Middle Class Warfare – Ma Exchange

Posted on January 28, 2011 by secondsaturn

Sony TV’s Ma Exchange programme aired every Wednesday and Thursday between 9 and 10 pm is about swapping mothers. The mothers are chosen carefully because while both families are middle class, yet one family, in terms of income, career and performance is ahead of the other. Care is taken to maintain the difference to a minimum but it is made sufficiently visible. There are some interesting points that arise out of the above differences.

  1. The upper class is hygiene conscious, homes are organized. There is system and order in the arrangement of these homes.
  2. Aesthetic is placed at a premium, colours are coordinated, furniture is organized with an eye towards space; space on the whole is more organized.
  3. The upper class family is routine conscious which makes it more focused in its everyday activities. These families seem often to have distinct goals that they achieve.
  4. The upper class family shows loyalty towards its mother, the lower class families are more concerned about the self.
  5. The lack of routine and order in a lower class home shows that they are somehow living life without a proper goal. The lower class lives life moment to moment without being aware of an overall goal or purpose of life. They have no idea of how an ideal life should look like.
  6. The children are low performers, less focused, less disciplined in lower class homes. Children here have very little idea of what they want to do in life. While they have aspirations they do not have any plan how they can achieve the same.
  7. Parents in lower class homes want children to enjoy life and teach them to become consumers rather than performers. The premium on consumption especially on fast food in lower class homes show an anxiety of not being able to afford things in the market. Upper class homes are less of gluttons because they are more assured of such goodies.
  8. Both parents and children in upper class homes are better informed than in the lower class homes.
  9. Parents in lower class homes feel threatened by upper class mothers and they shout and scream and assert that they are superior.
Posted in Media Sociology | Leave a comment

Just Having Read Shantaram

Posted on January 3, 2011 by secondsaturn

Shantaram is an unabashed praise for India in its Hindu way of life. The author, named Shantaram by the mother of his hero, Prabhaker finds himself in India in his search for freedom. The book is an autobiography of Lin, a short form for Lindsay, as he escapes from an Australian prison right into India where he knows, for the first time in his life, what it is to be free. India, despite its poverty and squalid slums, sleazy spaces and filthy bazaars, is a free country precisely because its people are law abiding, have an innate sense of civility and respect plurality of view points, attitudes, faith and politics. In India corruption does not corrupt the soul, here people despite their failings have a sense of right and wrong, people are not particularly fanatics, and even while they get wild when they board packed trains and buses, once inside it, packed like sardines, show civility that would not have been possible by citizens anywhere else in the world. It is India with its huge penchant for a “normal” life and its people who seek contentment and equilibrium in everything that makes India into a country that shelters all and absorbs all. And the hero of this India is Prabaker, a tourist guide with a broad smile who has the amazing power at “organizing everything”, solving every problem and answering all questions and one who is a poor migrant from a village and lives in a slum. Prabaker is a hero not because he achieves, he is a hero because he finds his freedom in whichever way he leads his life. This is why, when Lin goes away to Afghanistan to fights its wars against the Soviet occupation, the Taliban fighters listened to tales of Prabaker with rapt attention. In those snow filled mountain crevices and caves of the Sulaiman ranges, the hero of the Universe was not a sword wielding righteous warrior of the Prophet but the Maratha native who had his home in deep and dry Maharashtra and lived in a Mumbai slum.

Through the nine hundred odd pages the author takes us through the city of Mumbai, mainly into its slums, its sleazy cafes haunted by members of the underworld, its “palaces of sin”, the torture cells of its prisons, its den for child trafficking, its drug dealers and the prostitution racket. The agitated excitement of the underworld is sharply contrasted with the harsh but peaceful atmosphere of the slum. There are further contrasts between the underworld and the slum; the underworld is largely dominated by Muslim ideologues who believe in wars to end all wars, who follow principles of fair play and justice even in their illegal activities and who scum opportunities in Mumbai to feed Islamic wars in Afghanistan. Lin’s world is divided between the two worlds, the Empire of Khaderbhai, the leader of the largest gang of the underworld in Mumbai and Prabaker, the almost invisible and yet omnipresent tour guide of the slums. In the structure of a melodrama, if Prabaker is the hero, then Khaderbhai is the villain. Yet, it is Abdel Khader who is a father that Lin never had, a patriarch of the most improbable set of people, American woman running away from murder, Iranian refugee absconding from the Savak, Afghan guerillas raising money in Mumbai. But despite this, Khader is still the villain because most of the times he is playing God, or at best the Prophet trying to control people’s lives, guiding them to fall into traps that he lays or them and all in the quest of one single mission, to settle scores with his rivals in Afghanistan, his homeland. Besides, Khaderbhai is a true Muslim, abhorring greed and prostitution and stays clear of drugs.

It is through Prabaker that Lin understands the Hindu way of life and it is through Khaderbhai that he understands the Islamic cosmology. The Hindus win straight on because they have at their core, non violence, peaceful coexistence and a desire for continuity. Islamic philosophy, despite its holism and grandeur is flawed because it tries to control nature rather than fall in line with it, it revolves around the surrender to the “Will of Allah” rather than to the eternal pattern of the Universe, and it relies on violence to solve all problems. The Hindu way is persistent and seeks self sustenance and continuity, Islamic way has a direction, a motion and it is this dynamism that is the reason for so much of anxiety in the Islamic world. This is why, the author condemns the Hindu right very often but does not find too much fault with the Sena. In fact, the militarism of the Sena, in the view of the author is driven by Muslim money and Muslim manipulations. The Islamic way like the burning down of the sinful palace of Madame Zhou is done by the Sena, though the Hindus, who are not religious, can fall into sin as irretrievably as the Chuha gang led by the Hindu leader by a Marathi-Kannada name.

Just as there is a discourse over which is better, the Hindu way or the Muslim way, Lin also shakes out characters that Mahmood Mamdani calls respectively as the good Muslim and the bad Muslim. Qasim, the slum headman and Salman Mastan, Abdel Khader’s successor are good Muslims. This is because, like the Sufis at Haji Ali, they use Islamic ethics to integrate with the world around them and unlike Abdel Khader not use it as a righteous force to shape one’s world according to one’s own will. Good Muslims are born and live in India and put their stakes into seeing India grow inclusively. The Bad Muslims are the foreigners who use the Islam of the sword, with conquest and control inside them and who wage war almost always against fellow Muslims. The only exception is that of Abdullah Taheri, an Iranian refugee, but a good Muslim because he has made India his home. The author suggests at one point of time that if rebirth is to be believed then every human being must have, at some point of time been an Indian. In fact, the author suggests that India has a strange spirituality, which lies in its inclusive and accommodative society, where strangers are provided with shelter without asking any questions. No one even looked at Lint except in curiosity in India whereas in Afghanistan he was stopped at every kilometer of travel by the fighting guerillas. No wonder then Abdel Khader’s own guru, Idris Shah, an Afghan with strong Buddhist leanings made Varanasi his home. Lin is surprised because Khader never acknowledges the existence of Idris Shah, perhaps because like the “bad Muslims” of an Islamic world, he does not wish to accept that Islam has been best understood in the soil of India from the accommodative perspective of the Indian or the essentially Hindu way of life.

There are exceptions to the pattern because an Indian born Muslim, Rasheed exploits his wife and her sister and Anand Rao, a Hindu murders him. Anand Rao hands himself over to the police, accepts his punishment gracefully and cries when Lin arranges a journalist to create sympathies for the offender and get the sentence commuted. Anand Rao wants no mercy and Lin sees in this self flagellation, India’s essential non violence because the quintessential Indian Anand Rao punishes himself as mercilessly as he had offended his victim, Rasheed. Strangely, this is missing in the ideological battle in Afghanistan; the fighters do not wish to do unto themselves what they do unto the others. No wonder then Afghanistan is so tormented because it has none of the discipline of self governance that Indians have. No wonder then when Lin speaks of Prabaker to the Afghan fighters they fall over themselves in discussing life in India as though they were speaking of the mythical jannat.

The self governing society of India manifests itself in many other ways as well. There is no government help for the slums but people organize themselves marvelously before the monsoon rains waterlog their dwellings; the lepers are integrated into the market through the black economy of medicines and though the police is corrupt, it is also human because they let Lin be even when he is a wanted fugitive because the police decide that because Lin attends to the sick in the slum, he must be a good human being. In fact, the Blue sisters, survivors of attempts to murder them and Parvati, Prabaker’s widow live on with the same equanimity as they did before tragedy strikes them, a sharp contrast to Karla, the American, who is so afraid to love and live because of a few bad experiences in life. In India, there is no presupposed idea of a perfect state or a utopia and this is why, Indians can find Heaven in every situation of life without being defeated by adversities.

Lin looks at India from a male point of view and this is why violence against women does not appear among his concerns. He does not seem to have witnessed wife beating, female foeticide, and even when he does learn about Johnny Cigar’s mother being oppressed by her own family and loved ones; he lauds the mother and son for their resilience rather than critique the Indian society for its failures. Lin forgives the pitfalls of the Indians, forgives his tormentors and forgets those who let him down and instead cherishes those who loved him, sheltered and fed him into his freedom which he came looking for in India and found.

