Durga Puja - Missing Home !!!

For all Bongs (Bengalis to the world), Durga Puja is not only an annual ritual, when you want to spend time with your dear friends and relatives, but also a celebration of new. People used to paint their houses, buy new utensils and clothes before the Puja. The last one is still prevalent, but I think its mostly now a days another routine excuse to visit South City Mall or Forum in Calcutta to buy some more clothes, which anyways we buy year round. But for Bongs who are not staying in Calcutta or other Metropolis in India or abroad, to the Bongs from rural Bengal Puja is still the sole occasion for them to buy new clothes for them and their families and repair their houses, if needed.

Critics often mention that urban Bongs are slowly diffusing the real celebration of the Puja in their so-called busy schedule of life and night-life. It seems, they spend these five days of the Puja in the same manner they will spend any other weekends, when they get time to hangout with friends or family. They might add that Puja comes and goes almost perfunctorily in the lives of these Bongs. I am not sure how and what to reply to these critics and intellectual stalwarts. But one thing which I feel is that time changes at its own pace so does people. Durga Puja has always been special to people of India especially to us who are acclaimed as Bongs and will continue to do so for times to come. We celebrate Puja all over the world now. Wherever Bongs have spread, Puja has spread too.

For instance, many of us still awaits the publication of the annual 'Pujabarshiki', which is a collection of new novels, stories and poems written by noted authors and poets of contemporary Bengali literature. Puja is a celebration of new, so this collection of publications includes most of the new writings by these authors. There used to be similar craze with the music industry as well. Before Puja there were several new albums from famous singers and music directors of different genre, that were launched in order to mark the occasion.

Coming back to Pujabarshikis, we still buy them online from abroad and try to finish them up before the publication of the next years' version. Although some of us are shameless enough to not been able to finish the last year's publication, but still will be eager to buy the new edition with new stories. To us it is a passion, a stimulus to joy and celebration named 'Durga Puja'. I am not sure whether there is any parallel to this same among any other over the world, but if it is there should be handful of events like this which has this enduring impression among us which makes these five days of the year leave us enough joy and ecstasy for the remaining 360 days of the year to wait for the next event.


For me Puja has always been very special. We always used to go to our ancestral home in Matiari, Nadia where we still manage to celebrate our own puja. Unlike the Pujas in Calcutta, the Pujas celebrated at home are vastly different. Here the rituals are the main attraction and we need to work for organizing those. Since childhood we have been trained to participate in different rituals starting from ornamentation of the deity, before the day of reception, to de-ornamentation on the day of immersion. Durga Puja also marks the gathering of our entire family and close relatives at our ancestral home. These seven days we stay as a unit, share our lives and important events that happened through. Since most of us don't get much time to finally meet up in person throughout most of the year to follow, so Puja is an unique opportunity to share our lives with each other. Even at this age of emails and cellphones you will be amazed to learn how much we missed to communicate to one another about our day to day life.

Now, for the last 4 years I have been in USA for my PHD, I have missed this occasion to visit home. One cannot imagine how much I sulk and miss in these four days over here while my entire family celebrates Puja as usual. They miss me too, but I miss them the most.

"Oh Calcutta ! " -- Vir Sanghvi on Calcutta

Vir Sanghvi

Oh, not to be in Calcutta

Of the last three weekends, this is the first that I will not be spending in Calcutta. As much as I love the City of Joy, this is not, on balance, such a bad thing. I spent last weekend stuck in an endless traffic jam. And the weekend before that, I watched openmouthed as the Calcutta police shut down much of the centre of the city and inconvenienced thousand of citizens.

Let me explain. On the weekend before last, I was part of the press party that accompanied A B Vajpayee to Calcutta. As we drove into the city, I noticed that the roads were suspiciously free of traffic. On the bypass, there were no cars even on the other side of the road. Park Circus was bereft of vehicles. Park Street had been shut down for the benefit of our motorcade. So, it turned out, had Chowringhee. And Red Road. And the entire route to Raj Bhavan.

When the prime minister left Raj Bhavan for his public meeting -- half an hour before it, actually -- a similar exercise was undertaken and whole roads sealed off. All this, I was told, was done unilaterally by the Calcutta police in the name of VIP security.

As somebody who was fortunate enough to be part of the VIP motorcade, I have to say that I was put to no inconvenience -- rather, others were inconvenience because of us. Motorists were stranded for hours, some went round and round in search of alternative routes and at hotels, they were advising guests to leave for the airport four hours in advance.

