The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

When we come out of our main gate of our residential complex in Bengaluru, a short private road leads us to the main road, on the right side of which is an imposing office building. On the left, on the ground floor of a less imposing structure, is an arcade with eateries and other stores. We call the arcade Arcade.

 As lots of tech workers are employed in the office building, at any time of the day in the arcade, one gets to see a crowd of young men and women with ID cards hanging from their necks having tea, tiffin, or lunch, standing or sitting on the arcade veranda. The youngsters are always cheerful, always in a group, and always chatting. A little of their joie de vivre gets rubbed onto me whenever I pass them.

 It seems owners of the arcade aren’t too fond of them. There are notices limiting the areas where they can eat. There were two concrete benches in front of the eateries on which they used to sit and have food. A few months ago, the benches were removed overnight. Why? The benches troubled nobody. I think they were removed only because the owners of the Arcade wanted to exhibit their meanness and power.

While the tech employees are seen only during the day, there is another group that lives in the arcade: a community of stray dogs. Animal lovers of the area feed them regularly, and the dog-lovers among the knowledge employees overfeed them irregularly. Consequently, the dogs are overweight and mostly sleepy. Contented with their lives, they harm nobody. In fact, they hardly move. Their protectors among my neighbours also get them vaccinated from time to time and get them treated when the need arises.

When I think of these people who do so much for something that has nothing to do with their self-interest, I feel not everything has been lost in our wretched country where reading a newspaper is a fraught exercise.

But the Arcade owners, if they don’t like harmless young people, how can they not hate harmless dogs? There is a history of animosity towards the arcade dogs. The latest act is the case of Bruce, a handsome nine-year old black-and-white male dog who was the quietest of the lot. He hasn’t been seen since 16 August.

When people from our housing complex approached the Arcade management to see their CCTV footage, they were rudely rebuffed. But from our housing complex’s footage, it was seen that at 2:33 AM of 16 August, at least two dog-catchers were trying to lure and catch dogs while they were running away. Our camera had limited reach, but it would be reasonable to infer that the two men abducted Bruce, the quietest, while the rest managed to escape.

When a complaint was lodged, the police came to Arcade, but the arcade management shouted at the people who had complained, while the police stood silently, like the good boys they are. An Arcade manager even went on photographing the protesters in the presence of the police, despite being asked to stop. It was an act of wanton intrusion of privacy and an implicit threat: We have noted who you are.

On 22 August, when eight of our people, including a senior citizen, went to the local police station, they were told there was no space for them to sit. They were made to stand and wait outside for four hours while it rained from time to time.

Let me jot down the central points.

·         Someone—possibly the Arcade management—paid private dog catchers to remove the arcade dogs, but they managed to catch only one.

·         The Arcade management, who are part of a big property developer of Bengaluru, seems to have a good rapport with the local police. This of course is expected. A construction firm would have good rapport with the police by default.

·         Deep pockets usually defeat good sense.

How much hate one must have to pay dog catchers and organise a midnight raid to remove absolutely harmless dogs! Is this a tiny part of the rising wave of hatred in the country in general?

 

Bengaluru

25 August 2026

 

This is a developing story. Please watch this space.

Joining the Khan Market Gang

After an insanely sumptuous breakfast at our New Delhi hotel, my son Ritwik and I went to see the samadhi of a frugal eater who would go on fast at the drop of a hat. Rajghat was a few metro stations and a short autorickshaw ride away from our hotel.

Ritwik, who belongs to the cash-rich-time-poor generation of modern India, had come to Delhi for two days’ work, but didn’t have the time to visit home. So we decided I would spend a Saturday with him. Here is a brief note on the exhilarating day.

At the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated in Rajghat, a low rectangular black marble monument has been built. It was designed to be minimalist and simple to reflect the values of the great man. The not-so-great men who killed Bapu are our rulers today. But they haven’t messed with his samadhi, at least not yet, unlike the vandalism they have done in Jallianwala Bagh. Lata Mangeshkar was singing Gandhi’s favourite Gujarati bhajan, "Vaishnava Jana To” when a pleasant breeze blew over the green lawns shining bright under a clear sky in the late-winter morning. Some visitors—Indians and foreigners who incidentally hadn’t come on tourist buses—were sauntering past the memory of the greatest son of modern India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi still draws people. I am waiting for the day when he reclaims his place in the public life of India.

From a sad landmark of modern India to the beginning of the Indian civilisation. The section on the Harappan civilisation in the National Museum was overwhelming. I had no idea that their pottery was so large, in such varied shapes, and with such intricate designs. When their seals with right-to-left writing come out of pages of books and present themselves in three dimensions, it’s an indescribable feeling for the viewer. Unfortunately, the two most relatable artefacts of the period, the dancing woman and the bust of a bearded man, are in Pakistan. But what is in India is no less remarkable.

