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One can safely declare, without even comparing word counts, that the never-ending plight of migrant workers and the informal sector has surely pushed other coronavirus-related issues in the background.
For the first time in the history of independent India have the two issues grabbed national attention, though between them, migrants make better ‘copies’ and offer heart-rending visuals to those who still nurse values. The eerie silence of the nation’s most loquacious prime minister has strengthened the narrative of utter indifference, though he has, of late, been making feeble comments in sotto voce.
If John Kenneth Galbraith’s description of India as a “functioning anarchy” held, we should have collapsed before the coronavirus by now. Instead, it is Galbraith’s country and other developed and largely homogeneous nations in the West that appear to be blundering through unprecedented losses of precious lives. India’s less erratic handling of the crisis can perhaps be traced to its legacy of a colonial administration that was designed to pull through an impossibly problematic and chaotic country. Resources were always woefully short and despite chronic slackness in speed and response, the ‘steel frame’ of bureaucracy managed to deliver.
It is debatable whether any intervention earlier than March 21 would have helped combat the depredations of the coronavirus. To the government, the Parliament session and Madhya Pradesh obviously mattered. In any case, a janata curfew was observed the very next day to test the waters before a total lockdown. While people stayed indoors and came out only at 5 pm as advised, to clap hands and bang pots, officials were feverishly working behind closed teak doors to finalise the operational details of how to seal a nation so large, unmanageable and rather restless. Two days later, the prime minister announced, in his dramatic style, that everything would remain shut down for the next three weeks to halt the deadly dance of the virus.
It was only late last night when the hospital sent me a short report on Hari Vasudevan’s precarious condition that I realised he had a middle name as well, Sankar. Caught between a more placid Vishnu and a temperamental Shiva, Hari must have opted quite early for the tranquil deity, for everything about him was so unflappably cool, soothing and gentle.
It is more than just interesting that Narendra Modi’s government has decided to telecast the two great epics of India once again after three long decades, just when it was assured a mammoth captive locked in audience. Let us delve a little deeper into the connection between these two record-breaking serials of Doordarshan and the rise of communal politics in India. This will also help those who are still struggling to understand how the Modi comet appeared in 2014 and completely blazed out all traces of 67 long years of secularism practised by the Indian republic, sometimes quite sincerely and rather patchily in others.
Last year in December, when agitations against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act had just begun, in an article published in The Wire, I had stated:
“No one can predict how long the public anger will be sustained and how the Modi-Shah duo will retort, and with what ferocity and vindictiveness. One prays that communal conflicts do not break out in this charged atmosphere or are even manufactured to split the movement.”
It is needless to remind ourselves that Kolkata once famous for its large number of palatial buildings, which earned it the sobriquet: “the City of Palaces”. At present, however, except the Marble Palace, Jorasanko Thakurbari and a handful of other such well-maintained ones, the rest are all gone or are in a pitiable state of disrepair.
The sudden, unplanned outburst in many parts of India on the issue of citizenship is, no doubt, the first major agitation against Narendra Modi. For 5.5 years, the world’s largest democracy silently watched authoritarianism and communalism tighten their stranglehold, but now it appears to have found its voice back.
It is quite surprising that the claimed cultural capital of India does not have one worthwhile art museum or an international-standard exhibition space for painting, photography and other forms of visual arts. While the Biswa Bangla complex does the city proud, it is not meant for art like, say, the National Gallery of Modern Art is. This art museum is at its grandest in Delhi, but Mumbai and Bengaluru also have scaled-down NGMAs. Calcutta was obviously bypassed for the fourth NGMA, surprisingly without protest.
It is only natural for Kolkata to have some of the finest specimens of colonial architecture. After all, it enjoyed the status of being, for one and half centuries, the capital of the British Empire in India and of the East India Company’s Dominions, prior to that. We may marvel at the Gothic architecture of the High Court and St Paul’s Cathedral as great examples of this class.
