Parliament

Overheard:

What are your views on the trust vote in parliament?

Parliament, govt etc are so irrelevant in terms of actual governence - seen from the slum level. I dont understand the shock about bundles of money being thrown in parliament. that's sheer hypocrisy or criminal ignorance. As if in a sea of stinking corruption, parliament must be a pure fig leaf. Bullshit. Parliament is finally expressing the reality.

Ha ha! Worse were the English news channels.

The millions in rupee bundles should have been shoved up their arses. We are more enamoured of the forms and rituals of democracy and unconcerned about its living pratice. Fig leaf fetishism.

Parliament should be converted into a go shala or cow shelter. Better still, one house can be a Hindu cow shelter and the other one a Muslim slaughterhouse.

Zoo story: Goodbye blue sky

Photo: Dr. Debanik

I have written earlier about the criminal theft and privatisation of public space in Calcutta by the govt of West Bengal, acting at the behest of the CPI(M) party (see e.g.here, here and here).

Perhaps the mother of all such scams is the one involving Calcutta zoo. The conspiracy runs from the central govt to the state govt. Using the pretext of the need for more space and better facilities for the zoo, the zoo is to be shifted from its present location in Alipore to the fringes of the city. And the present premises would then be handed over to a private company to convert into a private development. Needless to add, a nice consideration must have been paid for the favour.

The location in Alipore is very, very valuable real estate. Thanks to the secret bilateral deal with the private company, on the pretext of giving the city a new and better zoo, prime real estate is to be handed over to them on a platter.


Photo: Cathryn Game

The zoo is one of the very few open and recreational spaces in the city accessible to the public at a nominal entrance fee. On Christmas day or on New Year day, tens of thousands of people, mostly humble folk, would be found queueing up to spend a few hours amidst green surroundings. It is one of the few places where families with children can spend a day or have a picnic. The zoo also provides much-needed lungs to a city beleagured by politically sponsored air pollution. To take this out of the public domain, hand it over to a private company and have it converted into a private enclave for the wealthy and powerful - is simply diabolical.

The private company is of course one that is adored by the ruling CPI(M). The same company on whose behalf the state govt appropriated fertile farm land, destroying the livelihoods of thousands of sharecroppers and larm labourers.

Will the people of Calcutta stand up and raise their voice against this criminal conspiracy by their rulers?

End of days

It has once again been demonstrated that the prime sport or means of entertainment in India is politics, or rather the antics of political parties in their greed for power (which brings immense loot). Sadly, the coming Beijing Olympics will not enable our political champions to display their prowess. Neither will India's incomparable free media, that great pillar of our democracy, be able to exhibit its dumbing prowess.

Like the froth and foam bubbling over a cesspool, the political arena in again in ferment. The CPI(M)-led Left had suddenly found itself in the position of being able to rail against the USA. Like King Canute, commanding the tide to stop. But the reality is that the CPI(M) is just a criminal mafia pretending to be a political party. All their oh-so-pious pronouncements sound hilarious when juxtaposed with what happens in, through and in the name of the party in its base of power, West Bengal.

If the Left had to pull down the govt - there were many reasons to do this. The current inflation; the farmer suicides; the collapse of public systems; the obscene socio-economic disparities - were all ground enough. If they could be so adamantly against the nuclear deal with the USA, why did they not show that same adamant attitude on matters that affect the daily lives of the masses, those in whose name they claim to act? If the Congress has patently failed in the last 4 years, then so has the Left because they were propping up the govt. They thought they would have power without responsibilities. They thought they would have the cake and eat it too. And now they are the laughing stock of the country, fit to be thrown where they rightly belong, the refuse heap of history.

Thankfully, whatever enabled the CPI(M) to keep returning to power has begun to collapse, and the party is facing one electoral setback after another. It can now only sit back and watch its demise which is unstoppable, like a terminal patient. They are helpless against the poison fruits of all that they sowed and nurtured for so many years.

People here are now talking about the end of Ceaucescu. Ministers in West Bengal would now know that they may be pulled out of their cars and lynched on the streets. By their own party members perhaps, for thus the latter could hope to evade a similar fate and have a chance for a future under the new regime. Ironically, it is only the Constitution and the rule of law that can save the lives of the party leaders from the visceral ire of the people, when they cared a fig for the Constitution and rule of law in all their time in power and rigorously supervised over the erasure of the rule of law.