Shantaram is an epic that really neither begins nor ends and though one reads from the first to the last page in about a month’s time, one never feels as though one is through with the book. In a way it is reportage rather than a story, a saga of episodes rather than of events, with really neither a beginning, nor an end but only a bulky and bulgy middle.

Posted in About Books | Leave a comment

Merry Christmas

Posted on December 24, 2010 by secondsaturn

Reading through Akku’s letter to Santa in Paromeeta’s post, I am reminded of the many Christmases where Santa brought many gifts. For a long part of my childhood I spent most of my holidays in my mother’s home that was populated by five uncles with two children each and two as yet unwed aunts who lavished gifts on us. Christmas was a time when Bachi, that’s what I called my mother’s older sister used to be our Santa. We never ever got to know how she managed to read our secret letters that we invariably left at the base of a pomegranate tree at the back of the house for she never step her foot inside it. When I grew up I did ask Bachi about how she did her Santa act, but she has never let the secret out. No, not even now when I am 50 and she 75.

When Bachi got married my stint at my mamabari ended. I “returned” home and my paternal grandfather was my Santa. He could never keep a secret and though I never saw him dropping off gifts on the roof of my mosquito net, I knew, through his own unguarded speech that it indeed he. Christmas, Santa, letters and gifts were so much a part of my normal life that I never noticed that in my home in Dover Lane, I was the only child who ever got gifts from Santa. My neighbours had no idea of what this system was and looked quite puzzled imagining that Dadu might have been a Christian, a small surprise given his acutely westernized ways. I was also the only child in my locality to have possessed an egg cup for eating half boiled eggs from. I never realized that Christmas, Santa, egg cup and the plum cake had huge class implications; Christmas was a culture that was specific to a social class of a certain kind. This culture of the Santa was not the same as attending the midnight mass in St Paul’s Church. While the latter was the participation in Christmas celebrations as a public event, the Santa cult was an internalization of Christmas as a ritual that had to be followed as a part of a family praying together and wishing all close friends and relatives Merry Christmas just like Shubho Bijoya. We had no idea of what Santa stood for and why he brought gifts for us, but that was just the way one led one’s normal routine everyday life with certain kinds of rituals built into it.

Along with this cult of the Santa, Christmas also had another ritual and that was among the Bihari and UP migrants who worked as street sweepers in Kolkata, or as Coolies in the Howrah Station or as vendors selling fruits. For them it was “bara din”, a great day, or a big day. There was no bakshish, nor was there food, nor clothes, but it was a day that they counted. Much later in my life I realized that Christianity had a big role to play in the lives of the poor all along the basin of the mighty Indian River, the Ganges, precisely because All along the “Ganga Kinara”, the Dalits have celebrated Christmas in their own way. Not all are Christians but they are poor and ignored, marginalized and oppressed by the reprehensible caste system that make life a living Hell for them. For these people, Jesus lives on, not always in the Church or through baptisms but often as a secret religion, a secret assurance that one day a savior like the Son of God will appear again as the messiah of the poor and take them under His wings of mercy. Many moons ago in the aeons of time, it is rumoured that while Jesus still lived, a sect in India started following his teachings even before that was formalized as Christianity. This sect is called the Naths, or the Nath panthis, or the followers of the Lord unspecified as Rama or Krishna or Shiva or Vishnu. One does not know how Jesus reached the poor people along the Ganges, whether the missionaries worked hard, or whether some secret mantra from the Naths trickled down here. My mother construed that bara din may have been called so because the Winter Solistice was assumed to be on the 25th December and from that time the day turns in to become longer than nights. May be, this is baradin. Whatever it may be but for my driver, domestic help, sweeper, cleaner, and my parents’ helpers in Kolkata, Christmas is a “bara din”; no nothing really is done on that day, no special food, or special prayer, but that’s just a day when they say that they just feel good and get a distinct feeling as the day turning into a longer sunshine, a newness which is beginning.

Well, happiness to all. Merry Christmas and a very happy bara din.

Posted in Family Matters | Leave a comment

Ajmer and Pushkar, Winter 2010

Posted on December 8, 2010 by secondsaturn

Strange things were happening around me. On the last Saturday of November while driving back from office one early evening, a Nilgayi emerged out of nowhere and in the midst of a busy Delhi street rammed into our running car crashing the window on the side in which Madhusree was sitting. The window cracked and collapsed on her showering her with grits of glass pieces like confetti. Vinod did a fine job by keeping the wheels under control but our vehicle was badly damaged, a repair that cost us somewhere around 20k. As we were reeling from this shock, way back home in Kolkata, a two year old toddler slipped under Pam’s car as he was reversing it and the child got caught between the wheel and the axle. It was sheer miracle that she escaped unhurt. These two episodes shook me up and I found that these were very difficult things to have happened. I inspected the spot during the day from where the Nilgayi had shot through and though the railing collapsed at one place, but it was leaning into the forest area and the animal would have had to jump at least ten feet high in order to clear it. This was therefore, an exceptional high jump. Similarly when I asked Pam to retrace the steps of the toddler, he found it hard to explain how the child could have emerged through locked closely grilled gates. These strange incidents call now for Divine Intervention and the Spirit of Light and Darkness all at once; Khwaja Garib Nawaz was the One to visit.

The first time ever I visited Ajmer Sharif was with a party of Modern High School. I was then in Jadavpur University and Mrs Dutta and Chakri roped three ex-students into the team as “helping hands”, euphemism for slaves. Anuradha Sen nee Chowdhury, Susmita Dasgupta, nee Roy alias Lazy and I, unchanged as Susmita Dasgupta visited the shrine with a large party of cackling girls and teachers in holiday jubilation by trying hard to look stern. The travel agent had arranged a special visit in one of the lean hours of the dargah and we went there to a specially arranged “darshan”. Ajmer remained etched in my memory as a peaceful place. But on the subsequent visits, I encountered only crowds and more crowds, pushing, pressing, elbowing and sharving. Hence on this particular visit to the Holy Shrine, my heart really sank as the car entered the parking area. But fortunately, a dark, stout young man with oily mane wearing a black embroidered kurta and white salwar with a crinkled dupatta emerged literally from a hole in the wall and offered to take us around. I knew that Ajmer was a lost case without a “panda” no matter how much we would have wished to avoid them. The “panda” introduced himself as a Astana-e-Alia, a category which is equivalent to the “sebaaye” in Hindu Temples, meaning that these are temple insiders, a minority that are allowed to touch, bathe, clean and clothe the deity. As our stocky Astana-e-Alia led the way for us, the crowds silently parted and Madhusree and I cut across the mortal bodies of human beings as if they were only air.

We walked into the Dargah across the pond that Queen Mary donated for the pilgrims to wash before the prayers, looked at the half- tonne of gold at the spire that the Raja of Rampur donated, and the various areas that kings and Emperors have added to the shrine in aid of the pilgrims. Two huge cauldrons on either side of the entrance are used to prepare daliya, both salty and sweet, the only food that Khwaja Saheb used to eat. The alley leading to the dargah is wholly vegetarian with one shop selling fish and chicken tandoori. The alley has temples of Radha Krishna and Jhoolelah (of the Damadam mastaqalandar fame) and there is also a Church somewhere at the beginning of the narrow path that leads up to the shrine. The crowds represent India and hence have an overwhelming proportion of Hindus, Sadhus who descended from the Himalayas on the start of winter, Ayappans from Kerala. Skull capped men and abeya wrapped women are busily making offerings in the Radha Krishna Temple, as much as the Christians, Jews and Hindus are thronging into the shrine for the lighting of evening lamps. The qawaali is soulful and the audience is almost wholly Bihari women who have come in busloads to visit the shrine. Women are sitting in namaz, a corpse is brought to Khwaja’s shrine to bid goodbye to the earth one last time and girls are running up and down the steps to witness a meal of daliya being cooked in a cauldron that can churn about 24000 kilos of cereal. Everything gets mixed and cooked in this shrine just as the daliya in the cauldron- Khwaja Moinuddin is a huge melting pot of all religions, all souls, all faiths and beliefs and disbeliefs. Khwaja Saheb is at one the Light and the Darkness, at once the sight and the blindness, the silent and the articulate, the living and the dead, the dead and the living, so the qawaals sing passionately, assertively and insistently.

I am in a rush to come out of the crowded space but not before I have peeped into Akbari Masjid, a serene space amidst the hustle bustle of the pilgrims in the dargah. Our Astana –e-Alia reads my mind as he says that any monument associated with Akbar is invariably peaceful. I have noticed this too. Monuments by Shah Jahan are regal but they bear a certain level of anxiety, nervous energy that make them seem to be too much self conscious in desire to be eternal. Akbar’s monuments exude power, a power that is so invincible and unchallenged that it turns into peace.

