Taxi Drivers

Posted on April 17, 2017 by secondsaturn

Taxi drivers in Kolkata…post to come

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Atul Prasad Sen…

Posted on March 13, 2017 by secondsaturn

Atul Prasad Sen, more commonly referred to as Atul Prasad is one of Bengal’s most popular song writer and composer. Atul Prasadi music is reckoned as a leading strand in Bengali culture, one that needs specialized training and practice. Atul Prasad was a contemporary of Tagore and lived between the 20th of October 1871 and the 26th of August 1934. Born as the oldest child of Ramprasad Sen of Dhaka, Atul Prasad had three sisters, he being the only male child of his parents. His father was an ambitious man who though employed as a school teacher in Dhaka wanted to study medicine. He met Maharshi Debendranath who arranged for him to study medicine in the Bengali medium. Ramprasad eventually studied psychiatry and became the superintendent of the Dhaka Mental Asylum. Unfortunately when Atul Prasad was only a mere child, Ramprasad died and his wife, Hemantashashi went with her children to live with her father, Kalinarayan Gupta, a renowned Brahmo Samaj reformer who also was a kirtan singer with a large troupe.

Atul Prasad Sen soon imbibed music from his maternal grandfather and theatre from his maternal uncles. Even as a young boy, Atul Prasad was influenced by Surendranath Banerjee, a prominent Congress politician of his times and with a family of influential men and women among who K.G.Gupta was a civil servant with the revenue board and his mother engaged in the uplift of women, another maternal uncle led a theatre troupe, Atul Prasad became a socially aware young man with a sense of larger social concern. This reflected in the way he eventually composed his music, infusing strands of the Indian classical like the thumri, dadra, kajri and ghazal as well as the popular forms of the kirtan and baul into his songs to create a composite music culture that would represent India’s unity in diversity as well as the fusion of the tradition and the modern. Due to the family’s social status and the influence of the Brahmo Samaj ideology, Atul Prasad became an egalitarian who literally mixed with every strata of persons, a “mixing” that became evident in his music as well. He used many instruments as well like the esraj, khol and even the harmonium, all of which he seemed to have mastered well by the age of nine.

Atul Prasad Sen went to study in Presidency College of Calcutta and then travelled to London to study law. In London he met Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, Sarojini Naidu and C.R Das among others and together they promoted Dadabhai Naoroji in the British Parliament. He passed his examinations in a single chance and returned to Kolkata where he apprenticed under Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, or Lord Sinha. In order to set up his own practice he migrated to Rangpur in East Bengal from where a colleague Momtaz Hussain brought him to Lucknow, a city that represented the politics of a rising British power and a feudal princely rule in its zenith but displaced through colonialism.

Professionally and politically Atul Prasad became an important citizen of Lucknow. He would receive important political dignitaries of the Congress, donated liberally to Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s political party, Servants of India, helped set up girls’ schools and homes for widows and much before Gandhi came into mass politics, and he insisted that he play Holi with the untouchables. Atul Prasad was known for his generosity; he earned very well but donated even more liberally for social causes especially for institutions. He was active in the setting up of the Lucknow University as well. He also set up the Bongiyo Parishad in Lucknow which held literary conferences. In 1926 he invited Saratchandra Chattejee to preside over the literary conference and when the novelist could not attend on account of ill health, and Atul Chandra presided over it, the presidential address turned out to be a musical affair because he had to keep singing all his songs through the night on the request of the audiences – such was the popularity of his songs.

He was especially close to Tagore, being part of the Khamkayali group, in which Tagore, D.L.Ray, the Maharaja of Natore were integral parts. Their friendship grew deeper over time and Atul Prasad, in his capacity as a person of influence and a song writer supported Tagore in each of his endeavours. They met in Lucknow as well as in Ramgarh where Tagore would stay on for months for the convalescence of his daughter. Atul Prasad stayed on long vacations in Puri and Darjeeling where he was particularly close to Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee and Chittaranjan Das, the latter being his step cousin and also a friend from England. He had substantial political visibility as well and often headed the reception Committees for the Indian National Congress sessions held in Northern India.

Atul Prasad wrote 206 songs which were unfortunately never dated. Though his music can be classified as Tagorean in the pitch, tonality and style, yet it had a unique quality to it and it was not always the fusion that marked his style. His style was in fact marked by a forlorn melancholia bearing with them the solitude of his soul. It is inferred that his personal life full of woes, his incestuous marriage with his cousin in Gretna Green, in Scotland, which eventually went sour, the poverty and neglect faced by his sisters because they had no father and no paternal home of their own made him compose the doleful numbers. He was particularly hurt by his mother’s remarriage to Durga Mohan Das an eminent Brahmo Samajist. Durgamohan was also a follower of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and got his widowed mother to remarry. Atul Prasad composed some peppy numbers as well and his signature song, Uthaga Bharata Lakhhi was composed on the music of the gondola rowers in Italy where he stopped on his way to England on a ship.

Atul Prasad Sen was almost a song archaeologist for he would collect music from wherever he could find it; he visited the baijis of Lucknow and it is to his credit that so many of the songs sung by them are with us today. He particularly admired Wajed Ali Shah whose tunes he used in some of his compositions. Being in Lucknow brought him to close contact with the classical musicians of khayal and thumri. Lucknow still has a road named as the A.P.Sen Road in the memory of a man who they called as the Nawab without a crown.

