রবিঠাকুর পরিচিতি

সবাইকে নমস্কার।



আমি শান্তিনিকেতনে জন্মিত এক সুদূর কানাডা বাসী বিশ্বনাগরিক যে মনে করি আমার সর্বজনীন সচেতনতাতে বাবা মাকে বাদ দিলে সবচেয়ে বেশি প্রভাব আছে রবীন্দ্রনাথের বিশ্বমানবতাবাদের। আমার দাদামশাই কালীমোহন ঘোষ সতেরো-আঠার বছর বয়স থেকে রবীন্দ্রনাথের সঙ্গে কর্মযুক্ত হন প্রধানতঃ পল্লী উন্নয়নের কাজে, প্রথমে বর্তমান বাংলাদেশে শিলাইদহ ও পতিসরে এবং পরজীবনে নিশান্তিনিকেতন-শ্রীনিকেতনে এসে এল্মহার্ষ্ট সাহেবের সঙ্গে। তার পুত্র এবং আমার বড়মামা শান্তিদেব সঙ্গীতভবনে ছিলেন। আমার বাবা কলাভবনের অধ্যাপক ও মা শিল্পসদনে কাজ করেছেন।
আমি অনেক বছর আগে ২০০৯’এ অনেক নথিপত্র ঘেঁটে এবং বিশেষ করে প্রশান্ত পালের রবিজীবনী অবলম্বন করে, তেইশ স্তবকের একটি কবিগান রচনা করি, রবীন্দ্রনাথের বারো পুরুষের বংশতালিকার পরিচয় দিয়ে।

কবিগান করার পেছনে কয়েকটি উদ্দেশ্য ছিল – প্রথমত, কবিগান আজ বাংলা থেকে অনেকটা উঠে গেছে। শহরের লোকেরা একে ভুলে গেছে এবং গ্রাম গঞ্জে হিন্দি সিনেমা, আর টেলিভিশন ঢুকে গিয়ে কবিগাননকে ঠেলে প্রায় নির্বাসনে পাঠিয়েছে। সুতরাং যদি আমার ক্ষুদ্র ক্ষমতায় লুপ্তপ্রায় বাংলা কবিগানে আবার একটু প্রাণ সঞ্চার করা যায় তবে সেটা ভাল চেষ্টা হবে মনে করে। আর দ্বিতীয় কারণ ছিল – যারা পড়া লেখা জানেনা বা বই পড়ার সময় পায়না, বা ছোট শিশু, এরাও কবিগান মারফত নানা তথ্য জেনে মনে রাখতে পারে -যা কবিগানের অন্যতম প্রধান গুন। সুতরাং এর মধ্য দিয়ে গ্রাম গঞ্জের মানুষ রবি ঠাকুরের পূর্বপুরুষরা কিরকম লোক ছিলেন, কোথা থেকে এসেছেন এবং কেমন করে তিনি শান্তিনিকেতনে পৌঁছলেন, তাও জানতে পারবে।

যাই হোক, এই কবিগানে দুচারজন সুর দেবার চেষ্টা করলেও পুরোটা করা সম্ভব হয়নি – যদিও অনেকে সাহাজ্য করতে এগিয়ে এসেছিল। বাংলাদেশের কিছু লোক এটা নিয়ে গিয়ে বলেছিল ওখানে চেষ্টা করবে বলে, তারও কোনও ফল এখনও আসেনি। আমি সুরকার নই, গায়কও নই – নয়তো নিজেই চেষ্টা করতাম।
 
আজ এখানে আপনাদের সঙ্গে শেয়ার করলাম। হয়তো কারুর ভাল লাগবে।
কেমন লাগলো জানাবেন।
 
শান্তনু মিত্র

পাঠভবনের প্রাক্তন ছাত্র, বিশ্বজিত রায়ের পুত্র, বাঙ্গালুরু বাসী তমোজিত রায় (টুকুল) কবিগানটির প্রথম অংশটিতে সুর প্রয়োগ করে গেয়েছিল, সেটা এখানে তোলা হল। কবিগানে সুর রচনার একটা সমস্যা হল যে এতে অনেক স্তবক থাকে বলে একই সুরে পুরোটা গাইলে সেটা একঘেয়ে, repetitive হয়ে যায়, কবিগান কিছুটা রস হারায়। তাই কবিগান রচনায় সুরের ও গাওয়ার রচনাশৈলীতে নানা রকম পরিবর্তন, বৈচিত্র আনতে হয়। সেই কথা মনে রেখে টুকুল প্রথম অংশটাই শুধু সূর করে গেয়েছিল।

শুনুন

 

Robbery of the soil

Here is a lecture Rabindranath Tagore delivered at the Calcutta university back in 1922, followed by another one by Leonard Elmhirst, who had joined Tagore for rural reconstruction efforts in Eastern India in the 1920s. Elmhirst, the agriculturist, concentrated on how the city takes all and returns little or nothing of real value to the soil’. Tagore, the humanist, talked about the importance of replenishing what you take from society as well as what you take from the soil.

