Pining for Pujo

Durga Puja has begun, I am told. Where is it? Want to grow young again, enjoy the pujo, and the pandals, in new clothes. Show off the new buys, brag about the new shoes... Life was simple. Or was it :)

first Eid in Dhaka. As McD's says: Yum loving it

Saw another face of Dhaka today. Sort of dusky amid throbbing life -- everyone's out in droves, as are the lights. Out.

Who would ever have thought Star Kebab Restaurant on Dhanmondi Road # 1 would be closed on a Saturday evening? The place that could well advertise itself as the eatery that never sleeps! (And one whose rolls left Subject here with a ugh tummy, and a tale to tell).
And those restaurants near Rifles Square? Switched off for Eid, buddy, all of them.

You go, grab your grub at a relative's place; that was the motif of the city today.
Needs sort of getting used to, especially after weeks of dhingchak during Ramzan. Sobriety, after all is, part of human nature. Loved it. Need to now sit back and reflect.

On Bangabandhu: My first piece after relocating to Dhaka

All of 31, it was barely days after he was promoted as a senior photographer with the daily ‘Dainik Bangla’. Life could not have been smoother for Babu Ansari.
It was August 15, 1975, and monsoon was in the air in Dhaka. Ansari had just kicked his motorcycle to head for the day’s first assignment -- Dhaka University, where Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was to be present.

It was that split second before a motorcycle guns to a start that Ansari got the shell-shocking news: the Father of the Nation had been assassinated. He did not know what to do. His wife rushed out, and when told about the killings at the house on Dhamondi road number 32, asked in naivete: “So Begum Mujib is widowed now?”
Ansari told her about the news of the assassination and the coup.
Like others in the still-nascent nation-state of Bangladesh, the news took time to sink in.

Ansari, meanwhile, gunned his bike towards his office.
Cut ahead to 2010, he told The Independent on the eve of the National Mourning Day: “I heard in office that our chief photographer, Golam Mowlah, had gone to Bangabandhu’s house after the assassination and got the photos. He came in, soon, and narrated the scene: bullet-ridden body of Bangabandhu; his wife and son Russell lay close to each other; Sheikh Mujib’s brother was shot halfway into the bathroom; Sheikh Jamal’s bullet-ridden body lay close to a car -- he must have been about to head out somewhere…”

Now 66, Ansari’s voice cracks just that slightly over the phone, recalling the horror of August of 1975. But the seasoned photo-journalist in him soon gets the focus back. “Mowlah had taken all these photographs; there were two or three frames at least of each. From different angles.”

Soon, he said, two Armymen came to the daily’s office. “They were armed; their eyes were bloodshot -- they did not look human from any angle,” he recalled. “They wanted the photographs. Mowlah said he was too devastated and exhausted and asked me to go up to our third-floor dark room to develop the prints.”

Neither Mowlah nor Ansari could fathom what the Armymen were after.

“I was a little surprised when they followed me into the darkroom, but I did not say anything. They jumped up when I closed the door. But I had to explain patiently that we could not let light enter the room.
“As I readied the chemicals for the film, I switched off the light, and they flinched again. They wanted the light switched back on -- this time I realised the feeling off the barrel of a gun on my back.

His pulse racing ahead, Ansari told them as patiently as he could that I could not work with the lights on. “It took time to develop films those days -- and they wanted to switch on the light even before I was done. After I switched on the red light in the darkroom, they counted the films. I showed them the exposed copies and then gave them some prints.”

Intuition told him not everything was going all right. “I tried to hide a few films; I didn’t want to hand everything over to them. But they counted the exposed copies and the prints and asked me about the mismatch. I felt the gun barrel again.
“There was little I could do but hand them everything. They counted everything several times and took away everything with them -- negatives, positives, wastage… everything.”

