Accessing Facebook at Auli was as exciting as getting a proper non-veg chicken meal after days of surviving on simple vegetarian stuff; exactly that happened on August 5 this year. After a long day's trek to Govindghat followed by bus ride, Auli was supposed to be an evening of living off delicious delicacies and drinks. As i logged in to my Facebook account from my cellphone at the GMVN ski-resort, i could not make out a one-word August 3 wall post from Dollar'da: "Nothing". What did it mean? Has it anythng to do with Nihilism? As i racked my brain what made him to write like that while simultaneously looking at other posts on Facebook, i just stumbled on what i didn't expect at all, especially in that scenic Himalayan retreat: Bikash'da is no more.
Only a few teachers can make you what you are today. For me, Bikash Chakraborty was one among them. As i always feel proud to say that i was groomed by excellent teachers both at R K Mission, Narendrapur, and Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, with those at Santiniketan supporting my eccentricities during my early twenties. While we were yet to delve deep into the treasure trove of the English literature, a kurta-pajama-clad shawl-wrapped frail professor stepped into our BA-I class as some other teacher didn't turn up on a wintry morning. That was our first class with BC till he took us to the world of Coleridge, and Romanticism, a year later.
From my BA-I days till we bade Bikash'da farewell, i saw he used to have an aura that earned him immense respect from us and his colleagues alike. He was not head of the department when we were students at DEOMEL, but he had the last word on most issues. An icon in himself, he nurtured hundreds of young minds to turn them into literary enthusiasts. His interaction with students was beyond the confines of a classroom but only a few could enter his almost impregnable inner domain. Those who succeeded could find a different man in great humour and spirits. Months after he retired, i went to Bikash'da's Daronda home to discuss a few points on a paper i was preparing on T S Eliot's influence on Tagore. From a purely academic discussion, it changed direction to things more mundane like Darjeeling tea or what new books the British Council Library had inducted into their shelves!
His classes on Yeats were unforgettable experience though students in the last row could hardly hear the mild-spoken professor. His lectures on Yeats's poetry were more than sufficient to prepare ourselves for exam papers. For many of Deomelites, Yeats, and 'Waste Land', was synonymous with Bikash'da. He had such an effect on us that weeks before the 2007 reunion, one of my seniors wrote a scrap on my Orkut page: "Romantic deomel is dead and gone/ it's with bikashda somewhere..." just to convey the message he would not return to his alma mater, as BC was no longer taking Yeats's classes! As i told Bikash'da about this, he just smiled and said: "Sob paglami tomader (All madness)!"
Today, as Deomel is ready to celebrate Teachers' Day with traditional pomp and ceremony, the ever-bustling department will certainly miss him: not as a teacher or a scholar only but also as a great human being of our time.
