Phul phutuk na phutuk...

Below I reproduce one of my perennially favourite Bangla poems. The opening lines literally translated would read "Whether flowers bloom or not / it's spring today." That gives no indication, however, how powerfully the poem is written. 'Powerfully' is the word. I've woken up thinking of the poem--quite possessed by it in fact--only to find that it has snowed heavily, and that I have actually not brought over the anthology from Calcutta, and that I don't have the poem written anywhere. So I called up a friend, all snowed up in Rochester, who first recited from memory, then called up his poetry-loving father in Calcutta to cross-check, and then sent me the poem electronically.
If the font does not display properly but you're dying to read, then you would have to download Avro Keyboard here, which actually downloads pretty fast, and is easy to use.


ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক…

সুভাষ মুখোপাধ্যায়


ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

শান বাধানো ফুটপাথে
পাথরে পা ডুবিয়ে এক কাঠ-খোট্টা গাছ
কচি কচি পাতায় পাঁজর ফাটিয়ে হাসছে

ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

আলোর চোখে কালো ঠুলি পরিয়ে
তারপর খুলে-
মৃত্যুর কোলে মানুষকে শুইয়ে দিয়ে
তারপর তুলে-
যে দিনগুলো রাস্তা দিয়ে চলে গেছে
যেন না ফেরে

গায়ে হলুদ দেওয়া বিকেলে
একটা দুটো পয়সা পেলে
যে হরবোলা ছেলেটা
কোকিল ডাকতে ডাকতে যেত
-তাকে ডেকে নিয়ে গেছে দিনগুলো

লাল কালিতে ছাপা হলদে চিঠির মত
আকাশটাকে মাথায় নিয়ে
এ গলির এক কালো কুচ্‌ছিত আইবুড়ো মেয়ে
রেলিং-এ বুক চেপে ধরে
এইসব সাতপাঁচ ভাবছিল-

ঠিক সেই সময়ে
চোখের মাথা দিয়ে
গায়ে উড়ে এসে বসল
আ মরণ! পোড়ারমুখ লক্ষ্মীছাড়া প্রজাপতি!

তারপর দড়াম করে দরজা বন্ধ হওয়ার শব্দ
অন্ধকারে মুখ চাপা দিয়ে
দড়ি পাকান সেই গাছ
তখনও হাসছে

The Stuff of Which History is Made

A conversation between Carlo Ginzburg and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

I missed my chance to go to a public conversation between Carlo Ginzburg and Sanjay Subrahmanyam last November, but found this happy compensation of sorts in The Hindu.

Quasi una fantasia

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or what I got looking for it

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990)

A spring evening. A large room in an old house. A woman of a certain age, dressed in black, is speaking to a young man. They have not turned on the lights. Through both windows the moonlight shines relentlessly. I forgot to mention that the Woman in Black has published two or three interesting volumes of poetry with a religious flavor. So, the Woman in Black is speaking to the Young Man:


Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!
The moon is kind – it won’t show
that my hair turned white. The moon
will turn my hair to gold again. You wouldn’t understand.
Let me come with you.


When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger,
invisible hands draw the curtains,
a ghostly finger writes forgotten words in the dust
on the piano – I don’t want to hear them. Hush.


Let me come with you
a little farther down, as far as the brickyard wall,
to the point where the road turns and the city appears
concrete and airy, whitewashed with moonlight, so indifferent and insubstantial
so positive, like metaphysics,
that finally you can believe you exist and do not exist,
that you never existed, that time with its destruction never existed.
Let me come with you.


We’ll sit for a little on the low wall, up on the hill,
and as the spring breeze blows around us
perhaps we’ll even imagine that we are flying,
because, often, and now especially, I hear the sound of my own dress
like the sound of two powerful wings opening and closing,
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your ribs, your flesh,
and when you enclose yourself within the sound of that flight
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your birds, your flesh,
and thus constricted amid the muscles of the azure air,
amid the strong nerves of the heavens,
it makes no difference whether you go or return
it makes no difference whether you go or return
and it makes no difference that my hair has turned white
(that is not my sorrow – my sorrow is
that my heart too does not turn white).
Let me come with you.


I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.


This house is haunted, it preys on me –
what I mean is, it has aged a great deal, the nails are working loose,
the portraits drop as though plunging into the void,
the plaster falls without a sound
as the dead man’s hat falls from the peg in the dark hallway
as the worn woolen glove falls from the knee of silence
or as moonbeam falls on the old, gutted armchair.