Tagore’s observations a century ago, appears eerily relevant even today.

The standard of living in modern civilization has been raised far higher than the average level of our necessity. The strain which this entails serves at the outset to increase our physical and mental alertness. The claim upon our energy accelerates growth. This in its turn produces activity that expresses itself by raising life’s standard still higher.

When this standard attains a degree that is a great deal above the normal it encourages the passion of greed. The temptation of an inordinately high level of living, which was once confined only to a small section of the community, becomes widespread. The burden is sure to prove fatal to the civilization which puts no restraint upon the emulation of self-indulgence.

In the geography of our economic world the ups and downs produced by inequalities of fortune are healthy only within a moderate range. In a country divided by the constant interruption of steep mountains no great civilization is possible because in such places the natural flow of communication is always difficult. Like mountains, large fortunes and the enjoyment of luxury are also high walls of segregation; they produce worse divisions in society than any physical barriers.

Where life’s simple wealth does not become too exclusive, owners of individual property find no great difficulty in acknowledging their communal responsibility.  In fact wealth can even become the best channel for social communication. In former days in India public opinion levied heavy taxes upon wealth and most of the public works of the country were voluntarily contributed by the rich. The water supply, medical help, education and amusement were naturally maintained by men of property through a spontaneous sense of mutual obligation. This was made possible because the limits set to individual right of self-indulgence were narrow and surplus wealth easily followed the channel of social responsibility. In such a society civilization was supported by strong pillars of property, and wealth gave opportunity to the fortunate for self-sacrifice.

But, with the rise of the standard of living, property changes its aspect. It shuts the gate of hospitality which is the best means of social communication. Its owners display their wealth in an extravagance which is self-centred. This creates envy and irreconcilable class division. In other words property becomes anti-social.

Because property itself, with what is called material progress, has become intensely individualistic, the method of gaining it has become a matter of science and not of social ethics. Property and its acquisition break social bonds and drain the life sap of the community. The unscrupulousness involved plays havoc the world over and generates a force that can coax or coerce peoples to deeds of injustice and wholesale horror.

The forest fire feeds upon the living world from which it springs till it exhausts itself completely along with its fuel. When a passion like greed breaks loose from the fence of social control it acts like that fire, feeding upon the life of society. The end is annihilation. It has ever been the object of the spiritual training of man to fight those passions that are anti-social and to keep them chained. But lately abnormal temptation has set them free and they are fiercely devouring all that is affording them fuel.

But there are always insects in our harvest field which, in spite of their robbery, tend to leave a sufficient surplus for the tillers of the soil, so that it does not pay us to try to exterminate them altogether. But when some pest, that has an enormous power of self multiplication, attacks our total food crop, we must consider this a great calamity. In human society, in normal circumstances, there are many causes that make for wastage, yet it does not cost us much to ignore them.

But today the blight that has fallen upon our social life and its resources is disastrous because it is not restricted within reasonable limits. This is an epidemic of voracity that has infected the total area of civilization. We all claim our right, and freedom, to be extravagant in our enjoyment if we can afford it. Not to be able to waste as much upon myself as my rich neighbour does merely proves a poverty in myself of which I am ashamed, and against which my women folk, and other dependents, naturally cherish their own grievance.

Ours is a society in which, through its tyrannical standard of respectability, all the members are goading each other to spoil themselves to the utmost limit of their capacity. There is a continual screwing up of the ideal level of convenience and comfort, the increase in which is proportionately less than the energy it consumes. The very shriek of advertisement itself, which  constantly accompanies the progress of unlimited production, involves the squandering of an immense quantity of material and of life force which merely helps to swell the sweepings of time.

