Category Archives: Tagore

A letter to a Vice Chancellor

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To: Mr. S. Duttagupta

Vice Chancellor, Visva-Bharati University

Santiniketan

Vice-chancellor@visva-bharati.ac.in

 

Subject : Expulsion of Ms Andrea Loseries and Mr. Shin Sangwhan

 

Dear Mr. Duttagupta

 

I write this as an alumni of Patha Bhavana, and as a member of a family with a five generation long association with the institution and the place.

My maternal grandfather, Kalimohan Ghosh, worked with Rabindranath Tagore in rural reconstruction efforts in the villages under the Tagore estates in eastern Bengal when Rabindranath was involved in overseeing these estates. Later, when he came to Santiniketan, Rabindranath brought Kalimohan to Santiniketan for helping kickstart the Sriniketan project, working with Leonard Elmhirst in the initial stages. Kalimohan’s mother was the first generation of our ancestors to live a considerable part of her life in Santiniketan. My mother Sujata Mitra was born in Santiniketan and ended her life there. My father Sukhamoy Mitra was a professor in Kala Bhavana, and he too ended his life there.

My maternal uncle, Santidev Ghosh, was with Sangeet Bhavana till he retired, and was peronsally requested by Rabindranath not to leave Santiniketan for better financial gains elsewhere. Other members of my family too have long association with the place.

I was born there and did my schooling in Patha Bhavana. My daughter, the fifth generation, did her college there.

Anyhow, I had wished to write to you about a few issues that I felt were of importance, and on which I did not get a good response from Visva Bharati earlier. These included :

  1. Research on the earliest wax cylinder recordings made by Arnold Bake, between 1925 and 1928, mostly in and around Santiniketan. These are now in London. Not enough research has been done on these. My suspicion is that these might contained unpublished voice recordings of Rabindranath, Dinendranath, Santidev, Gagan Harkara and many others. Visva Bharati should have been the best institute to be involved in research of these yet un-researched audio material and identification of those recordings. The last person I know to study some of those early recordings of Arnold Bake was late Mr. Nazir Ali Jairajbhoy. I have had some exchange with his wife Amy Katlin Jairajbhoy of California, noted for her own work on ethnographic filming and ethnomusicology including work among marginal music groups in India. She too has knowledge on the topic of her late husbands work with the Arnold Bake collection. She wrote to me that she had video recording of Dinendranath performing in Santiniketan. Anyhow Nazir Ali Jairajbhoy worked mostly with the later life recordings of Arnold Bake (made outside of Santiniketan) and not the early life recordings, made in Santiniketan. Unfortunately, I had not succeeded in getting Visva Bharati interested in this research.
  2. Better preservation and research on the manuscripts currently in possession of Visva Bharati, which include a lot of un-researched history on the circumstances under which these manuscripts came to Visva Bharati. Kalimohan Ghosh was reportedly involved in collecting some of them from surrounding villages where the original family held manuscripts were in deteriorating condition and the families in question could not tend to them. These documents needed more public awareness in preservation of our cultural heritage and needed better exposure to popular media and further research by current scholars. There is also the related issue of the Surul Inscription and its historical significance. Such items are worth being published in Archaeological and historical and geographic magazines. Items less important than them often grace the pages of National Geographic or International Archaeological magazines. It should have been the duty of people of Visva Bharati to get these invaluable artifacts and documents to the world view and fire the imagination of the younger generation on preservation of cultural heritage.
  3. Refocus on the need for research in sustainable low carbon footprint existence through the rural reconstruction unit of Sriniketan, and finding a solution to the yet unsolved dilemma for India on how to redress the economic imbalance between an exploitative urban Indian economic growth path and an exploited rural Indian economic devastation. There is no task more important than that and not just for Visva Bharati or India, but for a wide swatch of humanity across the planet. Rabindranath did not tinker with Sriniketan for satisfying a superficial hobby. It is distressing to see how far the Sriniketan effort has degenerated in the radar of Visva Bharati. I was also tempted to get Visva Bharati interested to helping out some of the chemical free organic farming efforts ongoing, and being supported by small NGOs to bring a debt free and toxic free natural food cycle economy back in the villages around Santiniketan. These were areas where Sriniketan should have been playing a pioneering role for the nation. There is also other efforts, such as preservation of indigenous varieties of rice strains. India had more than a hundred thousand varieties of rice, developed over several millennia of experimentation, to suit differing soil and weather conditions. But in the past few decades, the corporation driven mono-culture has gripped the nation and India is rapidly losing her biodiversity with regard to rice strain varieties, and today it has no more than two thousand or so trains of rice left. There are a handful of people desperately trying to preserve what can still be preserved, because the day is coming soon when non sustainable high fertilizer high pesticide genetically modified patent holding crop technology, already proving a failure in the west, is going to have to be replaced, and India will have lost its five thousand year old wisdom of rice cultivation by then. Sriniketan, again, should have been in the forefront of these efforts. And again, I failed to get anybody interested in such “boring” issues.
  4. Engage in a research of the decades long chain of correspondence between Kalimohan Ghosh and Leonard Elmhirst, currently preserved in the UK. These documents contained invaluable information on the purpose Kalimohan was sent by Rabindranath to various countries in Europe and the middle east to learn from their education, agricultural and rural reconstruction programs and then to see how to filter through them, and experiment with what might be modified and made usable under Indian conditions, through micro-experimentations in Sriniketan and elsewhere. My belief is that these are treasure troves that best deserve to be researched by Visva Bharati, but unfortunately these documents are not preserved in Santiniketan and are likely to be auctioned off by Dartington Hall if no one shows any interest. I have not had any success, again, in getting Visva Bharati interested in these issues. And that is not all. After the demise of Kalimohan, for the next so many decades, his fourth son Salil Ghosh continued a correspondence with Leolard Elmhirst, till Elmhirst passed away. Those documents too, are filed and preserved by Dartinton Hall. Those too are expected to be illuminating for research on a number of topics, the most important being Rabindranath’s efforts to start the ground work of research to eventually be the pathfinder that might halp solve some of the future problems that India was surely expected to face. Needless to say, I failed to get the University interested in this work. In fact, my experience has been that one immovable constant about the university is its lack of interest in engaging in anything worthwhile.

Rabindranath had toyed about the need for an ideal institute that was more than a school or a college or an university. India having lost its forests of the Upanishadic Aranyak period and the Tapovan phase of its history, he had toyed and experimented with conceptualizing a century ago, under difficult circumstances not under his control, how one might bring back an ambience that were to be a similar germinating ground of brilliant minds. He even selected the name, Visva Bharati, not out of a hat, but after careful deliberation.

However, instead of writing on those “boring” topics, new developments in Santiniketan coax me instead to write to you about a wholly different topic, getting rid of all non-Indians.

I now understand that the university is busy kicking out the last of the foreign professors, such as the Ms Andrea Loseries of Austria and Mr. Shin Sangwhan of Korea.

This has surprised, disappointed and pained me. In one swift stroke, Visva Bharati appears to have amputated the Visva out of itself and prepared to reincarnate itself as a Bhubandanga-Bharati.

There would be no point in engaging with the university on lofted topics of research on Arnold Bake’s recordings or Manuscriptology, or preservation of indigenous strains of rice, or studying old correspondence between dead people like Elmhirst and Ghosh, if the university is mainly focussed on burying itself into a tomb in Birbhum.

I shall therefore request you to seriously contemplate on what direction you are to steer this institution towards in the forthcoming years, and to contemplate on what Rabindranath might have envisaged the destiny of Visva-Bharati and India was to be, and in todays larger geo-ecological-economic context, how rational thought might prompt one in course correction for this supposedly open institute in the development of human endeavor of global significance  that was to sprout itself from the soil of India.

I would also suggest that Visva Bharati assumes a bit of humility, and absorb a realization that it needs good people more than good people needs Visva Bharati. It is the unproductive and lazy manipulative people that Visva Bharati has no dearth of, and who would cling to VB at any cost, because their presence has no constructive value and they have nowhere else to go.

Thanking you

Santanu Mitra

10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada

1-604-597 8261.

Tonu@me.com

cc: The registrar, Visva-Bharati University

registrar@visva-bharati.ac.in

Cc by physical mail to : Sri Pranab Mukherjee,

Rastrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, India

An universe for an anchor

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“They have remained invisible throughout history. But in my life, their absence have been a heavy weigh on my mind” Neil observed.
They had crossed the 100th Avenue, the main artery of the town, and walking north towards the bend in the Kicking horse river.
Less than a mile to the north-west of them, the kicking horse river met with the Columbia river. These were historically important rivers of southern British Columbia. The province got its name from one. But it was the kicking horse that also fascinated Neil. These rivers and the history attached to them, represented fascinating chapters in the recent past – the formative years that would eventually define modern British Columbia, or indeed Canada.
They approached the bend of the Kicking horse a football field away, over a small grassy park. The park ended at the river bank. Across the small mountain river flowing westward to its end of journey to meet up with the Columbia river, were the tall peaks of the Rockies in the north and northwest, the beginning of Yoho National park.

