Bhopal, Bengal Politics, Al Gore, Way To Go

As I listened to the verdict of a Bhopal Court in connection with the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy on TV yesterday night, I felt a surge of rage rocking my body: all the more heightened by the pictures of Raghu Rai taken a day after the incident had happened converting Bhopal into a city of death. The verdict sounded so bizarre, absurd and out of proportion that I felt like doing something dramatic and equally insane to match its banality. Political democracy works on the fundamental premise of the existence of a nation-state, which is an aggregate of its institutions. When these institutions become subservient to corporate interests repeatedly by design one cannot help concluding that political democracy is a failed idea, rather an idea that was essentially designed as a long-term cloak / veil to shadow the true interests of its original thinkers: patrons of free-market economy who later on became ruthless colonialists and much later, imperialists. What do you do to a group of well-bred and educated people responsible for the crime of killing over 20,000 people; maiming 100,000 people; creating genetic disorder to many (to be transferred congenitally to generations to come), and caused irreversible damage to the environment and ecology of a city beyond repair; and further that invisible cluster of people who are responsible for letting the former group go scot-free? Does this question sound as if it was transported out of a revenge thriller? It makes me laugh to think that the original petitioners (activists out of victim communities) in the case were not even allowed to enter the Court yesterday and Section 144 was imposed around the Court premises in apprehension of reprisals from activists and victim groups! Most of them were seen crying after the verdict was out.


What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.


Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.

I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?