kalimpong calling

Books Art Music (???)

2012-01-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

Books

The last time I visited TheKalimpong Sub Divisional Library to borrow books was when I was in school. Thesedays I just pass it on my way to work. The road in front of KalimpongPhoto Stores-Kodak for old timers- has become a small Van Stand.

The gate on the privateroad that leads up to the Library is locked, perhaps to deter theparking of vehicles inside. But the road itself has been claimed bydrivers who pass their time playing chungi while waiting for theirturns.

The earthquake earlierthis year did not damage too many houses. However governmentbuildings being what they are did not fare that well. The land reformoffice for example had to be relocated to the building adjacent tothe Library.

For some personal reasonsI had to visit the office to meet some officials there.

It seems I was a bit earlyso for the sake of nostalgia I paid a visit to the library.

Nothing much had changed.

In the reading room twonewspapers – a Himalaya Darpan and a Statesman- were flopped on onetable. On the other there was a religious newsletter with the photoof Sai Baba on the cover, an Employment Gazette and a Bengalimagazine. The place was empty except for one young man who satreading a newspaper. The librarian was nowhere in sight but a casualworker inside (the lending section) made small talk with anotherperson from one of those newly relocated offices.

Both were eagerly chattingup about London Day an archaic euphemism for 'payday'.

When I inquired if thehalf dozen or so books languishing on the shelf were all that theyhad in the library she said, “Hoi na hamroma career guidance bookharu pani cha”

My book recommendation: Debt-The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. An anthropologist and an anarchist's insight into the history of money.

Art

Many years ago we hadorganized an Art Show at the Library in Kalimpong. Of the number ofartists whose works were showcased then, I remember only two. One wasmy dad's friend Padam Thami. Old timers will remember him for hisincredible chalk drawings on the blackboard of Jaggu's Video Parlour. Padam Uncle was also responsible for the abnormally high marks Iused to get in the internal assessment for Art which I took as the socalled Sixth Subject in school. (Art wasn't my first choice. But the intensive six week course in pencil sharpening by Mr Lloyd whosince has moved on to more graver responsibilities in Dr. Graham'sHomes, put me off Technical Drawing for the rest of my life.)

The inflationarytendencies in my Art marks was recollected by none other than myfriend Manohar, the second artist I remember from that aforementionedexhibition. Manohar of course is incredibly talented. He has anuncanny eye for detail. This aspect of his art was amply reflected inone of his works on display. It was a detail of the lemon and chillythat you find hung by shopkeepers to ward off the evil eye. The mostimaginative (though a bit unwieldy implementation) of this is what Isaw in a young rag-pickers mobile phone near Bagh Dhara one day. Yesthis one had that custom anti-evil eye chilly and lemon contraptionhanging from the hook of his much used and abused cell.

Music

Manohar bought me two CDsfrom Kathmandu. One was the album Ati Bhayo by the Nepali Rock BandAlbatross. The other was Hamro Desh by Robin and the New Revolution.Manohar had good things to say about Albatross including an accountof a fiasco they had when planning a concert 'near Mount Everest' asa part of a marketing gimmick for one of their clients. The Albatrossalbum was 'nice' though the number that I found the most interesting “Janata Ma Appeal” sounded uncannily like a cross between Muktiand Revival's “Kalanki ko Jam” and one of the 'protest' songs ofRage Against The Machine. Robin I find very tedious to listen to,though I think some of his works are important from a certainperspective.

By the way for those whocare to keep track of such things I have upgraded my listening rig.

The Fostex driver basedrear loaded high sensitivity horns combine quite nicely with a RedWine Signature 30.2 battery powered Integrated Amp. The Marantz CDPlayer has been off-duty since most of my music in the hard drive.The digital to analog conversion duties are being done by a smallJapanese marvel Musica a NOS DAC with a tiny tube buffer. Wine helpsto keep my Foobar playing through Ubuntu.

Needless to say that thesound is warm.

For the past month it hasbeen Anthony Braxton, Vijay Iyer, Albert Ayler and the other cats.

And Tom Motian who passedaway recently but not without contributing significantly with his drum and his compositions.

My recommendation: the shimmering , impressionistic Bill Evans Trio “Live At TheVillage Vanguard”.
AIR
The age of the radio may be long gone but some memories of it remain and nothing can be more abiding than the sound of the A.I.R signature tune.
A little research reveals that the tune was composed by Walter Kaufmann (1907-84). This haunting refrain has according to my limited knowledge inspired at least three disparate jazz compositions that I know of.
1. A.I.R. (All India Radio) a composition in Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill. This album is the sonic equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses. Anyone who has the patience to listen through the layers of sounds (from rock inflected guitar to free jazz to everything in between) will be rewarded with music of exceptional beauty and creativity. And yes, musically erudite people have noticed a theme that runs through the entire body of this forbidding work..
2. Kurukshetra from Trilok Gurtu's Massical. The ace percussionist's sound can get a tad commercial at times but his compositions are right up there
3. Susanne Abbuehl's A.I.R. from the album April which is perhaps the most listener friendly rendition. The album by the way also has the Swiss surprising listeners with her eloquent hindustani (?) strains in Mane Na.
Ok make that four.
Because I remember Anmole Daju telling me that he too had fired up a composition around that once familiar radio tune.

The Measure of a Map

2011-10-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago when theGJMM lead agitation for Gorkhaland-called GL2 by internet hacks-wasspreading like wildfire and moving out of the confines of Darjeelingproper and into messier places like the Dooars, I had advised ( mypolitically inconsequential friends) that Bimal Gurung should keep amap of the place in his office.

Since the man had spenthis life in my maternal tea-garden at Puttabong it was a no-brainerthat he had to be educated in the lay of the land so that he could,for example, be able to distinguish his Lankapara from Totapara.

Unlike a racially andpolitically homogeneous Darjeeling, Dooars represented a moretroublesome mix of ethnicities and ideologies.
Even the names of theplaces had a stranger ring to them.

Not to mention thepejorative stereotyping of the Dooars denizens. Observations such asPlain ko Nepali haru ma ko haraami haru huncha etc.

Of course similarlysweeping conclusions have been made about the entire Darjeelingdistrict by folks in Sikkim, who in the unlikely event of theirmerger, fear being overshadowed and swamped by their baathey cousinsfrom the other side of Romphu.

Darjeeling people reveling in thisunfounded appreciation of their cleverness and perhaps a tad jealous– Transferred Jealousy in untidy academic jargon- look at theSikkim folks as being spoilt simpletons, lacking in entrepreneurialspirit and dissent .

Even within the confinesof much narrower geography such clichéd categorizations abound.

InKalimpong, people from the Goskhan area, women included (some wouldsay women specially) are perceived to be loud, brash and spoiling fora fight.

Chandralok youths arethought to be organized in gangs funded by GT (Goonda Tax, a not sosubtle euphemism for protection money) collected from M.E.Scontractors.

Of course suchgeneralizations have a sliver of truth in them.

For example in Sikkimwhere the CM in his electioneering speeches can say, Health kobahini haru lai I love you. Tapai haru ko sutkeri bhatta badai diyeko chu.......or to PWD safai karmachairs...Bihan dekhi bara bajisamma kaam garyo, sau rupye paki halyo, entrepreneurial spirit willbe lacking since it is not needed.

Goskhan is a place wherethe predominant vocation is selling meat and Chandralok does have theMES office.

Coming back to maps.

On 17^th Octobera mild earthquake of intensity 3.5 on the Richter scale was reported.The epicenter was said to be near Bakhim. I had heard that namebefore but could not for the life of me figure out where exactly itwas situated.

I realized I had topractice what I had preached earlier.

So I decided to download alocal map and have it sit on my desktop.

Now my sense of thelocal geography is improving.

One big revelation has been thelocation of Neora.

For some reason I just had vague notions aboutthis forbidding stretch of virgin, inaccessible forests.
The map hasto an extent demystified Neora and today I realize it is enclosed, at least on the map, byAlgara, Loleygaon, Gorubathan, Jhollung- familiar places that I have visited.

Bakhim, my map,indicates is near Ravangla.
I have heard a lot of Ravangla but havenever had the opportunity to visit it.

Maybe my desktop mapwill now compel me to go to such exotic places like Dzuluk, Tendu,Lingtam and Mayong .

A Dirge for Darjeeling

2011-10-05T19:02:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I took my family for a day trip to Darjeeling.
The idea was to visit the zoo and what is in my estimation the only world class Institution in the hills, the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.
I was in for an unpleasant surprise and felt absolutely sorry for the kids.
Back in the 70s when we were growing up there was a certain charm about Darjeeling.
For us kodays from Kalimong there was plenty about that town to be starry-eyed about.
Das Studio, Glenary's , the fashionable people , horses and sundry other things that seemed to rub on to our Darjeeling cousins and make them oh so cool.
Darjeeling on 3-10-2011, to say the least, was in utter shambles.
The only miracle -I don't know for how long- was that there were still some tourists who thronged Chowrasta, Nehru Road etc, doing the usual, touristy things that they do.
The crowd however was definitely down-market and I got the feeling that these seasoners were there because they could not afford to go to any place better. Sikkim where they could have gone is perhaps out of bounds because of the quake.
Human memory is short but definitely not that short.
(Here I would like to make a digression. Recent reports suggest that people who use the Internet Explorer have lower IQs. The premise being that people who still clung to IE in spite of the plethora of better alternatives on offer, had to be deficient in some way. Could we say the same thing about folks who still come to Darjeeling to spend a holiday?)
Of course if you have a vulgar Marxist view of things you may still find something to cheer about in Darjeeling.
It is the fact that people there are living in houses.
Lots of them.
The thing you notice now about this Queen of the hills is the absolute proliferation of buildings.
One storied, two storied, three storied and even taller structures that seem to shoot out everywhere.
Hills, rolling meadows, erst-while streams, patches of urban green- every space in Darjeeling has been utilised.
This frenzy to build has in my opinion virtually upended Darjeeling's claim to be a hill-station.
The people who live in these buildings empty into town, filling every shop, every nook, cranny and alleyway.
Thousands more are brought in by vehicles from the adjoining areas.
This by the way is not necessarily a bad thing. Darjeeling seems to have a population that is well capable of sustaining at least the bazaar economy. Which is just as well because I have this inkling that Darjeeling as a tourist destination is finished.
The change unfortunately is irreversible.
No amount of political goodwill, infrastructural adjustment, no amount of intelligent civil society intervention can stem the rot.
The sooner its citizens give up their pretensions of living in a Queen of Hills , the better for them
Come to think of it. This was inevitable.
People may blame political parties, municipal authorities -especially one who is supposed to have opened the floodgates by having every stretch of land in the town made available for construction, at a price of course.
But the urban sprawl of this unfortunate town- unfortunate because it had such an idyllic past- was always moving inexorably towards its final aesthetic collapse.
Politics of course has just accelerated that process by giving people a strange sense of entitlement.
This does not mean Darjeeling will not survive. It will. It may even thrive.
But definitely not as the town that old timers knew it to be.
That is a thing of the past and if you have those old photographs and memories I suggest that you treasure, nourish and curate them.
Too bad for the kids though.

"After the Quake"

2011-09-19T05:09:00.000-07:00

I remember exactly how it happened.
It was little past 6 in the evening.The day had been dull and dreary with an untiring monotonous rain.
I was listening to Lester Young- The Complete Savoy Recordings. The track was Neenah.
What began as a slow rumble turned into a full fledged quake. I was on the first floor where the effect was quite severe. The wall units shook and the flower vases and the glasses began to tumble and crash. The lights went off. The rattling of the windows, the smashing of the falling glasses and the hysterical shouts with which we warned each other heightened the sense of chaos.I paced out quickly and stood on clear ground watching my house.
I have experienced earthquakes before.
But this one was so severe that I could literally see the building lurch from side to side. The water in the small garden pond sloshed- a mini tsunami.
My wife was hoarse shouting for Ethan my three year old son. He was on the timbered-second floor watching TV with his grand parents.
Later I found that my mother being the practical woman that she is, had smothered him and had sought refuse under the door lintel.
As the intensity of that initial tremor subsided I quickly got my parents and Ethan out in the open.
Rachel my elder daughter and her friends were already in the front lawn- terrified and clueless.
Slowly shouts began to fill the air. Neighbours reassured each other. Down below from the road came shouts of terrified women. The novices in the monastery next door too were yelling.
It was quite dark so I ventured inside gingerly to bring out the mobiles and flash-lights. My shoes made crunching noises as I stepped on the glass splinters that were strewn across the floor.
“This was big one” I said.
My father disagreed, “In the 1980s even the birds had made terrified noises in the night.”
I was in no mood to contest anything.
Being adult males we made a tour of the house inspecting the walls, the pillars and the tie-beams.
Thankfully everything was in order.
Then we went to inquire how the neighbours were faring. My father stood near the water tank talking to the girls who live in the ground floor of the building above ours. I was standing a little below near the ginger plant beds.
“Its coming again”, he said, “I can hear the water sloshing”.
That was the second of the quite a few tremors that followed up on the first big one.
“Its returning” my wife whispered.
Sometime back I had read about Japanese legends that attributed earthquakes to the stirrings of giant eels that resided in the ocean depths.
I could empathise with those theories.The quake does conjure up images of such subterranean creaturely stirrings. Even when my parents and my wife spoke about it, they used creature-ly references.
Yo chai thulo thiyo...
Feri farkin cha yo....
And my daughter - Ghari Ghari chai kina ai ranu ho
After we reassured ourselves that no great damage had been done our thoughts turned to friends and relatives. But mobile signals were all down.
I ventured in again to try out the landline which miraculously was working.
The calls of course couldn't go through.
We spent the night with a heightened sense of alertness.
At about 3am in the morning I felt another one.
As day broke I proudly declared that I was the only one perhaps in the house who had noticed that last tremor.
My mother it seems had gone one up on me.
She had been awake when another one had stirred at about 1 am- that was the one I had missed, but not in that sense.
.

The Tuition Train

2011-09-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

A common sight in hill towns during the winter is of young girls and boys either going to or coming from tuitions. One will find them on the road, the park benches and of course shops and restaurants.
The ones with the means to do so, even make that temporary move to nearby towns in the plains where coaching agencies provide packaged coaching classes on various subjects at rates that range from the exorbitant to the fairly expensive. When it is a question of moving to another town, it is not just the child but the whole family that is involved. Usually it is the mother who accompanies the child and lives with him or her in rented accommodation. While the Coaching Classes are supposed to take care of the child's educational needs, the mother is expected to enforce the discipline and ensure that the child is well looked after.
It isn't the board candidate alone who finds tuitions necessary. Children from primary classes as small as LKG take tuitions. The tutors come from all backgrounds. They could be professional tuition teachers who do nothing else, college students in need of pocket money and of course those that are the most in demand- teachers who teach subjects to the child at school.
The tuition venues are also varied. The professional tuition specialist or the college student may visit the homes or paying guest accommodation of the students. The school teacher who is involved in giving tuitions in a big way usually has his own classroom, perhaps in his own home or in a central place rented out just for the purpose. There are some private schools that encourage the giving and taking of tuitions and the management allow tuition classes to be held in school classrooms, while charging a nominal fee for the same. Some consider this a good way of providing a financial incentive to the teacher, especially if the private school is not in a position to pay govt. scale salaries to their teachers. Others find the scheme cynical, self serving and inequitable since there are only certain subjects* that are deemed tuition worthy by the learner. To add to the aforementioned, there are some business entities that seek to provide a corporate flavour to the whole affair. These tuition entrepreneurs usually provide tuitions to a large range of subjects for a variety of classes and examinations.
Hardly anyone provides one to one teaching. The teacher will not find it viable to give tuitions if his group comprises of say less than five students. In fact there is a paradox at work here. If a tuition teacher is reputed to be good, the news spreads around, and those seeking to take classes with him naturally increase. Hence many well known tuition teaching classes cater to groups of twenty or more.
Just as there are diverse venues and tuition teachers of all kinds, what goes in a tuition class is also not the same everywhere. Most tuition teachers help the children with their home work. Others provide intensive tutorials in which the problem solving abilities of the students are supposedly honed. Some tuition teacher are quite friendly with students and apart from the subject that he or she specialises in, career guidance and if needed even advice on other areas of life are afforded.
There are however, hardly any tuition classes that provide individualised attention to the unique needs of a particular learner. Of course such may be advertised in the brochures of the coaching institutes, but the actual situation in the classroom do not permit such tall claims to be practicable. For one, the children are in such large groups (even ten is a large group for such an intervention), they come from different schools, indeed from different towns and are with the coaching institute for a maximum of two months- not enough time to provide that kind of help.
When one looks at the various goings on in the tuition class, it isn't difficult to realise why they have become so popular, in spite of the govt. enforced 'ban' on it in states like West Bengal.
For the student the tuition is a kind of a placebo and of course a license for fun. If he wants to get out of home, nothing could be better than a “I am going for tuitions” reason. If he comes late, he can always say, “Today he taught us longer than usual”. Tuition classes also provide occasion to meet new people and make friends. For those at school, the tuition class- especially those conducted by the same teacher who is going to set questions and mark his paper in the examination- provide a sense of relief. It does not need a psychologist's insight to infer what is going on in an adolescent's mind in terms of the expectation he is setting when he seeks tuitions from his teacher. The moral dilemma of the teacher in such a situation is also one that is not easily resolved.
The modern parent who seeks to make child rearing a reductive affair think nothing of out sourcing various aspects of parenting to the so called experts. Tuition in that sense fills a niche.
For the teacher besides the obvious financial incentive, tuitions are a win-win game. If the child does well, perhaps it was because of the tuitions. If he doesn't, its plain to see that he didn't study enough.
Of course one cannot wish away tuition classes. This is because it is a natural corollary of the malaise of marks that afflicts modern education. Who is the govt. or some sanctimonious educator anyone to deride it? The student-parent-teacher nexus is trying to beat the system in its own game.
However if one were to take away the 'ends justify the means' point of view , there are a few things that are wrong with tuitions, the way most of them are transacted.
First of all, the tuition teacher by providing ready made solutions to his protégées at the drop of the hat, is debarring him from an important aspect of learning. Creativity. It is a well know fact that a child who attempts and solves a problem of maths or physics by himself is leading himself on to a path of discovery. This of course takes time. Most problems are solved (think Archimedes) when one isn't consciously thinking about it. To put it crudely. The left brain takes in all the inputs of the problem and puts its cognitive engines at work. When a solution is not in the offing it give up. The right brain then takes over and mulls on it in its own way leading the student to his Eureka moment. It is the joy of this A-HA insight that is withheld from the learner whose problem solving processes has been cut short by the ready answers that the tuition teacher dishes out- can't blame him, though since he is being paid for that very purpose.
The other problem with tuitions is the burden on time that it imposes. It is not unusual to find students putting forward the tuition reason while wanting to be excused from some after school extra-curricular activity that would have contributed more to their personal enrichment.
One could of course go on, the bottom line however is that the popularity of tuitions, is just one of the manifestations of a system that commodifies learning and trivialises achievements into a number- read marks.
To conclude, I would like to relate an experience. In physics there is a quantity called acceleration whose unit is ms-2 . A student whose paper I was correcting had wrongly written it as ms-1. I had circled the 1 in that error and written 2 instead. The child came up to me and told me that I had made a mistake in tabulating his marks since I had overlooked the 2.
The boy it seems had not bothered to check the check the paper for the mistakes he had made. He had merely scanned it for the numbers in red and had mistaken that correction (2) for marks which I supposedly had not added up to make his total.