What bowled me over completely was a woman’s skeleton excavated in Rakhigarhi in Haryana between 1997 and 2000, which is incredibly undamaged. In his book EARLY INDIANS, Tony Joseph has written that only one of the fifty to sixty Rakhigarhi skeletons (c. 2600–2200 BCE, the Mature Harappan phase) offered DNA good enough for genetic analysis. And that skeleton (not the one in National Museum) settled one question finally. The Harappan civilisation happened before the steppe pastoralists migrated into India. the two groups had no shared genes.

As I looked at the woman wearing shell bangles on her left wrist, she opened a window to my distant past. She reminded me that we are descendants of an incredibly brilliant, peace-loving, mathematically gifted people. If young Indians are a force in the world of technology today, maybe, 5,000 years ago, the woman lying before me had passed on some of the genes that made it possible?

It was lunchtime and after walking many miles, the breakfast was almost forgotten! We weren’t far from Khan Market, where we went up a narrow staircase to reach Khan Chacha’s eatery. I am sure I had done a few good deeds in my previous life which entitled me to savour such a delectable combination of rumali roti and mutton at Khan Chacha’s. Must visit the place again because I doubt if there is a comparable place in heaven, which anyway is an unlikely destination for me.

Khan market, named after Gandhi’s friend Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was set up in 1951 to rehabilitate Punjabi refugees from West Pakistan. Over time, thanks to their enterprise, it has evolved into a first-class commercial hub frequented by politicians, journalists, diplomats, and other well-heeled Delhiites. For this reason, the Sanghi types coined the derogatory term “Khan Market Gang” to describe people who wear Western clothes but not a tilak, who read books, speak English, and are generally unaware of the original phase of the acche din two millennia ago. I noticed that the incorrigible Khan-Market crowd is yet to soak in the “sanskari” vibes and many of them still enjoy meat and reading. (Also, women’s clothes showed a distinct lack of disinclination towards the decadent West.)

To cater to readers among them, there are wo terrific bookshops in Khan Market: Bahrisons and Faqir Chand. We happened to walk into Bahrisons, which had books stacked from floor to ceiling, where Ritwik and I got exactly the books we were looking for. (Faqir Chand, a few blocks away, looked almost identical.) On top of that, there were copies of Amitava Ghosh’s latest novel _Ghost Eyes_ signed by the author. Ritwik grabbed two copies, one for a friend.

By then, I was quite tired and wanted to retire. But fortunately, I remembered that the National Gallery of Modern Arts (NGMA in short) which we had crossed in the morning wasn’t far away. For a long time, I had wanted to see Tyeb Mehta’s Human Landscape once again. And a Hemen Majumdar painting of a woman who was startled and embarrassed, presumably because someone had seen her while she was undressing.

Ritwik hadn’t visited NGMA, which has the finest collection of modern Indian art from Rabindranath Tagore to Bikash Bhattacharya. For the following three hours, Tagore, Abanindranath, Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Binode Behari Mukhopadhyay, Amrita Sherghil, Maqbul Fida Hussein et al took us to another world. I saw Tyeb Mehta’s painting again and was as amazed as I was the first time, but I couldn’t find Hemen Mazumdar or the large canvas of Jogen Chowdhury. (Why?) I was transfixed as I stood before a simple FN Souza drawing of a man in a few strokes. His haunting eyes gobbled me up for a while. It is a shame that NGMA doesn’t allow photography and hence I cannot show you the picture.

While our taxi went through a tree-lined avenue with embassies on either side of the road, I thought the areas we covered yesterday, i.e., a triangle with Aerocity, Rajghat, and Khan Market at its vertices, was possibly one of the finest urban landscapes of our time.

To wrap up, let me not forget say that contrary to popular belief, the Delhi people we met were almost epitomes of politeness. None of the three autorickshaw drivers we met tried to fleece us. Rather, they asked for modest amounts. Once, when we had to travel much longer than what the auto driver had initially anticipated, he didn’t grumble. And he was visibly pleased when I paid him for the extra distance without his asking for it. The oldest among the three, sixty plus Suresh Pandit, a proud brahmin and a true vegetarian, drives 20+ kilo metres from his East Delhi home to the Khan Market auto stand. Pandit said he was struggling to make ends meet because the app-based taxies were driving auto rickshaws out of Delhi roads. I was tempted to ask him if he realised that the political party he supports is doing exactly the opposite of what Gandhi prescribed, they are making life more difficult for the people who are already vulnerable.

 
I didn't ask him the question and he smiled warmly when we parted.

.

 Bengaluru / 08 February 2026

 

My Friend Pradip

 Last Thursday evening, as I sat through idleness and incessant rain outside, there was a phone call from an unknown number. It was one of those Bengaluru days when dampness reigns supreme and you tend to look more inward than outside. The call was from Kaberi, my friend Pradip’s wife. Kaberi said, ‘Your friend has left us today.’ The line was bad; I could catch little of what else she said.

I hope I won’t live long enough to receive many more such phone calls. But I won’t say it came as a shock, neither will I say I was devastated. What I can honestly say is this: since that moment, a dull, impalpable sadness has been hanging around me like the all-encompassing mist in rural Bengal in an evening in Hemanta, the often-unnoticed season between autumn and winter.