Once it too was new – not the photograph that you are starting at so dubiously –
I mean the armchair, very comfortable, you could sit in it for hours
with your eyes closed and dream whatever came into your head
– a sandy beach, smooth, wet, shining in the moonlight,
shining more than my old patent leather shoes that I send each month to the shoeshine shop on the corner,
or a fishing boat’s sail that sinks to the bottom rocked by its own breathing,
a three-cornered sail like a handkerchief folded slantwise in half only
as though it had nothing to shut up or hold fast
no reason to flutter open in farewell. I have always has a passion for handkerchiefs,
not to keep anything tied in them,
no flower seeds or camomile gathered in the fields at sunset,
nor to tie them with four knots like the caps the workers wear on the construction site across the street,
nor to dab my eyes – I’ve kept my eyesight good;
I’ve never worn glasses. A harmless idiosyncracy, handkerchiefs.


Now I fold them in quarters, in eighths, in sixteenths
to keep my fingers occupied. And now I remember
that this is how I counted the music when I went to the Odeion
with a blue pinafore and a white collar, with two blond braids
– 8,16,32,64 –
hand in hand with a small friend of mine, peachy, all light and picked flowers,
(forgive me such digressions – a bad habit) – 32, 64 – and my family rested
great hopes on my musical talent. But I was telling you about the armchair –
gutted – the rusted springs are showing, the stuffing –
I thought of sending it next door to the furniture shop,
but where’s the time and the money and the inclination – what to fix first?
I thought of throwing a sheet over it – I was afraid
of a white sheet in so much moonlight. People sat here
who dreamed great dreams, as you do and I too.
and now they rest under earth untroubled by rain or the moon.
Let me come with you.


We’ll pause for a little at the top of St. Nicholas’ marble steps,
and afterward you’ll descend and I will turn back,
having on my left side the warmth from a casual touch of your jacket
and some squares of light, too, from small neighborhood windows
and this pure white mist from the moon, like a great procession of silver swans –
and I do not fear this manifestation, for at another time
on many spring evenings I talked with God who appeared to me
clothed in the haze and glory of such a moonlight –
and many young men, more handsome even than you, I sacrificed to him –
I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight, burnt up by men’s voracious eyes and the tentative rapture of youths,
besieged by splendid bronzed bodies,
strong limbs exercising at the pool, with oars, on the track, at soccer (I pretended not to see them),
foreheads, lips and throats, knees, fingers and eyes,
chests and arms and things (and truly I did not see them)
– you know, sometimes, when you’re entranced, you forget what entranced you, the entrancement
alone is enough –
my God, what star-bright eyes, and I was lifted up to an apotheosis of disavowed stars
because, besieged thus from without and from within,
no other road was left me save only the way up or the way down. – No, it is not enough.
Let me come with you.


I know it’s very late.
Let me, because for so many years – days, nights, and crimson noons – I’ve stayed alone,
unyielding, alone and immaculate,
even in my marriage bed immaculate and alone,
writing glorious verses to lay on the knees of God,
verses that, I assure you, will endure as if chiselled in flawless marble
beyond my life and your life, well beyond. It is not enough.
Let me come with you.


This house can’t bear me anymore.
I cannot endure to bear it on my back.
You must always be careful, be careful,
to hold up the wall with the large buffet
to hold up the table with the chairs
to hold up the chairs with your hands
to place your shoulder under the hanging beam.
And the piano, like a closed black coffin. You do not dare to open it.
You have to be so careful, so careful, lest they fall, lest you fall. I cannot bear it.
Let me come with you.


This house, despite all its dead, has no intention of dying.
It insists on living with its deadon living off its dead
on living off the certainty of its death
and on still keeping house for its dead, the rotting beds and shelves.
Let me come with you.


Here, however quietly I walk through the mist of evening,
whether in slippers or barefoot,
there will be some sound: a pane of glass cracks or a mirror,
some steps are heard – not my own.
Outside, in the street, perhaps these steps are not heard –
repentance, they say, wears wooden shoes –
and if you look into this or that other mirror,
behind the dust and the cracks,
you discern – darkened and more fragmented – your face,
your face, which all your life you sought only to keep clean and whole.


The lip of the glass gleams in the moonlight
like a round razor – how can I lift it to my lips?
however much I thirst – how can I lift it – Do you see?
I am already in a mood for similes – this at least is left me,
reassuring me still that my wits are not failing.
Let me come with you.


At times, when evening descends, I have the feeling
that outside the window the bear-keeper is going by with his old heavy she-bear,
her fur full of burns and thorns,
stirring dust in the neighborhood street
a desolate cloud of dust that censes the dusk,
and the children have gone home for supper and aren’t allowed outdoors again,
even though behind the walls they divine the old bear’s passing –
and the tired bear passes in the wisdom of her solitude, not knowing wherefore and why –
she’s grown heavy, can no longer dance on her hind legs,
can’t wear her lace cap to amuse the children, the idlers, the importunate,
and all she wants is to lie down on the ground
letting them trample on her belly, playing thus her final game,
showing her dreadful power for resignation,
her indifference to the interest of others, to the rings in her lips, the compulsion of her teeth,
her indifference to pain and to lifewith the sure complicity of death –
even a slow death – her final indifference to death with the continuity and knowledge of life
which transcends her enslavement with knowledge and with action.


