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.

Tuesday 4 September 2012

DENGUE OUTBREAK GIVES MAMATA BANARJEE YET ANOTHER MARY ANTOINETTE MOMENT

Now don’t blame me for being unfair in writing on Mamata Didi. There are many doing so and like me, none can be blamed. Mamata Didi is right there, so regularly, with a fresh piece of her antic or a virgin comment of her wisdom, that it is hard to ignore her.

Her latest antics are never so old when yet another one is added. So if the day before yesterday, a publisher was raided for a so-called anti-Mamata book, today it was her high words warning of the false propaganda on rising cases of Dengue in West Bengal.

She said, "We can definitely take precaution. People should be aware that they need to drink plenty of water and have good food.” She further added, “In the name of dieting, if you cut down on your food intake, if you have less oil here and less spices there and eat less, you can easily get affected by dengue."

Now this becomes yet another Mary Antoinette moment for Mamata when she does a Narendra Modi. (Recently, Narendra Modi had blamed health and beauty conscious nature of the middle class for high child malnutrition figure in Gujarat.) In fact, there are plenty of politicians in India who can be placed in the Mary Antoinette anecdote league, beginning right from the prime minister. We’ll come to that later on. Here it is about Mamata Didi.

Mamata has made it a habit to skirt direct answerability on issues that put her government in bad light and in doing so; she has started sounding outrageous now.

Severity of Dengue is increasing in West Bengal but officials and ministers are busy playing with words ignoring responsibility. While unofficial estimates say of over 20 Dengue deaths and over 2400 Dengue cases, Mamata Didi and her people say it is just three deaths and around 400 Dengue cases. While hospitals are putting up boards saying no-bed-available, Mamata’s ministers are feigning ignorance.

Mamata is state’s health minister too and she is directly implicated here for whatever happens on the issue. Though the association of the ill-intended anecdote “of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche (cake)" with Mary Antoinette has always been debatable, what Mamata and her ministers are saying is clear, legible and out in the open.

Undermining the scale of a problem in order to make it look light and so to finding avenues to feign ignorance or avoid responsibility – this is what the Mary Antoinette anecdote symbolizes.

See some more samples on what her ministers and partymen are saying on the Dengue outbreak:

Municipal Affairs Minister Firhad Hakim: "Dengue is a natural phenomenon, and there was no cause of panic. Moreover, people too need to be aware. If they don't clean their terrace where water accumulates in water pots or discarded cans, what can the civic bodies do about it? Had there been fresh rainfall regularly, the accumulated water would have been washed away."

Trinamool Congress MLA Nirmal Majhi’s allegation: Some 'corporate houses' had been doing business with the dengue issue.

Being the top administrator of the state of West Bengal, whatever her ministers and officials say and do, Mamata has to be a party to that. So when a minister says that Dengue is a natural phenomenon and nothing can be done, it directly implicates Mamata of insensitivity.

This fact rides on the pathetic state of affairs thanks to Mamata only. She has already set a precedent of bizarre and outrageous comments in response to the various questions raised on her policies as the chief minister of West Bengal. She has been sounding repetitive in dismissing serious problems as trivial issues and attempts to malign her government.

And now her officials and ministers, too, are following her with shameless explanations on issues of public concern.

Clearly, the shadow is getting wider.

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