They could see the rising line of the national highway, Trans Canada Highway, across the river, snaking its way along the valley of the kicking horse, heading east and north. They were going to be on that road tomorrow, heading towards the even smaller town of Field, which was the base camp of Mr. Walcott a century ago, when he discovered the unprecedented fossils of the soft bodied creatures of the Cambrian explosion at the Burgess Shale fossil bed.
Mabel wrapped her arm around his waist. They were by now standing at the bank of the river, which had cut a channel for itself through a frozen river bed.
“What was invisible, in the Paleozoic? And how is Canada both rich and poor with regard to the invisible?”
Mabel had a good memory of things Neil said in bits and pieces which did not always connect up to complete the jog saw puzzle. And she liked working with jig saw puzzles. He was talking, as they crossed the main road heading north, about the invisible explosion of the Paleozoic which left a silent trace in the records of an expanding life form on this planet, and how Canada was both rich and poor in preservation of that history.
Neil lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. The temperature was above freezing. There was no perceptible wind. It was the beginning of April and the air was just fine, with a tinge of cold. It felt good on his face and it felt good to be standing by the water’s edge at the western border of Yoho National Park and the Rockies.
Mountains were all around them. To the west should be the Cascade mountains. To the east, were the Rocky mountains. Not being a geologist, or a geographer, he did not know where exactly the Cascade mountains ended and the Rockies began, but he could make a guess. The Cascade mountains, he knew, were essentially volcanic, and came up relatively recently through tectonic forces that were still actively pushing the oceanic plate under the land of the west coast, and had been the cause of seismic and volcanic activity all along the western shores of North America in the recent centuries, from California all the way to British Columbia. The Rockies on the other hand had been thrust up gradually over hundreds of millions of years, representing changes in the planets arrangement of its landmass over eons of time, that had resulted in pushing up the shallow ocean bed of a tropical sea, inch by inch and millennium by millennium, from under the sea near the equator, to high above the ground, in the northern latitudes of present day British Columbia.
In short, one might find basaltic formations in the Cascade mountains, while at the Rockies one should find sandstone, shale and rocks formed through accumulation of sedimentation in the watery depths of the past.
And it was here, in those shallow sediments, where the invisible part of early life lefts its ghostly traces that was a story of both comedy and a bittersweet tragedy for Canada. This is how Neil perceived it anyhow.
“Paleozoic stood for the ancient era of single cell primordial creatures that evolved in the murky past, the early billions of years of earth’s history.”
Mabel nodded, watching a dipper applying its trade in the shallow but fast flowing water of the Kicking Horse. The bird, the size of a robin but having an all over darker shade, had special claws that allowed it to grasp the algae and moss on rocks under flowing water and hunt for insects underwater. It could apparently swim under water too. It would dip under the surface at one point, and often emerge at another. Neil had mentioned that this apparently terrestrial perching bird has specialized itself into being an insect eater of the fast flowing cold rivers of this land, thus occupying a niche left vacant by the water birds of North America. She had since developed a fondness for this small tireless worker of the shallow, fast flowing cold white water rivers of Canada and the US.
“I think paleo means old, in Greek or Latin. When did this era end and what was the explosion about? And what is invisible and why is the story bittersweet for Canada?”
“Ohh, that” Neil observed. “I was coming to that. Do you feel like sitting down on that boulder by the water? It is so nice here, and so quiet.”
Mabel nodded. As they sat on a large but cold stone, there was a mechanical noise behind them. They turned to look, and saw two teenagers going over dry grassy ground driving their tracked snow mobile, heading for what looked like a barn or a shed in the distance. The sound was unpleasant. It left a faint smell of engine exhaust in the air.
“I think the season for winter sport is coming to an end” She observed. “Soon, as the snow melts, we shall have the season of the summer activities – hiking, rock climbing, and such.”
Neil nodded, “The ‘and such’ should also include exploration of what is left of the fossil bed of the Cambrian explosion, at the Burgess Shale. And there lies the bittersweet history of another aspect of Canada.”
“Explain.”
Neil watched a second dipper arrive at the water. He pointed at it and smiled at Mabel.
“Yes, I saw the first one. Amazing bird.”
“Yes indeed. Had Charles Darwin seen it, he would have gotten one more beautiful living example of evolution at work. Throughout history we have seen species cross over from their original habitat and enter a world they were perceived not to be suited for. Land mammals entered the water and became whales and dolphins. Birds entered the southern ocean and became penguins. Small animals went burrowing underground and lost their eyes. Large bears got to the northern ice covered ocean to hunt seals, went totally white with their fur and evolved webs on their toes to swim better, and here we have a tiny bird, the dipper, that dips under fast flowing cold waters and does not get swept away. It insulates itself from the cold and the wet, and is agile enough to grab insects underwater in fast flowing rivers in that condition. Nature working its magic here.”
Mabel smiled. She just loved to hear Neil speak. It had been thus for the last six years, ever since she first met him. She was a sixteen year old teenager at the time. She had never met anybody like Neil before. That first day, at her uncle’s place, he had mentioned the controversy of the origin and spread of Maize, and its fascinating link with the stone carvings of a west Indian temple that showed corn. She was fascinated by the story of that temple, built centuries before maize was supposed to have been discovered by the European early explorers of the Americas.
She had developed a teenage crush on him at the time. She was no more a teenager, but the crush had endured. She was going through a high right now, since the feeling was finally being reciprocated.
She still needed to nudge him, to get him back on track. “So what is bittersweet about the Paleozoic explosion, for Canada?”
Neil pulled her closer. “Paleo may mean old, but each of the eras had a trigger that destroyed and yet created. It shut out one kind of creatures and opened the door for another. The Cambrian explosion was such a remarkable event. It did not destroy, but did the opposite. It triggered an unprecedented explosion of new life forms. It coaxed the slow engine of evolution on to the fast lane for some unknown reason. Suddenly, out of simple small unicellular animals and tiny multiple celled arrangements rose a vast marine world of a myriad kids of larger creatures. Most of these were soft bodied, but not all. The first of the marine creatures with hard external shell, the trilobites, too emerged, as a new family of now familiar early marine creatures of the Cambrian.”
“Wow”
Neil nodded and leaned back on the rock, stretching his legs on the cold stone.
“And you feel strongly connected to about that period, and how the mountains of Yoho link to it. Yes?”
Neil nodded again.
“I feel related. That is one part. I feel sorry that many of the best fossils of the Burgess Shale might no more be in Canada any more, having been transported to the Smithsonian by Walcott, a century ago. That is the bittersweet part of it from my point of view.”

“How did that happen? I mean the fossils ending up outside of Canada? All the fossils or only some of them?”

“I shall tell you the story as I know it. The best of the fossils found at the time by Walcott, to searched and located the main vein of the fossil bed, which was merely seven or eight feet wide and a few hundred feet long, into the mountain slope. He dynamited it till the vein was exhausted, and chose the best of the best fossils to take to the Smithsonian. Sixty thousand of them in fact.”

“What?”

Neil nodded. “Yeah. Its true. I read about it. There are still fossils coming up there, but unless Canadians found another vein like that one, we are never going to find another fifty or sixty thousand unique fossils of that unique time again. Walcott did that. Great work indeed, but – you have to go to the Smithsonian to see it.”

Mabel thought about it. “Perhaps we should visit the Smithsonian together.”

“Perhaps.”
Mabel stretched her legs too. It was perhaps just as good that the fossils survived, even if it was across the border. She did not consider Americans to be too different than Canadians. Being a liberal at heart, she wished the Americans would be less involved with wars in remote places and more concerned about their own poor. But other than that, Americans were fine people, in general. Everyone in every land was fine, more or less, in her book.

It was also fine, to be sitting with Neil right now. In fact, it was more than that. It felt wonderful, to be able to spend a few days away from work, away from Vancouver, and away from the rest of mankind, just spending time with Neil. It was the first time they were doing this together. Some years ago they had gone with a bunch of others to a fishing trip in the lakes, but at that time, Mabel was a sort of silent observer of Neil, who hanged around more with her cousin brothers. He shared a log cabin with them, while she was with her folks in another cabin.
This time, they were an item. It was established, more or less. She did not know if Neil was seeing other women. She could not come around to ask Neil about it. Neil rarely spoke of women anyway. But as far as she knew, and she did know Neil a bit, he never went out with another woman for a four day trip into the mountains, or any place else, in British Columbia. She had no idea what he might have done while living in the US, or back in Hong Kong or India.
Besides, they were sort of seeing each other now. They slept together often. Actually, it was only about four times in the past two months. But, that was a start – a great start.
Mabel wondered when he might ask her to move in. Unfortunately, Neil was not known to talk about personal matters much. She wondered if she should sort of coax him on to the subject. She did not wish to rush him though. She knew he found it still a bit odd that she was so much younger than him. He still felt she deserved someone younger. That was rubbish, but Neil was old fashioned, she guessed.
“What are you thinking?” Neil glanced at her.
Mabel thought of telling him she was thinking of him, as much as what he was talking about. But she could not find the right words. “I was thinking about those sixty thousand fossils, but more than that – how you might be related to all that.”
“Well, the Cambrian explosion apparently produced all the families of living creatures of today, as well as a few more that are no more with us. It also had the first rudimentary vertebrate, could well be my likely direct ancestor going back half a billion years.”
Neil laid back on the cold stone, and cupped the back of his head in his hands. Above him swayed the near nude branches of a tree that was just now deciding to sprout new leaves of spring. The sky was partially exposed and free of clouds. It contained the signature deep and clear blue of the British Columbia skies, free of air bound particles of pollution and haze. His thoughts wandered back on his favorite topic – his relationship with the cosmos.
“You see, I feel related not just with those creatures of the Cambrian explosion, that Walcott discovered north of the town of Field here in the Yoho national park of today. I feel related also to the silent people that traversed the landmass of this planet long before modern man started etching his footprint more firmly on the landscape, thus turning his presence more into a scar than a track. Animals leave tracks. Early humans left tracks. Modern man leaves scars. Anyhow, I feel related, to those early humans. More than feel, I now know I am related.”
Mabel laid back on the stone next to him and turned on her side, reaching out to move a strand of hair out of his eyes. Neil was different than other men she met. He had the least worry about his appearance. He was about the only man she knew who tried cutting his own hair. The reason he preferred to cut his own hair, or have a friend do it for him at home, was itself unique. He considered going to the saloon and sitting before the barber for twenty minutes when he could not read a book or listen to music or glance at his iPad or do anything other than close his eyes and listen to the snip of the scissors or the electric hair trimmer – a torture. He did not care that the barber might do a lot better job of making him look good. As long as hair grows constantly, whatever the barber does is momentary. In a few days, the hair would continue to grow and assume a natural appearance that was his own. Anyhow, Mabel knew about this little secret of Neil because she had once seem him do a bad job of trimming his hair at the back of his head, and she did it for him. He even thought she’d make a good barber.
“And how do you know you are related to the early people?”
Neil’s face broke into a cheeky grin. “I got a note from the Gene lab recently. My second set of DNA analysis on my mitochondria is over. The result confirms the earlier test, that I most certainly contain two key haplogroups, “M” and “D”. These are sure signatures that on my mothers side, I am very closely related to the indigenous people of Indochina, Australasia as well as the entire north and south American continents and its First Nation people.”
“Really ? Wow. What does those Hapless groups mean anyway ?” Mabel purposely teased him a bit about the terms he used, which might be technically right, but far away from normal folks daily conversation.
“Haplogroup. Nothing hapless about them. I shall one day tell you, or perhaps show you the tree of life when it comes to the evolution of the mitochondrial DNA. But trust me, I might not be an aboriginal person myself, and neither was my mother, or my grand mother, or her grand mother. But, we share a genetic mutation that happened just before a group split away from the rest of the still nomadic population, somewhere in Asia, and went migrating as the first great explorers, generation by generation, hopping island after island, occupying the known lands of Australasia. Once they were there, in those remote islands and jungles, they were cut off from the main gene pool and evolved separately, eventually occupying a separated branch of humanity. They are known today as the indigenous tribes of various places. But they carried that mutation, haplogroup M with them, so that its prevalence in those communities today is very high.