The 9th of November was, indeed, a very interesting Saturday. The world celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; Sikhs rejoiced their visa-free darshan of holy Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara within Pakistan; many Muslims prepared for the imminent birthday of Prophet Muhammad; while Kolkata and Mumbai braced for deadly cyclones, even as it rained incessantly. But all eyes were on the Supreme Court in Delhi as it finally delivered its verdict in the epoch-making dispute at Ayodhya, over which thousands had already lost their lives. Interestingly, even those who had orchestrated the orgy of riot, arson and murder, both before and after razing the masjid in 1992, were not prepared to take chances.
Year after year, people in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and major cities wonder what exactly is Chhatt Puja when they witness so many lakhs and lakhs of men and women from Bihar out on the streets, heading towards the river or the sea. They see them push cartloads of bananas and other fruits or carry them on their heads, but few outsiders understand anything more. The main festival is just six days after Diwali, which explains why it goes by the colloquial name for the ‘sixth’, chhatt, that is also called Surya-shasthi.
Did you know that on November 2 every year, the dead manage to unite billions of living people all over the world?
Many of us know that it is ‘All Souls’ Day’ and that Christians visit the graves of departed family members. They lay flowers at their tombs and also light candles, which brightens these desolated cemeteries.
History, we are told, is invariably written by victors. We are not certain whether this is what prompted Amit Shah, undoubtedly the second most powerful person in India, to declare that “there is a need to rewrite the Indian history from India’s point of view”. Shah claims that had V.D. Savarkar, the founding father of ‘the Hindu nation’ not described the events of 1857 as the ‘Indian War of Independence’, Indians would still be calling it by the British term, ‘Sepoy Mutiny’.
It is rather astounding that India is the only country in the world that reserves two special celebrations for siblings to shower their affections on each other. The first being Rakhi or Rakshabandhan while the other is Bhratri Dwitiya which is popularly known as Bhai Dooj in north India.
From Tagore’s beautiful words, ‘Ei Bharater Maha-Manaber Sagar-tirey’ (From the shores of the vast ocean of humanity, India) to Nehru’s ‘Unity in Diversity’, we have excellent poetic expressions and vivid descriptions of the wondrous plurality that personifies India. But we need to delve deeper into the process through which this unity was actually achieved amidst wide diversity and Deepavali or Diwali is a good case study of the process.
All Bengalis here love Durga, but only few realise that Bengal’s Durga is uniquely Bengali and her form, agenda and legend are quite different from the rest of India. First of all, Durga never comes anywhere in autumn with her whole family and secondly, she is not greeted in other regions as the loving daughter of a whole people, not just Menaka’s.
What ails the Indian Administrative Service? This is precisely the question that has been raised in the book by N.C. Saxena, a role-model IAS officer who helped stop Vedanta’s mining project from decimating Odisha’s forests and tribal habitats. A prominent member of the almost extinct breed of scholar-administrators, Saxena also asks ‘why it [IAS] fails to deliver’ and tries to address, as honestly as possible, the issues that most bureaucrats would either deny or avoid.
I thank this prestigious institution, the National Centre for the Performing Arts of Mumbai for giving me this unique honour of delivering the first Jamshed Bhabha Memorial Lecture. Had it not been for the great visionary, this very ground that houses our auditorium and the extraordinary Centre, would still be many feet under the sea. His perseverance and leadership is best exemplified in the amazing reconstruction of his dream theatre, after it was destroyed by fire. I salute both the Bhabha brothers and the Tata family for their interest and munificence — a remarkable quality that distinguishes the Parsee community of India.
I have no love lost for any of the four major political parties that I have interacted with in Bengal in the last half-century. I joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1975 during the Emergency, and I have seen at close quarters how democracy was trampled by the Congress in Bengal – with the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, arbitrary arrests and detentions by the police and widespread clampdown on free speech and political rights.
India, as you know, is a multi ethnic, multi lingual, multi religious country which is vast and populous. Of the 1 billion 300 million people in India today, some 170 million are Muslims, which is the second largest Muslim population in any country of the world. Though Muslims are in a minority, they have lived in peace with Hindus and other religions for centuries.