SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY

Tahirir Square replicated at India Gate. Even if the context is not the same, the visuals at the India Gate, around Raisina Hill, reminds us of the people’s protest in Egypt we have witnessed recently. Initially when the protests began in Delhi with hundreds of people, mostly young boys and girls gathering at the India Gate with candles in their hands and demanding justice for the 23-year-old girl who was brutally gang raped and assaulted in the capital of the country, it seemed it would be another phase of candle-happy-citizens’ ‘outrage’. But it proved many of us wrong. Be it because of the social media or electronic, the people were moved. They were moved to come out and demand an answer, an assurance from the government. We saw the first of its kind agitation at the India Gate over the weekend. This unique demonstration by thousands showed how young people were actually outraged, from the core of their hearts. The 23-year-old girl’s plight made us all feel ashamed of our society, our system. When the rape victim was fighting for life at the hospital, young India realized this was not the time they could sit at home! For the first time in Delhi, the youth came out on the streets without any banner, without any organized platform and without any leadership. There has been a tremendous insecurity among the women and also their parents and families over their safety in public. This spontaneous street protest gave all of them a voice. More than condemning the incident of rape, this gave all of them an opportunity to raise issues which needed concrete action from the police and administration.

Yes the anger and the ‘animal’ within us came out. Many of us wanted the rapists to be handed over to the mob or castrated in full public view and the demand for ‘hang them’ grew louder and louder. Any sensible person will shiver imagining what the 23-year-old had to go through in the bus where she was raped by the gang of men on that fateful night. This is not too abnormal to demand the strictest punishment for the culprits, even if the law and rational logic defy our emotions. Unfortunately the Indian Penal Code, Section 376, does not provide for death as punishment for rape. Since the girl is alive, the crime would not invite Section 302 of the IPC or charges of murder as yet. So technically the culprits, though they have accepted their crime, can not be hanged at the end of the trial. We are also aware of our long judicial process and the apathy of the police and administration which make us angrier. How apathetic the administration was to this case, was evident from the compliments showered on Delhi Police by the Home Secretary of India after the police arrested the culprits. The bureaucrats and the police wanted us to forget it took almost a week to arrest all of them and they could not prevent this crime. It wanted us to forget the police patrolling is not strong enough to prevent such crime in future. It wanted us to forget the police, at many places, continue to refuse the rape victims from lodging FIR or taking any action at all. They wanted us to forget the women are not yet safe in public. The administration considered it to be ‘just another rape case’ like 24,206 cases that got registered in the country in 2011 alone. But the protestors didn’t let it go.

We were witness to the capital punishment of Dhananjoy Chatterjee who spent 14 years in prison after he raped and murdered a school girl, Hetal Parekh, in Kolkata and before he could actually be hanged passing through the legal process. It was much hyped story in the media. Still it could not stop rape cases. It is an inherent problem with the society. The mindset of the patriarchal society can not be changed overnight and it can not all be left to the administration. The cudgel should be taken up by every sensible citizen. We should all stand up and protest every single case of eve teasing to start with and any kind of violence against women or men to take the fight forward. No person should feel she or he is helpless at the face of any kind of sexual assault. This unprecedented protest should initiate the social movement that should not be confined to the cities and towns but reach the grassroots in the villages, but law cannot be taken up by the citizens in their own hands.

 

This is why the protest which unfortunately turned violent later should not be undermined. The protests at India Gate has created a possibility to  shake up the police, administration and the political class. It is shameful that no politician or anyone from the government could come out and share the sentiments of the protestors in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan. It was a great opportunity for President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, to show he was people’s president. It was a great opportunity for the ‘crown prince’ Rahul Gandhi to join the movement and probably begin his campaign for 2014. It was a great opportunity for the opposition BJP to take up the matter seriously pressurizing the government to act. But none came forward. The Leader of the Opposition, Sushma Swaraj tweeted that she requested the Prime Minister to call a special session of parliament. That is all. The country seriously failed to understand, as the protestors rocked Rajpath, if there was a prime minister in the country. Instead the police baton-charged and lobbed tear gas shells on the young protestors who chanted slogans and broke barricades demanding ‘justice’.

