist government? Will the Brown / Black Shirts from Europe in the 1930s come back? I don’t see any other way to deploy them given the shrinking economy, ever decreasing job opportunities, and our relentless journey on the fascist path.

(5) According to Yogendra Yadav, a rare politician who talks sense, the vacancies in the army at the jawan’s level was 16,500 eight years ago, but now it has ballooned up to 97,000. So, the government that blabbers ceaselessly on national security has neglected what matters most. 

(6) Yogendra Yadav also said Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar and a few other states with a martial tradition contribute a large percentage to our armed forces. Personally, I have seen, many from Kerala and Tamil Nadu join the army. However, unlike them, the North Indian states have little job opportunities outside the army. Therefore, from the teenage, boys there work hard, exercise, run miles and miles to prepare for the military. The new scheme has also made recruitment uniform all over India. Therefore, if a Haryanvi youth could look at say, 1000 vacancies in the past, now will find much fewer, perhaps 250. We can understand why young people have burst in anger in North India. And why young men are committing suicide.

I do hope there won’t be another suicide and the protests will be peaceful. Neither will another train be burned or any other property destroyed.

Finally, this is the latest of a number of disastrous steps taken by the current government which began with demonetization. Hopefully, this will be the last and one hopes the government will have the wisdom to shelve the bizarre plan immediately.

PS: I have copied the caption of the story from Facebook. I will acknowledge the author as soon as I see the post again.

17 June 2022

California Diary 1: From Pacifica to Morro Bay

Last month, when Arundhati and I spent a few weeks in California, our son Ritwik hired an eight-seater Toyota Sienna and took us on a drive along the California coastline. I have been fortunate to travel to many beautiful places and I’d say that the 450-kilometre drive was one of the loveliest I have ever experienced. We drove along California State Route 1 which connects San Francisco with Los Angeles and runs almost entirely along the coast. As we were driving south, on our right was the deep blue Pacific, colossal, awe-inspiring, and unvarying. On our left was the coastal mountains of California, which for some reason, has no given name unlike her cousins with well-known names, Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. She’s just called the Coastal Mountain Range.

As we drove, landforms on our left kept changing every 20 miles or so: from rugged mountains to dark forests, to open land with millions of flowers blooming in the spring, to huge tracts of agricultural land on the slopes of hills on which cows were grazing. If you have found the previous sentence little heavy and difficult to follow, then I have been able to convey what I had felt during the journey. It was a bit too much of captivating sights! I have had similar feeling in large art museums. After a few hours, the brain refuses to absorb anymore.

We began at a place called Pacifica, a picture of which you see above, and ended at Morro Bay. The unvaried sea and the widely varying landscape were punctuated with quaint little towns that were straight from Western movies. Let me digress for a moment here. My Oxford dictionary defines the word “city” as “a large town”. Americans however apparently call every human settlement a city. For example, Carmel-by-the-Sea or simply Carmel, is a city with an area of 2.75 kilometre and a population of 3,220! I will come back to this place in the course of this travelogue. The cities on the way that were somewhat bigger were Salinas (population 163,000) and Monterey (30,000). Incidentally, the American author John Steinbeck was born in Salinas and Monterey has a named after one of his novels, The Cannery Row.

I guess the introduction has been long enough! Let’s see some pictures.

Wild flowers on the way

The Pacific Ocean seen from the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse, built in 1871, is one of the two tallest lighthouses on the west coast of North America and is still functional. 

"Research published 2022 by the San Mateo County Office of Sustainability found that the lighthouse was vulnerable to erosion caused by sea level rise." [Wikipedia].

What you see below are not dead fish. They are female and young elephant seals. Ninety miles south of Monterey, we came across the stretch where 25,000 elephant seals come and relax during different times of the year. The place is called Piedras Blancas Rookery, rookery being the term for the breeding ground for sea mammals.

April-May is the moulting season, when female elephant seals shed their skin. They eat nothing for months during their sojourn on the beach. However, it was not the season when males come ashore in search of mates. Adult male elephant seals, which can be as long as 4-5 m and weigh up to 2,300 kg, would be something to watch. The females in comparison are much smaller at 2.5-4 m long and weigh 400-800 kg. 

We passed by Carmel-by-the-Sea, or Carmel. It is a tiny but wealthy city in Monterey County which has beautiful plush homes right on the beach front. Many of them apparently are owned by actors and artists who obviously have deep pockets. Movie star Clint Eastwood was elected the mayor of the city in 1986.

Our hotel was away from the beach. It was a quiet place in the lap of nature. Nishaant is carrying a crutch as he broke his leg while playing a few weeks ago.

The Riverside Inn is beside a river which was narrower than the sign you see in the picture below.

The sun sets in Carmel-by-the-Sea, but a little away from the sea

This is how the place looked next morning. 

Spanish colonialists from Mexico invaded and captured California in the 18th century and called the province Alta California. (Alta means upper and baja means lower in Spanish, Baja California is a state in Mexico just south of the US California.) As everywhere else, missionaries were the soft power used by Spanish imperialists too, who set up their first mission in San Diego in southern tip of present-day California in 1769, and followed it up with a slew of missions along the coast up to San Francisco. In these missions, padres made every effort to bring native Americans to civilization, using temptations and brute force. But it was not smooth sailing for theme, the San Diego mission was burnt down by rebellious locals in 1775. 

In the background of this picture is Carmel Mission Basilica, founded in 1771 by Saint Junipero Serra.

I wish I could tell you the name of the river on which the bridge is. 

The pictures below however, do not need labels. 

 

Our journey ended at Morro Bay, the main feature of the place being volcanic mound Morro Rock. Morro Bay, a city of 10,000 people looked desolate after sundown. 

In the morning that followed

The marina. In the whale country, this is how the weather cock looks.

Finally, the route, courtesy Mr. Google