* Of course some have found a way of getting around it. A friend related to me an account of a teacher in Bhutan who taught Physical Education. While the Mathematics and the Science teachers attracted 'tuitions' by the score no one came to him. So one day he called all the parents and told them that while the others were academic subjects Physical Education was about 'life'. That worked because they parents began sending him students in even larger numbers for 'tuitions' in 'drill' and PT.

Suicide Stories

2011-09-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

Some years ago a young man who lived in a village on the outskirts of Kalimpong woke up at midnight to go to the loo.
The moment he stepped on the floor he slipped and fell on something wet.
Putting the lights on, he found to his horror that the floor was a pool of blood.
Out side he discovered his sister hanging from an avacado tree.
It seems she had slit her wrist and when death came too slow she expedited it by hanging herself.
There is a sadder postscript to this story though.
The corpse I believe was put in a gunny bag and religious people wanted to have nothing to do with the 'sin'. The last rites were abbreviated and the girl forgotten in a hurry.
Reading about the spate of self-inflicted deaths in the local media I was reminded of this chilling incident and another one that happened in the family.
We had an uncle. Brilliant, eccentric and a graduate of the 60s. Offers for government jobs came on a platter but he wanted to be self reliant.
His passion was orchids. Although more established nurseries in Kalimpong may have pioneered tissue culture, he discovered the technique by himself- kind of like Ramanujan working out mathematical theories that a student would normally learn in college.
Anyway he had come visiting. I just remember two things about the visit. He painted pictures for us-bright red and yellow colors and drank lots of water, straight from the drum.
One morning we found him missing from bed. His bed-sheet was also gone.
Later the milk man reported of a man hanging from a tree branch. Gingerly my father went to have a look and had his worst fears confirmed.
The saddest sight I saw was of my grandfather- his beady eyes wet and vacant with an emptiness that never got filled.
My uncle did not leave any note. As it usually happens in the aftermath of such an incident there was a lot of soul searching in the family, a flurry of speculations flew in the air.
Events both just before and after the incident were analyzed and significance attributed to mundane things like – the two big begonias dropping off the stalk just at the time in the morning when the terrible deed was purported to have been done.
I don't want to be judgemental about people who take this extreme step. One cannot fathom the storms of complex emotions that precipitate such an action.
Academic literature offer various theories and sociologist Emile Durkheim categorizes suicides into these four basic types:
1. Egoistic suicide—This “is thought to stem from an individual’s lack of integration into society. Largely left to themselves, victims of egoistic suicide are neither connected with, nor dependent on, their community.” They tend to be loners.
2. Altruistic suicide—“The individual is overly integrated into a group so that he or she feels no sacrifice is too great.” Examples given are Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II and religious extremists who blow themselves up while killing their supposed enemies. Other examples would be those who have died by self-immolation in order to draw attention to a cause.
3. Anomic suicide—“The victim of anomic suicide is not capable of dealing with a crisis in a rational manner and chooses suicide as the solution to a problem. [This] occurs when the individual’s accustomed relationship with society is suddenly and shockingly altered.”
4. Fatalistic suicide—This is “thought to be caused by excessive societal regulation that fundamentally restricts an individual’s freedom.” Such victims “feel that they have no viable future.”—Adolescent Suicide: Assessment and Intervention, by Alan L. Berman and David A. Jobes.
The recent incidents could perhaps also be categorised as being copy-cat instances, especially since a vigilant and sensationalist media ensures that word does get around.
A friend for example was apprised of this latest incident through a news SMS.
However one sad fact stands out quite starkly.
Our society and all the machinery associated with it is sorely ill-equipped to deal with the issue especially when all the initiative to analyze it so far has come from the student wing of a political party.
P.S.
I firmly believe that successful suicides hinge on a morbid , perverse kind of luck. Things have to fall in place for the project to bear fruition.
There was one that was done quite clumsily. A cousin from the tea-gardens reported of this incident. It seems he and some of his good for nothing friends had gathered on a hill top (dara) for a smoke. From the vantage he and his cohorts saw someone they knew climb a tree. The fellow then began to tie his namlo around a branch and the group quickly got wind of what he was attempting.
Ay..so and so..jhar...ke gardai chas jharr...they shouted and ran towards him.
The man taken aback by the sudden shouting fumbled and suddenly the branch broke and he came crashing down.
Even as the life saving group approached him with further shouts and remonstrations the poor fellow bolted from the place, dragging the rope and the branch with him as he fled.
This one I thought was a complex story.
How could someone not afraid to die become suddenly so embarrassed that he could not face a group of idle youths?
And what would that bunch have done to the fellow if they had caught him?
Thrashed him to death?

Disasters

2011-08-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

Nuclear "Disaster"

About a month back I was made to sit through a meeting called by the Senior Citizens Forum of Kalimpong at the Seminar Room of the Town Hall.
There were about a dozen of us in attendance.
As was explained to us in the deliberations that followed, the idea was to initiate a movement to force the government to give up its Nuclear energy program.
Before you rub your eyes in disbelief please allow me to explain that the Senior Citizens of Kalimpong like the rest of the world watch TV and read the newspapers.
They know what is happening in Japan, what Germany is contemplating etc.
However much of what was discussed about the evils of nuclear energy was sourced from a Reader's Digest article.
It seemed that a venerable gentleman was even writing letters to the editors of this venerable magazine on the nuclear energy issue and one of his epistles had in fact been awarded the 'best letter' prize.
Of course the editor wasn't the only person at the end of his epistolary enterprise.
A letter had been shot off to the then Union minister for environment, Mr Jairam Ramesh asking him to effectively cease and desist from using Nuclear Energy.
Besides that letter the former IIT-ian minister was also served with an advisory on the kind of location in which a Nuclear Facility should be planned, if the govt. thought it so necessary.
After the formal meeting was over and the gathering awaited for the complimentary glasses of tea and biscuits, the gent explained us his concept of the nuclear installation.
On a piece of foolscap he drew the diagram of the plant (a square) and explained how the isolation that he envisaged for the facility(the square was surrounded by a couple of concentric circles) would ensure that in the event of a meltdown or a mishap like that, the surrounding land and water would not be reached by the contaminants.
“But what about the air, they could come from air,” interjected another gentleman, my neighbor and a poet.
Sheepishly the main architect of our anti-nuclear movement acknowledged that he hadn't quite contemplated air as being a route through which the radioactive materials could be trafficked.
One deadly fallout of the meeting however was this.
A grander affair was planned and I volunteered to speak on Atoms.
I couldn't help offering my services because often during the meeting I heard exclamatory references like “ab tyo radium ek dam poisonous huncha ..” etc, that I felt a little enlightenment on the nature of the atom, sub-atomic particles etc was in order.
That day finally came and I spoke for about 10 minutes to a half empty hall of dozing inmates on stuff like neutron decay and the stability of electron etc.
The light powered by electricity that thankfully wasn't of nuclear origin kept on going and I saved my audience further ordeal by abruptly winding up my unsolicited lecture.
The senior citizen forum however had their last laugh when they managed to get my half baked attempts at oratory aired late night on the local cable.

A Sad Postscript
While the attention of the senior citizens was arrested by heavy stuff like Nuclear Energy, Kalimpong just witnessed another sad death in a spate of student suicides.
The fourth one this year.

Random Walk

2011-07-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

Toss a coin. Take a step forward if its heads and one backward if it's tail. Where would you be after a million tosses? The foregoing is an example of the famous random walk problem. They key here is that the choices for moving forward or backward is random, determined by the outcome of the toss. Various kinds of randomness- the motion of atoms, combination of errors in measurement , your evolution of wealth in an evening at the casino are related to the random walk problem. Taken in that sense, random walk is a mathematically sophisticated study of the outcome of stochastic processes.
But what if we took away the erudition and simply indulged in a random walk?
What would be the terrain of your choice in which you would undertake such a venture? Would it be the vast flat spread of the plains or the crinkled contours of the hills?
I have often believed that in the plains, the spread of the landscape is eminently more suitable for a drive than a walk. After all out there , there is no vantage point from where you can measure your progress or take stock of the things that you have left behind. Your treads are too small and the time at your disposal relatively small to allow you to cover a meaningful distance. Distance that you could reflect on with a sense accomplishment.
A drive however , lets you sweep the contours, permits you to make progress that can be measured. It also gives you a chance to challenge the limits of your machine.
The hills on the other hand allow you to indulge in the luxury of loneliness.
There is just you and the road. The pathways can be both a challenge and a friend- for when you think you are about to run out of steam uphill-it gently flattens out to let you have not just a quiet moment of rest but also an opportunity to savour the ground that you have covered and view all that you have left behind.
Mountain people like the Nepalese add a spiritual dimension to this welcome interlude between steep climbs. There is a famous phrase, “Deurali ma paathi charaunu”.
Deurali is your mountain oasis, that allows you to punctuate your uphill trudge with some rest, a drink of cool water and perhaps the caress of the breeze.
It is a shady flat , with trees and springs and sometimes the haunt of a local deity to which offering are made (paathi charaunu).
In the hurried pace with which life is conducted even in the most rural areas, newer rituals replace old ones. The Deurali could well give one the opportunity to make that cell-phone call or open up a plastic packet of Wai Wai or worse still the supari sachet.
But even then, there is little else that will beat the experience of a random walk in the hills.
This time when we were hit by a rash of indefinite strikes, a wonderful opportunity offered itself for such short treks. These weren't so much expeditions you undertook to well known destinations as they were impromptu reccees to a neighbouring village.
Some years ago when the NHPC initiative to pock mark the hills with dams, tunnels and roads had just begun, someone posted this poignant message on a discussion board in an Internet forum-
“Remember Kalijhora? And the picnic spot there and the guest house where they shot "Barsaat ki ek raat"? You remember? Good. Because it's gone.”
I could perhaps add not so much with the same degree of urgency but poignantly enough that given the rate at which roads are being built, the chor batos too will be a thing of the past.
Chor Batos are narrow paths that criss-cross the hills like dusty arteries and veins. They are short cuts that help you to steal time. Time which is stolen by wheels today.
To someone new to a hilly terrain, there is something very random about their lay out. There is no saying where these decussations will end up delivering you.
But taking up a trail with no real sense of purpose except to be lead by it, can make one's incursions into the countryside pregnant with possibilities.
What if a terrific batch of tongba awaited you at the end of one such random ramble?

Monsoon Musings

2011-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

Celebrations

A few years back we had a janitor called Premchand Basur. Premchand was an incorrigible drunk. He also had six daughters.
When his beleaguered wife delivered their seventh child, which as luck would have it was a son, he was advised by senior colleagues to go for a vasectomy.
Now that your wish for a son has been fulfilled you should stop for the sake of your family, the health of your wife etc they tried to reason with him.
Premchand replied, “ Kanha ho sir, aba balla chora ko line suru bha ko cha, ka ban garnu ho?”.

Even as I write this I can hear fire crackers going off in town. This is not the stray sounds of some individuals celebrating. The pyrotechnic exercise seems to be organised almost at an institutional level.
A phone call to an acquaintance confirmed that.
With typical Kalimpong propensity for hyperbole she said. “ Uhh..Youth ko haru le mela ground ma pateka padkayera kehi chaina....tin lakh ko pateka kine ko cha harey..”
Of course one has to give credit where it is due.
Firstly it needs a certain kind of resourcefulness to be able to make such a purchase. The whole thing then has to be transported along the precarious monsoon roads, pockmarked at innumerable places by an army of excavators.
Then it has to be stored.
Finally someone has to make sure they go off and create a racket that rises above the din and the damp of the downpour.
No small logistical feat in that I say.

GTA
Now that there has been a temporary closure to the Darjeeling conundrum (the reason for the aforementioned celebrations) through some give and take, speculations are rife about the future.
Of course there is depressing unanimity in the belief that status quo will be maintained.
That the cast will change but the play (comedy for some, tragedy for others) unfortunately will remain the same.
Those who adhere to this line of thinking will tell you about the rash of shiny new SUVs plying along the lacerated roads of Kalimpong . By the way these roads morph into temporary rivers now and then.
However none of the nouveau-riches have , at the time of writing, invested in an amphibious vehicle.
But from what I saw of the roads yesterday, such a thing may become a real necessity should the rains continue a little longer.
Anyway getting back to politics, the most prescient analysis of the current situation came from a cousin. Perhaps other people too are thinking along similar lines.
It seems that there is something fundamentally different about Mamata Banerji's approach towards Darjeeling.
The CPM was content to have the place run by local fixtures like Ghissing.
The wily lady on the other hand seems to have set her eyes on the eventual Trinamulization of the hills.
The fact that a settlement has been reached on the platform of Development may have given her an insight into the workings of the Hill mind.
When the local dispensation will fail to deliver on the ground, perhaps a five or so years down the line, she would make a direct appeal to the masses and try to reach out to them.
If she does do that there is no guarantee that she will not find some takers.
She may emotionally connect to many and then there would be those pockets sympathetic to the Congress.
A proof of the emotional connection was noticed by some when she addressed the gathering during that 'historic' day of the settlement.
It seems she drew rapturous applause, even from the hill contingent when along with other emotional things she shouted in Bengali, “Darjeeling is the heart of Bengal”.

Post Script
There is hope that with the GTA in place, the flood gates of recruitment will be opened in the hills. A major chunk of that would be through the appointment of Primary Teachers, all 1500 of them.
If that goes through our education system, with more teachers than students in many schools,would perhaps be the most unique in the country.

Power Struggle

2011-07-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

Jorethang
A few days ago my friends and I returned home quite late from Zoom . It was midnight by the time we descended down the precarious slope to Jorethang. Having exhausted our quota of words in the conversations we had earlier, no one was in any special mood to talk. The friend who was driving however tried to keep himself awake by engaging in sporadic, one sided banter. As the smell of the heated brake lining wafted into the van with the midnight breeze he said, “This drive down is even steeper than Peshok!”. This wasn't the first time I had heard someone comparing a steep road with the Peshok ko Oralo or Ukalo.
Come to think of it, we are comparing all the time.
The taste of any contraband wildlife meat (pangolian, frog, porcupine or whatever else have you) is referenced with chicken.
Ka Ho Kukhra ko masu bhanda mitho huncha ni!
Of late however these comparisions have widened in their geographical scope. The over-policed orderliness of Gangtok is often compared with Singapore. Uncharitable people at one time used to say Patley Bas ta Darjeeling ko Bihar ho etc.
Sometimes however, we see things that leave us speechless.
My friends had that feeling when we drove past the Bus Terminus at Jorethang. The empty , cavernous interiors of this building, illuminated by a thousand CFLs was indeed a sight to behold. It was as if the entire machinery of this construction was in nocturnal anticipation of some important arrival. Of course, I know my Jorethang well enough to realize that there was going to be no such midnight visitation.
But still for folks accustomed to the anaemic efforts that the power supply makes to dispel the darkness back home, the illumination of the terminus was a delicious overkill.
Speaking of electricity, one really cannot complain if you were residing in the Darjeeling hills.
But sometimes we do call up the electricity department when some neighbour making good use of the free power, overloads the pole fuse by turning on his heater to- maybe warm some cow fodder or brew up his quota of moonshine.
The friendly voice at the other end of the line usually agrees to send in the linesmen.
However they have a word of advice if it is just your single house that is without power.
Please call up Siliguri they say and oblige you with the number to which you should dial.

Gangtok

Gangtok has of course overtaken Darjeeling as the most happening tourist destination in the hills.
The roads are cleaner and wider, the traffic well behaved to a fault and all other machinery that keeps this enterprise going is professional and bureaucratically well-oiled.
However I am not going to give up on Darjeeling any time soon.
An evening visit to MG Marg confirmed that. I was often told by my comparison-prone friends that this stretch of the town was like the Chowrasta of Darjeeling.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There was something incredibly artificial about MG Marg. Most of the tourists that thronged the promenade seemed to be in a hurry. Hurry to snap pictures, buy stuff- hurry to enjoy.
The water fountains, the music , the tile works seemed to have been put in place to produce the maximum dramatic impact. Ditto with the names of some of the commercial establishments. Most of them betrayed half-baked attempts to be either intellectual or hip.
Too bad the insipid architecture of the buildings that line this now-famous road provide a sight for sore eyes. Attempts to rectify the situation by banning the drying of clothes doesn't seem to have worked.
Chowrasta on the other hand is organic. This time of the year when the downpour takes a breather and the sun shines through that little crack of blue, it is time to head to the Chow.
The smell of horse dung, nattily dressed young people stealing amorous exchanges on the benches, old and middle aged people sunning their backs, watching the world go by.
You could actually spend an entire day at Chowrasta without ever being visited upon by an urge to engage in some petty-commerce.
It is also entirely possible- but of course unwelcome- that Chowrasta would be what it is even without a single tourist's foot print.
Perhaps one could sum up like this.
MG Marg is the sitting room (that part of the house unavailable/unnecessary for domestic use) of Gangtok.
Chowrasta on the other hand is the courtyard of Darjeeling.
Come to think of it, Kalimpong has neither.
But you could be reminded of it's bad roads if you drove to the Development Area in Gangtok.