 

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Ease of Doing Business

Posted on February 25, 2017 by secondsaturn

I never say no to invitations except when they are on Sundays. The Sunday is a difficult day for us because the dog sitter is on leave and we have to stay back with Georgie, our pet. But this time, on a Monday, I am saying no to an august group which is meeting to discuss the ease of doing business in India. India is low in the ease of doing business, business is not too well respected in the country, naukri, or a salaried job is. Businessmen, despite their money are considered to be low down in the ladder of social importance while the clerks and the bureaucrats are held in higher esteem. Hence the higher status class oppresses the lower social class by being mean and difficult blocking permissions, creating needless hurdles and showing unnecessary rigidities in the interpretation of rules. The recent being one in which the customs clerks refused to consider the user manual as part of import of machinery and instead charged extra for the manual under the section of import of books. Leh halua !! or is it Hallelujah !

But businesses in India also have things rather easy, they can steal provident fund money of their workers, pay pittance to the skilled innovator, refuse to pay for technology, refuse to pay for drawings and depend far too much on government support by desiring explicit and hidden subsidies. Also, they are poor in technology, oblivious to globalization, have no long term strategy and often fly by night by winding up businesses to park money elsewhere. The ease with which businesses get away with utterly unethical behavior is not funny. Businesses in India are veritable vehicles of money laundering, showing no respect for their trade, not caring for technology and expertise. Business in India is sans self-respect and bereft of any sense of self-worth. What kind of ease of business should we guarantee to the community which has no concern for itself and far less for the larger community?

India is losing its manufacturing base to China; next it will lose to Vietnam, to Bangladesh, to Zambia and Angola, to Peru and Colombia. Besides, it could never rise up to any commendable technology base. While money invested in business has grown, employment has stagnated and even shrunk. It has used borrowed knowledge and borrowed money and from the State desired that its loans be written off, it be allowed to pinch salaries and wages of workers and then retrench them at will, access the police force to steal land from indigenous communities, villages and the people at large. Few countries provide businesses such ease of operations.

Of course bureaucratic hurdles, clerical hurdles must be removed from the path of setting up businesses, but what will the business provide to us in return? Can it guarantee leadership in technology, sustained opportunities for employment? Can it provide an assurance that banks will earn interests and not encounter bad loans? Can it ensure that communities around the industry will develop and not live in abject poverty around the walls of Tata Steel, or the various SAIL plants? Can business assure that with growth in employment, knowledge and profits, it can provide affordable healthcare and education without making these into money spinning scams? If business can do so, then I attend the meeting. If it cannot, then be hell with business. There are many ways of earning money.

 

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Bonophool … The Nihilist From The Wilderness

Posted on January 23, 2017 by secondsaturn

Ohetuk Adda on the 21st January 2017, Bonophool

Bonophool, which means wild flower, was the pen name of Dr. Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay, a pathologist by qualification and a practicing medical doctor. He shot into prominence as a novelist, poet, playwright and a short story writer representing the neo modernist Bengali literature that started with the famous Kallol movement. The soul of this movement was to break the strong hold of Tagore’s influence on the Bengali reader and introduce a more pragmatic and dynamic prose that would articulate social conflicts rather seek only the sublime. However, the Kallol movement had its own snobberies and promoted a Calcutta centric culture and language. Since Bonophool was raised, educated and lived in Bihar, a province that though part of the larger Bengal subah during the Mughals, became a separate province under the British, he was considered to be a nonresident Bengali and assumed as not being capable of producing meaningful works in Bengali. In the post-Independence days Bonophool was not included in school and college syllabus and hence continued to remain largely peripheral to the Bengali literature.

His name, Bonophool, thus truly expressed his angst at being shunned by the city, notwithstanding the fact that he was also fond of the forest and loved his walks in the woods for which he was nicknamed as junglibabu in Bihar. However, he did have an all India fandom especially since many of his novels and short stories were made into films both in Hindi and Bengali so much so that the Government of India issued a commemorative stamp in his memory on his 100th birth anniversary. He also received the Padma Bhushan and an honorary doctorate for literature (could not find the University).

Besides novels and plays, Bonophool wrote some poetry as well and belonged to the school that wrote simple verse telling simple stories without much layering of complex ideas, perhaps also a reason for his not being part of the mainstream Bengali literature. But it were his short stories which can really be said to have made a mark. He wrote his stories really short with snappy tangy punches, piquant and vitriolic, his idea was to demolish the pretentious snobbery of the Bengali city bred elite as being superior in values and morals to the bucolic and rustic people who live in villages or work at the bottom of the rung in cities as rickshawpullers and coolies. In his novels and stories, the so-called small people always seem to be one up on the elites, the former appear as being smarter and despite their simplicity as more honest, spontaneous and integrated people. He also speaks of women who remain incarcerated in their roles as wives in the homes of the fashionable and modern men claiming to have a monopoly of good values. With such inversions one wonders whether Bonophool is not a post-modernistist who sees through the modernist and nationalistic ideology as being yet another kind of colonialism. Despite his strong ideological layering, it is his use of style that will continue to make Bonophool unique. He raised the Bengali language to a new level of expression and in fact, one may well call his short stories as constituting a break in the use of language in the production of literature, something which Pyari Mohan Mitra’s Alaler Ghore Dulal had done almost a century earlier.

