Madhyamik and Nishiniloy

Good to be back from hibernation and all that. Let's start with a couple of things I spotted in the newspaper this morning. Today, I see, begins the Madhyamik (i.e.Secondary exams under West Bengal Board of Secondary Education) and in the two districts of Midnapore alone, over a lakh of examinees are taking the tests. If this is the statistic from two largish districts, even a conservative estimate would peg the total rather close to a million or more. Given that everyone who crosses the tenth standard has to necessarily undergo some form of standardized school leaving test or the other, I too, aeons ago, suffered this grand rite of academic passage. I did everything possible to escape, including divorcing my textbooks in the long run and embracing a formidable couple of physical maladies. However, my mother somehow made sure I sleepwalked through the ordeal, and the examiners were careless enough to award me pass marks.

I do not really believe these tests comprehensively establish one's academic competence or foretell her future propects, but they do test one's adaptability to a given system of evaluation. In hindsight, I believe this is eminently possible if one cares to try hard enough. But I refuse to pontificate further on such weighty issues for I have weightier issues to attend to. Question paper leaks, for instance, is one such and I have--tangentially speaking--had at least one close encounter with the phenonmenon. The following account is pretty accurate barring a chronological detail. My batchmates will work that out anyway, and it is of no great import to the rest.

The day before our English test, one of my friends accosted me to the house of one of his friends where I found quite an assembly my batchmates. These were all backbenchers, like me, who took great pleasure in taking studies for a ride. One of them, I was told, had procured from somewhere a particular newspaper report on the runaway elephants of the Dalma hills. I was called upon to decipher the contents of the piece in a manner intelligible to this bunch. They had been suggested that this particular passage would reappear in the question paper in the form of a compreension test. Comprehension tests carried close to twenty five marks, only five less than the minimum pass marks. In other words, if you scored full marks in that part of the question, you almost scraped through, with some guesswork thrown in for good measure here and there. I did as I was told. Frankly, I did not take the whole thing very seriously.

As it turned out, the passage indeed appeared in the question paper the next morning, albeit in a simpler form. In addition, there was a short essay on a family picnic which too formed part of last afternoon's inputs. Many of us, most if I remember correctly, thus crossed the river of 'English' fire, as it were.

Did we deserve to pass? Was it not unfair on the students who did not know that some of us knew? Was I right in being part of what, strictly speaking, was an unfair conspiracy? I have some tentative answers but honestly I am not very sure. To start with, I did not particularly need the help. Second, I did not solicit it either. Third, I was not averse to helping some of these boys who I knew would not take up serious academics anyway, but did need that pass certificate badly. Fourth, I deduced that we were just lucky and that surely many students benefit from similar leaks every year. Finally, I think all systems of evaluation are loaded in favour of some examinees by default and that is inevitable. In other words, some participants always begin with some special advantages, and it so happens purely by chance. This is true about every test in life in that we are all programmed to perform better in some tests and not in others. No standardized test can ever be so designed, in a manner of speaking. All tests, in other words, are about our capacity to adapt to their particular formats. Some of us adapt better, some do not, some wish to and yet others just let go. Life is never fair in an absolute sense, but it offers us all enough scope to try and overcome our limitations and be at par with the best, if only we choose to. Not so simple, though. Some structures are often irreversibly loaded against some participants and so on. I do not have any more defence to offer and I do not regret what I did.

Nishiniloy is ostensibly a new Bengali word coined by the copy editors of Anandabazar Patrika. I read it in today's edition of the Patrika, deployed as a Bengali synonym for pub. There was this editorial--ABP editorials always appear in purportedly Sadhu bhasha--deploring, correctly I may add, a fiat by some local politicians in the Salt Lake area of Calcutta to shut down swimming pools in residential areas because they thought ladies wearing swimsuits do not make for ideally dressed Bhartiya Nari. I greatly enjoyed the title of the piece--cultural dinosaurs--but my smooth progress along the piece was jarred by this new word Nishiniloy. The word was used as an adjective, describing the young girls of Mangalore roughed up a few weeks ago by some ruffians on the same pretext of reportedly sullying our great 'Indian' culture.

I want to dwell a bit more on this word. Now I am game for new coinages and I do appreciate one must not close one's mind to linguistic innovations but this one really beats me. I thought Nishi in Bengali meant night and Niloy a house. I would have thought their juxtaposition creates Dwanda Samas of the very literal sort, the kind that actually conjures up a meaning very far from the intended one. Nishiniloy would be far more proximate to a house of disrepute--a brothel, that is--than to a pub and is thus a linguistic incongruity of the first order. Wait a minute pal--I am not imputing any value to going to a brothel but only trying to clarify a common Bengali usage.

I remember reading a Sunday HT column by Indrajit Hazra the other day lamenting the lack of pub culture in India. He was not calling out for drunken orgies, but rather referring to the English paractice of the countryfolk-even cityfolk- gathering around the pub for a quiet drink and catching up of all sorts after a hard day's work, hanging out, as it were. I am only suggesting that Bengali language never had a word for pub precisely because the stuff did not quite exist in our imagination or practice. Paanshala or Madhushala do not quite fit the bill, for both willy nilly envisage drinking as an extraordinary practice--either as a vice, or virtue of a delivering kind. Shunrikhana--oops, could could you please find a more value-laden word?

I wonder why must we rush to Translate every single thing that comes our way. Pubbing, like drinking, dining, studying or earning money or falling (!?) in love or painting or singing or dancing, is neither a virtue nor a vice, unless one goes for an overkill. At any rate, it is ceratinly not the same as visiting sex workers. Why must the girls going into a pub for a fun evening be translated as Nishiniloygami Taruniborgo and not just Pubgami Taruniborgo? Do the average pubs boast of rooms for nightstay? Must all foreign words be purged from our Tatsama tongue in order to parade its Sanskrit roots? Ironical, isn't it, this falling back on a language whose name literally means the reformed?