The phone call took me back to an indeterminable date in mid-1969 when Pradeep and I sat in the same classroom for the first time as undergrad students. Pradip, good looking and exceedingly fair, was mostly in kurta-pyjamas-slippers. His kurtas were invariably in light pastel shades, I didn’t see him in flashy clothes even as a teenager. We became friends easily, although we were very unlike. Pradip was quiet, never gloomy or angry, and always smiling, none of which adjectives fits me. In Bangla, Pradip means an earthen lamp. It won’t be an exaggeration if I say Pradip radiated happiness, which too is a kind of light. I believe Pradip never fought with anyone. I haven’t heard anyone say one negative word about him. That, in substance, was my friend Pradip Brahma.

While I lived in hostel, Pradip lived in a rented house with his mother. For some reason, I never visited their house in Santiniketan, although after graduating, I went to their Dhakuria home a number of times. It was a simple no-frills middleclass home.

Pradip was a disciplined hard-working good student. He did well at studies, but his BSc marksheet was unspectacular, as far as I can recall. After graduation, he didn’t join the Master’s course like most of his classmates. He did want to study further, but his family couldn’t afford it; he had to find a job quickly.

Back in the early 1970s, job opportunities were a negative number in West Bengal, which was going through the bloodbath of a failed revolution. Simultaneously, several economic factors including militant trade-unionism combined to drive away capital from Bengal. Major, century-old companies shifted their base away from Calcutta: Britannia, Brooke Bond, Lipton, ICI, to name a few. Thousands of manufacturing units, including a leading company, Metal Box shut down. The once thriving industrial estates in Howrah, which had begun under pioneers like Alamohan Das in the previous century, was turning into the death-valley of small industries that it is today. “Wagon breaking” would soon become an industry in itself. In front of their Chowringhee head office, jobless Metal Box workers sat under a red flag on a rug, shaking Bourn Vita tins partly filled with coins with a slit on its lid. Bourn Vita boosted their lives in the most perverse way then. They sat on the rug until death did them part, while the states whose names uppity Bengalis pronounced with disdain moved past. “Madrasis” had stopped coming to Calcutta for penpushers’ jobs; the reverse migration of Bengalis to South India for livelihood was yet to begin.

As unemployment stared at me, I had no idea how I could even look for a job, barring responding to rare adverts of job vacancies. But Pradip believed it wasn’t a problem. One just had to try hard. I was with him in one of his acts of trying hard when he and I barged into the office of the India Meteorological Department in Alipore with our CVs in plastic folders.

Although we were unsuccessful that morning, Pradip did find a job by trying hard. I don’t recall what kind of work it was, but I am sure it would have been one of the lowest paying sit-down jobs an educated person would accept. [After reading this, Pradip's daughter Rupsa told me that her father actually worked in a rice godown. It was far away from Jadavpur University, where Pradip would attend classes after his day's work. Rupsa also told me that her father had never even scolded her.]

Many in such a situation would spread roots under their desk and retire as a grumpy old man after wasting 35 years of their life. But Pradip enrolled for a three-year part-time MSc in Physics at Jadavpur University where he attended classes in the evening. If you don’t know how enormously difficult commuting was in Calcutta then and how tough physics is at the Master’s level, you won’t perhaps appreciate what impossible an unspectacular Pradip achieved in three years of work plus study.

Then he did his PhD from—if memory isn’t playing me false— the Indian Institute for Cultivation of Science in Jadavpur. He joined as a lecturer Sir Gurudas College in the city, from where he retired 10 years ago. There too Pradip showed his academic commitment. Instead of watching TV serials in the evening, he kept working on Solid State Physics through his college job and even after retirement, when he once told me, ‘I have published at least one paper every year since I began research.’

He need not have.

My transferable job took me away from Calcutta and I lost touch with Pradip soon after graduation. We picked up the thread in 2000, when I left my job and returned to Kolkata. Pradip was happily married then, his wife Kaberi, herself a highly competent person, too taught at a college. Their daughter Rupsa studied engineering and got a job at campus placement which took her to Japan. She and her husband work and live in Singapore now with their little son.

While Pradip did exceedingly well in his career and personal life, a neurological condition troubled him in the last inning of his life. Neurological medicines, which are invariably toxic, slowed him down and added kilograms to his once fine body. When I saw Pradip moving with difficulty, I recalled he was one of the finest table tennis players among us. And like in his life, he was never aggressive while playing table tennis. He would block all your smashes with infinite patience until you hit one into the net or go beyond the table.

He blocked the relentless aggression of a neurological disease for ten years or more until 7 August 2026. But ultimately, everyone has to lose the last match.

Goodbye, my friend. At last, you have managed to draw a few drops of tears in my eyes.

Bengaluru / 12 August 2025

 

WHY KOLKATA?

