Attention Plisss..

Let’s get back in the 1990s, when Raja Hindhustani won accolades for its high dosage-vala drama and pathetic songs; when Altaf Raja was a smashing hit; when Indian Cricket team used to lose only against Australia and Mr. Basu was the only living legend. It was 1997. We used to live in Paharpur (name changed) and it was the district headquarters. The people in admin used to call it “Sadar”. Our bungalow was far away from the main town, in the midst of eucalyptus and mango trees. It was surrounded by ponds and almost dense forests. Life seemed to have stood still amongst those sketches. There was a village “Hasnabad”, which could be seen if I would stand up on the boundary walls of the bungalow. Life was very pleasant there. People were so innocent. They hardly knew how to be smart. They hardly knew how to grow in life. But as I said, they were innocent, so they were not that educated. I am using “that” because there were some people who studied till class 4 or 5. I think those people were the most educated among the lots.

It was an ordinary evening for my dad as he was looking for the things to be taken along with during that inspection. But it wasn’t ordinary for me because my exams ended that day. My father was the Sub-Divisional Officer of Paharpur. The phrase which my father used mostly during that period was “Shakkhorota, Sochetonota, Swanirbharata”. The ruling Government took the agenda of spreading literacy to the remotest corners of our state. The Education Minister, perhaps, ordered all the administrative officers to keep a close watch on this. So they wanted to have the records as soon as possible and the Minister wanted to have the results of success.

“Jabi amar sathe?” asked dad. And I knew what to say. We went to a village. I have forgotten the name but it was almost an hour’s drive. The villages opened “night schools” with the help of the Panchayats. The farmers, after working for the whole day, used to come to these schools to learn; to get educated. When we reached one of these schools, there was none. Then someone, seeing us, called for the students. “Boro sahib esechhen. Chair ano jaldi. Bakira kothay?”. And soon we saw a make shift classroom with one black-board, one teacher (God knows where he came from!), some students and some spectators (its US silly. They haven’t seen so many police before). May be the spectators were there because they hadn’t seen this school before!

My father used to say that these schools were all shits. The in-charges of these schools only took the charges when some “Boro sahib” would come. In all other cases no one can even find a single student; not even the teachers. We can say that all what used to happen were nothing but a play, acted very well by some party workers, some ill-fated villagers and the administration. Reports to the Secretariat would obviously bear the facts that the night schools were properly being run and that people were getting educated. I could see how my dad used to suppress his grudge against the system. But he also knew there were no vents. The literacy rate was shown almost 80% in the district and that of the Sadar Sub-Division, it was almost 85%! The district was considered as an example of how literacy can be spread. Credits were given to the administration and dad won so many praises. May be later, when both the ‘red’s and the ‘greens’s started showing their true colours, my father could not stand by the system; so he got transferred again.

During this period of 1996-1997, the state registered a whopping 75%(almost) literacy rate. People started believing that rural masses are getting educated. But what I told is just a piece of the entire jigsaw puzzle. Other than the fools, some literary figures and some dumb politicians, any one on earth can realize how ruthless, how betraying, how perfidious the agenda was. We have even seen that, to prove that the rural and remote districts are performing well even in the Madhyamik and Plus-2 levels, almost everyone in the ‘top 10 lists’, had links to either to some village school of Bankura or South Dinajpur or hailed from a very backward class of the society. It’s debatable because these guys might had been very good students and they performed exceptionally well in the exams. But what used to steal our eyes is that reputable institutions like Narendrapur Ramkrishna Mission, SPHS, Nava Nalanda or St. Lawrence had no students belonging to them who were in the merit lists! May be this was possible. The quality of students in the urban areas might be deteriorating during that time. But it’s also questionable. Whatever, the Government policy to focus on the rural literacy was really a very good idea. But it forgot the policies of the local ‘netas’. Just think of this. Is this possible for anyone of us, sitting here in Kolkata, to investigate whether a certain village, with its diverse population, is actually getting proper literary enhancements or not. The answer is “no”. If it would have been a privatized matter, then also corruption would struck in it. The local party workers needed to show that their Panchayats were doing well and they showed it to the administration. And I think, even in some cases, the figures were ‘disfigured’ in the higher levels of authority. How could WB be behind Kerala in literacy rate! After all we had the same colour. The colour of ‘red’.