But who can play this game to the end?
And the bear gets up again and moves on
obedient to her leash, her rings, her teeth,
smiling with torn lips at the pennies the beautiful and unsuspecting children toss
(beautiful precisely because unsuspecting)
and saying thank you. Because bears that have grown old
can say only one thing: thank you; thank you.
Let me come with you.


This house stifles me. The kitchen especially
is like the depths of the sea. The hanging coffeepots gleam
like round, huge eyes of improbable fish,
the plates undulate slowly like medusas,
seaweed and shells catch in my hair – later I can’t pull them loose –
I can’t get back to the surface –
the tray falls silently from my hands – I sink down
and I see the bubbles from my breath rising, rising
and I try to divert myself watching them
and I wonder what someone would say who happened to be above and saw these bubbles, perhaps that someone was drowning or a diver exploring the depths?


And in fact more than a few times I’ve discovered there, in the depths of drowning,
coral and pearls and treasures of shipwrecked vessels,
unexpected encounters, past, present, and yet to come,
a confirmation almost of eternity,
a certain respite, a certain smile of immortality, as they say,
a happiness, an intoxication, inspiration even,
coral and pearls and sapphires;
only I don’t know how to give them – no, I do give them;
only I don’t know if they can take them – but still, I give them.
Let me come with you.


One moment while I get my jacket.
The way this weather’s so changeable, I must be careful.
It’s damp in the evening, and doesn’t the moon
seem to you, honestly, as if it intensifies the cold?
Let me button your shirt – how strong your chest is
– how strong the moon – the armchair, I mean – and whenever I lift the cup from the table
a hole of silence is left underneath. I place my palm over it at once
so as not to see through it – I put the cup back in its place;
and the moon’s a hole in the skull of the world – don’t look through it,
it’s a magnetic force that draws you – don’t look, don’t any of you look,
listen to what I’m telling you – you’ll fall in. This giddiness,
beautiful, ethereal – you will fall in –
the moon’s marble well,
shadows stir and mute wings, mysterious voices – don’t you hear them?


Deep, deep the fall,
deep, deep the ascent,
the airy statue enmeshed in its open wings,
deep, deep the inexorable benevolence of the silence –
trembling lights on the opposite shore, so that you sway in your own wave,
the breathing of the ocean. Beautiful, ethereal
this giddiness – be careful, you’ll fall. Don’t look at me,
for me my place is this wavering – this splendid vertigo. And so every evening
I have little headache, some dizzy spells.


Often I slip out to the pharmacy across the street for a few aspirin,
but at times I’m too tired and I stay here with my headache
and listen to the hollow sound the pipes make in the walls,
or drink some coffee, and, absentminded as usual, I forget and make two – who’ll drink the other?
It’s really funny, I leave it on the window-sill to cool
or sometimes drink them both, looking out the window at the bright green globe of the pharmacy
that’s like the green light of a silent train coming to take me away
with my handkerchiefs, my run-down shoes, my black purse, my verses,
but no suitcases – what would one do with them?
Let my come with you.


Oh, are you going? Goodnight. No, I won’t come. Goodnight.
I’ll be going myself in a little. Thank you. Because, in the end, I must
get out of this broken-down house.
I must see a bit of the city – no, not the moon –
the city with its calloused hands, the city of daily work,
the city that swears by bread and by its fist,
the city that bears all of us on its back
with our pettiness, sins, and hatreds,
our ambitions, our ignorance and our senility.
I need to hear the great footsteps of the city,
and no longer to hear your footsteps
or God’s, or my own. Goodnight.


The room grows dark. It looks as though a cloud may have covered the moon. All at once, as if someone had turned up the radio in the nearby bar, a very familiar musical phrase can be heard. Then I realize that “The Moonlight Sonata”, just the first movement, has been playing very softly through this entire scene. The Young Man will go down the hill now with an ironic and perhaps sympathetic smile on his finely chiselled lips and with a feeling of release. Just as he reaches St. Nicolas, before he goes down the marble steps, he will laugh – a loud, uncontrollable laugh. His laughter will not sound at all unseemly beneath the moon. Perhaps the only unseemly thing will be that nothing is unseemly. Soon the Young Man will fall silent, become serious, and say: “The decline of an era.” So, thoroughly calm once more, he will unbutton his shirt again and go on his way. As for the woman in black, I don’t know whether she finally did get out of the house. The moon is shining again. And in the corners of the room the shadows intensify with an intolerable regret, almost fury, not so much for the life, as for the useless confession. Can you hear? The radio plays on:

