Secondsaturn's Blog

Rakesh dropped in at my office in Delhi and put forth an interesting proposal. He was going on behalf of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, henceforth the NCPCR to Kokrajhar, one of India’s nine most disturbed districts and asked me whether I would like to go along with him. Rakesh is my brother who is presently leading a carefree bachelor’s life with his wife and sons away for a holiday with his wife’s parents. I, on the other hand am stuffed with schedules of meetings and deadlines for submissions. While my head reasons with me not to distract myself with too many interests, my heart tells me that I will never get another chance to visit India’s politically disturbed areas like this. So after a bout of inner agony and ecstasy I submitted to my instincts and packed a small bag for a four day trip into lower Assam, or what today is known as the Bodo Tribal Council Area. I will call this place as Bodoland.

The NCPCR’s position is that children must be given education in the districts that are torn asunder by civil unrest so as to catch them early and mainstream them so that they do not grow up to handle arms. Only a body as far removed from the reality as the NCPCR could think like this. Those who handle arms especially in the north east are more often than not students, produced and frustrated by the very education that the Commission was trying to entrench and deepen. Also, I do not believe in the exploitation and oppression theory behind violence; I feel that it is a desire to dominate over the rest of the society by groups in situations where no one group has any clear domination over the others. Anyway, eager to jump into the field, I called the cab and swished into the swank T3 airport to catch a Jet flight to Guwahati.

Aboard the full flight from Delhi to Guwahati I sat beside a mother and child duo. The child, a boy of about eight years sat by the window, the mother in the middle and I, by choice sat at the aisle. The boy agitated by his entrapment into the cramped bucket seat thumped and stomped irritably. I was getting very angry as I tried to catch some sleep and read Dave Prager’s book on Delhi at the same time. The mother was indisciplined too and after several berated warnings by the steward to stow away her front table, she continued to keep her bag resting there. Soon my ears buzzed and I knew that the plane was dropping altitude in preparation for landing when suddenly the boy child nudged sharply at his mother and said dehho, Brahmaputra !! (Look, the Brahmaputra). I pretended to rise to go to the toilet and peeped over the boys head at the proud, robust swathe of water that stretched timelessly into the earth. So confident, and so overpowering. Indeed, majestic! The boy kept looking at the Brahmaputra, singing to the river, saying rhymes in its ode and he calmed down without another noise. I was amazed how the Brahmaputra calmed the boy.

When I was planning my trip, I asked my Assamese boss which would be the best way to travel to lower Assam. Well, he said, and fished out a blank sheet of paper and drew an inverted L on it. This is the Brahmaputra, he said in his Assamese accent and here is Kachar, called the lower Assam which was to go to Manipur and lies now within Assam. He had no idea of how to get there because no Assamese would ever like to go into that land infested with wild tribes of the Santhals and Bengali Muslims who look like the Chinese. I marked that he never mentioned the Bodos and yet this was what was for all practical purpose the Bodo land. I think that for the Assamese, Assam is the valley of the Brahmaputra. Where there is no river, there is no Assam; it is the river that marks their homeland, keeps them close to the soil of Assam and lends meaning to their everyday existence. Bhupen Hazarika, the Tagore of Assam lived and sang by this river. He saw his entire world in the waves that loll at the heart of the river, carrying the waters of the mountains to feed and nourish the lower rivers of the Bengal delta. Assam is the Brahmaputra and vice versa. Lower Assam is not Brahmaputra’s land and hence it is not Assam.