Civilization today caters for a whole population of gluttons. An intemperance, which could safely have been tolerated in a few, has spread its contagion to the multitude. This universal greed, which now infects us all, is the cause of every kind of meanness, of cruelty and of lies in politics and commerce, and vitiates the whole human atmosphere. A civilization, which has attained such an unnatural appetite, must, for its continuing existence, depend upon numberless victims.

These are being sought in those parts of the world where human flesh is cheap. In Asia and Africa a bartering goes on through which the future hope and happiness of entire peoples is sold for the sake of providing some fastidious fashion with an endless supply of respectable rubbish.

The consequence of such a material and moral drain is made evident when one studies the condition manifested in the grossness of our cities and the physical and mental anaemia of the villages almost everywhere in the world. For cities inevitably have become important. The city represents energy and materials concentrated for the satisfaction of an exaggerated appetite, and this concentration is considered to be a symptom of civilization. The devouring process of such an abnormality cannot be carried on unless certain parts of the social body conspire and organize to feed upon the whole. This is suicidal; but, before a gradual degeneracy ends in death, the disproportionate enlargement of the particular portion looks formidably great. It conceals the starved pallor of the entire body. The illusion of wealth becomes evident because certain portions grow large on their robbery of the whole.

A living relationship, in a physical or in a social body, depends upon sympathetic collaboration and helpfulness between the various individual organs or members. When a perfect balance of interchange begins to operate, a consciousness of unity develops that is no longer easy to obstruct. The resulting health or wealth are both secondary to this sense of unity which is the ultimate end and aim, and a creation in its own right. Whenever some sectarian ambition for power establishes a dominating position in life’s republic, the sense of unity, which can only be generated and maintained by a perfect rhythm of reciprocity between the parts is bound to be disturbed.

In a society where the greed of an individual or of a group is allowed to grow uncontrolled, and is encouraged or even applauded by the populace, democracy, as it is termed in the West, cannot be truly realized. In such an atmosphere a constant struggle goes on among individuals to capture public organizations for the satisfaction of their own personal ambition.

Thus democracy becomes like an elephant whose one purpose in life is to give joy rides to the clever and to the rich. The organs of information and expression, through which opinions are manufactured, and the machinery of administration, are openly or secretly manipulated by the prosperous few, by those who have been compared to the camel which can never pass through the needles eye, that narrow gate that leads to the kingdom of ideals.

Such a society necessarily becomes inhospitable, suspicious, and callous towards those who preach their faith in ideals, in spiritual freedom. In such a society people become intoxicated by the constant stimulation of what they are told is progress, like the man for whom wine has a greater attraction than food.

Villages are like woman. In their keep is the cradle of the race. They are nearer to nature than the towns and are therefore in closer touch with the fountain of life. They have the atmosphere which possesses a natural power of healing. Like woman they provide people with their elemental needs, with food and joy, with the simple poetry of life and with those ceremonies of beauty which the village spontaneously produces and in which she finds delight. But when constant strain is put upon her through the extortionate claims of ambition, when her resources are exploited through the excessive stimulus of temptation, then she becomes poor in life. Her mind becomes dull and uncreative; and, from her time honoured position as the wedded partner of the city, she is degraded to that of maid servant. The city, in its intense egoism and pride, remains blissfully unconscious of the devastation it is continuously spreading within the village, the source and origin of its own life, health and joy.

True happiness is not at all expensive. It depends upon that natural spring of beauty and of life, harmony of relationship. Ambition pursues its own path of self-seeking by breaking this bond of harmony, digging gaps, creating dissension. Selfish ambition feels no hesitation in trampling under foot the whole harvest field, which is for all, in order to snatch away in haste that portion which it craves. Being wasteful it remans disruptive of social life and the greatest enemy of civilization.

In India we had a family system of our own, large and complex, each family a miniature society in itself. Ido not wish to discuss the question of its desirability, but its rapid decay in the present day clearly points out the nature and process of the principle of destruction which is at work in modern civilization. When life was simple, needs normal, when selfish passions were under control, such a domestic life was perfectly natural and truly productive of happiness. The family resources were sufficient for all. Claims from one or more individuals of that family were never excessive. But such a group can never survive if the personal ambition of a single member begins separately to clamour for a great deal more than is absolutely necessary for him. When the determination to augment private possession, and to enjoy exclusive advantage, runs ahead of the common good and of general happiness, the bond of harmony, which is the bond of creation, must give way and brothers must separate nay even become enemies.

