Don't forgive

Sir/Madam,
Forgive us for the lies we told you to guard our friends, the lessons we didn’t memorise, the sums we couldn’t solve, the questions we answered wrong as students.
But don’t forgive us for the sins we commit as parents. We know that whatever we are in life today is because of the caning you awarded us with when we bunked classes to watch Sholay,because of the dressing down you gave us when we taunted girls at the bus stop near school. But for the fear of you reaching our homes and catching us fast asleep well past 7 am, many of us would have slept on and never done anything worthwhile in life. Some of us still remember the cold look you gave if anyone was found outside the class after the tiffin break was over.
One of us has become a revered judge, but was the most shameless liar till you caned him constantly for 15 minutes for overwriting marks on his report card. He caught fever that evening and after recovering, he never lied in his life.
One of us never understood geography. His notebooks had more fictions than facts and figures. Sitting on the last bench, he used to thrill us with stories in boring classes. One day his notebook fell in your hand and he almost peed in his pants. Next day you said: “I went through your notebook. You write well. But class is not the place to spin a yarn. If I ever find you doing that again, you’ll be rusticated.” He ended his relationship with geography with 80% marks. The man is a famous writer now. His first published story was the last one in that notebook, and he didn’t have a clue to what had happened to that small thing till you handed him the issue of the magazine which had published the story.
Our doctor friend had lost his father when he was five and his mother was a domestic help. She did not have the money to send her brilliant son to coaching classes for Joint Entrance. He would not have cleared the exam had you not given him free tuitions after school. How many times did you call him a thickhead? He does not remember. But he never forgets that he owes his career to you.
We know you don’t remember any of us as it is impossible to remember everyone whose life you have changed with your canes, cold looks, shouts, guidance and encouragement. Forgive us for our mistakes and the choicest abuses we hurled at you on your back. But don’t forgive, cane us again instead, for supporting our sons and daughters when they don’t do their homework and complain about the teacher’s behaviour if scolded.
Cane us for bringing up children in such a way that they develop an ego very early in life and commit suicide if caned by the teacher. Cane your students in the media, who always side with students in depicting teachers as villains and cane your administrator students, who think antagonising students against teachers means protecting students’ interests.
We bow to thee once again on Teacher’s Day, but with a complain. Why didn’t you teach us the mantra to be ruthlessly affectionate, the mantra that drove you all your life?

India wastes freedom

“Now, you may kiss the bride,” says the Holy man, and you are free. Free to kiss the woman whom you have always wanted to kiss. That kiss, in all likelihood, is not your first. But till then you needed to find a place where nobody can see you kissing. After that announcement, you have been granted freedom to kiss in front of everybody.
When a non-Christian gets married, the licence to kiss is not handed to him/her in as many words, but the purpose of the elaborate ritual is, indeed, to grant the couple the freedom to kiss, hug etc etc. But that freedom comes at a price. In other words, it comes with a new bondage (in the language of cynics), which means:
a) You cannot, henceforth, kiss any person you want to. You can only kiss your spouse.
b) You have to look after your spouse and the child that is born out of the marriage.
c) You cannot think only about your own interests while taking a decision. You have to take your spouse’s opinion.
If you don’t obey any of the above written or unwritten rules, the joy of a marriage will be lost. First, the kissing and hugging and so on will lose their charms, and a few months or years from then, either or both of you will go to court, asking for cancellation of the freedom to kiss each other.
Cynics call it bondage, level-headed people call it responsibility. The fact remains, to have some kind of freedom, you have to give up some other kind of freedom. So when we, the Indians, drove the Queen’s men out of our country, we took up a huge responsibility. That, it seems, did not dawn on our leaders. Somehow they were under the impression that everything will fall into place, no effort is needed. Given our history of propagating fatalist philosophies, you can hardly fault them.
So even before the country was free, our leaders started fighting over who will get how much share of the power. When they could not find a clear winner or come to a consensus, they decided to cut the country into halves and distribute it among themselves. The father of the nation, who was famous for going on a hunger strike whenever the country didn’t listen to him, had perhaps lost his appetite by then and thought: “No point going on a hunger strike, I’m not eating much anyway!” Rest is shameful history.
We were given partitioned freedom. What a freedom! One fine morning, some Bengalis (and Punjabis) were told: “You are free but this land you are standing on is not your country. So pack up fast and go over to that side of the border. That’s your country.”
There they were, men who had a home and enough to maintain their families when they were not free, and penniless with no place to live after becoming free. They crossed the border on foot with families in tow. The 10-year-old sons died on the way because a doctor could not be found when the fever went out of control, the teen-aged daughters were snatched away, and then, on the platforms of Sealdah station and other refugee camps, they had to stay up all night so that the same doesn’t happen to their wives. This is real freedom, isn’t it? Everybody is free to do whatever he likes!
Hail the human spirit! People changed the times, people found homes, rebuilt their lives. Sixty-three years passed but the leaders have not changed. They are still concerned about power. The corrupt ones use it to become richer and the honest ones are not competent enough to do anything good.
And nobody accepts responsibility.
Case I: A multi-national company comes to the country, makes an unsafe plant, gas leaks, thousands are dead. The chief comes to the country, and is escorted out instead of being arrested. Decades later, the then chief minister of the state, after being found out, takes the easiest way out, saying the then union home minister, who is now dead, had pressurised him. “The then Prime Minister was innocent,” he adds. Of course. In that case the home minister was working on his own. That means the PM was an incompetent fool, couldn’t even control his own cabinet.
Case II: The country is organising a big sporting event. The organising committee’s corruption is exposed and the government avoids the responsibility of organisation. The head of the committee is a leader of the ruling party but neither the top leader of his party nor the PM, who is supposed to be a top-to-bottom honest man, asks that crook to resign. Moreover, the sports minister tells MPs they should file RTI applications if they want to know the truth about the scam.
Case III: Maoists are killing innocent people by damaging rail tracks. The railway minister says they have not done it. She even says military operations against them should stop. Not only that, she says the Maoist leader who has been killed by the joint forces was “murdered”, as if those who died in the train accident were not murdered. All this she does without being even verbally reprimanded by the PM. How can he do that? After all, she is an important ally.
It’s a free country, free-for-all. Nobody has any responsibility. We, the people of India, only have vulnerability.

