Best places for Life watching

Nothing excites me more during my travels than to sit somewhere incognito and watch life pass by; a small bylane or that street-corner in an unknown city. For a moment I too get to become a part of that scene and an observer of that flow of drama. If you literally translate life watching in my mother tongue, Bengali, it almost assumes a philosophical overtone – jibon-dorshon.

Here is a list of 10 of my personal favourites (in no particular order) for life watching –based on my one-and-half decades of travel around different parts of the world:

1.      Soho, London: Buzzing with beautiful cafés, Victorian pubs, and historic buildings, with avant-garde theatres and notorious strip-shows, Soho lies at the heart of Bohemian London. From Karl Marx to Dylan Thomas, from Sharon Stone to Kate Moss, nobody could escape its spell. You can spend hours sitting at one of the countless pubs here and watch people congregate from all over the world . It’s certainly one of the best places in the world to see the circus of life. I was fortunate enough to have my office here, right at the centre of Soho, for over a year.

2.      Coffee House, Calcutta: This is probably the only institution of its kind in India: a relic not only of the city's deeply rooted colonial past but also of a time when Calcutta exploded with creativity in every field - from cinema to the arts, and from literature to economics. By the time I started going to Coffee House as a student in the mid-nineties it was already part its prime and yet, the sublime character of the place had its spell. I usually went in the evening with my friends, sat at a corner table with a good view, and watched the hall get filled up slowly with middle-aged men, cigarette smoke, and loud argumentative voices. Though I haven't visited Coffee House in recent years, but I still remember how I used to feel during those evenings - mind full of ideas, respiratory system chocked with nicotine, and a sense of enormous anachronism.

3.      Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris:No other place brings out the café-culture of Paris more vividly than Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the intellectual nerve-centre of Paris between the two wars. Featured in countless stories, films, and articles, the cafés and the streets here have witnessed the birth and demise of many movements – from Surrealism to Existentialism, and from non-narrative literature (Deridda, anyone?) to the French New Wave. Two of the most famous cafés here are Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore – at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue St. Benoit. The best time to visit is afternoon, when you can sit with a glass of wine and watch the Parisian life - and the hordes of tourists - pass by. Clientele in the past included folks like Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and - well, the list goes on.

(7 more to come)

A Prayer for Swapneel and his Brothers - Part III

The more I watch him the more I realise the inadequacy of words and pictures. All the pages I fill up writing about him and the hundred of pictures I click on my Nikon and paste on my facebook will not be able to capture anything of his years of growing up - and the incredible mark it is leaving on me.

He asks me questions, many questions. His questions remind me of all that I have lost over the years: the melody of my voice, the richness of my mind, the curiosity in my heart. It makes me feel like a lump of stone, going by sheer momentum and nothing else.  

But he also teaches me. He teaches me to be human amidst all the chaos of modern-day living.  He reminds me there are things more fundamentally important than that pending PowerPoint at office or that micro fluctuation at the stock market. He also teaches me to smile: an ugly hardened smile from a middle-aged man probably, but still a smile.

There is nothing I can teach to Swapneel and his brothers; it’s only the other way round!

Ain't looking back in anger

I work through long periods of silence, when the noise outside looks like some silent farcical mime

I don’t work actually, but let my haphazard thoughts rummage through my mind

I waste the precious moments of my life – many, many years went by like this – in the trivial, trying to keep my bastardly egotism alive

I want to believe, but nothing comes my way; probably I’m not a believer                                                                             
                                                                                                                           
I had read and dreamt about the magic mountains when I was a child, sitting in the low plains and hoping to go there some day

What do you lose? What is there to lose? What is there to lose anyway?

The Paradox of Development

Human poverty is more than income poverty; it is the denial of choices and opportunities for living a tolerable life – UNDP


West Bengal, a relatively poorer state in India, is also a hotbed for political conflicts, often resulting in violence and institutionalised suppression. Among the poorest and most suppressed people of West Bengal – or any part of India for that matter – are the adivasis, indigenous tribes living for centuries at the bottom of the Indian caste system pyramid. The adivasis are often (as and whenever required) shamelessly exploited by local politicians, government officials, and unscrupulous industrialists.

One such exploitative nexus, recently brought to public attention by NGOs and the alternative media (and now even highlighted by mainstream media), is about rampant operation of illegal stone crushers across the adivasi villages of Birbhum, in west Bengal. Villages like ‘Mohammed bazaar’ and ‘Patharchala’ would never have existed in anybody’s mental map – beyond contributing to the national census once in every ten years – but for their rocky terrain, a valuable source of stone and stone-chips used for construction activities.

Fuelled by the construction boom in the cities, stone prices – and the greed of the unscrupulous industrialists ready to make a quick buck – have gone through the roof. They see these adivasi villages as a potential goldmine. However, it is not easy to get license for operating stone crushers (crushers are used for making stone-chips from the rocks blasted from quarries). Firstly, adivasi land, as per law, cannot be sold to non-adivasis. Secondly, it is strictly not permitted to build stone crushers in the vicinity of villages, due to health and safety reasons. In reality however, such legal restrictions mean only one thing: uncontrolled opening up of illegal stone crushers, often in full knowledge – and in some cases, even tacit complicity – of the local politician and the government officials. Currently, only about one-fourth of the stone crushers operating in the region are licensed.