Time will of course tell. I will look forward to following the development of this particular word, and my hunch is it will soon recede into disuse. I am afraid Bangla has more to fear from its overzealous adherents than from its perceived threats. To these great minds and hearts soldiering for the survival and prosperity of the Bengali language, I dedicate poet Shubho Dasgupta's 'Bankubabur Bangla Priti'--a little gem of a rhyme in chaste Bengali.

Politicians and Pakistan: we get what we deserve

It’s been a week since the most gruesome public tragedy in independent India. Amid the cacophony all around us two entities have received the maximum amount of collective condemnation: Pakistan and Politicians. Everyone seems to agree that politicians within and Pakistan without have ruined everything that is dear to us—politics, society, people, monuments, systems, institutions, conscience and all else that can be eroded and made dysfunctional. Interestingly both of them are out there, not within us. We seem to agree that all is right within us.

I beg to differ. Even children are taught that things happen on account of two kinds of causes: external and internal. Even if I am to admit that the two causes from outside have been correctly identified—and I do agree that they have been—I see absolutely no reflection on what happened to our internal defense mechanisms. I do not refer to the armed forces or police when I say defense. Rather it is to our own individual and collective vulnerabilities that I seek to address. Defeat, said Josephus Daniels centuries ago, never comes to a man until he admits it. And I sense a severe helplessness and desperation in the collective outpourings in the print and electronic media during the past week. Even the highlighting of tales of individual glory and sacrifices of individual soldiers and policemen cannot adequately camouflage the larger reality of our collective failure.

Righteous indignation won’t do, neither would all sorts of suggestions about preventive measures from non-experts of all hues. It is obvious that something fundamental has gone seriously wrong. Only a much more thoroughgoing multidisciplinary investigation will bring out the truth, not snap judgements based on instant ‘leaks’. Yes, many of us, both persons in positions of responsibility and common people, have made fatal mistakes. But what will blaming Pakistan and politicians achieve? Pakistani state is clearly incapable of reining in the ‘terrorists’ and our politicians will remain the same unless some of ‘us’ choose to forsake the comforts of middle class life and careers and take to active politics, like the few honest and sincere politicians who still offer hope and promise.

We suffer from cowardice, a mortal fear to lose whatever little we have. This fear of parting company with our little everythings will always pull us back from joining public life. Our best and the brightest will always go to the most secure and rewarding of careers, following a very rigorous academic preparation and training from institutions that tests their intellectual and mental abilities to the limits. Now when they work so hard, they will obviously seek the highest compensation in terms of good life and money, especially considering that that often put in 16-17 hours of professional labor every single working day. I have absolutely no issues when they demand safety for their life and property but I wonder whether they could spare some thought for the second rung minds entrusted with that very job. In other words, those who are entrusted with protecting our life and property are not, as a whole, the most suitable for the job and two, the most talented or suitable candidates do not opt for these jobs because they don’t pay. A friend forwarded me a sms last night comparing the Rs. 5 crores state award to a shooter when he won an Olympic gold with the measly five lakh to those shooters who laid down their lives to save others’. It is not a question of belittling the stellar contribution of Bindra, but one of our lopsided priorities. The state needs to know which job involves the maximum risk and needs to allocate compensation accordingly.

As for ordinary Indians, we have our heart at the right place but are always afraid that greater forces will fail us no matter how hard we try. I propose to illustrate this point with a personal anecdote. It happened shortly after I came to Delhi nearly three and a half years ago. I was still getting used to the ways of Delhi, where things happen in, well, strange, ways and success and failure is measured in ways that I have been still learning.

I live in one of the most secure corners of New Delhi, walled off from the din, blessed with abundant greens all around and fortified by the non stop patrolling of a few hundreds of private securitymen. Yet this is the place where it happened. During one June evening, as I was reading something in one of the library reading rooms, I thought I heard a muffled cry from a female voice. From the sound it appeared to come from the other end of the reading room. Now this reading room is large enough to contain nearly 100 or more readers and the sound must have been loud enough to travel to the back benches where I had been seating. When it came for the second time, I lifted my head but found everyone in the room perfectly at ease. I deduced the sound had been coming from outside and asked a few people sitting near me whether they heard it too. They said they did and advised me keep quiet and get back to reading.

But I failed to keep myself unmoved when I heard it the third time and rushed out of the l.ibrary, following the direction of the sound. It was completely dark but I found my way to the raised concrete slabs along the narrow passage between the canteen and some of the schools, to the point just beyond the outer wall of the reading room. I saw a girl whimpering before a boy who looked visibly angry.

I will not relate the details of the story on principle except what I did, that too in bare outlines. I did enough that evening to bring the matter to a peaceful conclusion for the time being. But the boy, who looked tall and muscular, came from outside and threatened me with dire consequences, somehow managed to insert within me a deep fear and insecurity from then on. I was new to the city, knew very few people except from my center, had a family back home and so on and so forth. You know the usual middle class existential worries.

It’s been three years, I know a lot more people in the city today and did little to brighten the face of my family in the meanwhile, as they say in Bengali. Yet since then I have stayed away from affairs where I perceive my own physical well being may be under any threat. You see the irony is I have actually taught myself to overestimate the strength of my perceived threats, as a matter of course. It’s the same mentality that makes us turn the other way when we spot someone lying on the streets in a pool of blood. I recall an incident last month in Calcutta, where a man suffered a heart attack in a busy thoroughfare and the thousands passing by the road did not bother to take him to the nearest hospital. Yet we all tut-tuted so much when we read it in the morning papers. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been there. I too am afraid of the police interrogation but I guess I would have tried. I donno really and can not vouch with certainty.

Here is my point about our collective vulnerability. Why are we so bothered today about so many deaths? My answer is because we can blame Pakistan and politicians. When it is our turn to save lives, we look the other way round but when it is out turn to blame external agencies we are all too eager to apportion blame. All of us are Mumbaikars today, scream opinion makers. You know what that actually means? That we are not Mumbaikars otherwise.