Outsourcing Memory

2011-06-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

This is a review of a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.It was done for a magazine- Talk Sikkim. Unfortunately, the review thing didn't quite work and had to be discontinued after this first attempt. Anyway I am sharing it with you here.
By the way, currently I am reading The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon. He is indeed a very special writer. Perhaps a review of that too some day.

You may perhaps have heard about the DotComGuy.
A computer analyst by profession, he was briefly famous in 2000 for embarking on a project to live his life entirely online for a year. DotComGuy would not leave his house . He would work, socialize and entertain himself entirely through the Internet. There was of course a financial motive behind the project - one that burst unfortunately with the online bubble.
But still there is no escaping from the new reality of the world wide web that underpinned the man's crazy initiative.
At the same time that Mitch Madoxx- DotComGuy's real name- began his experiment, another who re-christened himself NotComGuy, decided to do just the opposite. This one would live his life entirely offline, without having anything to do with the Internet whatsoever.
The reason why you may not have heard about the NotComGuy is because he lost.
Just weeks into his life of self-imposed exile from the cyberspace NotComGuy realized how extreme an unction he had attempted and quit.
While none of us may go to the either extremes that these two guys attempted, most of us perhaps have more of the DotComGuy in us. In fact in terms of what the Internet allows us to do today ,2000 is ancient history and there is little of our lives that is not impacted by this new technology.
The Shallows in that sense is a book that seeks to ponder over the changes that the all pervasive Internet has wrought in our lives.
This however is not a cursory attempt to tackle the external manifestations of that change- how emails have made letters redundant, how online bookings will drive travel agents out of business and sundry other mundane modifications in our society.
The book tries to get into the heart or rather the mind of the matter.
The Shallows tries to make out the case that the Web is actually rewiring our brain circuitry. There are two kinds of evidences brought forth in the book. The first is from the author's own experience, one that would resonate with us too. How many of us have felt our reading irreversibly altered by our browsing habits? Do you find deep, meditative, ponderous reading a chore? Do you even think it necessary? Do you share the point of view of Joe O'Shea a 2008 Rhodes Scholar recipient from a US University, whom the book quotes as having said, “I don't read books. I go to Google and I can absorb the relevant information quickly”. Do you like him think plowing through tomes is a superfluous exercise when you could 'cherry pick pertinent passages using Google Book Search”? And have you like me just forgotten how to fill a page with cursive handwriting? And do you like the author look at your own life as comprising of Analog Youth and Digital Adulthood?
Many questions, but then it were these kinds of queries that precipitated the writing of this book.
And are the very concerns that demand that the book be read by people interested in these kind of things.
If you have had no exposure whatsoever to the Web, you brain would make an interesting case study, since it would be a fossilized relic from the past. Which brings us to the other evidence that is sourced right from the study of the brain itself.
First the case is made out for the plasticity of the brain. Once it was held that the brain structure stopped getting modified after a certain age. That view has now been changed. It is now understood that within a brain cell, information travels as an electric impulse. But between such cells (a cell may have connections called synapses, with anything from 60000 to about 250000 other brain cells ) such information passes though a chemical bridge. This is not the case with simpler organisms where even between brain cells information passes as an electric impulse. The advantage of having a chemical ferry the information between brain cells is that it ensures that messages pass one way. Also the function and structure of the synapse can change. Some chemical synapses get stronger and other disappear because of disuse. The internet by the way it deluges the brain with information (the author employs the metaphor of using a thimble to fill a basin- with the book, the information comes in slow drips and is easy to catch, the Internet on the other hand is like having multiple faucets on) is overloading our working memory- the so called scratch pad of the brains, the area where information stays before it can be committed into deeper memory.
Here is a telling extract from the book, “ The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation cannot even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brains to be distracted- to process the information very quickly and efficiently but without sustained attention. …....Our brain becomes adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.”
Because of the foregoing, the Web enhances a certain type of intelligence- fluid intelligence, the kind that is employed in solving abstract problems, like logic puzzles. This is the reason why IQ scores have gone up over the years that have seen increased usage of the computer across populations. The book explains that there is a trade off here. Because remembering is hampered, crystallized intelligence, the one that is linked to acquisition of knowledge, is compromised. And with it the ability to think deeply, to meditate and engage in creativity.
The book of course doesn't go headlong into explaining the Web effect. In fact it puts matters in perspective by discussing another epoch in history- the one changed the way we thought and managed knowledge. The Deepening Page, a chapter that sets the tone of much of the discussion that is to follow, discusses the history of reading and the creation of print communities.
In an earlier but related chapter the author shares a much quoted exchange from Plato's Phaedrus. This is between Theuth-the Egyptian god, whom mythology credits to having invented amongst other things, the alphabet-and Thamus, a king. The latter not entirely convinced if the written word is a blessing for mankind articulates his misgivings, that should the Egyptian learn to write: “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on what is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks”.
The only thing 'wrong' about this warning, the author, attests is that it was premature.
Yes you guessed it , the injunction was more against Google- that repository of 'external marks' to which we more often than not outsource the task of memory.

The butcher and the watch

2011-06-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

The month of May for all intents and purposes witnessed two types of mass mobilisations.
One comprised of thousands of middle class Indians who rallied around the frail figure of the Gandhian, Anna Hazare in Delhi, elsewhere and on the Net. This surge forced the govt. to relent and agree on discussing the anti-corruption Lok Pal bill in the Parliament when it convenes in July.
The other major concession was the inclusion of civil society members in the drafting committee of the said bill. As to whether the more ambitious demand of creating an independent ombudsman with powers to prosecute corrupt members of the legislative, executive and judiciary, will be met or not, only time can tell.
But given the scale of scandals that are relentlessly feeding the headlines, the govt. will be indulging in wishful thinking if it allows itself to believe that it can rely on the fabled short lived public memory to bail it out of this one.
The other activity that saw large scale involvement of people were the elections to the legislative assemblies of Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Bengal.
However except perhaps in Bengal-which was in anticipation of profound changes in the landscape of the polity- these elections could hardly match the scale and intensity of the anti-corruption protests.
There are many reasons for this. Democracy as one philosopher put it, 'concerns above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules....Democracy means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results.” (Zizek).
(When a losing party refuses to play the game according to those rules we get the kind of conflict that is tearing Ivory Coast apart. Such civil wars however do not happen in a Democracy.)
Elections merely allow for an electoral legitimization of power. This power given the manner in which it is structured and formalized is far removed from the masses.
In that sense raw unadulterated Democracy, unless it is of the type practiced on small scale in New England town meetings or some Swiss cantons, hardly exists.
But now and then populism offers tantalizing possibilities of and for real, raw and vulgar democracy.
There is however a paradox here.
If one had conducted a survey amongst the thousands who had congregated around Hazare to find out how many of them had actually voted in the last elections, the results wouldn't surprise anyone.
Apolitical individuals, hitherto apathetic to the electoral process suddenly found themselves making the ultimate political statement and forcing the politicians whom they had never voted to grant them one concession after the other.
One cannot escape an irony. The mass, populist uprisings sweeping the Arab world is attributed to a lack of democracy, the power to vote. The Indian 'uprising' (after all there is already talk of a second freedom struggle) is coming from quarters who even though having the chance to do so refused to vote. Is this cynicism an endorsement of Plato's view that Democracy is like sending your watch to the butcher for repairs?
The protests and the manner in which the issues raised , resonated with even those who stayed at home, seems to suggest that the majority of the voters- if given the choice- would have punched on the 'none of the above' button in their EVM machines.
The provision of 'refused to vote' was there but the Election Commission did not think it proper to offer individuals exercising such an option, the right to do so secretly. If one wanted to register a protest by 'not voting' one needed to make a small spectacle of himself in the polling station. Perhaps the EC will never have the 'none of the above' button. Or perhaps an activist EC like the supreme court would contemplate giving the voter such a juicy option.
However given the prevarication of the political parties over the Lok Pal bill, the question is moot as to whether populism would lead way for a meaningful legislation to enter through the back door?
Will this butcher finally repair the watch?

KALIMPONG NEWS

2011-02-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

If you, given where you are have no clue as to what is going on in Kalimpong, I too am in the same boat.
Like you, I too get my news from websites, phone calls and the TV.
Speaking of TV, last night I watched the evening news on 24 Ghanta, a Bengali channel with a reputation for objectivity (at least amongst my limited circle of Bengali news viewing friends).
Besides showing the same burning bus (and the magistrate's jeep) for the umpteenth time they had a fire officer on the phone.
The poor fellow was livid at the police, because according to him, they kept calling his department to douse the flames without giving his men any security cover.
From the little bengali I can comprehend he seemed to be asking “The police have guns, what do we have to protect ourselves?”
And then he went to rant on about the officers who never bothered to answer his phone call.

In Bijanbari however, they didn't have to worry much because the Fire Station itself was reported to have been set aflame by arsonists.
The TV reporter I think,gave the organizational capabilities of the protesters undue credit by smelling a conspiracy there.
She seemed to be saying “It was a well thought out move. First they set the fire stations on fire and then they do the buildings”.
This little snippet of news from Kalimpong will prove her wrong.
Most of the injured protesters were rushed to the Kalimpong Hospital.
Then we got news that they were cutting down trees and blocking the road at the Third Mile area.
I was left wondering , what if the condition of the injured worsened and they had to be rushed down to Siliguri?

P.S. The local didi -from whose grocery store we rush in emergency supplies- had a very busy day.
First she went to gherao the police station.
Then in the afternoon when that small window was allowed to open for normal transactions, she rushed to the wholesale to replenish her dwindling stock of items in her shop.
After all a man's got to eat, no?

BOOKS I READ IN 2010

2011-02-06T23:55:00.000-08:00

I hope you will spare me this indulgence.
Some reviews of the books I read in 2010.
Here is the first one.

FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS- THE HIDDEN ROLE OF CHANCE IN LIFE AND IN THE MARKETS- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A superstitious person confuses correlation for casualty.
Things may pan out like this: a black cat crosses the road and this is followed by an accident.
It is a coincidence, a random sequence and yet much meaning is invested into how it all played out.
An old belief is reaffirmed, a pattern of thinking established and a rule of behavior framed .
One of the most interesting books I read in 2010 doesn't deal with the origin of superstition but in a related fashion deals with randomness.
Much of the book in question is about how people mistakenly see patterns and rules where none exist.
Success especially in the markets are usually attributed to an investor's acumen, prescience, knowledge etc when all it could have been is just pure luck.
In this the author distinguishes between professions with varying degrees of randomness. The profession of a dentist is resilient to randomness. A good dentist is so for reasons that have little to do with luck. On the other hand an actor, rich and famous could be plain lucky. The success of the actor has to be seen against the background of thousands like him (in talent, looks etc) who did not make it and are waiting tables etc. The actor has made it not because he possesses something special that the others didn't, he was just dealt a good hand. His success is therefore a happy outcome of randomness. Ditto with the success of the equity investor who has made his killing in the markets.
Here I have to invoke the authors 'monkey on the typewriter' example.
Imagine 'x 'number of monkeys on a typewriter. One such monkey produces say Macbeth. How much are you willing to bet on the monkey that his next work will be say an Illiad? The author tells us much depends on the value of 'x' the initial number of monkeys on the typewriter. If that number was say as less as half a dozen, you could bet your entire life's saving on the simian. But if there were ten billion of them then the masterpiece that resulted from the monkey's tryst with the typewriter could be more of an outcome of randomness and not much sense could be made by betting on the lucky monkey.
That lucky monkey could be your successful businessman or actor.
One edifying result of that analysis is that one may look at ones own relative lack of success soberly and attribute it to randomness albeit of the unhappy kind.
Another lesson that could be learned in the context of Kalimpong is that when scamsters (or genuine but naive people) point at someone and say look he has earned his millions by investing in this, why don't you too follow suit, one could call the bluff and say 'but he could be the lucky monkey' and keep the money in FD instead.

P.S. The theoretical underpinnings of the book are in what philosophers call the Problem of Induction, sometimes also called the black swan problem. No amount of observations that swans are white can allow one to infer that all swans are white. A single black swan on the other hand is enough to refute that conclusion.
The authors own investment idea is to try and be prepared for the black swan event (the extremely improbable rare event ) and make money out of it.
I too was once the unhappy victim of a black swan event when my car (in fact a van, what else) was waylaid by carjackers and stolen.
Had I read the book then, I could have consoled myself over the fact that such things though rare, do actually happen.

A SEASON FOR SCAMS

2011-02-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

SCAM 1
Kalimpong has long been the happy hunting ground of fraudsters hoping to make a quick buck. These mainly prey on two typically middle class vulnerabilities- greed and ignorance. A scam that is relatively fresh in memory is what local hacks call the Subham scam. A company suddenly sprang up out of nowhere and promised to make available all manner of goods- from electronics to clothing- at half of the Siliguri price. A few brave folks with excess liquidity tested the waters and to their surprise found that the promises were being kept. A 10K TV was actually being sold for 5K. And no these weren't stolen goods. They came with bills and warranties. The news spread like wildfire and before long the store was packed with 'customers' booking their goodies against an ' advance payment'. Naysayers who questioned the credibility of that business model and tried to warn those whom they wished well were dismissed as being unduly alarmists - after all wasn't the proof of the pudding in its eating?
Then one fine day the good people of Kalimpong woke up to find that Subham had vanished into thin air along with crores of advance payments.
The scene that follows this is typical. A huge crowd gathers around the shop (or office), the door is opened by force and stuff such as chairs broken. A committee is formed and of course the police usually step in with “We had been warning you etc”.
Normally scams are nothing but different variants of ponzi schemes where early birds at the top of the pyramid usually take home the loot. Subham was different because it singed all. In fact the guy who had actually been sold the TV at half the price was hurt the most.
Why?
Because having tasted the credibility of the company first hand, the unfortunate fellow had gone right ahead and put in a much bigger deposit for a Maruti Van.
Yes who doesn't want to own a Maruti Van in Kalimpong and that too at half the price?

SCAM 2
Last year a rash of schemes was unleashed upon Kalimpong. A semi-educated govt. servant or teacher, preferably from a double income household was an especially vulnerable target. Such an individual always harbors pretensions of doing business. He gains his 'knowledge' from watching business channels on TV, through programs that supply him with a ready inventory of stock phrases and words such as 'market', 'returns', 'investment', 'sensex' etc. He also has a vague idea of an economy growing at 8% and how fixed deposits are well so blasé. He wants to 'maximize' his returns. Enter then the helpful 'consultant'-usually a colleague, wife's brother or even the child's school teacher. He or even She will sell him something that is 'different' from the earlier scams. It could be an investment in Gold (to be used in mobile phones). They will even say something like: We buy gold directly from the source. And since our company has such good rapport with the company that sells gold, for every kg that we pay for we are given another extra kg at a month's credit. Imagine for the price of one kg we get two kgs of gold which we then sell to cell phone manufacturers at market rates, providing you with hefty returns etc”.
They will give you the company website, testimonies and scans of 'official documents'.
They will then pull out their winning hand.
A local example, usually of the well respected type, who has made a killing in this and is willing to vouch for the credibility of the scheme.
The twin bedfellows of financial disasters-ignorance and greed- helped quite ably by excess liquidity will then do the rest.
In this sense Subham is less malignant than the current scams. Those cheated by it lost just money and perhaps gained the benefit of hindsight.
Ponzi schemes on the other hand cause individuals to lose more than money. It threatens trust and destroys relationships.
In the latest SMS scandal there have been reports of wives who put in lakhs without telling their husbands. There is at least one person who sold his property and 'invested' the entire amount and another who put in his house building money.
The latter individual who comes from a Kalimpong suburb, is reported to be parked in Kalimpong running from pillar to post trying to retrieve his stolen cash.
He has no guts to go home and face his family.

NOVEL-WORK IN PROGRESS

2011-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Hi There,
A few years ago I was working on a novel. After a few chapters I lost interest. The hard disk crashed and the work seemed irretrievably lost.
Fortunately a strike during vacations gives you ample opportunities to while away your time. So this afternoon I was rummaging through my pile of old cds to see which ones were worth saving.
It doesn't need a novelist's gift of surprise to inform that I found a few chapters of the draft, which I am sharing with you here.
This is very much a work in progress and I humbly request you to REFRAIN FROM TAKING IT AWAY FROM HERE, you know what I mean.
I expect to add more chapters as the days go by and wish that you read it and respond with your comments.
It is a very Kalimpong centric piece of work and I am not sure if it will appeal to all of you. Also, this is a work of fiction and though certain names have been evoked to retain the local flavor, one need not take up unnecessary issues with the seemingly unsavory portrayal of certain people and places.
Once the book finishes it will undergo the rigors of another bout of vanity publishing. Till then, here goes......

P.S. I just realized it now that I will keep on updating and adding through the edit options of the blog. I urge you to kindly keep track of your journey through this experiment and keep visiting for more.