This passion of greed that rages in the heart of our present civilization, like a volcanic flame of fire, is constantly struggling to erupt in individual bloatedness. Such eruptions must disturb mans creative mind. The flow of production which gushes from the cracks rent in society gives the impression of a hugely indefinite gain. We forget that the spirit of creation can only evolve out of our own inner abundance and so add to our true wealth. A sudden increase in the flow of production of things tends to consume our resources and requires us to build new storehouses.  Our needs,  therefore, which stimulate this increasing flow, must begin to observe the limitation of normal demand. If we go on stoking our demands into bigger and bigger flames the conflagration that results will no doubt, dazzle our sight, but its splendour will leave on the debit side only a black heap of charred remains.

When our wants are moderate, the rations we each claim do not exhaust the common store of nature and the pace of their restoration does not fall hopelessly behind that of our consumption. This moderation leaves us leisure to cultivate happiness, that happiness which is the artist soul of the human world, and which can create beauty of form and rhythm of life. But man today forgets that the divinity within him is revealed by the halo of this happiness.

The Germany of the period of Goethe was considered to be poverty stricken by the Germany of the period of Bismarck. Possibly the standard of civilization, illuminated by the mind of Plato or by the life of the Emperor Asoka, is underrated by the proud children of modern times who compare former days with the present age of progress, an age dominated by millionaires, diplomats and war lords.

Many things that are of common use today were absolutely lacking in those days. But are the people that lived then to be pitied by the young of our day who enjoy so much more from the printing press but so much less from the mind?

I often imagine that the moon, being smaller in size than the earth, produced the condition for life to be born on her soil earlier than was possible on the soil other companion. Once she too perhaps had her constant festival, of colour,  of music  and of movement;  her  store-house was perpetually replenished with food for her children. Then in course of time some race was born to her that was gifted with a furious energy of intelligence, and that began greedily to devour its own surroundings. It produced beings who, because of the excess of their animal spirit, coupled with intellect and imagination, failed to realize that the mere process of addition did not create fulfilment; that mere size of acquisition did not produce happiness; that greater velocity of movement did not necessarily constitute progress and that change could only have meaning in relation ,to some clear ideal of completeness.

Through machinery of tremendous power this race made such an addition to their natural capacity for gathering and holding, that their career of plunder entirely outstripped natures power for recuperation. Their profit makers dug big holes in the stored capital of the planet. They created wants which were unnatural and provision for these wants was forcibly extracted from nature.

When they had reduced the limited store of material in their immediate surroundings they proceeded to wage furious wars among their different sections, each wanting his own special allotment of the lions share. In their scramble for the right of self-indulgence they laughed at moral law and took it to be a sign of superiority to be ruthless in the satisfaction each of his own desire. They exhausted the water, cut down the trees, reduced the surface of the planet to a desert, riddled with enormous pits, and made its interior a roiled pocket, emptied of its valuables.

At last one day the moon, like a fruit whose pulp had been completely eaten by the insects which it had sheltered, became a hollow shell, a universal grave for the voracious creatures who insisted upon consuming the world into which they had been born. In other words, they behaved exactly in the way human beings of today are behaving upon this earth, fast exhausting their store of sustenance, not because they must live their normal life, but because they wish to live at a pitch of monstrous excess.

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Mother Earth has enough for the healthy appetite other children and something extra for rare cases of abnormality. But she has not nearly sufficient for the sudden growth of a whole world of spoiled and pampered children.

Man has been digging holes into the very foundations not only of his livelihood but of his life. He is now feeding upon his own body. The reckless waste of humanity which ambition produces is best seen in the villages where the light of life is gradually being dimmed, the joy of existence dulled, and the natural bonds of social communion are being snapped every day. It should be our mission to restore the full circulation of life’s blood into these martyred limbs of society; to bring to the villagers health and knowledge; a wealth of space in which to live, a wealth of time in which to work, to rest and enjoy mutual respect which will give them dignity; sympathy which will make them realize their kinship with the world of men and not merely their position of subservience.

Streams, lakes and oceans are there on this earth. They exist not for the hoarding of water exclusively each within its own area. They send up the  vapour which forms into clouds and helps in aside distribution of water. Cities have a special function in maintaining wealth and knowledge in concentrated forms of opulence, but this should not be for their own exclusive sake; they should not magnify themselves, but should enrich the entire society. They should be like the lamp post, for the light it supports must transcend its own limits. Such a relationship of mutual benefit between the city and the village remains strong only so long as the spirit of co-operation and self-sacrifice is a living ideal in society as awhile. When some universal temptation overcomes this ideal when some selfish passion finds ascendancy then a gap is formed and widened between them. The mutual relationship between city and village becomes that of exploiter and victim. This is a form of perversity in which the body becomes its own enemy. The termination is death.