Although Bonophool started off as a young guard criticizing Tagore, Tagore and he became close to each other. Tagore sensed that Bonophool’s sensibilities were very much like his, in identifying that nationalism was becoming an affair of the elite where values and morals were being imposed upon the populace. The simple people much like the flowers in the wild survived in their cultural and moral integrity against the domination of the modernity and nationalism. Tagore described Bonophool’s pen as spicy, sharp and strident. Shonibaarer Chithi, a journal that tried to give space to writers and poets from the mofussil and the suburbs promoted Bonophool actively as someone who brings in a fresh perspective with a punch. Bonophool is not one who explores emotions, he is not one to present lofty ideals, nor one with many layered symbolisms who would produce new cultural idioms. His straight and strident style was nihilistic, annihilating any and every one in a position of moral authority especially those which flowed from sites of incumbency in social and public institutions. While there have been Tara Shankar Bandopadhyay and Manik Bandopadhyay who spoke about the subaltern and their perspective, few, if any could annihilate the institutions of social domination like Bonophool did.

 

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Hamlet’s Ghost

Posted on December 27, 2016 by secondsaturn

Hamlet’s Ghost is the name of a free on line course offered by the Harvard University through the EdeX. Prof Stephen Greenblatt is the author of the course and has carved this course out of his book, Hamlet in the Purgatory. The idea of the course is to throw into relief the ideas of death of the Catholics versus those of the Protestants and how a grave politics of revolutionary nature was played out in England over the contending ideas of death, especially the aftermath of death in the sense of what happens to souls after humans die. The Catholics believed in the idea of the Purgatory, a place in between the earth and the Heaven or Hell as the case may be, where souls are purged of their sins. The act of purging out is painful and horrific and souls, were they to walk the earth again as ghosts were forbidden to report any of the details of the space. The Catholic Church collected large sums of money, land and other forms of property from the kith and kin of the dead in the name of alleviating the pains of the souls of their loved ones from the fires and other tortures in the Purgatory; the Protestants refused to believe in the Purgatory and hence somewhat could escape from the extortions of the Church for money. In a series of Acts passed in the 1530’s by the Crown in England, known as the English Reformation, Protestantism and not Catholicism was established as the official religion. Catholic beliefs were outlawed and along with that belief in ghosts began to be considered a legal offence. Amidst such mayhem of theological contestations which were covert political and economic revolutions, Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays. Hamlet’s Ghost was therefore a Catholic survival into a Protestant politics. Death emerges central to the drama of Hamlet and the fact that the Ghost of the dead King plays a crucial role we know that the ghost of the now dead Catholicism will play an important role in the play.

The drama opens with Hamlet, the reigning King of Denmark dead, his beloved wife, Gertrude, who is now widowed marries the King’s brother, Claudius. Claudius is now the king of Denmark and the dead king’s son also called Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark, the heir apparent. The play is about the younger Hamlet, the surviving Prince of Denmark. Hamlet is in mourning both from the loss of his father and the remarriage of his mother to Claudius. He used to admire his father who was a man of noble quality and loved his wife dearly; Hamlet cherished the fact that his parents were much in love with each other and cannot accept the fact that barely the funeral feast was over that a wedding was celebrated with the leftovers. One is not sure whether it is the death of father or mother’s remarriage that Hamlet is more upset about; it is possible that the remarriage reinforces the grief over death. Catholic Church forbids remarriage and divorce and indeed the promulgations against the Catholic Church had to do centrally with Henry VIII’s desire to remarry, bigamy and divorce, both of which Catholicism disallowed. The motif of remarriage figures as prominently as the idea of the Purgatory as survivals of Catholicism in the newly proclaimed Protestant England.

Death is both the separation of the body and the soul, but is also a return of the past, of tradition to haunt the present times. As the Ghost rises from the Purgatory to walk the earth and beseech Hamlet to avenge his death, which was not natural as was made out to be but a calculated murder by Claudius. Hamlet is confused, whether to believe in the Ghost’s existence, then to believe in what he says and eventually to bring himself to the task of revenge. Revenge incidentally is more of a pagan concept and inheres in the many versions of the pagan folk story upon which Hamlet is based. Against the political backdrop Shakespeare places Hamlet, a reworking on a familiar Danish tale upon which plays had already been composed for the public theatre, to insert a set of new arguments into the familiar plot so that the audiences can engage with the drama in a more significant manner.

Shakespeare places the dead King into the Catholic Purgatory but for the son, the hero Hamlet the entire world becomes the Purgatory and life is a metaphor of death. He finds that the sunlight breeds maggots to feed on the corpses and everything about life surely walking towards death. For Hamlet, the prince, death is Protestant, a blank, a nothingness, in which the beggar and the King are the same. The difference between life and death is only the shadow of dreams, or a set of illusions for a world which has been so corrupted with the arrogance of the intellectual, rudeness of bad men, corrupt morals of women and betrayals by friends, life is shorn of life force and resembles only death.

Death is the main theme of Hamlet; it begins in the backdrop of death, braces Hamlet, its hero with the shroud of mourning for the dead, and then as the Ghost appears invoking Hamlet to revenge through murder, we are prepared to see the end of the play in death. In Shakespeare’s times, in the Books of Mortality, we find list of deaths due to the various causes like plague, other forms of illness, and even out of grief. When we place the list of deaths from the Books of Mortality and Shakespeare’s deaths as they take place in his plays we obtain a distinct difference. While deaths listed in the Book are of diseases and other natural causes, deaths in Shakespeare are always caused by human agency, like murder, stabbing, wounding, poisoning and so on. In the play in which death of the King should lead us to the death of his assassin, we encounter a series of deaths in the meanwhile. Polonius is murdered by Hamlet, Ophelia loses her mind in grief and is drowned in a gushing stream, Gertrude drinks the poisoned drink intended for Hamlet, Laertes and Hamlet fatally wound each other with poisoned swords and in the end, Hamlet wounds Claudius with the same poisoned sword. All characters die in the end of the play.