ATHENS, JUNE 1956

Reportage from Nandigram

Notes on Nandigram
Bhaswati Chakravorty
The Telegraph, Kolkata Tuesday 27 November 2007


It was a day’s trip. On November 18, the Sunday before the last one, I travelled to Nandigram with a small group of people from different non-governmental organizations. We went first to the relief camp in Brajamohan Tewari Shikshaniketan, and then travelled down the road past Sonachura to Bhangaberia bridge. Some of the people who spoke to us were hesitant to be named or photographed, but many were willing that we should know their names. That seemed important to them, like a signature to all that they were saying.
Just before we left Calcutta, I met a woman from Adhikaripara, who had escaped to Calcutta. She had been one of the victims of the March 14 violence when, while at the puja where women and children had gathered, she was hit with a lathi, then had fallen choking and dazed with tear gas fumes into a field, from where she was dragged away and possibly raped by three men. She does not remember very well, but she still bleeds heavily if she tries to do any physical work.
But why was she in Calcutta? In the months after March, she and other women in the neighbouring villages, had built up small women’s groups of resistance. Now that “they”, the CPI(M), had “recaptured” the villages, she was on the run.
I asked her if they had been told that the police might use force that day at the puja. She said no one expected it; they had been told the police might come, but they would go away when they saw so many women and children. This was my first personal encounter with the enigmatic meshing of agency, consciousness, memory, victimhood and political play in Nandigram, something that would wrap itself around me more confusingly through the day.
As we approached Nandigram, we were overtaken by a heavyweight police convoy. The director-general of police, Anup Vohra, was entering Nandigram to hold a meeting in the police station. Later that evening, it was reported that the meeting had been about a change in the positions of CRPF camps; within another day, it was not so.
We saw CRPF personnel and vehicles, usually clustered in the town and around junctions with bazaars and shops on the way, and occasionally standing by the almost empty road. It felt cold on a sunny day to see a soldier standing under the thatched roof of a mud hut by the roadside, gun poised. Green fields, shady groves and shimmering ponds stretched for miles around us, and behind him, as we passed.
The vista of the enormous and beautiful school with its green grounds, familiar now to every newspaper reader and TV viewer in Bengal, opened like magic the moment our car passed through the gates in a narrow, crowded street. In spite of the twelve to thirteen hundred people who were there that morning — apart from the many men running the camp — the area looked tidy, orderly. The population there is a fluctuating one; reports say that almost half the people we may have seen there that day have gone back to their homes in the week that has followed.
In the rough estimates we were given, there were around 2,400 people taking shelter there on November 7, although the school had to be thrown open to house the hundreds running for cover on the afternoon of November 6. That night the refugees had to live on dry food, such as puffed rice, and full-fledged cooking started the day after. The state government had provided a one-time relief of 25 quintals of rice. The first three days a religious organization had provided all foodstuff except rice. Since then, meals each day were dependent on the efforts of individuals and organizations bringing foodstuff and clothes, and on the untiring efforts at collecting relief and food by a Trinamul Congress panchayat pradhan. On November 8, around 3,200 to 3,500 people had eaten in the camp, the highest number the camp had seen.
The cooking takes place in the yard behind the main building, in huge iron woks simmering on clay ovens. The cooks are men from close by, stirring, pouring and serving with almost professional steadiness the enormous amounts of food to be distributed on perfectly crafted sal plates sewn with white thread. There are tube-wells for water. In one wing of the main building is a temporary clinic, where doctors come and sit, because the health centre that had been kept going since trouble first broke is now under the control of the most recent captors. The people have taken shelter in the large classrooms, emptied of their benches, and carpeted with plastic sheets. A microphone is used to summon them to their meals.
The relief material we had taken was collected by people delegated for this particular job, one of whom wrote out a receipt. A woman with pleading eyes asked me when she would get a second sari, she was still wearing the one she had on when she came away. “You have brought saris for us?” asked another little knot of women. “But when will we get them?” One of them said that she wished we had given the saris to the local leader of her village instead of donating them centrally.
Within the appearance of order, disorder was intangible, but oppressive. Children ran about, playing, when they should have been at school. Girls of eight or ten, with babies on their hips and with adult faces, joined the women when they talked of misery, loss and fear. At the same time, the children of the school which housed the homeless could not come to class. The shelter was fragile. The Madhyamik test was due, and the principal wanted the school cleared. “We have requested him to conduct the test in the upstairs classrooms,” said one of the men. “Where will I go?” asked a terrified middle-aged woman. “My home has been broken down, it is empty. Everyone has gone I do not know where. My younger daughter’s in-laws live close by, they will not have me. And I will be killed if I go back. For 13 days I have been here and I still can’t go back.”
What about school in the 11 months that they were in their villages, when “we had control”, as one of the men said? It was irregular, said almost all the children and women we spoke to. There were bouts of shooting and rumours of trouble almost constantly, and very often, parents kept children at home. And not everyone who had escaped was in the camp. Only those who had nowhere else to go had come there. The others had gone to relatives and friends, to Calcutta, to Burdwan and Birbhum, to Jamshedpur and Ranchi, to Punjab, to Haryana.
The numbers in the camp fluctuated because many of those who went home came back, bringing with them accounts of devastation and looting, rape, fines and terror. The looting was done systematically, with van rickshaws being loaded with furniture, sometimes even with doors and windows taken off their hinges. Anyone who returned ran the risk of having his bike or bicycle taken away, if he had one, and if the looting of his home had not been completed satisfactorily. Houses had been smashed in with ‘dredgers’, we were told. “But how would you know that?” I asked. A man, who had come from Calcutta to check on his in-laws, said he had seen the machine. A woman from Satengabari joined in: “I saw one being brought over as I was running away.”
One young woman from Gokulnagar had taken shelter with her parents in Nandigram. Men with pistols had come to that house too, gone into all the rooms to see if she had brought away any of her in-laws’ “good things” from her village. They had even checked the henhouses, she said.
We found an unsettling echo later as we stood at Bhangaberia bridge talking to men who had taken shelter in Khejuri for 11 months. “Even if we have returned, what can we do?” said one. “Everything has been looted.”