Although I am an authentic mache-bhate Bengali, more than half my friends are from South India. Incidentally, many of them have lived in what was then Calcutta for at least a few years; three among them were born there and studied up to primary school to university in the city. One among them, Ramachandran, is the worst Calcutta fanatic I’ve come across. He says Flury’s makes the tastiest pastries in the world, Nahum’s, the richest plum cakes (of course, in the world), and you get the juiciest beef rolls ITW at Nizam’s behind New Market. I have at times wondered why every one of them is such a passionate lover of the dying city where you sweat 24X7 for eight months, a city that routinely goes under water at least three times between July and October, a city that is perennially dirty and overcrowded. … How on earth can you fall in love with her?

I reckoned they are in love with the metropolis because most of them lived there in the 1960’s or before, when Calcutta was actually one of the finest cities in the world. In the late 1950s, and even in the ’60s, every morning when I waited for school bus around five-thirty,  the roads used to be washed with water jets. There was a separate network of pipelines all over the city for drawing water from the Ganga for this purpose! (On our terrace, there was a topless tank to store the untreated river water that was used for cleaning etc.) There were hardly any taller-than-three-storey buildings; the sky was much bigger. Roads were well maintained. Buses were crowded; trams were spanking clean. It was unthinkable to get cheated by a Calcutta taxi driver, particularly if he was a Sardarji.  Hawkers hadn’t taken over the pavements along every major throughfare. The cinemas in upmarket Chowringhee were a treat. Even in the late seventies, you could enjoy a relaxed drink at the uncrowded, beautifully furnished pubs in Globe, Light House, and Metro after watching a John Ford or Clint Eastwood Western. In Metro, we would walk unsteadily (even without a drink) as our ankles sunk in the soft carpet. Usha Uthup used to sing at the Trincas. The television hadn’t arrived.

But all those were merely on the surface. I believe those who knew the city intimately also experienced non-transactional, much warmer one-to-one relationships with the people around, something that might not have existed elsewhere. Also, Calcutta didn’t look down upon the poor. Rather, she had space for everyone. That tradition continues. Presently, in my three weeks stay here, I’ve had a few glimpses of that egalitarian warmth.

In the much better organized city and the tech capital of the country where I spend half my time these days, changing a watch battery costs ₹800+ at the nearest watch shop which happens to be in a swanky shopping mall. Therefore, I was delighted when my Casio watch stopped during our flight to Kolkata.

Next morning, I went to our local watch-man Aseem, who has been running a road-side kiosk for 20 years near my home. Aseem showed me a Maxell battery and put it in the watch for a hefty sum of ₹200. (Before writing this, I checked online. Aseem Banerjee matched the price offered by Jeff Bezos.) Then I sheepishly fished out an Allwyn watch that had been dead for over 10 years. I hadn’t thrown it away only because it was a gift from my beloved (and only) wife. (Those days, the price of a quartz wrist watch was half my monthly salary and more than what she earned as a school teacher in a month.) Aseem opened the case and fished out a black mass. He said he would replace it with a new movement which would cost ₹550 including the battery! … I am sure you will find people like Aseem in less prosperous areas of Bengaluru or Hyderabad, but the difference here is, it’s the norm in Kolkata. But there is a flip-side to the story.

Aseem has been selling his expertise for 20 years. Nothing has changed for him in these two decades except that he has become older.

The next story was narrated by a friend, S. S’s Man Friday Dilip (name changed), who is about 60, suffered a massive heart attack not long ago. After a few hits and misses at different hospitals, S managed to get Dilip admitted to RG Kar Medical College, one of the oldest, largest, and filthiest government hospitals in Kolkata. (As you would know, RG Kar has been in news recently because a trainee doctor was raped and murdered in its premises and the powers that be have been largely successful in burying the case.) My friend said it was past midnight when they reached the hospital which was unbelievably overcrowded and unclean. Stray dogs seemed to have 24-hour passes at the hospital. Lots of patients were in the Emergency ward and outside it. Sitting, lying down, on benches, on the floor. Through the chaos, a group of men and women (more women than men) in white coats ran around, not walked, and treated patients. My friend was amazed to see that the doctors actually treated patients in such an environment. Dilip was admitted and brought back from the brink. (He would have died if medical help was delayed by a few more hours.) Later, a stent was implanted in his heart; he was discharged in a week’s time. The cost of treatment? Zero rupees, as Dilip had been wise enough to acquire a free Sastha-Sathi insurance card from the Government of West Bengal.

The third anecdote too is about sickness, but on a much smaller scale. the main protagonist in this story is a fiftyish woman whose name I do not know. We call her Neera’s ma (name changed). Neera’s family irons our clothes and her mom comes to collect and deliver clothes. She is not a particularly busy person; whenever she comes, she sits down for a chat, which is pretty long when my wife Arundhati (name unchanged) is present. We too love to track the career paths of her three daughters. The first one is a trained nurse, the second, a commerce graduate, packs materials at an Amazon godown for 12 hours every day. The third, Neera, is studying nursing and midwifery. A competent mom has seen to it that her daughters stood on their own feet in a country where millions of graduates are unemployed.