Time has changed. May be the colours are changing. We don’t even care these days about the literacy rates because already so many numbers of engineers are ‘produced’ in the ‘factories’ that one might curse the system of making so many people literate! Well, if literacy only means to become an engineer or a doctor, then the system should be cursed. But I think, literacy has also got some other meanings. These meanings, I think, the people of some ‘Lalgarh’ or ‘Nandigram’ don’t know; otherwise there could be something else happening now. If the Government properly puffed the ‘spread Literacy’ mission, these places could be different. People could know that literacy doesn’t only mean knowing the names of some scholars or scientists and mugging up some formulas; it also means finding the proper ways of living, cultivating ways to ensure proper nourishment, realization of the major necessities in our lives.

Eve

It’s 3 in the morning. Soumya and Soumyadeep are planning to sleep though they don’t know whether it is a wise decision to sleep or not; because they have to leave the flat at around 4.30 and reach Howrah station by 5.30. They are going Maithon. And only the last evening, the three spent one of the most exciting moments of their lives at BBD Bag area in deciding where to go. They found the train, found the lodge, found the hunger in them.

Kolkata is a very nice city with its fast life. The streets are nice, the signals are better, the traffic is best. The 3 idiots spend most of their time in these streets (don’t get surprised; it’s the job!). But only a year ago they were not like this. One of them tries to catch the old charm of college life, so usually gets into JU campus almost every day. Another finds his home comfortable, keeping some pains inside himself. The 3^rd one finds solace in something else, trying to cover up his sins: The 3 monkeys of Kolkata.

No one knows these three guys. They are not popular in their localities. They don’t play in the state or national levels. They didn’t get rank in the plus-2 exams. They are not scientists. They are very ordinary. Just like you. Shocked!! So let’s start. Let’s call them X, Y and Z.

X is a very simple person. He had been a very good student (not the best) in his school days. In 2005 he got into JU EE dept. He couldn’t perform their well. Don’t ask why. Because engineering students don’t know the reasons. They only know the effects. Perhaps he tried to know only a few effects. That’s why he still gets scolded by his girlfriend ( plz don’t laugh. Many of us have this luck :P). Everyone used to make laugh of him. He was a “khorak maal” of the group. His innocent smiles would never get dry. At least he had the heart to feel a heart.

Y, I don’t know much about him. But as far as I have known him, he never hurts. He is almost like X. The basic difference is that he is a bit introvert. He speaks rarely about his love, his family. He speaks less. He thinks more, thinks smart. To quote: “my processor speed is almost 3GHz but the RAM is not that good”. He had spent his old times in quite a different way from that of Z’s.

Z is a very bad person. He is very selfish. He uses people to enjoy. He only thinks of himself. But he, doing so, never wants to hurt people. He is, all the time, dealing with problems, of his, of others. He thinks no one understands him. That’s his problem. He is the man, who has so many dreams. But the reality has something different in store for him.

These three blokes came from different backgrounds, different societies. They lived their lives in almost different ways. But the fates brought them together. The entrapped minds tried to break free at the same time. May be they were tired of the city. May be Yan Martel changed the minds. May be the forests were beckoning. May be one of them was trying to flee away from the near death or may be one of them tried to know how it feels to perceive the wretchedness. The three might had something very uncommon that kept them fighting for tickets of the train to go into the wilds. But they came closer and together they fought to jump off the barriers. X, perhaps wanted to enjoy because he seemed tired of the daily ragging of his girlfriend or parents. Y seemed tired of himself and thought this could be the way. Z was actually trying to escape from the present, from the reality. He didn’t know how to cope up with the difficulties. Perhaps the first time in his life or the second!

They are now asleep, maybe. They can’t be seen. The lights are off. They are the not the gunners like ‘Sid’ or ‘DJ’ of RDB. They are not creating history by making this short trip. But their hearts are clean. They need further purification. The young hearts are trying to beat in the same rhythm as those of the research scholars, trying their best to invent the cure-alls. The dreams inside them need a ‘surge’ to hold them back from dissipation. This trip may prove the effects. I am just waiting to see how these innocent hearts sing so that I can stop being selfish. Because I want to live again like them, happily.

Golazo...

It’s the World Cup season. Brazil, Argentina, Germany, England are again in the task of showing their team work, fighting for the glory. Girls are dying to see Kaka, running like a Cheetah or Villa sporting his trendy haircut. Young footballers are keeping a close look on Iniesta’s dribblings, Messi’s races, Robinho’s Samba. If u walk by your regular ‘paras’, you will see new faces; the new faces playing football along with the regular roadies. If you stop in a traffic signal and look into the jewelry showroom by the street, you will find the keepers watching the game in their TV, as still as statues; if you go to the park, where you pay regular visits for evening strolls, you will find no space even when it is 6 by the watch! There are posters, flags statues of Maradona or Pele all over the city. It’s madness after all. It’s World Cup after all. It’s football after all.

