A few passing thoughts and a thank you note

A few passing thoughts and a thank you note:
1.
Will somebody ask Sachin Tendulkar to retire? Will Sachin heed to such solid advice? Is the 100th International Century – a concept, of adding Test Centuries and ODI Centuries, is faulty; and at best, debatable – so dear to him?

2.
It is sad that one will not find Rahul Dravid bat once again especially in the most trying of circumstances. He earned the nickname of The Wall playing along side Sachin Tendulkar: this has been his greatest achievement. Rahul beamed an aura of silent aggression, which I have always associated with Sunil Gavaskar. I find this variety of aggression deeply rooted in our ethos and intensely chivalrous.

3.
2013 in all likelihood will witness the next General Elections and truncation of the regime of UPA II. Mr. Prakash Karat, Mr. A.B.Bardhan and Mr. Gurudas Dasgupta – the Revisionist Parliamentary Left – are likely to hover around Mr. Mulyam Singh Yadav and Mr. Akhilesh Yadav for a long time now to revive hopes of a Third Front. Does Ms. Mamata Banerjee stand for agriculture or industry? Does she know that to stand for something she is required to carry a cogent and comprehensive economic and political vision that will require conviction and sincerity as compared to pulling off publicity stunts like organizing competitive padayatras?

4.
Is there an intrinsic nature of man, which we are yet to discover? If yes – as argued by a large number of anthropologists and natural scientists – what is it? Is it benevolence; and love for justice, collaboration and community life? Or, is it greed; warmongering; and accumulation of power, wealth and unfettered pursuance of material goals? Man arguably has both contradictory tendencies. The question is: does he have a conscience [not a supernatural one but a part of the brain that is a critique of his combined actions] or is it a liberal construct of human imagination. Where will the conscience of man lead man to? Can it lead him to a more equitable and sustainable world before he has destroyed it beyond repair with the help of his arms and ammunitions that have been mass manufactured and stockpiled on one pretext or the other?

5.
Holi night – was lost in a highway maze – absentmindedly took a route among a carnival of billowy unidirectional highways with no dividers in between to facilitate a U turn – stranded and headed for Delhi on a route that I thought would be homeward bound – having gone 21 km from home and going without any divider in sight, anxiety hit like a thundering typhoon – when this albino guy in lungi and kurta, we found, evening walking on the swarthy berm hitting us like a helpful cannon gliding us in no time to a divider, Dankuni approaching – getting dropped, almost vanishing, after showing us the return way near the toll tax counters near about Bally – he said his name was Haridas Bhattacharya and he was sort of retired – at home whoever heard the story told us we had sighted a good ghost on the highway maze – a Samaritan in today’s time, I believe – thank you Haridasbabu!

A few thoughts at the onset of summers

A few thoughts at the onset of summers:


1.
A person is more or less guided by his perceived sense of immortality. In his active life he is rarely thinking about death; he believes he might be endowed with an endless life. A miracle could happen – that is the implicit, underlying belief. As such, he is not careful about the long-term implications of his own actions – on him as well as his family and community. When this happens en masse it poses a challenge to the human civilization that we are facing today – private tyrannies escalating into public tyrannies of the powerful elite on the powerless. Is there a way by which humans could continually be alert to their mortality and yet be able to lead happy, sociable and creative lives? Well the idea could lead one to religious indoctrination but that clearly is not the way. The problem is the constant remembrance of mortality could pin one down to a very narrow space full of loathsome grief. That is not the idea as well. The thought essentially is: to know wholesomely that one shall die and as such, one must accept death as ones end and the intervening life is to enjoy the universe among people in the best possible manner without aspiring too much or too less and, this is not possible without causing least hurt to others. The life thus spent can be a reason of happiness to one as well as to the others who are interconnected for the life spent is on enjoyments and merriments [they obviously multiply when experienced against the knowledge of extinction] rather than on accumulations and achievements [they obviously pale in the context of extinction].

2.
Modernity is approximately 250 years old. It has thrived on the burgeoning industrial societies all across the globe. Industry is all about producing more at least cost and selling all that has been produced irrespective of the real requirement and in the process making and accumulating enormous private wealth. To legitimize these actions there have to be supportive nation state structures and those have happened under our very nose irrespective of the extent to which industry has destroyed the nature. We are constantly talking of shifting climatic and weather patterns, irreversible impacts of global warming and signing various energy and environmental protocols without following any of their provisions or doing anything about the root causes. To top these, one has to add the stockpile of nuclear arsenal that we have compiled already including the underground tests that are being carried out regularly by the powerful group of nation states. Industrial society has accelerated greed, competition, consumption, war and reckless and hedonistic lifestyles like never before. Above all, it has concentrated wealth, access to privileges and power to live in style among a few who are actually running the corporations as well as the nation states – directly and indirectly. Industrial society has not made us happy. Smokestacks and factories have not made us happy. Banks have not made us happy. Departmental stores and shopping malls have not made us happy. Gizmos and gadgets have not made us happy. Investments and insurance policies have not made us happy. Huge apartments have not made us happy. What will make us happy? We know what will make us happy. Yet we will not be allowed to choose them as that might bring down the edifice of corporations and nation states which sell us false dreams. The fact is: we have to make a return. That will require tremendous energy and resolve. We have to start with collaboration and not competition.