Ami ekhon gan gaibo, tomadero gaite hobe... ami jokhon bolbo tokhon gaite hobe... je na gaan gaibe, tar kintu gordan jabe... baajandaaar

Bhaswati Chakravorty's op-ed in The Telegraph captures very well the mood of the current protests against state-backed atrocities in Nandigram. The more I read and watch the news, the more stupefied I am. Is this Godhra revisited, or worse?

To read the article in The Telegraph's archives, click here.

From : The Telegraph, Calcutta, 13 November 2007
Sing along, or else- The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police
Bhaswati Chakravorty

Does duplicity have a face? There is no need to guess three times. To match the face, the chief minister of West Bengal has a double role besides his chieftainship: he is police minister and culture minister. He uses the police to protect his brand of culture. The sanctity of the international film festival in Calcutta has to be protected from the artists, poets, actors and film directors of Bengal, singing in pain, awareness and protest against the CPI(M)’s second devastation of Nandigram. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s lathi-wielding policemen went for artists and students because they had got too close to Nandan, where the festival is being held, beat up whomsoever their lathis found, be it a woman actor or student, loaded them in vans and shoved them into the lock-up at Lalbazar.
That is all that policemen in Bengal need to do, when they can take time off from their duties of separating couples when any aggrieved father has clout enough to engage the police to break up his offspring’s marriage. But where armed groups fire on the unarmed, demolish homes, where gunfire rages and grenades explode among groves and fields, where alternately victorious groups take turns to drive out their opponents with women, children, the old and the sick from their dwellings in a home-made war over territory, the police are absent. Or almost. The chief secretary of the state, with the home secretary by his side, had promised a credulous Bengal that all those driven out, presumably irrespective of party affiliations, would be able to return home with police protection. So there were policemen, at two spots far away from the scene — perhaps to prove that bureaucrats don’t do out-and-out lies?
The chief minister’s party knows how to use the police. They can be used as shields when members of the party cadre decide to shoot down villagers — with police help — as they did on March 14 this year. And they know how to use women and hostages as shields when they want to block the entry of CRPF vehicles — now that they are here — into the core area of the battle, so that their takeover of lost ground can be completed without interference from the law, as they did on Sunday. It is a small incongruity that a party cadre cannot order policemen about. Neither can they decide when Central forces are to be let in. The orders and decisions surely come from somewhere else?
Facts are good enough story-tellers. They show that policemen in the city cannot wait to get their hands on poets and artists because they might disrupt the chief minister’s festivities with their singing, while forces waiting to implement law and order in Nandigram are turned back to sit and twiddle their thumbs as CPI(M) cadre make their fortress safe. Apparently, the administration has curled up and died there, just where it suits the chief minister’s party. He, being a man of more parts than can be named, knows exactly when to give his fief the look and feel of a police state, and when to ask the police to look the other way. For months at a time. When North Bengal exploded in the Prashant Tamang controversy, the army was there within hours.
A senior spokesman of the CPI(M) said on Sunday that there is no more terror in Nandigram. By holy writ, obscure to all non-party creatures, partymen do not have to speak the truth, what they speak is the truth. So when CPI(M) leaders, within the government and without, keep promising a peace process in Nandigram for days before the region is overrun with party cadre, the rest of the world is duty-bound to believe them. If someone dares to suggest that they have a habit of being economical with the truth, or if someone believes them and is hideously disillusioned after the ‘action’ in Nandigram, they are damned for having failed the demands of objective truth. No protest is legitimate in the eyes of the government — as the arrests of artists show — because no one protested against the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri. That is where the CPI(M) supporters driven out of their homes had gone.
