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