Over time, Neera’s mom has become a family friend. She came in the evening one day and sat down. Arundhati was limping a bit; Neera’s ma quickly diagnosed the problem and before leaving, prescribed what to do.

Minutes later, she came back with a pain spray and said it had reduced her  ankle pain. But, ‘You must take paracetamol along with this.’

Besides reducing Arundhati’s pain, Neera’s mom demonstrated why Kolkata even now is the most charming place ITW.

Kolkata / 21 May 2025

The Princess and the Pauper

 

The happiest moment after beginning campus life arrived a few weeks after our academic term began. The sky was overcast that morning; a wet wind announced the onset of happy rains, blowing away twigs and shrunken leaves accumulated over a long dry summer. As we were reluctantly preparing for college, the news came it would be a day off for the entire university. Moreover, it would be a day of outing, an English word I hadn’t heard.

Soon, hundreds of boys and girls began walking away from the campus, along gravelled roads, across barren undulating red laterite grounds called the khowai, many singing in groups. Our destination was the River Kopai. The horizon beckoned us as dark clouds above turned the ground below into a darker shade of crimson. An outing was a part of the campus life in Santinketan. An event to usher in a new season.

Whoever had thought of the event was a teenager at heart. Apart from being close to nature, it was the first time I was in proximity with so many young girls. After nine years in a boys’ school that was as barren as the sands of a seashore, spending half a day with so many beautiful girls was a delight. Countless glances would have been stolen that morning, and I guess some hearts would have been exchanged, or just given!

I gave my heart to a girl who smiled at me. She was beautiful, slender, and exceedingly fair. Let me quickly add that she would have been beautiful in everyone’s eyes, not just to a seventeen-year-old yokel. She looked like a princess. Most unfortunately for me, she was actually a princess! Of an Indian princely state.

I never mustered up the courage to speak to her, though I rehearsed the opening lines of a never-to-happen dialogue in my head millions of times. There was some chemistry whenever our eyes met on the campus. There was also a hint of a smile on her lips, or maybe, I imagined it. In our dining hall, I noticed her a couple of times, looking dejectedly at the steel plate with rice, watery dal, postor jhol, and maybe, an egg. Her grandfather might have been an admirer of Rabindranath Tagore, but it would have been cruel to expose her to the food served by the kitchen of the university set up by him. She left after a few months.

A huge burden was off my chest.

Bengaluru, March 2025

Sexual dimorphism

 

The header of this article is a phrase I have come across recently. To be honest, this brief note is an attempt to show off my newly-acquired vocabulary, but I guess you will enjoy if you read on, particularly if you are interested in the animal world or the evolution of life forms. 

“Dimorphic” means “representing two distinct forms”. Sexual dimorphism means the differences in sizes, strength, and behaviour patterns between the two sexes of the same species, and how different they look. For example, among wild mammals, males are often bigger and more aggressive than females. Females, on the other hand, take care of their infants. Among birds, males not only have attractive plumes and colours, usually, they are the ones that sing! The male deer has antlers, a cumbersome accessory, but it adds to his visual appeal, besides being useful during fights with other males. 

Males and females are different because the struggle for reproductive success has each of them along different evolutionary trajectories. Male birds / mammals have to win sexual contests with other males. To put it simply, they must impress females, a situation you come across in humans in campuses and everywhere else. 

Interestingly, sexual dimorphism is much less pronounced among domesticated animals because they don’t have the same evolutionary pressures as wild animals! Their survival (or suffering) and procreation is ensured by their human masters. Among humans, in so-called civilized societies, physical strength has taken a back seat in personal contacts. Even if a man has a contest with another to win the favours of a woman, they don’t try to beat each other to pulp. Usually! Consequently, sexual dimorphism is less pronounced among humans. According to an estimate, 10% of US men weigh less than the average weight of an American woman. Men don’t need a bigger body or muscles to impress women these days. Instead, they try to enrol in Ivy Leage universities. IITs in our country.

However, certain forms of dimorphism, like bright colours among birds and antlers on deer should be a disadvantage for their survival. These make them more visible and easier targets for predators. But the paradox is easily resolved if you consider that the reproductive success of an animal is often more important than his/her life span. For example, a wild male pheasant lives half as long as a female. (Nature is perhaps not as partial to males as it might seem at the first glance!) A male pheasant’s reproductive success depends not on how long he lives, but on how many females he can mate with. Bright plumage improves his chances. On the other hand, among insects, females are often bigger than males as they need volume to produce a large number of eggs.

I got interested in the topic while reading some books. Of these, one I read at a stretch over the last two days: a beautiful Bangla novel for young adults and children like me. The story is around the evolutionary success of migratory birds in particular and birds in general. The title of the book is অচিন পাখী  which literally mean An Exotic Bird.

The author of the book is Debashis Moitra, who besides writing in Bangla, teaches civil engineering. Humans are no less intriguing than birds!

More about the book later. Please watch this space!