Violence is unacceptable, say the protestors, and nowhere are the sufferings of the people to be condoned. Instead of vengefully throwing Khejuri into their faces, should not the CPI(M) leaders ask themselves why the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri did not figure in the popular protests? Can it have to do with the fact that the chief minister, together with other leaders in the government, constantly talks about “ours” and “theirs” as if they were not governing West Bengal but taking part in a street fight with party thugs? Or can it be that even the foolish citizens of Bengal suspect that the homeless in Khejuri have been carefully nurtured over the months so that the place could be used to build up an arms cache and the name could be used as ammunition to discredit all protest? Or can it just be that people do not believe a word that this government or its party says? Why ask the people a question the administration, “their” administration, should answer?
Why Khejuri alone, what about “outsiders”? Those who protest are not only biased, they are blind too. Maoists have laid mines in Nandigram and two CPI(M) supporters have died. No death can go unmourned. But if ordinary people as well as intellectuals protesting on the streets find it difficult to believe in Maoists from Jharkhand, not one of whom has been identified, whose fault is that? They are as invisible as those policemen supposed to have been grievously wounded during the March 14 massacre. As for the mysterious outsiders on the “other” side, they certainly merge in well. Because the only outsiders identified so far are those in Janani Intbhanta after March 14 and Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali on November 11. All fighting for the CPI(M).
It may be that CPI(M) leaders were never told the fable of the wolf and the shepherd boy by their grandmothers. They cannot imagine that people might actually dare to disbelieve them. The CPI(M) general secretary has said at a press conference that because of an ex- parte order of the Calcutta high court, they decided to restrain themselves from sending the police there for all these months. The people are supposed to have forgotten that the high court had first asked for an immediate investigation into the circumstances of the police firing on March 14 and directed the state to ensure “the safety and well-being of all general public in the area”, then had reiterated the instructions about restoring normalcy and law and order later. But the party is happy now. According to the general secretary, the administration can move in at last. That is, the West Bengal government has got the CPI(M)’s goons to clear the way.
The government’s satisfaction is understandable: goons are good company. Better company than those intellectuals and artists, left-leaning or even party loyalists, who are taking to the streets or boycotting festivals in protest. Not only have many of them boycotted the Calcutta film festival, they have also decided not to participate in the Natyamela. While a quiet and far-from-politically-visible Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay refuses to attend a film festival seminar, an acutely ill Sumit Sarkar joins a protest rally in Delhi.
Shame can be measured in many ways. It is good of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s government to offer us such a wide range of images to choose from. An unarmed man with a gamchha round his shoulders, his legs curled up, his brains spilled by a bullet, lying on the spot he had stood minutes earlier shouting slogans against the guns that crackle across a smoky field. Or even just the once-green fields, groves, the spattering of tiled houses and occasionally running, secretive figures, blurred by shaking, uncertain cameras of people risking their lives to catch the total absence of policemen, of any shred of civilization, and the shifting colours of hatred and murder. But maybe we have grown used to those.
But there is another. The face of a gentle-spoken poet, teacher and scholar, small in build and towering in stature, gazing in through the closed gates of Lalbazar police station. Somewhere within those gates are artists and students arrested for singing. It is enough to look at his eyes.
Upon hearing that intellectuals were boycotting the film festival, the chief minister had said, “If you have the list, you can put it in a photo frame and hang it on the wall at home.” In return, he should be presented with this picture. He can look at the poet’s eyes and congratulate himself on what he has achieved.

Pianos from Scout's Town

Yamaha digital pianos from Scout's town: here is a link I'm posting only because it's about pianos from Mobile, Alabama.
At this site, you could listen to some short demo tracks on the piano.

Mexicana in Greenwich Village

Bamboleo, a riot of colours, just asked to be photographed! It's a pity I had only a cameraphone on me. We hit upon this Mexican eatery quite by chance, and had a merry time!

Poster on the wall

The guacamole dips were just too delicious, and whetted our appetites so much so, there were soon no more chips left.

Pouring sangria

Ornate sombrero on the wall.