We have started in India, in connection with Visva-Bharati, a kind of village work the mission of which is to retard this process of race suicide. If l try to give you details of the work the effort will look small. But we are not afraid of this appearance of smallness, for we have confidence in life. We know that if, as a seed, smallness represents the truth that is in us, it will overcome opposition and conquer space and time. According to us the poverty problem is not so important. It is the problem of unhappiness that is the great problem.

The search for wealth which is the synonym for the production and collection of things can make use of men ruthlessly can crush life out of the earth and for a time can flourish. Happiness may not compete with wealth in its list of needed materials, but it is final, it is creative therefore it has its own source of riches within itself. Our object is to try to flood the choked bed of village life with streams of happiness. For this the scholars, the poet, the musicians, the artists as well as the scientists have to collaborate, have to offer their contribution.

Otherwise they live like parasites, sucking life from the country people, and giving nothing back to them. Such exploitation gradually exhausts the soil of life, the soil which needs constant replenishing by the return of life to it through the completion of the cycle of receiving and giving back.

The writer of the following paper (Elmhirst), who was in charge of the rural work in Visva-Bharati, forcibly drew our attention to this subject and made it clear to us that the civilization which allows its one part to exploit the rest without making any return is merely cheating itself into bankruptcy. It is like the foolish young man, who suddenly inheriting his fathers business, steals his own capital and spends it in a magnificent display of extravagance. He dazzles the imagination of the onlookers, he gains applause from his associates in his dissipation, he becomes the most envied man in his neighbourhood till the morning when he wakes up, in surprise, to a state of complete indigence.

Most of us who try to deal with the poverty problem think of nothing else but of a greater intensive  effort of production, forgetting that this only means a greater exhaustion of materials as well as of humanity, and this means giving a still better opportunity for profit to the few at the cost of the many.  But it is food which nourishes and not money. It is fullness of life which makes us happy and not fullness of purse. Multiplying materials intensifies the inequality between those who have and those who have not. This is the worst wound from which the social body can suffer. It is a wound through which the body is bled to death!

1922

A few videos about Debal Deb

Dr. Debal Deb on Golden Rice. Dr Debal Deb is the true essence of a scientist. A scientist turned farmer who has the ability to understand issues and environments not only on an intellectual level but as importantly, on an emotional one. He understands what is taking place globally and has come to his own conclusions in how best to correct the damage taking place, scientifically and practically. He understands that science can be used as a solution to our food crisis, just that it needs to be functioning holistically, working with the natural systems and almost as importantly, with the farmers and their generations of agricultural knowledge.

This maverick scientist working against the corporate and institutional grain, dedicating his life to scientifically prove that nature already had the answers and what we were being sold has little to do with sustainability and everything to do with control. Debal, I was told, was one of four scientists working on what is known as the ‘Food Web Theory’. Rather than trying to destroy life around agriculture, Debal argues that we need to understand and then simulate an efficient bio-diverse environment, a more holistic approach to agriculture, one that has existed for many thousands of years. He is involved in preservation of over 1,000 strains of rice, apart from training others how to do so.

I decided to include here a few videos uploaded on U tube on my talks with Debal, that deserve to be on my blog. These are

1. Dr. Debal Deb – on Golden Rice

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2. Dr. Debal Deb on GM crop – part 2

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3. Dr. Debal Deb on GM crop – part 3

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4. Dr. Debal Deb on Rabindranath Tagore, Santiniketan, and the corrosive effects of Bengaliana

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And now I shall include below a video on not created by me, but also of Debal Deb talking about food security and against Golden rice. The video is titled – Asian Farmers Say No to Golden Rice.

