AMRI Fire : Could Sociology Help?

Posted on December 10, 2011 by secondsaturn

My friend has invited me to a candle light vigil at Kolkata’s Hazra crossing to mourn for those dead in the AMRI hospital fire, the worst ever since the Guatamela fire at the mental hospital during the World War II (Star Ananda News, Suman De). The gathering will demand affordable health care by the public health system in order to help patients avoid greed ridden health care deliveries by private profit making bodies. The kind of people who will be at the vigil this evening are liberal, plural, tolerant and secular Indians, who will only try to ignore the core issue and skirt around to demand from the State, its greater role, knowing full well that in the aftermath of economic liberalization, the State withdraws systematically from all economic activities leaving the space for private investments. They will try to raise issues of State and public health, monitoring agencies and so on, only to avoid raising the uncomfortable questions about the ownership of the hospital to whom profits accrue. The State can do nothing where greed prevails in such an unpardonable shamefulness.

The single point of convergence and hence of consensus across the world of neoliberalism is privatization, since private capital, pursuing profit motives is supposed to be able to deliver goods and services best to citizens who now are overwhelmingly consumers. What this programme fails to see is that private capital is never happy with a steady state of affairs and seeks ever higher profits exhausting resources with alarming rapidity. The great AMRI fire is the result of private property seeking more and more profits by cutting costs to ridiculous levels.

AMRI is not an exception; it is the rule of business. Polluting industrial units, locked out mills, units operating out of contract labour, leaving behind communities in ill health and poverty is the business of such investors. Should one protest, such investors go into an industrial strike, migrating businesses out of the city and returning back into it only after some amount of prosperity has returned. The story is the same everywhere in the world, and especially so because not only the investors have no loyalty to the people but in almost all cases of unbridled greed, investors have essentially belonged to a different community. The sociology of the actors is as important to outcomes as economics is.

Sumitomo and Mitsubishi are better behaved in Japan than they are in China; Posco is a mild mannered exemplary group in Korea and a rather wile one in Orissa. Enron would never have got off in the US and Union Carbide would never have dared to do what it did to India in the country of its origin. Investment capital is invariably contemptuous of its consumers because the relationship is one of exploitation; just in the way labour and capital are invariable enemies. A possible reason why India could never quite develop capitalism within the caste frame is because community ties places severe limits on free exploitation. Besides, capital also needs to cartelize and it is difficult for a few among them to gang up against the larger community into which they have to interact on an everyday basis. The most opportune route for business is therefore to migrate; it is not surprising that mercantile capital has migrated the most and early globalism has been entirely due to spread of culture through trade routes.

Nationalism that came riding on the back of industrial capital, Protestant ethics and community ties of mutuality helped sublimate greed into a work for a larger community. Much of capital escaped this entrapment into spirituality by continuing on the path of mercantilism through colonialism. The nation proved to be tenuous under the glare of capitalist greed; the neo-liberal consensus dissolved the worth of nations in a sweep of globalization that pulled down barriers for capital but set them up higher than ever for labour. Capitalism finally realized its worth by infesting countries socially and historically unconnected to them for shameless exploitation, violence, murder and mayhem. Latin America and Africa are instances of such attack by unrelated investors. Indeed, an important way to contain and control capital is by making it accountable, which in turn means tracking them across larger spaces and larger stretches of time. Sociological accounting of capital is needed; tracking families such as the Rothschilds across decades and over two centuries from Japan in the east to Alaska in the west, from Iceland to Australia to reveal to their stakeholders that such people financed wars and drugs, mafias and banks, hotels and hospitals, Churches and Synagogues and paid for both sides in the American Civil War; only when faces are known and made known can the Shylocks be contained.

Who are then the faces of greed in the AMRI fire? What other businesses do they have, where else have they obtained assets, who their family members are must be tracked to the minutest if we really want to bring the guilty to the book, genuinely.

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Murder Of The Maobadi – Mamata’s Fatal Flaw?

Posted on December 2, 2011 by secondsaturn

As early in her life as now Bengal’s Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee has murder on her hands; the stain of the Maoist blood will be difficult to wash off and the assassination of Kishenji might well be her fatal flaw. This burden of abrogating human rights imposed on her so soon in what one expected to be a flawless run of the TMC in bringing about a new order in Bengal and from there to spread her ideology towards the rest of India and vindicate Gokhale’s belief what Bengal thinks today the rest of India thinks tomorrow. To wedge such a deep gap with the Maoists, to have them hunted and killed at point blank, to have provoked them into despair is not something that Mamata can afford to do especially in view of her tabula rasa of her intentions for Bengal. Clearly Mamata’s rising Bengal is not a copy of shining India and hence one need not have hunted a certain section of the citizens, namely the Adivasis to appease another section, namely the capitalists. Yet this is exactly what appears to have been done; the day Mamata visited the Trade Fair in Delhi was the very same day that Kishenji was killed in a manner that was not a mere encounter.  The assassination was a hint to assure the industrialist that Bengal had sympathies for super profits of oligopoly.

Mamata is not all that chaotic and impulsive as she appears to be. It is true that she was abrupt and tentative in all that she did to oppose the deep entrenchment of the CPIM in the state but that was till Nandigram and Singur happened. She suddenly seemed to have hit upon a formula that could forge a programmatic opposition to the invincible hegemony of neoliberalism. In Singur and Nandigram, villagers opposed the takeover of land by industrial projects; it was not conservatism on part of the farmers, nor was it a resistance to change nor was it a preference to farming over industrialization. The farmers in these areas were often prosperous than the rest of their ilk; many were retrenched industrial workers who returned to land for food security and many of the landless farmhands worked on land to obtain their food especially in view of rising food inflation. Many looked upon their lands as their savings bank account into which they accumulated their earnings and helped the asset grow in value and worth. Mamata fought on the side of the peasant to secure for them their only asset as social security. It was a fight for social security against the increasing uncertainty that global capital invariably brings with it. The CPIM was too ineffectual to be able to resist global capital and gave in to the Tatas and the Jindals, both rising players in the global arena of steel, power, raw materials, logistics, trade and real estate. Mamata took on their might.

Mamata’s indefatigable defense of local property in the face of global capital also brings her ideology very close to that of the Maoists. The Maoists are indigenous people who we call as adivasis; their asset is ecology consisting of forests, biodiversity, water tables and quality of soil. The adivasis have a very different organization of economics that rests very heavily on food security; much of the tribal isolation is also due to the peculiar nature of food security where food production must be withheld from the market forces; it must be bartered to the members of the community who in turn offer their labour much needed to diversify the tribal economy. Markets are notorious for homogenization of crop production, lowering the fertility of soil, over exploiting ground water and reducing food value and finally bringing about food insecurity through squeezing margins at the producer’s end while raising the same at the retail end as the latter must cover the ever rising rentals in metropolises. Maoists resist the market and because of it, the society at large. Yet to say that the adivasis are especially attached their pristine ways of life is sheer ignorance. In my extensive travels in Jharkhand I have learnt that Adivasis pursue a way of life where high thinking especially the pursuit of scientific knowledge is at the very centre. Little children want to be scientists, women want to be able to discover principles of microbiology to be able to defeat the monopolists selling them fertilizers and pesticides; men wish to be able to master mechanics and the science of materials to be able to procure basic materials for building homes, bunds, towers and roads. For all such pursuits one needs food security and this is done by preserving the ecology, something that market forces erode. The Maoists desire similar protection for their assets as the farmers need for theirs. When Mamata defended such local assets in Singur and Nandigram, the Maoists hailed her as their savior too.