All this because the prime minister was in town.

The following Saturday, I was back in Calcutta to moderate the Calcutta Club debate. This time we should be okay, I thought to myself, Vajpayee is in Lucknow. But I had forgotten something: Sonia Gandhi was in town.

Even so, I was not unduly perturbed. Sonia travels in New Delhi with minimal security. She uses two unmarked Ambassadors and no uniformed policemen are associated with her protection detail. So, there should be no problem.

No way. That may be how Sonia moves around in New Delhi, but things are very different in Calcutta. On Saturday morning, she attended a Spastic Society function at the Taj Bengal. The overzealous Calcutta police promptly shut down the entire route from Raj Bhavan to the Taj and flooded the hotel's lobby with a hundred policemen. Nor were they shy about admitting this. They used the press to advise motorists to take alternative routes because they were shutting the roads for over an hour.

That evening, on my way to the Calcutta Club I noticed that police pickets were preventing cars from entering AJC Bose Road. As you can't get to the club without traversing AJC Bose Road, I wondered how anybody would make it to the debate -- and inevitably, I silently cursed Sonia's security.

It turned out I was wrong. The disruption had nothing to do with Sonia. AJC Bose Road was not only closed, it was also jammed. The cars that had made it on to the road through a variety of devious routes found themselves stuck for hours. We couldn't start the debate till an hour and a half after the advertised time. And even then, guests kept trickling in throughout the first few speeches.

And why was AJC Bose Road jammed/closed? It turned out that a procession celebrating the tercentenary of the founding of the Khalsa Panth had decided to wander through the centre of the city during rush hour. The obliging police force had promptly closed all the roads and stopped traffic.

I couldn't help feeling sorry for the folks at the Calcutta Club. They had already postponed the debate by a week fearing traffic disruptions during Vajpayee's visit. They had spent sleepless nights hoping that Sonia's security would not lead to road closures and jams.

But in the end, it wasn't VIP security that got them. Right there, in the centre of Calcutta, they were done in by a parade of Sardarjis.

I recall these instances not to make the usual points about VIP security. Yes, such security is intrusive and a nuisance, but equally, there is no denying that some VIPs need protection. For instance, Rajiv Gandhi would still be alive today if he had been granted SPG protection.

The trick is to find a balance that allows you to protect the VIP without needlessly inconveniencing everybody else. It is not that difficult a balance to achieve. They have found it in England and the United States. And even in New Delhi -- where hundreds of jokers on whom nobody would waste a bullet get security -- traffic disruption is at a minimum. The Delhi police only stop traffic for the prime minister (not for Sonia or L K Advani or anybody else) and then too, only for seven to 10 minutes at a maximum. A police vehicle travels ahead of the motorcade, temporarily clears the roads, and then, after the motorcade has passed, it is traffic as usual for everyone. There are no half hour closure or diversions.

So my point is not about VIP security, it is about Calcutta. Why do the Calcutta Police adopt such extreme measures and treat citizens with such contempt when there is a simpler way of doing things?

Off the record, the SPG will tell you why the Calcutta police behave like this. If you want to stop traffic for only a few minutes, then you need to be well organised. You need a high level of coordination between police parties all along the route and you need to be certain your advance vehicles will reach 10 minutes before the motorcade. As far as the Calcutta police are concerned, this is too much trouble. Why bother with all these complicated arrangements when you can just shut down the whole city for a full hour? That way, there is no danger of going wrong.

It is wrong to assume that policemen do this at the behest of visiting VIPs. I know of at least one instance when Vajpayee looked out of his car and asked, "Kyon bhai, aaj koi hartal hai kya (Is there a strike today)?" He had to be told that he was the reason the road was empty.

I suppose the same is true of the deputy prime minister of Vietnam. Two years ago, I missed a flight because the intrepid Calcutta police shut down the bypass for a full four on the grounds that the Vietnamese dignitary was due to pass that way. I doubt very much if the poor deputy prime minister asked for this kind of security -- who in Calcutta would want to kill him anyhow? But, like all other VIPs, he was at the mercy of the Calcutta police.

Just as the citizens of Calcutta are.

I've never worked out why the police treat the people of Calcutta with such contempt. I used to think that it was a hangover of the colonial past. But there is another factor to consider. It isn't just VIP movement that causes traffic disruptions. A more frequent cause is demonstrations, morchas or michhils. The parading Sardarjis did not stop traffic because they were VIPs. They did so because it has become the fundamental right of any assembly of more than 20 people to bring life in Calcutta to a standstill.