© Text and photos: DURBA BASU 2007

Writing Politics/Writing and Politics

With Salman Rushdie's being knighted and Chinua Achebe's winning the Man Booker Prize within days of each other, the postcolonial novel in English/english is again in the news. The knighthood sure has political implications, and has been promptly politicised too. The postcolonial novel is often avowedly political (Achebe's remarks about his own writing in the report linked above bear testimony) but what makes literature vulnerable in its relationship with politics is that some texts are particularly susceptible to being used for political agenda quite unthought of or unwanted by the author. Another writer whose work has been put to political cross-purposes is J.M. Coetzee. Of course that brings up once again the vexed question of authorial intention, and its place in cognitive protocols of response. At a talk show organised by The Telegraph on 9 December, 2004, in Calcutta, that I was fortunate to be able to go to, Rushdie dwelt on this troubled aspect of writing, and it seems it is worthwhile to revisit Rushdie's remarks on that occasion now. Here is Rushdie's own transcript of his talk that appeared in The Telegraph on 20 December, 2004. The punctuation seems to have been messed up in the internet version, and from a brief glimpse I can decipher that the commas, apostrophes and quotation marks have all morphed into question marks. Questions abound, for sure.

Sir Salman

Some news links:
The Times of India
The Statesman
Anandabazar Patrika
Aajkaal
Bartaman

These are the only reports of Salman Rushdie's being knighted that I found in the newspapers I read regularly. I am sure there will be more reports and features soon. I am dozing off as I wonder what the implications of this royal attention to literature in chutnified English, and of Rushdie's acceptance, are. But we will hear about that in the press shortly, anyway.

Caribbean Clouds

This picture is from some match in the Cricket World Cup 2007. I spotted it on NDTV or IBN or Cricinfo.

 

IBN news item on gay flamingos adopting

Here is an interesting story from IBN.

Besame Mucho

Soon after I mused about the accordionist, I bumped into another very talented young Latino accordionist on the subway last Friday afternoon. He made a dramatic entry on the R train moments before it began hurtling past Prince Street station: even with half his body still outside the train, he played a loud chord all of a sudden, and seemed to revel in thus shocking commuters out of their reverie. He played a medley beginning with Besame Mucho and going on to a melody I know only from Klaus Wunderlich, and can't recall by title this instant (getting old!), one of those melodies eminently suited for the accordion. He played much little compared to what others do on the subway, no matter how skilled they are, and seemed very aware of his competence, looking around and asking for the appreciation that he was sure he deserved and would be given, not like my humble smiling hexagenarian accordionist who acknowledged even every twinkle of appreciation. I even wondered briefly if I should give him anything, before finally choosing to give because he was very obviously skilful, and easiliy belonged to the top bracket of performers I have come across in New York, and of course he was playing for money. I wonder if he played a little more and showed less awareness of his skill in his demeanour, he would have collected more money in the same compartment. Perhaps that is what New York will teach him.


© Text: DURBA BASU 2007

Ford fiasco

With Graham Ford's declension of the BCCI's offer of being the coach of the Indian team, the BCCI has again made a laughing stock of itself. While Ford may have any number of reasons for refusing the offer (the short contract, the BCCI's choosing of his support staff for him do not seem very attractive propositions, but I will not enter into those issues here), the modus operandi of the BCCI especially for the last few years has only too often left a lot to be desired, and indeed one wonders whether the position of the coach would interest capable candidates from within and outside India any more at the present moment. The BCCI's way of (unofficially?) wooing Dave Whatmore before rejecting his application, and the subsequent hullabaloo stirred up about Graham Ford, and the sudden induction of John Emburey into the race all together suggest a most unprofessional way of going about the whole business of appointing a coach, and perhaps indicate continuing internal bickerings as well. Starting with the leaked email in September 2005, the BCCI has been regularly in the news for all the wrong reasons. There are bound to be differences of opinion among any large group of people, but the recent fiascos lead one to wonder whether the board, especially in its current prescriptive mood--draconian even--about the conduct of players and coaches alike, should not also determine for itself formal procedures beyond its electoral and constitutional affairs, for going about things that it must do periodically, and preferably, without blundering: it will have to appoint a coach through a proper selection procedure once in a while, and talk to the media before and after. Just as there is a long way for the team to go to get back to winning ways, there is a lot the BCCI needs to do stop looking stupid.

Graham Ford's statement on the Kent County Cricket Club website

On the Picture

Daffodils, also called 'Narcissus', seemed the logical choice after describing myself as I have. The flowers, the mirror, the camera and my reflection together stand for a preoccupation with perspective, reflection, and self-obsession. Narcissus wouldn't shrink to fit anywhere, but on this page, the whole page being HERS to fill, she will be content with a corner.

हिंदी!!!!!!

हिंदी! देवनागरी!

ब्लॉगर में हिंदी में एक पंक्ति लिखकर मैं बहुत बहुत खुश हूँ! इरादा हैं कभी बंगला में भी लिखने का मौका मिल जाएगा।

For the love of blogging!

I found I love my old blog too much to let go of it. And so, I have decided to keep both pages going. Too much resolve, I fear, from someone who has not been able to keep even one blog going properly!