But those that did not go to those remove places, did not evolve separately, and continued to mingle with the rest of the mainland crowd, thus evolved with the main branch. They eventually ended up looking and behaving a bit differently than those isolated populations. Eventually agriculture and animal husbandry reached them first and along with it, a change in lifestyle from hunter gatherer to pastoral and farmer. That brought a rapid change of diet and a rapid rise of population, eventually also leading to rapid rise of a new lifestyle, a civilization, complex language with a larger vocabulary etc. But a smaller slice of these people were part of that group that had the mutation in their genes, the “M” haplogoup. But they were mixed with the larger group that included many others that did not contain that M marker. So, the present non-tribal population has much less people with this particular mutation. These small number of people that carry the same mutation evolved and mixed with the general population, and hence look, feel and behave the same as the rest of the large body of humans. But, they carry in them the tell tale signature of being the most recent cousins of the Australasian and Indonesian and Andamanese aboriginal people and the Indian, Chinese and other Eurasian tribal groups, among the first people of Eurasia.”
“Wow”.
“Yes. Indeed. But that’s not all.”
“No?”
Neil shook his head. “Nope. After the ‘M’, another mutation came up in the same group of people, leading to the ‘D’ haplogroup.”
He turned to Mabel and assumed a mysterious look on his face. “And do you know what happened to this new group of people with the’M’ and ‘D’ in their gene ?”
“What ?” Mabel could feel the sense of adventure, tracing the early footsteps of man through the world map, through the voice and personal observations of Neil. There was just nobody she knew that was even remotely similar to Neil. He was a unique mutation all by himself, she felt. But she did not interrupt him.
“This ‘D’ holding group also split. And the wandering spirit remained in them. One branch of them went on to cross more land bridges and ended up in North America, and then to South America, colonizing the Americas as well. IN the US, they are called American Indian. Here, you call them first nation. And I, my dear Ms Richardsen, contain both the ‘M’ and the ‘D’ haplogroups in my mitochondria, inherited in a direct maternal ancestral line going from my mother, to grandmother, all the way to fifty, sixty or eighty thousand years ago when all this was happening.”
“Double wow”
“Yes. Therefore, I have genetic proof to substantiate my feeling of closeness, that I am related, to the first explorers of our species, people that left those invisible tracks on the ground in all the landmasses that could be reached by early man, including in Canada. And they did it very long before Columbus. Very long indeed.”
Mabel could not help being amazed. He had explained part of it to her before, though it had not fully filtered in for her. She was still unsure of mitochondria and tracing of ancestral movements through DNA mutations. But she was beginning to understand.
“It must feel great, to be related to the whole world” She mused.
Niel considered the statement. “You know, those few markers in my DNA that I inherited from my maternal side, as well as the details I have so far found from my father’s side, helps me understand my roots and my anchors better. It has essentially freed me from narrow boundaries. Its like that poem about the two Bigha Zameen.”
“What ?”
“Well, you know about Tagore, right ?”
“Right”
“Well, he did many things. Among them, he also wrote a few poems. One of the early ones was this poem about a small slice of land that a poor man of Bengal once owned as his ancestral plot. He lost it through false accusations of debt to a rich landlord, who wanted that land. So, he was rendered essentially homeless, and became a sort of wandering holy man, traveling from place to place. In that poem, when the man lost ownership of his his ancestral home, Tagore penned a paragraph, that goes like this – I’ll show you.”
Neil got up, and fished out the notebook he always kept in his right hip pocket. “I am never without a notebook, you know?”
Mabel nodded. “I have noticed that, yes.”
“Its a habit I picked up from my teenage years. I have gone through a fair amount of notebooks this way” he smiled, and fished out his pen from his breast pocket, another thing he was always never to be found without.
Then, in the fading light of the evening, keeping his notebook on his thigh, he concentrated and wrote a few lines, which Mabel could not follow, but understood he was writing in his own language. She had come to appreciate the handwriting, although he claimed it was not good enough. The thing is, folks did not write much in long hand any more, even in English. She did not have any relative of friend that had a real neat handwriting. Writing by hand was going extinct, as Neil often said – like the Dodo.
Neil finished writing and showed the notebook to her. She took it and tried to make sense of it.
“What does it mean?”

Neil took the notebook back, and slowly repeated what he wrote, apparently in Bengali.
“Money Bhabilam Moray Bhagaban, Rakhibay nah Moha Gortay
Tai Likhee Dilow Bishwa Likhilow, Thu Bighaar Poribortay”
He looked at her and smiled.
She compressed her lips and thought about it.
“Well, it does have some rhyme.”
Neil laughed, pocketed his notebook, and laid back, resting his head again on his palms. He looked up at the emerging stars and translated the few lines in English
“I believed that the almighty did not wish me to have useless attachments to frivolous earthly possessions.
And so, he released me from that sliver of ancestral land, and in exchange presented before me the entire universe.”
“Thats wonderful. What a beautiful expression!” She was genuinely impressed. “I think I should read Tagore sometime.”
Neil nodded. “The problem of reading Tagore might be that if the reader judges them as a work of literature alone, then he or she might miss the underlying tidal current that tugged at the heart of the man, who was, in my eye, more than a poet. That is the basic difficulty of reading Tagore. Most folks might read him as a poet, and that would be a mistake.”
“Well, you can help me, can you not?”
Neil got up again and sat upright. “I am no expert. But those two lines resonates for me. I did not lose any ancestral land, in the sense that I did not have any in the first place. My parents came from stock that were rendered essentially as landless refugees through religious strife fermenting in India for a long time. Their stock moved westward from the waterlogged delta of Eastern Bengal to the drier lands of Western Bengal. IN the east they were religious minority but held most of the land. In the west they ended up among the majority, but without the land. So I grew up without any sense of deep roots. But, thinking back, my growing up all over India, my exposure to Tagore’s writings, my working life all around the world, and now the analysis reports of my genes, they all tend to help me identify with that landless man of that poem of Tagore.”
Mabel snaked her hand in his and looked watched his darkened face in the fading light.
“I have lost my anchor, but gained the universe in exchange” Neil mused aloud.
“And also gained the girl lying on the stone next to you.” She mentally said to herself.
She tried to imagine a time, fifty, or a hundred thousand years ago, and imagine a small band of hunter gathers that might have included a woman that carried a piece of genetic code that was to come down, generation by generation, all the way to Neil’s mother, and then down to him.
“Its amazing. And you being a male, still have that gene from your mother, but cannot pass it on?”
Neil nodded. “This is of course just one way of tracking ancestral lineage through maternal line. All of us, males and females, get the mitochondria from our mother. It was thought to play no direct role in deciding our sex or our traits, since it was not part of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. I have read papers that claims that mutation in this non-nuclear code of DNA might still affect health of people. For all I know, there may be other ways to track genetic footprints and ancestry through the maternal line. But for now and for me, the links are the M and D type haplogroups in my mitochondrial DNA that makes me related to the first explorers, the tribal and indigenous people of the world – those silent travelers that left a near invisible track on the ground, but a heavy imprint on the trail of human evolution. They were the invisible first explorers, whose descendants today face a dire existential threat, thanks to modern humans need to take their land, their resources and what is underneath their feet. These people with little demands and the faintest of footprints. And we are asking them to move on, and they have nowhere else to go. They are at the end of their rope.”
They lay there, on the stone, and watched the sky get darker and the paler tinge of the slice of sky across the western hills disappear behind the dark outline of the mountains. Somehow, the whole story, Mabel felt, was bittersweet and sad, and somehow leading to a tearful ending, just like those creatures trapped in those sixty thousand fossils that Walcott found a century ago.
A few stars appeared in the fading blue of the sky. The dipper was no more visible in the river. Behind them, the town of Golden had put on their artificial lights, which glowed against the southern sky. It was going to be eight.
She sat up. “Perhaps we should walk that way to the junction of the rivers, before it gets more dark.”
Neil got up too. “Okay, lets do that. We might not get much time tomorrow, as we intend to try to look around the area covered by Walcott a century ago in the Burgess shale tomorrow morning, just a few miles to the east and north of here.”
They walked, arms around each others waist, a new style for them, heading northeast along the bank of the river. They could hear the water, where it joined the Columbia river, perhaps a mile ahead, by the side of the small airstrip that went by the name of ‘Golden Airport’. They crossed what was an unnamed and unpaved road onto another that paralleled ran between the runway and the river, and headed towards the confluence of the two rivers.
It took them a few minutes to reach the point where they could not go further. The Kicking Horse had joined up with the larger Columbia river, and together, the waters turned southwest and downhill. They stood by the shore and watched. A man was walking along the edge of the water with his dog. The night sky still had some light that reflected off the water. They could see the dark shape of the man and the dog in silhouette against the rippling reflection off the water. The breeze was both stronger and colder. They automatically huddled closer, and watched the scene before them as the sky continued to darken by the minute.
Mabel watched the dancing light on the river water, and signed in contentment. Neil heard it and turned to watch her in the dimmed light, bending to kiss her nose. She turned her face and they got into a deep kiss, holding each other.
The dog’s bark got fainter as it and its owner moved further away. The air strip behind them was silent and dark.
An air whistle blew behind them somewhere, from a train.
Neil broke the kiss and looked at her, her eyes looking more black than blue.
He cleared his throat. “We need to find a restaurant”
She nodded imperceptible, and kissed him again. “I love you Neil.”
Neil pulled her closer and chuckled, teasing her. “Is that love, or an infatuation for an opinionated Bengali babu, that talks a lot about nothing?”
“Shut up”. She knew what made a Bengali. But she decided to check up what a babu was. This was not the time though. Whatever it meant, she felt confident the guy next to her was not quite an ordinary man, babu or otherwise. “You were talking about the invisible people and their weight on the history of mankind. You are one that is far from invisible for me, and you will do, Bengali or not.” She linked her fingers in his and strode along the western end of the air strip, back towards the town.
The lights of Golden brightened ahead of them.