3.
Great men have said that it is education that can solve most of our problems. How believable are they when we find the most educated out of our lot enslaved by the powerful elite in their corporations and institutions working at their beck and call to enhance their power and wealth? The universities today in their bid to raise capital are selling themselves to industries and then there are industry universities selling education at hefty sums. But there must be some education away from these well-known centres of education, like, understanding and appreciating the classics and epics, learning to do algebra and arithmetic, learning farming and fishing, learning yoga and music so on and so forth from the masters in the field as one would do in community learning, which is the crucible of all great learning. Think for a moment: the greatest works of art – in all fields – including philosophy have been achieved much before modernity had set in. Of course, modernity has given us some of the greatest works of scientific thought.

4.
There is an increasingly growing nexus between the politicians, industry leaders, writers, artistes, entertainers and intelligentsia and this is most obviously visible in the regularly carried photographs of party scenes in the national dailies. Our idea of a suffering; impoverished and marginalised and yet, an irreverential and revolutionary intellectual at sincere work to snatch among all odds the magic whiff of amorphous truth has been attacked forever. Nowadays we almost doubt the credentials of an intellectual inherently. That is not to say that one is jealous of a successful intellectual, no. The issue is: increasingly the writers, artistes, entertainers and intelligentsia are looking for a strange commercial patronage more than acceptance of their works with their respective audience. To be able to succeed by doing mediocre work and being in return able to create entry barriers for the struggling lot one needs a peculiar kind of commercial patronage by the powerful elite which requires a constant networking at these party circuits. However, this can be argued that intellectuals, contrary to popular perception, have always been ideological and socio-cultural managers on behalf of the powerful elite.

Dreams [end of 2011]

You dream of your life in waves
In
Your dreams of deaths
And
In
Your dreams of homes

And
Then you dream
And
Then you dream of dreams
As you walk down the gray aisles of your mausoleum of dreams

Your dreams change
Your life does not for you have no life without dreams

You dream
Of a wooded villa
Of a sunflower field
Of a paddy field
Of rain frozen on railway tracks
Of heat rising
Of a bunch of crows waiting on a electric wire
Of an empty stadium on a moonlit night
Of faces – sparkling and emaciated
Of bodies – scented and decaying
Of hunger – shooting
Of thirst – cracking
Of lust – animal and familial
Of shadows and shafts of light
Of closed spaces, of abandoned spaces
Of hooded faces
Of arrows, machine guns, harpoons, landmines and rocket launchers
Of funeral pyres, coffins and excavated pits
You dream
Of you chasing and being chased, in spiraling loops
Of you jumping through air and falling
Of you leading a heist
Of you managing a wild circus
Of you dancing across oceans, clouds and continents

You dream of your life in waves
In
Your dreams of deaths
And
In
Your dreams of homes

A faceless man croons in your ears:
Our planet is a stage, overflowing
You are a phantom in an endless opera
Entertaining the faraway stars, constellations and galaxies

You came lonely from a faraway mist and will certainly vanquish in that mist
In between you are torn between a billion dreams

Few Posts and Consumer Reviews relating to my Books

Posts

http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy_22.html
http://www.anaggh.com/2011/11/27/pentacles-abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/12/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://www.anaggh.com/2011/12/11/frosted-glass-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html

Consumer Reviews

http://www.flipkart.com/books/9380154824
http://www.flipkart.com/books/9381115091
http://www.flipkart.com/books/9381115367

Kolkatadreams

http://www.kolkatadreams.com/2011/10/author-sabarna-roy-books.html

A recent interview given to iSahitya

http://isahitya.com/index.php/english-sahitya/interviews/193-talk-to-isahitya-sabarna-roy

On a few General Cricketing Matters.

1.      According to me the 3 greats of modern cricket are Sunil Manohar Gavaskar, Viv Richards and Imran Khan. They apart from playing the game to the best of their ability, have also left an indelible imprint on the game: they snatched the imagination and aesthetics of the game from the colonizer’s universe to the ghettos of the colonized and not only that, they had taken head-on the machinations of their respective national cricketing power-centers during the peak of their careers without ever caring for their own future [and in doing so changed the course of the game completely in their own countries]. My words are euphemistic to an extent, I agree, but they are true in spirit. When I was growing up I witnessed these tigers prowling on the cricket field [most of the times conjuring great battles in my soul listening to radio commentary – extremely evocative in those days] and feel very strange [almost convulsing] and implicitly life-changing sensations and emotions akin to what I undergo when I read the greatest of the novels. Mr. Gavaskar has had the greatest impact on me. I have rarely idolized anybody except this man. In many critical situations of my life I have asked myself silently: What would Mr. Gavaskar have done in such a situation; how would he have responded to the impending ambiguity that I face? Nowadays I feel sad when I find him, incipiently and tacitly, furthering the interests of the cricket establishment without cautioning the death of the game in the seductive hands of the T20 format. In that sense Imran and Viv have been very vocal; in fact, in India Bishen Singh Bedi has been very vocal too. Imran has traveled to a greater stage; I hope [I more or less believe] there is a part in his soul that genuinely bleeds for the sordid situation Pakistan is in at present and he is not just creating a crescendo to get a slice of the cake in the power corridors of Pakistan. I do not know much what Viv does nowadays. I was delighted to find him expert-commentating on TV during the recently concluded World Cup. He has mellowed, no doubt [collateral damage of being sired], but one can occasionally trace that familiar strain of the ‘King’s’ irreverence in his tone and body language.