(i)
Even in October, the tables at Narayan Das attracted droves of flies. They were generally drawn to the sticky sweetness of syrupy sugar that had been rubbed a million times on the tabletops by the waiters. These were mainly Bihari boys whose enthusiasm for wiping the tables clean with their rags were not exactly matched by their appreciation of the acceptable and safe standards of hygiene in public places. It was no wonder then that the place was empty for most of the hours that it was open for business. The only ones who frequented it, apart from the flies that is, were a few youngsters in dark glasses and colorful bandanas. These kids patronized the place to prolong their codeine infused highs with frequently repeated cups of sweet black tea. They just sat there at the corner tables minding their own business and keeping the waiters on their toes by ordering their teas. The only other presence that seemed to matter in that sweet shop was that of Narayan Das himself, whose black and white countenance looked down disapprovingly at the emptiness from the confines of his freshly garlanded frame.
Sudhin often visited Narayan Das. It helped him relive his school days when it used to be the favorite hang out of his soccer team buddies. After every match at the Mela ground, their team manager would bring in his noisy group to give them a treat of the sugary tea and samosas. There between mouthfuls of their oily snack they would discuss strategy, curse the referee and hurl recriminations at their own teammates who had conspired to hasten their exit from the local league or worse still the Independence Day tournament.
It was also at Narayan Das that he had met his first date, a shy mousy girl from Girls High School, whose classmates could never understand how she had managed to make the prefect of DGH fall for her. He could vividly see her dip the samosa in that red watery sauce and then chew it in slow, self-conscious fashion with her mouth closed. Chewing with the mouth closed was one of the first lessons that parents imparted to kids as a part of dining table etiquette and the girl was not going to put an early dent on her femininity by erring on this vital point. Sudhin of course could not care less but still thinking of her effort made him smile. Later he had taken her to the movies. That was the standard thing you did then. Kanchan used to be crowded on Saturdays and the easiest way to manage the tickets was to go to the blackers. Here was a veritable gallery of characters. People like Telu, the terror of both Kanchan and Novelty. He was reputed to have killed his father over something as trivial as a kite. Later Telu had turned political and during the agitation sided with the communists. His life was in danger in the hills and hence was whisked away to Siliguri by the authorities. It was reported that as soon as the buses from Kalimpong entered the terminus there would be Telu waiting to pounce on individuals suspected of sympathizing with the agitation. Later of course, Telu’s condition had become pathetic. Two incidents stand out for being particularly humiliating. In his heydays, Telu was the tormentor in chief of Thakpa, the one-eyed Tibetan who sold momos in a plastic bucket. The agitation however upset a few hierarchies. Poor Thakpa had had it enough going over that ritual of taking his steaming momos out from the folds of his blue plastic and offering it free to a hungry Telu. So one day in desperation he cut up Telu’s face with his onion-cutting knife. Telu fell from his pedestal of invincibility. His self-esteem now lower than that of the Harijan Road pigs with which he had spent his childhood, he left Kalimpong. There were reports that he had become catholic. But that may not be true because Telu’s final act was a raid that he made on the FCI godown at Topkhana where they caught him with two sacks of rice. The thrashing only completed what Thakpa had started earlier and Telu died soon thereafter. His sins of having betrayed his community had been forgiven but the job that he did on the two sacks of rice proved the ultimate arbiter of Telu’s terrestrial fate.
Sudhin however never patronized Telu. He always looked out for Habu the peace loving, pot smoking Harijan who sought an escape from a life of cleaning shitty drains and toilets by hawking tickets in black. He was some kind of an odd ball in that tribe of mean talking individuals who looked up to the fist or the knife to sort out any argument. Habu’s approach was strictly non-violent but not in the usual Gandhian sense of the word. Anyone who picked a fight with Habu would be taken to the corner where he would be discreetly shown Habu’s enormous appendage of the trouser and fed with a poser, “if you can show me something bigger than what you have just seen I will fight you”. The adversary, his masculinity considerably undermined by that sight would beat a hasty retreat and Habu’s ahimsa would triumph. Sudhin of course felt a little queasy taking the tickets from Habu since there was no knowing to what places that the hand dishing it out could have been. This unsavory suspicion of course was never communicated to his girlfriend who being her usual matronly self would instinctively want to assume charge of such nitty-gritty like tickets.

That affair with the GHS girl lasted just a year, two dozen letters and five films. The break up was precipitated by a visit to the park where she had betrayed her lack of class by insisting that he carve out their names on the bark of an unfortunate tree called the love tree. It was a gnarled chilauney on whose trunks and branches, aesthetically challenged lovers with limited imagination such as themselves would labor away, cutting what seemed to a veritable algebra of romance. L+K, S+J, M+N or even S+D+P, a calligraphic hint of a ménage a trois ! This was too much for Sudhin who had already started to have second opinions about their pairing when he had begun to notice and get irritated by simple things like her habit of clutching sweatily at her arts and crafts handkerchief whenever they went out on their dates. Or the manner in which she draped her dupatta around her head in the fashion of some coy sixties heroine. When he dropped the bombshell, the arts and crafts handkerchief had come in very handy. She cried copious tears, blew her nose and professed undying love while he tried to explain to her the number of reasons as to why their union would never work. Finally, he had left her at one of the cabins in Neera hotel with the two plates of momos that he had ordered for them untouched and cold. The girl of course did just fine and as was the custom of those times returned through her little sister all the letters and presents that he had given her. These included cassettes, cards and a slightly used bottle of Charlie Perfume. Later in his room, he had taken out the letters that he had written to her and spent an entire evening reading them. His English he realized was not bad and the words that he had managed to put together in some of them gave him the impression that he had indeed fallen for her at one point of time. He was not very embarrassed about it since it was the done thing in those times. It had not cost him much either since being a girl from the Madyamik board she had not been very demanding.
The kids who had all along been quite subdued in their trip started to get restless. One of them who sported a Tibetan tattoo on his left bicep played with his cigarette lighter, a cheap Chinese knock-off of a Zippo.
“Let’s go and play a game of pool”, he said.
Next-door Ola ran a pool parlor. He had set it up long before the game had caught the fancy of the Kalimpong youngsters. Some of the players that frequented it were quite good. The bets made were substantial and the good cueists were even borrowed by hucksters and taken to Gangtok where money was cheap and beer even cheaper.
The kids seemed to have made up their mind. They paid at the counter and left. The last one to go he noticed had been rolling a joint and had spilled some of that stuff on the table. Sudhin had to fight that feeling hard. It was almost a year since he had come out clean and he knew situations like these were what he had to watch out for. He did not want to slip. That would be too bad. Time was running out and so were his options. He desperately needed to simplify his life.
Just then, two girls walked in and sat at the table next to Sudhin’s. They must have been in their early twenties. Their jeans clung precariously at their hips and their tie-died tanktops hugged their flat chests in a desperate yet pointless bid to make some sexual point. Something told Sudhin these girls were shady. He had a special knack for recognizing this sort of shadiness. The girls ordered tea. One of them, perhaps the older of the two looked directly into Sudhin’s eyes. Sudhin slightly embarrassed shifted his gaze elsewhere but she teased him with her persistence. Finally he spoke, “so where are you sisters from?” “Kafer” the younger one replied and before she could say anything further the other cut in, “But what is it to you?” She spoke in a singsong fashion with an attitude that was straight out of the hindi movies. “Just curious,” he replied wishing that he had never started the conversation. But they were not going to let him off so easily. “Actually we have come to do some shopping for the pujas. Some of it is still left but then we decided to go to the movies”. He knew they had this one coming. That was the standard Kalimpong sexual innuendo. Going to the movies opened up endless possibilities for intimacy. He knew that he had to get out of Narayan Das. The girls were now coming on to him like anything. One of them had even taken her cell phone out of the bag and was punching away at the keys-an effort towards sophistication that was effectively neutralized by her dirty fingernails.
Sudhin got up suddenly acting as if he had forgotten something and coolly walked off after stopping briefly at the counter to pay.
It was bright and sunny outside. The main road was being dug up once again. It was very typical of Kalimpong to do a road up nicely with bitumen and tar and everything else and then have it all dug up again to either lay the telecom cables or the water pipes. He took the alleyway next to New Restaurant and walked towards the motor stand. The motor stand for once was chaotic. The Tihar season always saw a considerable rise in the number of people traveling to Silguri, Gangtok, Darjeeling and places like that. Of course, today it was possible to avail of Jeep services to places as far flung as Geyzing and Kumai. A broker approached him. “Want to go to Siliguri in a van? We also have an Indika,” he said. Sudhin nodded his head in the negative and walked towards the public latrine. Kalimpong motor stand has two pay toilets almost next to each other. Both are relatively cleaner than the one that Darjeeling has below the stables at Chowrasta. There is enough water too if you wanted to use them seriously. After relieving himself, he took out a rupee to pay the young girl at the door. She was trying to deal with a customer who was refusing to accept the change that she was handing over to him. He was saying, “But this money is all wet” to which she replied, “sir, it’s just the water”. Sudhin just flung the money into her box and walked out. The smell of ammonia and bleaching powder was getting unbearable and he wasn’t particularly interested in knowing how that conflict of the wet change would be resolved. Outside there were rows of boot polishers shining shoes and porters with liver patches on their puffed up cheeks unloading stuff from the buses. He knew most of these coolies by name. Kalimpong porters are very territorial. Local bred ones had almost complete monopoly over the motor stand business. It was a strict no entry zone for the healthier men from Nepal who had to seek employment in hardware stores and groceries. Working at motor stand was lucrative. The loads weren’t too heavy and a porter who led a tourist to say Crown Lodge was rewarded with a fine commission. The eating joints known as Number one, Number two hotels served good food and raksi too was readily available at ten rupees a glass.
From below the Gandhi gate, he cast a glance at the Mela Ground where a bunch of kids were playing bare feet football in front of the Nehru Manch. In the middle smartly attired boys, probably from some club were having a game of cricket. On top of the gate Gandhi reclined in his typical pose facing the motor stand; his back turned towards the ground. This gave rise to the standard Kalimpong gag that the Mahatma did not like football. Football today suddenly reminded him of another Habu the MRC goalkeeper. Habu was cross-eyed and as the joke went saw three balls out of which he caught the one at the center.
There in front of the Darjeeling Jeep booking syndicate office he met Sonam. He had a large rucksack on his back, two white girls who too bore similar loads on their backs walked behind him. They shook hands. “I am off to Darjeeling. We are going to trek up to Sandakphu. So how are things with you brother?” he asked. “Not too bad,” replied Sudhin.
“By the way did you know that Tashi died, last evening?” asked Sonam matter of factly as if expecting Sudhin to have already come across that piece of news.Sudhin was stunned and could only manage “What? He was all right when I met him a couple of days ago. Wasn’t he in rehab at Namchi?”
“Yes, but he was out in a fortnight. He wanted his folks to give him some time to gather himself. He had gone to Siliguri to his mother. He slept after lunch and never woke up. Must have OD-ed on SP. What a waste!”
Just then, the jeep blew its horn and the white girls called out.
Sudhin slowly let the news of Tashi’s death sink in. It seemed so unreal. His mind shut out the noise of the cars honking and people shouting.
Tashi his good friend was no more- that was a fact that he had to start getting used to.
Initially he felt like rushing to their house but then decide against it instantly. It would not be prudent at all. The two had started on it together. In fact, Sudhin had led Tashi into it- a fact that was not lost on his parents. In their endeavor to rescue their son from his addiction, they had taken him to all sorts of places and had become very close to him. He in turn opened out his heart to them telling them everything. That kind of openness had its own problems though. When an addict realizes that everybody close knows about his addiction, he becomes bolder and in his moments of weakness does it in the open. Once the threshold of fear of being found out is crossed, the situation becomes worse almost beyond repair. Sudhin knew perfectly well what impact his presence would have on Tashi’s mother. The best thing he felt was to avoid that unpleasant situation all together. Grieving people, mothers specially, assumed some sort of a sovereign monopoly over sadness and his own sorrow would be of no consequence when confronted with the magnitude of her maternal anguish.
The only other thing that Sudhin could think of then was to go over to NET HUT the cyber-café on Ongden Road and check his inbox. There was much of Tashi in it that he wanted to erase.
Net Hut was as small as a real hut. It was ironic that one had to squeeze into its tiny cubbyholes to be able to surf something as vast as the World Wide Web. The connection was agonizingly slow. His hotmail account did not open at all. The other one that he had with sify opened after what seemed like eternity in digital time. His inbox was populated mostly with mails from Tashi. He checked the boxes next to them and then in one hassle-free stroke deleted them all. His inbox now entirely purged of Tashi’s mail shrunk to just a couple of commercial emails from companies that advertised their body building supplements. Even these brought memories of Tashi, as it was with him that he had decided to start lifting weights as a means of rediscovering his self-discipline. He realized how pointless all that seemed now. Tashi’s parents bought him a home gym hoping that their son would not run into his drug-dealing friends in town. They also equipped him with a PC and enrolled him in a under graduate course with IGNOU. The gym equipment, the pc, the ipod, the ignou course – these were sign posts of the numerous resolutions that Tashi made to himself and his parents to come out clean. It was not as if they had not tried.Without bothering to wait for the girl at Net Hut to check her register he handed her, a ten rupee note and walked out.
It was almost evening now and Sudhin had very few places to go to except home.

(ii)
Murukami in Kafka on the Shore made running away from home seem very cool. That was Sudhin’s first impression of the book that he had bought a few months ago from Upasak’s but had not yet bothered to read. Today at five in the morning, he had taken it out from the shelf to tide over some moments of early morning sleeplessness. He had read the man’s short stories earlier and liked his quirky sense of humor and the odd situations that he put his characters into. About Norwegian Wood Tashi had once said “Do you know that Midaro means green in Japanese. The novel actually came as a two-book pack. The first one was green. Does that not open up newer possibilities of understanding the work?”
A loud, agonizing squeal broke the mornings silence and interrupted Sudhin’s train of thought. It was the sound of a pig being slaughtered. He remembered ordering two kilos himself. Sudhin closed the book and lay there on the bed listening to the pig sounds. He could well imagine the man with his spear making repeated incursions into the porcine flesh, desperately seeking for that decisive strike that would puncture the creature’s heart. Sticking pigs was a messy affair even if one was an expert but today it seemed as if somebody was hell bent on torturing the poor animal. The squeals continued for some length of time and then slowly died with the pig. Feeling a little uneasy with the morning’s violence, Sudhin reached out for the jug of water and drank thirstily after which he threw away the blanket and leapt out of bed. It was always his custom to make that dramatic gesture every morning. It underlined the sense of purpose with which he wanted to begin each new day. He then put the CD on and Velvet Underground swelled in to fill the morning spaces with their chaotic Heroin. It struck an effective counterpoint to the honey sweet Anup Jalota Bhajan that wafted in from the neighborhood along with the aroma of a freshly lighted incense.
The house was a British time bungalow with a red roof and a lawn in front. Since Sudhin lived alone, he had sealed up most of the rooms and used only the bedroom, the dining hall and the kitchen. At the back of the bungalow, there were some out houses meant for servants. These too were empty. Sudhin’s father had been in the British army. Today he lived with the rest of his family, except Sudhin of course, in London. The British government had granted citizenship to most Gurkha ex-servicemen and their families. Sudhin’s family too had taken up that offer and left for England about five years ago. Of course moving to London wasn’t always in the cards. They had known Kalimpong all their lives. It was in this town that all the boys had been born. Leaving it was out of question. But then it wasn’t as if Kalimpong would always remain an idyllic haunt for retired British soldiers spending their quiet time on pensions paid in pounds and shillings.
It was the agitation that had shaken Sudhin’s father. The last straw was the masked raid that the boys made in their house to demand his two-bored hunting rifle. Not used to being treated so roughly by lads younger than his sons he had become withdrawn, meditative and melancholic. It was then that he had resolved to leave Kalimpong and start life anew in the UK. Only Sudhin had decided to stay behind. He had put his foot down and refused to fill the forms. As the cut-off date approached, his family members had tried every trick to convince him to leave. They tried to make practical sense, enlisted the help of neighbors and relatives to reason with him but to no avail. So finally, his father, secretly admiring his son’s resolve worked out an arrangement wherein a portion of his pension would be sent to him through western union and Sudhin would try to make a life for himself in Kalimpong.
Just then, there was a knock at the door. It was the milkman. He poured out a kilo of milk from his can and without saying anything, walked off leaving behind a whiff of what Sudhin called the ‘stable’ smell. He was about to close the door when Ramey came in with his two kilos of pork. The meat was stitched on to a thin bamboo strip. He inspected it to see if his neighbor had kept his word of giving him ‘only the red stuff’. The promise as usual was broken and Sudhin’s portion comprised mainly of a thick hairy layer of fat with a morsel of the red meat sticking stingily on it. Ramey was excited that morning. Slaughtered pigs brightened up the whole community and Ramey who Sudhin suddenly realized was the individual behind the pig squeals was the real star of the morning. Sudhin had to acknowledge that his was a rare case in which the person responsible for slaughtering the pig had himself run on an errand to bring a portion of it to a customer. This was of course Ramey’s way of showing gratitude to Sudhin for all those times that he filled up the Central Bank withdrawal or deposit forms for him. Ramey lingered around, expecting Sudhin to say something in appreciation. His breath smelled of raxi and his wet beady eyes danced in the merriment of that busy, fruitful morning. Sudhin opened his fridge. There was a half-empty bottle of hit beer with a newspaper stuffed at the mouth. He handed it over to Ramey who emptied it with great relish. “I have to be going,” he said. Sudhin smiled at him as he handed over the money for the meat. Ramey thanked him and the beer having gone slightly to his raxi muddled head, bowed low in an exaggerated show of respect and staggered out of the door.
Sudhin took the pork and put it in the refrigerator. His eyes then fell on the yellow post-it note stuck on the fridge door as he closed it after putting in the meat.
‘Appointment with the lizard’ it said. He found it strange that something that he had been eagerly looking forward to for the rest of the week had almost escaped his notice at the most crucial moment.
Lizard was seemingly a very unoriginal name assumed by a local rock star whose biography Sudhin had been planning to write as his first incursion into the literary field. Writing and Rock were his twin passions and he found it hard to believe that these would come together in this biography project. He then remembered Tashi’s thesis. “All this talk about the hills being in the forefront of western music as a result of some kind of a special gift is all bullshit. It’s just the hippies and the cheap copies of rock classic knocked out in Thailand that we have to be thankful for”. It wasn’t something that Sudhin agreed with entirely. His love for music was not limited to his appreciation of Rock. In fact, there were those hours that he spent with friends discussing the vocal intensity of Narayan Gopal or the lyrical and the musical genius of Gopal Yonzon. He had often told Tashi-‘the only thing that we Nepalis can be genuinely proud of is our music.” “What about the khukuris?” Tashi would butt in provocatively. “Aren’t you proud that you are a Gurkha?” And that would get him all meditative. He remembered the live telecast aired by a local TV channel during Diwali. It showed how the soldiers of the Gurkha regiment stationed at Algara celebrated dasain. The same harmlessly jovial, cherubic Gurkha soldiers ‘breaking their hips’ to the tune of the madaal and the dohori ,were to be later seen on stage applauding gleefully as many of their compatriots beheaded the goats of maar. The decapitations had been turned into a spectacle and the soldiers seemed to be up to their necks in their enjoyment of that gory display. And here was Sudhin, true-blooded Gurkha and not even able to slaughter a chicken. At least the pork doesn’t make me faint, but yes what binds us is our music he reflected as he remembered how he was swayed by the gay abandon with which those young soldiers went about making their mountain melodies. There was of course no simplistic explanation of the hold that Rock music had on the youths of the hills. Unlike Tashi, he had not yet succumbed to that urge to theorize. Rather he felt that meeting with the lizard and spending time with him would open up a few windows of insight into his generation’s proclivity towards this genre of music. The lizard was a typical specimen. His English was bad and when he sang Iron Maiden, it was only the speed of the singing that would mask his atrocious accent. Of course, he was not a rock star in any half measures. Short and squat, he wore his straight mongoloid hair up to his shoulders. He fancied only leather and torn jeans; which thanks to the cheap Thailand stuff that flooded the market, he was never short of. He had met him only a couple of times and was surprised to learn that he had never heard of Jim Morrison. But what had shocked Sudhin the most was the lizard’s utter disdain for anything black. He hated the blues and utterly loathed rap. Habsi music was the pejorative that he applied for any music that had to with the blacks. The only exception as you may have guessed it by now was Jimi Hendrix, who was looked upon as this otherworldly being who could do magical things with the electric guitar. The lizard knew of at least one musician who had tried to commit suicide on hearing about the news of Jimi’s death, by jumping into one the lakes of Nepal. The lizard also talked of Mongbol busty grandmas who loved listening to Jimi type licks that were played on the guitar by the legendary Albert Subba whose virtuosity on the instrument was said to be heard to be believed. Of course, the lizard could never handle the new fangled gadgets that youngsters these days fancied. This was learned the hard way by a couple of Kalimpong boys studying in Delhi. The lizard had been made to pass off as the lead guitarist of their college band in one of the many beat contests that are organized at DU. The lizard was to be their Hendrix type god who was supposed to give to the Satriani soaked Delhiites a taste of what the guitar could really sound like. Unfortunately, the lizard was so lost in the tangle of wires and the mountain of gizmos that he could barely scratch his axe. This resulted in him being booed off the stage. This was one of the lowest ebb of his career as a musician; worse than playing Sultan of Swing to an inebriated crowd at a tea garden immediately after they had been enthralled by a sentimental Suresh Kumar number. But not quite embarrassing as the near death experience that he had encountered when he had accidentally swallowed a mouthful of tobacco as he had tried play the guitar with his teeth a la Hendrix. The second time that Sudhin had met the lizard he had asked him about his influences. The lizard rattled off a litany of band names. Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Iron Maiden, ACDC-all the usual suspects! To the lizard, these were the authentic syllabus of Rock, a hallowed canon that could never be veered away from. But what about more intelligent bands, YES, PERE UBU? Sudhin was greeted with an ignorant silence and an all-knowing sneer. He almost pitied Sudhin as he proselytized him on the virtues of unadulterated rock. The lizard it seemed was caught in a time warp from which he moved neither forward nor backwards. His education in rock had been entirely musical. His classroom was the cassette. He was not schooled in the polemics, the politics, the protests or the other scholarly platform from which the topic was broached at times by the journalists and academics. It wasn’t even snobbery. The lizard had never been that much at home with the English language to even understand the meanings of the words of many of the songs that he sang. But nothing could detract him from worshiping his limited pantheon of rock stars. And that was the way he had always been. What about cutting an album of his own? The lizard had no clear-cut answer to this one. Suddenly the doorbell rang. It was the man himself.