20 March 2022 / edited on Friday, 22 March 2024

Picture of male and female orioles from Marin Independent Journal, e-edition

Decoding Brand Modi

The Secret of Survival for 10 years

India Today Conclave, Mumbai 2023

Beloved Modi-ji has been the PM for 9 years and 4+ months, but INDIA TODAY would like us to believe he’s been in power for 10 years. It’s a minor trickery, somewhat counter-parallel to Bata selling shoes for Rs.999.95. In a discussion anchored by Rahul Kanwal (a proud Modi bhakt) and another journalist, a group of marketing / advertising big cheeses laboured  hard for 33 minutes to prove the invincibility of “Brand Modi”. 

In the normal course, I wouldn’t have watched the video, but I did, because a friend sent the link with an intro that read: Sorry for sharing the video so early in the morning. Indian Today anchors are live examples of what described the media during the Emergency: “When asked to bend, they crawled.” In fact, I think it’s more than crawling now. Let me explain why I think so.

In one of his memoirs—I don’t recall which one—physicist Richard Feynman describes the difference between a scientist and a salesman: A scientist, even the most unspectacular one, would invariably mention the downsides of the theory proposed by them, and in what conditions the theory doesn’t work. But for a salesman, hiding the negative aspects of their product is de rigueur, a part of the job. The Indian mainstream media today is more salesmanship than journalism. And for the modern-day marketing executives, who often build a false narrative—sometimes a myth—about the product and call it  a brand, one cannot but feel a little pity. These smooth-talking, smart, and well-informed men spend their life inventing beautiful lies. 

Personally, I hadn’t heard the name of any of the INDIA TODAY panelists except Dilip Cherian, who spoke glowingly about Modi’s event management skills. Watching four of them waxing eloquent about Modiji was a learning experience for me. In the 33 minutes they talked, none of the essential issues concerning Modi and his prime-ministership was touched. If an intelligent being from another planet had watched the video, the poor fellow would imagine India had zero problem with the economy, her social harmony was perfect, her democracy was functioning beautifully with its pillars such as the judiciary, parliament, and media in good health. The conclave sidestepped all the critical issues in the context of which Modi should have been examined. 

Instead, the panelists said something that were both bizarre and startling: 

• Modi rules over the hearts of the people. Evidence: Survey by some unnamed US organisation which found Modi is the most popular national leader in the world with 76% approval rating. (Not a word about the methodology of the survey or the size / nature of the sample they used.)

• BJP doesn’t win elections by creating religious divides, but because of the development they have brought about. Proof: “Religion doesn’t fill stomachs.”

• The panelists talked eloquently about the comparability of Modi and Xi Jinping. They had no problem about the fact that Modi was a leader in a democracy and XI, of the biggest totalitarian state in history. Actually, by making the comparison, they let the cat out of the bag about their own concept of democracy.

• When asked about the weaknesses of the “Brand Modi”, the panelists struggled hard to find an answer. Their innocence was touching; perhaps they hadn’t noticed Modi’s proclivity to take decisions without consulting anyone, his disdain for democratic processes, his shameless hatred for Muslims and Christians, his abject failure to manage the economy of the country, ... his lies. In particular, the panelists seemed to have missed the following.

o The economic distress caused by demonetisation with zero prior study, and ignoring the opinion of RBI.

o Haphazard implementation of the GST by relying on a single IAS officer from—where else but—Gujarat, which caused more damage.

o the enormous suffering of the migrant workers when Modi announced a nation-wide lockdown at 4 hours’ notice, once again without any evidence of planning.

o The delay in introducing vaccines, countless documented instances of people dying because of lack of oxygen, and the bodies floating on the Ganga during the second wave of COVID.

o Muslims attacked and killed in every BJP ruled state with no legal action against the criminals.

o Systematic destruction of Muslims homes, again by BJP ruled states in complete and egregious violation of legal provisions.

During the discussion, Dilip Cherian said that Coca Cola, the most successful brand of the 20th century, contains 30% sugar, but the company doesn’t reveal the fact. (It’s not obliged to?) Similarly, Modi doesn’t have to acknowledge his weaknesses. It’s the brand that matters.

It does seem we have evolved from the idea of the media bending or crawling. From the idea that a leader must be measured against his/her performance. Modi is a brand around which an aura is to be created. Modi has to be marketed, like Coke, whether it’s poison or not. Just as capitalism is value neutral as long as there’s profit, in today’s India, anything that Modi does is fine, as long as he wins elections!

You have to decide if deserves to win the elections in 2024.

08/10/2023

Photos courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

Left: By Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India

Right: By Ralf Roletschek - Own work, Public Domain

Genuine fountain pen, awful cooking oil

 

This happened long ago in the last century when Indian Railways had non-airconditioned first class coaches. The coaches, which were partitioned into eight cubicles with either four or two berths in each, had a corridor on one side connecting them. (Is there an English word for them?) I miss those coaches with large openable windows that let in strong gusts of air while the train moved, besides offering an unimpeded view of the world outside.