Let us observe how Shakespeare treats death in the course of the play. The men die through stab wounds while the women die of grief and guilt. Ophelia dies of grief while Gertrude dies of guilt and therefore, in terms of the Books of Mortality, not of human agency. But all the other deaths are of stab wounds and the last three deaths namely of Laertes, Hamlet and Claudius are of poison as well. Poison kills all except Polonius and Ophelia just as stabs kills all except Gertrude and Ophelia. The men are thus fatally stabbed by swords and hence are also victims of human agency. The death of Gertrude and Ophelia, though both suicides are retained as being of “natural” causes such as of fear (read guilt) and of grief. Women are thus not subject to human agency while all men are.

 

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Delhi’s Pollution

Posted on November 23, 2016 by secondsaturn

Dear Mr Kapil Misra,

Thank you for your email asking of me my opinion about the pollution in Delhi. I am not really a resident of Delhi because I live off the city limits in the periphery of a suburb in Faridabad, driven out of Delhi due to high land prices. However, I am in the city for three decades now and work here and may continue to work in Delhi while living in the NCR for another couple of decades. Hence Delhi is very much a part of my concern and hence its pollution needs my thinking hat.

We have to accept the fact that Delhi is not at an advantage in terms of its geography and climate zone; it is a dust bowl by the fact of its longitude and latitude, by the fact that the great Himalayas guards the north Indian plains like a giant hat which prevents air to flow out of the area. Central Asia which is drier and barer practically has no dust because there is nothing there to trap wind and hence dust with it. Therefore, Delhi is naturally inclined to be dusty. Crackers during Diwali, crop burning before the winter, crop cutting through machines, the rise in moisture in areas around Delhi like the heavy rains in eastern India this year which creates an envelope of vapour around the northern plains and thus preventing the air from making a safe exit towards the sea all escalate air pollution by making the air both dust laden as well as heavy. Besides, autumn and early summer, when temperatures change and the winds reverse their directions air pollution is bound to happen.

If we examine the nature of air pollution in Delhi, it consists not of hydrocarbon emissions nor of suspension of Sulphur which could have been caused by vehicles and crackers respectively. Nor do we have a high noxious factor for which we could blame our industries. What Delhi has is a very high dust quotient and given its natural proclivity to have a high suspension of particulate matter which is dust, one must look towards what raises dust in Delhi.

There are three sources of dust, one seasonal and which is crop cutting and the wind falling around Diwali and early summer. But there are other two which are structural to the urban sprawl of Delhi and hence may be addressed as part of town planning and city management. First are the construction. There are all kinds of constructions in Delhi, roads, buildings and of course, the metro rail. I do not see any extensive use of dust suppression methods used by the contractors. I am not sure whether dust suppression constitutes a part of their cost sheets or not and whether the tender documents at all check the environmental and ecological matters. Then there are private buildings and large scale apartment complexes which are taking place all over the city and in the large swathes of land lying outside the city. These real estate development activities are dust generating activities and are ecological disasters. I have no idea why there are no elaborate rules charted out for the management of dust for construction activities. I think that one has to be very careful with the builders and the land and real estate developers.

These developers not only clear forest lands, dig up farm and grazing land and adopt no dust management practices whatsoever but these projects uproot the grass growing on soil. I have briefly visited the USA as well as Central Asia, which was supposed to be parts of the erstwhile Soviet Union and I have observed that every bit of exposed earth is sown with grass. In India, we hardly find grass on grounds. Every bit of earth should be planted with grass. This is the best method to prevent soil loss and dust.

Delhi is presently very green thanks to the hectic plantation of trees, but trees gather dust as well and this dust along with pollen and dry leaves produce a higher concentration of particulate matter suspended in air. I have observed that the MCD staff rarely sweep roads with any regularity and even when they do the garbage is piled up alongside the road. In the poorer areas of Delhi and in the MCD there is no system of garbage collection. Local nallahs and rain water channels are choking with garbage. The principal reason for this garbage heap is the lack of understanding that garbage is generated in geometric proportion while the staff to collect the same, the capacity of the carts to carry away the trash and the capacity of garbage processors such as incinerators are not increasing. There is no garbage forecast model, no model to track the operation of garbage clearing. Almost all the permanent staff employed for city cleaning outsource their jobs to others and these “others” are mainly the kabadiwallahs who sift and sort the garbage, take out whatever is important and throw the rest anywhere they feel like. The rural zones of Delhi, the suburbs of the NCR have heaps of trash since years. The pile up of such massive garbage adds to the heaviness of the air which finally traps dust causing the unbearable levels of pollution.

