The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Sunday 12 August 2012

MAMATA BANARJEE – THE PATHETIC RUIN OF PERSONAL VALUES

Do you know who Shiladitya Chowdhury is? I certainly didn’t know, until the last evening.

And the reason behind him coming into news is something no one would ever want to see happen. Ironically, India is gradually sounding like a place of political anarchy where no dissent is to be tolerated.

There are many leaders in the pack and one important front-bencher here is Mamata Banarjee, the once firebrand leader of West Bengal. In the recent past, she has been a pathetic downslide of what she had been in her political career till assent to the chief minster’s chair in the Writers’ Building, an honest and determined politician with simple living and high ideals. There were glimpses of her theatrical overtures but were never so worrying that they are now.

And Shiladitya Chowdhury is the latest victim of that personal downfall. According to reports, Shiladitya dared to question Mamata led government’s inefficiency on increasing fertilizer prices and so the plight of farmers, and that too in public in a rally in the Maoist affected West Midnapore district. He alleged Mamata of not delivering on promises.

Mamata, in her post-2011 avatar of the trademark dictatorial style instantly branded this bus conductor-turned farmer as a Maoist coming all the way from Jharkhand to target her. What is more worrying here is what followed after the rally on August 8 that clearly tells us of a sick mentality of vendetta. What the Times of India reported on the incident tells us that Shiladitya was let off on August 8 after cops questioned and warned him.

But later, on August 10, he was arrested and slapped with many non-bailable sections of the Indian Penal Code that may attract even death sentence. The same police that had let him off on August 8 after questioning, returned to his house on August 10, with allegations of having scuffle with police and fleeing from the rally venue on August 8.

What changed in these two days?

It was certainly pressure from the top, right from the Writers’ Building. The police machinery remote controlled by the public-elected dictator would have used these tow days in framing as stiff charges as possible to please their Mamata Didi.

This is silly and this is outrageous.

And this is just yet another addition to the growing list of Mamata’s victims.

Mamata rode the West Bengal political tide on high hopes of change. But the ground reality of the West Bengal of the day presents before us a polity not-on-the-track and it looks to follow the similar patterns as it used to be during the previous regimes.

Apart from the growing reports of the ‘Gundaism’ of the Trinamool party workers (as we used to hear about the CPM cadres), there are silly elements of mediocrity now clearly visible in the psyche of the ‘poribortan party’. What is more ridiculing are the targets that her party is banging on and the list of targets is getting more odd additions with every passing day.

So some day, it is Ambikesh Mahapatra, a Jadavpur University professor, for drawing anti-Mamata cartoon; some other day, it is Partha Sarathy Ray, a molecular biologist, for taking part in anti-Mamata protests.  

She made the West Bengal CID to write to Facebook’s US management to remove objectionable posts related to Mamata and TMC.

She had a U-turn on the issue of deleting the likes of Marx, Engels and Lenin from the history syllabus after it created ruckus in the intellectual world. She said she respected these historical luminaries though defended the decision of change.

She had termed at least two rape cases as cooked up when the whole media was going in full throttle to nail the culprits.

She had many popular magazines and English language dailies banned from the state government funded public libraries as she found them promoting one particular ideology.

To wipe out the ‘Marxist’ red, Mamata proposed to paint Kolkata in blue. Government establishments, roadside railings and taxis were on the target.

Some days ago, she had staged a walkout from a CNN-IBN show branding the students of Jadavpur Universality and Presidency University Maoists when they questioned her on negative pointers. She later tried to clarify saying her anger was to tell others that she was a transplant leader and not some diplomat.

But the fact is she is not behaving either as a transparent leader or a diplomat. Apart from her poor show in West Bengal, she lost much of the grace by the way she acted during the presidential poll. She was adamant on not supporting Pranab Mukherjee and thought would bring the government to her toes but ultimately bowed down meekly to support Pranab when found her in political isolation. What she did then was never expected from an idealist.

Such move was certainly not expected from her when she was sent by the masses with thumping majority to put the state of West Bengal on the path to the lost glory. Mamata was famously whimsical but they would certainly not have expected to become the victims of her political tyranny.

Shiladitya is the only earning member of his family. They are no big landowners with one and a half bigha land in family possession. Now the family is staring the dark about its future.

And this Mamata is certainly not going to listen to its cries. 

Until recently, she was someone instilling confidence in the man on the street. Post-2011, she  has become someone breaching that confidence. A perfect ruin of personal integrity. She is well entrenched now into the league of political anarchy.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/