In a Station on the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

[Disclaimer: Ezra Pound's famous poem has nothing to do with this post except that both have an association with the underground railway, though in different cities. My choice of epigraph, honestly, is inspired by Pound's title rather than his lines.]

Hexagenarian, chubby-cheeked and grinning widely, he sat on a small stool, enthralling all commuters present with the Latino melodies that he played effortlessly on his piano accordion. From Besame Mucho to El Condor Pasa to La Cucaracha, he played them all with equal panache, and once obliged New Yorkers with the theme from The Godfather. In my eight months in this Mammon's den, of all the 'musicians' I have given money to, perhaps only one other man who played Latino melodies on a Spanish guitar on 116th St could vye with this man for felicity. Both, incidentally acknowledged not just the money passers-by would give them, but also their appreciative glances and nods. I was dismayed to see a "For Sale" tag on the accordion. As I embarked on the train, I faintly hoped the accordion wouldn't find buyers too soon, so that I could hear more of him. And lo! Two days later, I chanced upon him at another station, but as luck would have it, I had no money on me this time. It has been two months since then, and I have not seen him again. I only hope the accordion has gone to good hands, and my nameless artist does have another to play on, though not for the mercy of commuters.

Midwinter spring is its own season

I am in the mood for Eliot today it seems. So here are some more favourite lines. With all its improved typography, Blogger isn't allowing me to indent as I want. So here is some Eliot typographically altered from the usual anthologized text.

Marina

Quis hic locus, quae

regio, quae mundi plaga?

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What water lapping the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return

O my daughter.

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place

What is this face, less clear and clearer

The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--

Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat,

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

- T. S. Eliot

Evicted

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...
...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...

From "Little Gidding", Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I begin again. The decontextualised epigraph from Eliot is as much an epitaph for my earlier blog as a prologue for this one. Logging in to blog after aeons, I find so much has changed on Blogger. For a brief moment, I faintly revolt against having to gulp down all the changes Blogger wants me to accept if I want to use their space. But what would it matter? I briefly muse on possible wider consequences of Blogger urging all users to update their blogs. I just want to write, and there wouldn't be much at stake anyway. So I accede as countless others have done. And then, I am dismayed to find the template I loved so much is no longer available. I re-posted my earlier postings, simply because I was loath to lose them--they are like pieces of myself. There must be some way to retain the earlier comments too. I would love to save the comments my friends made. The only consolation is that Blogger let me keep the same title. So here am I, typing away again.

Postscript: I have added the link to my earlier blog on this page so that I don't lose my friends' comments, and the older blog itself.

Another World, Another Time
“Biyer shanai jachchhe bole, chhotobelake jachchho fele,” stares at me from an 8'x10' billboard as I pass Golpark. A pensive Deepika Padukone, resplendent in bridal jewellery, a distant gaze on her kohl-rimmed wide eyes, her forehead gently resting on her bejewelled left fist… Saturday afternoons idled away looking at black and white photographs… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion over my head at the gate of Sakshigopal Mandir would devour me… my mother cuddling me in the lobby of a Benares hotel, my freshly lost incisor on the table in front... me in school uniform posing on the Victoria Memorial grounds, one sock drooping… … summer afternoons spent in coaxing the local sweetshop man for clay cups to pour milk for our kittens… poking fingers in the bellow of the harmonium while my uncle played and sang... reflecting sunlight on his face with book transperencies as he checked on the mirror if a shave was due... my brother and I busily assisting our father in repairing leaks on the roof before the monsoon set in… poking the colourful caterpillars that infested our ghaashphool in the monsoon so that they would curl up … Honking horns remind me I must pick up altered trousers on my way to my parents’ place from my in-laws’. At home, my mother has kept an album ready for me to take along to another land… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion…At night, when I hear familiar snores around me— I miss these sounds at my in-laws’— I login hoping to find my husband online. He isn’t there. I wait. I type something in a new Word document. He’s still not online. I type a few more lines, and more, and more. My blog is born.

© Text: DURBA BASU 2007

Blogger's Block?

This is the first time I am blogging in New York. I have been itching to write for a long long time and don’t know quite what has held me back. I had much more time before the semester started, and much more new in life each day than I do now. All the newness that my mind registered went into the long emails I wrote, and yet I never once tried to blog. Perhaps one needs to get used to even a new corner in a new home to think of it as suitable for personal, reflective activity, even through its fruits will be shared with others.

A Beginning

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right-angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

From: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, rpt. 1995)

One of the many things Scout’s words here highlights is the existence and inevitability of competing narratives of the same event, which partly explains the reason I chose to name my blog as I have: it will inevitably represent only my version of things. Another reason that governed the christening is that this is a book very dear to me, and whenever I reread it (never in full), I am reminded of my childhood, and I thought I could have a blog that not only focuses on my present, but also my past, and the ‘pastness’ of my present.