But soon the breach happened between the Maoists and Mamata. Democratic politics like market economics has its own rules in which rights of minorities are usually passed over. Both work on impersonal signals whether of numbers of voters or of the purchasing power of consumers. Maoists oppose the market because of the peculiarity and hence specificity of their situation that cannot be subsumed under the more universalized laws of the country designed on the basis of statistical uniformities; this is also the very same reason why they also oppose democratic politics. A political tabula rasa that must deal with the Maoists must have an ability to create exceptions rather than rules, handle plural polities rather that homogenize the constituency. But this was not to be so because of the nature of relationships between the mainstream peasants and the adivasis.

Despite West Bengal being a state perhaps the highest density of population, rural Bengal sends avalanches of migrants to work in metropolitan cities and other states. The reason for such outmigration is the non sustainability of agriculture due to high input costs, subdivision of land in view of extensive property rights in land and a very successful land reforms programme and of course the rising cost of labour due to the collapse of the PDS and the food inflation. Further to this list of woes is also the rising population pressure on land that makes some people regularly get thrown off land ownership without having the security of food through subsistence farming. Much of this is because alternative employment opportunities namely through industries did not take place in the state. It was therefore in  a state of desperation that the CPIM government had invited the Salims from Singapore and the Tatas from Jamshedpur and the Jindals from Haryana to set up plants in the state. What happened then to trigger off agitations in Singur and Nandigram is another side of the above story to which we will shortly return. As of now, the adivasis are a steady source of cheap labour upon which much of the farm economics in Bengal depend. Assertions in the adivasi zones are thus extremely detrimental to the interests of the Bengali mainstream farmers.

There is yet another function that the adivasis perform and which is that of carriers. Were it not for the adivasis, much of the produce from farms would never have reached the market. Farmers, especially the women who would carry headloads of no less than 25 kilos on a 30 kg body, are now passé. Tribal women are thus easy sources of labour to carry goods to the markets. Political agglomerations, tribal unity through movements and cultural expressions and above all ideological consolidation of existential issues are thus detrimental to the interests of the peasant community. For an urbane intellectual, removed from the countryside both mentally and physically, such compulsions of mainstream and adivasi conflicts are difficult to grasp. Just as the way farmers realized a whole new voice and political constituency through the Singur and Nandigram movement, these movements were also important, especially the Nandigram movement to help adivasis organize themselves around a new kind of political ideology. Did Mamata, by killing Kishenji actually choose the peasant over the adivasi, to appease the section of the rural mainstream where the CPIM’s base lay? Does she then go back on her agenda of creating a new mainstream that is more inclusive?

Yet, Mamata failed them; wherever I have visited villagers, forest dwellers, adivasis, industrial workers all eyes seemed to have been turned towards Mamatadidi; she can never harm the poor, she is the face of new India, a new thinking, a new politics, a new power structure. But I am not sure what her killing of Kishenji would do to her. There will be a huge disappointment among her followers in Sukinda forests, Latehar hills, Noida factory complex and this was a very large constituency which morally backed her by speaking of her as the new messiah and thus creating a buffer of public opinion beyond those who were on her voters’ lists.

As I walk into the avenues of Gariahat market to escort my father while he buys vegetables, there is cheer everywhere, Kishenji Khatam, ki bolen dadu? Maobadis attack trains and kill passengers, a huge catastrophe for Bengal where people are forever travelling from within the state to beyond it, from villages to kasbas, suburbs to downtowns taking the public transport, mostly the train.

 

 

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Edmund de Waal – Hare With Amber Eyes, A Hidden Inheritance

Posted on November 6, 2011 by secondsaturn

Karl Marx wrote his essay, On The Jewish Question in 1844 to contest a thesis by Bruno Bauer how Judaism as a religion directly conflicts with the interests of a modern and free political society. Judaism is a religion of the merchant, a religion that only knows self interests and has no pragmatic grounding. They have no nation, cannot belong to any state but to their own imagined utopia as chosen people. In its bid only to accumulate money, the Jew trades relationships between man and woman, sell women as chattel and has no taste in art. Edmund de Waal’s book, Hare With Amber Eyes contests this Jewish Question. Speaking as an insider of the famous Ephrussi family, de Waal draws out a historical biography of Charles Ephrussi, an art collector and a connoisseur. The hare that has amber eyes is one among the 264 odd netsukes that Charles has collected and thereafter gifted them to his family making those into veritable heirlooms. Throughout the book, the author challenges Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer on the thesis on the Jews by investigating his own family history and shows how contrary in real life the Jews were to what philosophers and thinkers made them to be.

The netsuke is an interesting object; this is a Japanese arte d object used as buttons to toggle pouches hung from sashes of kimonos serving as pockets. The netsukes attained very high level of craftsmanship and aesthetic standards especially given the smallness of their dimensions. The netsukes emanate out of the Japanese way of mingling art into the everyday life of pragmatic applications and it is the Japonaise of finding the purity of aesthetics in the content of the practical that inspires realists like Renoir and Manet of Europe. European modernity is founded upon rationality and its esthetics is defined as the reconciliation of the opposites of the concrete and the abstract, the context and the rule, the specific and the general, the particular and the universal. The points of difference between West and Japan is while the former maintains the hierarchy of the universal over the particular, of the abstract over the concrete and the concept over the content, Japonaise finds the two sets of attributes intermingled. The sense of life in Japanese art does not rise towards a higher level of the sublime but becomes the sublime in its state of being. It is the state of being as the sublime that really attracts schools of art like realism and impressionism to Japonaise. Renoir and Manet are so much like the Japanese prints and since Charles has both paintings and prints, the similarities are explicit.

The Ephrussis are the Ashkenazi Jews, meaning the eastern Jews. It is a belief among such Jews that they and the Japanese were once, in the aeons of time, the same people. The repeated motif of the netsuke perhaps tries to establish ties with Japan. Japan is an important land; it aligned with the Nazis and fascists during the Second World War and hence by the logic of extrapolation was against the Jews. But the seeking of Japan by the Jews is interesting; it is the search of common interests of finance capital. The Jews were bankers, financiers of both war and grain trade, in fact grain trade was one of the main ways in which the Ephrussi and Rothschilds made their money. Japan was the non-European power that Europe admired and the Jews were quite instrumental in financing Japan’s trade of silver into Europe. Japan’s economic surplus that was invested into the various economies of European countries helped Europe emerge as a major economic bloc in the pre War era. Jews were well entrenched into these societies on the might of their financial powers and in fact befriended and pampered by Emperors.

The problem with Jews emanated with European nationalism. Nationalism was based on localism, linguistic uniformity and Christianity; it was rooted in manufacturing and industry. Jews holding onto a religion that was not grounded in the local contexts and histories, their fraternity with their ilk across national and linguistic boundaries and their pursuit of rituals that were not founded on folklore alienated them as being foreigners, non secular and anti-nation people. Jews, affiliated to and identified by religion had no place in secular politics.

If the Jews fell then they fell to persecution of nationalism and not by Empires. It was the nation with its rigid borders and the industries that chose to maximize margins within the enclosure of national economies that fell apart with interests that were of global finance. Nationalism brought wars and Jews, like most other citizens fought wars on behalf of nations. This was odd for the Jews because as nationals they fought cousins from other nationalities. They were suspected of not being dedicated enough to the staunchness that wars needed. When nations came to be defined as irreconciliable enemies of one another, Jews who were globalized found themselves as being irrelevant to the project.

The Eastern Jews were somewhat looked down upon by the Western Jews as well as by the Christians. The Christians claimed their superiority through a higher level of spirituality; a spirituality that was grounded and this worldly. The Jews on the other hand were pronounced as being merely mercantile in interests and covertly push their rather selfish interests through a ritualistic religion that claimed at best an inferior kind of other worldliness. But the author shows that the Jews because of their riches could finance and thus create very large art markets, art being one of the main arteries through which Christian spirituality claimed its legitimacy. Art is thus a way in which the members of the Ephrussi family seek their acceptance into the cultures and ideologies of the non Judaic people in whose society they stay in.