How green was my Facebook

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I read the book ‘How green was my valley’ three times. The first time, I was in school in Santiniketan. I was mesmerized by the warm hearted and bittersweet story about a Welsh coal mining village of the 1930s by Richard Llewellyn. I was not as familiar with English then. I did my schooling in my mother tongue. And yet, I liked that book a lot because it had made me think. I remember talking about it with my elder sister, who had not read it at the time. After I spoke about it, she too read it. I remember that I was impressed by the Welsh names in that book.

How green was my valley – the movie

I remember how the main character of the book, Huw, would go to his sister in law Bronwen for advise. He loved the gentle character of Bronwen. I used to play around with that name, rolling it in my tongue and imagining how the Welsh  pronounced that name, so it would sound feminine instead of masculine. She vaguely even reminded me of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, and his sister-in-law Kadambari devi. I was just catching up those days, about the early years of Rabi, in JoraSanko, and often drew parallels between sets of information that floated my way. So, I tried drawing a comparison, however absurd it might seem, between Bronwen of the novel, from a welsh coal mining village, and the real life character of Kadambari Devi of Jorasanko, Kolkata, before she committed suicide.

How green was my valley – the book

Apart from the Welsh names, I got a glimpse of the now vanished life and times in a coal mining village in the western hemisphere. As I grew up, I came to associate that atmosphere in rotation with other regions of the world. It related to the mining towns in Soviet Russia and then to China and on to Africa, particularly southern Africa. And, in the name of progress, a version of it has come to India, with typical Indian versions of the political, social and ecological nastiness.
But, do we have a writer of the same caliber as Richard Llewelyn – someone that can write a book that can be the ‘How green was my valley’ equivalent in India?

I remember reading ‘Gone with the wind’ in school, with its social upheaval relating to a civil war and end of slavery in the US, and immediately connecting it with “Saheb Bibi Golam’ of the vanishing days of Zamindary in eastern India, on the last decade of the 19th century. The Indian story lacked the civil war and the social upheaval. The transition did not perhaps affect the common man too much. But the lazy and oppulent, wasteful life of the fading Zamindars reminded me somehow, with the fast vanishing life of the vain and pompous Southern Plantation owners of the American south. In India, the old lifestyle of people being born into wealth because they agreed to tax the residents for the benefit of the Raja, the Nawab or the British, were soon to disappear. They were to be replaced by a new breed to people that got license to do business by greasing the right palms. Ultimately, the coin was replacing the sword. But then, the coin had always employed the sword.

Saheb Bibi Golam – by Bimal Mitra

But – I did not find a book comparable to ‘How green was my valley’ with regard to the life and times of miners in India and their families, and expanding that, the general degradation of the land that such mining invariably involved. Even Llewellyn’s book did not touch that issue. Ecological degradation of the landscape was not in people’s radar in the 1930s. It should have been. Had they been conscious about it then, we might not be in the state we are in now. But, I am digressing.

My time in Facebook is going to taper down. The first thing that came to mind while writing about it – was How green was my Facebook. Somehow, I subconsciously connected  my departure from Facebook with the main character’s departure from his mining village in that book I read first in my childhood days. And just like the valley, Facebook turned out to be full of fond memories as well as wasteful and sad. That similarity resulted in me rambling for a few pages about that book, about Welsh names, and about mining. And now, I have finally arrived at the root – Facebook and the fact that I need to move on.
Facebook had been a wonderful place when I first got used to it. It was novel, it was like a virtual Kalor Dokan, or a virtual tea stall. Folks from different parts of the world would sit down and yap a little, exchange views and even show off a bit. Every one has a laugh, and then we go home to deal with real life.
And what is real life ?

I have pondered that question, but have not found a reasonable definition. Some would think my real life should be the time spent in the working hours of weekdays, when I am an engineer working for my employer. But I don’t think of that as my real life at all.
Some might consider the time they spend at home with their family as real life. I am tempted to agree with them, but am not sure.
To some, real life is the weekends when they can go and do things that they really love to – such as skiing, or watching soccer, or playing badminton, or, for me, wandering about the foothills of mountains nearby, just watching the scenery, or focusing on birds and clicking their pictures. I just realized I take approximately five hundred times more pictures of landscapes, birds and animals, than I do of humans. This has been the case ever since I got my first good camera, thirty years ago.

So, what is real life? Is it about humans, or birds, or mountains and rivers, or what ?
Whatever it is – it is not Facebook. But, for a long time, it provided an interesting parallel. Man is after all, a social animal Thats what sets us apart. We socialize, we communicate, we exchange views – because we are human.

It was nice to get back in touch with long lost acquaintances. Those were the heady days. At the back of my mind, there was also the wish that we needed to do something with our spare time that related to some form of community work – to give back to the system from which we have taken so much. This ‘system’ could be the school we studied in, the region or the people that we develop an attachment for, or the neighborhood where we live, the wider world, the nature, wildlife – whatever we feel obligated to for making us what we are. Its a token of appreciation and an effort to see that the ‘system’ will survive and thrive after we ourselves are gone. Humans developed not only communication skills, but also the notion of altruism. No?

It came from the general and fundamental understanding that systems need support, and the best support is one that comes from bottom up, rather than top down from the Government or politicians. It may be a wrong perception – but that was my perception and it stayed with me over the years.

Anyhow, Facebook, along with bulletin boards, blogs and such, became also an avenue to see if we could do something to support the vision of Tagore. Subconsciously, FB became a vehicle of sorts. But that was then, and I was more hopeful than wise.
It also became a vehicle of creative outlet. I doubt I would have penned as many cranky verses, “ছড়া”, as I eventually wrote, had it not been for Facebook. But, that was then, too.
Somewhere down the line, Facebook became just a thing one gets used to, and perhaps a bit hooked too as well – like a cup of coffee in the morning. It gets addictive.
We made many good friends through FB. But, along with that, we also accumulated junk. We saw more junk, we processed more junk, and we created more junk. By junk, I mean instantaneous flash in the pan that lasts a day, two days, or a week, but after that becomes part of the rising tide of background noise. This background tide of noise can, eventually, become deafening. I needed to get away, and look at it from another perspective. I needed to turn the volume down. I needed social ear plugs.

I had too many acquaintances on Facebook – way more than my brain or my time could reasonably deal with on a personal one to one level. So the question came, do I need the notion of having so many friends that I shall perhaps never exchange anything personal with? Do I need five or six people to like what I write so much, that I must advertise my thoughts and deeds to hundreds of people?
Our past is a great thing to remember. But there is one thing about the past – it is in the past. Not all things from the past will survive. I shall always have close and dear ones from the past – but, I should not need five hundred silent friends on Facebook just to keep in touch with a half dozen. There surely should be a better way.

Facebook is less green today. It is turning brown at the edges. Its details are beginning to fade. Also, as I get older, I find this platform more for the youngsters that have the time in their hand, and the interest in small items of their daily life. For them, it is perhaps the essence of catching up with the community. For me, it increasingly looks like a barrage of trivia that I do not want to know.

But, I cannot leave Facebook completely, just like Richard Llewellyn the writer could not quite leave his Welsh homeland, even as the main character prepared to leave that land for good.
Facebook, like the google forum on Santiniketan, like the “Santiniketaner Khata” blog I used to run, or the Uttarayan bulletin board, just like the podcast – they will remain fond memories and we shall retain contact with it, albeit from a distance. Distance is not bad per se. It shows us perspective. Distance is three dimensional.

I am not leaving it completely also because there are folks on this platform that I value, and who I would like to continue interacting with in future.

Somnath Mukherjee – for his sheer dedication and selflessness in community service towards the downtrodden Indians, and for being such an inspirational person.
Madhusree Mukherjee – for reminding me that taking up science as a profession should not make one uncaring about civic society and ecology.
Felix Padel – for reminding me that even trained economists can be caring ecologists.
Tathagata Sengupta – for being a smaller version of Somnath and growing up to equal him.

Edward Lee Durgan – for joining up with us for “Free Binayak Sen” March, after listening to me just for a half hour about Sen, and for his world view and firm commitment to principles that are so rare to find these days.

Ashley Zarbatany of Social Justice Group of the University of British Columbia – the second person that joined up on the Free Binayak Sen March in Vancvouer, who took the mike and spoke to the crowd. Although I have not had much interaction with her, I have watched her involvement with more issues of social justice. Folks like her help keep my faith in humanity alive.

Susan Bibbs of downtown Vancouver. She showed me what it meant to be a bleeding heart liberal of British Columbia – ha ha.

Ashie Hirji, the Ismaili rebel that read the Veda and practiced yoga, the entrepreneur, feminist, social reformer, secular and whacky, of downtown Vancouver of the past  and of Europe of present – for just being herself.

Subin Das – because I was once with him in college, because he know and spent time with my father when I was half a world away, and because of his perception of the world.

Pradip Malhotra – as the only person I know and spoke with on phone while he spent months on the Antarctic, not to mention being a great guy.

Lokendranath Roychowdhury – for being so intelligent, articulate and observant.
Chira, Barsan, Sujoy, Sandeep and others who, like Madhusree, live in the west, are from cutting edge Science and yet do such a wonderful job of maintaining social awareness, and compassion for the world. You may not know it, but you all have influenced my views on the balance between technological progression and regression, and the balancing acts between new versus old and good versus bad. I hope to find some of you in google + too.

Bhaiya, Kukul, Tukul, Moni and so many others – for being my relatives and friends – who I shared my past with, and hope to share part of my future with too.
Tapas da, Tukul, Piyali – the trio that, along with me, formed at one time the quadrangle of Santiniketan ex-students that existed on conference calls, on Facebook, on Uttarayan, and physically in Santiniketan as well as even here in Canada when some of them would come to visit. I shall always remember the great time we had, speaking with each other and rattling off. I even have recordings of most of it.

Then there are my many friends from Santiniketan – that I share a great memory with.
Ravi Dwivedi – because of the size of the lens on his avatar – ha ha.

And then there is Debal Deb, one of the few that stand tall in my view for wanting to buck the trend of globalized and corporatist food industry where indigenous strains of food are to be destroyed and replaced by genetically modified and patented food that will feed those that can afford to pay, and same time enrich the patent holder, and where the hungry will no more have the choice in selecting what kind of food he likes to eat. He, Vandana Shiva and others like them that defy the corporate Goliath and their cohorts in the Governments and decide to preserve indigenous seeds when no one else will – so a small slice of our biodiversity may still survive the onslaught of “economic progress”. But, he is moving out of Facebook and on to google+. So he did not really deserve a mention here. But then, I am a human and not a computer. I make mistakes.