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Tonu (তনু)

A letter to a Vice Chancellor

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

Remembering Kalimohan

Writing about a grandfather I have never seen, should be unusual. Further, writing about him before I write about any other relative including my parents and siblings, should be stranger. And yet, here I am.
What prompted the thought process that helped me start writing about my grandfather is more introspective. I guess I have always been engaged in introspection. Some even considered me to be a dreamer. I used to day dream as a child. But those dreams were perhaps different than others. I used to get lost in thoughts relating to the past, the present and the future, and almost never in fantasy, religions, magic, or whatever else kids normally day dream about.
Those introspection did not always produce believable or satisfactory answers. Therefore I would often take my questions to my elders. The elders that had the misfortune of being the recipient of my incessant questions, used to joke about it. They even named me “Keno babu”, or “Mr. Why”, because of my constant barrage of a standard question – Why things happen the way they do. If someone made a simple comment such as “Look, the moon is emerging over the horizon”, this would have resulted in a question from me, asking why the moon emerges that way. If someone tried to wriggle out of the question with simplistic statements such as “because the moon always rises about once a day”, this in turn would normally result in a further question from me asking why the moon does that daily. Telling me that the reason was that the moon was actually circling the earth, and that the earth was spinning around itself, would have generated further follow up questions – why, why, why. So, the elders had genuine reason to be rather wary of me, the “keno babu”.

Keno babu, 2 year old, with elder sister Ankhi.

But was that a reason for me to now write about Kalimohan Ghosh, the late father of my late mother?

Not directly. I am not sure if Kalimohan Ghosh was an introspective person. From what I gathered, he was a hard working man often away from home, and was engaged with rural people that his children did not really associate themselves with too much in their young lives. Nobody among his family understood him much. A lot of folks benefited from his generosity. He supported not just his own children, seven of which reached adulthood – six sons and a daughter. A number of other relatives including youngsters grew up in his house and got education in Santiniketan, because they were less fortunate than him. Those days, his salary as set by Rabidnranath Tagore, was five rupees per month. I do not know the exchange rate between Indian and American money back in the first half of last century. In today’s money, it would amount to about ten cents.

The foundation of the house was unlike foundations made these days. Earth was removed many feet deep. Then special tight pack clay was brought by bullock carts, along with water. Santhal men and women laborers were engaged in packing that earth manually, beating them with heavy steel weights. For almost a month, the Santhal women would come early in the morning, and work through the day, singing in tune with the beating of the steel weights, packing the earth into a semi-stone consistency. That it took almost a month to pack the foundation slab, was information I got from my grandmother, who outlived her husband for many decades and who was fond of speaking with me about the early days of Santiniketan. It is from her that I learned so many facts, such as that one of my uncles, Montu mama, once got a score of 12 out of a hundred in mathematics in school. He was a naughty boy and did not like to study, and the score was low enough to generate some follow up exchanges involving a note going to his father, my grandfather. The issue was different enough to get embedded in my grand mother’s memory.

My grandmother vividly remembered the unending stream of people that often ended up at their house to meet with “Kali babu”. Kali babu was the short name given by the villagers, to Kalimohan Ghosh. He was to be the recipient of all their complaints, difficulties, expectations, sorrows and joys. This included the Hindu, the Muslim and the tribal villagers surrounding Santiniketan. Just like the foundation for his new house in Santiniketan, Ghosh was the worker laying the foundation of a future society, following the master concept of Tagore, fine tuned and systematized in some of its facets into an evolving master plan by Leonard Elmhirst.

Anyhow, going back to the house – once the foundation for the house was firm – the rest of the construction would be erected over it. Houses did not have pillars. The strength came from the walls. And since brick houses were more costly and bricks were not so common, and since they did not support the local industry, the house was build by mud packed walls re-inforced with bamboo framing. The walls are almost a yard wide. Each material was treated with local knowledge and according to local practice, to prevent rot. The roof was supported with an unusual kind of wood – Palm tree trunk sliced lengthwise into four pieces.

That house, a hundred year old, still stands, and does not suffer from insects eating into the walls. It is a model of sustainability of a kind that has very few parallels within the University compound. However, sustainability, supporting the local industry, low ecological footprint, and living simple – are not mantras for Santiniketan these days. It prefers to imitate others. Not having a socio-economic or cultural compass anymore, and neither any roadmap or a clear destination, it cannot set its own course.