My concrete suggestions are:

  1. use very stringent laws of dust suppression for builders, real estate developers and the Delhi Metro.
  2. Invest money in grassing.
  3. Track the city and suburb garbage removal schedules and performances minutely.
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Aye Dil Hai Mushkil

Posted on October 29, 2016 by secondsaturn

Dil Vakei Hai Mushkil …

The exact wordings of the song are Aye Dil hail Muskhkil, jeena Yahaan, Zara hatke, Zara Bachke, Yeh hai Bombay Meri Jaan insisting that your heart is indeed in deep trouble since the city in which you live in Bombay, now called Mumbai. It seems like sheer serendipity that a film named as Yeh Dil Hai Mushil should find itself in trouble in the city of Mumbai and that too from a group that poses itself as the champions of the development of Maharashtra, the state that has Mumbai as its capital city. The political group is known as the Maharashtra Navnirman Samity, or the MNS, a name that sounds as though it is a civil society group but is an intrinsic parastatal of the right wing party in power, the BJP. The apparent reason is that the film deploys a Pakistani actor called Fawad Khan in the movie. Fawad Khan is not a new face for he has been around quite a bit in television serials and in a movie called Kapoor and sons. As a television actor, Fawad has topped the popularity charts and been appreciated for his film histrionics.

However, in the film mentioned above he has played the role of a homosexual man, something of a great disgust for the right wing persons. The tirade against Fawad Khan is thus not merely about his being Pakistani, his Pakistani identity appears to come in good stead to stall his further development as a homosexual. The structure of Bollywood is such that stars, especially those who become popular are supposed to keep repeating their acts; clearly then the MNS feared that his sexuality may find furtherance in the “to be released” Karan Johar’s film. Karan Johar too is suspected to be a gay man and hence already looked upon with scepticism by the right wingers.

Fawad Khan’s rising popularity created a risk of making him into a star, a competition for many Indian wannabes and a buzz against him may already have been there which the MNS picked up. Let us never overlook that among the studio hands in Mumbai, there is a block of support for the Shiv Sena and its family parties. The anchor of Sudarshan television who has equated the Pakistani actors with the damageability of terrorists fear that Pakistani men and women may run over Bollywood throwing our actors out of jobs. An actress, Prachi Adhikari even went to say that aspiring female actors may find their way into prostitution if the Pakistani actors are not stopped from infiltrating into India. Clearly, the ban on Chinese goods, the ban on Pakistani actors and in fact the entire politics of the right wing, riding high on nationalism and a high moral ground of culture is an innate fear of competition.

The Sudarshan channel went on to a voice bombing on Pakistan, moving from the Pakistani actors to the directors who create opportunities for them, to the co actors who act with them and moved on to Muslim actors of the Khan trinity insisting that they have connections with Dawood. It was clear that they were trying to hit at Bollywood in general and the Pakistani actor was only a veneer of the tale. Voices rose, pitch shrilled and sentiments rolled out and finally came to an interesting resting point – Bollywood cinema itself.

The right wing attacks institutions, Universities, democracy, cinema, literature, poetry. Book burning episodes have chequered history through ages, which is a part of power struggles between empires and often social orders. Muslims have attacked and broken idols, looted and killed, Hindus have attacked relics and monasteries, Buddhists have attacked pagan sites and Jains have known to waged wars as well. Christians have burnt at stake people over centuries. Every religion has its own history of violence, its saga of cruelty. To my mind, all of the above must be clubbed together in order to understand the idea behind the attack of institutions lie deep inside societies as its angst. When institutions can no longer absorb the social change, when they can no longer respond to human aspirations, they no longer carry any meaning for the individual, they are attacked as junk. Beneath the attack of Fawad Khan and his cohorts, I see not so much the MNS as I see the ennui of the audience with Bollywood.

The Sudarshan channel clearly said that how long one could go on watching romances, one gets so bored. Did not the audience say this in the early 1970’s when Amitabh Bachchan emerged as the action hero? Amitabh changed the mood, after romance one of now engaging with the world through activity, struggle, and action. Amitabh was a new level of engagement, a new tire of involvement. The rise of the right wing often happens out of an unfulfilled need for action, a desire for engagement, a need to be gainfully employed. Romance is unemployment, a withdrawal from the world of action. No wonder then the soldier is becoming the hero, for him we are required to feel guilty when we light lamps in the evenings or cook food for children as they return home from school. Right wing politics of anarchism is thus an expression of the same forces that create a desire for nihilism, expressed through Prophetic religions of hate and envy and violence all struck through a call for a higher moral order, fascism unleashed with supercilious nationalism, popularity of football over more sedentary cricket, action movies over romances.

What do we make out of all this? To my mind, this is the time for new thought, new levels of reflections by institutions and establishments, a call for new ways of engagement and perhaps even new forms of social existence. The glory of institutions can only return with their reinventions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Amitabh’s Feminism

Posted on September 27, 2016 by secondsaturn

Amitabh Bachchan’s letter to his granddaughters is important in more ways than one. Firstly, it is a letter. Letter writing is an art of which the cultural elite know very well across the world; the intellectual pariahs who abound the social media and not having any kind of cultural heritage perhaps do not know of this grand art imagining that in the days of mobile messaging, why do people write letters at all? Their families may never have known letter writing and hence this unfamiliarity with this form of art. This is what one has to put up in democracies, the culturally lower classes abound in the same sphere.

Next is that he actually instructs his granddaughters. In Indian families, girls are cuddled, clothed, fed and pampered but rarely instructed specifically especially by the patriarch. Sons and grandsons are because they will have to bear the legacy of the family. But here, the patriarch takes upon himself to instruct his granddaughters on letters of life. The fact of especially instructing is already a step forward for here is the grandfather’s acknowledgment that they will bear the family legacy with them. He would not have bothered to instruct them if they were to be just individuals; because he looks upon them as legatees of the family that he sets about instructing them.