Left Front government: In Memoriam

The Left Front government in West Bengal, by all means, is on its way out. The body language of the opposition leader, the ministers, the officials, most importantly, the voters suggests so. I am trying to look back on the Left rule, not in anger but with my fulfilled and unfulfilled desires.
On June 21, 1977, when Left Front came to power, I was a just a beautiful dream, in the hearts of my then unmarried parents. In fact, my father’s bigger dream at that point of time was of making a new Bengal. During the previous government’s rule, he had to go through a lot of torture for being a member of Communist Party of India (Marxist). He, like many of his comrades, didn’t bow under that pressure and continued the movement. Therefore, when Jyoti Basu and his cabinet were sworn in, it was not just the party’s victory, it was also a personal victory for party members like him.
The thing about that generation of Communists was, they had an even bigger dream – of revolution. Those were the days of Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia et al. The Left Front government, therefore, had the task of not only providing better governance than the previous Congress government but also governing so well that people in other parts of India would think Communists should be in power all over the country.
Having declared long ago that they believe revolution can be achieved through Parliamentary democracy, that was to be CPI(M)’s path to revolution. This is revolution not in the Leninist sense, but in the Gramscian sense. Besides, Left Front was not just CPI(M), it was a conglomerate of like-minded parties.
The first step towards achieving those goals was, as it should have been, revolutionising the villages of Bengal. So Basu’s government, under the leadership of land reforms minister Benoy Chowdhury, pursued the agenda of giving land to sharecroppers. ‘Operation Barga’ had a huge success in economically empowering the poor of rural Bengal. The next step was giving political power to them. To do that, the government set up a three-tier panchayat system.
In 1982, when I was born, the panchayat movement was taking shape. My father was at the forefront. He won the election and was given charge of a panchayat samity (the middle tier). Back then, CPI(M) was not a pack of just middle-aged and old men. My father became the sabhapati at the age of 33. Today, when the fashion is to say: “Left Front has done nothing for Bengal,” I would beg to differ.
What surely remained neglected under the Left rule is Kolkata. But my country lives in villages. And I don’t want development like Hyderabad, where the city is plush but is filled with beggars who come from the outskirts and villages, for they have no choice. The areas that didn’t get the benefits of Operation Barga and panchayati raj are the tribal areas, hence the Maoists. But let the biggest political analyst, the most knowledgible economist and the most brilliant statistician come and tell me this government has done nothing for even rural Bengal. I’ll show them how the housemaid has become administrator, how the rickshaw puller has started talking on even terms with the rich and middle class rider.
Why then, one might ask, has this government lost its popularity even among the rural voters?
First, people have lost faith in comrades. Nowadays, when a party member tells a farmer: “Give up your land for the factory, you’ll get good compensation and your son will get a job there. You’re not getting enough out of that small piece of land anyway,” the farmer instantly believes the man is lying even if he is not. That is because this farmer knows how that crook uses his affiliation to the ruling party to run all kinds of murky business. Corruption, in a word, has detached the party from the poor.
Second, the heady smell of power has made dictators out of comrades. This is true at all levels. The panchayat member at Shashan and the chief minister share the same sentiments. They forgot long time ago that they are in power by the grace of the people. The secretary of the local committee thinks he can say whatever he likes, can do whatever he thinks should be done, and people will not say anything. His top boss Biman Bose, sitting in Kolkata, thinks he can abuse even a High Court judge and yet people will support his party. People don’t say anything, they just vote, against the Left.
Third, a result of the first two - bad governance. When the ruling party is corrupt and conceited, how can it provide good governance? Even the panchayat system has turned into a machinery of oppression.
Talking about my fulfilled desires, there aren’t any. I had two ambitions. First, and this I have always kept a secret, I wanted to become a full-time party worker. I wanted to become a journalist in case I could not become worthy of the Communist party. I could not, it seems. I had joined the Students Federation of India to learn politics but I pulled out. Why? I realised my leaders knew less than me. Most of them have never read the Communist Manifesto. Some of them don’t even know the spelling of Marx, and they would take any Tom, Dick and Harry under their wings, even if they are pathologically anti-Left.
Unfulfilled desires? Many. Revolution in India, at least a Communist-led government at the centre, Bakreswar Thermal Power Project, rendering Mamata Banerjee meaningless etc. Let those be unfulfilled. As a Communist at heart, I wish this Left Front government is removed. Without tragedy there can be no catharsis.