A judicial commission, a committee and assurance of speedy trial can not really tame the anger. We are all habituated with this mechanism of diverting the attention. The people want something concrete. Concrete like amending the IPC and introducing the strictest punishment for eve teasers, molesters and rapists. This can be done by calling a special session of parliament. The amendment bill is lying with the House for almost six years. Concrete measures like setting up first track courts for cases related to violence against women, increasing police patrolling, sensitizing the police force, stressing on community policing, etc should be taken up immediately.

In fact there is a disconnect between the political-executive class and the common man. Tahirir Square marked a turning point for the history of Egypt. Let’s hope India Gate brings a new dawn for our beloved country and the ‘symbolism’ of the protests over the 23-year-old girl who is showing signs of life in the hospital bed, does not die down.  

THE PUJA RITUAL

 Pandal hopping in Kolkata during Durga Puja has always been an attraction. Being born and brought up in a suburban town, it was a great feat for me to visit Kolkata pandals. My oldest memories of Kolkata puja are tram ride and pandal hopping with my father’s friend and his family. I still remember we used to go to Pamdapukur and I used to look at the pandal in the middle of the pond with a lot of amazement. As I was growing up, the fun was more in running around with my friends in my neighbourhod than taking the plight of wading through the waves of revelers to have a glimpse of the pandals and the idols in Kolkata, as over years, the number of pandal hoppers increased manifold with the advent of ‘theme puja’. In later years, thanks to my friends in Kolkata, I made it a point to visit Kolkata atleast one day during the puja, more to have adda with them rather than queuing up with thousand others to enter the pandals. For many, flaunting the list of pandals they visited was like showing off their treasure. I wanted to stay away from this practice.

During my college days, Durga Puja in Madox Square was a new revelation. Having endless adda with friends at the Madox Square puja ground brought a new kind of pleasure. For us it was like a reunion. All the past and present students of our college gathered there during the festival. Over the years the quality of the crowd changed. Madox remained as nostalgia in many of our hearts.

For last few years my wife has dragged me into a Durga Puja ‘ritual’ I preferred to stay away from. As a Delhi girl, her experience of Kolkata Puja was limited to TV viewing. So I took the responsibility, in the first year of our marriage, to introduce her to Kolkata Puja. We decided to take a round of the city pandals on Chaturthi/Panchami day before the revelers could crowd them. Now the ‘introduction’ has become a habit. I never thought that I would go overnight pandal hopping every year. But I do.

From next year I really wish to give this ‘ritualistic habit’ a pass. These days we no longer go to a pandal to find if Mother Dura has angry eyes or calm ones, if the asura has the right moustache, if the trident has hit the right part of the asura’s chest. It is more like, as one of my friends puts it, the greatest celebration of art. At every thematic pandal, it appears as an open quiz to understand the theme of the pandal. The same uses of abstract idea in erection of the pandals, the same use of light and darkness, overuse of blue and red lights have started to bore me.

Simple adda and good food should be all that I wish to enjoy during Durga Puja, may be, like a boring Bengali.

LET US NOT BE SNUBBED ANYMORE

For last almost a week, I spent most of my time in a city private hospital. No it was not me but my father who fell ill and had to be hospitalized. After the doctors at emergency addressed his immediate problems, he was admitted. Next morning came a strange doctor whom we met for the first time as the hospital authority almost thrust him on us. To our utter amazement he turned out to be a semi-God for us. Though we had to wait outside his OPD chamber with my ailing father for about two hours in two phases, the way he welcomed us to his chamber, we digested the anger that was piling inside us. After a long time we met a doctor who after checking my father and before prescribing any medicine or advising any surgery, sat with us including my father and started drawing the organs where the problem lies. In layman’s language he explained every bit of the physical problem and then talked about the options to solve it. Any handsome or beautiful doctor smiling at us and saying ‘don’t worry’ makes half of our illness go. Here we got a doctor who not only gave a smiling welcome but also made the problem clear to us. I believe 99 percent doctors don’t even tell the patient what his problem is. We began to trust him. He listened to us and cleared all our doubts one by one patiently.