We make donations for the girls’ madrashah at the Anjuman office. This is better than spending money on the chaddars and other offerings. The office bearers present us with booklets on stories about the shrine. We suggested that in view of the large number of Bangladeshis who visit the shrine and the fact that West Bengal still has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country; booklets should also be printed in Bengali. The Anjuman stiffened at this suggestion and said that Khwaja Garib Nawaz was of universal religion, religion of man, and not specifically Islam. Of course, of course, this is so. There are numerous faiths around saints in India, the bauls, the fakirs, of Jhoolelal, Kabir, Lallan, Saibaba that are neither Hindu nor Muslim. These are faiths unto themselves that are not necessary to classify in terms of major religion; something like the Bhojpuri, a complete language in it but appended as a dialect of Hindi.

There is only one shop on the way to the dargah that sell fish and tandoori chicken, the rest are strictly vegetarian. Right at the car parking area there are tea vendors selling boiled egg. Nothing inside the shrine is from dead animals, neither the fans, nor the nakkaras, nor the bhistis for sprinkling water. The shrine has its own festivals, none of the animal chopping and blood flowing ids. There is only sweet nokuldaana, fragrance and flowers and lamps.

We move away from Ajmer, climbing the hills to reach Pushkar, appearing barren and deserted with silhouettes of champa tree as the sun sets on the Aravallis leaving an unpeopled stretch sink into the twilight. It is a moonless night and a few electric bulbs from far below Ajmer blink and disappear into the curves and bends of the ghat road; another day is sucked into the eternity of Time. We emerge out of the completely lifeless stretch to take the long winding path to Pushkar Fort Hotel.

I remember my colleague Parameswaran telling me the myth of Pushkar, the south Indian version, in which Brahma and Vishnu wanted to get one up against the other. They approached Shiva for a judgment as to who was the greater of the two. Lord Shiva gave them a task; each would have to find either the head or the foot of Shiva as he reveled in his Vishwaroopa. In the appearance of Vishwaroopa, Shiva became so vast that neither could find the limits of his body. Vishnu, who had chosen to seek the Lord’s feet, confessed that he could not locate the feet at all because of the infinite dimensions of Shiva. But Brahma chose to lie to Shiva and on seeing a falling flower on the ground, the same as the one that Shiva wears on his head; he told the Lord that he had seen his head. Shiva immediately found out that Brahma was lying and instantly cursed him that he was never to have a temple and would have to remain contended with the only one in Pushkar, a land of the flower. In north Indian myths, Brahma took a Gujjar woman who he purified by passing through a cow and named her Gayatri, when his wife, Savitri took a long time to dress and got late for the grand yagnya that he was conducting in the presence of all the deities. Savitri, angered by Brahma’s infidelity cursed him and all the Gods badly. The gods cursed were Indra, Pavan, Vishnu, and several other rishis.

When we arrived in the vicinity of the Pushkar lake, the main one known as Senior Pushkar, for there are the middle and the junior Pushkars as well, I found that people dressed in traditional Rajasthani attire moving about asking for “cow donations”. Rather short and sweet looking animals that looked like bovine yaks were strutting with contended faces with splashes of dry sindur on them. These cows were supposed to represent the sacrificial cows that the Vedic people used to chop off during yagnas. The entire ritual is a survivor of the days of cow sacrifice by Hindus ! Then in a flash I got the story of Pushkar; Brahma versus Vishnu in which the former loses the battle, the curse of wife of a monogamy marriage, the Holy Cow who purifies the Gujjar girl Gayatri, the curse on Indra, Pavan, typical Vedic Gods and the curse on Vishnu that he will be born as Krishna, Rama, Varaha and so on, possibly hints that at Pushkar, there was a battle between the Vedic and the later Brahminical Hinduism. I reach for the dates of the various temples, numbering to over 400 around the lake and I realize that all of them have been built between the 10th and the 18th century, highly medieval instead of ancient India. The Vedic rituals of which cow sacrifice was an important part is replaced by a strict vegetarian zone and every deity in India including the now disappeared God Jhoolelal has a temple here.

The crowd of temples as each tries to nudge the others in order to get some space along the lake hints that some battle must have taken place in this very land as Hinduism throws out Vedas and brings in the epics and the Puranas. The population consists of Gujjars, the caste of Lord Krishna and of Gayatri and of Parashar Brahmins, a low caste Brahmin who hails their descent from the dark skinned Ved Vyas, the author of the Mahabharata. There is no business in Pushkar except as priests especially because this is supposed to be a place where one washes sins and prays for souls to have moksha. The spiritual business, however, is only a tip on the iceberg, because the real bulk business of Pushkar is in drugs. Anyway, what endeared me was the surfeit of girls’ schools all over the town and indeed the education of the girl child is a credit that the Brahmins must deserve. One of the modes of Sanskritization before Independence was to educate one’s girls that today unfortunately have come to rest in teeny clothes but with honour killing.

I try to use my time in the car well and divide the prasad from Ajmer into small packets for distribution. We discuss how similar anything to do with Vishnu and Lakshmi is so like the Pirs. The prasad of Satyanarayan is so much like the Arab breakfast that Marriott had laid out in Dubai, pirs always have the same food prepared and same stuff offered as Radha Krishna and lo and behold, Garib Nawaz was seated just at the place which according to the south Indian Pushkar myth, Lord Vishnu was supposed to have found the feet of Shiva. Khwaja Saheb was already there in Ajmer when the temples were starting to get constructed in Pushkar. I read in the Ajmer pamphlets that Garib Nawaz sat in Ajmer, the outskirts of what was to become Prithviraj Chauhan’s kingdom and challenged the then king, by saying that love and not the sword was the true weapon of universal suzerainty. It was a political move through the spiritual path predating the Muslim conquests by at least two hundred years.

Prithviraj Chauhan hailed on his mother’s side from Bengal, Ballal Sen, the founder of the Baidya caste, being the maternal grandfather to this great hero and in one of the Pushkar myths, cursed Vedic God had turned into Kali of Kolkata !! The religious contests between the Vedic and Gujjar alias Krishna cultists must have had something to do with the establishment of the kingdom of Prithviraj Chauhan. Pushkar has a surfeit of Bengal and Bihar presence and also a discernible Sindhi and a Maratha one. There is also, at Pushkar, a Sankaracharya temple. Ajmer, on the other hand has a marked presence of Southern Indian Sultans. It is then definitely a space in which Hindus and Muslims, each in their own way had tried to combine the north and the south of India and for the Hindus, it has been a shake out within Hinduism as Brahma, with his monogamist family and cow sacrifice clearly bowed out to a polygamist and vegetarian culture of the Krishna worshippers and also a rise of the Gujjar community in defiance to the greater ritual statuses of Brahmins.

As these thoughts crowd my mind and I decide to sound Anirban, a adventuring historian on these passing ideas, I am animated by a appealing smell emanating from somewhere around me. I detect the fragrance as being from the now shriveled pink rose that I got at the dargah – Khwaja Saheb’s rose smelling jolly sweet.

Posted in Travelogues | 1 Comment

Dev Anand – Eternally Young or Trapped in Time?

Posted on December 6, 2010 by secondsaturn

Cine Durbar was once again instrumental in organizing through the IFFI, a panorama of Naveketan films to celebrate 60 years of the film producing company owned by Dev Anand. Mr Dev Anand was himself present as a bonus for the audiences along with the premiere of the coloured version of a Dev Anand starrer, Hum Dono. The theatre was packed with eager viewers from every generation awaiting the arrival of the star on the event. As soon as the star of the 1950’s arrived, notwithstanding the 50 years that stood between the times that his films were first released and now, the audiences mobbed him, jostling for autographs or a hand shake, or even a glimpse of the star. The compeer was pathetic; in a voice quivering with intense excitement at the sight of Dev Anand she was completely taken over by the star’s charisma. While the compeer repeatedly appealed to the audience to leave the star alone as he soon would be on the diaz, the mob around the old frail man was unnerving since one cannot guarantee the well being of such elderly when they find themselves trapped in a whirlpool of such volumes of carbon dioxide emitted from the mob that was falling on him, touching his feet and shaking hands. One fails to understand why the organizers did not bring Dev Anand directly on the diaz though it is possible that he needed some rest in the chairs and gather himself up before he could climb the steep steps to the podium.

The event was as badly planned as it could be as there were two very low level officers who struggled to open the cellophane packet from which they segregated a shawl, barely being able to open it up from the folds to make it of adequate dimensions that could be better settled around  the star’s ageing and drooping shoulders. Just before the gifting the shawl the Ministry gave a bouquet of standard sunflowers and carnations for the star to hold which he had to clutch all through the shawl ceremony and while delivering the acceptance speech. The compere was so stunned by the star continuing to be amazed at whatever Dev Anand did in her shrill quaky voice that it did not occur to her to lend the star a helping hand.

Dev Anand started by objecting to the contents of the felicitation speech; he said that the felicitator has stressed too much on what he had been when she should ideally have said what he is, continues to be and will emerge shortly as his new film releases. It is interesting that Dev Anand continues to make films and uses a felicitation ceremony as an occasion to promote his forthcoming releases. The Ministry officials were commenting on the delusion of grandeur that Dev Anand seems to be suffering from because notwithstanding his flops and the complete abandonment of Navketan by the financiers, he continues to believe that he can and that she should make films and that too for the good of the nation.