I do not believe in god that strongly nor in retribution but I say we deserved this. We deserved this because we do not care. The adman-lyricist Prasoon Joshi said as much in his poem Is Baar Nahi (Not this time) and I cannot thank TimesNow enough for airing such a moving response. Joshi says it’s time to preserve our anger, allow it to smolder and continue to remind us just how much we have let go and not exhaust it all out through unconsidered, instant bursts of indignation.

Pakistan cannot change or it’ll not survive. Politicians will not change as we will continue to prevent ourselves from joining politics because we know it’s a dirty profession. Will we change? Will we stop blaming others for our own miseries? No body can guarantee that such attacks will not recur. But we can ensure that the attackers pay. I do not have the competence to suggest how. But I can suggest ways to learn to value others’ lives a bit more. If we see any one suffering on the road, let us at least learn to cancel that life changing meeting that our bosses and partners have most kindly scheduled for us and take him to the nearest hospital. This mentality alone will take us towards devising more effective strategies against terrorist attacks. In other words, I submit that we cannot devise effective counter terrorism measures until and unless we value every life lost as our own. The state will offer some compensation in monetary terms to the families of the slain and well it might. But will the state offer any compensation to the family of that man whom none of us bothered to take to the hospital? Point is, when we kill, we blissfully turn the other way and move on. When they (P & P) murder, we explode in collective condemnation. Let’s face facts-in India some lives are more valuable than others and some deaths are more regretted than others. Let’s not convulse with rage on the state and politicians anymore please. Let’s first learn to deserve. We desire far too much.

when will we ever learn?

One of the most intimate prose writers in Bangla I’ve ever read is Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, much better known to the world as a virtuoso filmmaker. An unrestrained genius who excelled in everything that he took to, including reckless self destruction, Ghatak also wrote prodigiously, his prose coming straight from his heart, dripping with pains of an uncompromisingly idealist mind at sea against the searing, unscrupulous, struggles for animal survival that he always saw around him and that his sensitive and passionate intellect and heart found too much to bear. Yet never ever did he give up his faith on the innate goodness of humankind. Indeed, in most of his writings dwelling on common man and what he saw as the relentlessly escalating trend of human depravity in post independence, and post-partition India—all later compiled in a posthumous collection of essays, critiques and interviews called Chalacchitra, Manush ebong Aro Kichu—the concluding paragraph would invariably include an oft-repeated quotation from Tagore—Manusher upor biswas harano paap (it is a sin to altogether give up on the redeeming qualities of humankind). This morning, when yet again Mumbai is under siege of yet another bout of neurotic ‘terrorist’ attack, and at the last count more than 80 people have been officially declared dead and over 900 injured in random shootouts at various locations in the city, I silently pray more of us listened to sage advices like Ghatak’s.

What do mere numbers, considerable though they are, tell us? That too many people have died? I say it is this very reduction to statistics of so many human stories that so numbs us to their actual and potential significance. There is no greater indicator of spiritual capitulation than counting our losses, whether to plan retribution or devise more effective means of resistance. Indeed, about a hundred years ago a Bengal army doctor had written a booklet called ‘They calculate their gains and we count our losses’ wherein he argued that the Hindu population of India had been dwindling as against a corresponding rise in the Muslim population, his points couched in so called ‘scientific’ numbers which meant selective passages from the census statistics without bothering about the problems of enumeration. That booklet, incidentally, is understood to be one of the key texts of Hindu communalism in Bengal. Frankly, numbers by themselves do not offer a comprehensive explanation, closer enquiries at times digging out very different stories. We actually quote numbers when we have given up and try to estimate our losses, trying to wriggle out of an unpalatable situation with the least possible personal damage, resigning to the inevitable that nothing more can be done to improve the existing state of affairs, a point made brilliantly by Amitabh Ghosh in Shadow Lines in a different context. We have been hearing about accidents and terrorist attacks since past so many years but have they stopped? If today it is Mumbai, yesterday it was Delhi and Jaipur and the day before it was Hyderabad and Mumbai again. The spiral of mindless violence has been around since time immemorial and will not disappear unless we do something qualitative about the way we respond to these dastardly acts.

Much has been said about the changing nature of terrorist violence in India in recent years. Their patterns have been studied ad nauseum, and far too many methodological solutions prescribed. Modern violence has been shown as characterized by a distance between the perpetrators and the victims and in India the analysts have been speaking about the homegrown and educated terrorists, people like you and me who precisely for these reasons are so difficult to pin down.

I admit both these points are valid. While in the recent past there has been a considerable surge in the number of explosives operated from a distance, the pictures that I see this morning in the newspapers convince me that the terrorists operating in Mumbai now look pretty much like me and my kind, the middle class Indian youth with an university degree and in that sense not very unfit to do well in today’s world where knowledge is ostensibly capital.

This worries me profusely. It is of course naïve to prejudge the profile of a terrorist and since 9/11 seven years ago the world is no longer unfamiliar with the educated terrorist.
But I want to make a broader point. Is it at all possible to see what is it that these people want? They obviously do not want a better life for themselves or else they would not do things that will take them straight to the gallows or torture chamber when caught. They are then obviously striving for a greater cause. If so it is important to try to investigate the nature of this cause, and this can be done by opening a channel of communication with these groups. But this is a rather romantic and childish option because most of these groups operate in shadowy fashion hardly ever making demands possible enough to be conceded by sovereign nation states. It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that their only objective is to murder innocents and terrorize the rest.

