Fake IPL player and the intellectual

I wrote this post 2 years ago, during the 2009 IPL season, when the Fake IPL Player blog was a rage. I gave it a title and left it brewing, and then completely forgot all that I wanted to say in it. Since it will not assume a fuller shape, I decided to publish it as it is.

_________________________________


If bloggers could have their Kubla Khans, then this post is it for me. I am giving up in vain after trying for long to recreate what spurred me to write the title of the post, but it’s now gone forever.
The Fake IPL Player blog kept me glued to the networld like countless other cricket fans. At the same time in Calcutta, intellectuals had become extremely vocal in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, and had formed a platform that openly critiqued the state administration in West Bengal, especially in the wake of Nandigram and Singur. What connected these two happenings for me was that cricket and politics seemed to have become two arenas where onlookers/commentators/non-actors had assumed responsible agency and were speaking out in a way that was compelling attention. What has been bothering me for sometime now is the way the word intellectual (and its Bengali counterpart buddhijeebi) has been deployed in the WB press, especially in the last two years. Translation theory has now grown past the notion of the necessity of producing equivalents, and is instead more attentive to why cultural differences may make it difficult to produce equivalents in the first place. I am not here bothered about the satisfactoriness of intellectual or buddhijeebi as translations of each other. What bothers me more is the whole notion of the intellectual. Buddhijeebi literally is someone who earns his/her living by intellect. Do people who do not write poetry or direct films or act in them… not require the use of their intellect to earn their living? Or are their contributions not beneficial for society at large? The Fake IPL player blog refreshingly brought these issues up again. Though it ended with a disappointingly didactic dénouement, here was the follower of cricket reflecting on the game. Do followers of cricket qualify as intellectuals?

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!

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.