The character of Dr Elisabeth Ephrussi, the author’s grandmother with a doctorate degree is evidence that flies in the face of the contention that women were not free among the Jews. The Jews fashioned themselves after the rich and this in turn confined their women into the inner spaces of the dressing rooms, they pursuing fashions where it could take a very long time and a retinue of helpers to get the dresses on. This was unlike the Christians who modeled themselves along the poor and the workers; with greater simplicity that brought with it easier mobility. Elisabeth’s mother was one such a Jew woman who would take hours to dress and was so privileged that even her sexuality was not bound by marriage since her husband and lover coexisted in mutual congeniality. Some rich Jews pursued erudition in European history and the author traces how these very Ashkanazi Jews were the ones to have really studied, promoted and held most fondly created the history and culture of Europe. Yet, these are the very ones who Europe pronounced as being outsiders and dispensable to its reason of history.

As Jews were being persecuted, the lower classes among them felt the burden at first. Such Jews streamed from all over Europe into Vienna, the seat of European drama in the inter War period. During such exodus, the richer among the Jews were hateful of their less fortunate brethrens and it becomes rather clear in the later part of the book that the movement for Israel emanated out of a need of the lower classes of Jews to be placed under the protection of the richer ones in the community.

De Waal’s book is an interesting inside story of the glamoured opulence of the Ephrussi-Rothschild family; sometimes money, especially in Austrian Ringstrasse can become rather tiring for a mind that is more in tune with ideas of socialism, equality and citizenship. But it tells us the bitter truth that without money, the spirituality of civilizations cannot thrive and the Jews did a good turn to Europe by promoting art in a way that circulated its spirituality away from Churches into the secular world. One cannot help but notice the netsuke as being the core of the writing, and also notice that in recent times there has been a renewal of searching a link between Japan and the Jews, especially because Japan today owns most of the global financial capital like the Jews once did.

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Karwa Chauth

Posted on November 4, 2011 by secondsaturn

My friend Dr Kalinath Jha, a feminist sociologist has asked of us in facebook whether Karwa Chauth is a festival that abrogates a woman’s dignity by asking her to pray for her husband’s long life especially in view of the fact that the husband never really prays for his wife’s longevity. I, as Dr Jha’s fellow sociologist, am tempted to elaborate the sociology of the festival.

Karwa, typically means an earthen pot and chauth means the fourth day and these two combined with the practice of biting neem leaves after throwing water connects the ceremony of karwa chauth to a death ritual. The moon is seen only through a cloth or a sieve or in water, hinting that one is watching an eclipse, again signifying a dead moon. The ritual assumes that the woman in question has lost her husband, views his dead face, because even the husband is seen through the sieve or in his reflection on water. It is typically a ritual of mourning; the bride’s clothes imply that as she readies to celebrate a wedding life with her husband she loses him. It is a ritual that emphasizes her widowhood while in her wedding clothes.

The death motif is further strengthened by the custom that the woman and her children obtaon new clothes from her natal family and her fasting food is offerred to her by her mother-in-law, the sargi. These are typical of rituals followed in ceremonies pertaining to death and widowhood.

Karwa chauth is celebrated in Punjab and Western UP and marks the beginning of the sowing season of the winter crop. A woman just widowed before the sowing season becomes barren both in her womb as well as her fields, for owning no property rights and no right to hold the plough, she can neither participate in the productive nor the reproductive economy. Therefore, it is in her interest to negotiate with Yama, the Lord of Death to return her husband to her safe and sound.

The motif of a married woman, dressed in her wedding attire just widowed and pleading with the lord of Death to resurrect her dead husband is common throughout the northern Indian River plains.

The myth of Behula and Lokhinder, the story of Savitri Satyavan are instances of such motifs. These myths are common especially in areas where women not only have no property rights but have no rights of existence as individuals without husbands. The south is better due to the system of cross cousin marriages where her rank as an aunt has some meaning in the family set up; in case of the exogamous northern India, a woman much else ceases to be when she has no husband. The prevalence of Karwa Chauth in Punjab and western UP hints that the costs of widowhood are not only very hard to bear but the fear of death looms larger here than elsewhere where life has been more certain. The geography of karwa chauth has been areas of heavy warfare, of conquests and genocides and it is perhaps in this perspective that this kind of essentially death ritual may be reckoned with.

Karwa Chauth finds a new meaning with Karan Johar’s cinema and emerges as an occasion for women to display their husband’s wealth and splendor. It is often a means of asserting social powers of the family, of conveying its affluence. Karan Johar also reinvented the ritual as one where young nubile pine for husbands. Films determine the constitution of public space; this makes cinema an apt vehicle to launch new deities such as Santoshi Ma and highly revised and remodeled versions of traditions such as the karwa chauth. While the original meaning is lost, in its new kind of existence, I find it to be a reiteration of women’s need to draw power from husbands both existing and anticipated. While the tradition reaffirmed a woman’s purity of heart in persuading Yama to let go of her husband, in the modern times, it reassures the woman’s belief that her only way to social power and prosperity lies solely in her ability to land up with a nice man via matrimony.

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Formula One Car Races : Who Won?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by secondsaturn

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O Sonia Re

Posted on August 28, 2011 by secondsaturn

On the 24th of August 2011, on the twelfth night after her surgery, in the USA, notes reached Sonia Gandhi in her convalescence informing her of the impasse between the people and the political class over the Anna Hazare movement. By then the Congress led by the PM Shri Man Mohan Singh had come head on to a crisis where the battle lines between the people and the Parliament were drawn firmly. This is how he led up to this state of affairs.

First there was denial. Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram denied that there was any kind of popular movement at all. They tried to say that this was a media created event and had no real basis among the people. Then they saw the grounds beyond the precincts of the Parliament swelling. Seeing this they tried to insist that this was a BJP led Hindutva movement but telly footages were clear that the movement was apolitical and overall leaderless, albeit with hard lines and fascist overtones. The corner of fasting people who would now and then break into the daily naamz for the ongoing Ramadan flew in the face of the categorization that the “Annashaan” was a Hindu affair notwithstanding the Bharat Mata imageries and sloganmongering. Next the Congress tried to play against Muslim sentiments just as the British did for the 1942 Movement by drawing upon the Imams to condemn the movement. This too failed. The Congress next tried to say that the movement was sponsored by America because of the support from NRIs in New Jersey and the presence of techies in the fray. This too fell flat because of the loose format of the movement.

Next, as always the Congress talks of the people and yet imagines that this mass must be led otherwise it would lead to mobocracy started to insist that the movement was turning into mobocracy. One only had to be in the Ramlila ground to see how lakhs of people moved in such a civil and polite way when one cannot even get into the Metro rail in Delhi without push and sharve. But the government led by Manmohan Singh was preparing to provoke the mass into a law and order problem by which Anna could be arrested and the people lathi charged. All the while the PM tried to push forth a consensus over economic reforms trying to dissolve the support for Anna as if only corporate India was in the movement against corruption; he clearly had no idea of the movement at all, himself never having won an election. He thus tried to call the movement as unconstitutional and constitutive of an attack of the Parliament, which the Anna movement was turning towards and then gather the political class against a movement that had gone clearly beyond the civil society. At this point, with the political class aligned against the people, the Parliament was in the danger of being stormed as the Bastille. At this moment someone advised the Congress and the government that turned the situation wholly to stand into a victory for all. This someone was Sonia Gandhi in remote advice. This is how the government changed its stand.