But the passing of the CPI(M) rule does not signify anything positive in substantive terms. Status quo will be maintained, but with the spoils of power now being taken by the Trinamul. For instance, the auto rickshaw mafia and the private bus mafia and the land development mafia will all continue, but they will owe allegiance to Mamata didi.

At the centre - anything can happen. Ants are in everyone's pants. Everyone has egg on their face. But the only party really gleeful right now, the only one whose stock is set to rise metorically, is Trinamul. With the stock markets in a tail-spin and with inflation shooting, the best investment right now would be on Trinamul. The gates for entry into a share of the spoils from their being in power will be closed very soon.

Mayavati is a prime PM candidate in the next national elections. I have had a feeling for some time that Mayavati would be assasinated, possibly with US involvement.

But who is at the centre - does that matter at all in terms of making a positive difference to the people? With global economic forces at play, what can a national govt of a poor nation do? The current crisis of inflation and the govt's helplessness to deal with it illustrates that. What is more relevant is the spread of militant insurgency, of the naxal-maoist variety. This undermines the state from below, even as its significance is whittled away from above.

The inevitable civil war / showdown between people in India, essentially the haves and the have-nots, comes closer. No more beating around the bush, no more mediation of the state. So, in Calcutta, maid-servants, cycle rickshaw-pullers, drivers etc would ransack their babu-masters' homes and help themselves to the swag. Those who can, will protect themselves in every way they can. The business of security will flourish.

Plaint

Two years ago I had posted a poem of mine, titled Rama's Plaint. That was written in 1999. Yesterday I happened to add another (concluding?) verse.

They emphasise difference, they ascribe values
Rama looks, wistful and forlorn
’Tis the one earth that fattens all
But teaches some to write the tale.

Painting: Chalk & Cheese, David Weston.

Yvonne Le Rougetel

"I write about a person very few people would have heard of. I do so because I know of no one else who has spent all her life giving away whatever she has and asked for nothing in return. Her name was Yvonne Le Rougetel.

She had no religion but lived for others without bothering about herself."

Khushwant Singh

Photo: Self-Sacrifice, by Ruth Foote

Necropolis

Best of Kolkata Campus presented Necropolis: rehearsing Koltes in such times... at Earthcare Books in Middleton Street, Calcutta, on the evening of Saturday 5 July. The performance was dedicated to the 60th birth celebrations of Bernard-Marie Koltes.

Two men meet on the street. They have to make a deal. Or rather they want to make a deal. One has something to sell and the other needs something to buy. The dealer is unsure what to peddle or would he want to peddle anything in the first place. The client knows what he has to buy but does not know exactly what to buy. A cat and mouse game begins between these nameless, faceless, shapeshifters who have to make a transaction about which they are not sure why they do it. For the next chunk of minutes they indulge in selling and buying of concepts without transacting anything.

What are they selling? Or rather who is buying? ... Are technology, displacement, memories, genocide ... the road-map of the universe... becoming so routine that we have lost the power to engage with them, and provide a soothing balm to the displaced, destitute, fried, barbecued, roasted, killed human-folk?



More often than not we are groping for words to describe routine violence. Routine cases of racial profiling. Of exclusion. Grappling with stereotypes. Cliches. Biases on the basis of human rights. On ethical treatment of animals who become globalised pharma companies' experimental guinea pigs. Biases on the basis of sexual orientation. We are looking at images and we think either they supplement the words or complement them. Is image only a memory tool? Is it just a visual metaphor? Is it just to learn things by heart? By rote?

What is a perfomance? Merely a text or an improvisation or a series of theatre exercises which are prescribed as typical workshop methods? The performance probes into the image-word relationship ... it gets into into the rationale of images...



What images are we looking at? Nellie, Morichjhaanpi, Malom, Mokokchung, Nandigram...

What was the process of transforming the "us" into "them"?... How are "they" celebrating diversity and "their" culturalness in these times? The performance negotiates these terrains.

By the time the performance ends, nobody has bought... nobody has sold... yet those two individuals have transformed themselves enough to be probably up for sale if the next set of clients gatecrash into the narrative.

The play explores the idiom of solo performance with city-specific collaborators who intrude, alter and tamper the nature of the performance... yet there is an unified thread that runs through these structured improvisations.