(iii)
The lizard walked in with his rock star swagger. He seemed shorter than usual in his black leather jacket and skintight jeans. His imitation Dr. Marten’s was patched up in a number of places by what seemed to be a very incompetent cobbler. Sudhin could not help thinking that had the lizard been a real rock star of international acclaim it could have almost passed off as a style statement to be imitated by local rockers like the lizard himself. He sat down on the sofa and listened to Lou Reed sing Lisa Says in his characteristic nonchalance. The lizard squirmed and asked, “Why do you listen to this sissy music?”
“Shall I turn it off then?” Sudhin asked. “No let’s listen to some real rock,” he said and handed over a CD. It was a SONY CD on which somebody had scrawled Hard Rock with a marker pen. The first song that started to blare out from Sudhin’s boom box was BREAKING THE LAW to which the lizard began to sway his head so that his long hair fell in the front of his face. Sudhin left him to enjoy his music and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. This was the first time that the Lizard had paid a visit to his house. Their previous two meetings had taken place at Narayan Das where the lizard during the course of their conversation had smoked at least a packet and drank six cups of their watery coffee. Sudhin had all the while been taking intuitive notes in his diary. Today he had his Dictaphone ready but was in two minds whether to use it or not. He realized that he did not have the ear of a journalist. What he was good at was internalizing the conversational experience and then working on it later; piecing together the disjointed strands of the lizard’s mumblings as he mused on a variety of topics. He had all the time in the world today. What he hoped was to get not just the rock star but the man behind the lizard. Suddenly he realized what a significant name the lizard could turn out to be. He could if given adequate insight into the man behind the performer name the biography the lizard itself. The lizard was a creature equally at home on land and water. The man lizard too was an amphibian although at the moment he new little about the real man inside the rock star.
He prepared a pot of black coffee and took it inside. The lizard had quite unusually turned the CD off and was leafing through a copy of India Today. He seemed out of place doing something so mundane, so unlike a rock star. But even then, Sudhin could not help noticing a multitude of rings on his fingers, sometimes as many as three on one.
“Thanks,” said the lizard taking a cup of the coffee.
“They slaughtered a pig this morning. Would like to stay over for lunch?” Sudhin asked as if throwing in a bait.
“Didn’t you know that I am a pure vegetarian? We are kabir sadhus from Dalapchand. We have not eaten meat for generations”, the lizard replied almost hurt by the insensitivity of his host’s invitation. Sudhin somehow felt it quite incongruous that the lizard, a rocker with that reputation could be so gastronomically harmless. But secretly he was pleased to discover this fact. It was great for the book.
“Do you mean you have never tasted meat? But then how can you sing about all that blood and gore when you are so fastidious about even the food you eat?” he asked and then almost felt like biting his tongue for being so journalistically formal with that line of questioning.
The lizard didn’t seem to mind.
“There are lots of Hindu vegetarian gorkhas in the army who would not hesitate to lop off heads if needed. All I do is just sing some dark songs. So what’s the big deal in that?” he replied.
“But even then…” he started to say something and then having realized that the lizard had already preempted any further need for information on this topic diverted the discussion by asking him about his family.
“I am not married yet, but hope to do so in the near future”.
“Any one particular?” Sudhin asked, not really wanting to get into this mundane, predictable territory.
“There is no one at all. I will marry the girl my parents will choose for me,” the lizard replied suddenly sounding very unlike the lizard that Sudhin seemed to have appraised in their previous two encounters.
“But don’t rockers have strings of girl friends and one night stands?” he asked quite incredulously.
“Common, that’s only in the magazines. I am into rock for the music, the rhythm, the experience. Long live Rock! Rock Rocks!” he said as if suddenly feeling the necessity of having to get back into his rock star skin.
And so the conversation went on. The lizard as the meeting drew to a close took out an envelope from his pocket. It was a complimentary ticket to a concert that his band was performing at the Mela Ground during Diwali. The concert was allegedly in aid of some Buddhist charity group. Sudhin of course knew why all such shows in Kalimpong needed to be given that altruistic edge. It was simply a means to get around the tax that the government imposed on programs that were presented merely for the sake of entertainment. The complimentary ticket was of course something to be dreaded by all as these did not come cheap. Usually a club or an association organizing something identified certain individuals in the community to be deemed worthy of being burdened with complimentary ticket. At one time, such ones were invariably contractors but today the net had widened and everyone including teachers with a lot of tuitions was targeted. The complementary ticket people usually came in with a register in which there were three columns. The first one listed the serial number, the second the name of the benefactor and the third, most important column, revealed the amount paid. The trick was to inflate the amount paid by the first payer by adding one or two zeroes so that the rest who generally took that as an indication of the going rate was made to shell out much more than what they were inclined to under more normal circumstances. Sudhin was reaching out for his wallet when the lizard waved out and said it was really complimentary. He in fact promised him free access to the stage if he wanted to get a feel of the ambience of a Rock show. Sudhin thanked the lizard for that offer.As the lizard was about to go out Sudhin could not help asking him why he had not smoked even a single cigarette all the while that he had been there.“Because it’s Tuesday”, replied the man and walked out of the door without looking back.

(v)
That night Sudhin ate his usual, quiet dinner. He had tried to do the pork the way his mother used to and that brought him memories of his family. He remembered growing up with his brothers in Kalimpong during the late seventies and the early eighties. There wasn’t much of TV to keep you entertained during those days but he could fondly recollect the eagerness with which they anticipated new issues of Indrajaal comics at the Himalayan stores and Upasak. His favorite was Phantom. Phantom the health conscious hooded hero who always started a fight in a bar by ordering for milk! Phantom who in the brusque, dynamic language of the comic was- ‘rough on roughnecks’! He was also a fan of Mandrake. He also remembered with a curiosity that had grown over the years, the chinky guy called Ho Jo- martial art expert and chief of Interpol who in his under cover avatar was a chef cooking chow for Mandrake at Xanadu. As they grew older, the comics gave way to books. Enid Blyton, the abridged classics of Kenneth Library, Hardy Boys, Louis L’Amour, Alistair Mclean, they had read them all. Tashi’s intellectual flowering of course happened earlier than most of his contemporaries. He remembered the excitement with which he had discovered Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Each one of his friends saw himself reflected in the adolescent confusion of its protagonist. Of course, books were not the only windows into culture. There was music too. Sudhin was particularly influenced by Robin who was three or four years his senior at school. It was Robin who introduced Sudhin to Deep Purple, Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Robin used to own a small Sanyo tape and the two whiled away many musical hours listening to the guitar riffs squeezing their way out of its tinny speakers. Later Sudhin would go on to own more serious hi-fi systems, but no cutting edge acoustic technology by the likes of Bose and Harman Kardon could ever evoke the feelings that they used to get when they listened to Smoke on the water or Born to be wild on that ancient machine. It was with Robin that Sudhin had come up with the idea of floating a band, an idea that was immediately shot down by Tashi who as he recollected now was a cynic even in his adolescence. Tashi had been very matter of fact with his discouragement. Doing rock music would not only prove a distraction from performing well at school but would also be a fruitless exercise since neither Sudhin nor Robin lacked any genuine talent in that field. Being able to appreciate purple haze and identify with Hendrix was one thing, playing like him quite another. Today Sudhin did not know whether to be thankful for that advice or regret that they had not been strong enough to get past Tashi’s early flowering negativity. With Tashi now gone it was pointless thinking about it all though. But Robin was still around teaching in a government school in Sikkim and the two would meet up whenever they could. Robin had been in the recent months going through a particularly hard time. He lived all alone in his tenement at a remote village in North Sikkim where his school was situated. The village, notwithstanding the blitzkrieg of modernization that the state government subjected it to, had not changed much during the five long years that Robin had been employed there as a teacher. For somebody used to the warmth of Kalimpong the place stung with its cold and its lack of culture. Robin did not consider it snobbery to belittle the shallowness of his adopted village whenever he came to his Kalimpong circle of friends. The ordinary folk of the village were alright, the ones he could not stand however were the political and the literary class. He disliked Sikkim as a whole for its lack of dissent, its preoccupation with pecking orders and its nauseating lack of originality and entrepreneurship. It was in fact a wonder that he had lasted so long. A teacher’s position in the village was one of great deference and Robin often found himself being suffocated by the terrible show of formality that governed most of his societal interactions. What was of course equally inexplicable to people who knew Robin was that in spite of being an intelligent, kami boy he had not managed to pass the state civil services or the bank PO exams. For a number of years examinations had become a sort of an annual ritual for Robin but he could not prove himself lucky with even those lowly clerical grade selections. So partially frustrated and to a great deal very lonely he had hit the bottle. That was a very Sikkim thing to do and he wasn’t alone in it. The only outsiders who managed to stay off the bottle successfully were the Bihari teachers who had profounder things to worry about than just bouts of late evening ennui. A typical Bihari worry in Sikkim could be a daughter’s impending marriage or the outcome of a generation hopping court case back in their own country. Fortunately, for Robin life was less complicated. He had tried writing poetry but with no one to show it around to, he found the exercise fruitless. Robin after all had the heart of a performer and he could not do anything that did not involve an audience. So the only thing left to do was to drink himself silly in the evenings and then entertain his drinking buddies with old sentimental Narayan Gopal numbers that he would sing in his god gifted kami voice.
Sudhin had of late been a little concerned about where Robin was heading with his life. The last time that Robin had been up at his place had really shaken Sudhin. His fingernails were coated heavily with a thick crescent of black dirt and his breath reeked of gold star. There were occasions when the two would have sat to enjoy a case of Hit beer that Robin brought as a gift from the beer friendly state, but now he had felt rather guilty. Robin seemed to be a shadow of his former self and Sudhin detected a stranger in him that made him a little uncomfortable. Still they had talked about the old times and planned an evening with Tashi, which of course never materialized because as with any alcoholic, plans and resolutions meant very little to Robin. Then of course, Tashi died, a development he was not quite sure Robin was aware of given his out-of-the-way field of operation.
Sudhin thought a while of Robin and then wondered which of his friends were really doing well in life. He knew this was a tough question since the parameters with which you measured out the successfulness of an individual’s life were usually clichés like money, status and relationships. Even his own life did not seem very purposeful for the moment. Yes, there was the book that he had been planning but he was not so sure about it. The lizard had turned out to be different than he had expected. He was interesting no doubt but was his life heavy enough to merit a book. Yes, it had some appeal but something told him suddenly that it was a sort of a gimmicky appeal. Maybe he could please Sandip Jain, his editor friend of the local magazine with an article on the lizard but the book needed thought. And he knew he had to delve further into the cultural, religious background of his subject. The fact that the lizard did not swear and smoke on Tuesdays implied that he was a devout practicing Hindu. His aversion for blacks was a mystery but not a very dark one given the light of these recent revelations.
Still he could not defer the idea of writing forever. He had resisted the tide and decided to stay back and there had to be something to show for his stubbornness.
There was power cut that evening and swarms of moths swiveled into the flame of the lamp putting up a display of desperate, defiant and ultimately dumb death. He sometimes wondered where these creatures came from. He had seen them nesting on the curtains, their wings resplendent with the almost obscene beauty of their exquisite patterns. Yet they were hairy with big ugly mouths and repulsive, hideous insect eyes. Suddenly these moths, millions of them flew down in a hairy vortex of wings drowning him with their noisy fluttering and flapping. Sudhin woke up with a start. He had dozed on the table and there right in front of the moth infested lamp that was now flickering in a losing battle against that unending procession of moth deaths he had drooled a small puddle of saliva. His mouth tasted the stale tastelessness of his dried up saliva. There was the smell of kerosene and moth burnings in the air. Sudhin was too sleepy to do anything so he just blew out the lamp and slumped on the bed to snore deeply in sleep. Another day gone.

(vi)
The beggar at the top of the stairs in front of Sunrise stores, thrust out the phallic stub of his amputated arm and looked eagerly as the coin tossed at him by Sudhin completed its trajectory and landed with a clank on his old beaten down bowl. Today was Saturday and as usual, Sudhin was making his weekly trip to the market to buy his stock of vegetables and other grocery items. The town was crowded with people doing their puja shopping. Sudhin always looked forward to making this trip to the haat bazaar. He liked the smell, the sights and the sounds that greeted him there. He sometimes found it odd that while matronly women sold vegetables, it was generally young children who ran around the crowded place hawking brightly colored packets of rat and cockroach killing poison. But stranger than that were the sight of hirsute Bihari men behind piles of panties and bodices of all sizes and shapes and colors. He found it quite inexplicable that the normally coy and demure Nepali women would have no qualms about buying such intimate items of clothing in such public places and that too from such forbidding looking hawkers.
As usual, Sudhin made his way to his favorite vegetable seller, a plump woman of about forty with whom he did not have to strike any hard bargain as her prices, at least for him, was quite reasonable most of the times.
But before he could steer his way to her stall he had to pass through that crowded bottleneck just after the gate. Today of course was better. The pork that Ramey had brought earlier meant that he had been saved from the ordeal of visiting the meat stalls. The romance of visiting the weekend market was considerably tempered by the smell, sights and sounds of the unsanitary conditions prevalent at Harijan Road.
It couldn't have come out of reasoned town planning deliberations, or maybe it could have that the dirtiest part of the town was populated by a community of sweepers, the fraternity that was responsible for maintaining the cleanliness and hygiene of the town.
It could either be that they were too busy elsewhere or that the usual domestic lethargy of professionals meant that their own turfs were neglected more than the rest.
Sudhin had also keenly observed that the overweight women who kept a stark, commercial vigil over the pork stalls were usually a bit over made up. Their cheeks were rouged with a screaming red and their slit eyes underlined by a thick streak of kohl, attempts which he felt were quite counter productive given their bloody, messy vocations. But then again he thought maybe that was one way to assert their femininity, futile though that attempt may have seemed to people like himself.
The bazaar was a babel of sounds. The blind Harey Ram spouting beggar had long died but he had been replaced by a number of upstarts.
Sudhan too was in his elements addressing an imaginary crowd amongst the hordes of jostling shoppers.
To top it all a Christain preacher surrounded by a bunch his demure sisters was screaming through his megaphone and exhorting the sinners amongst the shoppers and sellers to repent
......(will be continued)

MT and the internet

2010-06-03T11:23:00.001-07:00

I was wondering, given the man's penchant for dissent, his media savvy and the shrinking space available for him to articulate his political views, Madan Tamang would be the ideal hill politician to make his presence felt on cyberspace.
Did he have a cyber avataar through which his political aspirations and frustrations find a vent?
I know this line of thinking could lead on to many conspiratorial whispers.
But still for a fallen hill politician who is perhaps amongst the very first ones to have been laid to rest, lamented and lionized in the internet, it would be a meaningful endeavor to find out if he left such a 'footprint' in the sands of cyberspace, some frozen online legacy that could be canonized into a cyber-shrine...
I don't mean this in any disrespect to the man.
However the Victor Banerjee essay got me thinking.
For a man with that pithy email ID (was it rhododel?) it shouldn't have been too much to maintain a blog or an avataar with which he would have sought to shape public opinion in the new medium....
Let honorable, imaginative, intelligent speculations fly....