All my local friends from Greater Vancouver area.
And many many others that I came across.
My thanks to you all .. You will see me here, but not that often.

I shall be more present in google+ as a social network site. Its easier for me to find folks and events that I like to keep track of. But even there, my presence may not be high. Any of you that have a gmail account can find me there. I am not even sure if it requires a gmail address. Anyhow, mine is tony.mitra@gmail.com

Other than that, any important message that is just for me – pls send an email. I tend to ignore mass emails since there are so many that come my way. An interesting statistics of the quality of our communication against quantity – out of 100 emails in my inbox, usually there are only two that are directly addressed to me by someone I know. The rest – are just floating debris.

Those that have an interest in catching up on my random thoughts and musings and creative writings, – well, there used to be bulletin boards, multiple blogs as well as podcasts, each carrying volumes of stuff written and talked over the past so many years. But I am winding them all down.

I shall only concentrate on one site, and write only what pleases me, irrespective of if it pleases readers. I do not aim to make money out of it and so I do not need to follow convention and formula. You can find that in www.tonu.org.

And so, here I am, starting with how I first read the book ‘How green was my valley’ and ending here, on a blog, writing how green my Facebook was.

Be good, everyone.

It was nice.

Is it always someone else’s fault ?

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The date was November 8, 2009.
I had written on the then maintained blog on Santiniketaner Khata, about my feelings and frustrations about the continued decline of Santiniketan. It got off to a flying start to from a world beating institution way ahead of its time and geared to spearhead creative as well as social movements on multiple fronts for the nation, and for the region and for the world of the future. But from that, it has now come to a sorry state of irrelevance so deep and pathetic that it defies logic.
And yet, there seem to be no serious soul searching by anybody. I find the bizarre situation not an act of God, and not a machination of the Delhi Government. I see the people of Santiniketan, the Bengali group and the exstudents of Santiniketan as directly responsible for the deterioration of the institution. Out of them, the ex-students have been the biggest failures. They failed to live up to any single expectation of its founder.
This has been a cause of a major heartburn for me, I have tried to shake the apparently lethargic and drugged group of ex-students into some form of recognition that the ball stops at our court and to contribute into some serious thinking and joining hands and doing something more than lip service towards reviving the institution.
My failure, along with every other person before me and after me, has made writings such as the one I did in November 2009 so heart wrenchingly bitter. It is like admitting that we, ourselves, are the greatest failures as social humans.
We are in fact the reason india will struggle to get out of its difficulties. Those of us that have migrated to the west, we ourselves are responsible again for overseeing the slow deterioration of the west and devaluation of its great institutions and philosophies.
Its like a virus. We go everywhere to suck out what benefit we can for ourselves. But instead of contributing to its growth and giving something back in return, we have only learned to take and take and never give anything back.
Welcome to the new diaspora of educated Indians – the techno-maggots of the new millennium. We have mastered the art of training, and yet have not understood the meaning of the word ‘education’.

And for those that worry about the decline of Visva-Bharati, look no further than the ex-students to find one of the main root causes of its decline.
The decease lies within.

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Is it always someone else’s fault ?

We spend a lot of time, thinking and talking of Visva-Bharati and who and what has been the reason for its decline.
It is my belief, that the ball is in our court, and the biggest fault lies on the shoulders of the ex-students. Of course, I do not expect the ex-students to agree. Admitting fault is not in anybody’s nature.
Sunday, November 8, 2009

WHOSE FAULT IS IT ?

No one in sane mind would dispute the fact that Visva-Bharati has fallen from grace and is not living upto expectation of any kind, past or future.

There are long stories, doing back fifty or more years, on who did what and when, and how this or that factor contributed to the future malady of the University. Looking through all that, it is not difficult to get mired in it and end up with a headache, and a feeling of disillusionment, a defeatist view that nothing can really turn the clock, or bring a change for the better.

While most of the pessimism might be placed on some ground reality, it still might be worth thinking outside the box, and trying to see whose fault it might be. This is not necessarily for the purpose of pointing fingers, but rather, to see if change can be brought, for the better, even at this late stage.

First, who are, or should have been, the stake holders? We know a few – those that are inside Visva-Bharati. The list starts with the VC. But his is a temporary job – lasts for five years. Then there are the Students – who might stay for 2 or three years, and in some cases, if we include the school, as much as ten or fifteen, depending on where one starts and ends. Then comes the workers and their multiple unions, albeit politicized.

Next comes the Government, which is the custodian, and the financier, of the University.
Lastly, there is the vast diaspora of Alumni, literally spread around the Globe.

There is a sixth party – the citizens of India, whose tax money the Govt doles out so generously to the University. But I shall for now discount the 6th group – they have many items on their plate, and the University might be virtually invisible in their list, when they go to vote.

So, taking the five groups : VC, Students, Workers, Govt, and Alumni, it is this last group, the Alumni that shows up as the oddest one. This is one entity that is wholly divorced from the affairs of the University – and yet, it is this group that Rabindranath liked to most depend on, in order to protect the University. There is a reason – this is the only group that does not, or should not, have any vested, selfish, interest.

And, this is the group, in my eyes, that has failed Rabindranath, and the University, most spectacularly.

Mind it, it is not that the Alumni are all insignificant people, barely eking out an existence, too busy keeping body and soul together, and in no position to think of grander issues like their alma mater. Quite the contrary. A vast number of them are highly educated and professionally successful. They are spread around India and around the world. Many have acquired foreign passports, as citizens of nations in Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, etc. Some are well known locally and even globally.

Tagore and Gandhi - Wikipedia

And yet, this is the most disorganized, disunited and disinterested group among the five stake holders of the University.

Why is it so ?

Frankly, I do not know. A lot of them maintain a cursory interest in Santiniketan, and the University. Many of them attend to cultural functions here and there, listen to renditions of Tagore songs and dance drama. Some make a career out of it. And in spite of that, in the last fifty odd years, there has never been a ground swell, a movement, to get the Alumni diaspora under a single umbrella, with a specific agenda, to try to give something back to their Alma Mater, to repay a part of their debt, and, most importantly, be a serious stake holder for Visva-Bharati.

So, today, among thousands of news reports, analysis, and endless rounds of discussions on what is the matter with Visva Bharati, and how and why it has become what it is today – the Alumni shows solidarity with the Union leaders of the University in one critical sphere – its refusal to analyze itself, before judging others.

Its not that effort has not been made a few times to appeal to the Alumni to join hands, and decide what we can do, or give, instead of passing judgment and comment on others. But, typically, while such appeals might stir an unconnected third party – the diaspora of Alumni, 99 out of 100, would shun such appeals.

Why ?
It is high time when this critical group that has thus escapes scrutiny, be placed under the microscope.
This group is the biggest failure, the biggest shame, in the history of the University. And it happily remains invisible – while willingly passing high judgments on all others.
It is perhaps just as well that Tagore was cremated and not buried. He would have had a restless stay, having to turn in his grave so often, for the misguided faith he had placed on the ex-students of the University.
For the last 25 years, being involved as I have been with ISO 9000 Quality Assurance system, and with developing tools for self-analysis systems based on searching for the root-causes of problems in order that a firm might be able to self-regulate itself for perpetual and incremental improvement in its function and its operating process, so that the ultimate product can stand the competition and be counted as a quality product – I have tried to think things through for the past two years, about Visva-Bharati. And hundred times out of hundred, I come back to the same issue in the root-cause analysis, and in thinking through a road map for the betterment of the University, from the stand point of us, those that are not working for the University. Every time, without fail, the ball ends up in our court – and the Alumni are identified as the first and most critical group that should have, from our perspective, been engaged, been unified, and been proactive. And we have not.
The first step in all this would have been to get the Alumni together under one umbrella, and instill the first lesson in the process of self-assessment – learning what this group as a stake holder could potentially do, and what is has so far done.

One does not need to be certified as a lead auditor for ISO 9000, or for that matter, to have high level of experience in root-cause analysis. After all, these systems were thought through by ordinary people, using nothing more than a bit of common sense, and unbiased analytical thought. It was astute of Rabindranath, that he had come to the same conclusion, long before ISO 9000 was born, that the most important stake holder for the Asram should be the ex-students.
And we failed him. And we continue to fail him. And we continue to waste time, judging others.
Sure, we engage in some token activity, in a path of continuously diminishing returns, where more and more effort produces less and less significant return, and bring no appreciable change for the better. We all know, that the path so far pursued is a slippery slope going downhill.
And still – the ex-students continue to fail, and continue to feel good about themselves.

 Sorry, Gurudev – I am truly, genuinely, sorry.
Tonu

November 8, 2009

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I wrote than more than two years ago on the Khata blog. Now that I am planning to close down every other site, more or less, except this one. I thought I shall bring over some of my musings from there, to here.

Nothing much has changed in these two years, except that Santiniketan has faded further into the backwaters of the world, slowing decaying, along with the rotting vegetation of a dying forest.

Tonu – March 24, 2012

Wish I could write like them

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It has been only about two months since I started this blog. So, I am only two months old as a writer here. Not a writer of fame. Not even a writer with published books. Just a guy that wrote a blog or two.
Yes, some of these blogs are musings, like a diary. This is one such. Then there are some postings that attempt to write about writing a novel. Still others seem to be part of a novel. Some are my perspective of the world around me.
I am essentially trying out my hand, playing a few practice games as it were. These trial runs may help make me a better writer in the eyes of the readers. Or perhaps I shall decide to write as a creative outlet, and not necessarily to please others.
But what should I write about? This is the sixty four thousand dollar question.
I have thought of writing a novel. I have actually done more than that. I have dabbled with it for a few months, going as far as two hundred pages, before tossing half of it out, and finally putting it in temporary cold storage.
The thing is – one could write a novel covering issues far removed from one’s own life. For example, I could write a science fiction, or a satirical comic book.
But then, I could also write a novel that borrows from my own life experience about the world as I see it. This choice is attractive to me because I already have certain lifetime exposures an developed an opinion about things. I am an opinionated person, did I mention that before?
But hang on – is my own life experience interesting enough to the reader? I have no blooming idea, but would guess in the negative. A reader would likely find my outrageous views and endless rambling quite a bellyful.
So, back to square one. Do I write for others, or do I write for myself? Most folks write or paint or create music such that others will not only enjoy it, but also hopefully pay for it. So, there is an economic prime mover hiding behind some of the creative outlets.
But, there must be exceptions. Vincent Van Gogh, I am told, never sold a painting in his lifetime, and died a poor man. In fact, the world is littered by painters, writers and musicians that died poor, but whose creations became famous after their death, enriching a group of middleman in the process. This probably goes to show that, if the meek fail to  inherit the earth, the middlemen might.
So, if I wished, I could write on whatever took my fancy. I could write about my worries about the future of the planet through climate change and human encroachment into every niche and ecosystem. There are many that have already written on this. Perhaps I would merely add some noise in an already noisy field.
But then there is this habit of pundits of selectively focussing on only certain sections of the problem, while avoiding mention of the others. Very few in fact address the whole package.
Few, for example, blame it our on our perception of ourselves. Man has not evolved enough to question man’s own core belief about being a superior species who enjoys the right to let other species live of die, at whim. The mainstream thinking supports the  notion that destroying a tiger, a whale, a forest, or even an entire species, is alright if it can save just a single human. Life of a single human is more sacrosanct than an entire species, or even a family of creatures. Our faith and our system dictates that we are the chosen people, by no less than God himself.
This, to me, is a laughable humbug and at the root of most injustices perpetrated by man – against another man, another creature or against nature. Religious leaders, Ethnic groups, Racial groups, Cultural groups, Economic groups, Politician, Social reformer, Writers and especially the foreign college educated smart Alec of the world lose their tongue and shy away from addressing this main question – why should man be more valuable than the rest of the planet?