On one hand Rahul started canvassing for Anna’s bill putting forth his suggestions for a supra Constitutional Body. Next, the government appointed a Marathi speaking Vilasrao Deshmukh to talk directly to Anna by passing his lieutanants Kiran Bedi and Anand Kejriwal. It needed a Sonia to realize that people may not always be comfortable in languages that are not their own vernaculars. Hence a Marathi to talk to a Marathi in Marathi. The lieutanants were by passed to make them irrelevant to the government and thus also taking away their importance as leaders. It is better to deal with one Anna than the whole team. Next, she made it clear within the party that the will of the people was the will of the Parliament and that there could be none other. People could never be ignored in a democracy and that it would be dangerous if the Parliament was to be blown to pieces as Anna’s Gandhis were now talking of turning into Bhagat Singhs. PM relented; the younger members convinced the Congress Party and as the Congress opened up to the will of the people, in a competitive spiral everyone else did that too. Arun Jaitly could well have been the government spokesperson in his calm and assertive speech that reasoned why sentiments and emotions must be disciplined into procedures and rules of the institutions in order to be effective and Sitaram Yechury said why the Parliament in order to maintain its sanctity should reflect on itself, critique its own conduct and reclaim its moral supremacy over and over again. Lalu Yadav said that it is not the political class alone but every kind of institution like the media, NGOs and private profiteers should also be under the Lokpal. The PM said that the people were supreme; there was nothing that the Parliament could do but to obey the people’s invocation of the Constitution. The deal was done, all parties that hardened their respective position converged and submerged into the grand unity of the spontaneous and the regular, the contingent and the instutionalized, the immediate and the permanent. When the world would now say India is a corrupt country, they would also say what a movement against corruption there was and how the Indian democracy accommodated the will of the people as the reason of the law of the land. Waha waha Ramji.. khel kya dikhaye.. sabko badhai ho badhai..

But this grand unity of mutually opposed forces would not have been done without Sonia Gandhi. Actually I would say that the process was started by Varun Gandhi who said that he would present a private member’s bill in the Parliament. When Rahul returned to India after attending on his mother’s surgery, he was clear that he was on the side of the Janlokpal drawing most flak from within his own party. Priyanka came back too possibly with the point by point strategy dictated by mother. All the while others were made to play in the frontline; Sonia remained invisible. But without that single family including Varun, the process of mitigation would never have begun. Families have genes by which they can transmit diabetes or pigmentation but they have internal communication, sense of purpose, ideas of the world that they transmit among members as they communicate amongst themselves. The Nehru Gandhi family has a rare wisdom, something that they are perhaps not very conscious of in order to be able to document or articulate but it is there, just as an intuition to be able to lead us Indians as a pack. Indians are fiercely autonomous and independent minded and yet paradoxically certainty seeking people; a trait that we share with domesticated animals. No wonder then we are the world’s finest rearers of domestic animals who we treat with far greater respect and kindness than we do for human beings. This is because we find a deep sense of bonding with our flock; we always love to be in a pack dominated by a pack leader who keeps us together. The Nehru lineage has this wisdom of a pack leader, not dictating us, or categorizing us and never trying to civilize or humanize us but always keeping us from straying.

 

 

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Hazaar Hazaar Hazaare….

Posted on August 23, 2011 by secondsaturn

As thousands throng thoroughfares of metropolises holding candles against the dusk and wearing skull hugging caps saying I am Anna Hazare, there is something very critical that gets formulated. Anna is not merely fighting corruption; he is doing something else too. Beneath the veneer of a righteous moral fight, this man and his ilk is challenging the very institution of the Parliament, the crux of a democratic State. He wishes to curb everything that stands for institutions in the country and superimpose a Lokpal which, if ever in effect will be the ultimate word for an absolute Dictator. Beneath Anna’s movement is therefore a search for a dictatorial system, which will curb all that that goes in the name of a democratic State with checks and balances, a Parliament of duly elected persons. It is an assertion of the dictatorship of the citizens so alienated from the very democracy that is supposed to be based upon the will of the people. The tyranny of the Annalogs, the swell of the sea of humanity at Annapolis resembles the Storm of the Bastille, where the haloed halls of the Parliament are purported to be torn down as the punishment for sins of the government to have erected the walls of rules and propriety against the highest authority in the country, namely the free citizen.

The target of the movement is the government, its Prime Minister, whose head must roll at any cost. Those who oppose Anna see in this a license to anarchy, are fearful of the death of a reasoned democracy at the hands of a willful vigilantes. Those who oppose Anna are against corruption through the instigation of the existing institutional arrangements; those who support him are nihilists. Such nihilism is at the very constitution of fascism. The arrest of the government by Anna Hazare, his wrathful posturing, his willful assertion that it is either his way or the highway, reflects exactly, in a mirror image of what the Indian State had actually become when it arrested Dr Binayak Sen, fired on protestors over Posco, killed in Kalinganagar and eroded spaces, ecologies, livelihoods and lives in Karnataka. And all of this happened through the system of bribes, where the corporate could bribe the government to twist rules for suitable interests. This is why corruption has become the space where the weak are shortchanged for the rich; and since the weak are also the more numerous, such acts of the Indian state are compromises on democracy. When the Indian state can itself douse democracy, how does it become the citizen’s prerogative to respect its case? Then go to hell, democracy, there exists none of it anymore says the angry Hazare. Readings from the Third Reich papers show that it was exactly through such a failure of the State that Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. If fascism breaks out in the streets of India, only the Indian government will have itself to blame.

Personally, I do not blame Anna Hazare for the state of affairs on the anvil of anarchy; what worries me is the sovereign Indian nation state that with its elaborate rules and rights to fight corruption appears to get entrenched deeper into the problem with each passing day. There is a secret script that is shaping up between Anna and the government; it is that script that I intend to reach. Anna is attacking a government, a state that has turned a hundred and eighty degrees in its role as a mediator between the various forces shaping the society. The Indian state before liberalization formally vowed to protect the weak against the strong; in the aftermath of liberalization as the Indian economy and society gets more aligned to the interests of the global capital, the Indian state vows to remove the claims of the weak coming in way of the strong’s accumulation of limitless and mindless wealth. This turns the entire edifice of the Indian State and its Constitution into a lie. The Indian state stands no longer as a buffer between the interests of the rich and the poor, but aligns itself shamelessly with the rich against the poor. Such a realignment of the State has eroded its authority with the thousands who are on the streets today. The Anna Hazare movement shows how little the Indian citizen cares for the Indian state, democracy or no democracy.

Corruption has existed in India since the aeons of time but never before now has an entire movement been centred on corruption; I wonder whether such a movement has ever been staged anywhere in the world. Never before now has corruption become a catchword to explain every kind of evil in the everyday life of an individual. Today’s corruption is something else; it is far beyond having to pay a bribe to get a phone connection, beyond having to bribe a excise inspector; today’s corruption is the 2G Scam, where a few people, some people are seen to have access to large moneys where no ordinary soul can even in her wildest imagination wish to access. It is this inaccessibility to wealth for most and its secret password in the hands of a selected privilege few that really enrages people; no wonder then at the crux of the imagery of money stashed away in the secret chambers of the hallowed Swiss Banks. Everything that the government does, the BRT corridor, the Commonwealth Games, 2G spectrum, oil price hike, development through industrialization are seen to increase inequality in wealth, not through differential merit or qualifications but through differential access to be in the right place at the right time. The economy that drives through large monopoly private venture funds with blessings of the political class constitutes a coterie aided by none other than the democratic system. This makes losers hate democracy, become apolitical, jump due processes, disregard institutions, in short anything that constitutes that world that leaves them behind.

