Homecoming

For many of us, the days before the annual autumn festival are probably the best time of the year. At least for Bengalis who stay away from home for most part of the year. Some of my friends also change their Orkut identity to “Pujo@Calcutta”, or “Only a few days away”.

When i was a boy of 12/13, i could see black-gray clouds making way for white ones even as we were busy preparing for revision test or half-yearly exam. The day the revision test ended, i used to pack our bedding and books as soon as possible and keep on waiting for my mother to take me out from the place we call hostel to an open place what people call WORLD.

Ours was a small world inside the high walls of Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, Narendrapur. When we took the bus either to Sealdah or Sonarpur (the nearest big railway station), i could feel that something had changed in the past three/four months: one or two new residential complexes, some new shops (mall culture was not there like it’s now), and moreover the bustling markets at Gariahat and Sealdah where Puja shoppers browsing shirts and skirts alike.

I used to go for countdown, like most of us. It usually started about 25/0 days before the day we were scheduled to go for a month-long vacation. Yesterday, my nephew Sabaan (real name Rajarshi) told me: “Mamai, ar aat din (It’s only eight days away).” Sabaan stays at Santiniketan and he knows like the past two years his D-Day (D= Departure from routine life) would be the night of Mahalaya when they organise Ananda Bazaar at Gourprangan. For a nine-year-old boy like him, there is no pressure of revision test, but the fun of going home and enjoy the best time of the year with his mother and grandparents.

Sabaan reminds me my days or years away from home. On dewy mornings at Narendrapur, i could smell Shiuli — the same flower that used to bloom with its unique fragrance at our Barasat home. On misty late afternoons at Santiniketan, i would watch in wonder the colours a sky could offer even after sunset like that in Dattapukur. In September 1999, i was returning home soon after the floods that devastated Birbhum, Burdwan and other south Bengal districts. From the train i could see huts still submerged, one or two makeshift boats carrying flood victims and the grim scenes that would etch in my mind forever. But amid all these, two frames that i still carry with me is one that of a boy flying kite from the roof of his deltaic single-storey house at low-lying flooded Guskara, and the other were the branches of Kash kissing the Santiniketan Express near Khana. I could feel Durga Puja was near.

Call for Peace

Another weekend, another series of blasts rips through city markets teeming with crowd preparing to celebrate the annual festive season of Id-Dussehra-Diwali.
Another series of blasts, another evening of "breaking news" beaming on TV sets in drawing rooms of people busy drinking a peg of whiskey or smoking a cigar.

What to do? How can we react? Is there a chance of our survival? Who will secure our lives — the politicians? Or the rifle-toting jawans keeping a close eye on our movements? Or the people themselves? That is the first question came to my mind after Delhi 9/13. Are we heading for 9/11 or the numbers are just getting blurred with sheer intensity of the blasts that very often shake Karachi, Lahore, Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and of course Srinagar. Are the cities safe anymore? Should we head for villages then?

Who is to blame? Who will take responsibility for scores of innocent lives lost in a moment? A press release would have been faxed or an email sent to media houses across the country, or even the world over, stating some terrorist groups have taken the responsibility of the blasts; condolence notes from the President and other VIPs would pour in; investigation committees would be formed; and above all people like us would again hit the road the next morning with a new hope to bury the past and "life must move on".

But think of the girl in jeans and tee being carried from Karol Bagh blast area to a hospital while the blackish-red substance still oozing out from her injured body parts. Most of us don’t know who she is; neither did we try to know whether she survived or not. By now, her family members would have been shattered: whatever was the outcome of her fate. Think of the teenaged boy who went to see the laser show in Lumbini Park in Hyderabad in August last year for the first time before something rocked the gallery to kill him on the spot. Think of the woman in green sari on an Ahmedabad road "sleeping" upside down: the only sign that she won’t wake up again was her head in a pool of blood.

Think of the thousands of frames of bloodshed that we have accustomed to watch since that "Terror Tuesday" evening on plasma screens installed on our beige walls. The scene of a plane hitting one of the world’s tallest buildings that morning in Manhattan, followed by another aircraft full of passengers crashing into its adjacent tower is quite fresh in our mindscape.

Seven years. But i am still scared. Probably, this fear would give birth to courage to move on with life, no matter how much threatened the existence is. Being coward won’t help rather we should gain strength from people around us; people with creative minds, constructive wishes and an intention to care fellow human beings.

©Supratim Pal

Little steps towards humanity

Last year, I wrote about two schoolgirls who approached me at the Science City auditorium with the request to hand over their little purse to the rickshaw-puller in Balurghat who takes care of education of village girls on the outskirts of the Dinajpur town.

This year, during the same event — The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence — the audience were stunned to hear the announcement by Barry O’Brien that students of Loreto contributed in the fund created by The Telegraph Education Foundation for scholarships to be awarded. The contribution may not be a huge amount, but the generosity and fellow feeling of girls of a Calcutta convent — from where one Skopje-born girl became Mother Teresa some 60 years ago — are truly inspiring. The girls created the fund with small savings from their tiffin money they used to get everyday.

The aim of the awards ceremony was never to shower cash awards on meritorious students, but to recognise efforts of little brave hearts. In its 13th year, the event bore more fruit than ever before with students joining hands to help each other, teachers of a little-known school donating a month’s salary to start a scholarship or a poet’s 60km journey from Jamshedpur to Purulia every weekend for decades to start an ashram for Santhal students with lakhs of trees around.

Take the example of Krishna Pada Bhattacharya. A year after the Quit India Movement, a 35-year-old man with a vision to change the face of rural Bengal came from Karimpur in Nadia to Nekurseni in Midnapore (now West Midnapore) to join as station master at the small halt on the Howrah-Madras (now Chennai) line.

The station master, Krishna Pada, believed that a school and hospital could uplift the lives of villagers, mostly tribals on the Bengal-Orissa border, about 165km from Calcutta. With some like-minded friends, he established Nekurseni Vivekananda Vidyamandir, which was upgraded to a high school 14 years later. When the first batch passed school final (matriculation exam) in 1960, tears rolled down his cheeks. Throughout his career spanning over decades, the station master did not leave the village even when he was offered promotion because he wanted to involve with the school and the hospital built later till the last day of his life. Today, the 90-year-old is still going strong with the firm conviction that villagers too can be enlightened with education and healthcare. This year, Krishna Pada was inducted in the Hall of Fame of the foundation with a contribution of Rs 50,000 to the school so that it can build a girls’ hostel on its campus.

The annual awards ceremony —held on the last Saturday of August — leaves us with the message of serving humanity, not always demanding Rs 2,000-tagline Nike shoes or a pair of Levi’s jeans, as told by Barry on August 30 morning, from our parents.

(Links to some of the news reports related to the event that appeared in The Telegraph)
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080831/jsp/frontpage/story_9767961.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080831/jsp/calcutta/story_9759845.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/calcutta/story_9766726.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/calcutta/story_9766727.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/siliguri/story_9770271.jsp
http://telegraphindia.com/1080911/jsp/calcutta/story_9811499.jsp