He assigns to each a lineage; the hard patriarchal lineage. Progressive families teach girls, teach them to be independent and individualistic and in many cases to even opt out of marriage. But such girls are raised as individuals and never as members of position within their families. Amitabh could have mixed the lineage; the Nanda girl could have been said to have also been a Bachchan girl. But he does not do this. He maintains the edifice of the class of heirs in the Indian law and more so in the custom. This is important because as independent women the greatest challenge comes from within the family in which when you are not married and on your own, a time comes when families marginalize you, count you out, cut you off and eventually forget you. You may have the autonomy but never a position in the family. Amitabh therefore, clearly assigns them the position of legatee of the patriarchal line of inheritance. This, I sense is remarkable.

Why not then also tell them of their mothers and grandmother? Amitabh is not socializing them or teaching them the arts. He is teaching them life and here he is assigning to them a post that women almost never have; a post within patriarchy despite not falling into one or the other of its roles. This is the great strategy of the lineage.

What are these instructions? The instructions are rather simple and in fact there is only a single instruction and which is that they should listen to only themselves and lend a deaf ear to whatever else people are asking them to do. But where is the guarantee that within the minds of these girls they will take the right decision? There are two ways in which this guarantee is achieved. One by making decisions as the legacy bearer of the patriarchal family which immediately assigns to them the position of inheritors and the other is by expanding their courage to accept the full consequence of their actions. Women suffer for want of inheritance; it is because of the essential lack of inheritance most prominent being forever remaining as outsiders and tentative members of their families of birth that women are basically rootless and anchorless. The other problem is of feminism and feminine politics itself and which is the hesitation in accepting the consequences of actions. You assert your rights within marriage and the man throws you out, you try to walk away from home and fall victim to sex trafficking; everywhere women are made weak by the consequences of their actions. Few feminists have ever recognized that the vulnerability of women to the fall out of their assertions lie in their lack of any legacy within their families. Because they have no “post” to fill in the families of their birth that women remain vulnerable, inconsequential and seemingly irrational. Amitabh’s strategies of first assigning to the independent woman a position within the patriarchal family lays the foundation for these girls to be autonomous for marry if they must, says Amitabh, marry only for reasons of marrying and not for anything else.

Why does he ask the girls to do things and not the boys? He does not curtail the girls and free the boys; he frees the girls. What would he tell the boys? and which boys? the ones on the streets, to stay off because his girls are walking it?

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Murder ? The Abesh Dasgupta Death

Posted on August 2, 2016 by secondsaturn

Of course Abesh Dasgupta has been murdered in cold blood and in a planned manner whether the police finds evidence or not. Kishore Bhimani and his gang will tend to turn the episode into one of an accidental death, an act of horse play gone horribly out of hand. Abesh fought with Rishabh over a girl called Prerana, who was not a part of the party. During the brawl, both the boys had been drinking because Rishabh punched Abesh hard with a broken booze bottle. The case has some very interesting details, of course culled out from whatever I could catch in the television fleetingly. Fleeting because I watch Mahanayak and Goyenda Ginni and then the programmes on the Epic channel. The facts of the case from whatever I catch are as follows.

The venue of the murder were the lawns of Sunny Park, an apartment house in one of who’s resided the host of the party, Aruna, the daughter of the celebrated author, Amit Chaudhuri. Aruna says that her family is a teetotaler and there is no way in which alcohol could have made its way into her house. The alcohol of course was found in the lawns and not the house. It is also clear that Aruna knew neither Rishabh nor Abesh; then how is it that these two found their way into this party? For this we must understand how such parties work.

In the common Bengali parlance there are two very distinct terms; one is called nematanna and the other is a party. A nematanna is a gathering of a closed group, of people who are especially invited for the occasion and who sit together, talk together, eat together and at the same time and constitute what one calls in sociology a group. A party is a loser idea, here there is a host but one who has an explicit intent of entertaining the guests; the guests are not especially invited but are informed of the intention of the host and a venue is often specified with a broad range of time. Some guests are closer to the host and they are informed first hand by the host and these guests then inform others and who then inform many more. The guests land up on circulated information, some kind of by word of mouth. Despite such looseness there are strong entry barriers to parties; and which is that a guest must at least know another guest very well. Every guest is a personal contact of some other guest at the party. This is why despite the utter looseness of a party, parties can very well be crashed into. Hence when Aruna says that she knows neither Rishabh nor Abesh, it makes sense. Then there must be somebody who knows Rishabh because Abesh was Rishabh’s contact.

Yet another aspect of the party is that the guests often bring their own drinks and sometimes even food; most parties have hawkeyed observers to track contributions. You can also make a money contribution and this is why Abesh took Rs 1100 from his mother to attend the party.

Why attend parties if you do not have any closeness to the host? Parties are like that; they are mostly hang out places for people to be in. Unlike the nematanna which is a private affair, a party is a public sphere though it is conducted indoors. Here people go to be in public circulation and this becomes very crucial in understanding the party’s victim, Abesh.