Rakesh and I reached Guwahati by noon and headed straight to the railway station of Kamakhya. I thought of dropping by at the temple but I was put off by the goat sacrifices and decided not to venture into unpleasant sights. So we bought tickets for the inter city express which could be boarded only after four hours. We used this long waiting time to treat ourselves to a sumptuous lunch of boiled eggs, local buns, soft and sweet, thick sweet milky tea, a piece of cake, some packed salty snacks and fresh stick of sweet and watery cucumber with stingy hot concoction of common salt and red chilly powder. Then we used the morning newspapers to squat on the platform doing our own reading of the NCPCR progress reports. Trains arrived and then proceeded for the onward destinations every now and then and the platforms filled with people speaking Bengali, Hindi, Bhojpuri, and Assamese. A man asked us for a train to Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, someone was to go to Coochbehar; a boy made preparations to go towards Jaipur while some were headed towards Chennai. The scene that emerged slowly over the minutes and then hours was one of undivided Bengal Presidency, Muslims speaking in East Bengali dialect, Biharis speaking in musical Bhojpuri and Maithili, Oriyas, Nepalese and even people speaking the Santhali language loitered along the railway platforms, chewing paan, drinking tea, nibbling biscuits and simply looking for a place to sit and sink into. The serenity of Kamakhya, the wet green of the land, the damp cool breeze and the occasional rain transported me to the yester era of the Bengal Presidency from where time in this railway station has not seemed to move. What was lodged in my mind as being just a corner of the country now appeared to me to be its very centre. West Bengal, in comparison to Assam looked provincial and vernacular.

We reached Kokrajhar well past the evening. We could see the Brahmaputra for quite a while as we chugged over bridges and trailed over culverts. As long as the Brahmaputra was visible, not a single passenger in the compartment spoke. All eyes were fixated on this mighty flow of water. Again I saw the power of the Brahmaputra to mesmerize the Assamese.

The NCPCR resource persons and the teachers from Kokrajhar Government College came to receive us at the station. They drove us to the Circuit House where we heard that the All Assam Koch Rajbanshi Students Union, AAKRASU had called a strike which included a rail rook. The teachers told us that a bandh in Assam means a bandh when life becomes literally stand still. The resource persons had made a meticulous schedule by the half hour for us to visit various places in the field area and they were disappointed that such plans went haywire. Bandh is the disturbance of Assam; bandh is the very reason why the area is disturbed. It appears that a AKRASU bandh turned violent and the police instead of using force on the students for fear of retaliation arrested the leader. The bandh was in demand for release of the leader.

Assam politics is student politics; the politics is wholly controlled by the students, irrespective of whether that politics is violent, terrorist, extortionist or mainstream, participative and democratic. Hence the thesis of the NCPCR that the students will stay out of terrorism if they are educated flies in the face of the ground evidence that politics in Assam is education. The AKRASU’s demanded Kamatapur, an independent state which was to be carved out of Kokrajhar, Dhubri and Goalpara in Assam and Coochbehar in West Bengal and stretched as far as Patna in Bihar and included Sikkim and Bhutan. Kamatapur has been an ancient princely state out of which the Bengal Presidency and later Assam was carved out. The Koch Rajbanshis who ruled Kamatapur are now claiming their lost kingdom back. If there is Kamatapur then there will be no Bodoland and possibly no Assam. Kamatapur is impossibility but AKRASU uses this plank to consolidate its demand for a ST status, very much in the same lines along the Bodos. At the heart of Kamatapur is reservation for seats in colleges and jobs in the government. In absence of a robust economy, government remains the largest employer and everyone imagines herself in the role of a government servant. Hence the politics of Assam is largely the competitive democratic politics of reservations.

The following morning there was nothing to do. The resource persons were determined that we should not waste our day and with some effort fixed up an array of government officials we could meet. We met the officers from the Bodo Tribal Council, an autonomous self governing area consisting of the four districts of Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang and Udalgiri. The demand for Bodoland however stretches up to much larger tracts of Assam stopping short of just those lands from which the Brahmaputra comes into view.

The District Commissioner, a Bodo received as many as ten phone calls from Delhi and the Assam state government asking him to clear the railway tracks on which the Koch Rajbanshi students sat and to use brute force if needed. The District Commissioner diplomatically handled these instructions and without stepping on to any toes steadfastly refused to use violence. I could see in his face a determination not to use force. We asked the officer what the nature of disturbance in the BTC area was, he said that there was too much of violence, too many strikes, too much extortion, and kidnapping. The picture which the Commissioner presented was dismal; I imagined that there was no peace in Bodoland, no one could do any business peacefully, and all buildings were unfinished due to extortion. The resource persons too corroborated the Commissioner’s version of things in Bodoland.