Those who are today opposed to Anna in their fight against corruption refuse to accept themselves as losers even though they may have every objective indicator against them such as not owning homes, cars, designer purses and so on. They would rather activate the RTI, go to the consumer courts, write letters of complaints to authorities and whistle blow to media. These are the usual jholawalas, the intellectuals, the critical cynics of neoliberal growth projects. These people have stood outside the madness of global capital, many a time refused to belong, to jump into the fray of buying gadgets, owning homes and going on vacations abroad. Interestingly, such people who stand outside the competition consider themselves as the winners. These “winners” are the anti-globalization people with outdated beliefs in Keynesian economics, welfare state, public sector and market regulators.

But those who support Anna, despite their management degrees, or foreign jobs and plush bungalows in America, look upon themselves as losers caught in uncertain employment, fearful of retrenchment, plagued by vagaries of their investments at the stock market or regretful of investments whose EMIs they can no longer pay. This is the pro group; who disdain politics because it brings in the claims of the have-nots into the enjoyment of the haves, who believe that privatization is the panacea for every evil and that the State should just up its tail and disappear beyond sight. Yet it is today that this group that contains people whose self image is that of a loser. This is the most interesting aspect of the sociology of Annacronyism.

Neoliberalism has its own way of making people feel unwanted, unqualified, undeserving and underperforming. The more one performs, one is never really on top of things, the growing inequalities of income and wealth more so in the absence of State regulation leads to a loss of a sense of agency. In simpler terms, individuals feel less in command of her life, less capable of shaping it the way she wants to, less in command of her own future. All such trepidations transform into a battle against the one that caused it all, the State. The State is an institution that creates certainties in life, certainties that efforts would be rewarded, opportunities will be presented, and capabilities will be created. These are the basic function of the State in any civilized society. Unfortunately in neoliberalism, these are not possible; only global capital pursues its profits mindlessly and depends a lot on the State system to fructify its agenda. The State turns against its own citizen while promoting a Tata-Corus deal as in the UK, or the award of the 2G spectrum in India, or the speculation of wheat when food prices are shooting through the roof, or even the sinking of the public sector to benefit a private player in the same industry. Such turning of the State against its citizens is captured under the generic term of corruption. Anna’s team is fighting to reverse the dominance, from the State towards the citizen; that citizen who might be a nihilist, a negationist, and a fascist but nonetheless is only the mirror image of a State that has totally belied its own Constitution, perverted its institutions and used democracy only as a cover up of deeply oligopolistic practices.

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Shammi..at the end of the day

Posted on August 17, 2011 by secondsaturn

Shammi Kapoor died on the early morning of the 14th of August 2011, succumbing to a chronic renal malfunction. Fortuitously, I was reading about one of the possible causes of the malady as being chronic adrenaline fatigue, a possibility that over excitable personalities often develop. Shammi’s hyperactive persona was his real self, something that his screen persona borrowed from, worked upon and then integrated into the cinematic form and stamped as a template. Interestingly, Shammi’s templates have been most used and continue to be used till data, the latest instance being Zoya’s film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

I encountered Shammi Kapoor through the song Suku Suku. I was then suffering from typhoid and because of my intense weakness had to be carried by Chhotomama so that Ma could feed me porridge. On one such a day of intense conflict between food and my appetite, someone was called upon to entertain me with song and dance. This someone was my mother’s cousin, who the family knew as Khudu, from khudey, a Bengali word for small. Chhotomama was tall and I sat above heads of adults in my perch in his arms and all I could recall of Khudumama was his tuft of hair raised above the forehead like the hood of a cobra, bobbling waywardly as he did a twist while he sang Suku Suku. Sejomama quickly found a surface and played out the beat of the drums while Bachi and Bulimashi shook themselves converting the covered patio of Indulok into a dance floor. Sejomama also imitated the sound of the clarionet. Then they sang also sang Yahoo ! I always associate Shammi Kapoor to that morning when what began drearily for me with force feeding, quickly transformed into all sunshine and gaiety. Shammi had been just this for his fans, I suppose.

I distinctly remember Shammi’s era as a child growing up in Kolkata. It was the age of Trinca’s and its rock singers, of steamer parties with bongo drummers and clarionets; men with drainpipe trousers, women with high bouffet and skin tight kameezes that made my father’s mama, who I called Motadadu, Mota as in Gujarati meaning the older one, comment that women must have first worn the cloth and then got it stitched instead the other way round. Our local darzi, Ruhul made many such firoza blue and rani pink body hugging kameezes for Bulimashi. Beauty saloons such as Eve’s and Karabi specialized in switches and buns that would make one’s hair stand tall as an implanted bucket on one’s head. Swimsuits and bikinis were worn by women swimming in Calcutta Club’s indoor swimming pool. Shammi was an age; an age of unbridled joy and its uninhibited exhibition. It was an age of the outdoor picnics, of clubs and club singers, of cabaret and floor dancing, of Blue Foxes and Waldorfs. It was also the age of dreary lock outs, of strikes and processions, of food crisis and blackmarket, political uncertainties and the ever present fear of war and jingoistic patriotism. Shammi was the Hindi film’s way of not addressing the world outside oneself; a desire to be immersed in a self contained mesmerization of intoxicating opium of O.P Nayyar and S.D.Burman. To say that Shammi was a rebel is to misunderstand his impact; his was a way of never addressing the world head on.

When I studied Shammi Kapoor as a sociologist, I observed something rather interesting. In Madhu Jain’s account and in various print sources, one is fairly familiar with the Kapoor clan’s working. They are so proud of their craft that they do not tolerate anything to stand between them and their cinema. Raj Kapoor was at best only tolerated as a clapper boy with a paltry salary in Prithviraj Kapoor’s productions; Rajeev, Kunal, Aditya, Kanchan, Ridhima are Kapoors those who have perpetually stood out of reckoning and Karishma and Kareena had to slog it out themselves like any outsider. So when Shammi emerged as a wannabe in the silver screen, not the Kapoors but others like K Amarnath, P.N.Arora, Balwant Bhatt, Nasir Hussain and Shakti Samanta raised, reared and propelled him into stardom. Shammi expectedly then developed his own set of people, his own brand distinct and unique. But who were these people, what were they looking for and what did they do to the Hindi film and why did they do what they did? These questions when answered would perhaps establish to some degree, sociology of Shammi Kapoor.

 

The Hindi film world have had interesting blocs, each contributing significantly to what we now reckon as the grand formula of the melodrama. There was a Bengal bloc composed of New Theatres, D.N.Ganguly with overtones of both Tagore’s Shantiniketan as well as of the Deccan through Madras Music Academy, Nizam’s art college. This bloc was joined in by film makers from the North West province of Peshawar, Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and family, Dilip Kumar and others. The two extremities spanned into one line of film making. There was a Marathi axis, Damle-Fattelal, Shantaram, spectacular, full of trick photography, high sound impact, high energy. There was a Gujarati-Parsi axis consisting of Gandhian activists in Nandlal Jaswantlal, Ardeshir Irani and others. This was a segment that experimented with the narratives and many nationalistic ideologies were often transported through its narratives. Much later after Independence many of Raj Kapoor’s scenes from Awara or Shri 420 or Aah, Aaag or Barsaat can be traced to have been influenced as much by the Gujarat-Parsi school as by the New Theatres. Around the middle of 1950’s, another axis in cinema rose and this was from Madhya Pradesh, periphery to Mumbai, hinterland, unconnected to the IPTA movement, unlearned in New Theatres, a bit disdainful of the Parsi axis and desirous of charting its own course of pursuing cinema as pure entertainment. Nasir Hussain et al, the kind of people that raised and reared Shammi hailed from this bloc. In fact, Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar, though Bengalis were born and brought up in Madhya Pradesh.

