Fare thee Well...Miss Williams

Today was one of those days when u feel a lil bit tired and a lil bit sad and yet..theres all of this joy to compete with the feelings of sadness. Rambling again aren’t I…when will I learn…so getting to the point…today I wished farewell to one of my bestest office mates and I hope my frnd for life Margaret…the girl is stupid and weird and strange and yet we gelled…major 377 bonding happening some ppl thought…hehehe…dude only we knw the truth na…hahaa..ok enogh procrastinating. Margaret is one of those ppl u see on the road and the face although not beautiful would arrest many. No lesbian feelings dude but have nice skin and nice hair wic we were supposed to get cut for the past 3 months!!!

It just makes me think about the changes that life has in store for each one of us. Friends that we cant stop talking to one day we just completely forget just ten days later. Is that what life is…just keep moving, one relationship to another, one friendship to the next all in the vain hope of filling a vacuum, a vacuum so deep and dark at times it threatens to engulf the person in each of us…a lonliness so sad we wudnt know where to find companionship…desperate, frantic efforts to fill out lives with noise…conversation, laughter, music, sex., booze, smokes, anything…anything to drown out the scary vacuum, the lonely nights and the lonliness in the day…a life so filled with miseries and deadlines and backstabbing and lies and love and losses and career runs and trying to get right up there with the best…in the hope of pleasing someone…someone u love..someone u hope would love u..someone u can be urslf arnd…100% no questions asked… a bare caricature with ur faults and all ur insecurities…

Why am I talking bout such sadness…this is supposed to be a happy writing…in Mimi’s own words a tribute…to the time we spent together…doing god knws wat…the reason is pretty simple…Margaret and me were to each other the single losers who listened to all our crap about all that was wrong in our existence…she was my hope, my entertainment and my fun at work…no competition, no questions asked, I spent some amazing time wid her being horribly irresponsible…my attempts to convince her to lemme smoke and her attempts to keep me away are the true stuff of legends!!! Will miss u dude…u were…different…loads of love and all the luck…God bless

I wonder...

The driver to the office cab was feeling mighty chatty today...madam ap kahan se ho...kitna umar hai..kitna bhi behen hai...N i just felt mighty irritated...why cant he just mind his own business I wondered...Uff so bugging baba...Just out of sheer irritation and a lil bit of wanting to not talk bout me to a lowly driver I asked him..Bhaiya apka ghar kahan hai...He told me he doesnt go home more than once a week...rest of the time he sleeps in the car itself..."ek hi problem hai ab...pankha rehta tha gadi mein na to neend a jata tha malik ne pankha hata diya hai to thoda problem hai"with an accompanying smile. I wonder where has the human me had gone...is it dead???Could it be that a long fight with a bad illness has made me impervious to anyone's problems but my own...or has the rush of materialism reached such a pinnacle that I can no longer think, see, hear, or feel beyond myself...I just wonder....

The problem with Bengal....

Someone told me today that the problem with Bengal is Bengalis. Interestingly enough I have heard many a people’s takes on what constitutes the problem that is Bengal today. Most are pretty strong in their convictions. The Bengalis themselves are to be blamed for their horrid lot in life cos they’ve elected the same government for the past 30 friggin years!!! All Bengalis are pseudo intellectuals. They think they know it all. The same someone who said that Bengalis are Bengal’s problem also told me that the entire place is characterized by red flag dadagiri- or in the more recent context didigiri.

Why then am I writing this as my first post…I ask myslf the same question even as I start penning this down…I mean its no secret that im no big fan of the place. I am not a Bengali, nor a Bengali sympathizer…I don support the Left or the center or the very non existent right in this place…why then??? Think…think…No reason in special. Just thought I should start my journey back to writing by writing bout the place where I grew up and spent my whole life except a vagrant and lets face it weird year in Delhi.

I realized just a few days back, Bengal is not just about Kolkata. It is not just about the city. It can never be just about Kolkata. Yea so wat!!! Bengal today is about Singur, Nandigram, Darjeeling, Lalgarh and many others like it. What has happened to the state? Its gone to the dogs some say…it went to the dogs some 30 years back say others. It’s a dog eaten state with no industry and no hope…stinking fish eating pseudo intellectual residents who don even know about the good life. I think im rambling a lil bit now…the tirades of a sad soul who is trying to defend something indefensible...

Why then is Bengal different? I am still trying to search for an answer. Lets try and talk about the land acquisition issues…Singur, Nandigram and Mamata. Lemme reiterate, I do not support the lal jhandadharis. Bengal has the lowest private average landholding size in any state in India. Till 2002, the government of Bengal had distributed about 1.045 million acres of land among 2.544 million beneficiaries. This would then make the average landholding size in Bengal as small as .20 ha in size. This would also then mean that over 40% of the farmers in this godforsaken place own land. Small tracts of land..barely enough for sustanence but land nonetheless and their own land at that...I hate numbers, always have…but I needed to understand this in terms of numbers couldn’t do this widout them. So back to the issue at hand. In Singur, the land under dispute was about 180 acres much less than the 400 everyone heard of. And in trying to get back just 180 acres of land, the government had to deal with over 2500 families.

The point im trying to make here in all my ramblings is that it was the government which had through its land reforms given land and thus giventhese ppl a taste of what empowerment could feel like. The problem here therefore is not of land. It was about power. power once given to people cannot be taken away. Power that had been given to them by the much criticized, much maligned Left. The problem was and remains that the Bengali people, the villagers the poor gaw-walas are the most empowered villagers anywhere in India. They are poor yes but an astonishing number are happy in their relative poverty. The issue therefore was the taking away of the power.

Bengal is now a scapegoat. Everyone laughs at either Buddha or Mamata…well who am I to argue I laugh at them as well…hell they bring it upon themselves. But one needs to now understand and accept the fact that this is a norm that will continue for a while to come…Bengal with its culture of extremes…be its academics or militancy is probably all set to become the next most violent state in the nation Iarguably it already is) given the fact that change is bound to come. And this change will not come to Kolkata..it will come to Bankura, to Murshidabad, to Midnapore…to Nadia and many others. Wait, I think I just made an error the change may or may not come. What is bound to come now are efforts at change. These may be made by Buddha or by the verrry eccentric Mamata…no matter who tries and makes these changes, there are many a Singur waiting for this state…cos ppl will not give up their right to their power...Will keep writing it as I see it and hear it…hope there would be at least some who would rise above the pettiness of Red Bashing, Mamata bashing and Bengal bashing in general and read with an open mind….signing off…tata