If you knew me well, you would perhaps know that I am not particularly fond of self-promotion. But for a change, let me say that I have a world record. It is as follows: as a passenger, I have always been the first person to reach a railway station or airport, invariably hours before time. That morning too, when I boarded Coromandel Express, my fellow passengers hadn’t arrived. I was alone in a four-berth cubicle. My destination was Madras, mother of Chennai, where I would change train for Trivandrum, my workplace. At that time, I had lived in Kerala for many years. I had fallen in love with the place and her people. In particular, I loved three things of Kerala, the undulating lush green landscape, the unmatched cleanliness of the people, and their delectable food.

I opened an India Today, which was an eminently readable magazine those days; its owner, Aroon Purie hadn’t become the cringeworthy sycophant of the ruling party he is now. Midway through the first article, I was interrupted by a thin young man in shabby clothes and uncombed hair, ‘Dada, this is genuine Chinese,’ he took out a golden fountain pen from his pocket, ‘… Please buy one, dada. For just 10 rupees, it’s a steal!’ That it was counterfeit was written all over the product and the vender. It had been manufactured not in China, but perhaps in Howrah. Even then, I bought a pen without saying a word for two reasons: first, although his pen was fake, the fellow seemed to be a genuine struggling young man, and second, I wanted to get rid of him quickly.

Soon, a man, who seemed to be a Malayali, walked in with a small suitcase. He asked me where I was headed, and when I said ‘Trivandrum,’ his face lit up with happiness. He volunteered with the information that he had come to Calcutta on office work and spent a difficult week here. ‘What a horrible place! Men bathe in the open!’ Was he disappointed because women didn’t? Anyway, I didn’t feel like pointing out that if men bathing in the open was the chief criterion for a place to be horrible, then every Indian village too was a horrible place.

Although I didn’t share his indignation, my companion kept talking in a friendly manner, ‘I was in my company guest house. These beggars (some Malayalis pronounce buggers as beggars, at least they did then) eat such awful food. … Do you know what cooking oil they use?’ After a long pause pregnant with possibilities, the gentleman announced, ‘Bledy mustard oil! Can you believe it?’

At that point, a portly middle-aged Bengali walked in, followed  by a porter carrying two suitcases. After finishing a brief argument with the porter about what would be a fair compensation, the man sat down with a sigh and asked, ‘Apni Bangali?’

In the meantime, the Malayali gentleman had gone to the loo. My new acquaintance began talking to me in Bangla. When he heard I was going to Kerala, he looked sad. In a heavy voice he asked, ‘Have you been in Kerala before?’

‘Never,’ a white lie.

‘Go there, but I tell you, you won’t be able to eat anything.’

‘Why?’

‘The fools use coconut oil for cooking. Can you imagine?’

Meanwhile, the train had started to move. To avoid hearing more unpleasantries, I took out my diary and began writing. To my surprise, the new pen wrote beautifully. I felt bad for presuming that the young man was a cheat. I admonished myself for being judgmental.

A few minutes later, as train crossed the outer signals, the flow of ink stopped. It never restarted.

That it would malfunction was expected. But its maker’s expertise was astonishing. It worked exactly for the period of time for which it was required to work. Amazing perfection!

3 April 2023

Kolkata Diary 2 / Nayantara in a Globalised World

Nayantara, which means the star of one’s eye in Bangla, was the star of her father’s eye. He died in his sleep two days ago. 

Nayantara’s mother Shanti worked as cook in our home for 10 years. A quiet diminutive woman in her forties then, she would come for two hours every weekday. And during the long period, she was absent for a total number of zero days (I mean AWOL). Neither was she late once. Once, a cyclone-hit Kolkata was under knee-deep water and it was still pouring. Shops hadn’t opened; buses weren’t plying. But Shanti arrived at the precise time. Besides her discipline, honesty, and decent culinary skills, Shanti is an unexceptional person.

Her husband Sudhir was an expert machinist who ran a cottage industry, using his own lathe. He fabricated small industrial components for the dying engineering units located around the city. (Shanti, who helped her husband at work, couldn’t describe the product, and I left it there.) Sadly, given the state of the economy in West Bengal, Sudhir’s clients’ factories would be closed more often than not, and consequently, Sudhir was unemployed for most of the year. In fact, that is the reason Shanti took up a cook’s job. Ours happened to be the first house she worked in.

Last evening, we reached Shanti’s house after taking several turns in narrow lanes that weren’t Wider than five feet at any point. But thanks to Kolkata Corporation’s people-friendly work, the alleys, all cemented, were scrupulously clean; there were gutters leading to an underground drain every 100 feet or so. Halogen light bulbs flooded the lanes in bright white.

As four of us sat on the only armless three-sitter sofa in the room, Shanti stood before us and talked. We couldn’t ask her to sit down because there was no other place to sit in the tiny room cluttered with old calendars hanging on unpainted walls. Shanti’s house has two small rooms and a smaller one for visitors, which I’ve just mentioned. However, the walled compound is spacious, with several fruit trees. The mango and jackfruit trees reminded me of the delectable fruits Shanti used to bring for us every summer.