The new kids from Madhya Pradesh were late comers into cinema; they rode on the back of their predecessors and inherited from the enormous knowledge in technology and skilled studio hands. Free of pursuit of having to respond to the heaviness of Freedom Struggle, or to participate in social reform and entrusting the sovereign State to be all hunky dory, this new generation wished to explore, for the first time, a life, light from the burden of ideology. In the 1950’s the world of cinema was held together by the troika of Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar, all steeped somewhat in their own agendas of critiquing the world, heavy weather emotions and dutiful investigations. Dev Anand, among them had qualities of emerging out into some kind of unthinking playfulness and surely enough, he was the more sought after template. Interestingly Dev Anand made way for others twice by refusing a role; one was for Shammi Kapoor in Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1957) and the other was for Amitabh Bachchan in 1973 when he refused to act in Zanjeer. In both the cases he made way for new stars to emerge and in both cases the persons in question were from Madhya Pradesh.

The Madhya Pradesh angle is interesting in Hindi films because it was from the film makers of this region that cinema finally reached its status of pure entertainment. It was not until Salim-Javed that cinema once again, through the renditions of Amitabh, started to emerge with a clear political angle. But that did not make the cinema compromise on its essence as pure entertainment. The Madhya Pradesh cadre of Hindi film then raised the cinema free of its ideological baggage into something more amenable as a visual extravaganza. The rise of O.P.Nayyar along with Shammi Kapoor is perhaps not coincidental because of the close personality resemblances one had with the other, both thought and felt alike. Shammi’s personality aligned itself rather well into this group led by Nasir Hussain as free floating, free flying, spontaneous enjoyment without the baggage of philosophy. Shammi’s was also the cue to a new glossy and consumerist India, slowly gaining in affluence and also in deepened inequalities; this is why, one associates Shammi so closely to Trinca’s and Blue Foxes in Park Street, sequined in tony lamps all decorated for the New Year’s Eve. This is why he is at once a Junglee and also found in Evening in Paris; naïve, simple, childish women are associated with him a la Daisy Miller of Henry James. Indeed when he is domesticated into a child rearing role, he is accredited with the title Brahmachari, hinting that here is a man, unattached and disinterested and hence because of this Kantian disinterest is capable of giving such unconditional and even aesthetic love. The Hindi film vigilantes, most of who appear in the board of awards, gave him his first Filmfare Prize for Brahmachari where pure hedonism was mingled with responsible domesticity, albeit through unshaken celibacy.

Shammi’s is also an image that was explored for likeness to the American pop culture; hence his rock star image in so many of his films. But unfortunately for both cinema and Shammi America appeared as a land of only the unhindered pursuit of pleasure; the pathos of rock was never studied, its sociology never understood. Hence, while they did get the shake and the twist as surface similarities and what they left out was the political quest of the music form. There was the restiveness and impatience, the arrogance and the aloofness of the American pop culture but Shammi and his team remained out of any kind of political contestations. O.P Nayyar’s music with writings from Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri kept up the spirit of politics for all of the above persons were decisive in their political stands. On the whole, the apolitical nature of Shammi’s image is the crux of his appeal and henceforth of the Hindi cinema all through the sizzling decade of the 1960’s. Music is what braces and locates a star in her basic mood, attitude, way of being and historical era; Shammi became the star that he was because of his excellent response to music, when he almost personalized its flow, beat, rhythm and temper. Later on, India’s first superstar, Rajesh Khanna was a personalization of music; no one can discuss Rajesh Khanna without a sway of her head and of fingers held in a victory sign.

When I met Shammi Kapoor some thirty years after his stardom was over in the Hindi films, I found him to have balded and his middle acquired enormous amount of girth. He was loaded with chains of rudrakshas, had the tacky tika on his forehead, but as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, I recognized, he, the star and the Khudumama in him. Both men’s wives were surprisingly alike, kept their heads firmly wrapped under the pallu and peeped out from behind the curtains into the sitting room to catch glimpses of the guests. Star and his/her fan become congruent; this has been the focus of my own study. Shashi was then sinking deeper into his state of depression after Jennifer’s death and he remained silent sitting astride a chair facing its back at the far corner of the sitting room. The venue was a hotel suite of the Leela Kempinsky that Shammi had booked for the day and its reason, in a strange and indirect way was I !!

I had then just finished my MPhil on Amitabh Bachchan from JNU; I wrote my dissertation in the spirit of a treatise and in the language of German Idealism. I wrote all about the spirit, the soul, the agency, and through my constant reading of Lukacs, Levinas and Adorno, I adopted their language too. The reaction from the world of cinema was one of an overjoyed shock. Amitabh invited me to be his guest, introduced me to the doyens of the industry and Shammi was so curious that he started his video magazine, Manoranjan by inviting all of us to discuss the image of a star ! After the shooting, he called some of us to his hotel suite and targeted me as to what I read and what I write. He was quite disgusted at my philosophical leanings, refusing to believe that the cinema could be anything better than mere sensations of the skin. He asked me questions but never allowed me to answer them; he seemed to be in no mood to discuss and only to disparage. He then targeted Amitabh, accusing him to be trying to be too big for his boots and attempt to run the country via his studios. Shammi was clearly very disdainful of cinema trying to be anything else beyond the premises of the theatre; any attempt at doing anything else with it, according to him was sacrilege and that included his own father and brother.

For some reason, I found Shammi to be a person who is unable to respond to the world around him; just the way Khudumama turned out to be. Both had become recluses, avoided human company, stayed mostly aloof from friends and immersed in the Internet, a space both asocial and apolitical. To impose politics, rebellion, freedom on Shammi would thus be anomalies; for all that loud music, vigorous shaking of the body and hair, the gay abandon were withdrawals from the world, not in the way the rock music did through its own distinct politics, but in an apolitical manner of the IT sector entrenched affluent middle class, refusing to acknowledge cracks in the shine and shying away from our roles to set that right.

 

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Dadu, too much..

Posted on August 13, 2011 by secondsaturn

Dadu, my father’s father died on this day, i.e the 13th of August in 1976. This is thirty five years before now. I think that with every passing year, his presence just grows on the family; each year Dadu seems to actually become more alive.

My father being the only child of his parents, our small nuclear family was essentially very close knit. And my father being an only child in the days when families often would be large attracted a strange kind of attention from his parents who I called respectively as Dadu and Thama. This attention was a curious mixture of minute monitoring, compulsive control and obsessive affection. My father had to be protected from everything in the world and in order that the world would never rise to disturb father, that world needed to be controlled as well. Hence Thama and Dadu extended their parenting to the world at large. Servants, drivers, washerman, garbage collectors, office peons and assistants, kins people and friends, neighbours and the family doctor and his family, income tax accountant and his family and friends were all subjected therefore to this kind of obsessive affection which was actually a covert form of control and monitoring. When mother married into the family and when I was born, we were both subjected and subjugated to this kind of affectionate panoptic and disciplining control. My brother Pam four and a half years younger to me was partially a recipient of such regimentation.

Our home was run like a corporation. Menus were fixed; begun pora on Wednesdays, Keema cutlet on Fridays, bread pudding, custard, (I forget which days). Timetables were set tight and calendars followed for winter and summer makeover when fans would be tied with newspaper, or unwrapped and oiled and window panes shut or open depending which season we were getting prepared for. Notebooks and files were maintained for everything, there was a system of regular paper clippings with scissors and bowls of “lei” especially when Byomkesh Bakshi’s Benisanhar was published weekly in the Sunday edition of Anandabazar. Bookcases were dusted, geysers repaired, electrical switches changed with the routine of an office.

