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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 BharaterMaha-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.

Countless people are arguing incessantly about whether Narendra Modi will come back to power – many have assumed that it is a foregone conclusion.

It may be time to take a realistic look, which means that it does not matter which political party or parties form the next government. Only the naive refuse to believe that India is what it was between 1947 and 2014 – largely tolerant, secular and wedded to democratic norms.

At a time when all attention is on the elections, this topic could be discussed later, but by then, it may be too late. Fresh bamboo poles are being put up on pavements every day in some locality or the other, to test the ground for new stalls to come up — precisely because most policemen are busy with elections, meetings and processions. Sensible people in Kolkata have long given up all dreams of seeing a ‘London’ and tiny Chinese lights glittering at night simply cannot hide the ever expanding shanties and squalor that symbolise the city. Street vendors, as hawkers are called in legal language, have been encroaching every possible public space at such an alarming rate that there is either a master plan to slum-ify the city or there is a dangerous conspiracy of silence. What is important for us to realise is that once the new law is in position in the near future, it will be impossible to remove street vendors ever again.

As a keen observer of the electoral process, I can safely say that this election is really quite different from others —except perhaps 1977 — as India has to take a very grave choice, on which the future of the nation depends in many senses. Having said that, my main worry now is that since vindictiveness is a part of state policy, should we not take extra care to protect the voter from being identified and harassed later on, by any powerful party at the centre or in the states?