One by one the officers irrespective of whether they were from the Bodo community or from the Santhals, or Assamese or Bengalis told us unsavoury things about the Bodos; they were wild, uncultured, uneducated, could not produce teachers, ate away the midday meals, stole cement and steel from buildings, absconded duties, ran side businesses, and captured all posts of primary teachers, anganwadi workers and Asha workers. When the news reached us late in the evening that the strike has been called off and we could travel into the villages, I had already made notes on the Bodos using their political autonomy for genocide against the Santhals to exterminate their population.

We set out early in the morning with a hearty breakfast of luchi and ghoogni cooked by a family of Bengali speaking Assamese staff in the Circuit House despite Shobhan, one of our resource persons fearing indigestion after the lavish helping of the oily refined wheat product. Shobhan is from Telengana, dead serious about his duties as a resource person. He is so serious that even if we sighted the odd urchin fishing in a swamp by the roadside instead of being in the school, Shobhan’s heart would sink, he would clasp nervously on to his bucket seat and look furtively at us apologizing that he has been an underperformer.

Throughout my stay in Assam I sensed this deep anxiety, a fear of failure that seemed to grip the people. Teachers’ faces went white when we would alight at the premises of a primary school. People would immediately say that the school buildings were not in place, there was no drinking water and there were no toilets when apparently things did look perfect. Our education campaigns have created such a fuss over toilets and class rooms that having only a building with its sanitary facilities seemed to be the be all and end all of education. Nothing can be as ridiculous as to have a school being defined in terms of its infrastructure; no one by a city based stupid policywallah can think like this. In the open fields of villages, a pucca building is the last thing which is required and sending children to a closed toilet without proper water supply and drainage is to harm them even more. Village people have their own ways of defecating; to my mind there is no tearing hurry to imitate city people especially when the required infrastructure is not there. Who needs a pucca classroom when one can easily keep the school together with bamboo poles and straw? Such classrooms are less intimidating for the children; schools with classrooms inside closed walls look like prisons anyway. But a pucca building, toilet, drinking water flowing out of a pipe seems to be the defining features of our education system. What really goes unnoticed that the children can neither understand the meaning of the letters they learn by rote, nor can “read” the illustrations and pictures contained in the pages of their books, yet teachers are tense with worry, as books have not arrived. For Heaven’s sake teach one single book for the entire duration of the school years but teach that perfectly, it will do. But the NCERT must have its own syllabus completed. What it designs for children from families of the educated, it also designs for children from families who have never seen letters from the time their species took birth upon earth. The pursuit for equality and uniformity everyday creates wedges and deepens inequality and the universal education lays the foundation for that.

Does the community participate in the child’s education? Yes, they do by complaining against the teacher who is more often absent than present. Unfortunately when the teacher does arrive, in almost all cases it is a man, he fails to teach. It is not as if he is not trained, but he is trained in a syllabus which is one size that has to fit all and it does not fit his. A Santhal or a Bodo does not come from a literate culture. Theirs is an oral culture. The two cultures have very different sets of cognition and one does not always easily translate into the other and each require a set of processes while transforming from one to the other. An important way to move from an oral to a literate culture is to learn how to verbally articulate. I suggested to a Bodo teacher, why you don’t allow the children to be on their own, play their games or just play truant for a while and then come and speak out what they did while they were out. The teacher gaped at me, but, he said, this is not in the teaching manual! How daft our programmes are, what takes only a few minutes for me to find out has never occurred in these long sixty five years to our educationists? I started doubting my ingenuity, for questioning the foolishness of so many people over so many years seemed absurd.