As a child, strangely, I felt quite reassured with such all encompassing and all enclosing affection. My fierce autonomy that I developed later was not so much of an independence of the spirit as it was a refusal to acknowledge anyone else’s authority upon me other than those of Thama and Dadu. My parents and we were more like siblings under the ferocity of love from my grandparents. When Thama died in 1967 and Dadu crashed emotionally, one of the ways he coped with his situation was to become even more obsessive about everyone around us. My tutor Dola Aunty, our family friend Madhuri Mashi, Dadu’s driver Srikanta, his barber Ram, the family compounder Barunbabu, the fishmonger in Gariahat market, the scrap collector, Jalil, all came into the ambit of Dadu’s concern. None of us were allowed to catch colds, develop coughs, get fevers and fall sick; everyone’s well being was of utmost importance to Dadu. He was a man with a strange recognition of mutual interdependence; he was imperial and he knew that an Empire could not run well without everyone of us being in states of perfect health and happiness. His deep and honest desire for everyone’s happiness emanated from a much larger understanding that viruses of sorrow can be very contagious; the world needs to be generally happy in sum if it has to guarantee an individual’s happiness. He firmly believed in a perfect world and he also imagined that he had the power to make it that way. But all of that needed a huge mental energy that manifested itself in a state of nervous excitement that was Dadu’s usual state of being.

After his retirement from Calcutta University, Dadu was the curator or Victoria Memorial. He often chased lovers on its grounds insisting that they come inside and visit the galleries; he repeatedly declined Lady Ranu’s requests that the building be lighted for he feared that a short circuit could burn the precious museum down and on evenings and nights of heavy shower and norwesters, Dadu convinced himself that the windows of the Central Hall were not closed properly. Mr Nair, the museum’s resident manager would be woken up in the middle of the night on the very few occasions when the telephone was working and insisted that he open all those tall and heavy doors with torch in one hand and inspect whether each and every window is properly sealed shut. Those were the days of high Naxalism and Dadu too was gheraoed once. But he chatted so much with the rebels, became worried that a few among them would be dehydrated and organized tea and shingaras out of the Victoria Memorial Canteen that the belligerent boys soon forgot all about the gherao and became involved in the beauty of the cannas around the ponds.

Dadu tried to cultivate my mind. I was to see museums, read biographies of famous men, learn about epics, read fables, watch puppet theatre and learn Rabindrasangeet. I had little interest in the above list. Dadu soon discovered sworn enemies in Enid Blyton, Kiriti Roy, Tenida and even at a point of time decided that Bankimchandra and Sarat Chandra were not all that noble. I was also growing fond of classical music. I started reading Soviet authors late into the night. I decided to flee into what was Thama and Dadu’s bedroom now lying vacant because Dadu could not bear the loneliness of Thama no longer being with him. It is here that I cultivated my mind quietly and surreptitiously and used those as arsenals to challenge Dadu in his opinions on history and politics. Dadu was anti democracy, which he termed as ochlocracy and he was very far from being a socialist. Dadu had been a student and a teacher of history in Presidency College before he joined as an administrator of Calcutta University. I loved to argue out themes in history and culture with him. When in a recent academic debate some scholars asked me where I knew of the various religious sects who were neither Hindu nor Muslim such as the Nirmohi Akhra, I realized that I learnt so much just by arguing with Dadu across the dining table. He was also very Westernized having being brought up in a pucca sahib family of his own father. He was never comfortable eating with his fingers and it was here that I loved to surprise him by showing how well I could debone a piece of Ilish peti.

None of us quite realized that behind Dadu’s hypertensive existence there laid an emptiness that gnawed at him day and night. So Dadu being Dadu decided that he needed something to look forward to. Soon he found one, his own death. The prospect of death now inspired a new meaning into his life. We had a family astrologer who Dadu consulted for everything, from whether I would pass in my maths, whether my cough will be diagnosed as tuberculosis or pneumonia, whether Boromani would survive her heart ailment and so on. One Sunday, Dadu returned from the astrologer cheerfully. By this time, Ma learnt driving and got Srikanta, Dadu’s driver sacked and drove him around instead. Dadu, who would always be agitated at the traffic while Ma negotiated the same at her own level of comfort, seemed, on his way back to be surprisingly calm and relaxed. Instead of a sweaty forehead wrinkled up with worry, Dadu walked contended into the house announcing that the astrologer predicted that he has only this very month to live. It was early July and the sky had been overcast for the entire week that year.

He suffered from prostate problems and decided that he needed a surgery. He also decided that he would never return alive from his operation. With him gone, he also anticipated that we would all be left rudderless and the home would crash. So he decided to do a final makeover. For that entire month, it was a preparation for a grand event. Cracks were repaired, electric cables overhauled, window panes cracked from crashing cricket balls replaced, the car was serviced, a new battery was put, dues to everyone cleared, a pair of gold bangles were made for me as a gift for my wedding that Dadu would not live to see. On Sundays of July, Ma would drive Dadu to visit every relative; Dadu would come and tick names off the list, a list that he called as a goodbye list. As soon as the visitations were done, Dadu called me to help him tear apart a pile of papers, letters, cards, appeals, complaints and so on. Now, he said satisfactorily, you can use my drawer for your notes. What about your things Dadu I asked; he said, no I will never be needing these things. He also told me to go ahead and use his soap cases and towels after he was gone. I laughed my heart out at his jokes.

Dadu called a meeting of close relatives, all women. Among them were Dola Aunty, Madhuri Mashi and Sovathama. He showed them a drawer in which lay washed, pressed and ribbed his silk dhuti and Punjabi set. Put these on me, he told them, when I die. Please comb my hair, put my false teeth and set my glasses. He was certain that we will cry so much that we will not be mindful of such details and hence relatives who would be firmer would be in charge of dressing his corpse. He approved the flower decoration of his hearse van, the design of the chandan on his forehead and reminded that the Yardley perfume be put on him. Having done all that, he booked his room in the nursing home, packed his bags neatly, packed also some biscuits, and sat back to have his last cup of tea at home. I was going to school then and wished him all the best. He suddenly clapped his forehead and pointed despondently at the radio, this, he said, I forgot to repair it. Now it will only be junk because none of you will ever get it repaired. Dadu never trusted us to ever behave like responsible adults.

Dadu died on his operation table of bleeding that could not be controlled. Baba was with him in the end, held his hand in the OT till he passed away. Ma, a very strong nerved woman really broke down. Her older sister who I call Bachi arranged for the hearse van and the flowers. The others arrived; Sova Thama dressed and clothed Dadu. Nomami and Chhotomami helped around efficiently. Dida came and stayed the night with all of us. Dr Pal, our neighbor informed the press and the radio and I think Boromama arranged for an announcement in the newspapers. Throughout the mourning period, our large extended family came in all the time, paying their respects to the oldest among them, brought flowers just as Dadu liked them. The house always smelt of fresh fragrance and perfumed incense. People, unknown to us dropped in, they heard it on the radio, or read the obituary, they would say, for Dr A.P Dasgupta as the world knew him, was a hugely popular man in his professional world and officialdom, known for his concern, love, affection, worry for everyone’s well-being, just the way he was with his own family. The stream of visitors continued well into the days to come, remembering a man who tried to hold everyone he ever met as his very own.

 

P.S We never got around to repair the radio; many years later I threw it off as junk.