As Dev Anand continued to make his speech, three things came out very clearly. Firstly, the makers of popular Hindi cinema see themselves as serving the nation. Indeed, in the programme called Vishesh Jaymala in the Vividh Bharati of All India Radio and the television programme Jai Jawan almost equates film artists with the military, both as serving the cause of the nation. Secondly, Dev Anand believes that his cinema in particular and cinema in general is most successful if it speaks of timeless and eternal truth. One could immediately see the star-director-producer’s problems in failing to align himself with the times. Dev Anand insists that he is always modern and indeed he is very receptive to images of modern men and women, and to modern technology and techniques, to modern professions and occupation structures and to modern personalities, he convinces himself that there is no specific politics of the modern and hence he cannot capture the drama of changing times. In short, in the mindscape of Dev Anand, the world is timeless and eternal; it only changes on the surface. Such a belief system has been his failing as much as it was his success in the 1950’s.

Popular art uses the politics of its age in order to project the victories of the present power struggle as an eternal state, and this is the utopia into which the popular must escape into. Successful films are sensitive to the specific contradictions of their age but also clever enough to use narrative strategies and cinematic techniques to project such conflicts as an eternal truth when resolved in favour of the protagonist. The problem with Dev Anand is that while he very successfully pursued the utopia, he missed the trees for the wood because he was unable to address the conflicts and contradictions that emerged in a variety of ways over the past 60 years of Navketan’s existence. Is there a sociological reason for this? Yes, perhaps there is and my surmise is as follows.

We have to understand the politics of the Hindi cinema in terms of its basic ideological and political agenda which is intricately located in its history. The Hindi commercial cinema in particular and the Indian popular film in general were products of the new middle class intelligentsia that saw itself as the leader of the Freedom Struggle and as creators of new India. The Indian Constitution was considered as the ideal state of affairs and the cinema was supposed to imagine this idyllic state. For Dev Anand, since the idea of the ideal did not change, he felt no need to change cinema. What he missed out on was how changes of everyday life postponed the attainment of the ideal and therefore, what his cinema subsequently missed was an understanding of the concrete and temporal reality.

But what Dev Anand brought to Hindi cinema is perhaps no less than Phalke himself because his works marked out much of what cinema looks like today. If the Hindi film is formulaic, then it was none other than Dev Anand who had much to do with the setting out of this formula. Dev Anand had himself selected four of his films that showcased what he is all about – Hum Dono, Baazi, Guide and Taxi Driver. All his creations are variations of these four films. Of these, Guide is in colour and Hum Dono, an original black and white film has been rendered into colour. In the course of his ruminations about himself and his work, Dev Anand said that when he closed his eyes he sees black and then slowly the darkness emits strong light, the cinema. His cinematic images are thus not out there but those that reveal themselves from the background of nothingness. No wonder he has excelled in the black and white with strong images that are not contrasts of darkness against light but aporia of light through darkness. Hence his images and montages illuminate to reveal themselves. No wonder then Dev Anand films have dealt so much with mysterious happenings in our society in which the rich and the powerful are the villains. Further, if the rich man happens to be the father of the girl the hero loves then the former would have to be the villain. In this essay we will discuss Baazi and address through an analysis of the film how and why Navketan has played a central role in the formalization of the Hindi film

In a Dev Anand film, the hero is an underdog as always is the case but he is innocent, very often, innocent of what is the good and the bad. In this innocence he makes some “mistakes” that in today’s world would be considered as grave and unpardonable. For instance, he teases a well-meaning woman doctor, sneering at her generosity in running a free clinic and also for her being beautiful and professionally qualified and also for being the daughter of a rich man. There is vigilantism, depravity and above all bad taste in this depiction of the ideal male. Though the hero says later in the course of the narrative that he had misbehaved and was indeed sorry but the depiction of the bad behaviour was depicted as being suave and smart. The director, writer and of course the actor all of who had arrived at a consensus in creating the hero persona revealed to almost similar levels contempt not only for the female in the public space of a knowledge based profession but elevated the hero who had the “guts” to hurt a woman, pure in her intentions and untrammeled by poverty because of her riches. Dev Anand’s depiction of the ideal male thus attacks the women folk of the privileged in order to make his point against poverty. He establishes social envy of the have-nots through contempt for the haves by harassing, insulting and sometimes to the extent of emotionally violating their women.

Baazi is one of the central films of Navketan. Guru Dutt has directed the film, Balraj Sahni has written the script and Dev Anand plays the main protagonist. The hero is an underdog, a taxi driver by profession who falls in love with a rich, educated doctor, the only daughter of a rich lawyer. Romance is not the main story though it is the peg on which the tale hangs. The main story is that of the protagonist, the trials and tribulations he faces as he tries to manage a “normal life” through poverty. The idea of a “normal” life is the bond between a brother and a sister, the brother who looks after the sister and be with her through thick and thin. The image of the hero is therefore the protector brother, who can go to any extent in order to sacrifice for the sister. In Baazi, the sister is ill and the brother enters into the world of crime in order to be able to meet the expenses for his sister’s medical treatment. But that is too little and he has to go in search of a doctor who treats poor patients free of cost. But as soon as he encounters the heroine, who will eventually be the hero’s beau, he forgets about the sister and looking at this educated, beautiful, rich man’s daughter who dedicates her life to persons like he, the hero’s ego is ruffled and in a bid to cover up his own feelings of inadequacy in front of such a perfect picture tries to tease her, sabotage her efforts, insult her and destroy her confidence in every possible manner. Despite such insults, for being very capable and yet charitable, the doctor, played by Kamini Kaushal comes on her own to treat the sister. The hero feels even more humiliated at her kindness because he can, in no way match up to her. He calms down manageably when the heroine falls head over heels in love with him perhaps for his excellent looks and smart demeanor. Dev Anand helped his viewers to place a lot of value on appearance and style and in a way quite convinced his viewers that good looks could launch one anywhere in the world.

The hero of course would never imagine taking any help from a “woman” and especially as the woman has already fallen in love with him. The sister talks of the doctor as her “bhabi” and in this sense there is a possibility of marriage between the hero and the heroine and hence the hero, keeping to the social convention that the man must earn more and become the provider of women, proceeds to become an even larger gambler that what any gambler can possibly be. It is at the gambling den that he meets the vamp, who too falls in love with the hero instantly and later, also sacrifices her life for him. The Paro-Devdas-Chandramukhi triad is achieved, something that has been very central to the image of Dev Anand. The two women, one noble and one fallen both pine for the hero; the hero sets his own image vis-à-vis both women. Both women are well meaning and equally noble but they are set apart by the kind of choices they have. Rajni, the doctor can marry any well-qualified and well-settled man and yet chooses the taxi driver, our hero. Nina, the bar dancer can marry any rich man yet she chooses the hero. The hero passes tests in both worlds and thus, in the eyes of the viewer emerges a winner among all kinds of men at all available to women of any kind. Dev Anand, through two women set widely apart in the society, exhausts the social space as the best man who ever walked the earth. The principal narrative function of two women is to help the hero pass tests as the best man.

As the hero earns enough money to pay for his sister’s treatment and hence he is free of the heroine’s charity, he gains in confidence and starts meeting Rajni openly and soon attracts the ire of Rajni’s father. One day when on the way back from the sanatorium where the hero’s sister is admitted, the hero listens to Rajni and her father talking in the rear seat he immediately identifies the voice because as a taxi driver he is used to listening to people talking in the rear seat. The voice belongs to none other than the mysterious owner of the gambling den who people only heard but never saw. As he is about to spill the beans to the heroine, the father lays a trap for the hero and through unexpected turn of events, Nina is murdered trying to save the hero and the hero is charged with murder and sentenced to the gallows. The investigating police officer, the heroine’s childhood friend and presently head over heels in love with her was ill-disposed towards the hero but now rises to the occasion and investigates the matter. He proves that all evidences pointed out to the hero’s innocence but the hero, who the villain, the owner of the gambling den and Rajni’s father has threatened of dire consequences for the ailing sister refuses to budge from his confession to the crime. In the end, the police officer through his cunning extracts a confession from the villain and gets him and the accomplice arrested and the hero is let off scot free.

Nina, the ‘other woman’ dies sacrificing for the hero, which is, in the narrative, less of her loss and more of a gain for the hero. Since Nina is a fallen woman, death appeared to be her best option as she could not have possibly emerged into society. The vamp or the prostitute has always died for the hero because while they are used to portray the hero’s sexual powers and erotic charm, they are usually dispensed with because in genteel society such women have no place. But, in the film narrative, the best songs are sung through her and the songs “ tabdeer se mara hua taqdeer bana le, apne par bharosa hai to ek daun laga le” and “ samay guzarta jaye… so na na, kho na na” set the principles of the hero’s character. It is interesting as to why the vamp should articulate the basic principles of the hero’s character and his state of being and not the heroine.