When the medications, the first option the doctor tried with our consent, didn’t help, he suggested we should go for surgery. We agreed. Outside the operation theatre, everyone must be feeling that the clock doesn’t move, all the bad things will happen to us and what the doctors are tampering with inside for so long. All ears are alert to listen to the bed number or the name of their own patient as the security guards call out at regular interval. We went through the same experience. But the shock came a little later. As my father’s bed number was called out we almost ran to the door of the operation theatre only to be told by the young nurse, the surgery went well and he was fine. Going by the medical ethics, she showed us the sample they collected from the organ operated upon. When we asked her how long it would take to get him back to the bed, she said since spinal anesthesia had been administered it would take another 45 minutes or so for him to come back to his senses completely.

 Spinal Anesthesia! But we had given consent for General Anesthesia! When we confronted the nurse, she almost ran away saying, “I am telling the doctor to speak to you.” For another five to ten minutes, none turned up as we were fuming. How could you administer something when we had given consent for something else? In fact, the preceding night an anesthetist had come and as we opted for General Anesthesia, she clearly had written on the consent form that ‘the patient party is opposed to spinal anesthesia’. I signed opting for General Anesthesia as, in our family, we had a bad experience of post operative impact of administration of anesthesia through spinal cord. We wondered how the doctors could do otherwise at the operation table. If something went wrong!

After repeated insistences, a while later I was called inside and a doctor popped out of a room to introduce himself as head of Anesthesia department. I really shouted at him and asked for an answer, “Why did you administer spinal anesthesia when we were opposed to it?” He reasoned, ‘’I was present there and I thought it to be the best for him at this age. Rather general anesthesia might cause problem.’’ My next question, most important of all, was “Even if I accept your argument, why didn’t you inform us before doing what you thought to be the best. After all we gave our consent for something else.” He could realize I was asking him a very logical and ethical question and not just shouting at him. He looked down and found an answer, “I asked the patient at the operation table. He said yes to spinal anesthesia.” His answer really amused me! “Do you think the patient who is at the operation theatre for the first time in his life would be mentally strong enough to understand the difference and give his consent at that moment? I had signed the consent papers and I must have been told what changes you were making. If something went wrong who would have been responsible?” The doctor promised to own the responsibility but I knew what had to happen have happened. Administering spinal anesthesia is easier for the doctors and may be for some patients with some medical difficulties.

Fortunately so far nothing is wrong with my father after he has been discharged from the hospital. It may be so the spinal anesthesia won’t, probably, create much problem for him. But the point I was fighting for that day is why the hospital authority should not inform the relatives of the patient when they had to go against the consent. If that young nurse would not have told us, probably we would come back satisfied with the fact, a wrong one, he was operated under general anesthesia. We had fortunately got an excellent doctor in a famous hospital; still we had to face this. I wonder what happens in other places and in 99 per cent of the cases!

Last evening I came across a story of a 12 year old boy who had sudden attack of epilepsy during a simple operation of tonsillitis and went into coma. The doctors claim the parents didn’t inform them that the boy had a history of epilepsy and it went wrong. The parents claim they didn’t know about it and the doctors didn’t carry the pre-operative tests properly. Reports suggest the hospital could not produce any consent paper which had the signature of the parents.

Most of us lack medical knowledge. We don’t know what the actual procedure is and in most of the cases we are snubbed by the hospital authority and the doctors for asking a question, may be a right one. We seriously need an awareness programme and government kiosks at every hospital for layman like us to clear certain complicated issues so that none can cheat us, take us for granted at the hospitals and make us fool. Will the Consumer Affairs department always be in a sleeping mode?