What a tragedy!
Kalimohan’s family had 12 cows, which were kept within the property. His wife maintained them, though she had some helping hands. Milk came from the cows. Extra milk was converted into durable milk products and stored for future use. They had a small paddy field behind their home, which was cultivated for rice. That provided about half the annual consumption of rice. Rice was also used initially for converting to puffed rice, as well as roasting and mixing with jaggery, to prepare rice candies what could also be stored, but preferably in air tight containers, to keep the insects at bay, and that too for a short while.
Life was very different, as little as eighty years ago in Santiniketan. There may have been fifteen to twenty people living in that house which essentially had just two main rooms in the center of the house, and four smaller rooms, barely big enough to fit a bed, at four corners. It had four small varandas facing all four sides.
The roof was originally thatched, but later converted to corrugated iron sheets that were coated with bituminous tar, poured hot and brushed across the surface, both sealing it and disinfecting it. One of the side effects of it was that it would absorb heat from the sun and turn the house into an oven in the warmer months. Erection of an internal false ceiling improved the thermal balance to an extent. But no matter what you did, it would never be as good as the original thatched roof when it came to climate control.

People kept their windows and doors open to let the breeze through, and often slept in the Varandah in the summer months.

Mango trees were planted within the compound to provide shade and also fruits. The mangos turned out to be not too many or sweet, but good enough for extracting mango pulp and with addition of sugar, drying them out as patties that were known as “amsatta”. I remember seeing my grandmother do that before she got too old, and the trees stopped producing too many mango’s, likely from lack of care.

Decay, was creeping into that house even when the children were alive and doing well. NO major trees were planted on the property after the demise of Kalimohan. I remember at least four great trees of different kinds that had been planted by Kalimohan, and that eventually toppled in storms in my childhood years, never to be replaced.

The mud wall, corrugated roof house that Kalimohan built in Santiniketan a hundred years ago.

But all this does not explain what prompts me to think about my Grandfather. Folks have been telling me to write about my grandfather. But the reason given to me is different from my own. My grandfather’s work towards rural reconstruction effort of Rabindranath Tagore was important, and has remained more of less out of the mainstream research or documentation of the academia. But, this effort, conceptualized by Tagore, was a key item in Tagore’s view on life, at the local and global level. The Bengal academia has been more or less remained blinded by the more exotic and glittering side of Tagore – his literary achievements. Therefore, there were some that feel, perhaps justifiably, that I should be writing about my grandfather.

I know my grandfather was not averse to writing, although it was a lot more complicated those days to write anything and to ensure that those writings would survive. He was, for the lifestyle he followed out in the villages around Santiniketan, a remarkably productive writer, both in his essays, his journals and his continuous exchanges with so many people. He was well connected not just with the villagers, most of whom did not and could not write, but also with a large number of people among the educated class in India and abroad. His association with Elmhirst alone spanned much longer than the actual tenure of Elmhirst in Sritiketan, and only ended with the death of my grandfather, in 1940. For a man that was a generation younger than Tagore, he passed away a year earlier. I know Ka;imohan lived mostly alone, and died alone. Very few people were home when it had a massive stroke. I remember my uncles discussing that incidence many years later. From that I gathered that, other than Samir Ghosh, the third son, nobody else was home when he had the stroke, and there was nothing anybody knew what to do. Kalimohan passed away quickly and did not linger on paralyzed or incapacitated.

I did not feel the need, and still do not, about writing a book about his work towards fulfilling a social task that Tagore figured Indians aught to undertake. I was no scholar. I did not see anybody really interested to know about Tagore’s efforts with improving the socio-cultural fabric of India. Folks wrote about him only when the author is paid for his/her labor, or when invited to present a lecture somewhere, or see an article about it published somewhere. The effort must benefit the writer in his/her personal career, more than it would further the effort initiated by Tagore, to serve as an example of a duty for future generations. We are the future generation, and we do not believe in any duty other than lining our own pockets. So, who does one write a book for? To me, a book is not just what it is about, but also who it is for.

There has been a serious deterioration of the moral fabric of the middle class – I often felt. Or perhaps the middle class never really had a moral fabric, and that I only stumbled upon it lately.

Either way, I was not too keen to be “Me-too” in the long chain of folks that write non-fiction books on things that only a handful of academics were interested in, and the subject was to remain within the academia and the libraries.
Tagore mistrusted the bead counting, chanting masses and their disinfected temples, libraries and castles, and the professional pundits. These so called pundits possessed knowledge that were mere barren copies of old chants and past practices and theories. There was often no effort at creating new knowledge, nor ideas being tested and tempered by real endeavors in life. Tagore questioned the belief that spiritual enlightenment could come from sanctified pages of books alone. For him, salvation came from identifying with the sweat of toil of the common man, and with nature. Some of that had rubbed off on me too, although I have never seen Tagore either. Both my Grandfather, and Tagore, passed away a decade before I was born. I knew a lot of it rubbed off on my grandfather.