 

 

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Seeing Off Na Mama

Posted on July 24, 2011 by secondsaturn

Na Mama, Na being pronounced as in naughty, a name for the fourth born in a family, implied something very specific when he said that he was seeing someone off. He used the term see off to mean one who is off abroad aboard a plane, or taking an aircraft to go on some official duty. In those days, travelling by plane was not within easy reach of one’s pocket and when one took a plane it meant that she would either be flying abroad or going on some work of a great deal of importance. Such people, the successful ones, the chosen ones, Na Mama would see off. The others, if one went from Kolkata to Patna, or to Deoghar, s/he would deserve only to be “put on the train”. Na Mama was my mother’s fourth brother.

Born in the early 1930’s, he belonged to a generation that took the projected dream of India’s Freedom very seriously; believed in modernity led by technology, economic growth led by enterprise and corporations, and sincerely believed that India’s sovereignty also meant a sovereign public sphere where equal opportunities awaited anyone who had the talent to cash on it. He also believed, far ahead of his times, that the middle class was meant to become prosperous, catch up standards of the richest of rich and that every honest bhadralok had a right to the finest quality of life. While he lived, he constantly fought to establish such beliefs as the truth. Na Mama believed in sudden turn of fortune, spectacles in everyday life, drama in even the most unpromising situations and had an unyielding optimism. His was a world of the saxophone and the band, of flood lights and glitter, of ornaments and livery, of grand cars and huge sofas. In many ways, he was my mother’s family’s dreamer.

His discerning tastes were literally put to use when he was employed by a global tea auction company to be a tea taster on board. We listened with wide eyes and gaping mouths stories about how tea tasters put benchmark prices to be auctioned at the Calcutta and London markets. It was for one such assignment that he once spent a few months in England; returned and then told us all about moving staircases known as escalators. My mother tells me that this trip was before he was married and how he saved up every penny to get presents for everybody except himself. In all the Marks and Spencers he shopped in, he did not buy anything for himself. He was a team man, who knew how to put everybody else’s interests before his.

In many ways he could see far ahead of his times, nurturing fantastic schemes for business. He quit his job and joined a business in Nepal that blended and packaged tea to be put up in the retail stores of supermarkets. But the tea business collapsed worldwide, auctions crashed and spot markets replaced benchmark prices, something for which Na Mama used his tea tasting skills. The world rendered him redundant. This was a trough from which as long as I kept track of him, he did not seem to recover.

As a child, Na Mama wanted to create fairy tales for us. He seemed to be the one to have seen it all, done those things. He took us on trams, on minibuses when they first came, he took me to my first ever circus; he always bought the latest fire crackers, went to Circarama, installed one of the first television sets when the telly came to Kolkata.He had magicians and ventriloquists to entertain us at home when we gathered for his children’s parties. Once he also organized a puppet show by placing sets in the lobby of Indulok. My mother’s was a joint family with as many as ten children living under the same roof. Na Mama ordered and designed cakes from Flury’s shaped like a motor car, or a ship or a circus arena, and sometimes a pink and mauve Doll’s house. He introduced me to marzapine and the stick jaw, the latter was to help me chew and take a loose milk tooth out.

A joint family has a way of creating some trouble shooters; Na Mama and Chhotomama being the two youngest of the five brothers were floor managers for the large family. They would coordinate how children would spend their holidays; the hobby classes they would attend, make lists for the family’s Durga Puja paraphernalia, organize feasts, manage events such as weddings, and if need be beat up thieves who dared to step into the kitchen garden darkened by long shadows of the papaya trees. They took the elderly to the hospitals and call doctors when children fell ill. In many ways they were the pillars of the large household known as Indulok.

My special interaction with Na Mama was in the stories he told me; he could narrate a story with sound effects so vividly that I got a feeling as if I was watching a film. My Ghanadas, Motadas, Bantul The Great, Hnada Bhnoda and Nonte Fonte were heard from him. He could describe in minute dramatic details the football match he saw, or the catch Solkar took the fine bowling by Chris Old. He had a fantastic memory, never forgetting even the most insignificant detail he heard. He had a great ear for music, an eye for art especially sculpture, knew how to make images by pressing aluminum foil, to fold colour paper into shapes of animals. He decorated the Goddess during Saraswati Puja, designed the lighting when his youngest sister got married.

But these were merely the tip of the iceberg; for Na Mama lived in his own world of enormous dreams; he loved success, spectacles, splendor. It is not that he had ambitions for himself alone; he imagined the moon for everyone else as well. But dreams do not go well with hardnosed middle class families where adventure is discouraged, risks avoided. Most of his ventures did not succeed because he had little idea that not talent but access to capital was the crucial factor in business and that access to funds was not something that the Bengali middle class in a Marwari dominated capitalist set up was ever likely to have. He then became the loser of the family; a category that the middle class disparages and fears. Rather than help him secure his finance, the family harshly criticized him for dreaming big. The more he failed, the harsher the family became towards him; he was emotionally harassed and ragged for being a loser, for not being like the rest. He never accepted his defeat, continued to be a defiant dreamer and on this high pitched ego battle, it became very difficult for him to go on. In the wee hours of one morning, he left home with his wife, his children being already away in other continents, without leaving behind a contact address.

I met Na Mama and Na Mami many years later when my mother located their address. They were then both much older and did not keep well. The children and grand children were both away and we politely inquired about them. Na Mami cooked some Murg Massalam, a dish she had perfected and this she did despite her extreme ill health. Both came when my maternal grandfather passed away, performing their duty, chatting dispassionately on neutral issues like cricket, cars, vegetables and fruits. He was, I observed, no longer interested in interacting with the family as family. I let them be, in their privacy, away from the competitive pressure of the Hindu Joint Family that needed one always to fall in line.

On the occasion of my 50th birthday when I sent each of the adults who mattered to me while I was a child, thank you notes. I composed one for him and did not know how to reach it to him. For then he had already shifted home again; somehow, through a long winded process I located his email and wrote to him. He was happy to have talked to me but did not wish to restring the thread of the family again; I knew that his interaction with all of us had become detached.

Last Sunday, my cousin called me up to say that someone quite unknown to him had sent a message in his facebook informing the family that Na Mama (his Na Jethu) had taken seriously ill. There were some phone numbers where he called to learn that it had been over an hour when Na Mama lay dead in a hospital that required a blood relative to come and claim the body. It seems that he died at an ATM while withdrawing money; it was a massive cerebral stroke. He was always the one to take people to the hospitals, but when it was his turn, he fell all alone. Since the police had recovered the body they wanted someone from the family to come; this is how, through facebook, we got to know that he had died.

When the members of my mother’s family visited Na Mama’s flat in Rajarhat, they were astounded at the plush of the apartment. His neighbours were most obliging, he was enormously popular, he was the President of the Durga Puja Committee. He always liked high class living, with cooks and nurses to help out; he liked socializing and he loved the Durga Puja. His strained relations with the family, their insistence on selling land in the ancestral village where they had a Durga temple had also estranged him from the annual celebrations which he loved so dearly. He used to take the cinema to the village, set up massive generators to put up lights, introduced taasha bands at immersion processions. I was happy that he had taken upon himself to manage a Durga Puja at his apartment complex. The concluding chapter of his life ensured that he got his kind of life style that he always aspired for, achieved sometimes but lost most of the times. Though his dreams shattered time and again, he fell into penury and managed to emerge out of it all on his own efforts, all did end very well. The net conclusion- his was a successful life. My brother said that he would be there for the cremation and I instinctively told him, yes, it is important that his nephews should “see him off”. Death is a “send off”, a “see off” for Na Mama, for like life, his death should also be an adventure.

I have been the one to usually convey any news of death in the family to my cousins. Never before now have I sensed such nervousness with which news of Na Mama’s death has been listened to. I think though he was away from home a good twenty years before now, yet there is a recognition that a load bearing pillar of the family has been struck down.

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