Usually in these circumstances in our part of the world, the house of bereavement is flooded with relatives and friends. But when we were there, there was none beside mother and daughter. Both of them seemed to have taken the sudden, completely unforeseen shock with remarkable calm. Or maybe, the enormity of the loss was yet to sink in. Nayantara, wearing pink trousers and a poncho over her shirt, came and stood beside her mother.

A good student, Nayantara had graduated with Honours in English. Then she found a job at a call centre on the other side of the city. It ended her dream of higher studies, but saved the family. She commuted 30 kilometres by bus every morning, and her company provided transport at night. She would reach home at 12:30 AM with mother waiting to serve her food. I knew all that, but as I was away from Kolkata for three years, I didn’t know she had lost her job during the pandemic. I asked her what she is doing now.

‘I’ve been working for an Australian company for the last six months.’

‘Great, where is your office?’

‘We don’t have an office in India yet. We are a small team of just 21 people. But we meet from time to time at a conference hall. I work from home … from 4 in the morning to 11, with a recess for an hour.’

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘I work for a telecom company. In Australia, every telecom company has to provide a combined package of telephone and internet services. Our company doesn’t have individual clients, it’s all B-to-B. My job is to call up corporate clients and convince them to shift to our network.’

‘Including cold calls?’

‘Yes, some of them.’

‘What is the talk-time for you in a day?’

‘At least two hours.’

Wow! Sitting in a corner of Kolkata, Nayantara convinces Australian companies to buy her network! Does she find the Australian accent difficult?

‘No, not really. I worked for a British firm for five years. So, I was quite okay with the British accent. Initially, I found the Australian accent difficult. But they trained us for a month. It’s okay now. A bigger problem was that I knew nothing about the telecom sector. I had to work hard to understand the industry.’

‘What kind of work did you do in your previous company?’

‘I sold nuisance-call blocking devices to elderly people in the UK.’

‘Wow! How do you find your present company?’

‘Very good. There are no hassles, my salary comes into the bank on the first of every month. The recess hour is flexible. I can even take off four fifteen-minute chunks any time I like.’

‘You found your earlier job through campus placement. How did you find this one?’

‘Through LinkedIn. I had to go through three rounds of interviews.’

 *

West Bengal is known to the rest of India for its moribund economy, lazy people, and a government seeped in corruption. From outside, it looks like a perfect cesspool. As we walked back, I thought when the Gods are against you, only education can help. I also thought however much the scoundrels who run our country might try, it’s difficult to put down young people. They rise above the ruins around them and chart their own course. Nayantara and her 20 colleagues are an irrefutable proof of that fact.

Live long Nayantara, live well, live independent. Be a beacon to the hundreds of similarly disadvantaged young boys and girls around you.

 [Needless to say, I have changed the names of the protagonists to protect their identity. But the rest of the story is unadulterated truth.]

 

15 Jan 23 / ©Santanu Sinha Chaudhuri

Kolkata Diary 1 / A mother is born

If you have a sweater under your jacket, a woollen flat cap to cover your head, and if your feet are in comfortable shoes, a January morning in Kolkata can be enchanting. 

After many months, we returned home last night. Although I am not an early riser, this morning I ventured out at six to get milk for our coffee and a Bangla newspaper. The sun was yet to be up, the lake in front of our home and the trees around it were under the blanket of a mysterious fog that never fails to bewitch me. A few die-hard early-morning walkers around the lake looked like health-conscious ghosts in the semidarkness. If there was heaven on earth, it could only be in Kolkata during the winter. 

As I approached the newspaper vendor standing behind his bicycle on which piles of newspapers carrying terrible stories were neatly arranged, a man standing nearby casually threw his empty paper tea cup on the road. Chalta hai! 

The newspaper man asked me with a smile, ‘When did you come back?’ Face recognition ... a pleasant homecoming. A woman sitting with vegetables on the other side of the road called me, ‘E dike eso baba, tomay diyei bounita kori. Come here son; let me begin my day’s business with you!’ 

I was happy to be called son. My mother had passed away 40 years before. Besides, no one can say No to such an endearing request. Her merchandise wasn’t much, some coconuts, bananas, and banana flowers. The last product, which we call mocha, is a delicacy. But removing the sap between the petals of a mocha is a painstaking, time-consuming job. When she held out a mocha for me, I said, ‘You want me to get an earful from my wife so early in the morning? Who would remove the petals?’ 

She said, ‘Don’t worry son, I came here at five o’ clock so that your wife doesn’t have to bother.' And she proffered neatly packed mocha petals in a plastic bag. 

She had come from Amtala, a place 20 kilometres away, which means she would have started latest by 4 in the morning. When I asked her if I could take her picture, she quickly covered her head and broke into a beaming smile. 

One doesn’t have to go to Paris to see a smiling woman! 

 9 January 2023 / ©Santanu Sinha Chaudhuri

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

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