Whenever I insisted that every child should have cultural education, learn her own songs, memorize folk tales of the community, exercise through the dance forms and martial art, I appeared to have offended the communities. We want none of our stuff, they said. I sensed Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was flowing out in action here. The communities felt that they were oppressed by people like us, the middle class, the government officer, and the English speaking gentry in towns. Hence education was to create their children in the images of such oppressors. The children were thus to be as far from their own communities as their oppressors were. Universal education was intended to create internal colonizers and exploiters of one’s own community. No wonder the Bodo officers were so eager to show the members of their own community in poor light. Education seems to have created monsters for our civilization, denying our historicity, our context, and the inner dynamics of our communities.

When I met the ABSU leaders later in the course of the day, they too had the same narrowness of vision. Their politics was over education, reservation, quota, appointments. But what does your community control? How would you control the means of production? What of your life will you command? There is no answer. Education would make them officers and with that they will command those who command and exploit them. Politics also serves a similar purpose. When communities lose control over their means of production, they seek to control those who control them; politics and education become the twin tools. I understood now why Rakesh every now and then would think aloud, education is not welfare, it is politics. When education and politics converge into the same intent, social conflicts are bound to arise.

Kokrajhar is a disturbed district and I had a question in my list to ask around, what constituted the disturbance? It appears that in recent times, especially since 2010, everyday violence has ceased; I could frankly see no apparent damage. But now the non Bodos have come into the mood of retribution and hence they have chosen a more insidious path to violence, bad mouthing Bodos. I soon found out that I had been fed on a heavy dose of lies. I was told that all anganwadi posts were filled by Bodos. False. Every community had its own member as the anganwadi worker. I was told that every teacher was a Bodo. Wrong again, the Santhals had their own teachers. I was told that every school building was incomplete because the contractor was extorted and exhorted out. Wrong. School buildings were completed, even when they were only with a single class room. Bodos were constructed as villains through rumours and bad mouthing. They were the monsters to eliminate, the virus to be exterminated. Santhals were the worst in this respect. The Bengali Muslims merely “heard” such tales, but the Santhals seem to face genocide every day.

I was also told that the Bodo women stole rations from the midday meal. I was shocked but then Bodos were supposed to be animals, a species of homo sapiens less developed mentally and emotionally. He truth was contrary; in all the Bodo schools, midday meal was being cooked, the community paid out of their pockets when rations from Assam were not released. It was in the Santhal schools that midday meal scheme suffered because women had no role anywhere near the school. Wherever women were strong the meals did well. It did best in the Bengali speaking Muslim community where women were assertive and also had money.

The entire eastern region is culture conscious. People here have their standards of cultural refinement and cannot tolerate anyone not falling into such standards. This is why the Assamese have a deep contempt for the Bodos, disown them all the time. I recalled that my Assamese boss tried to tell me that in Kokrajhar there are Muslims who look like the Chinese; he was referring to the Bodos and he was an Assamese, he was in Assam at the height of the AASU movement, then why did he lie. He also lied that Kokrajhar could only be approached through Bengal and not via Guwahati. This was to mislead me; Kokrajhar is nearer to Guwahati than to New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal. And now Assam state government was on some fiction that Bodo women were stealing food from their own children stopped supplies meant for children’s nutrition. Also, they were under the influence of some corporate house to supply biscuits to the children. In fact, many teachers paid out of their own pocket to procure food for the children in the schools. Such sacrifice by teachers must also be recognized and lauded. But let the Brahmaputra not be generous to wash the sins of the Assamese.

If Santhals were against the Bodos, Bodos were ever so eager to appease the Santhals. They took up issues of the Santhali language, the appointment of the Assamese teacher who taught at a school of mixed communities and they were very eager to campaign against witch hunting among the Santhali communities. Bodos treated their girls very well, Santhalis in a bid to modernize, acquire political power have started marginalizing their women. The denial of their culture is also a part of the package to marginalize women. Girl child trafficking flows out of similar intentions. Had they access to facilities of the ultrasound, the Santhal community would also have killed the female fetuses.