Creation of Adam - Michelangelo

So, with all due respect, the writers of this world have perhaps not done enough in this field either.
Sure, there are a few that did question this conventional wisdom. But the subject is basically under the radar for the masses – masses that are still intoxicated about God having created man after his own image, or about the importance of having a so called modern civilization, even if it destroys everybody’s habitat.
On websites dedicated to the environment, one can these days find new information, or “revised” assessment, of effect of an increasing human population on ecology. Folks are tiptoeing around the topic – too scared to call a spade a spade.
My thoughts would often stand at the edge of these dark and ominous issues that just would not go away. The state of the planet, the state of our society, the degenerating state of Santiniketan and the mindlessness of the Tagore chanting diaspora, the apathy of fellow humans, especially the selfish class that come to take advantage of the trappings of an advanced society, but refuse to give anything in return – these were depressing turns of events. They depress me. Yet I find myself unable to shut them out completely from my thinking. Thus, writing about it too provides an outlet.
I remember, three years ago, I was in Santiniketan during the annual fair in December, called Poush Mela. Originally this was conceptualized by Devendranath Tagore as a fair to let folks of different faith systems to exchange views and understand each other. This was later modified by his son Rabindranath Tagore to play a key role in  revitalization of Bengal’s degenerating rural environment. This village fair was fine tuned to bring village goods, both material and cultural, to the urban clientele, and to raise awareness and appreciation of rural products, thus creating a market for it. This was supposed to provide a source of income for the craftsmen and artisans, and help sustain the lifestyle and creative vitality of the village, which would not just feed the cities with agricultural products, but also provide the source of its spiritual and artistic refinement.
Today’s December fair of Santiniketan, the so called Poush mela, is such a grotesque caricature that it may deserve a blog of its own – or rather, a book of its own. Urban products and services take precedence over rural products. Products from far off lands gets preference over local products. Rural craftsmanship and its support gets nothing more than lip service. Urbanized folks prepare “ethnic” looking goods, to sell to a new breed of ethno-conscious buying class. Babus come from afar, have a lot of fun, song and dance, take pictures, clap hands and cause a media blitz. The villager and his welfare, the original goal of the mela, is all but forgotten.
And the middle class Bengali crowd as well as the ex-student body, cannot get enough of this hideous caricature. There is no one, either in Santiniketan or outside it, to even think about the reason these events were designed. The decay of the original ideal is complete.
Anyhow, three years ago I was there. I remember being rather involved with a handful of friends in opening and running a stall at the Mela grounds, but one that did not sell anything. The stall provided quiet space ambience, free of charge, to help older generation ex-students to get to know the younger generation, as well as the locals of the area, both urban and rural. It broke from tradition and tried to do something different to facilitate human to human contact, hopefully removing cultural, generational and class barriers based on ignorance. That was to be our small contribution. We did not beg for donation and bore the cost ourselves.
But as it happened – there was another stall, in another location in the fair, that was promoted by ex-students. It presented attractive cultural items, music, speech and sold some books, paintings and such.
I was asked to take the microphone and speak something for ten minutes to the listening crowd. I started out, talking about our efforts to do something worthwhile and addressing some of the problems facing Santiniketan.
I was stopped in mid sentence, and was advised not to talk of any controversial issue. Either speak good and positive, or do not speak at all.
I stopped and stepped back.
I have never again gone to speak at that venue, and likely never shall. If self-criticism is undesirable in a society, that society is for sure going down the tube. That is how I see it.
So, on a personal level, it has been rather frustrating and disheartening for me to face the fact that my own kind almost never stands up for anything worthwhile. I got several painful lessons on this. There were effort to do something on the ground in and around Santiniketan, just to pay back for what it gave us, which was more than just education. It gave me my humanity and my world view. The effort required support and volunteers, to start a few good measures that were taken for granted in the times of Tagore, and were all but forgotten today. There were a few that were willing to spearhead the effort. But, such efforts thing fail, repeatedly, due to lack of sufficient conviction among those that benefitted from Santiniketan.
Back in Vancouver, I was once heavily involved in garnering support for a gathering in front of the library and a March to Indian Consul, protesting the imprisonment of Binayak Sen in Raipur India on framed up charges of sedition. We wanted to create pressure on the Government of India through a coordinated work in several cities across north America and Europe. I tried to energize my known friends to participate in that protest.
On both occasions, I was highly disappointed and frustrated by the apathy of most of the people I approached. Some even ridiculed us for our wasted efforts. A few Canadians, and even Americans that did not know much about Binayak Sen, still came forward and joined in the protest once told about the situation. But our fat brothers and sisters stayed home with their crackers and chai, and perhaps watched hindi soap opera or stayed at couch potato with a can of beer.
My disappointment in people around me has been long standing, steady, and by now, quite predictable.
But there are always exceptions – thank goodness for that.  It is those exceptions that makes life worth living. Through that protest in Vancouver, I came to know folks I might not otherwise meet, and these have enriched my life. Through efforts in Santiniketan I have come to appreciate a handful for their dedication and integrity, and that too has been a source of nourishment for our psyche.
So, going back to those whose writings I admired,  I could name a few.
One is Gwynne Dyer.

Gwynne Dyer

He is a Canadian born journalist and author. As far as I know, he had moved to UK and lives there. I came across one of his books, named Future Tense. It talked about the changing scene in the pecking order of the world of humans, and liked it. That prompted me to seek out and read another book – The Mess They Made. The second book dealt with the war in Iraq and the mess it created. Dyer influenced me in his journalism.
At the back of my consciousness, I suspect the influence of Rabindranath Tagore still remained rather strong. Tagore, born a century and half ago and who wrote mostly in a different language and followed a different linguistic style of the time, did write a lot and they influenced me – not just by the content of the writing, but because I could step past the writings and try to enter his own mind, and try to imagine what made him feel the way he did, so that he could write the way he wrote.
I am not talking about the music he created, or the dance drama he composed, or the novels he wrote. I am talking about the essays he wrote and speeches he prepared, and discussions he had, covering socio cultural issues, issues of race, culture, class, caste, race and religious differences, issues of poverty, and issue of  social and economic exploitation and the role of creativity in opening up of the mind.
I could see that he was a thinking man and did not stop at conventional wisdom. Challenging conventional doctrine and orthodoxy was as innate to Tagore in his time as it is to me in mine.

Rabindranath Tagore

He had observed how Indian urban class exploited the rural landscape in the new westernized model of economy. He recognized how rural humanity had historically been the lifeblood of India and the source of all of India’s creative excellence, the fountainhead of its spirituality, music, literature, philosophy, and world view. He noted how this urban exploitation of villages follows an economic model that was counter-productive for India and also unsustainable. These realization was, in my book, very profound for a person that was known merely as a poet and a mystic.
He realized India would lose her unique power of independent thought and creativity unless the rural landscape reached an equitable and complimentary economic relationship with the consumer class of the cities. As long as the village was exploited by the city, like a babu and his servant, the general degradation of Indian society would continue, even if it appeared to be doing well superficially in the cities.
I find observations like this to be exceptionally profound for that time and place. This indicates a penetrating and contemplative sharp mind that was, compared to what he was surrounded by, mind boggling and generations ahead his time. Till date I am yet to find another person speak of it quite as penetratingly or eloquently, especially among the politicians of India or any other land anywhere.
He did not just rest on his laurels having written about all that observation. He made real effort, without Government backing and without him being rich any more, in the villages around Santiniketan. He tried to attract brilliant socially conscious people from around the world, to join him and study the details of the rural lifestyle and find ways to improve it – socially, economically, culturally, and find a formula, a software, that india could use in the future, to lay the foundation of a just society and an equitable human race at peace with itself and in harmony with its surroundings. India was to be a pathfinder for the rest of the world. This had been India’s historical contribution in the past, and was also India’s destiny in the future, Tagore felt. In this vision and his efforts at this field, he stood alone. Very few others could see thing this penetratingly. He was also among the very few, even today, to rate humanism higher than even nationalism.
His efforts  to find means to redress the economic imbalance between the village and the city was, in my book, among his most profound gift to mankind. He created cultural functions, to influence the babu class of Bengali bhadraloks to open its eyes and to learn to recognize the villager as his equal, and as one that provides him with food and sustenance. He tried to teach the middle class that folk culture was source of all finer and world beating philosophies and arts of India. He tried to make the city dwelling babus to develop a degree of respect for the village, and to rally in its revival. He tried to get the urban self absorbed class to learn to value the produce of the rural artisans instead of hankering for goods made in European factories. He tried to have the so called educated class realize the weak foundation of their society and endeavor to address them at their root, and not just make symbolic gestures like denouncing the Union Jack. He tried to point out that exploitation by the British was only possible because India was exploited by Indians to start with.
He promoted an internationalism that allowed for free thoughts and cultural exchanges to percolate through and enrich mankind without having to deal with national barriers. His efforts were not restricted to India alone – but covered the east and the west. He did not condone either a hardcore nationalistic view that everything of India was great and foreign goods and ideas should be rejected outright, nor did he support a blind faith in western civilization to be the answer to everything, or that the east had no skeletons in the cupboard of its own.
Its unfortunate that these realizations, thoughts, views and efforts of Tagore are mostly forgotten by the chanting masses of Tagore worshippers as well as the media and the punditry. These were not properly understood even by folks that lived around him while he was alive. Today the Tagorean banyan tree provides shade for all. Hordes of pundits enjoy the shade and are making a career living off it and are still as blind as a bat.
So, there are original thinkers that wrote like Tagore did in his time and a few others that do so today. Then there are people that dirty their hands with real social work like Tagore, Gandhi and others did in their day, and others are doing  today.
I wish I could be a little like them.