Thirty-five years on, it still rankles Ansari that he could not save the films for posterity. “I regret till this day that I wasn’t able to preserve even one photograph. I have not talked about these issues, about the films of Bangabandhu’s assassination, because I do not want to sound supercilious about what I did -- I did what any photographer, any journalist, any nationalist, any humanist would have done. And I want people to know how the fate of those films.”
Asked about Golam Mowlah’s reaction when told that his films were taken away, he said “He was too shocked, disheartened and exhausted to react.”
He died three years later.
What survives is a colleague’s version of truth; one that no bullet can expose hollow.

(PUBLISHED IN 'THE INDEPENDENT', DHAKA: AUGUST 15, 2010

Write back after being left out

Okay, long time no write.
So, on the second day of the new year as per my calendar (and yours), I am back.
Yup, same day as you or I see (or don’t see -- depends on the state of fogginess outside. No, not because of still-lingering hangover, but the ‘thick blanket of fog enveloping the skyline’, as weather reporters love to put it.)
Yes, the very same day fog has been playing truant with visibility and trains (again, colliding with fellow train at Kanpur; Gorakhdham Express hit a “stationary” Prayagraj Express).

Yes, I am a day late, but here’s my wishlist for 2010. You keep your rear side on the chair and your hands off the ESCAPE key, and read on:

1. I shall not lie and say I am not lying.

2. I shall not tell a reporter that he’s a lousy writer, and a lousier reporter.

3. I shall not tell a deskie that he should quit journalism and try a call centre or airline calldesk job.

4. I shall try and cut down on the number of packs (cigarettes, I mean, so Shahid Kapur, Hrithik Roshan and all the filmi types can get their salary cheques).

5. I shall genuinely, genuinely, and honest-to-my-heart genuinely, try and reduce my dates with Bacchus.

6. I shall love all human beings and not tell them that they shouldn’t have tried to outlive the Neanderthal Age.

7. I shall even try and love all the dogs of this world (their population seemingly split between Vaishali, Ghaziabad, where I live; and Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, where I work).

8. I shall not tap-dance my way to the DELETE button on the keyboard the moment I see a mail from the HR guys (admission: I might just slow-waltz my way to it, whatever the difference is).

9. I shall try and do an honest day’s work every day (but, maybe, for the Sundays, when wife dear expects more out of human specimens in a day than is humanly possible in a week).

10. I shall try and keep this blog a little less spaced-out than six months, when I last wrote on it, as I just saw while logging in.

That’s it. Goodbye and good day. Now hit the ESCAPE key

In Delhi, Metro kills. (Or is it Killer Metro?)

LONG before cassettes, compact discs and other hi-tech sources of music invaded our lives, there was the humble LP – or long play records.

Now, played over and over again for every guest and her uncle’s relative who came home, the records often got scratched beyond repair, leading to the needle going all over the place. It also got stuck quite often, playing in a loop like a broken record.

Example: like India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who, plagued even as the country is with swine flu and a world of other health issues, is stuck on controlling India’s population with ideas of late marriages and late-night TV programming to deter sex.

Which brings us to the issue we might as well discuss. Population. Azad is right, in a roundabout way: India’s population is way too much for our political, civil, social and anti-social societies to care too much about a few lives gone here, and a few gone there. A few lives snuffed out by a pillar falling at a Metro construction site in South Delhi, for instance.

Or more lives that could have been snuffed out barely 30 hours later at the same site, when cranes pulling out the crashed debris crashed themselves.

The reaction: inquiry commissions galore, and the obligatory few lakhs of ‘compensations’ announced for families of the ‘victims’.

Question: Can you compensate for a life? That, too, life of the lone earning member of a family, most likely steeped in debt back in the village? For, that precisely is the state of the families of Anshuman Pratihar, Pappu Yadav, Amit Yadav and Niranjan Yadav, as reported by Delhi Newsline over the last two days.

What, pray, were they doing? Following the government’s ever-ambitious dreams of basking in its own glory, come October 2010 with the Commonwealth Games, and putting one more project on an even more ambitious track.