LESS TALK

Being out of Bengal for about a month, covering one ‘M’ – the Maoists in Odisha, I realize I have missed out a lot of action in the land of other ‘M’ – Mamata Banerjee. Bengal has become the permanent national headline. Continuous news coverage in the state, both in national and regional media, reveals the bottom-line: Mamata is intolerant, autocratic and inefficient. News stories are revolving around this agenda. Some media houses are covering her from inside the ‘library’ and some are from outside it. Interestingly, there is no dearth of stories for any of them. Everyday issues are being delivered at the doorsteps.

Every morning the columnist in newspapers and every evening the expert panelists on TV channels are dissecting the government’s performance and the trend which its chief minister is following. So many theories are emerging out of it and many are being applauded by the ‘common man’. But what is the root cause of this turbulence in the area of governance? Why are the professors, intellectuals, many who supported Paribartan, anti-establishment activists getting a chance to hit the streets to protest against certain decisions of the chief minister and the government? Isn’t 10 months too early for a state which sent Mamata Banerjee to Writers’ Building with such huge mandate to turn its back to the same fiery lady? What’s going wrong?

In Odisha, chief minister Naveen Patnaik follows a system of addressing the media. When the assembly is in session, he would not speak about anything which he has not told the house. If he makes a statement in the assembly, he will come out and make the same statement, a written one, to the media. When the assembly is not in session and, let’s say, he is chairing an important meeting, his PRO will call the waiting journalists and note down the questions, as many as they have. Naveen will come out of the meeting and answer those questions one by one referring to the note he has prepared and is holding in his hands, will not take any supplementary questions, walk to his car and go home. I don’t know how he addresses the public rallies. I suppose he would be this articulate and adapt this short-crisp-to-the-point approach while communicating to the people as well. In this process, Naveen minimizes the chances of speaking more and speaking nonsense. Though the Odisha television media is in its infancy, still I don’t think any matured media also can catch him at the wrong foot at least in terms of his speech or words.

In Bengal, with due respect to Mamata Banerjee’s down to earth approach in communicating with the people, her audience, Mamata’s big mistake lies in talking much, talking extra. I was covering a government function at Basirhat, a function to launch several government and railways projects in the sub-division. In her speech the chief minister kept on mentioning the achievements of the government. She was referring to a draft of what will be published as a booklet documenting the achievements of her government at the end of a year in Writers’ Building. It was full of brilliant figures and enough to satisfy the people present there. After finishing that part she referred to the Nonadanga controversy without naming it. She assured her government was still against any kind of forceful eviction, but would also not tolerate any NGO bringing people from outside and organizing a movement (something she has done all through her political career). She is free to change her stand after coming to power according to the need of the principles of governance. But then came the moment. She kept on talking. She kept on daring the critics and she went up to the extent of issuing an advisory: there are two or three CPIM news channels. Don’t watch them. It will make you lose your cool and that can disturb your brain. So watch channels like Star Jhalsa, Channel 10. Listen to ‘peaceful programmes’.

My question is why a chief minister should talk about unnecessary things when she was very well boasting about the achievements of her government. Let that be criticized. But people would at least talk about that. She herself had spoilt the game.

Recall any incident be it crib death, Raigunge principal bashing, renaming of Indira Bhavan, Park Street rape, Katwa gang rape, former CPIM MLA murder, cartoon row, everywhere CM’s unwanted comments have aggravated the issues which ultimately went out of control. CPIM probably used to do same things but it was subtle. This government is exposing itself to controversies.

Talking less and working more should be the mantra for the Bengal government.

LOST AT THE FINGERTIPS

I

Dreams break into pieces with the most annoying sound coming from a far away world. I struggle to open my eyes. Eyes are half open and still groggy with sleep I try to locate the source of the sound that gives a shock. A shock, which marks the beginning of a hectic day. Now with eyes closed again one of my paws stumble on the device and turn off the wake up call. Soon as the sensors carry the message, my eyes are now wide open. I pick up the device lying beside the pillow, wake up to realize I am 10 minutes late to start the day. Sitting up, I look at the device once again. Is there a call I missed while ‘dreaming’ or a message that needs to be attended? Is there a mail waiting to be opened in the inbox? Taking stock of the hours spent sleeping, I get ready to conquer the day, a new one, like a daily-wage earner. I clutch the device tight. The device, my closest companion in life: a Smart Phone.