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Modern High School – Selected Memories

Posted on December 1, 2010 by secondsaturn

When my mother decided to pull me out of my exhilarating bliss as a student in South Point into Modern High School, a long and tedious sentence started in my life as the condemned Sisyphus. I joined MHS in Class III because it was from Class III onwards that the school was housed in the Amir Ali Avenue building, close enough to be a walking distance from my home, or a distance that my grandfather supposed my mother could manage with the old landmaster engine Mark 1 Ambassador car. I was neither sent to Loreto House, a school that the Dasgupta girls usually went to before my generation, nor to Lamartiniere where some cousins studied, nor to Gokhale Memorial where my mother and her sisters read; for these schools did my grandfather decide were too far for me to travel to. So to MHS I went with the over sized uniform that my aunt who just passed out from the school had been wearing. To Dadu’s constant complaint of how expensive the school was, how expensive the books were and to my mother’s tears that quality and classy education was the girl’s best weapon against a world that in every which way was to be eventually cruel to her, I resentfully, ruefully stepped inside the swing door of Class III B waiting for my class teacher to arrive.

I realized that I was there with two other girls smaller than I, all of us looking out of sorts and out of place. Neither was in their uniforms because they did not have the time to get one stitched and neither had a legacy of over sized clothes as I had. I felt a class of four rows and eight desks scrutinizing us minutely with the same wonderment in their eyes as we had in ours till the door swung in and a lady walked in wearing high heel shoes and a tight skirt while the class cried out in a concert, Miss, Miss, new girls, three new girls. The teacher scolded the class, first say good morning Miss Payne, she demanded. The class sung out, Good Morning Miss Spain.. Then this lady turned to face us. I saw her desperately trying to smother a guffaw as she tried to find me from inside the many metres of large sized garments. Such a small girl, with such large clothes, she said and the class broke into peals of laughter. I felt a bit more comforted at what I sensed as a hostility turn into some kind of amusement among those who sat facing me.

The two other girls, I learnt were Madhuchhanda Kar, who now heads Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital and Sangeeta Roy Deewanji who now teaches in MHS, were shorter than I and were given seats in front. I got an isle seat in the third row. In South Point, I was the first student among all the sections, legendary for my marks, my hand writing, my needle work, my origami. In MHS, I sensed I had to stand among the ranks. It was death for me, or a new life, disconnected with my past. People feel a sense of loss when they move from school to college or from college to office. For me, I already had this feeling in my journey from South Point to Modern High, and that feeling was so done for me that never ever had any rites de passage been able to shake me up as this huge journey from Hindustan Park to Amir Ali Avenue.

MHS appeared to me like the Woodlands Nursing Home with its long corridors, laminated doors to classrooms on either side that were painted in pastel shades and had the same square glass covered holes in them for people to peep in. Two sweepers with broad mops on sticks seemed to be forever cleaning the corridors. None of the airy, breezy, hap hazard, free and chaotic atmosphere of South Point School prevailed here. Everything was sanitized and removed from the soul. We were made to stand in queues where not even a finger could jut out, we had to walk straight to the watchful eyes of senior girls who mechanically repeated Stop Stocking.. (stop talking) to even smother a loud breath. Everyone spoke in English, a language that I never conversed in and besides, it was a different society with all girls bearing unfamiliar names and unfamiliar surnames of many non-Bengalis to whom Kolkata was a home. I realized that I was hurtled in a different world, a wider world as my mother had told me.

This was not my problem; my problem lay more in the classroom, where every minute my pride of a first student of record holding full marks in every subject was beaten down into failures. The teacher wrote too fast on the board and rubbed it off even faster, I could not follow her accent and so got almost a zero in dictation, something in which I never in my life made a mistake. Only mathematics and Bengali seemed to be fine, because South Point had better standards in these subjects. My life was made worse by a thin, dark girl with two long and wriggly plaits hanging from her well oiled black curly hair, the monitress of our class, T.R.Girija who was so impatient with my slow responses that she never stopped calling me silly. Strangely, I did not resent her because it was of no use. I was in a new territory, without a past, without an identity and my voice and opinions had no value. Besides I was too stoned to respond.

In this terrible world of Class III B, there were a few faces that reached out to me as saviours in the whirlpool. There was a girl with a very kind face, Anita Ray who looked at me often across the desks and kept smiling assuredly at me. Today I know that the smile meant All Is Well. The other girl was the second monitress, Gurleen Grewal, who resembled Girija in many ways, thin, wriggly plaits on oiled curly hair, except that she was fairer and her hair little browner. She was kind and she made it a point to shuffle around my desk pretending to collect my copy as I went through some revisions and I could see that she edged Girija out of my way.

In the tiffin break I had to make some friends. In South Point I went to a half day school and there was no tiffin break. Hence I had no need to make any friends. While I was quite contended to eat out of my lunch box alone because I am used to being all by myself, I could see two girls, very self assured and confident walking up to me. They introduced themselves as Sumita Warrier and Saloni Pandey, my first friends in MHS. These girls became my tiffin companions and they were also the two who came home to my birthday party that year. Sumi left Kolkata for a while and when she returned she joined back in Section C. I greeted her once, but she seemed to have forgotten me. But Saloni Pandey and I remained friends, a relationship that was wholly Saloni’s making and not mine.

I returned home after the first day at MHS diminutive and demeaned. I cried so much that Dadu and Baba really scolded Ma for being so self willed in impairing and mutilating the image of the first girl among all sections, morning and afternoon sessions included, of South Point. I learnt that evening that the Birlas and Dadu were on inimical terms over Rani Birla College and that Dadu never considered Birlas as anything else but profiteers who sold education just as they did for tea and jute. Baba pleaded to Dadu that he would take up driving again, a passion that he had to forego after Dadu tore up Baba’s driving license after his near fatal car accident at the Theatre Road Crossing, so that he could drop me to Loreto House. But costs of petrol were calculated and the idea of my shifting out to Loreto House was dropped. Ma promised me that if I still felt so castigated and attacked after a month at MHS, she would pull me out of it without a second thought. With this assurance I was calmed enough to give MHS a try before I called quits. I pulled out my secret weapon to deal with such issues, a weapon that I still have and use and which is I got out a notebook and a pencil and started copying my text books word by word, punctuation by punctuation. At the end of the first week, I found Saloni Pandey copying the questions on the board from me and when Girija came she found that mine was the first copy to be handed to her along the isle. I slowly integrated into MHS.

With much despair I realized that I had no future of excellence in MHS. The girls seemed to be ahead of me in everything. Payal Narain was unbeatable in art, Girijia unsurpassable in maths, Anita Ray, terrific at English, Anusree Mitra and Sanjukta Dutta Gupta amazing in handwriting, Gurleen Grewal too smart and fast, Nandini Kapoor could write copiously, Madhu Kedia, a confident strutting know all and Sunita Chaocharia ran like a deer on the tracks; the girls were in a different league altogether. My performances in my earlier life and in my earlier avatar as first girl meant nothing. In a way I was freed of all pressures to perform and realized that learning could be exciting and absorbing. I dug deep into my books and soon I realized that my dictation and spelling were impeccable and what really surprised me the most was that my comprehension and reading seemed to please Miss “Spain” no end. I knew that I made my niche and even though I never stood first in MHS I started to enjoy learning. The seat reserved for me in south Point High School was given up forever.

In the days of middle class values, I was often reminded at home that I went to the most expensive girls’ school in Kolkata. This meant that the family budget that I could lay claim on was wholly taken up by the school fees and bus charges. This meant that I had to do without a private tutor, without taking expensive extra-curricular classes and refrain from buying story books. Hence I used the resources available in the school to the hilt. I participated in debates, quizzes; wrote for Lotus Buds, did the copy work for charts, edited wall magazines as extracurricular activities. I loved nothing more than doing my geography homework of colouring and shading maps to show mountains, ground elevations, sources and destination of rivers, mineral deposits and crops. I have carried my geography lessons out of school and I feel privileged to note that my idea of the world as a space is indeed an advantage in my profession.

I was devoted to the Library and helping Supriya Roy in arranging the Library was one of my most favourite occupations. The Library used to be on the ground floor of the west wing just across Class IIIB and that was a space that grew so sunny in the winter afternoon and so cool in the summer morning that attracted me the most. The Library also became my most free space. I had no ability to read when I joined MHS but within a month I was gulping down Enid Blytons so much that my grandfather decided to write to the UK government to put the authoress under check so that she stops writing books so distract me from my studies. A few years later, in class VI or VII, Madhuchhanda Kar introduced me to the magic of Bengali novels and immediately I finished Leela Majumdar, Bibhuti Bandopadhyay, Saradindu, Bankimchandra, Saratchandra, again in a wide sweep, with grandfather deciding that he was against the novel as a genre.