I went to an expensive school in Kolkata which had a significant proportion of the rich class; we were from the middle class and almost wholly removed from party scenes. We did go for nematannas though at friend’s places for birthdays and they came for ours as well. But parties were for the rich girls; many of those girls are on the face book but they refuse to recognize us. This is the quintessential class war. Alcohol and tobacco and boys were very much part of such parties but we were exiled from such worlds. We did not bother at the fact that our parents did not wish to spare the money to fund our parties for that was a world that was not for us. Ours was a world of work; futures lay clearly in pursuing professions, careers and employment. And in that we were contended and confident; because in our times, our social class, produced social leaders. The leader class, the opinion makers, the moral pursuers, the ones who made laws, who defined ethics, who laid down the rules of conduct and behavior were drawn from the middle class; this is why the upper class mores and values could were indeed not ours.

When the middle class was the leader class, middle class invested everything they could to help children maintain themselves within their social class and hence studies, accomplishments, sports and other activities like drawing and painting, sewing and knitting, swimming and cycling were pursued with ardour and compulsion. But today’s leader class is the rich class; celebrities and Page 3 persons are the opinion makers, they determine our values and mores, they chart out our ethics and rules, they set the codes of conduct and thought. This is why we need to invest in activities which will help us enter this rich class. Which are the activities of the rich class which we must cultivate? These are socializations, social contacts, networking, knowing a lot of people, the ability to drink at parties. Abesh’s family background shows that they belonged to the middle class which was on the anvil of a crossing over in terms of their contacts among the whos who of the society. It is likely that it was the family that encouraged Abesh to lead what the middle class mentality would call as the “fast life”. Abesh’s family cultivated such a lifestyle for Abesh and no wonder when Rishabh threw the lolly of attending the birthday party of a celebrity, Abesh agreed immediately for the lure of being with the high society. At this party then Rishabh bought alcohol, though they were under age with Abesh’s money and punched him with the broken rim of the bottle which he bought with Abesh’s money. Were Rishabh to buy his own bottle, going by the mindsets of such boys, he would not have jabbed Abesh with what “was” his, bought with his money.

Abesh and Rishabh fought over Prerana. In her interview, Prerana clearly said that she had no clue to what the two boys were up to. Yes, she did talk to Abesh for she liked him but nothing much. Yet, when she became friendly with Abesh, Rishabh’s father threw a fit calling Abesh names in front of Prerana, calling up her parents to say that she better be away from Abesh. He also called up Abesh’s mother to bad mouth Prerana. Prerana, on the other hand looked upon Rishabh only as a little brother, almost chaperoning and bossing him like an older sister would. Yet, Rishabh’s father was the one who behaved more like the jealous boyfriend. This is the crux of the case.

Did then Rishabh’s father craft this murder by provoking Rishabh into a murderous rage against Abesh? If so, then why? Is it a case of ethnic hate? I have felt this hate of non-Bengalis against Bengalis in Kolkata many times. This is a strange hate of the colonizer of the native. Colonialism is a syndrome by which the immigrant is not a slave or a refugee as of the NRI in America, but a British or a Dutch who assumes to emerge as the ruling class. Bengalis in other provinces are culprits of a great measure of such hate. I have seen Bengalis hate native Odiyas in Odisha, detest the local Tamils in Chennai or have only contempt for the Marathis in Nagpur? Is this also part of the famous Bahari-Bihari syndrome, or the conflict between the Brexit and Bremain? Does the outsider take the insider to be a loser? Does the immigrant consider herself as the superior colonizer against the local who is the poor subject? This mentality is real though almost never documented academically. Such contempt of the colonizer may have considered Abesh’s claims to belong to the high society of the host, remember that Aruna is a Bengali too and her father Amit Chaudhuri is gunning to save Kolkata in its pristineness and which is before the non-Bengalis had run it over. It is a wealth worth robbing; murder was a mean

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India Calling China To War

Posted on July 25, 2016 by secondsaturn

Its not very serious really but one does get some ideas, stray thoughts here and there, some notions, some vague presumptions, some kind of a gut feeling that India is war mongering with China. There are movements of military tanks in Ladakh, three Chinese journalists have been asked to leave, the Parliament in the forthcoming monsoon session is full of detailed questions on China, the ministries and think tanks wants some write ups on China’s investments and a few months before now, country representatives of China’s largest state owned trading company simply upped and left India without bidding their customary adieus. In 1962, China was the aggressor; in 2016 it is India which is the aggressor. India is now under a right wing government and like all right wing regimes, it is not surprising that India too will design at least to posture for war especially at a point of time when China is really not interested in war.

China has not been too peaceful a civilization for war has been both an instrument of territorial expansion and colonization as well as a way to rev up its economy. Chinese emperors have often believed in waging wars to enlarge its economy, deepen its production base and to bloat the imperial coffers; what war has never done for China is give it a kind of nationalism or the feeling of being united under an Empire. The Chinese people are fiercely federated, proud of territorial and local ties, embedded into communities and clans, jealous of cultures and vernaculars, of beliefs and customs; it is difficult for the Chinese to let go of such ties in favour of getting universalized under a central authority. War has been a sore point in that civilization for it has put the Emperor and his people in a situation of conflict, leading sometimes to major stand-offs as peasants and armies have rebelled against kings, generals and bureaucrats. No wonder then Buddhism was such a great hit in that land for it gave an instrument for territorial expansion and colonization through peaceful means of religious teachings and it absolved the communities from having to wage wars for the Emperors.