The violence that was external has now travelled inside into social envy, prejudice, witch-hunting, rumour mongering. Santhals need someone to flay for their own desire to and failure in creating their oppressors. At one level they seek money at any cost even if that is through sale of children and prostitution because they are as yet too weak to become extortionists, at another level they create scapegoats to cover their deficiencies.

But why did the violence on the ground, a violence that was perpetrated by gangs of boys settle down after 2010? The key to this is the balbandhu scheme. The Balbandhu scheme is a rather clever move by the NCPCR, a kind of its own Salwa Judum to protect child rights which are abrogated during times of civic unrest. The Balbandhus are a band of young boys and girls who move about in the community beseeching the children to return to school, gathering community initiatives to put the school system back in place, invigilate other deliveries such as health and nutrition through the community health workers. Kokrajhar district has 37 Village Clusters, each cluster containing anything between four to as many as twenty villages depending on the population and size of these villages. The Balbandhu scheme operates in 20 out of the 37 village clusters and there are 20 balbandhus. But these balbandhus are not confined to single village clusters as they freely move around the community, throwing their weight at contractors who employ child labour, parents who do not send children to school, families who marry off young children, agents who smuggle children across borders into flesh trade and begging and reporting such matters to the police and the National Commission. The NCPCR has a list of indicators with which it wants to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the balbandhu scheme such as whether enrolment into school has improved, drop outs decreased, attendance improved and teaching become better. These are important things to do; but what has really happened due to the balbandhus is that the communities seem to have got a new purpose in living and thinking about their future, which reflects in an increased awareness towards education. In Kokrajhar, the balbandhus have brought about a new role model for the youth to follow rather than the rash, extortionist mafia image.

The balbandhu is a smart idea; they are in the same age group as the terrorists and the unsurrendered violent students groups and hence offer certain kind of competition to the glamour of the extortionists. The balbandhus are equally vigilante and yet they work to integrate rather than intimidate the people. The balbandhus have created not merely awareness about the Right to Education among the villagers but infused them with a new purpose in life after which they look more gathered up and sorted.

Assam’s Multiculturism

Assam is multicultural but not plural. No one culture dominates over others here; no one’s culture dominates here. People pursue a soulless alienating modernity. These were only words for me from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and had I not visited Assam I would have never known that such a reality exists. The elite of Assam are government servants; education is a step by step preparation towards appointment in various government posts. As government servants the elite is supposed to control society, verify identities and eliminate wannabes from true claimants. Such elite is an internal colonizer whose idea is to destroy the life of a community and the soul of its culture. Assam’s economy is such that there are government servants and contractors; those who cannot be employed in the government and cannot be contractors become politicians and if the space in mainstream politics is to narrow to accommodate them, then they become extortionists and militants. Education thus serves the only purpose of acquiring social power, inter communal competition over educational quotas thus constitutes the core of politics in the North east. Education neither creates a community life, nor deepens genuine democracy, and much less creates civil societies, skills, innovations or social leaders. In fact, education, the way it is designed can only create oppressors for the society. There is no culture in education, no power in cultures. Assam is a state, which like its other north eastern sister states, is progressing towards culturelessness.

The Bengali speaking Muslims are the socially dominant group. Despite a small demography they have done economically the best. And they are not contractors. They are farmers but so are the Santhals and the Bodos. But the Santhals and the Bodos farm to feed themselves, the Muslims farm to produce surpluses which are then reinvested in shops and agencies of consumer durables or taxi services. The attack against Muslims during the All Assam Students Union days in the plea that Bangladeshi migrants were infiltrating into Assam was a way to intimidate the Muslim community who always seemed to get large supplies of farm hands, who were neither the local Bodos nor the Santhals.