The results of such uncontrolled growth in stone crushing activities, as can be expected, have been tragic. The crushers have been largely been built on land taken away from the adivasis by force – hence depriving them of their livelihood. The stone dust from the crushers have not only destroyed the productivity of the land and contaminated the water bodies in the vicinity, but also polluted the air to an extent that it has resulted in sharp increase of diseases like tuberculosis and silicosis (source: Anandabazar Patrika, 16 October, 2010 issue). The blasting of rocks in the quarries by explosives have resulted in stones flying into the nearby villages (often the quarries being set up at less than 50 metre from the villages), injuring and killing people, making holes in the roofs and falling into their huts , and cracking the walls (due to vibration of the explosions).

The adivasis, most of whom are extremely poor, do not have the means to fight such institutionalised atrocities. With the loss of their agricultural land and supporting ecosystem, and no other means to earn their livelihood, most of them are now struggling for sheer survival. Earlier this year in April, when some of them tried to raise their voices (in villages like Chanda and Sagarbandh), they were suppressed by armed mercenaries hired by the owners of these crushers – resulting in burning of 42 houses and killing of 4 people.

Some of the NGOs (including one backed by the internationally reputed author Mahashweta Devi) are trying to organise and educate the adivasis against such exploitation. Recently, even the chief minister of the state, Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, has acknowledged the problem and promised that no crushers will be allowed to be built within hundred metres of a locality. The situation at ground, however, has not changed much. While some of the crushers have stopped operation temporarily, most of them admit that there are many ways to bypass the law.

In a country where industrialists and second-generation politicians are increasingly seen as role models – and are expected to steer the country to the next level of development, such harsh realities – practiced regularly throughout the underbelly of rural India, but rarely highlighted – raises serious questions about India’s development paradigm, especially on issues of sustainability and inclusiveness. Even internationally, as India is trying to project an image of an emerging economic and political power, such violation of basic human dignity may prove counter-productive in the long run. Yet, it is only the tip of a corruption chain whose roots go very deep.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media in India is largely apathetic towards these critical issues. While people continue to be suppressed in villages and unabashed exploitation of nature and indigenous people continue, the national newspapers and television channels are getting filled up more and more with images of celebrities opening the next designer store.

                                                                                                                                                                                   - Siddhartha Banerjee

A prayer for Swapneel and his brothers – Part II

Swapneel is growing up – day-by-day, hour-by-hour – like a bundle of pure energy. The earliest riser among us, his voice – full of strange melody and chaos – wakes us up every morning. His never-ending questions, his tremendous effort to climb the stairs or push my laptop bag around the room, his eyes and face always bursting with curiosity and enthusiasm, reminds me every day how our learning curve starts stagnating as we ‘grow up’. The incredible speed at which he is learning and picking up things everyday – from replicating complex sentences to doing acrobatic jings – leave me with awe and admiration.

As parents, we could only hope he continues to bloom in his own way and in his own pace, guided by nature and instincts, and not particularly moulded by our thoughts, norms, or ways of life. Though I’m not a believer in any way, yet, seeing him grow up day-by-day almost like a flower, I sometimes feel like bowing down before God –whosoever he or she may be – in gratitude; my mind filled with those beautiful words of Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Every child brings with him the message that God is not yet tired of man’.

Sometimes I also think about the world in which he is growing up: what kind of a world will it be? Though our generation were probably luckier than many previous ones (destroyed by war, poverty, conflicts of identity), there is absolutely no guarantee that we are moving towards a better world. Yet, no matter what awaits Swapneel and his generation, I believe they would have the strength and the conviction to shape it the way they want it to be.

Rediscovering Ritwik - A personal tribute

Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most talented and visionary directors to have come out of world cinema, is being slowly rediscovered by film lovers all over the world. Personally, his movies had always left me deeply moved - and here's my small tribute to the master:

http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2010/05/03/cinema.htm

The fact that this was published by the biggest National Daily in Bangladesh keeps my hopes alive that culture can overcome barriers which politics has created, that what is common in us is more powerful than divides us...

Halfway through the track

I often think about many of my friends for whom life has been mostly a positive affirmation – fame, position, stature, natural ease, ambition, everything juxtaposing (as if by a stroke of luck) in just the right proportion. I see them making their way through life without the least bit of visible effort, basking – though a bit narcissistically – in their self-glory. I look at my own life in comparison – grumpily stuttering my way through all the wrong roads, often not knowing where to go, often wandering off in totally undesirable and solitary bylanes.

During many of these unproductive wanderings, I often remember those apocalyptical words of Thomas Mann, which, over the years, has continued to live with me and haunt me: ‘… for knowledge Phaedrus, has neither dignity nor rigour: it is all insight and understanding and tolerance, uncontrolled and formless; it sympathizes with the abyss, it is the abyss.’

As one of my friends has often put forward this question (rather rhetorically, and not without intending to produce a dramatic affect): ‘If we are like this, there has to be a purpose; why are we the way we are?’ I must admit that I don’t have a straight answer to this one. One of the negative effects, I guess, of too much introspection (and aimless wandering) is to see the elusive promise of redemption fall apart. As Camus puts it so matter-of-factly in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the promise of a mythical paradisiacal homeland is not something many of us can fall back on.

Yet, for most of my friends who move through their lives effortlessly, shinning through their successes and always keen on ensuring all the right moves and gestures, there seems to be no such need for a redemptive promise or a mythical homeland. They belong to this world, to this time. This is their homeland. Their self-glory is sufficient a reason for them to exist and to exist happily. And no matter how much I sneer at the shallow foundations and self deceiving nature of their pride and self-glory, the fact remains that they savour and live their lives in a manner that I’d never be able to; though this doesn’t mean that people like us are essentially depressive by nature. It only highlights the fact that for most of them, life is to be lived: straight, healthy, and without the unessential complications; while for others like me, it continues to be a haunting, dazzling puzzle to be unravelled – one day at a time.

- Written on 11 May, 2010