The literary rather than the aesthetic was more within my command and in those days of egoistic adolescence I stuck only to what I was good at and feigned indifference at skills those I had still to acquire. Hence I stayed clear of dance and music. Alka Yagnik was a year senior to us and her in Hindi songs and Sarmila Bose in Bengali, both in Champak house set the bar so high that there was no point for anyone else to score a point there. I was mediocre in sports, though I did play basket ball quite a bit and did some yoga and excelled in dodge ball; rounders, throw ball, athletics and drill display were never my strengths. Anusree and Sanjukta (Dutti) almost pleaded me to join the Girl Guide but it was one of those desires that I had to suppress because grandfather could never dream of allowing me to stay overnight out of home in a camp ! Dutti taught me that if one went for the “big job” and had no access to soap, one could rub some sand or mud or even wall plaster to substitute for detergent in washing one’s hands. It was a very liberating thought though all through school I lived in a nightmare of my knicker draw strings getting into a knot while the need to relieve myself was getting very urgent. In the break, friends could help untie the knot especially those who surreptitiously kept long nails which they filed with emory boards below their desks, but if one needed to go to the washroom during a class, one was always insecure about not finding a help should the necessity arise. Our school was miserly in keeping ayahs who it had to pay, though we were stuffed unnecessarily with teachers and prefects at every nook and corner like in a Soviet surveillance. I think that my invigilation skills arise from my unconscious registering of the panopticism of Modern High School and as I say that nothing escapes my notice whether it is the office corridor, or the parking lot, or the home kitchen.

I resented MHS while I was there. I got a distinct feeling that it was more like a finishing school rather than a school. There was a kind of dilettantism that we were being helped to acquire; some sports, some studies, some music, some dance, some acting, some writing, jacks of trades but without being a clear master in any one of them. These were, I suspected, only to prepare us for being wives of very successful men and not being a successful person on one’s own. Decidedly then most of us spent all our free time thinking and worrying more about boys than about our careers. This was fanned by our principal, “Willy”’s abhorrence towards boys. The more Willy struggled to keep the male sex beyond the range of our vision, more like the Miranda of Tempest we were tempted by them. MHS surely and steadily “feminized” us. I revolted so much against the strong culture of the feminine that I decided against anything that would ever make me even resemble a girl. In Sudarshana Bagchi’s plays I was always in male roles and in the life after school, in my mind, I am very much a man, a clear resistance to the “lady like” behavior that was always expected out of us.

But because of its finishing school approach, MHS taught me a few apparently trivial things that I believe that every school should follow. One is to silently walk in a line where even the end of the pleated skirt should not be seen sticking out; to have properly ironed uniformed, drawn up socks and polished shoes, to have hair tied back neatly, to have no decoration on the face, or body, to have covers and labels on exercise books, to have neatly packed pencil boxes, needlework boxes and games bags and right or wrong, never to defy authority. I realized much later in my life that such military discipline always helps one to climb up the social ladder and improve one’s professional position. I realized that the academic skills were developed rather broadly so that we easily found our way into career options like medicine, economics, law, teaching, music, dance, fashion designing, jewellery designing, cosmetics and among the braver hearts, social work and social activism. Perhaps because of a lady like approach, our girls were less confident about harder professions of being in the bureaucracy or the judiciary or as merchant bankers or in films, those that claimed more wholesome dedication, but in the balancing act that women seem to be always in, I think that we have managed remarkably well. At least from our facebook statuses, we all seem to be in awe of a normal and balanced life of some career, some cooking, some colleagues, some family, some interest and some duty towards our homes.

Posted in Family Matters | 9 Comments

Murder of CEO

Posted on December 1, 2010 by secondsaturn

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Ma, Mati Manush

Posted on December 1, 2010 by secondsaturn

Mamata’s Politics – Reign of Terror Or The French Revolution?

susmita.dasgupta@hotmail.com

On a rain lashed morning, hemmed in by a garbage strewn muddy road of a colony in a NCR suburb and marooned by water logged stretches of the posh South Delhi colonies of Greater Kailash and Saket, I sit interned in my modest flat thinking of my homeland, West Bengal, of the change that is brewing there, as the mild wafting breeze slowly gathers momentum into a typhoon. Mamata Banerjee, a non descript leader of the not too civil nor really cerebral political party, known as the Trinamool Congress is swarming up like the Joan of Arc to lay to cinders the citadel of the CPI(M), no less in its solidity that the Roman Empire had been. To the best of my understanding, the Bengali is averse to any kind of change and especially those that lead to a realignment in the balance of power. Hence, the CPI(M) is not going away because of an anti-incumbency, but because it has threatened the status quo. Trinamool Congress, hereafter the TMC, promises to fight against this disruption and something more. The “something more” constitutes the crux of the TMC politics, its mass base, its intellectual support and the fact that all over India, a significant section of farmers and workers are saying under their breath, only if Mamatadidi was by our side. A fair quantity of intellectuals seem to repeat what Tilak had once said about Bengal, what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow. It is irksome to many among the glitterati of Kolkata’s elite club to imagine that such a thought as the one that is swelling up into some kind of a grand critique of the present politics should emanate from a riff raff such as Mamata Banerjee. Let us therefore, observe closely what Mamata’s politics is all about.

As far as my recollection goes, the present wave started at Singur. Singur, the site of Bengal’s most fertile land and one of the few agrarian tracts which is fully irrigated supporting the bulk of potatoes and vegetables of the country as a whole, was claimed by Ratan Tata to become a hub for its automobile company. Farming, which is not too gainful an occupation after the input and utility charges like water, electricity, fuel and other consumables have increased enormously, appeared to be less lucrative than the interest income flowing out of huge money stacked away as fixed deposits in the bank. The huge money was supposed to come from the munificent compensation that the Tatas were offering in lieu of lands that supported livelihoods of farmers in that area. Many farmers found to be compensated off their land to be a god sent boon. Many however opposed and in the opposition of such farmers, grew a politics that seemed to be growing into unmanageable proportions. This is the typhoon of the Trinamool.

The Singur farmers’ resistance gave unto the Indian politics an interesting political category, the willing and the unwilling. In this case, the unwilling farmers were unwilling to give up their land, while those who were fine with compensation instead of land constituted the willing farmers. Studies on the resistance tried to understand the reasons behind the choices made by the willing and the unwilling farmers. The Nobel Laureate, Prof Amartya Sen said that industrialization was a natural progression from agriculture and hence farming had logically to make way for industries and the unwilling farmers were just being sentimental about land and fearful of a new way of life – a typical colonial construction of the Indian farmer as being ignorant, superstitious, and conservative.

There was yet another view on the farmers’ willingness to part with land which was that those who owned land but were absentee landlords wanted to sell land while those who were sharecroppers and even only landless labourers had more stake in keeping the land precisely because it were they who produced on land. This too is again rather naïve and facile and returns us to Prof Sen’s thesis that such attachment to land is therefore only habit or is sentimental or conservative and most likely all of them, in saying that those farmers who are the actual tillers of the soil are the ones who wish to continue to be in the same way. What such “class analysis” does not take into account is why should the farmer not be a rational decision maker of his own economics and why should he, in the face of an apparent possibility of a higher income through compensation not decide in favour of giving up his land? Until and unless the farmer is totally a non-rational sentimentalist who knows the price of nothing, such analysis of class does not help us understand the problem of Singur.

If we visit Singur and list in two columns the willing and the unwilling farmers, then we will have an interesting picture. Farmers on both sides will reveal very similar “external” features. Both columns will have farmers who own land, those who are landless, or sharecroppers, both sides will have the same distribution of educational qualifications, both columns will have very similar family compositions of unmarried daughters, sons who study medicine or engineering or are petty traders and civil contractors. The socio-economic and educational attributes have similar distributions for willing and unwilling farmers. Then why are they different? Only because some are non-rational sentimentalists and the rest is not? Such analysis tries to understand human behavior in terms of its correlation with factors that are outside the behavior itself. What one really has to understand is the behavior and the world view of that behavior.

Those farmers who are unwilling to sell land have an important difference with those who are willing to do so and which are that the unwilling farmers have fewer opportunities for an alternative source of income or believe that they do not have one. For the same income category, it will be observed that the farmer who is unwilling to sell land has “fallen” into this category, while the famer who is willing to sell land has “risen” into this category. Therefore, the world looks bleak for the one who has suffered a downward mobility while it looks rosy for the one who has enjoyed an upward mobility. The two farmers, even at the same level of economic prosperity conceal two directly opposite stories, namely one of decline and the other of a rising incline. The story of Singur thus divides its actors and characters into two clear divisions – one who is part of India’s shining story and the other who is not.

Yet another “calculation” guides the story of Singur and which is those farmers who wish to hold on to land are speculators and hedgers who wish to part with land only when the value of such land rises. They know that compensation, no matter how high is likely to be worn off as inflation gets the better of it and higher the amount of the present compensation, higher the inflation rate is likely to be. In such a view those who are unwilling to part with land are speculators, who do not wish to be parted of their future value of land. The politics of Singur is therefore also over the present value and the future value of land. Such a category of “unwilling” farmers constitute the stronger component of opponents to the land deal. The farmers are fighting to protect the future worth of their assets while the state is trying through forced commerce transfer this future worth of land from them to the land acquisitionists.