The Muslims could have had their say in Assam politics had they a better participation in the Freedom Movement. Partition of Bengal also cramped their style to a great extent. But the Muslims of Assam were part of the Mughal nobility and in some cases the generals of Hussain Shah as he invaded Kamatapur. Like the rest of their ilk, these Muslims stayed away from the vernacular nationalism of the Assamese Hindus and the Bengali Hindus. Many Muslims of Rangpur presently part of Bangladesh had worked their way up into moderate riches, the very same Muslims of who the famous sociologist Radhakamal Mukherjee regarded rather skeptically. To the Bengali Hindu, the economic prosperity of the Muslim was a problem because not being, to the Hindu mind, of a progressive culture Muslims might use their wealth to enter the elite intelligentsia and corrupt the exclusivity with a lesser culture.

The Santhals are obviously cast away workers of tea estates in Assam who inhabit the trenches and swamps of lower Assam. Poor and backward, the Santhals have awoken to a new consciousness and seriousness after the genocidal attack upon them by the Bodos in 1996. Ever since that year of insecurity, Santhals have become attentive to education, gained more social awareness, come up with a students’ union. But they have also become scheming, wicked, perverted, anti women, female child traffickers, politicized and socially envious and back stabbing. The line is straight; oppression, awareness and then desiring education and falling in the trap of a dehumanizing syllabus where one is straight jacketed, extracted out of culture and hate that self which is located within a system of community and human relation.

The Bodos demographically the most numerous tribes in the north east are expert bamboo craftsmen and weavers. Clans of the Bodos have ruled Kachar, or what is known as lower Assam. It is this space that they wish to rule again as the Bodoland. Assamese deny Bodos their existence as the Bodo demand for Deodhahi script shows. Assamese have not allowed the Bodos to use their script nor allowed Bodos to resuscitate the Deodhahi; the Bodos have to be content with devnagri, a script that does absolutely no justice to the language and its diction.

Apropos to the Bodos desire to return to a pre-British history, there is a demand for Kamatapur as well by the Koch Rajbanshis. Koch Rajbanshis ruled over Kamatapur, an area which covers a huge territory covering Bhutan, Assam, Meghalaya, Cooch Behar in West Bengal and the northern states of Bihar. Maharani Gayatri Devi was from the princely family of Cooch Behar, a Koch princess, who was married into the royal family of Jaipur. The Rajbanshis take this connection seriously and this has taken a stream of migrants from lower Assam into Jaipur and Jodhpur where it is common to find rickshawpullers, cooks and drivers from Bengal and Assam. For the Bengali Muslims who because of their economic wealth are also better educated find Jaipur an ideal city to send their children for higher education. For a small section of families who are directly related to the grand Mughals, Jaipur is home of their historical allies, the Rajputs. History continues here unpunctuated by British colonialism and by the modernizing nationalism of Freedom Struggle. Child marriage is still practiced in the region as witch hunting is a vestige of a medieval tradition. Balbandhus are a modernizing force, who intervene into such traditions and try and reform these.

The Bodo reassertion, the demand for Kamatapur, the rising envy of the Santhals and the gradual cultural marginalization of the Muslims show that every culture is now uprooted and its people fired into the vacuum of an alienating modernity. No wonder then that social conflict among communities becomes irresolvable. Everyone is rendered into cultural homelessness and bereft cultural capital, communities cannot mobilize social capital to sustain economic production or create assets needed for social status. There is only an empty space of the universal human being, uprooted, standardized, branded, and ahistorical. Neither education nor its alter ego politics, tries to revive the community’s soul by which it can become a productive agent, commanding life and controlling life chances. As dehumanized and standardized atoms, they command nothing, control nothing; they play communal politics by which one standardized atom  clings to others on the basis of some ethnic tie to become a larger homogenous mass than the others. No wonder then demography becomes important in democracy.