It is this trend that alarms me even more. I suspect there are many youngstars who take to terror just for the fun of it, the thrill of bringing the world to their knees for their proverbial 15 seconds of notoriety, in this age of instant TV appearances and Youtube postings. I will try to illustrate the point with reference to three movie characters. Let’s begin with Hrithik Rosahn’s character in Dhoom 2. He is not a criminal by forces of circumstances but by choice. He loves to take challenges and break through the toughest of security systems as a kind of mental and physical exercise, not unlike the way we study harder to do better in exams and then to get a job and so on. It is a life for him, the one in which he finds his intellectual and spiritual fulfillment, and he brushes aside questions of ethics or morality as completely irrelevant, until of course the last reel when he chooses to redeem himself. I am not here concerned with the way the story ends but with the mentality with which the character operates—this approach to crime as an art, as clearing of obstacles through years of meticulous preparation and research, considering all sides of the problem and pursuing excellence through crime. I mean apart from his objectives, there is absolutely no difference between his outlook and that of his nemesis, the police officer who finally catches up with him, both a mix of very good and very bad, very soft and very tough and so on. But when it comes to pursuing excellence in their respective crafts, there is very little to choose from.

Then there is the Joker in the Dark Knight. Again Batman is beset by doubts and rather thick shades of gray have crept within his character. But more importantly, for the Riddler the lives of so many people—recall the climax—and indeed of even the whole world depended on the correct solution of his riddle. Now lives are clearly cheaper than riddles here, lives of people who do not ever get to know what hit them before theirs are snuffed out in a battle between crazier, mightier characters locked within the delusion of their own grandeur.

Let’s not forget the little thief in the forthcoming laugh riot Way lucky, lucky way, where too you have a small town boy effortlessly flicking away people’s motorbikes and cellphones and credit cards and even calling them up later and owning up the crime. He too loves playing cat and mouse with the police, who mercifully finally catches up with him.

To say nothing about

Bunty aur Bubli and Catch me if you can, where the same story repeats itself though in these cases I did find some causal backgrounds, that is, some sketchy reasons as to why these characters take to crime the way they eventually do. But in all these movies I also find a determined challenger who tracks them down without ultimately terminating them. In fact, all these characters eventually are absorbed within the fold, the mainstream making accommodation for their extraordinary talents in one way or the other for greater common good.

They are movies and they can only focus on individual stories and their resolutions. But they are more real than reality at another level and as such I appreciate this approach that tries to talk to these delinquents. Essentially I think that these marauders who reduced Mumbai to a nightmare within a single night represent a collective neurosis which has festered for far too long. The symptoms have been visible all along but we have all been busy in our individual pursuits and never lent an ear to the grievances of these highly creative and talented people, letting them waste their energies on these mindless massacres.

It is our collective closure that forced these youngstars to try to sublimate their dormant rage on innocent citizens. They had been long trying to tell us something but we, busy with fortifying our own individual prospects, have not had any time or space to lend them a ear. Not only that, we have selectively glorified mass murders when it furthered our own causes, blinding ourselves to the prospect that the same violence that charred someone else’s family today will return to haunt our own tomorrow.

I propose what these movies show at an individual level we all try to do at a larger plane. Let’s keep our eyes and ears open and try to silently listen to what people and things around us are trying to convey to us. Let us first admit that we have closed ourselves to certain voices. Why else are we so surprised today, as if this is something beyond our imagination? There must be a lot of things we have not factored in, much that may have appeared seriously innocuous at first sight.

I, for instance, kept wondering the whole morning how the very front of the Tajmahal Hotel where I had so much fun on a rainy morning only four months ago could also be witnessing so much bloodshed last night. How could very same CST that hosts so many passengers on their way back and forth from the city of dreams be so easily converted to a mass graveyard? Which human being in his right senses would shoot so many people so indiscriminately? What is the method behind this madness?

I am sure the most accurate of analyses will only find a partial answer for it will try to seek it beyond our own volition. However, just how long will we continue to point at them? I do not refer to any ethnic or religious collective when I say them but to a general tendency to seek explanation elsewhere, beyond our own reach. The moment we begin working on such a premise, we voluntarily concede our incapability to actually resist such mindless violence. The moment we abdicate our own responsibility, we necessarily point fingers to factors that will always remain beyond our control, for they reside outside our own configurations of perception and imagination. It is a conundrum that will never be resolved and we will continue to pursue it, hoping against hope for a clue that might turn up by chance to take us some further distance.

But by then the perceived outside factors too will have crossed some more distance and our relative estrangement will change very little. My point is not that we give up searching for outside factors altogether, but that we focus more on what we ourselves can do. For instance, the police and common citizens can talk to each other more regularly; they can, for instance, try and believe each other a little more. It is no news that the beat policemen in our country work under miserable conditions. What’s wrong if I just invite him for a cup of tea when he is on his nightly patrols?

As citizens we probably need to move beyond our common sensical and academic stereotypes of who is a good man and who is not. I remember an interview with a senior monk of a divine order fifteen years ago who rejected me admission in one of their colleges because he thought I might become a ringleader leading other, more quiet and god fearing students astray. I wish he was true, wish I could really influence people enough to stop prejudging and dismissing future potentials of wide eyed teenagers after only a five minute interview where the teenager spoke what he thought was truth, i.e. admission that he regularly watched Hindi movies and participated in addas.

Not that it caused me very great personal or professional damage, but I cannot forget the incident for my life because it has taught me not to judge people by appearance alone, that first impression need not really be the last impression. I do not claim that I judge people correctly, but I try not to judge people wrongly. To be absolutely truthful, I too must have dismissed many potential talents equally instantly and I am no holier than the Swamiji (I recall his name and am sure I'll meet him someday to thank him) who predicted my future in 5 minutes.

We all have our set parameters of judgements and we seldom care to go beyond them, for if we do, we risk our own ideas of right and wrong. We acquire them over long years of observation and experience and we are better off dismissing experiences challenging those parameters as exceptional or else they threaten to shatter our own sense of well being. True but what if our very sense of being is itself threatened?

I confess I do not have any answer when it comes to those who ruthlessly murder innocents only for the sake of it—and I have said their number is growing—but for addressing those who kill because they seek to achieve their utopia on earth, I reiterate we can do better by broadening our receptive capacities.

Nightscape

All through the nightscape
Garbed in a printed cape,
Fun wrestled with unknown
Thoughts of times bygone.