2.      I must confess I am a great admirer of Sourav Ganguly, of his batting style as well as his leadership flair. However I believe Greg Chappel’s quotes [based on the extracts I have read in the media] about Sourav to be essentially true. In his struggle to remain captain of the Indian cricket team he jeopardized his own game. He became a prisoner of the ever-powerful-syndrome; I suspect this has something to do with his privileged upbringing. When somebody becomes more anxious to remain the captain instead of improving his own performance and aspires to manipulate the system to achieve so, it speaks equally of the system that generates such individuals as much as it speaks about the individuals. The fact is the sensation of being powerful has defocused many a great in the course of history. Yet there was something in Sourav’s cricketing personality and style of playing the game which had lent a very appealing, attractive, edgy and restless quality - very similar what a rock-star does to a song. He had the natural flair of leading greater players than him, he could bring out the best in the minions, and his instincts on the sinusoidal course of a game were brilliant.

Most Recent Observations

1. Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam by commenting on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant has clarified where he belongs. It is perverse to note that while supporting the Nuclear Power Plant he does not put forth any scientific argument of credibility or merit and in fact, he has dished out a grand rehabilitation package thereby creating more room for attendant businesses. He makes a show off of this package and justifies the Plant, retrospectively, in the light of this package. He does not address the fundamental questions relating to long-term emission / radiation hazards and dumping of nuclear waste [among many], especially, the fears and anxieties arising out of and in the backdrop of the Fukushima incident and a few significant European companies exiting this business. The resistance of the local people and the environmental activists has been traced to the ‘foreign hand’ – that is what he alleges. But my view in this case is: the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the ‘foreign hand’; he does not represent the concerns of the people of Kudankulam; he is the high profile representative [comprador] of big corporations.

2. The mainstream media in India does not update us on the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. Is this a deliberate move? One will doubt considering the space and airtime it gives to the Team Anna and Mr. Advani’s bogus yatra. Well one can argue its [Occupy Wall Street’s] relevance to India. I think ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in more ways than one is critically significant because of its nature: it is a political movement at its core without an aspirational and conventional political leadership – it is trying to hit at the classical motive of all big corporations in the world, which is, unhindered moneymaking by subjugating the natural resources comprehensively to its whims and fancy, by converting political systems all across the globe to its business development and marketing teams thereby ruining the planet in the short term – unrelenting economic recession and food crisis – and in the long term – ecological devastation and climate change. If the mainstream media in India can cover endlessly [at times exceedingly and using jingoistic jargon] skirmishes / infiltrations on the Indo-Pak, Indo-Chinese and Indo-Bangladesh borders [without for a moment understanding the underlying economic, territorial and long pending political disputes] why cannot it cover this movement round-the-clock and from all across the globe? Because the media [mostly] beyond a point does not want to paint a destructive image of big corporations [of which it is a part]; it plays out either its developmental image in the times of good business or its victimhood in the times of recession. The media covers the cotton theme in the Lakme Fashion Week with aplomb, but fails to tell us the story of suicide-deaths of cotton weavers with equal intensity. Will ‘Occupy Wall Street’ be a winning movement? The answer is simple – of course, not. My answer is – human greed is all pervasive and million-times more cunning than melodramatic.

3. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shamelessly [without any visible shade of remorse] reacted to the surging food inflation. He says – food prices are increasing because there is an unprecedented rise in demand; which means, we are eating more because we can afford to eat more. This is far from true. It is an insult to the people when its leader endorses falsehood thereby erasing all hopes of economic corrections that could be made in the future to ease the burden of the people.

4. Ms. Mamata Banerjee is a specialist of somersaults, this time she did it in the name of withdrawing her support from the UPA Government at the Centre on the issue of rise in petrol prices. She is bargaining a special economic package for the state of West Bengal; the idea is noble. The package in one form or the other is on its way. But West Bengal should not rejoice which despite, all the mandatory caveats and cautions, it will. A sizeable section of the money will be siphoned out in the due process of executing capital projects to make TMC guys among the wealthiest politicians in the country [well, owner’s pride neighbour’s envy!]. Once the Left is out after 34 years what has come to light in its entirety is the holistic extent to which the Left had depraved West Bengal in this time-span – especially, in the health and education sectors. However, TMC’s response to the recent child deaths and only concentrating on the Presidency College / University to make it a clone of the Oxford University is terribly depressing to say the least.