TOUCH AND PASS

2010-02-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

For those of us who have seen spates of arson during GL1, it was a kind of a deja vu to spy upon the fire eaten carcasses of two buses (one of them belonging to the NBSTC, or did both? ) and a police jeep (hope you guys remember the red siren jeep at the front of convoys).

Two things however stand out.

Firstly when I say NBSTC please forget about those hideous red and blue buses whose sight alone was enough to induce vomiting tendencies.

The buses sacrificed on the altar of agitation this time around were the smaller vehicles , more stream-lined and passenger friendly. The changing face of public transport in Bengal if I may say so.

Of course for the state that boasted of the Rocket bus, this isn't really saying much.

(A small aside-as a kid I always used to wonder about these buses. Rockets were something that you experienced at Diwali...but Rocket buses, now those really took your imagination to the stratosphere ..)

The other thing was that while the buses were burnt standing, the police vehicle had been tipped over.

Did the protestors want to send out a stronger message with the police vehicle- that not satisfied with setting it on fire- they had to inflict upon it the further ignominy of being tossed belly-up like a drunken pig starring at the moon?

The police were nowhere to be seen in all this.

It however confuses you that given a conspicuous absence of law enforcers, there is no significant increase in the crime rates.

The agitators are all students this time.

A worried guardian wondered whether this was the right thing to do when the rest of the country was preparing for the board exams.

What is making our students so supremely confident?

Could it be, that if you went up to Upasak or Kashinath, the GUIDE that is a major hit is one that is titled TOUCH AND PASS.

News You Can Use

2010-01-27T19:06:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, a young girl I know quite well came to offer me a news subscription.
For fifty rupees a month she said her organization would provide me daily updates of the local news through text messages sent on my mobile.
Given the current climate of uncertainty prevalent in the hills, it was no doubt a good idea to be kept abreast about the latest happenings (read strikes, chakka jams etc).
The source, of course were the local reporters and stringers who provide news to nepali newspapers and newscasting local channels.
The evening news here in Kalimpong is a big hit.
The success of the concept can be inferred from the fact that there are rival institutions providing two alternate broadcast of the news.
Unfortunately they are provided through the cable, a dying enterprise that is being relentlessly replaced by the internet TV and the DTH service providers.
However in Kalimpong at least, such news and telecast of local subjects made almost on a daily basis, have provided Cable with a new lease of life.
Just as some societies are litigious, the hill society is a very journalistic one. You may perhaps find it hard to believe but even in so small a place, the hacks have organized themselves into two opposing camps.
The working journalists come under the umbrella of the JAK (Journalist Association of Kalimpong) while the other news-people (professionals such as bank employees and teachers who dabble in the print and electronic media) have formed the Kalimpong Press Club.
People love to read about themselves on print or see themselves on the idiot box.
It is not unusual for school functions, NGO campaigns and even marriages to be regularly telecasted. Of course much before the issue of 'paid for news' came to be highlighted in the national media, Kalimpong denizens have been financially rewarding the News channels for such services rendered.
Or they have found another way around it.
Many local newspapers follow what I call the Tulsi Ghimirey model.
In almost all movies by this stalwart director most of the bits and pieces roles (and some meatier ones too) are played out by unpaid extras.
It is a win- win situation.
The movie buff gets immortalized (or at least he wishes) on the cine screen while the director operating out of his shoe-string budget gets his work done free.
The icing on the cake for the director is when the unpaid extra becomes a paying viewer of the movie along with a dozen or so of his friends and family who come to watch his histrionics (or maybe a thirty second shot of his profile) on the screen.
Similary most news that one reads in say the Kalimpong or Darjeeling pages of the Himalaya Darpan, have been provided by the newsmakers themselves.
So whether it is a body building club that needs to report about its Show or a local club which wants to highlight the fact that their members have cleaned a drain, they provide the news, which fills the pages of the paper.
They then later buy the issue, cut it and paste it on their club bulletin boards and almost everyone is happy.
Of late the cable has been playing an important political role too.
As is usually the story of the hills, everyone backs the winning horse.
The opposition therefore have to make themselves heard from the interstices of the cable news and local channels.
When Madan Tamang was not given proper access to air his views in a public platform he got himself interviewed.
In the relaxed environs of his own drawing room, the man roared.
The videographed interview was then shown on cable thus providing the politician a platform to air his views.
I remember watching a report on cable about a strike called by the GJMM or was it the GNLF?
Anyway I don't remember the exact sequence of events- whether the GJMM had called the strike and then the GNLF called their strike to oppose it or vice versa.
But the sight of a shaken leader of GNLF (was it KN Subba?) speaking resignedly about the threats issued to his party cadres by the followers of the opposing camp was indeed a telling picture of the shifting power equation in the hills.
The GJMM have indeed been masters at making use of the media.
Notwithstanding the embarrassing performance of its stalwarts during a phone-in program broadcast by a Bengali Channel, the media savvy pros of the party-Dr. Harka Bahadur, Anmole Prasad and Amar Lama have in the subsequent soundbites they have provided to the cable, more than made up for the goof-up by their ambushed colleagues.
Of course one of the banes of being thus captured is that your antics are preserved for posterity.
Like the character, Fumes in Borges' story (Fumes-His Memory) once the media digitally captures you, it doesn't forget.
In fact your actions could be endlessly replicated.
In this regard I remember with a degree of amusement the very public displays of reverence that used to be made during the days when the GNLF sun was shining supreme.
School principals and other stalwarts of the society used to literally bow before people like CK Pradhan, in full view of hundreds of onlookers during programs such as the 15th of August Celebrations.
Viewing such indiscretions today would indeed be an educative experience on the degree of caution that needs to exercised when having oneself thus 'captured'.

Zero Rupee Note

2010-01-26T18:12:00.001-08:00

The RTI is a potent tool to fight corruption.
Just asking what the Passport department has done in the weeks following the submission of the form may be enough to expedite the delivery of the passport.
The logic is simple.
Providing information-to answer the pointed queries submitted by the one filing the RTI-may be a tacit admission of the fact that the department has not been working.
It would be better to give the man what he really wants-his passport, and close the matter once and for all. The same goes for the driving licence too.
Of course officialdom has its own way of hitting back when thus cornered.
There was one instance when a particular department submitted a truckload of photo-copied paper work to an RTI applicant seeking information on some matter concerning the workings of the said department.
Needless to mention that he was sent the bill too.
The answers given by the disaster management department to RTI queries filed by the Save the Hills are monosyllabic cliches that do not inspire much confidence.
Now another innovative idea is doing the rounds.
Fed up with having to pay bribes to grease the administrative machinery or get some legitimate demands for public service met, an NGO (Fifth Estate) has had this bright idea of issuing zero rupee notes.
When a govt. official next time demands his unfair share to do something that he is paid to do anyway, 'bribe' him up with zero rupee notes.
The idea is to embarrass him and hopefully expect his conscience to do the rest.
And as has been mentioned in the following report, it indeed seems to be working.
Your can read further about the zero rupee initiative here at:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services

WINTER MUSINGS

2010-01-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

Do or Die
This blog has been looking lost and forlorn and not the least for lack of new posts. Anyway to the millions who frequent it in the hope of reading something salacious about the hills my sincerest apologies. Winters as they say is a season for hibernation and yours truly has indeed been challenged on the literary front. Politically too there is a lull. Everyone is looking forward to the 'political level' talks. This phrase has now entered conversational vocabulary along with a few others such as 'identity' 'relay hunger strike' and 'do or die'.
Thankfully the last one is a thing of the past.
Or is it?
“Do or Die” reminds me of an encounter we had or rather 'manufactured' a few years ago. A friend had this bright idea of creating what he called, the andolan DVD. So armed with a smattering of history (primarily of the GL1 variety), a new DVD camera and a few contacts we sought to interview people for their take on the GL issue. Remember this was way before Indian Idol so the climate was quite different. One of our catches was Dr. Harka Bahadur Chettri, whom we put under the glare of our prying camera in his newly built study. The interview went quite well with Dr. Hark speaking eloquently on various aspects of the issue which apparently was very close to his heart.
I don't remember the specifics of what all he said but this Do or Die phrase reminds me of something.
It seems the GNLF had come out with a long list of action strategies for the attainment of GL. It had stuff like the burning of the 1950 treaty, strikes etc. These were written point by point. So if say, burning the treaty was No. 1 then the strike (not sure which one) was No 2. etc. According to Dr. Hark, somewhere in No 17 was “Do or Die” after which the list continued the numerary sequence of the other action phases to No 18, No 19 etc. I cannot of course produce any documentary evidence to back Dr Hark's version of the surreal sequence of the andolan strategy.
But over the years I have learned to defer to the man's prodigious memory and of course the recurring lack of logic in many aspects of political life in the hills, to actually give him the benefit of doubt.
Of course Do or Die is one thing but there were some who actually went around telling people that in case this or that didn't work they would enter into the Do and Die phase of their agitation.
I wonder whether they were being plain philosophic or just grammatically challenged.
Speaking of grammar, someone- probably a Rai , sick of the number of his fellow chiso jat bhais getting either hurt or killed in the internecine skirmishes that marked the particularly nasty phase of the andolan- coined this rather pithy verse:
Do or Die
Mor Cha Rai....
In retrospect the one strategy conspicuously lacking in the GL1 andolan days was the Hunger Strike. It somehow didn't strike (no pun intended) anyone then that self deprivation (and I don't mean this because of the ban on booze) perhaps could also be used as a potent agitating tool to send out a symbolic message. Come to think of it, the andolan of those days had nothing symbolic about it. Unless one calls a decapitated head in a net bag symbolic.

Identity or Development?
These two words have also seeped into usage. Of course when someone talks about identity, he doesn't use the word in Nepali. Many perhaps would be left searching if told to elucidate this slippery term in his or her own mother tongue. Could some reader translate/negotiate this Roshan Giri refrain : “We want our Identity” into Nepali?
At no time did this word have so much impact in the hills than during the elections. As usual I found myself on duty.
This time it was a particularly forlorn and neglected Tea Garden near Kurseong. The school where we were made to put up was a sorry shack. The windows had been boarded with painted plywood to double as a black board. The wooden planks on the floor was rotting away and from the morsel of words left behind on the improvised board we could sense the valiant effort the poor teacher was making to educate his proteges. Of course what we felt most acutely was the discomfort caused by lack of water. Anyway ours was just a temporary visit so no point in complaining.
Just as we had landed and were doing due diligence to create some rudimentary infrastructure for the following day's voting, we were surrounded by a bunch of onlookers. In my past experiences of elections these people are generally just a curious lot who have strayed in, attracted by the novelty factor of elections that come once every so many years.
This time however the crowd was much more self confident and purposeful. Most came forward and proffered their introductions. Now election time means a generous allotment of ranks. The ubiquitous school teacher becomes an officer with an even imposing prefix Presiding. In other words, he becomes a Presiding Officer. Not to be left outdone, the forest guard , the storekeeper and the peon are also conferred upon the rank of Polling Officers. This time however there was a reciprocation of introductory protocols. Almost everyone we met was either a secretary or a vice president of something, of either the Nari Morcha or the Youth Morcha or Asthayi or whatever.
This was when I realized what a political party does to the self esteem of its more pioneering members. In a place like that where opportunities to engage in something economically useful was either limited or virtually non existent, this dispensation of offices and titles invested the lives of folks with a sense of purpose and meaning. There was one particularly active fellow with whom I struck up a conversation. His children were in an orphanage in Kalimpong while his wife was busy preparing for a little shop she intended to set up to cash in on the election day crowd. From the man's conversation I knew he was no political novice. And so it turned out late in the night, when after a few rounds of the local stuff he revealed to me that he was actually a GNLF man and that he had in fact walked about five kilometers to another tea garden with a handful of supporters and his green Flag to actually 'surrender' before the officials of the newly formed party.
Even as I write this I remember the man's face contorted into serious meaningfulness as he spoke about his politics.
Towards the end of our conversation( punctuated by the wild, rapacious snoring of the overweight lepcha home guard sprawled on top of a precarious bed of joined desks) he asked us to be a little easy with the voting proceedings.
In fact he actually said, “ Development ko lagi bhako bha ta kehi thiyena...tara yo election ta identity ko lagi ho, tyesai le bujhi dinu hos na”.
And I began to have that surreal feeling all over again.

IB Rai
Continuing the theme of identity Anmole Daju once asked me “Did you buy the book?” He was of course talking about his translation of IB Rai's stories. I still remain guilty as charged. Somehow, having read most of the man's stuff in the original, I cannot bring myself to pick up the translation. The joy of reading would now be replaced by nitpicking judgments about the quality of translation and that is no way to treat a creative effort. As a wag said, “Translation is like a mistress, if it is beautiful it must be unfaithful”.
Translation to me is a last option to be exercised if all else fails. But to those who have been brought up on an impoverished diet of Nepali literature, this translation is perhaps one of the better ways to get acquainted with the works of a truly world class litterateur, who has unfortunately lost his way a bit now.
Just to retain the anecdotal flavor of this blog, here is an interesting one on the wry humor of IB Rai. It seemed the driver of his jeep stopped his vehicle abruptly on the way and made off to a village somewhere down below. After what seemed like an eternity the man returned with a sheepish smile and a bunch of vegetables (iskus ko munta to be specific)clasped in the crook of his arms. Explaining the reason for his absence he rendered an apologetic, "Hernu hos na sasu le munta leyara janu bhannu bhayo". To which an irritated IB retorted, " Bhai lai jara laijau bhaneko bha ta jhan bholi aaun thyu hola"
Speaking of translations, I am quite certain that most of you have read Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum etc translations of Murakami. In the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes, there is an offbeat tale called Lederhosen. I wouldn't want to give away the plot for those who have not read it. But as a small aside I can talk to you about a conversation in the story between a Japanese housewife and a German salesman in a lederhosen store in Hamburg. The conversation happens in broken English specially of the heavily German accented shopkeeper of the apparel store. Nothing especial until you realize what the translators have pulled off.
The story originally was written in Japanese.
So here you have a rendition in English of a conversation in Germanized English that originally took place in a Japanese story.
In this particular translation by Anmole in which I too have had the honor of brainstorming, a particularly challenging exercise happened in translating the conclusion of Euta Din Ko Samanyata (An ordinariness of a day). The protagonist returns home with his wife after an 'ordinary' day in the fields. As they approach home they encounter a group of kids playing AMRITE (the word presumably being a corruption of Am I Right?)..The husband muses to himself 'AMA RITE' ('mother/wife is right') which is a topical pun on the chorus (AMRITE) of the game. Now how do we render that in English while still retaining the nuance and the humor of the original. You will then begin to realize why I recommend reading the stories in your own mother tongue.
(For those who need a more contemporary example based on popular culture I urge you to remember the Disney animated flick Aladin. When Aladin encounters Jasmine for the first time, he quips, “ You can cal me Al” (which of course is a pun on a famous Paul Simon song). Now imagine watching the same in Hindi? Would, ”aap mujhe Al keh sakte ho" sound as ...well....you get the point.)

Of course part of the buzz about the book is the introduction. Mr. Prem Poddar has done what cultural theorists do-theorize. GL2 has suddenly got an intellectual aura about it with deconstructionist catch phrases like 'other' , 'margins' etc doing the round in essays and even speeches.
But it is interesting to read the take of people like Poddar , Fanon and Bhabha.
As Homi Bhabha tells you in his book The Location of Culture, issues of identities in these time of cross-cultural movements are played out in the 'space' of the interstices and the 'time' is not the 'empty homogenous time' of Benedict Anderson (whose Imagined Communities, seems to have inspired the title of the IB Translation)....
Anyway was blabbering in the end..so will get back later.
And when I do so will talk more one the subject of identities, about some new books I am reading and also report about a particularly riveting afternoon that I spent here at home with Anmol Daju listening to jazz on my single driver speakers.......

P.S. 1
As has been acknowledged by an erudite and persistent reader of this blog, negotiating through the denseness of the prose of Homi Bhaba is a seriously difficult affair what with impenetrable sentences like this one from the Location of Culture, which once made it to the second rank of The Bad Writing Contest ...