I am willing to concede Calcutta sees more demonstrations than any other city. But the fact remains that all cities have their share of morchas and michhils. They just cope much better. In Mumbai, the police will not allow a procession to disrupt traffic in the city centre during rush hour: They will suggest that the morcha be held a few hours earlier, when the roads are less crowded. They will also refuse to stop traffic for a procession. If a morcha has to cross the road, they will allow one batch of demonstrators to do so, hold the rest back, let traffic run for a few minutes, and then allow the next batch to go across. This way, disruption is minimised.

In Calcutta, on the other hand, any procession can be held anywhere, at any time. There is no question of letting demonstrators cross the road in batches; they have right of way. All this is made worse by a peculiarly Bengali innovation: the propensity to agitate in single file. Everywhere else in the world, demonstrators crowd together. In Calcutta, they walk in single file. This way, even a small group of 200 people can form a long line and cause major traffic disruption.

What unites these two phenomena that so inconvenience ordinary people? How can a city that bends over backwards for rulers also shut itself down to please every roadside agitator? How can the egalitarian stoppages and the proletarian disruptions be reconciled?

I have a theory. When we associate a fawning respect for VIPs with monarchies and colonial societies, we forget there is -- or used to be -- another kind of society where the rulers demanded and received absolute respect: the so-called communist republics. They would close Red Square for Leonid Brezhnev and use batons to clear the streets for Nikolai Ceausescu.

West Bengal is not a Communist republic. But I suspect it draws its confused view of how to do things from some long defunct communist regime. Rule in the name of the people and let them agitate, but never forget the people must serve the rulers.

I can't really object to that. Much of West Bengal voted for the Communist Party of India-Marxist, and those that did deserve what they've got. But what about the rest of us? What about resolutely non-CPI-M Calcutta?

Our lot, I guess, is to suffer. Perhaps one day when the CPI-M follows its east European counterparts into obscurity, its epitaph will read: 'Nobody moved but we passed."

Passed into oblivion, if we're lucky.

Vir Sanghvi

The Hungry Tide - A journey to Sunderban !!!!

I just finished reading 'The Hungry Tide' by Amitav Ghosh. Among the Indian authors who have become very famous in international English literature, Ghosh is a noted one.

The present novel is about two people who hold their ancestry to Bengali families but are brought up in different societies. The male protagonist 'Kanai' is born and brought up in Calcutta and relocated to Delhi for professional reasons. His female counterpart 'Piya' is brought up in Seattle by the parents whose only reason to stay together was their daughter. The story unfolds from these two strangers, who are both to some extent 'self-centered', making their headway to Canning and then to further south in the tide country of 'Sunderban'. While Kanai was visiting his aunt Nilima, Piya was on her research on river dolphins and their habitat in the tide country. Ghosh spells his mastery in story-telling by going back and forth between the events happening to Piya and Kanai as they proceeded through different routes but to meet at the end at Lusibari, one of the two hypothetical islands in the story which resembles slightly to Gosaba in reality.

The story takes its turn through different human emotions and the uncanny similarity in behavior of two pair of individuals Kanai-Moyna and Piya-Fokir, even though they are really from different worlds which never leads to one another. In fact, in the story Moyna is married to Fokir, who again happens to be the son of Kusum, a childhood friend of Kanai. The backbone of the story is Piya's expedition for the riverine dolphins, inter twinned with Kanai's search for Nirmal's (Nilima's husband) involvements with the settlers in one of the islands in Sunderban, against whom the Government had taken brutal action in the name of wild-life preservation. While Kanai found that most that involvement of Nirmal was related to his soft corner for Kusum, Piya discovered that her findings about dolphins matches with the colloquial god 'bon-bibi' and her legendary messengers.

The novel proceeds through the turns of human emotions and rationalism, often putting both in dramatic confrontations. Finally, a devastating cyclone and a near death experience for both Piya and Kanai yields them in changing their way of life and accommodating others emotion in their life. The story leaves us in a open end situation, where the reader might keep extrapolating and interpreting the next moves in their own way.

Having never read Ghosh before, this was a refreshing experience for me. Not only he details the plots in his writings but also enriches them by using real incidences and references. After reading this, I became to some extent familiar with the tide country which is just a couple of hours away from Calcutta.