Diamonds in the dark,
Stars reducing the stark,
Darkness twinkling so bright,
Keeps you staring in delight

Towards the little bittle,
That rhythms in rhymes,
I gawk amazed for a while
While the wind chimes.

The moist leaves of grass,
As I walked barefoot,
Reminded me of time that was
Innocent; when I could scoot

Deep into the night all alone,
And get lost in the horizon,
With nothing much to call my own,
Except a will to keep marching on.

Gut wrenching in sensuous wonder
Making faces at the moon
I recall with pleasure today
Days I could whistle in tune

With the night’s that’s again here with me
Whispering delights in my ears,
Still shining with soft cosy cheers
Only my eyes fail to see.

thank you sir

A chance remark that one of my professors made a couple of months ago about my intellectual location has been making me think very seriously. Many others who know me slightly better personally have spoken along similar lines before and since. But I have been observing my words and actions more closely during these couple of months, partly because I was not expecting the comment from the professor since we have not interacted very regularly, except for occasional academic exchanges. The incident made me alive to two crucial realizations. One, either people who I don’t know too well observe me too carefully or that my words and actions leave too many telltale signs. The later is more likely to be true for the simple reason that I have no special power or authority to impact people’s lives for them to keep track of my conducts very seriously. Put more crudely, I appear to be rather careless about my public profile, either overestimating my intelligence or underestimating others’. The second point relates to what he actually said and on that let me wonder a bit today. Both have very serious implications, for me as well as for friends, floaters and foes who I keep coming across as a person and as a professional.

On this lovely early autumn morning the other day I had gone to the market complex to pick something up and so presumably had the professor too. He was heading back actually when I entered. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, he wondered whether I had been part of a ‘relay’ hunger strike that had then been in motion, challenging the administration to rectify certain alleged anomalies in this years’ admission process. He said he had seen my first name in some of the posters but was wondering whether I might indeed be the person. Explaining the reason he said he thought I am too much of a classical liberal to take sides, that I always see both sides of the arguments. For that he did compliment me mildly while, more importantly, at the same time cautioning that I’ll have a very rough ride in future precisely for that reason.

To put it mildly, it stopped me on my tracks right there and then and been haunting me ever since. Within a few seconds, he summed up a central trait of my character that I had known all along but refused to digest for what it is. If you wanted to insert that willing suspension of disbelief stereotype anywhere, I say this is the place. Indeed, I have never felt comfortable in a debate for I always find some merit in my opponents’ arguments but then feel pressing it beyond a point leads to impasse and orthodoxy. The truth is slightly more complicated. Deep down I think I would very much like to press my point through but somehow do not and then feel bad about it.

Over the years, I have discovered, believing in your points beyond all reasonable limits has nothing to do with logic or analysis. It is rather a matter or choice and conviction, that is faith. Faith, I have seen, actually moves mountains. If you don’t believe me, please read about a gentleman called Dasrath Manjhi. In brief, he spent half a lifetime singlehandedly cutting a tunnel through a mountain to make a road from his remote village to the nearest hospital. Earlier, his people had to endure a half day long journey circumambulating the mountain to reach the hospital which they now make it about three hours. Manjhi’s wife could not survive such a long journey to the hospital and that got the unassuming man undertake what has been literally a Himalyan task and successfully complete it too. Words fail me when I think of characters of this sort. I only admire in silence. But then I am also fascinated by just how much can be accomplished if one actually persists with one’s simple, basic beliefs.

Now faith of this magnitude calls for an absolute devotion to the cause and shutting out the rest of the world before you. But then my heart sinks at the mere thought of sacrificing my daily dose of neat certitudes. At another, more serious, level I find it very frustrating to see many people enduring a very difficult life in anticipation of a better future that never comes. My mother is not a Dasrath Manjhi but I have not seen anyone believing more in god and destiny and in working silently and sincerely. Yet I have not seen anyone suffering so much in life, in pretty much every phase of it. I have read and thought on this issue occasionally—this thing of ordinary people choosing to repose so much faith over god, over destiny, over science, and over many other institutional instruments of order.

Then I reflect on an observation by the Mother, of the Aurobindo ashram, Pondichery. I had read it at least twenty years ago and it is one of the rare lines that again has remained with me ever since. She said that to start with we must have a simple mind and those who nurture too many dilemmas always continue to suffer from indecision. This is the core point about being tempted to see merit in both sides of the fence—you stand undecided. But I think the real problem is a reluctance to face difficulties. Faith necessarily makes you partisan but it also empowers you to ensure hardship, and to nurture hope for a better future, even beyond the faithfuls’ lifetime. But when one moves from considering all sides of the problem to taking a stand, one has to travel through a loss. This loss involves making the choice that one is never going to get the things that taking the opposite stand could have ensured. I presume I have always had a problem negotiating this road.

That, however, leads us to a fascinating aporia. On the one hand, if you choose to believe in a cause, god or anything of your choice, you are willingly committing yourself to suffering all sorts of hardships until your faith is realized in the way you want it to be. But this option offers you the delusion, or solace, of spiritual rootedless, in a larger sense. On the other hand, if you do not choose to believe and continue to question, like I have done all my life and still do, generally speaking, you cannot afford the comforting embrace of naïve faith in a greater cause and continue to suffer from a paralyzing uncertainty. Unless you question, faith will lead to orthodoxy, whether scientific or spiritual, and will snuff out all dissent for good. Orthodoxy, in its turn, will lead to stagnation. And unless you believe, questioning will only lead to anarchy or chaos, and will only destabilize instead of contributing anything positive towards a better, happier and more constructive future. I guess all of us who can think face this fascinating aporia all the time and work out our own individual solutions which is nothing but striking a negotiable balance between the two. I am, of course, still working out mine. The beauty of the problem lies in the fact that even as it offers so many solutions, it still somehow always remains a problem that never ceases to stir our imagination. I mean here you have a problem that has so many solutions and yet is never solved for good. Amazing isn’t it?