In contrast to the above, the willing farmers are definitely households of smaller means who desperately need the compensation money to start some business of their own. When the prospect of such a business was offered by none other than Tatas to become contractors in none other than inside the Nano factory, these farmers jumped at the prospect. The “Nano Bachao Committee” contrary to popular perception is not a CPI (M) outfit but has a motley combination of opinions and for all practical purposes is a standalone outfit. The debates within this outfit usually pertains to whether industrial employment is sustainable in the future or not and whether the local boys of Jamshedpur have benefitted from the existence of Tata Steel since four decades before Independence. The Nano Bachao Committee people speak in English, the younger ones among them dress well, and the older ones have well stocked homes with gadgets like air conditioners and cars of the latest models, the size of which would depend on the depth of their pockets. The Committee was formed when Tatas decided to leave West Bengal because Mamata Banerjee was so obstinately against development, an excuse, which all of us found at best as flimsy. Tatas finding an immediate home in Modi’s Gujarat was again too quick to be real and people smelt of an axis among the communist-communalist-capitalist.

Bengal, incidentally is one state in India where industries mean retrenched workers and locked out factories. Bengalis are the last persons to believe that industries provide jobs. At the time of Independence Bengal was India’s most industrialized state and slowly it also had the most unemployed. The USP of the CPI(M) was that it attempted to make farming somewhat profitable, but even farming had its problems of diminishing returns as villagers from all over Bengal migrated in droves to work as servants all over India. What protests in Singur did was not to suggest the merit of holding onto land but rather to cry foul over fooling people with false promises of jobs with industries. Mamata’s politics is not about farming over industry, nor about the merit of agriculture over manufacturing, but it is about exposing lies of prospects of an inclusive economic development through the policies that governments irrespective of the party in power pursue and propagate. The reason why all over India, farmers and workers are seeking “Mamatadidi” is because they have seen the great lie that is being ferreted as the truth, the lie being development that only increase private profits can also mean public gain. Mamata’s politics is about this huge schism in the country that divides India again after the Partition, into constituencies of those who are aligned with the small base of capitalism and those who must remain outside the pale and slowly decay to death.

Mamata’s politics could never have reached the zenith that it has done had not the intellectuals and an increasing number of the literati also seen the point. There is a steady rise among her supporters in the media, in cinema, in the FM radio and of course in the academe, not only in Bengal but everywhere in the country, openly stating the divide in India, acknowledging the existence of two Indias with the uncomfortable realization that the middle class will also, in time know of decadence that has been known so far to the poor. Mamata makes us realize that all is not so well with us and this is her politics. She does not promise stable governments, sensible ministers, honest workers and clean bureaucrats; we are not certain of what her victory will bring for us for all it might be the Reign of Terror without the French Revolution. But as of now she is the Joan of Arc.

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Dear Shri Ratan Tata

Posted on December 1, 2010 by secondsaturn

New Delhi.

18th October 2008

Dear Mr Ratan Tata,

This letter to you is in response to Mr Modi’s letter to the Buddhababu and yours to the youth of Bengal written over the past week. Sometime back I saw full page advertisement in the Business Standard (2nd October, 2008, Kolkata, pg 5) that extolled you to stay on in Bengal since you were the hope of new Bengal and of its young persons. It was signed the Young People of Bengal. I was intrigued by the page because it contained no marker of the advertiser and no name of its printer. It was totally anonymous. But now with your open letter addressed to the youth of Bengal I surmise that it was your company that bought the space and published the anonymous advertisement. Incidentally, the Business Standard was a paper that published the almost scandalous deal that the government of West Bengal had signed with your company and hence you perhaps chose the paper to publish the advertisement probably in an effort to turn the popular opinion in your favour. It is interesting how you have relied so much on popular opinion and the media for a project that claims to be hard economics and technology. We thought only democracy was run on popular opinion, it is heartening to know that even businesses choose to be run by such means as well. If democracy were to serve the cause of industry, nothing could be better.

I distinctly remember the time when you announced the one lakh rupee car when I said to myself that the Tatas have now broken the price barrier in the automobile industry. I soon read that you were going to develop the hydrogen car and I swelled in pride at your marvel. I knew that if India was to ride the crest of innovations it had to be through you. As a Bengali, I have no faith in the Marwaris and the Gujaratis (they are mere banias) but Tatas being established, respected and traditional, are the real industrialists. Tatas are honest, transparent and responsible. I have been to Jamshedpur and seen with my eyes how people, whether they are in your steel plant or not swear by you. When I became a working and an earning individual, I preferred Tata to anything else. Tata Eau de Cologne was the only perfume that I used; I bought the Tata Indicom and installed the Tata Sky. I am insured under Tata AIG, purchased Tata Steel shares and hence greatly looked forward to the Nano, the Tata Car. I found the Indica a bit heavy for my size is the Maruti 800, but the Nano, I imagined would sort out that problem.

The Nano also meant to me something else. By locating the plant into West Bengal, I felt that you were going to give a new economy, a new culture and a new society to Kolkata. I was only twenty two when I left my home and my parents behind because Bengal could give me no employment that would do justice to my qualifications and the standard of living I inherited. Each day of my stay of a quarter century away from home I have lived with the dream of going back to Kolkata some day. Nano and the Tatas gave me hope of that return. It was belying of the promise of homecoming that upset me the most when you decided to move out of Bengal.

It was then really that I took a hard look at the Singur stand off and this was also the first time in my life that I really noticed Mamata Banerjee, the accused in your open letter. I have been so long outside Bengal that I am out of touch with the details of everyday life in the state. Mamata, to me, is one who is incessantly upsetting my travel plans back home because she seems to call one bandh after another. But suddenly as you decided to move out of Singur into Sanand and openly called the progromist Narender Modi as the good M, and Mamata as the bad M, it was then something struck me. I realized that notwithstanding Mamata was the bad M, it was pernicious for you to have called Modi the good M, the man who has used political power to sponsor riots and finish off his bad M, the Muslims. It was at that moment that I started calling up people in Kolkata to find out what really had happened.

I began first by reading through the details of the massive subsidies that you were to get. So the people of the country and the state were helping you with Rs 30,000 per car to maintain the Rs one lakh barrier. In days of industrial competition, such subsidies are unethical and you could very soon be put to question by the Competition Commission as soon as it is formed.

Then I looked towards Singur. I am familiar with that area and I learnt that a piece of land was lying just across the road of an area of over 500 acres which could have served your purpose. The only thing that you would have had to do was to construct an underpass and things would have been solved. But you insisted on the contiguous area of the 350 acres whose owners were unwilling to sell land. When I visited the locality, your steadfast demand of the land of the unwilling farmers became clear to me. The land was irrigated and you needed water. So with land you were claiming water as well. In any case, irrigated land is a precious thing in India and more so in Bengal because of its high population density. I was quite surprised when you insisted on such an irrigated land be given to you when you know that a car can be manufactured anywhere but food crops cannot be grown in any place. What lay behind your obstinacy was puzzling to me. I imagined that with your stature you should have at least gone half way with the farmers and helped Buddhababu to abandon the acquisition of the 350 acres and instead settled with the underpass alternative. For you, the compromise would have hardly cost you anything, for the farmers it meant their lives.

As a child I read Tagore’s poem Samanya Khoti in which the queen of a kingdom burnt down shacks of the poor people because she wanted to dry herself after a cold bath in the river, I felt that you were like that queen reveling in your own glorified self gratification when you should have been the king meeting people half way, leaving more from your share to make others happy. But it seems only the greed of profits helps you grow and that such greed is the only virtue in a free market. By such logic then you should respect the right of some farmers not to sell their property if they are unwilling to do so just because you as a buyer insist on it. Such is not the sentiment of a free market; it is an even lesser sentiment of a free society.

As the Singur struggle was going on, I was feeling the heat of rising vegetable prices and soon enough the government admitted that the rise in prices was also due to a slowdown in agricultural production. It suddenly hit me that food production was dropping and indeed, the Planning Commission was true when it said that 70% of India’s farmers want to leave farming because of the poor remuneration in the occupation. Since we cannot force farmers to remain in agriculture when it yields them less money, we would be, as the recent food price rise suggests, facing what one knows as food insecurity. This is not a nice thing to happen especially since we know of the Bengal Famine in 1943, barely sixty years ago killed three million people and recently helped to give Amartya Sen his Nobel Prize. In this light, we should be grateful to farmers who are still willing to produce food for us. But you portray such farmers as lawless, violent, reactionary and quaint just because they decide to feed us when most of them no longer wish to do so. As an industry leader of the country I imagined that you would be the one who should be alerting us to the grave crisis facing us in terms of food insecurity and its greater crisis in the impending corporatization of farming, instead, you show scant knowledge of the importance of food growing lands and even scanter respect for informed opinions who raise the issue.

There is a certain kind of economics of a global market and which requires us to only concentrate on producing those goods that we are good at. The rest of it we could buy. India is not an efficient producer of food, it is an efficient producer of steel and cars, yours being the world’s cheapest ones. Thus, we could very well produce steel and cars and buy food. By such switch we would be increasing the overall income of the country. This is exactly where the case of the Nano fits. But away from this neat model, there is a reality and which is that of food security and food sovereignty. We know of a similar situation in the form of the oil economy, where no matter how our economy has grown to prosperity we are still harassed by rising oil price because we do not produce it by ourselves. Food, is an essential commodity like steel and it is better that we produce the subsistence quantities for ourselves by ourselves. Otherwise food prices will play truant with us in the future and while we would be left with cheap cars we would have our stomachs empty. Hunger, surely will not help us buy your Nano, especially when your factory would employ no more than a mere 1500 persons progressively to be reduced in the pursuit of productivity.