China was keen on warfare as late as 2010, a time just before the commodity price collapsed across the world. Before 2010, China was one of the major buyers of metals and minerals, of oilseeds and grains because of the massive industrialization that was taking place within the country. But as China’s factories produced far more that what China could consume and what the world markets could absorb, the Chinese traders lost all markets into which to sell the raw materials and products. Commodity prices softened and melted leaving the Chinese traders distraught and disheveled. Then China designed the Regional Cooperation for Economic Partnership, or the RCEP in which China would emerge as the trading Godfather of an entire region spanning the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and even the Mediterranean. With the region, the Chinese traders would trade by sourcing products from various countries and exporting these to the other countries; margins would be purely from trade.

Before 2010, the strategy of China was to buy raw materials from the countries at high prices; so high that it made more economic sense for the countries to become raw material producers rather than continue to be in the business of manufacturing. Examples from the world steel industry are cases in the point. Canada, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine and even Russia became active exporters of iron ore and thus deprived their own steel industries of raw materials. China, on the other hand was a cheap producer of everything and its traders knew very well that with the moneys the exporters earned from raw materials they would be eager importers of cheap Chinese manufactured goods. This was how, almost through a reversal of the European colonialism, China became the largest manufacturer of goods displacing the local manufacturing bases in almost every country in the world. India, too has been a victim of Chinese manufacturing for even if it does not buy much from China, yet the natural growth of its industries are capped by the global competitiveness of Chinese factories.

When China was in the process of buying up raw materials and selling manufactured goods, war made great sense to China. War efforts were a way of absorbing minerals and steel, of coal and oil, of investing in logistics and infrastructure and keep the machine going on. But after 2010, there has been an important change within China and which is the global recession that has weakened the global demand for its goods and services reflecting in large trade surpluses held in its exchequer. While such a large trade surplus would have been a blessing to finance wars, yet wars would mean the destruction of the surplus and not its investments and circulation. China has altered its strategy; it is now looking for ways and means to invest the surplus in countries of Africa, the Middle East, in south Asia like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan and then track, monitor and integrate returns from these investments through the trade network it proposes through the RCEP. War would mean an end to this plan. China cannot afford to go for war and neither will it indulge in any kind of battles and skirmished.

For India under the right wing, there appears much to gain from war. Firstly, war will help India cut off its ties with rest of the world and plunge into isolation. Thus isolated, its indigenous industries will grow once again and the GST Bill, if passed and made into an act will help integrate the economy at the national level. War will have the effect of isolating India, and isolation is just the thing that India is looking to given the slew of trade protection measures it is undertaking. Then war might help distract the mind of the people from the great scam of a Government actually not working at all. The food inflation, the collapse of industry, the belying of the promise of employment are emerging as major embarrassments for the Government; war may be a good idea at distraction. Besides, war may mean scope of speculation, yet another relief for the social class of speculators who have backed up the right wing government to the hilt. War is also a wonderful opportunity at the refining and activating its ultra nationalist discourses. Modi for who the greater Nemesis is neither Pakistan, nor China but Nehru, a war with China could mean an opportunity to overwrite Nehru’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962. Besides, a war with China will help India get into the same league as China, emerge in the eyes of the world as a genuine “contender” and force the world to be divided into India or China camp, thus slicing off some importance from what now is solely China’s monopoly.

But what are the odds that India will win this war? There are very few actually. China is manufacturing giant; it not only makes cheap stuff but makes very high quality stuff as well. Its designs are leading the world; technologically China can produce almost everything at a fraction of the costs of what any country can produce; it has strong communities and local bodies which makes governance both decentralized and effective unlike India where public deliveries are at best pathetic. The Chinese students have scored second in a global learning outcomes, India has ranked the second last among tests conducted across 176 countries. China has a global outlook in terms of its economic programmers, India is defensive and hides behind a pile of trade protection. Chinese investments are spread across the world, India’s investments are green horned and tentative. Besides, the Chinese are great fighters with homegrown military equipment and arsenal; Indian defense technology like its industrial production are imported and grafted externally.

India’s invitation to combat may emerge as just the opportunity that the Chinese were waiting for. For once provoked to war may help them overrun both North East, Kashmir and the Indian Ocean on the route to south east Asia. Incidentally the above are all part of the land and the sea trade routes of the Silk Road, just the routes which China wants to secure through the modern day RCEP. Pakistan will be its natural ally and so will be Russia; Pakistan because of Kashmir, and because China and Russia both have investments in Pakistan, for both are cultivating Pakistan as a destiny for their surplus funds, Russia will join the axis too. China has massive investments in Central Asia and Middle East especially in energy projects and mining and mineral beneficiation of which substantial number of Indian companies are beneficiaries. War with China will obviously see Indian companies lose their support in Central Asia and Middle East.

In Africa and Latin America Indian companies are in direct competition with the Chinese but because China has a wider and a more diverse basket of investments as compared to India, when it comes to choosing between India and China, it is possible that the African and the South American countries will choose China. Since China has purchased government debt bonds of the countries of EU and North America, it is likely that these countries will be obliged to China as well. Mr Modi is travelling across the world in a manner of Mrs Indira Gandhi did before India waged its war on East Pakistan that led to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. His wide travels and especially repeated visits to Africa, promise of investing in agriculture and food production, plans of cultivating pulses on African soil are hints that Mr Modi is preparing for war on a large scale. Steel giants like Essar Steel is already on the job of preparing for defense equipment and supplies.

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