One way I now try to negotiate this aporia is through the position that problems themselves defy a comprehensive solution because they don’t have an external existence, beyond what we ourselves do and are. Problems are essentially within us, not in our surroundings, entirely independent of our contribution. They can’t probably be spoken of in abstraction, if we are indeed looking for a solution for no solution, correspondingly, can be found beyond our own perception of the problem. And when we accept this much, we have little else to do except to try to get back to striking this balance to which I referred above. Since this is more or less within our reach, I suppose the aporia no longer remains so much more daunting. Sounds fairly empowering to me really and I think it’s all that I want to say today. I owe this insight to many friends and well wishers but I must acknowledge fondly that chance encounter with prof J. Thank you prof. J, you’ll never know how great a favor it has been.

Postscript- To those of you who find this too obscure or are wondering where you have heard all this before, please go to the second paragraph in page 56 of Catch 22. Nobody can make this point better than Yosarian aka Joseph Heller and I am making absolutely no claim to originality. But Yosarian finally made it, didn't he? So too will we all. For sure.

tomorrow always comes

Things happen. People who may be doing the same thing everyday for as long as you can remember suddenly take to doing very different things. Signposts disappear, and they leave a vacuum. Things that apperaed absolutely ceratin yesterday no longer remain as predictable anymore. More importantly, you no longer remain the same person--you chop, you change. Sometimes these internal adjustments harmonize with the external mutations and then people call you mature and happy and successful. More importantly, most of us learn to enact such a harmonization with time, often with varying degree of success, if only to keep repeatig to ourselves that we are not so different after all. Deep inside, we all know what we are inside is neither completely in tune with what we appear to be outside, nor would it ever be. May be like political economy, there is an economy of personality projection too, one that deals with learning to make optimum use of limited supply of this personality harmonization.

Well, even for a renegade Bengali like me quoting a bit of Tagore often comes as a great rescue in moments when I struggle for words. In one of his most popular--and prfound--songs he spoke of--and to-- God as finitely infinite. This is a challenge we all are socialized to undertake-to harmonize the finite with the infinite in a vein attempt to mimic the almighty, whoever or whatever s/he is. We are all a bit like the Khuro in Sukumar Ray's Khuror Kol--we keep running after the impossible because it looks very tempting. To be sure, this is how we keep excelling ourselves and keep raising the bar. Someday, we are tarined to believe, the final frontier will be crossed-we would know all that is knowable and do all that is doable. But you see the fun is that the distance between Khuro's Kol-with its sackful of mouthwatering delicacies--and his reach will always remain constant. Yes, Khuro does ceratinly manage to cover in one and a half hour the distnce he would otherwise have covered in no less than five hours, but is he any closer to the Monda-Mithai than when he started off?

That, my friend, is what life is all about. You set out to do something with great vigor, having already been trained hard to imagine the goal as eminently achievable when you start. You run hard and pass many milestones on the way. You reach destinations no one has reached before, you do things no one has done before. People look at you as a pioneer and keep gawking at your audacity and so on. But more often than not you realize this is not what you had set out to do. Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, said Lenon. From my own experience, I would add that both good and bad things happen to you when you least expect them. When you think you have made fullproof arrangements for something and that nothing would anymore go wrong, you discover the Murphy's law as well. Mercifully though, good tidings too come precisely on moments you think you have done your best and that nothing more can be done to save the situation.

So what is it about Khuro's escapades that is so ennobling? That if we stop worrying about precise outsomes, we are all in some way or the other breaking new grounds. So what if this is not the ground that I had set out to break? May be I am making it easy for someone somewhere. May be someone somewhere is doing things that'll make things easy for me. May be we are all engaged in a gigantic cooperartive enterprise without our direct knowledge. The feeling does probably lighten our burdens of personal failure a wee bit. Funny isn't it? I mean if you begin to see things this way, things and signposts that appear to disappear before you might just be making a grand appearence in someone else's life. Now that is seriously funny because then somebody else somewhere might be losing his milesstones so that you discover yours all over again. But are they the ones that had disappeared to start with? I don't know. I'm just relieved that today is only a passing phase and tomorrow I'll have new milestones to look forward to. Yeah, Khuro and his Kol make a hell lot of sense to me. And promise.

N.B.-Please read all the 'we's as I. I have no right to impose my premises and my conclusions on anyone else. The shameless humbug that I am, I always use I when talking about good things and 'we's when writing about failures and inadequacies, as if I do all the right things and others mess up my good works. As a matter of fact it is more often the other way round and I jolly well accept it.

'Murder' in the temple

My birthplace has been burning for the past couple of days and all I can do is fiddle with the computer 2000 miles away. Okay the Nero simile is not exactly applicable in my case but this sort or helplessness I have not felt very often in my life. My birthplace and I share a very awkward relationship. We do not love each other, but we cannot ignore each other either. It has made and shaped several aspects of my personality because I have spent the first 22 years of my life there. Quirks of life and profession have ensured that I will probably never live there permanently but as they say it is impossible to take that little place out of my system, no matter wherever I go or whatever I do. Clumsily translating a cult expression of (now Kabir) Suman, I too can claim that it has seen all my firsts. To this day, I remember all its nooks and corners, and my long solitary walks across its lengths and breaths. No matter how much it changes, it will never be alien to me.