Then the day comes when Brazil succumbs and Argentina gets tamed. Messi flops and Fabiano cries. The living legends get entrapped by the new age warriors like Sneijder or Xavi. The ‘para’ club members, who have been shouting from the very first match to support their favorite superstars, start shouting at them. When Messi misses the post by an inch, someone from the crowd suggests to playing from behind; when Torres fails to prove his excellence, someone throws bottle at the TV set to advice him to get substituted. With all the agonies buried deep within their heart, the fans cry in pain to witness the loss of the great guns of soccer. They burn their effigies and flags. They tear away the posters with tears.

This is Kolkata, the city of joy; the city of strikes. This is the city where in every house, there is at least one person who has once ever wanted to become like Pele. This is the city where the students play football in the basketball courts of their schools. Here, people call Saurav Ganguly the “Maharaj” and also call Maradona the “God”. Every one, in a hundred people of the city knows how to play football. Every one, in a fifty knows about Barcelona and Manchester United. But only one, among a thousand gets the opportunity to experience the divinity, to play in a club and reach the pinnacle. So, might be there are very few clubs around you. Isn’t it? No. We know that there are hundreds of clubs around us. Each and every ‘para’ has at least one club which wants to make a new Baichung or Mehtab ( He rose from our ‘para’!). Then? “Actually there is no future in this career. How much can he earn even if he plays in the 1^st division?”, said the maam, who was siiting beside me in SD4. Along with her, there was her kid, perhaps a 5 year old, carrying a huge bag( which I asked him to show later and the bag had in it 2 bats, 2 pads, one helmet, 2 pairs of gloves, arm guard etc etc and also water bottles, glucose etc etc) and staring surprisingly at me as I was speaking of his learning football instead of cricket. It’s true that we shout for Sachin, Saurav, Dhoni and Yuvraj at a higher level but it’s also true that we often fall out when there is game between KEB and MMB. So what can be the deciding factor that we send our colts to hit a “sixer”, instead of asking him to learn dribbling like Barreto or Christiano Ronaldo! May be broadcasting problems?( “Yes..that is a huge reason!”) We don’t have the privilege to see the local matches. Doordarshan, which is getting worse day by day, can at least broadcast these matches! Clever ones may opt for “podcasting”, but the thing is that how can we know about the local warriors if we go on sticking to same ESPN or Star Sports to see Ashle Cole running the whole day or Maicon playing both the ‘right back’ and ‘right wing’ the whole month(or may be the whole season!)? We know about the remotest counties of London and their players only because we see them on our channels. We know that there are Asia Cup, T20 Cup, Champions Trophy, Ashes only because we see the campaigns all day long in our favorite sports channels. So, if the local football matches are shown in the channels (well, even if it is Doordarshan), then we can know more about the game, more about the players. It can increase our interest and enthusiasm. Basically football is a game which is dependent entirely upon the players. It has got no sense of “grammar” (cricketers often use this word..sorry). It involves all the "six senses". It is felt by passion. It is a game where 11 brains coincide; where a 11 heart has to beat in the same rhythm ( by the way, may be out of the context, but Agarkar, successively ducked in 5 innings and still India won some of the matches; whereas Dhoni is a “grammatical player”? I am sorry. Fallacies you see… ).

If we are really so mad to shout for hours, even when the clock ticks 2 at the midnight, for a player, who lives thousand miles away, who doesn’t even know that we had been cheering for so long, then we are mad. Yes we are mad about the game. Can the Government hear us? We are mad about playing football. We need stadiums, proper stadiums, not like ‘Kalyani stadium’, where if you kick the ball to the bars, the goalkeeper saves the ‘mud’, not the goal. We need attention from all the levels of our society. CCFC and many other elite clubs have been arranging corporate football tournaments to spread the mania. Even in this year, there had been many tournaments in the city where many teams participated. We need a good broadcasting of the game through the channels. We need posters of Baichung, Subroto or Alvito to be hung around the city highs. We need to channelize our passion for the game. We have the blood of football. So, let’s start donating.