I am the last one to suggest that the citizen should return to the community; I am the last one to revive local ties and reinvent the feudal authority. All that I am saying is when we develop into universal citizens; we should universalize and liberate our cultures to enrich the universal. I am suggesting that if we are pursuing generalizations let not that abstract content dominate us from above; instead become a manifestation of our specific concrete. History becomes crucial to this project and I can see where the demand for Kachar and Kamatapur comes from. But there should be more to it. I ask the Bodo and the Koch student, do you want to rule your lands again? Yes, they nod enthusiastically. Then, imagine you are aleady kings and behave like one; kingdom will follow. But when you raise only demands and stall trains and block highways, you are behaving like victims, like beggars, stripped of all means, and now fighting with other beggars for the crumbs that the state government throws at you as grants and public investments. Communal politics is dog fight over territory for crumbs that someone happens to cast at you; it is not a politics where you command the means of production.

Notwithstanding the close link between demography and democracy, population for every community in Bodoland is declining save the Muslims. No wonder child marriage is so prevalent among them despite being better educated and culturally rooted. What a paradox ! Of the various challenges that democracy faces, demography interestingly is also one. No wonder that slowly, politics of the world’s largest and wonderful democracy is pulling into a zone beyond the will of the people. Political propaganda and the media are creating images to manipulate what people want; I think that I want a plush apartment in a gated colony, why though I have no idea.

Despite the many bandhs and frequent disruptions to normal life, life when it runs it does so with precision. An appointment at 9 in the morning means 9 in the morning; a person waiting at the Gosaingaon crossing means you will find him there. People are hardworking and dedicated and it is possible to call a rickshaw on mobile at the wee hours of the morning when you have to catch the 5 am Intercity Express to Guwahati.

Rakesh and I boarded a rickshaw for the railway station; fixed rates, no haggling and fixed points of boarding and alighting as well. Trains run on time whenever they are not held up. Our train stood there right on time but a backlog of goods trains carrying oil and coal were jostling for signals to clear them. I asked the students how come they continue to tolerate this colonial exploitation of Assam where the non renewable minerals move out of the state and no one but the companies get their royalties? They had no answer; it is so much simpler to fight the state and the political parties than to fight the companies. It has ever been so easy for Bengalis to fight Hindus-Muslims, East Bengal-Mohun Bagan, CPM-TMC than to fight the real looters, the Marwaris who lock up factories and migrate out capital and spread the rumours that Bengalis do not work.

Aboard the train a young woman lawyer who sat next to me told me exactly in five minutes the crux of our story. We are facing the Crisis of civilization; all of us are now consumers and towards this consumption we run exhausting our resources and reducing our opportunities; conflict and not cooperation dominates us. This is low thinking which pervades across Assam; here people imagine that the next door neighbor is the problem. For Assamese, Bodos are the problem, for Bodos everyone else is the problem, for Santhals their own people are problems, for the Muslims loss of power is the problem. Assam’s common life is defined by extreme standardization, mobile and motorcycle.

Back in Guwahati, I called up Tahir Ali, the man who drove us from the airport to the station on our way to Kokrajhar. Tahir was now to carry us back from Kamkhya to the airport. On the way we stopped for lunch at Paltanbazar and opted for a restaurant called Mahalakshmi, the same name as Rakesh’s wife. We ordered for some Burmese food. The man behind the counter refused to serve us the delicacies; they are not good he said. Then get us Assamese thali please, I said. The man said it was better for us to try the Bengali Thali. I understood what he meant. He suffered the same fear of failure I have seen throughout the Kachugaon bloc of Kokrajhar; he deprecated his own culture, felt ashamed of his cuisine, felt that it was not good for our palate. Assamese thali it is to be, I was steadfast. The meal came, sumptuous, salubrious.

Thoroughly pleased with myself after this hearty meal and relieved that Rakesh’s work had been partly complete, I looked around to absorb the sights and sounds. I suddenly realized that all through Assam I have seen something that I often do not get to see in Delhi; namely, the abundance of girl children! I realized that little girls were less seen around in north India, they were so abound in Assam, well dressed, well fed, confident and contented. I thanked Ma Kamakhya.