‘See, what we have done!’ the political class would say next October, and you can bet that your October 2010 salary on that. ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way,’ they would gleam on.

Sure, but as every smoker knows the poor-taste joke: if there’s too much of Wills, there always is a smoke.

You can’t of course blame the authorities, for within hours after six men turned ‘victims’, the Metro railway chief took ‘moral responsibility’ and resigned. But realpolitic and exigency counts more than morality these days, so he took back the resignation within a day.

Question: who will take the physical, material and corporal responsibility for turning men into photos on wall?

After all, somebody made a mess of the project. A big mess. Somebody had also made a mess at all the earlier messes on different lines of the same project.

The political class has an answer: inquiry commissions have been set up. The truth will come out soon and “action” then will be initiated against the guilty, as Urban Development Minister S Jaipal Reddy told the nation through Parliament.

Question: who will the action be initiated against? No one has been booked, after all. The police have registered cases of culpable homicide (or murder, as I prefer to out it, shorn of the cover that the pretentious word seems to offer) against ‘unknown persons’.

There you are then: somebody messed up for sure but bet your salary of October 2009 that no name will ever come out.

If it was homicide, or murder, of six young men, sure. But there are no murderers. No one is culpable.

Who needs culpability anyway? After all, there are too many of us in this country. A few funerals do not matter, but for the immediate family members.

Damages, after all, have been paid for those funeral services.

May be Azad in his stuck-LP mode is right: bring down the population and we might start caring for each other.

At last, the truth: Maoists led Mamata in Singur, Nandigram

Finally, the media has begun reading traces into what has seemingly been evident for long in West Bengal: that the Maoists have backed Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress in her agitations in the past couple of years.
Nandigram. Singur. Two of Mamata's singular achievements as a politician for over two decades now. Cut out the two, and Didi becomes just another four-letter word: Zero.
In Nowhereland, and with a one-way ticket into further reaches of Nowhereland, she was hurtling from one platform to another in political vacuum when the Singur issue came up, followed by Nandigram. Till then, Mamata and her band of men (for there were hardly any woman in Trinamool till even two or three years ago) could, at best, organise a hartal in Kolkata. And even that would have been an unsuccessful one, leading to clashes between her men and the CPI(M)'s. So much for her organisational skills!
Then came the twin issues, and suddenly Mamata and Trinamool were seen by the Indian media as beacons of virtue, a born-agaon Mother Teresa, with skill sets in organisaing protests equalling that of Mahatma Gandhi's. It was a joke, of course, for all the groundwork was done by the Maoists, and frustrated, rebellious and kicked-out CPM members.
Only, the men and women who should have seen through the joke and called the bluff -- the journalists -- never saw it. Perhaps they did not want to. The hatred against the Left was so deep-rooted that they failed to see the bigger picture. And the far bigger menace: bloody lawlessness like Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand.
The monster's out of the bag now; some of the Maoist leaders have been quoted by the media seeking their pound of flesh from Didi now -- in return for the favour in Singur or Nandigram.
Having half-turned West Bengal into another Naxal-hit area, will The Lady see sense now?
Good question, but going by her antics over the past two decades and more, seems unlilely.
So, burn my beloved Bengal.

Heart wave in Delhi: Even Manmohan ‘loves’ the Left (smiley)

Politics, Manmohan Singh says today, is “an art of the possible”. What he perhaps missed out saying is it is also the art of lying.
Otherwise, how do you change your views 360 degrees in less than 24 hours?
On Friday (May 1), Singh had addressed a rally in Howrah, in the suburbs of Kolkata, and launched a Bofors missile of an attack on Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s Left Front government in West Bengal. He had blamed the Left for all the under-development and joblessness in the state, apart, of course, from criticising them for nearly scuttling his deal with the United States -- aka the “n-deal”.
Today (May 2), he tells CNN-IBN: “We have worked with the Left parties before... I have enjoyed working with the Left.”
Really, Mr Outgoing Prime Minister? Or is it the heat stroke effect?