P.S: Some guys come to play in JU ground putting on original Nike or Adidas. It’s different if this increases their interest and love for the game or raises their “enthu”, but first of all, you people please learn to play with the ball, then play the “F” series :D

I think, therefore I am

When I woke up this morning, I was a bit surprised. Because of the hump in my right leg, I could not attend the regular lambaste (of my boss) and I had to stay in the couch with my laptop. Oh yes, the shocking thing: I felt that I was actually making up my mind since last night not to visit the so-called "outdoor". Was it a co-incidence that I felt the pains only this morning! Perhaps everything I see, I feel that I want to see them. If we all think over this thing, we may run into confusion. May be we see things because there is something inside us which forces things to be done that way. We may think of the world as a kaleidoscopic ever evolving scene, which always keeps on changing as we want. A "psychic" dimension we may call it. Some of us don't believe in God, some believe in ghosts and some people don't want to believe anything. We doubt about the things which may or may not exist. It might be the case that we ourselves don't exist. It happens sometimes that we feel " This words I have heard before" or " I think I have visited this place before" or "I could visualize this thing before". The existent don't have the power to control the things as they pass by. Only the non-existent possess that. May be we are not existing at all; nothing is real. We make up things in our minds and try to mould the things in our own pattern. We hear the things as we want to hear; we need to get tensed, so we create the problems in our own way. The feelings of disgust, envy, treachery, hypocrisy etc are all our self-creation. We can feel happy in any of the ways, but we say "I am not happy" only to give ourselves a chance to recreate a new mental thought to be implemented later, somehow. If we stop thinking we will land up in an absolute deserted scenario. One can think in this way: Science proves everything. So the great powers of Buddha or Ramakrishna can be enlightened in this context. They had control over their thoughts. May be they were the ones who discovered that we don't exist. They created their own world of thoughts, but as they were "Caspers", as they had more concentration and meditating abilities, their worlds were at the most felt by us; we could not perceive or see them. "Divinity" we may call it. What if I say that the world is a home for our thoughts and the people around us are imginary and they play their roles accordingly. This world is a matrix of the complex patterns which are joined very orderly in our minds. A "mystic vision" may help us knowing the existing and non-existing. May be we cannot see beyond 3 dimensions because our minds do not want to. May be the Heaven or Hell are beyond these 3 dimensions! To see a 3D image we need special glasses; may be someday the scientists will be able to invent specs by which we will be able to visualize many more dimensions. Then, we might see others' thoughts effecting or generating images which appear before us and we may discover the secrets of the mind, brain and universe. At least for now, We are because we want to and we think, therefore we are.

TIGERS 6th May, 2010

I don’t know whether how many of us have read “Life of Pie”. It’s a wonderful story depicting the life of Mr. Patel where he scores high for elucidating the zoo-life: how animals feel, what they want and what freedom is meant for them. Somewhere in the book he says, “In many ways, running a zoo is a hotelkeeper’s worst nightmare. Consider: the guests never leave their rooms; they expect not only lodging but full board…Each guest is very particular about his or her diet.” Now Mr. Jairam Ramesh is only concerned over the tiger reserves and he is right in many ways. Think of a tiger reserve which is banned from tourism and the authority is running out of stock in all ways: fooding, lodging and money (funds). When the foreign visitors come to see these national parks, they spend quite a lot of pounds or dollars to experience such beauty. Thus the revenues earned from these tourists are undoubtedly worthwhile. It’s very much true that there are very few (only 1411) tigers left in India. But will not that be a little jerky to insist on ban on tourists only to increase the number of tigers? After so many altercations regarding the widening of the road from Nagpur to Jabalpur through Pench reserve forest, from 18 mtrs to 30 mtrs, it was even a dilemma of the bench: to save tiger or to save money. Here the main dispute was whether widening a road was really going to cause harm to the natives of the forests or not. Banning tourists from entering the reserves is really a foolish idea. However, so long as the ‘save tiger project’ is concerned, it is nothing to do with the tourism; because all what tourists want is a fresh glimpse of the flesh eating giants running through the greens and not to put their lives at stake. Considering the monetary aspect, the oppositions should be ready to find an alternative way to arrange for the same amount of maintenance fund to be provided to the national parks if they become void of the nature lovers.

Echelons Of Despodency

Look up; look alone

And when you can see those thousand stars

Striving for stature, you smile at their destines.

I look often at those red pisces

Running hastily for a passive corner in the jar;

Smothering their beauty and squelching the rebels inside;

I look often.

__________________________________________

I Could not love them

For she never loved me and

Now when i look at nothing,

I stare at the empty place and

Cry for the same destiny.

Face

''When was the last time you felt the rains?''

And she didn't stop to give a reply..

It was raining heavily;

I remember the panic room,

Clowns bargaining on the flesh and sweat;

Red, clumsy walls closing; so close; too close;

And the breasts awaiting the acoustics..

The known faces hiding an innocent smile and

When the drizzles were oozing like blood,

Blood started outshining the rivulets

And the flow flushing us away to the door -

Prologues of free smile, free soul and free rains..

I don't know whether I will be edging the

Denouement or perhaps the

Story hasn't ended, though I will not wait

For the rains to stop; the peacock is still dancing;

It is raining heavily.