It is not a particularly distinguished place, with none of its sons and daughters having made it horribly big. Its two modest claims to fame are its resident goddess and a rather eccentric character that appears in several science fiction stories of Satyajit Ray. The second is decidedly a condescending reference for I am quite certain that Ray chose to house this literally prophetic character there because his funny name rhymes with the name of this place. I am a great admirer of Ray like all Bengalis but I have not found a single topographical reference to this place in any of the stories where this character is featured. His place of residence is always perfunctorily announced in two words,( ……te thaken) as if to suggest that the strange name of the place had anything to do with his unusual gifts. In effect, he is estranged and treated as an abnormality, in contrast to his hero professor Shanku. This is an old literary device dating back to the nineteenth century English literature which shaped the worldviews of almost all major Bengal renaissance figures including Ray. In terms of absolute spatial distance, it is not more than 20 kilometers from those localities in South Calcutta where Ray spent his life but I am pretty sure he has never been there in person. But for its funny name that lends itself easily to caricature by the sophisticated south Calcutta sensibility, this place had no role to play in the stories. Digressions apart, I am only suggesting that the place has never been particularly distinguished for anything, except for such occasional snide references.

This is precisely why I have been terribly disturbed by the way it has been hogging so much media attention last couple of days. All publicity is certainly not good publicity and murder and mayhem is definitely not a great way to burst into public consciousness. I do not know in detail about the actual course of events and I do not have access to Bengali news channels. But from my hourly conversations to my family and friends I have gathered some fragments that I must put on record. And I want to make a few general points about the inept handling of the problem by the local and district administration. This lapse is especially glaring because we now have a young cabinet minister from our place, who had been a very upright and honest man when I used to know him many years ago during his occasional attempts to entice young school students to party training courses.

Now there is this ritual observed every year on the Ekadoshi during the Debipokkho in the temple of our resident goddess which is but a local version of the omnipresent Bengali goddess Chandi. Every para where Durga pujo is held brings forth a range of offerings to the temple to perform a special pujo ceremony which culminates with the ritual sacrifice of a goat. Probably this is some sort of a passage money or customs duty you pay to the resident goddess for daring to ignore her for four days. Historically speaking, such practices probably owe their origin to the medieval accommodation that saw successful insertion of the local ‘tribal’ deities within the Brahmanic pantheon in the form of the great Bengali mother goddess and her local deputies such as our resident goddess. One of my professors wrote a whole book on this process that he called Religious Process. But since he is a very busy man, I can supply you people with expert knowledge on the question when you invite me for a paid lecture.

Each of these passage money ceremonies lasts typically for half an hour or so and their anthropological details form part of the paid lecture. One point that needs to be made, however, is that the Drummers (Dhakis) of the respective para pujo committees often break into impromptu competitions with each other in the temple hall while these offerings are made. Poor souls from poorer places, they try their best to play to the gallery and attract generous donations from the assembled crowd. The crowd too keeps rewarding these chaps with currency notes of small to medium denominations. When the drums reach a crescendo it is indeed a bit of an entrancing moment. The sound of drums still rings in my years as I write this although it must have been more than a decade since I last heard these Dhakis. With twenty or so Dhakis playing in tandem in a medium sized hall and dancing and moving around in a circle, going back and forth in a rhythmic motion, it is not that difficult to break into dancing ourselves and I too always found myself literally dancing to their beats as did everyone else present there.

During such a moment of exhilaration, one of the onlookers reportedly threw a coin or two of appreciation towards a particular Dhaki who then stooped to collect them. Probably then this Dhaki had a collision with someone standing nearby and he fell to the ground. This in turn sent the chaps to whose para he belonged into a fit of rage and they went for this chap who caused the collision as it were. Obviously then the boys from the para of which this bystander is a resident sprung into action and the minor collision soon relapsed into a full scale street fight. Within a few moments the temple was turned into a battlefield as the warring sides went for the jugular. The narrative is not very clear from this point onwards. A stampede must have ensued and many would have run for their lives through the three gates of the temple. This stampede must have wounded some people seriously but I have heard of no such incident. This is, to borrow the pet phrase of another popular Ray character, ‘highly suspicious’ and so here I give up the pretense of trying to reconstruct a linear narrative.

Events moved in quick succession from this point. Some of the chaps now reportedly snatched the keys of the three exit gates and locked them for good. These guys reportedly do not hold any Durga pujo ceremony in their para and so logically should not have been in the temple. This is actually a complicated issue. Contrary to the popular belief that caste is not much of an irritant in Bengal, it is very alive in and characterizes the spatial distribution of our village. In effect, each para roughly signifies the concentration of a particular caste, although these days it is not so obvious. But beneath the surface the identities are fairly robust as are the propensity to take to certain professions. It so happens that the chaps who happened to have snatched the keys belonged to Dulepara, a concentration of the low Dule caste. Most of them are abysmally poor and consequently do not hesitate to take to petty crimes. I do not mean that others are squeaky clean—they just hide behind masks of sophistication—but it’s just that for a range of socio economic reasons these chaps are often a little more reckless with law. The local politicians cynically exploit their vulnerability, using them to carry out petty crimes of vendetta. In exchange, they also protect them from police and so on and so forth. Frankly though, the demand that only people from those paras with valid pujo license be allowed entry into the temple is utter crap and totally unenforceable.

By now a youngstar called Pradip from Karuripara, largely a concentration of petty traders and shopkeepers, was unfortunately cornered by four or five or more chaps from Dule para. They allegedly hit him on the head several times with a large clay tub, the kind on which you grow cactus on your terrace garden. They must have picked it up from inside the temple premises because I remember there are several of such tubs there, housing creepers, money plants and other such decorative saplings. There were other boys from Karuri para who too were critically injured in the skirmish and quickly rushed to hospital where they continue to battle for life. Unfortunately, it was Pradip, whose name literally means lamp, who faded out while on his way to hospital. I wonder how not a single soul from Dule para is reported injured. The chaps from Karuri para were certainly taken by surprise but not so weak that they could not land a single blow. It is not clear how or when the locks were opened or how the chaps escaped. Apparently there are several eye witnesses to this act of attempted murder although charges of anything more than culpable homicide not amounting to murder will be hard to sustain in a court of law for several reasons. First, it certainly was not a premeditated act and second, if it can be established that the miscreants did it under influence of some kind of an intoxicant—which given the pujo revelry is not an impossibility—the case will indeed become very weak. But I am jumping the gun.