As I was mulling over the Nano versus the food security issue, I stumbled across an issue of the Statesman (19th September, Kolkata etc, front page) in which there was a report on the area of land and capacity of the car manufacturing plant. According to this report, you could have at most required 700 acres of land for an annual capacity to manufacture 5 lakh cars with ancillaries. The report listed out several car manufacturing companies and their ancillaries and nowhere in the world, does a car company need as much land as the Nano would need. What is even more pertinent is that in the pursuit of competitiveness, you sack workers, reduce fuel consumption and cut down on raw material consumption, I am curious to know why you are less inclined to show such parsimony in the case of land, which is a scarce resource.

When I reflect on the Nano project in Bengal, I feel that never in the history of Bengal was a corporate body welcomed with such open arms. Bengal was determined to change its image from being a militant trade unionist state to one that would show up the ethos of good industrial culture. Buddhababu bent backwards in projecting himself as one no more hostile to the capitalists and one who promotes industry. Almost every one in Kolkata lapped up in pride such an impending change in Bengal’s future prospects. The worker abandoned his demands for fair wages; the babu left his laziness behind gearing up to work for you, the women in the farmer families looked forward to opening up their canteens. But you disappointed everyone; you left your vendors high and dry, left the Bengal exchequer strained with the huge money that the government had spent for your project, got Mr Modi to call Buddhababu and us Bengalis names and then decided to be kingmaker by attempting to meddle with our political decision making through open letters. As being the world’s cheapest steel maker, the world’s most innovative car maker, the owner of the only private city in India, and being the oldest industry house in the world’s largest democracy you should have been the one to remind the Bengal Chief Minister of the WTO issues of India, our Planning Commission’s concerns about agriculture and how we are deadly worried about threats of hunger and why food security is the very core of a successful industrial base. To top it all up, you have decided to fine the residents of Bengal by demanding a huge compensation, which I believe would be transferred to Mr Modi to keep the Gujarat balance sheet in order, something that the “tolabaaj goondas” do in Kolkata. I am disappointed to find in the country’s most revered industry house the mentality of a cheap extortionist, a blackmailer, and a self-aggrandized narcissist who forgets that in giving us a car he also means to make his own profits, not normal profits but super profits. I suspect, that in addition to the above, you were also a land grabber.

Yours truly,

Susmita Dasgupta

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Dear Mr Chidambaram

Posted on December 1, 2010 by secondsaturn

Surajkund NCR, Haryana

7th January 2009

The

Honorable Home Minister

Government of India

New Delhi

Respected Shri Chidambaramji,

I am writing this letter to you in a state of extreme grief and shock. This morning (7.1.09) at 3.44 am I was picked up from my rented residence in Haryana on the ground that I was a Bangladeshi. I see in this a vicious design of the police and state to ethnically cleanse the migrants into the state of Haryana from West Bengal. I am so traumatized that I can hardly stand up straight and hence kindly excuse my ramblings as I dictate this letter to my employer in Bengali who is transcribing my words in English for you.

My name is Malati Patra, age 43, female and married and living separately from my husband Bablu Patra. My only child, a daughter is married with a child and lives with her in-laws and husband in Batanagar, Maheshtala area of Kolkata. I was Malati Haldar before my marriage. My father is Shri Ratan Haldar and mother is Smt Saraswati Haldar. I was born at my parents’ home in Jagadhatripur, 14 Laat under Kakdwip Thana of South 24 Parganas. I studied in Manmathapur Shiksha Bhavan High School. My father owns land inherited over generations and I too own land divided by my father among my siblings and I. I work as a part time cook in several houses in Eros Garden in Surajkund NCR.

My father –in-law, Late Bagambhar Patra lived in Patharpratima Thana of south 24 Parganas. My husband lives and works in Delhi while his family stays in the village in south 24 Parganas.

I live in a rented accommodation at the address given above. My co-tenant is a Bengali Muslim family comprising of a married couple and two infants. Last night this Muslim family and I were lifted by the police.

It was 3.44 in the morning and the police came with their faces fully masked. They were neither in their uniform, nor wore badges, carried no search warrant and the only feature that said that they were the police was that they came in a police jeep. I was woken up from sleep by a woman police who was holding a baton over my head. In the cold morning neither the small children nor the adults were allowed to even wear our woolens. I was in my night clothes and insisted that I wear my underclothes. The woman then stripped me and asked me to change in front of her. We were asked not to make any noise and the neighbours were asked to remain indoors and never to speak of the incident to anyone and not to ever discuss what they saw.

The police jeep carried us very far and drove us to a police station. My co-tenant was asked to pay Rs 75,000 to the police. As the police insisted that we were Bangladeshis, I wanted to call up my husband and my friends. They did not allow us to call up anyone. Then in the course of the arguments, they suddenly noticed my red and white bangles and my sindur that married Hindu women wear. Initially they said that I was faking my identity but it seems that there was one among them who caught on my accent and decided that it would be safer for them to let me go. Suddenly the police gave me Rs 30 and asked me to take a bus to Kashmere Gate from where I could board a bus to Badarpur. When I was coming out of the police station it was early morning and the children had started going to school. I asked the school children what the area was and it is from them that I learnt that it was Shahdra, Salimpur.

My co-tenant showed property papers to the police who tore them off. The man was let off after taking Rs 25,000 from him but his wife and children are kept back. One of the children is suffering from high fever and is not allowed to wear warm clothes.

My complaint to you is that in the name of terrorism you are creating an atmosphere of witch hunting where ethnic prejudices are having a free play. The state in my case has behaved like a non-state actor by assaulting the rights of a free citizen to reside and live freely anywhere in India. The state of India has abrogated the Constitutional provision by actively discriminating against the Muslims calling them as illegal migrants when Muslims are an integral part of the Indian population. The police have misused the state machinery to terrorize innocent citizens only to give vent to their ethnic prejudices, which in a multicultural democracy is a scandal. I am appalled by the callousness that you are showing in calling for an end to terror through non-state means of police vigilantism. I ask you why I will not think of India as a FAILED STATE !!!

It is not everyday that I can get to write letters. I can only speak and often my employers are not kind enough to transcribe my thoughts into letters. But today I am insulted as never before in my life and my employer is lenient towards me and so I will write more.

I want to ask you that if you the educated people salivate at the prospects of working in the USA and Europe and become NRI, why will not a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi be allowed to come and work in India? I myself want to go to UK as a housemaid then why not recognize the urge in every human being to wish to migrate to the more developed countries? Like a NRI, even a Bangladeshi or a Pakistani citizen has every right to migrate into economically more developed countries for their livelihood. If the USA or Australia or Canada or Europe did not allow immigration, all your elite NRIs would be only illegal migrants. We want to be a developed nation like the USA then why not allow work permits for non-nationals? I know that Bangladeshi migrants would push down my wages and squeeze my opportunities for employment but despite that I want all migrants who come to my country in search for a better life to be able to do so.

During my childhood in West Bengal I have witnessed the Naxal movement. I have lived through bomb blasts and assassinations. I know what terror in civic life is. This is also why I know that a terrorist lives in camps, is a loner and takes training with military experts. I know for sure that a man living with wife and children, worrying over children’s school and wife’s health is not the image of a terrorist. In trying to look for terrorists I can now see how you are harassing a part of your own population. What scares me even more is that your anti-terror posture is a way of eliminating chunks of Indian population out of the census count. The area I live in has about 20,000 households with a majority of them as the rich class. For the past three years many a times “officers” have come and collected forms and photos for making voter I cards but not a single family in our locality has an I card. This is your innovative way of striking off voters from participating in the voting process. I am dumbfounded at the deviousness of the Indian state which carries such a moral high ground about it saying that it is the world’s largest democracy.

Look at the Prime Minister and yourself carefully. Is the PM not the very Sikh that assassinated Mrs Indira Gandhi? Are you not the same Tamil that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi? If I were to stereotype you as terrorists would that make you comfortable? Then why is the Indian state bothering a law abiding Bengali Hindu who confuses her l’s and n’s, and r’s and a’s as a Bangladeshi and that too a terrorist? If Hindus have torn down the Babri Masjid, will I as an Indian Hindu be responsible wherever I go? If Dhananjay Chatterjee, a Bengali has committed the most gruesome murder, will I be made accountable?

It has been my great misfortune that I, an uneducated person had to remind an educated man like you of the Indian Constitution and the rights of citizenship.

I want a written assurance from you that never will the Indian state use non-state means against any bona fide Indian citizen irrespective of language, religion, caste, creed and ethnicity. I also want from you in writing that you will always differentiate between the lawful citizen and the criminal, the civilian and the terrorist irrespective of whichever community that they belong to.

I wish to remain proud of my country as I always have been. I will be very disappointed if the present government cannot uphold the dignity of my nation which is the sangam of the world religion and culture.

Yours truly,

Malati Patra

Cc:

  1. Members of Parliament
  2. Chief Ministers of States
  3. Chief Justice of India
  4. Solicitor General of India
  5. Newspapers
  6. Television Channels
  7. Other opinion makers
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