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality..."

which bring me to my next point......
P.S. 2
An interesting book that I am reading discusses the role luck (randomness) plays out in life. In one of the chapters the author talks about the possibility of a reverse Turing test. The Turing test holds that a computer can be said to be intelligent if it can fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The reverse Turing test that the author envisages is the converse. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by another human. The author then asks, "Can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida entirely randomly?" He answers it in the affirmative and after invoking the inevitable example of the Sokal hoax, he talks about Monte Carlo generators designed to structure such texts and write entire papers. "Fed with 'postmodernist' texts, they can randomize phrases under a method called recursive grammar, and grammatically sound but entirely meaningless sentences that sound like Jacques Derrida, Camille Pagila and such a crowd. Owing to the fuzziness of his thought, the literary intellectual can be fooled by randomness."
A long time back Madhusudhan Daju had told me about a prank that he had played with Diyalo, the literary journal from Darjeeling. Taking a glossary of words such as 'volcano', 'Eucalyptus' etc that one finds in the ayamic poetry of say, Iswar Ballabh, he too fleshed out a poem and sent it to the editors. Needless to mention that the poem was featured in the subsequent edition of the magazine. Our very own Sokal at work there.

'RECRUITING' SHORTY

2009-09-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

It was Khuswant Singh perhaps, who quoted someone else when he said “Beware of the short man, his brain is too close to his bottom.”
Thankfully the Indian government does not share such fears , especially when you consider its concession on the qualifying 'height' for prospective Gorkha recruits.
Or does it?
Talking of being vertically challenged, a 'gaun khane katha' asks 'pudke bahun ko sukeko chandan ke ho?'. (answer kalo dal)
Funnier still is this observation about a shorty's household.
'Tesko gharma pauna besi auda...tyo chahi achana ma sutcha'
I can only add..'aba achana ko pir....'.
Anti-immigrants of the world unite.
You have nothing to lose but your sleep.

WHAT THOUSANDS?

2009-09-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph today reports: “Gorkha Janmukti Morcha president Bimal Gurung has become a hero for thousands of contract workers of the DGHC, but if Subash Ghisingh had wanted he could have been on the same pedestal 11 years ago without having to make any effort.
The Telegraph has learnt that the state government was willing to regularise the jobs of the contract workers in 1997 and had also approved the DGHC (Recruitment to Group C and Group D and equivalent categories of posts) Rules, 1997.”
There is a small problem with this.
1997 is more than a decade ago. Had Ghissing accepted the State Govt. proposal, recruitment would have been rationalized.
The question of 'thousands' in the scale being talked about would simply not have arisen.
But the larger issue is, why are things so bad in the hills that people 'hung' on to such jobs for almost twenty years?
And lastly while Ghissing does need to take a bulk of the blame, the State Govt. cannot take a 'holier than thou' attitude by planting such news in the press-and that too now.
They seem to be, in a way saying, “look we had offered 'this' and 'that', now what could we do if your own did not want to take it”.
I am reading Amartya Sen's “Development as Freedom” where the central thesis is that without democracy you cannot have true development.
Though Amartya Sen quotes facts and figures from all over the world to make his point, one would have wished that he had dug up some stats from his own backyard too.
After all, you can to an extent, attribute the lack of development in the hills to a lack of 'real' democracy.
I sometimes think of Sikkim. The ruling party is so strongly entrenched that opposition is virtually non-existent. (The press could have taken this role, but they are too busy playing it safe.)
Even that State faces the issue of 'muster roll' employees who are nothing more than glorified 'asthayis'. But do we see protests of the scale witnessed here?
And lastly, there was some delay there in implementing the pay commission recommendation and yet the employees waited like patient school children.
No messy trade union strikes, no Dharna's, no picketing.
It is no wonder that Sikkim wants to follow the Singaporean model of development based on the so called Lee thesis-denial of basic civil rights and liberty is acceptable if that leads to economic development.
GL too may go the way, given our experience with oppositions.
But as Sen asserts, there is little empirical evidence to prove that such hypothesis is correct, in the long run.
Anyway will be posting some more on this and other books that I have been reading.
Thanks all.

THE OTHER SIDE OF HUNGER STRIKE

2009-09-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

The hunger strike has been called off till Diwali.
Round one you can say have gone to the strikers since an official response from the WB government has promised to look into the regularization of at least about 70% of the temporary work force.
There could be similar good news for the rest too.
But as of now, the lifting of the strike must has come as a relief for the strikers.
We all know about the scale of this protest.
More than six thousand starving protestors spread across every government establishment available, is a logistical not to mention an administrative nightmare.
For example, even though you have not eaten for days there is still that important matter of attending to nature calls.
Kalimpong Town hall I am told was home to about 1200 of the protestors, both men and women.
There was such pressure on the almost non-existent civic amenities in this crumbling establishment that the place just imploded with...we will not get further graphic than that.
Perhaps to give the govt. a better idea of the imagination, bodily flexibility and resourcefulness of their prospective recruits a few of them had even accomplished the gravity (and biology) defying feat of off-loading the unspeakables and unsmellables on the wash basins.
Then as the fast continued it is understandable that some people will face medical emergencies.
Falling blood pressure, dehydration, diabetic-complications etc are a given.
But a medico cousin from Kurseong came up with this intriguing medical condition, at least for someone on a fast to death protest-diarrhea.
“What message are we sending out to the larger world when anshan karis are suffering from indigestion?” was what a politically conscious doctor had to say.
What the doctor had to say about the fist-fight that broke out amongst drunken protestors (or is it visitors) in Darjeeling is not known.
Speaking of hospitals, a number of asthayis got admitted to the hospitals just when the strike began. Many must have had genuine medical reasons to do so.
But a few could be playing truant.
Just to make sure that these did not get to fool the unions, a terse directive ordered them to continue with their hospitalization till the strike was called off.
So you can well imagine the pressure on Kalimpong hospital where a significant proportion of the work force too were on strike.
P.S. Yesterday was Biswakarma pooja. This festival is a kind of a prelude to the Durga puja. Of late Kalimpong denizens decked up in all their finery have been seen going around town in the night.
But I was reminded of a Kalimpong , no a typically SAS joke.
One Biswakarma Puja day Fr. Lobo asked Mason to explain the reason for his absence from the accounts office. Mason told the man, I had just gone to the hostel to wish Fr. Sebastian 'a happy feast day'.
Now Fr. Sebastian is actually Fr. Sebastian Singh so we all know what Mason was trying to get at.
Lobo being a simple soul too went up to Sebastian and wished him 'a happy feast day'. The priest was so fired up that he went hammer and tongs at poor Lobo.... “sala chutiya...giskin chas...”.

LIFE BLOOD

2009-09-16T08:57:00.001-07:00

There are few animals with whom I share my life.
I want to share some of them with you.
But before that a disclaimer.
I don't quite succumb or subscribe to that evolutionist's fantasy which misleads many into inferring that humans too are animals.
For example, I have some ape loving friends who tell me that according to some genetic or is it genomic(?) algebra, humans are 98% similar to the simians.
I tend to sober up that analysis by reminding them that in terms of 'percentage similarity' you would, at least in a chemical sense, be quite 'similar' to the cucumber too.
I am not exaggerating...cucumber 95% water..humans 78% (well with grown ups it comes to around 66%).
Anyway if the figure does not impress you...look at it this way, the primary component of you and your favorite salad is the same..water.
But then this is not how I wanted to start this post.
I meant it to be an elegy on my dog KALI.
When I brought the black pup home it was inevitable that I would call the mongrel 'Blackie'.
But then you don't know my mother.
Even before I could get to the B of ..Blackie she had already called it KALI.
Immediately I realized that this canine christening celebrated the femininity..or to be uncharitable the bitch-hood of the mongrel.
'Blackie' would have been as asexual as it was affected.
Of course the 'dangos' of the neighborhood had other ideas and it wasn't long before they began to leave tell-tale signs of their 'manhood'...smelly gates..gangs and finally a pregnant bitch.
Anyway, Kali died today.
Old age did her in.
She went to attend her call of nature and then slumped on the lawn..made some whining noises and breathed her last.
Nature after all did come a calling.
We buried her quite deep.
Deep burial is the only way of dignifying a dead dog.
Now the only animal with which I share some proximity is the gecko.
I share some time with it..he takes a bit of my space.
Both time and space gently collide on the ceiling.
I stare at the ceiling-a white expanse to gaze on aimlessly some sleepless nights- while for the Gecko it is a theater of action.
Even as I watch, it sends out its probing tongue to nimbly trap a mosquito.
A mosquito which has gorged itself pink-tight on my son's blood, and a second ago was singing about it.
Me, the gecko, my son and the mosquito we all share an immediate brotherhood of blood.
Of course I am the only one writing blogs.

HUNGER STRIKE AND RUMORS

2009-09-16T07:39:00.000-07:00

Even as I write this the hunger strike is still on.
This is not your dainty relay fast to make a symbolic point but an extreme unction that takes people to the brink.
Twice when I was in town today, the normal grind and groan of traffic was punctuated(or rather rent) by the wails of the ambulance sirens rushing another fast-casualty to the hospital.
As the days go by and the deadlock continues this could be a common sight.
Of course this is not the first time such hunger strikes have been undertaken in the hills.
But the sheer scale of this one is staggering.
Sadly it is not sensational enough for the mainstream media to merit wasting any column inches or air time.
However the strike has garnered its fair share of controversies and conspiracy theories too.
Before I post the following points, I need to add an important caveat. They could be false, politically motivated or downright malicious.
But since I believe that the readership of this blog is mature and discerning, I am sharing these points to give them an idea of the kind of gossip circulating in the hills.

(i) There is one school of thought which subscribes to the belief that the strike has been instigated and sponsored by the GJMM to deflect attention from some of the vexing questions that have cropped up recently in the hills.
Some of it has to do with stories about a reported falling out between the GJMM president and his wife over the former's alleged infidelity involving some GLP cadres. The same report further asserts that Mrs. Gurung has left for Australia in a huff.
(ii) Another variant is along similar lines except that in this version the 'falling out' is between the GJMM president and his spiritual guru.
(iii) A third report has to be attributed to the 'sensational revelations' threatened by the AIGL president, Mr. Madan Tamang. This one like a true pot boiler has everything in it. It talks about secret deals, millions of rupees and even bank transaction numbers. Of course, and this is true, Mr. Tamang hasn't been given the opportunity to actually come out in the open to air his allegations. Efforts to muzzle the man have only succeeded in making the rumor mills work overtime.
(Since this entry is threatening to be too serious let me share with you an interesting exchange. Cable TV in Kalimpong can be quite naughty. It once reported Dr. Harka Bahadur's take on Mr. Madan Tamang. Dr. Hark (as he is affectionately known amongst his Flatfile circle friends) said that every political party needs a Leslie figure in the opposition. Of course I don't have to tell you who Leslie is. If I have to explain that than maybe 90% this blog will be lost on you.Anyway the channel reported that matter to Leslie and let him have his say. Lectured Leslie to the school master, “First Dr. Harka should be going to school...before he can....”..anyway you get the point.)
Another politically famous FLATFILE alumnus is Anmole Daju. Besides his other substantial gifts, Anmole Daju has a great sense of humor and coins spoonerisms on the trot.
Once Sanjay (of Bajla Transport) and Navin (of Bajla stores) were returning with us from a function at SAS. Anmole Daju had brought his car along and we asked for a lift. "Enaru lai chai sanghai lanu hudaina.." he said. "Kina, Daju?", I asked. "Bajla Bajla huncha ta anta"..was his reply.
Once Anmole was invited to arbitrate a dispute between the two scheduled caste communities of the hills.
After working out a rapprochement, he is supposed to have finally summed up what he wanted to put across in, what else, but another spoonerism.
I believe he is supposed to have said," Abo hami..kami, damai ityadi bhanera hundai na... milnu parcha ra boru dami kamai garnu parcha..."
Ok a last one. Many years back we were invited to a poetry festival at Gangtok. Guru Ladaki had coined the meet CONVERSE meaning Conversation in Verse. Anmole Daju's take was no less poetic-'CONVERSE bhaneko Kan dai verse bhannu parcha'..he said.

Let us come back to the more serious issue at hand.
These by the way, are just the tip of the iceberg. In a society threatened and at times even defined by violence both real and implied, truth somehow becomes the first casualty.
Newspapers which perhaps owe it to the masses to bring out the truth have their own commercial and at times even existential compulsions to actually be following those 'impossible' ideals. Sometimes they even add to the confusion. A bengali daily tried to set the cat amongst the pigeons by reporting that there had been a secret meeting between the GJMM president and the Chief Minister who was forced to temporarily recuperate in a resort near Siliguri from a smoking related ailment.
That story set off its own avalanche of rumors.
This post in a way seeks to highlight the confusion prevalent in the hills.
Of course, some of us have the luxury of getting confused.
Others like those who are on strike have their livelihoods at stake and are hardly bothered by the polemics that populate poorly read blogs.

SAHEED DURGA MALLA FORCE(?)

2009-09-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

If you want to make sense of a politician's rhetoric, it is not important to decipher 'what' has been said; nor is it necessary to figure out 'why' it has been said.
A more meaningful exercise would be to investigate 'to whom' the matter is being addressed .
The key therefore is not the content but the constituency.
Figure that one out and everything else will fall in perspective.

Tanks in Kalimpong
Take the case of Mr. Bimal Gurung's recent talk about raising a volunteer force to counter Chinese aggression.
To whom is Mr. Gurung speaking?
Whoever it may be, it is certainly not the Chinese.
By the way let me make a small digression.
The past few weeks have been rife with rumors that Kalimpong will witness a major movement of artillery through its roads to counter the Chinese escalation.
There have been talk of the roads being kept out of bounds for all civilian vehicles for up to three days.
Old timers feared that the 'tanks would destroy' our roads again this time.
Not that there is much left of the roads to destroy.
That job having already been accomplished by the monsoons and the Municipality, though not necessarily in that order.
I also heard rumors that the Lions Clock Tower would be pulled down to allow the Tanks more room to negotiate the roundabout.
(By the way, the next time you are near this Kalimpong landmark, please don't fail to notice JAWAHAR STORES, where the sophisticated, young entrepreneur owner has put up the slogan: JAWAHAR STORES- A HOUSE OF DEPARTMENTAL STORES).
Of course no such movement really took place.
You can perhaps apportion a part of the blame on the 24X7 news channels whose sensationalist reportage have fueled the imagination of the more imaginative amongst us.

So to whom is he talking?
Anyway let us come back to the main point.
Who was Mr. Gurung talking to, when he made that 'volunteer force' comment?
Could it be the GLP?
After all it does make sense to give the outfit a higher, 'national' sense of purpose.
From saving the locality, to saving the nation what could be a more meaningful, more logical extension of the patriotism project?
Could it be to make up to the Tibetan community, which understandably was a bit peeved by that earlier accusation about it being mindless Congress voters?
Or could it be to cock a snook at the BGP for their alleged efforts to appropriate the Gorkha freedom fighter's legacy for its own ends?

Waiting for the next shoe to fall
Compelling as all these reasons may seem, my submission is that Mr. Gurung has raised the Chinese aggression pitch to drive home the message about the sensitivity of the region.
This after all, was also asserted by the MP when he made the Budget rebuttal.
Anyway, Mr. Gurung has not made any secret of his intentions of being a thorn in the side of the WB govt.
This time around too-by seeking to slip in the militant message wrapped up in a patriotic package-he seems to be telling all that his options are wide open and that unpredictability is still the main weapon in his political arsenal.

FLOWER SHOW

2009-09-13T06:35:00.001-07:00

There are a number of clubs in Kalimpong. Before we get into what these clubs do or don't do, it is interesting to note their names.
Baghdhara has EMOTION club.
11th mile has PIRANHAS club... and would 12th mile be too far behind... yes they have DANSBERG club.
Anyway DANSBERG club is organizing a Flower Show.
Speaking of flower shows, a year or two back the Kalimpong Horticulture Society had high hopes of 'winning' the 'International' Flower Show in Gangtok.
If the members are to believed, the organizers had even written out the prize cheque in favor of the Society.
Of course like all stories this one too came with a surprise ending.
The prize was given to the Sikkim CM's wife instead.
Quipped one rightly disgruntled Kalimpong representative, 'it is as well that Sikkim did not organize a Beauty Contest ….'.
Anyway watch this space.

SOME MUSINGS ON GL1 AND 2

2009-09-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Cha Inchi Ghatai Dinuhos
I have this pet question to throw history teachers into a tizzy. In 1914, when World War 1 broke out did the newspapers report it as such?
Of course they didn't since none of them were so prescient as to anticipate that in another thirty years time, the world would witness a second, deadlier conflagration.
The categorization of the conflict into neat, first and second, was after all a journalistic (or was it an academic?) afterthought.
Anyway we are entering into the second (or is it the third year) year of GL2.
Spearheaded by the GJMM, the 'agitation' this time around has been thankfully different from GL1.
You can gauze this from the subtle difference in the jargon that the movements have spawned .
The GL1 days brought to the fore a warning that was as mathematically precise as it was brutal: cha inchi ghatai dinchu.
GL2 on the other hand has introduced the catch phrase Gandhi badi andolan (though some cynics continue to assert that the Gandhi of the slogan is not the historical Gandhi of the 'nonviolence' fame but the caricature of the 'monetary' kind, the one that you find on your currency notes especially of the bigger denominations....).
The 'cha inchi ghatai dinchu' was of course not as ominous as it was 'made' to sound, in the beginning.
Before the agitation, such phraseology was more in the domain of tailoring than in the arena of political retribution. Here I am thinking about the times when you searched the JB heaps for a pant, till you found something that you liked, a bell-bottomed vestige of the Go Go days.
You then took it to the tailor for a major exercise in altering : mori chai cha inchi ghatai dinu hos.
Life indeed was simple even when we had to make that sartorially seismic shift from the bell bottom to the drain pipe.

What GL1 destroyed and created
GL1 of course destroyed many things.
Innocence was its first casualty. The night shows in the two cinemas, the almost zero rate of crime etc. But it did have its positives too.
Power in Kalimpong moved away from the Main Road and the Motor Stand. It went to Monsong, Kafer, Sangsey etc.
Kalimpong Municipality, for a period of time, had a retired wood cutter from Monsong as its Chairman.
The man technically qualified to be counted as the first citizen of Kalimpong.
Politics after all is a great leveler.
But this truth works in more ways than we can possibly imagine and even when things did change, nothing really changed at all.
Pardon me this elliptical excursion, but maybe it could be summed up in these two pithy lines.
Junai Jogi Aaye Pani Kani Chireko, or.
Communism is man oppressing man, capitalism is just the other way around.