P.S. My father gave up his administrative post in the late ’90s to concentrate on party organisation. Little did he realise that nobody around him was interested in the party, because money is where power is, not where organisation is. With such comrades around, who needs bourgeois?

To Messi With Love

Dear Lio,
Everybody thought I would cry after our loss to Germany in the World Cup quarter-final, like I did after the Germans rode an unfair penalty to beat us in the 1990 World Cup final. But I held back my tears. Not because I wanted to show the world that I am not the same Diego Maradona, to whom win was a matter of life and death. I didn’t want to prove that now I am a real 50-year old. The truth is, loss is still painful for me, I am still as passionate about football as I was in 1990. I did cry, but not in the stadium. Do you know why?
I know there are people who feel the pain whenever I lose or my team loses. There are people who have never seen me in person but treat me like a family member. They have cried for me after that loss in Cape Town. More would have cried had I cried. But I wasn’t thinking about them when I decided not to show my emotions. Neither did I think about what Dalma and Giannina would do if I cry. It didn’t matter, because they cried, they do every time they feel their dad has lost a battle -- be it against drugs, against critics or on the field against the opponents.
It was you, Lio, whom I didn’t want to see crying. I knew you would break down if I break down. No Lio, not so early. I cried after the 1990 final because I knew I may never get another chance to win the World Cup. But believe me, that’s not the case with you. And that is why I didn’t want you to cry before the TV cameras. No, I don’t want the world to know that Lionel Messi is vulnerable. I want Argentina’s enemies to know that Messi’s team can lose, he cannot.
The first time I saw you grab the ball with your left foot, and dodge past one, two, three players, I knew God has sent my successor. During this World Cup, every time your shot hit the post, went just wide or a defender fouled you, my heart lost a beat. I always knew my country’s walls are not strong enough to keep European aggressors at bay. I knew Burdisso and Demichelis are not good enough stones to build an unbreakable wall. I even knew the limitations of my midfield marshals – Mascherano, Di Maria et al. They are mere mortals, as good or as bad as the Oezils and the Schweinsteigers. My faith in Tevez and Higuain were not misplaced but my inner eye had told me long time ago that they are no better than Burruchaga, they need you to provide the balls. You, Lio, it was you who could make my Argentina a team from the heavens. But you could not.
I was ready to hand over the crown of the Crown Prince of football. You fell short. When your time came, your left foot failed you, your teammates failed you. They just did not know how to assist the son of God. But Lio, isn’t it human not to understand somebody superhuman? Your failure at Green Point only showed you are still the little son of football’s Almighty, you are still not the God.
The more I see of you, the more I am reminded of myself. On that July 3 evening, Lio, my Lio, you were looking just like me -- lost, sorry, worried, as I was in 1982 when I lost my cool, was sent off and had to see Argentina knocked out of the World Cup, from the sidelines. I was not yet the God.
In the next four years, I learnt to rise above the dirty tackles, to provide passes from which mortal strikers cannot but score and to attack, attack so much that my fragile defence can have a sound sleep. Now is your time. Stars will come and go, Lio, but you have to be the North star. The God of football wants so. He has given you his brush to paint grounds in your own way and his dearest daughter, the Golden fairy, has chosen Spain as her home for the next four years. She wanted to stay close to you, God granted her wish. On your way back to Barcelona, go to Madrid, have a look at her. You’ll know she’s dying to give in to your charms, to dance with you, to kiss you.
But you have to earn her embrace. I know her well. She was my muse in the 1980s. Now she is a sweet little darling, just like my Dalma, and Giannina. That is the only thing that has changed in my life. Now, like every other dad, I want my cutie to walk down the aisle with my favourite star, the North star. Let others say whatever they think, I know you are the One, Lio. So don’t cry, store your tears. I’ll prepare the groom’s suit, you come with the shoes, and become worthy of the bride. You have four years. After you get married in Rio de Janeiro, we’ll shed our tears together.
Yours,
Diego.