Oh Calcutta!

Gunter Grass, the German postwar writer, in the course of his three seperate visits, had spent a significant amount of time in Calcutta, a city with which - in his own words – he has a 'love-hate relationship’. During the few hot summer months (in mid-eighties) when he stayed in Baruipur, a distant suburb of the city, he and his wife Ute Grass used to commute every day to city by the crowded local train as ordinary citizens, something which more priviledged 'post liberalization' mortals of the city (like my erstwhile Calcutta colleagues) can’t even dream of. In fact, I used to be an object of much curiosity in office since for four years I (an overpaid Management consultant) travelled in local trains (an experience which I much enjoyed and had resulted for me in a few genuinely enduring friendship with co-commuters). While Calcutta (and the local media) rejoiced when Grass got the Nobel Prize, Grass’ own experience of the city and the attitude of her people was not so admirable. Here are just a few of his observations (though these may appear as ‘another westerner’s view of Calcutta’, I personally found much truth in it).

Grass on Calcutta and her people (several comments):

I was shocked and stupefied by the indifference of the privileged to the misery and poverty all around. I asked myself: it is their own country, their city and their people; yet how can they be so composed and leave almost everything to a few foreign charitable organizations…?

I visited the grand and palatial Victoria Memorial symbolic of British domination, and there I hoped too find a museum where India, Bengal and Calcutta would be portrayed as they exist after independence. Yet what did I discover? – A Victorian junk-room filled with colonial paintings, presents from Lady Curzon to Queen Victoria, war sketches depicting British victories… and many people, students, teachers, villagers, looking at this false, irrelevant foreign collection in that lumber-room.

It was an absurd experience for me to see how Gandhi’s birthday was celebrated, and that too by leading politicians who seemed to be determined to take India into the twenty-first century with principles (or lack of it) which stay in absolute opposition to what Gandhi willed.

Only a miniscule will live in ultramodern luxury, a new techno-feudal class, small, indifferent, and exploitative to its core.       (How true!!)

How can you call a city the cultural centre of India (a term most Calcuttan loves to use)… when more than half of the city’s population is illiterate? Isn’t it shockingly ridiculous? I also wonder how after the disastrous flood which almost swept away Midnapore, you could begin your celebration with such fanfare: Durga puja, Kali puja, and so on… Music and light while nearby villages lay submerged in water? This swift and collective amnesia I find incomprehensible…

For those already preparing a defence in their mind, Grass (who had actively helped rebuilding his own country, literally from ashes) was not alone in his criticism. Almost a century back, in 1895, Rabindranath Tagore, whom all Bengalis (including I) hold dear, had this to say about the people of the city (the occasion was a memorial meeting for Vidyasagar who himself had endlessly scorned the ‘theoretical snobs’ of the city):

…day after day we begin but never finish; we make a show but do nothing concrete; we do not believe what we set out to do; what we believe we do not carry out; we can spin out words without end, but cannot make the smallest sacrifice; we feel pleased with ourselves by exhibiting our pride; but never think it necessary to be worthy; we depend on other for everything and yet rend the skies finding fault with them. We take pride in imitating others, we feel honoured to receive their favour, yet we try to throw dust in their eyes and call it politics; and the main object of our lives is to make clever speeches that fill us with intense self admiration. Vidyasagar had infinite contempt for this weak, mean, heartless, lazy, arrogant, argumentative race of men.

While it pains me tremendously (and hits my pride equally), the fact remains that in the last thirty years or so, we, as a city, has not been able to produce anything significant - in any discipline (with the possible exception of Sourav Ganguly in cricket). We still love to pat ourselves by talking (not without pride) about the sixties when Louis Bank used to play in the Trincas. Unfortunately, that’s where our pride – and knowledge of history - ends.

I sincerely apologise if I have not mentioned Sector V*...

                                                                               * Sector V in Salt Lake is where most of the IT companies of the city are located

Death of a stranger

Manik kaku, a dear uncle whom I have always loved deeply, succumbed today morning, after struggling with a coma-like situation for nearly two days in a government hospital where there were no doctors to see him because it was the ‘weekend’.

His struggle, in fact, stretches back much further – nearly three decades of fight with an extremely painful and ruinous drug-addiction, which was, nevertheless, his only true friend ever since he had stepped out of his teen. And even before that – the sensitive and vulnerable boy of seven losing his father and forced to come face-to-face with a strange world full of insecurity, alienation, and fear.

The word ‘Manik’ in Bengali means ‘jewel’. I don’t know to what extent he had been able to justify his name during his life (and what are the yardsticks), but Manik kaku was certainly one of the most talented, sensitive, compassionate, and honest human beings I have seen in my life. My father’s side is generally a talented lot; and yet, among my father's cousins, Manik kaku always stood tall – at over six feet, even physically. At seventeen, tall and extremely good-looking, he had an athletic physique and was already well versed in skills as diverse as judo and painting (he had a God-gifted talent in painting). Under the bright exterior however, maybe what always lurked was an id-like desire to return to the safety of a mythical childhood which he never had, and to his father whom he knew he would never get back.

Those were the eighties - hippies and drugs ruled the youth culture in Calcutta . And especially vulnerable were people like my Manik kaku, who were too honest, too innocent, and too sensitive for the world in which they found themselves. They wanted to hide, to run away from themselves, from the terrifying reality all around them. Was that the beginning of his ‘death-wish’? – I don’t know. My father, who undrstood human psychology far better than me, could have possibly answered.

Ever since Manik kaku got into drugs, he was mostly criticized (sometimes scorned) by relatives. Among the few exceptions were my parents, who were deeply attached to him ever since he was a child, and continued to treat him with love, empathy, and respect due for every human being, especially a man like him. He in turn, always loved my parents as few others did.

While many people tried to persuade him to come out of his addiction, not too many could really go into the depth of his soul and see the disfigured world as he saw it. Hence, their reasonings were not of much help. Time and again he himself struggled to come out of it; made genuine attempts, refrained for a while, and again plunged right into it like a helpless kid who didn’t knew how to face the world. During all these years there were numerous hospitalizations, accidents, broken bones (requiring insertion of steel plates in his hand and legs), asylums (some shockingly corrupt ones), gradual change in physical appearance, self-inflicted wounds… in fact, the God-gifted health and the God-like physique took a long time – decades - to be destroyed, slowly and meticulously, by injecting poisonous narcotics in his veins year after year – a helpless inhuman suicide which stretched painfully for so long. While he continued to scream for help and support during all these years, we could only see the cruel six-foot tall drug-addict who makes his widowed mother (my father’s aunt) - and all around him – suffer.

As his health gradually floundered and he had to stop working because of his deteriorating condition, money became more and more sparse. Today, when I called his mother, she told me that she had failed because she could not get her son admitted to a private nursing home, which was beyond her – but which could have saved her son’s life. As the meaning of her words gradually filtered through me, long after the conversation was over, the enormity and the absolute reality of her helplessness made me feel like screaming: against a society which condemned a sensitive and innocent child like Manik kaku to death, against the monstrous indifference and corruption of the medical profession in West Bengal where patients who cannot afford a nursing home has to invariably die (inspite of the taxes we continue to pay to maintain the government hospitals), against the dead Manik kaku who could not save himself from all these, and most of all against myself for not being able to do anything, for just standing and watching as a fellow human being died (are the doctors listening?). I wanted to scream and cry and do something about it – and all I could do is write this blog which doesn’t mean anything.

He lived all his life in pain and alienation, and died helplessly, almost unloved... like a complete stranger.

(November 9, 2009)