How permanent is temporary
The GJMM president recently pronounced that the debacle of the temporary council employees could only be solved with the formation of GL.
It isn't difficult to understand where the compulsion to make this statement is coming from.
But the appreciation of the problem and its 'proposed' solution underlines the gravity of the matter.
The issue about the temporary employees is one of the most vexing ones confronting the hills.
And when you realize that some of these asthayis have been working for twenty years, you would perhaps want to redefine what 'temporary' really means.
I see this in two different ways.
On the level of humanity and welfare, yes the employees do need to be made permanent.
A slightly weaker argument would delve into the circumstances under which these categories of employees were created.
Most are political appointees recruited without any process or procedure. Some of them man redundant positions. The DGHC for example once had a transport department. The buses are all dying in the yards, but the employees of the said department cannot be meted out the same fate as the machines.
So the question is would you absorb all these people and bloat your already inefficient system with the extra baggage of unproductive manpower?
A case by case analysis with 'substantial' golden handshakes for the flab does seem like the only solution possible.
But please put that with one caveat.
None of them would be allowed to buy a van with the VRS.
No not even a Nano.

Chattrey Subba

The CPRM seems to be a farsighted lot in this game. It has almost been a decade since the man's incarceration over his alleged involvement in the Ghissing assassination attempt case.
Victim hood imparts a special halo to individuals, all the more so if the individual has the enigmatic antecedents possessed by our man here.
The silence of the GJMM over CS is indeed wrought with implications.
Would his release be the last throw of the desperate dice to politically polarize Kalimpong??

LANDSLIDE UPDATE

2009-09-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

Relief
After a brief spell of sunny weather, the rains are once again upon us with renewed vengeance.
For someone like me-living in an area that is relatively unexposed to the landslides(at least for now)-it serves as a reminder of the harrowing times that people in and around Kalimpong are going through.
Just a few days back, I was talking to someone whose house had been partially ravaged by a slide.
Disaster relief personnel from the SDO's office visited to assess the damage; they did not find it serious enough to merit any substantial official help .
All she got therefore was a piece of tarpaulin.
Her neighbor on the other hand was 'lucky'. His severely damaged house was reckoned worthy of compensation:24kg rice and Rs120. Besides of course, a mention in the official record as one of the victims.
And yes they gave him the tarpaulin.

Does your house exist?
If you talk to the officials they say there is a serious bottleneck towards rehabilitation efforts.
Most of the house/land owners do not have relevant papers to prove ownership.
This is true.
Land laws in Kalimpong are hopelessly complicated. The category of ownerships bewildering.
In the past not having papers meant not being able to monetize the land.
Today it is the difference between getting relief or having to fend off the elements on one's own.
The official position being, they cannot rebuild houses that didn't 'exist' in the first place.
Existence of course have to be proved in paper.
It is an irony that houses that have been sheltering poor families do not 'exist' because they don't exist in paper; roads and bridges that do not exist in reality, 'exist', because they do so in paper.
I know the sentence is ugly, but the situation is not very pretty either.

Missing the forest department for the trees
A few huge trees were uprooted by the slides and these fell on top of a house above Himalayan Hotel. Thankfully there were no casualties.
Missives were sent to the forest department requesting that the trees be cut.
The department replied curtly asking if they had taken the permission of the Department before building houses in such areas.
Of course the department in all its official wisdom was correct.
But I thought the timing was hardly the right one to drive home that important lesson against illegal construction.

Sleeping at school
At Bhalukhop, many affected villagers gather at a local school in the evenings.
They look at the sky.
If the rains don't seem imminent they return home.
Otherwise they stay there.
I can only imagine the plight of the ladies and the students and the young.

No landslides at Mela Ground
The Rotary Club is at the forefront of relief efforts.
They plan to bring in tents donated by well wishers abroad.
But before that can be done, the damage has to assessed by a Rotarian expert from Canada or Australia.
That gentleman was refused a visa by the Indian govt.
A local Rotarian carped: “But why don't they believe our assessment of the situation and send us the tents?”
Someone asked him, “Where will you put up those 120 tents?”.
Another replied, “Mela ground, at least there is no danger of the landslides there”.
True.

SAHEED CUP

2009-09-08T05:26:00.000-07:00

MELA GROUND

Before the concrete wall had been erected around Mela Ground, the flat used to be barricaded by bamboo 'chitras'.
As far as materials go the chitra is cheap and easily installed. It was biodegradable and could be sourced locally too.
But it was not perfect.
The main problem was that the joins were not seamless.
It was therefore not unusual to find small groups of die hard football fans straining themselves to illicitly view the match through orifices that would increase in size and number as the tournament progressed.
The KSA of course were not the ones to take things lying down.
Those wanting to steal the match (or at least portions of it) would be dealt with appropriately.
The solution was to promptly blacken all such unplanned and illegal view-points with a generous smearing of burnt 'mobile'.
Now it was difficult to stick your face into that broken cross-stitch of cane without getting it blackened for days.
The good news however was that these bamboo barricades would come down on the 15th of August and then one could watch the finals without buying tickets or getting faces and clothes ruined.
This was one freedom that the KSA gifted to good folks of Kalimpong year after year on Independence Day.

SAHEED CUP
I was there to witness the finals of the Saheed Cup.
Most of you will know that football is just one of the many reasons why one makes that trip to Mela Ground.
This year too was no different.
First let me tell you what has changed.
If you see a bunch of young boys in tracksuits suits at the gates don't get fooled into thinking that the extras of one of the teams have spilled over outside.
These are the GLP on duty.
And they take their duty seriously.
From selling tickets to ensuring some order during the opening rush, the GLP bring some 'military' type discipline to the whole affair.
Unfortunately they cannot do anything about the standard of the matches played inside.
The finals was played between Sikkim Police and a club from Nepal.
The Nepali team must have been from somewhere near the border.
I was watching the match with Nepali porters who had turned out in full numbers to support their country cousins.
They had even brought their wives and children along and these kept the chai wallahs and the jhal moorie wallahs busy, while the men folk pepped up the Nepal team and asked them not to be afraid of the Sikkim Police.
Some 'dais' told me that the Nepal team was from Dhulabari, others said they were from Jhapa till a stern looking, Rai fellow waving the Nepal Flag said that they were from Chandernagar.
He had obviously come with the team and did not know what to do with the support of the porter dais.

From where I was sitting, I had a panoramic view of the spectators around the ground.
The large maroon and yellow patches below Sherpa lodge and to the right of the VIP gallery where the SAS supporters usually sit, were the lamas who as usual had turned out in full force to watch the match.
There was one especially vocal gentleman in the crowd who had stripped himself down to his PT vest and was keeping the crowd entertained with his antics.
Thankfully that was the final extent of his undress.
Otherwise the GLP would have another controversial situation to take care off.
I invariably make it a point to sit on the steps facing the VIP gallery.
There are two reasons for this.
I love to follow the trajectory of the football when it gets kicked out of the ground.
This time one landed up on top of a jeep, another hit the Dharamsalah wall and still another bounced near a lady shopping at the grocery near the ICICI bank.
The other reason is because I love listening to the pep talk, analysis and other things more colorful that the coaches and the team entourage give to the players before the match, during the half time and once the game is over.
This time I heard the Sikkim Police captain tell a younger team member:
“Final ma khelnu pau dai chas..alik jos diyera khelna....”
At the final whistle, the game was drawn at one goal apiece.
The KSA have done away with the concept of extra time.
They start the match so late that by the time it is over, it is usually quite dark.
So we were into the penalty shoot outs.
The crowd wanted the kicks to be taken at the goalposts below the Gandhi gate, but the match officials being sticklers for tradition had it in front of the Nehru manch.
Making this a perfect day for the porter dais and their families the Nepal team won.
I heard the Sikkim Police captain tell the KSA officials... “Aaju ko judgement chai maaney....” and to his team members … “Ghanta yesto team sanga ta kahiley haarey ko thina...timaru thaap tyo cup chai.....”.
But of course he did go up to the dais with his team, albeit a little reluctantly ,when their name was called to receive the runners up token.
After the winners trophy had been presented, the announcer for the afternoon who had been peppering his announcement with a generous and at times boring doses of GL cliches said.... “Hami ley afnui rajya paye pachi..yes saheed diwas lai aj bhabya roop le manaune chau...”.
No he wasn't Subha Sir of SUMI.

HOLDING HANDS

2009-09-04T20:04:00.001-07:00

Recent reports about the banning of the display of affection in public (which intriguingly also forbids the holding of hands by couples, though presumably not of the same sex) by the GLP have understandably raked up a huge controversy.
The internet forums are drenched with the cries of aghast young men and women in colorful monikers venting out their disgust and dissent in language that would have surely made their English teachers proud.
The national press too have picked up the issue and reported it with sensationalist headlines. Curiously this is not for the first time that the same incident has been highlighted and reported by all the major newspapers with a journalistic presence in Darjeeling. This is quite understandable since reporters in Darjeeling move around in friendly packs. There is no real compulsion or competence to unearth exclusive scoops. The carcass of an issue is shared amongst all. And since most of such news are printed in just the North Bengal edition of the papers, no one really cares.
Now on the issue of the diktat.
My theory is that had there not been that public showdown between the GLP and the couple-married, with the woman having the 'vermilion' proof of matrimony on her forehead-we would not have heard of it at all. As a small aside, I wonder what would have happened had the couple really been married but not belonged to the faith that espouses the use of vermilion by married women. Since, marriage certificates are not usually carried in one's person to provide ready proof of the conjugal union, my guess is that they would have beaten a hasty retreat to prevent the matter from escalating any further.
I say this because the GLP zealot would not really have bought the marriage ring argument.
Of course the other matter is about the nature of the place in which the diktat was sought to be enforced.
Mal Road is a kind of a cultural space in Darjeeling.
Every Darjeeling denizen who shares the pretension of living in the 'Queen of Hills', sees the walk around the Mal as the defining experience of Darjeeling.
In a way, you cannot blame him.
The rest of Darjeeling is crumbling away.
The roads are punctuated by potholes. The landscape ruined by buildings.
Chowrasta and by extension the Mal are the only places where the vestigial remnant of old Darjeeling still exists to keep on fueling the nostalgia about it being a 'happening' place. The Mal is also the place where many wide-eyed young men and women who have come to Darjeeling to attend college from outside have their truly first cosmopolitan experience. And of course there is that small matter of the Mal being a romantic destination where cuddling couples are left to their own devices.
Now as in all manners of force deployment, the head honchos of the GLP have understandably used some strategy. Darjeeling is being manned by GLP sourced from Kalimpong and elsewhere. These rustic lads have no sensitivity to the nuances of Darjeeling life. For them the Mal could be any road. This disconnect therefore is where the core of matter lies. The GLP as a body needs a reason to exist. If that reason is connected with a 'higher' social purpose, the more meaningful a cadres engagement with it. It is no wonder then that an effort is being made to sanitize the society and rid it off its perceived ills.
The incident at the Mal may consolidate that process further.
Or hopefully it could lead into further articulation of dissent that would make the GLP idealogues rethink their strategy.

SUNSHINE HOLIDAY

2009-09-02T20:01:00.000-07:00

Just read in the papers that Mount Hermon gave a day off to celebrate the sunshine.
Mr. Fernandez called it an opportunity to 'energize the soul'.
Though a bit surprised by the poetry from my ex. physics teacher, I can empathize with his enthusiasm.
Incessant rains do have that effect of dampening the spirits, not to mention the mess from the mildew.
Of course MH and as the newspaper reports NP, aren't the only schools that have the tradition of 'sunny day' holidays.
Swiss Principals of SAS too were known to surprise the scholars with an occasional day off.
The boys would be packed home and the priests would hurry off into the countryside with their butterfly nets and SLRs.
But sadly (or is it happily) sunny Kalimpong overdoses on the sun, so it is no wonder that the concept of this type of vacation was abandoned early on.
But I cannot fail to notice the more subtle message in the MH principal's pronouncement.
Education in the hills of late have taken a beating, what with the procession of bandhs and strikes.
Less imaginative institutions are trying trying to recover the lost working hours by going to extremes such as curtailing legitimate holidays and introducing extra periods.
MH on the other hand has put matters into the right perspective.
School after all is as much about studies as it is about the 'soul'.

THANKFULLY THAKPA

2009-08-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

Dr. Ali

Just the other day, my young son was admitted at Sewa Sadan. He was referred there by Dr. Ali, who suspected that the wheeze in his breathing was due to an asthmatic attack.
Dr. Ali as we all know is the most monosyllabic doctor in Kalimpong. Once a friend went to him with a sore throat.
Dr. Ali examined him and then wrote out the prescription.
My friend, himself also a man of few words (and plagued by his bad throat) asked, " Is it pharyngitis?"
Dr Ali without even looking up replied, "No it is something else" and stopped at that.
My friend did not bother to take the matter up any further and till date has no clue as to what he was suffering from.
Sometimes I wonder whether being aware of the precise nomenclature of an ailment has any bearing on the process of recovery.
Anyway, what Dr. Ali lacks in words, he makes up with the volume of his prescriptions.
My son, all of 18months, was recommended a pharmacopoeia regimen that almost emptied Tibet Stores.
Antibiotic injections, saline, inhalers and even an oxygen tank was kept ready on hand.
Dr. Ali does not like to experiment.
His method is to blast to smithereens any microbial resistance by what could be termed as the medicinal equivalent of a Bofors.
And most of the times it works.
As will be attested by countless parents, Dr. Ali is nothing short of a miracle worker.

Sewa Sadan
Sewa Sadan where my child was admitted is a charitable hospital run by a local trust. The hospital you will notice is very clean.
It lacks the hospital smell.
It is thankfully also deficient in bullying nurses.
Most of the staff here are young, pleasant and very empathetic.
In this particular case even the resident patients were quite tolerant of the decibel levels inflicted on them by my son's wailing, which like the rains, continued almost through the entire night.
We stayed there for two days. The boy got better. His chest X-Ray did not support the asthma hypothesis.
Yes Dr. Ali told me that.
And taking charge, I struck off the last dose of the antibiotic injection.
Somewhere I had read of the Australian regimen with antibiotics. The idea was to come off the drug once some relief had been attained.
Even without that 'last dose' the boy is doing fine. The wheeze has gone and the cough is just occasional.

Thakpa

One of the more pleasant surprises of the Sewa Sadan stay was a chance encounter with Thakpa. No he wasn't sick.
He had come there on business.
Before I get to the bucket, I must share with you the sad fact that the man has grown old.
Unlike cartoon characters like, say Dennis the Menace, Thakpa unfortunately had aged and he did look strange with his bad eye disappearing inside the caverns of his wrinkling face.
But the angled twist of his mouth was the same.
Ditto with his slanting stance, the bucket perched on his shoulders.
And adding to the relief that somethings don't change at all, the bucket was as dirty as you had seen it when momos were 5pieces a rupee.
The invocation too was the same..MOMO..MOMO....but here i noticed a little variance...SABZI MOMO KHANEY..
Had Thakpa gone green I suspected.
Suddenly I realized that the man was in the premises of an establishment run by the PRANAMIS.
Thakpa after all was still the astute businessman he had always been.
And I doubt the dhoti clad gentleman with the white streaks on his forehead would bother launching into his own private investigation about the innards of Thakpa's momos.
I however was under no compulsion to taste the contents of Thakpa's bucket.
Some adventures are best left not undertaken.

LET US SEE WHERE WE CAN GO FROM HERE

2009-08-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

If it is an All India strike, one may rest assured that in Kalimpong life and business will go on as usual.
So when the met folks made the forecast that India would receive less that its usual quota of the monsoons, we should have seen what was coming.
This year the second half of August has been particularly wet. The rains have been incessant, sometimes pouring down the entire night. The havoc they have wreaked seems to have in a sad way, vindicated the ominous warnings sounded out by NGOs such as Save the Hills.
Whole hill sides have been battered and bruised. Houses that have been built on landfills have been especially vulnerable.
But then to use an old cliche, every cloud has its silver lining.
This year the hope is that relief efforts- burdened by bureaucratic narrow mindedness and corruption in the past-will be swift, empathetic and most of all substantial. And that policy makers will finally sit up, take notice and actually do something about it.
Since it goes without saying that more needs to be done at a policy level to mitigate effects of such disasters, and those still in the waiting. Much much more needs to be done to avert them.
In some cases resettlement may be the only option.
But where, when and how are important political questions that need to be resolved at the earliest.
As many people see it, I too see disaster mitigation as a political problem. Hopefully with more local participation and less hankering for making a quick buck and cutting corners, we would have all learnt our lessons from the terrible times that the hills are going through.
On a more personal, happier note (pun not intended) I have acquired the single driver speakers that I have longed for such a long time.
Single drivers eliminate the need for crossovers, so deliver music with the coherence and timing that is simply not possible with multi drivers. They resolve detail and do not throw it at you, as more expensive multi driver speakers are wont to.
Of course there are issues with 'shout' that happens in the upper mids and a slightly focused treble but then I am happy with those compromises. Off axial listening too suffers but since I have found my sweet spot, it isn't an issue. By the way, I am using the single drivers with SS amps, which may not be the most sound matching. Hope therefore to either go the pure class A route or use tube pres, whichever will optimize the cost/benefit...
However it goes without saying that even now, my set up is great for jazz. The music is earthy and warm, the bass tactile and articulate.
So it has been Herbbie Hancock in all his tonal glory for most of August, with some Sony Rollins and Art Blakey thrown in for good measure.
Here I must not forget to thank my friend Tuhin Chatterjee of Siliguri for picking up the consignment from Pafex and his wife for tolerating the 280kg box in their landing....
Hope to carry this forward whenever I get the time and the mood.
By the way this is my first blog so let us see where we can go from here........