The fact remains that nearly 48 hours after the incident, not a single culprit has been nabbed despite eye witnesses having named several of the suspects. In retribution—which I condemn just as strongly as the alleged murder—the youth of Karuri para and other paras have gone on rampage, burning buses and damaging properties in and around the village. Under the impression that some in the body that administers the temple were hand in glove with the culprits—because they could so easily lock the gates—they have also reduced to ashes some factories and shops that these guys or their relatives and neighbors own. I am deeply disturbed by this neat alliance of all the upper and middle caste paras and their easy dubbing of the Dules as the habitual criminals but for more on this question you’ll have to wait for the paid lecture.

The main arterial road remains blocked and police has completely sealed off the locality. There is much debate over whether article 144 has been imposed but an hour ago a friend said it was not required. Some paramilitary forces have been deployed to bring the situation under control and the body of Pradip was reportedly cremated this evening under police protection amid a 3000 strong crowd conducting a silent protest march demanding the arrest of the culprits. The local crematorium has been a favorite haunt of mine—I became an expert in performing funerals by the time I was eleven and a half—for many years and I can tell you that even at the best of times it cannot accommodate more than two hundred people. I mean it is one of those small burning ghats typical of medium sized villages of yore, although the newly erected temple on its premises has now added a bit of gloss on its rather mundane appearance.

My mother has already prohibited my brother’s external movements and for once he does not seem to mind it, for today at any rate. They said even the cable connections were suspended until this evening and the mobile connections remained irregular at best. But more importantly, two things completely beat me.

This minister from our place has reportedly been missing from the scene. I would have thought the he would drop everything else and rush to the spot, taking charge of the situation and trying to restore calm, besides doing everything under his command to apprehend the culprits, especially after they had been explicitly named. On the contrary, he has not even once spoken to the press nor seen to do anything substantive during the last day and a half. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that he has been negotiating a compensation package for Pradip’s family so that they prevail upon the agitators to withdraw their struggle. A very practical move no doubt, one which will certainly hoist him up by a few notches in the party pecking order. The money too will certainly be useful to the family for Pradip worked as a humble car driver. But I wonder whether he would have done the same if the slain belonged to his own extended family. Frankly, this is definitely not the Kurta Pajama clad whole timer who used to travel in a bicycle and had time for inquisitive school students. I hear these days he only travels in closed ambassadors and people only get to see his ambassador passing twice a day. I also wonder why so many TV channels that had been camping there decided to spare him an interrogation. Very strange, isn’t it? Last heard, he was seen walking next to the dead body in the crematorium. He was reportedly also instrumental in a quick disposal of the body which the Karuri para youth had threatened not to cremate until the culprits were nabbed. His senior colleague Subhas Charabarty, the hero of the Balak Brahmachari (the copyright holder of the Ram Narayan Ram chant) dead body rescue episode would have been pleased.

At this point I find myself smoothly veering towards a particular subject position and need to ask a few hard questions. Do we have a Dule para version of events? Just how credible is the charge that those chaps started the brawl almost unprovoked? What right did the Karuripara (and others) crowd have to (systematically) destroy others’ properties subsequently? In fact, the retribution appears to be more organized and methodical than the alleged murder in that the targets of violence were chosen with some discretion. Anyone with the slightest familiarity to legal provisions would agree that planned violence attracts more stringent penalties than spontaneous brutality. I have personally known some of the Dule para chaps for many years and I know they have a volatile temper at the best of times. But quite a few of them I remember as extremely talented footballers who could never make it big because they had to get down to supporting their families. I know quite a few of them are addicted to country liquor and soft drugs and probably also participate in petty crimes. I have played football with them and even now get to meet some of them when I visit home. I have always enjoyed the rawness of their company and found their bluntness a very refreshing departure from the sophisticated pretense and opportunism of some of our local intellectuals and leaders of society. These are mostly hollow men with almost zero originality who inherit their worldviews from their inward-looking milieu and always refuse to call a spade a spade. In a cultural sense, they are the petit bourgeoise—unable to compete with those above for lack of caliber and guts, they are in mortally afraid to be associated with those below. Now that almost the whole of Dule para has been reportedly torched, who is going to ensure the rehabilitation of those poor families who had nothing to do with the attempted murder? Are not these acts of rage going to breed many more criminals?

The police has not exactly covered itself with distinction. Not only have they comprehensively failed to pick up even a single suspect, they have arrested a number of youngstars who obviously had little to do with the crime. If it is a tactical measure to douse the violence, it has clearly not worked. More importantly, is it credible that the police does not know anything at all about the possible hideouts of people who had already had some petty crime records? But of course, it is always easy to blame the police and the administration in a bid to shift the focus from our own abysmal conducts.

For me the larger question here is one of rage. It is a bit like those cars where you can switch from 0 to 150 km/hour speed in a matter of seconds. If so many people can get so angry within such a short span of time, is it really possible for the administration to handle the situation without conceding some innocent lives? What is it that engineers so much of rage within so many of us so instantly? What is so fundamentally wrong with us that we cannot even sit on our pent up emotions for a little while more? What is this huge emptiness within us that leads us to lose all control over our conscious actions? What is it that frustrates us all to such an intolerable degree on certain moments? Mind you it is only this pent up rage that brings together the aggressors and the victims in this particular episode. Actually I am no longer so sure about the distinction between the aggressors and the victims here. If you have followed my somewhat disjointed narrative, you’d also see that the only sentiment I have about this entire episode is one of incomprehension. This is a kind of incomprehension that is not dispelled by more ‘facts’. On the contrary it is, to borrow the title of a recent collection of essays on caste, ‘the blindness of insight’. It is a painful realization that no matter how much I brag about familiarity with my birthplace, there are aspects of it which have always remained beyond my comprehension and will probably always remain so. It is a pity that some surprises are never pleasant. It is ultimately having to confess that I did not know the brute that had always stayed hidden within my own self. I am enraged at my own helplessness but I am glad that I wrote it out.