Reflections on an old Alumni meeting of my school

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Originally posted on Thurseday, February 12th, 2009

I decided to bring over some of my old posts sprinkled over the net here and there. One source is the iWeb blog site with Apple’s software and web space called শান্তিনিকেতনের খাতা (Santiniketaner Khata), which means diary from Santiniketan. Santiniketan, is my birth place. That is were I went to school. But the place is more than just that. It was where Rabindranath Tagore tried to make his dream come true, and leave his creative software. It was software that was designed to help future mankind – not just in and around Santiniketan, but around the world, along a path that would have been more creative, congenial, and harmonious for the people and the planet. Tagore had created a lot of poetry and literature, for which he was recognized. But the software was his best creation, and his best gift to mankind.

Unfortunately, the software today is virus afflicted and dying.

Some of my writings on Santiniketan, my birth place where I had five generations of exchange, starting with Tagore himself bringing one of my ancestors to the place to help in its inception and construction.

Its a sad story.

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Bubla has an expressive face, I came to the conclusion, after having seen a number of his pictures in my collection from the last Poush Mela. Faces float across our screen as I flip through my photo folder labelled “Santiniketan 08-12”.

I sometimes go back to a handful of these pictures and look at them again. They bring a smile. That expression of Uma di, intently listening to Somenda speak at the Asramik Sangha, or Baka da, with his sun glasses, that remind me of the movie “of all the President’s men”.

Then there is Bubla with his wiinter cap, and the wild haired Benuda. They all represent faces, and bring back the flavor, of Santiniketan. Benuda, at certain angles, remind me of his father, Bodo Daktar babu. I remember running about on our bed at Ratan Palli, and bodo Daktar babu trying to catch me. The issue was some vaccination, which I was unwilling to take, and he was determined to administer.

It was mid morning in Amra Kunja. The sun filtered through the canopy and struck the ground at a slant, coming from the north east. There were gigantic looking box shape speakers erected all around us.

They looked odd and intrusive, loud and somehow faintly offensive. They tried to pull me away from the Amra Kunja, back into the mechanical and noisy world that I had hoped to leave behind, to attend the Asramik Sabha. as the congregation was small, and every one was close to each other,

I wondered if there was a need for those massive speakers.

I remember Alo di and a few others mention that some of the seniors had a hearing problem, and wondered if some

kind of speaker system could also be used during the general discussion. It did occur to me that, instead of speakers, one might consider providing some of the new generation hearing aid devices, where the microphone is a small hand held piece of plastic the size of a box of matches, with matching radio operated speakers that fit the ears of individual listeners that need them.

This would make them unobtrusive, and same time spare the others from feeling an oppressive presence of huge speakers and the corresponding noise. In the adjacent ground, more loud speakers boomed, and we were forced to hear the preparations for the Alumni Association meeting. Somehow, I could not bring myself to appreciate the loud speakers.

Well, I should write up some more in the next few days… even include some of the topics of discussion. But then, I already put all that up, from the recording, on a Podcast. But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

———————————————
Well, that was what I had written in Fab 2009 about a meeting in December 2008. But, in this case neither a picture is worth a thousand words, not any number of words is worth anything.
The slow decline of Tagore’s influence can be seen from observing the effectiveness of meetings such as these.
The Alumni of the University, that are alive today, should perhaps go over a hundred thousand individuals. But the number of people that attended were barely thirty. Even the number of ex-students living or present in Santiniketan would have been several times larger than the attendees.
So, first of all – the group hardly represents the ex-students. More importantly, it does not seem to hold much of an attraction in the minds of the ex-students. It might be here that its greatest failure lies.
But that is not all. This meeting is supposed to be serious, to chalk out discuss what the alumni did in the previous year and what it might do in the year ahead. NO serious analysis was made of what was to be the original purpose of this Alumni association, and if that purpose was being fulfilled. There was no serious discussion of what should now be the real charter of the group. The name of the group was Asramik Sangha, or an association of people that are Asramiks, meaning people who had spent time in the Asram – i.e. exstudents. It could, in essence also include teachers and others that spent time in the Asram – but I shall not get into such finer points.
There were discussions of parallel association, called in fact the Alumni Association – an English name for basically the same thing. This was required by the Government of India where it funded any University. The University was to have this association and it was to elect members annually. And the executive board of the University, should have two elected members from this Alumni Association. The original “Asramik Sangha” created by Tagore himself at a time when the country was ruled by the British and there was no funding by any Government. The new “Alumni Association” was a requirement by the Government when it decided to fund the University, a few years after India got independence and a decade after Tagore’s death.
The two parallel bodies where to be merged into one. That did not happen.
Its a long story.
But, the main thing is – whatever was discussed in this miniature meeting of the Asramik Sangha, nothing much came out of it. Most of the participants were old folks. Some have passed away. The rest mostly do not remember what was discussed. There is no follow up of any kind. We do not receive any notice or a request or any other kind of information regarding any kind of follow up.
These meetings are self contained cocoons that, like fossilized bones, exist only as a reminder of a past existence, but otherwise having no influence on the present or the future.
Asramik Sangha has become an annual get together place for a few old folks reminiscing about the good old days that are fast vanishing.
It already behaves like a fossil.

Whose fault is it – (Tagore’s fading influence)

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(Moved from an older blog of the past)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2009

Whose fault is it ?

No one in sane mind would dispute the fact that Visva-Bharati has fallen from grace and is not living upto expectation of any kind, past or future.

There are long stories, doing back fifty or more years, on who did what and when, and how this or that factor contributed to the future malady of the University. Looking through all that, it is not difficult to get mired in it and end up with a headache, and a feeling of disillusionment, a defeatist view that nothing can really turn the clock, or bring a change for the better.

While most of the pessimism might be placed on some ground reality, it still might be worth thinking outside the box, and trying to see whose fault it might be. This is not necessarily for the purpose of pointing fingers, but rather, to see if change can be brought, for the better, even at this late stage.

First, who are, or should have been, the stake holders? We know a few – those that are inside Visva-Bharati. The list starts with the VC. But his is a temporary job – lasts for five years. Then there are the Students – who might stay for 2 or three years, and in some cases, if we include the school, as much as ten or fifteen, depending on where one starts and ends. Then comes the workers and their multiple unions, albeit politicized.

Next comes the Government, which is the custodian, and the financier, of the University.

Lastly, there is the vast diaspora of Alumni, literally spread around the Globe.

There is a sixth party – the citizens of India, whose tax money the Govt doles out so generously to the University. But I shall for now discount the 6th group – they have many items on their plate, and the University might be virtually invisible in their list, when they go to vote.

So, taking the five groups : VC, Students, Workers, Govt, and Alumni, it is this last group, the Alumni that shows up as the oddest one. This is one entity that is wholly divorced from the affairs of the University – and yet, it is this group that Rabindranath liked to most depend on, in order to protect the University. There is a reason – this is the only group that does not, or should not, have any vested, selfish, interest.

And, this is the group, in my eyes, that has failed Rabindranath, and the University, most spectacularly.

Mind it, it is not that the Alumni are all insignificant people, barely eking out an existence, too busy keeping body and soul together, and in no position to think of grander issues like their alma mater. Quite the contrary. A vast number of them are highly educated and professionally successful. They are spread around India and around the world. Many have acquired foreign passports, as citizens of nations in Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, etc. Some are well known locally and even globally.

And yet, this is the most disorganized, disunited and disinterested group among the five stake holders of the University.

Why is it so ?

 Frankly, I do not know. A lot of them maintain a cursory interest in Santiniketan, and the University. Many of them attend to cultural functions here and there, listen to renditions of Tagore songs and dance drama. Some make a career out of it. And in spite of that, in the last fifty odd years, there has never been a ground swell, a movement, to get the Alumni diaspora under a single umbrella, with a specific agenda, to try to give something back to their Alma Mater, to repay a part of their debt, and, most importantly, be a serious stake holder for Visva-Bharati.

So, today, among thousands of news reports, analysis, and endless rounds of discussions on what is the matter with Visva Bharati, and how and why it has become what it is today – the Alumni shows solidarity with the Union leaders of the University in one critical sphere – its refusal to analyze itself, before judging others.

Its not that effort has not been made a few times to appeal to the Alumni to join hands, and decide what we can do, or give, instead of passing judgment and comment on others. But, typically, while such appeals might stir an unconnected third party – the diaspora of Alumni, 99 out of 100, would shun such appeals.

Why ?

It is high time when this critical group that has thus escapes scrutiny, be placed under the microscope.

This group is the biggest failure, the biggest shame, in the history of the University. And it happily remains invisible – while willingly passing high judgments on all others.

It is perhaps just as well that Tagore was cremated and not buried. He would have had a restless stay, having to turn in his grave so often, for the misguided faith he had placed on the ex-students of the University.

For the last 25 years, being involved as I have been with ISO 9000 Quality Assurance system, and with developing tools for self-analysis systems based on searching for the root-causes of problems in order that a firm might be able to self-regulate itself for perpetual and incremental improvement in its function and its operating process, so that the ultimate product can stand the competition and be counted as a quality product – I have tried to think things through for the past two years, about Visva-Bharati. And hundred times out of hundred, I come back to the same issue in the root-cause analysis, and in thinking through a road map for the betterment of the University, from the stand point of us, those that are not working for the University. Every time, without fail, the ball ends up in our court – and the Alumni are identified as the first and most critical group that should have, from our perspective, been engaged, been unified, and been proactive. And we have not.

The first step in all this would have been to get the Alumni together under one umbrella, and instill the first lesson in the process of self-assessment – learning what this group as a stake holder could potentially do, and what is has so far done.

One does not need to be certified as a lead auditor for ISO 9000, or for that matter, to have high level of experience in root-cause analysis. After all, these systems were thought through by ordinary people, using nothing more than a bit of common sense, and unbiased analytical thought. It was astute of Rabindranath, that he had come to the same conclusion, long before ISO 9000 was born, that the most important stake holder for the Asram should be the ex-students.