II

The boy in white uniform, holding the books and the notes close to his chest, walks past the bridge over the lake. Smelling the chapa flower, listening to the chirping birds retiring to their nests, surrounded by the soothing greenery, ignoring the sound of ping pong from the common room and the clinking of the utensils towards the dining room, he unlocks the door. He goes straight to the window and looks up through it. Is there any activity on the corner of the second floor balcony? Not yet, confirms his roommate. This time the boy straightens himself on the bed, lying on his chest facing the window, gazing at the third floor. Yes, after a while, the Brother walks in the frame. The Brother carries a bunch of yellow and greenish blue stuff and puts them into a wooden box. The boy and his friends run up to find if they are the lucky prize winner of the day. If luck favours, the joyous face flaunts the prize from the second floor. The handwriting on top of it tells him all. He has the most precious possession of the day, the fresh air from home: a letter. The boy goes through every word at a go. Reads it again and again. The lines bring silent smiles or tearful eyes. At the end it brings an untold joy. Before dusk as daylight fades, the boy takes a shower, wraps around the white dhoti and uttorio, moves toward the prayer hall. It was time to press the refresh button. Serenity engulfs him. Blurred alleys come clearer. Heart is sunk in purity. Recharged he makes a move towards study.

III

There is no permanent address for me anymore. The roots have weakened. I roam, I move and I live in a virtual world, a world shared by millions of people, yet is full of solitude. I don’t write anymore, I type. I talk less nowadays, I type more. I hold the world at my fingertips. News, good and bad, creeps in by every second. Once in a while messages pop out of the box coming from the distant world. They are not elaborate but crisp and short. I am privileged to have two windows that keep me asking ‘what’s happening?’ and ‘what’s on your mind?’ I converse with them. Don’t think I don’t know you anymore. I peep through the windows of my small and cozy world at the corner of the globe and stare at you like a voyeur. We have forgotten to write to each other, but I know every movement you make, every person you have in your life, every thought you share with the world. I have seen you grow. I know you have forgotten every curve of the letters that used to fill up pages. Electronic waves have engulfed us all.

IV

3:30 am

“….Just finished writing the projects for tomorrow. It is still dark outside. But I am waiting for the magic light as the day dawns. It looks beautiful to see the blinking bulbs of the factory at the foothill will fade away soon and the mystic hills will unfold before my eyes as I look through the windows. This place is cool. I have been writing this letter for last seven days. I think I must post it today as I go downtown during the recess. Do I have the postal stamps? Let me check. Yes I have them. Then I can tell Basant bhai to drop it at the post box when he goes out for lunch….”

The bunch of letters chronicled the life we spent then. It told about the emotional battles we fought in life. It recorded the differences of opinion we had in our mind. It exchanged simple news that we reached safe and we are doing well. The nostalgia over the bluish green inland letters which initially seemed a lot of space to write on, but turned out to be too small to write the concluding lines, the yellowish envelop which sometimes could not hold the thickly bended papers full of my thoughts, the blue and red aerogram for the pen-pals (archaic) still haunts me. Queuing up before the small counter and weighing the envelope to buy the exact amount of postage stamp to be pasted was exciting. Uncertain if the letter will reach on time or will land in the right hands was always a question but that ‘wait’ at the end of it gave an emotional pleasure. Then we all cursed Indian Postal Department but they were the only courier company available at that time and almost forgotten now!

V

The big world has shrunk and now fits into our palms, but I still miss the personal touch that’s been left behind somewhere.

(Published in Arghya, the magazine of Mahavidyalaya Praktani of RKM Residential College, Narendrapur, in 2011 issue)