And we failed him. And we continue to fail him. And we continue to waste time, judging others.

Sure, we engage in some token activity, in a path of continuously diminishing returns, where more and more effort produces less and less significant return, and bring no appreciable change for the better. We all know, that the path so far pursued is a slippery slope going downhill.

 And still – the ex-students continue to fail, and continue to feel good about themselves.

Sorry, Gurudev – I am truly, genuinely, sorry.

Tonu

Cult of Tagore

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Lately, I have been changing my interface with social networking sites on internet – by reducing my presence in Facebook and increasing it in google plus.
Facebook was getting to be a bit addictive and I decided to cut the addiction. It was also taking more of my shrinking slice of personal time. I concluded that the time spent on Facebook was more wasteful than productive. And after having quit smoking, I felt confident of kicking any bad habit.
We are creatures of habit, and develop attachments through our lives. Our growing years have a lot of influence over our thinking and world view. It is without a doubt, that Rabindranath Tagore played a very big role in my world view, even more than Gandhi or anybody else did, barring my own parents.

Tagore Bust at UBC, Vancouver

But – I grew up. I matured. I acquired the ability to attempt to think independently and to step outside the proverbial box in order to do so. And as I matured, rather late in my life, I realized the need to divorce myself from some preconceived wrong notions. These included keeping Tagore welded to junk heaps of of sentimental dead matter.
Tagore needed to be freed from Santiniketan. He needed to be set free from Bengal. He needed to be unshackled from the cult of Tagore.
Tagore was many things, but not a cult figure whose mantra needed to be chanted mindlessly by the masses in the hope of achieving some fictitious nirvana. But, the masses will do what it will. I needed to set myself free from that grotesque caricature.
Tagore had written “Tasher Desh”, the land of cards. It was a great social parody with a serious underlying message. The land of cards needed to rid itself from millennial accumulation of dead habits and debris. Fresh air needed to course through their land and their lives. A prince charming came from a far off land and set them free. Rules that no more served a purpose other than mindless copying of meaningless tradition, needed to be broken. Habits that were locked in stone and unable to evolve needed to be changed so creative freedom could again express itself.
Ironically, Santiniketan had turned itself into another Tasher Desh – a land of cards. It had become moribund, devoid of new ideas or creativity. The cult had barricaded itself with mindless copy of Tagore’s words, like the parrot in Tagore’s own  satire – “Tota Kahini” the Story of the parrot. Santiniketan took to repeating ceremonially repeating Tagore’s words without understanding or believing in them. They did not promote Tagore’s vision by application of it in their actions and endeavors. Instead, they killed Tagore by parroting him incessantly, by turning him into a framed picture on the wall, a figurine to sell in Poush Mela. They ended up reducing his legacy to a mere creator of some music and dance for the weekend amusement of a group of hapless Bengali babus.
The cult represented a slow degeneration of ideals and values. Tagore the universal man was unrecognizable if one limits himself to watching Santiniketan, and the hordes of Tagore lovers sprinting all across the globe busy promoting themselves.
Santiniketan became a den for misfit leftists, dimwit academics, useless nincompoops that had no love for either the land or the people, and were merely there to fatten their pockets and live a lazy life without working. They ensured more and more useless folks accumulated there, supporting each other – so that the place was thence unsuitable and hostile for anyone with a wish to break the deadlock and inject some life into the comatose patient.
Outside of Santiniketan, the greater Bengal, in its own path of slow decay, provided a suitable backdrop. The culture and the cult has now gone virtually underground. It is not underground in a legal sense. It is not hiding from law. Its only crime is uselessness and failing to to display sign of life, energy, honesty or vitality. Thus, it has sunk below the radar of the living world.

Santiniketan does not exist for the rest of the world, and for good reason. It is hardly a place for bright, honest, free thinking, progressive hard working representative of humankind whose vision goes further than the tip of his nose. Shyamali Khastgir might have been the last free spirit to percolate through the dead leaves heaped at the bottom of that decaying forest.
It took me a lifetime to realize I was getting  supersaturated in this foul broth. My parents provided a buffer. They carried with them a breath of the past long vanished on the ground, but still surviving in the minds of the older generation – of simple living and high thinking.

But my parents are no more.
Today, we have a lifestyle of high living, dishonestly at the taxpayers expense, giving nothing in return. And instead of high thinking – there is no thinking. Cognitive activity is too taxing for the brain. It has been sleeping for two generations. It has lost the will to wake up and get to work. ঘুমে জাগরণে মিশি একাকার নিশিদিবসে।

With my parents passing, I was, late in my life, forced to peer outside the cocoon and look at the Tagorean world as it exists now. My extended childhood was over. I had to now confront the legacy of Tagore from my own perspective and look at it through clear glass of reality. I had to confront the unenviable influence of the cult of Tagore in denigrating the image of one of the greatest social thinkers and universal philosopher that the world had seen.
I could see I was soaked with this unhealthy odor emanating from the gathering mass of pseudo devotees of this new cult of Tagore. I was surrounded by mindless cult followers, stifling my air and blotting my sky. Half of these devotees wanted only to further their own little careers while using what was left of Tagore’s carcass as a stepping stone, while the other half lacked cognitive ability to think through anything, let alone analyze the intricacies of life, real value of Tagore’s visions or how these could be applied to an ever changing humanity and planet.
My social networking environment had been filling up a this slow stench of decay and a large crowd of nonplussed groupies under a Tagorean banner, that did not really share any of my views on anything. I was surrounded by people in denial.
This is not an uncommon state. Americans are in a state of denial about their decline. Western economic model is in a state of denial about its un-sustainability. The petrochemical industry and the governments they support are in denial about the end of cheap oil, religious nuts and the public in general are in denial about the threat of overpopulation. Everybody is in denial about the great mass extinction of species going on right now. Bengalis are in denial of the existential threat to their language and culture and the steady decline of Bengali thinking. So I guess Tagore cultists are no exception. My mistake was in expecting them to be any different.
Soon after the death of my parents, I started getting increasingly skeptical about the intention and the ability of hordes of ladder climbing Tagore worshipers sprinkled around the world. I needed to synchronize my views to match reality. In reality, Tagore and Santiniketan had already divorced each other a long time ago. It was therefore unfair to continue to keep Tagore’s coffin buried in the desert sands of Santiniketan. Santiniketan has to either stand on its own, or be buried by the sands of time. It had been conceived and nurtured by Tagore in its infancy. But that was a long time ago. Santiniketan had long since grown up as an adult, and has been charting its own course for a few generations. It needed to face the world on its own terms and on its own two feet, without support. If it was top heavy with weak legs, unable to support itself, it would need exercise. Giving it a pair of crutches bearing Tagore’s name would only lengthen its misery.
It took me a while to realize that in this new scenario, I needed neither Santiniketan’s residents, nor its ex-students to expand my understanding of Tagore. There was nobody left there that could add anything other than their own little agenda. Remembering the life and times of Leonard Elmhirst, I recalled how he, later in his life and much after Tagore’s death, appeared to be thoroughly disenchanted with Santiniketan. Was there a common link in all this ? I know my uncle Salil Ghosh had a long association and correspondence with Elmhirst, but the content is unknown to me. Unfortunately, I did not think of all this while Salil Ghosh was still alive.
Anyhow, looking around for a hangout, I concluded that there was no need for me to even contemplate a hangout on Tagore. The kind of folks that might drop in are the very group Tagore needed distance from.
There was of course another reason for tilting towards Google plus. It had its advantages. My first impression of the place was, I was able to find more folks that followed my line of thinking.
Say – wild life watching. There were not many that shared my hobby and interest within Facebook. Perhaps that could be amended. But here in Google, I found it easy.
Then – archaeology, anthropology, geology, sustainability, climate change, nature and wildlife preservation, globalization, financial crisis, plight of the aboriginal people, over-mechanization of industry and exploitation of the rural environment. I could hang out in specific hangouts, or create my own.
Are these things related to Tagore? Well, ask a Santiniketanite that is busy singing ‘Amader Santiniketan’ noon and night, and he might not find any relation. That’s because the cult of Tagore only learn to chant mindlessly and without comprehension, but not the application of the formulae in real life – which was the primary goal of Tagore for creating those verses, music, function and events in the first place.

In Tagore’s own mind, there was more life that needed living outside of sanctified temple-altars than inside. Of course there is elements of the Tagore’s vision in Universalism, in climate conservation, in activism to protect our forests and the lands, watching and appreciation of nature, sustainability, tribal life or the exploitation of our villages. These are the issues with which a younger Tagore would have loved to get his hands dirty, and an older Tagore would have pushed and cajoled the younger generation to get their hands dirty. Tagore’s visions were to be fulfilled in the outside world through appropriate karma yoga, and for a continuous re-thinking and striving for betterment of an equitable society in harmony with its natural environment. His vision was not to be fulfilled in walled zoos packed with robotic people programmed to parrot out Tagore music and functions periodically for paying tourists.
As I think through the life of Tagore and his efforts with humankind, both in India, and in the easter civilizations as well as the west, I can conclude with some hope, that Tagore would survive because he represented a path that was universal culturally, ecologically, economically, sustainably and equitably. It was vision that never claimed to be perfect, but always encouraged questioning minds to forever strive to tweak and fine tune. It was a vision and a blueprint that is as relevant today as was in his time. Santiniketan, meanwhile, stopped representing Tagore, or sustainability, sociocultural creativity, or universalism or anything at all that could be worthwhile for humanity. In Tagore’s original blueprint, the place and the institution, along with its ever increasing number of ex-students were to spearhead in a lot of directions to find creative and unique solutions to new challenges that faced humanity – solutions that were not a mindless copy of either the west or the eastern past. Solutions that promoted an equitable relationship between the city and the village, between the affluent and the not so affluent, and between people of different race, cast, religion and cultures.

Today, Santiniketan is so far behind on all the sociocultural issues of today, that nobody looks up to the place to provide any answer to anything anymore. Santiniketan therefore, needs to engage in fresh soul searching to identify a reason for its existence.

Rabindranath Tagore meanwhile deserves to survive outside of Santiniketan, outside of tepid academic debates, and power-point presentations on the screen in quiet auditoriums. He needs sunshine. He needs freedom from the clutches the Tagorean cultists. He deserves to be among the people of this planet, and not sterilized, myopic pundits and blind groupies.

And so – be well, Cult of Tagore.  It was nice knowing you.