Kalimohan’s interaction with the Brahmo Samaj religious movement was a case in point that helps me identify a similarity in our cognitive behavior, which I like to attribute to our genetic relationship. And for that reason, I broach this issue in my journal here.

Kalimohan had gotten interested in the Brahmo Samaj movement, when he was sent by Tagore to Giridi, even before Rabindranath dug his root in Santiniketan. From his family estates in Bangladesh, he had sent a young and ailing Kalimohan to Giridi. Overwork, undernourishment, and a hot and humid environment had combined to enfeeble young Kalimohan, who had succumbed to pleurisy, a form of tuberculoses. Alarmed about Kalimohan’s chance of survival, Tagore had called for an English doctor to visit from a nearby town. The doctor recommended that Kalimohan be transferred for cooler to a drier place. And thus, Rabindranath sent Kalimohan to Giridi. Kalimohan met up with a lot of progressive people of the Brahmo samaj movement there.

What happened after that, is a good example that helps define Kalimohan. He got influenced by the movement because of its main theme – that all humans were equal. This resonated with Kalimohan’s own beliefs which had already been molded by a close association with Tagore in his East Bengal estates. Then, as Rabindranath was released from his duty of overseeing the family estates in East Bengal, he asked and got permission from his own father, Devendranath Tagore, to use the premises in Santiniketan, to form a school. It was then that Rabindranath called Kalimohan over to Santiniketan, and engaged him with the budding rural reconstruction efforts there.

Kalimohan left Giridi for Santiniketan, but carried with him a fondness for the basic premises of the Brahmo Samaj movement.

Kalimohan did not engage in idol worship. This part of his belief was shaped by Tagore when Kalimohan was still in his late teens. Subsequently, no image of any God or Goddess adorned the walls of his mud-walled home in Santiniketan. But other than that, he did not impose any religious do and do not within his home, except for one thing – nobody and nothing, was untouchable. Tribals as well as low caste Hindu, and Muslims and people with any other kind of faith system was not only allowed to visit, they would eat using the same utensils that the rest of the family used, eat the same food, sitting side by side with the family and would use the same water, soap, towel and everything else. All a person required, to find equal treatment in Kalimohan’s home, was to be a human.

This was strictly adhered to. This was not just proving a point, for Kalimohan. This was what he believed in, and he needed to set an example by living it in his own home, before he could go and preach it to others in the rural community around Santiniketan.  Lastly, these people, if tired at the end of a long travel, could also sleep over at Kali babu’s place. Again, no segregation on caste, tribe or religion. Women were segregated from men. That was about it.

And he got enlightened to this faith system based on universalism of humanity, directly from Rabindranath Tagore – first hand. This was at a level higher than Hinduism, Brahmo Samaj movement, Islam, Christianity or the pagan faith system used by the Santhals. This is what Tagore meant by faith systems in his book “Religion of Man” although he did not use the words I used here. It is my belief that Kalimohan was likely his first, and perhaps last, convert on this religion. Rabindranaath had a lot of followers and hangers on, but only one true disciple.

Meanwhile, not having idols on his walls was an area where one could identify perhaps an influence of Brahmo Samaj. I have seen comments as well as writings, claiming that Kalimohan had secretly converted to Brahmo Samaj. I dispute it. Kalimohan was not the type of person to change his faith system in secrecy.  Besides, Rabindranath’s influence was very strong in Kalimohan’s life. And Rabindranath had long since realized that converting from one religion to another did not solve anything. It only alienated a person from his old social network. There is enough mention by Tagore in his letters to third parties, that he was a bit worried at times, about Kalimohan getting “too” influenced by this or that religious types. This in itself should be a good indication of what Tagore thought of religious zealots. In short, there is a lot more to Kalimohan’s bare walls devoid of deities, than a simplistic answer that he secretly had converted to Brahmo Samaj.

Kalimohan was influenced by Tagore’s humanism first and in a fundamental way, and Brahmo Samaj later, and as a milder interest. None of the erstwhile Brahmo samaj practitioners in Santiniketan or elsewhere went as far as Kalimohan went, in accepting all humans as equal in his own home. That should explain part of Kalimohan’s mid set, and set him apart from the rest even in Santiniketan, barring of course Rabindranath Tagore himself.

So, revisiting the issue of Kalimohan’s attachment to the  progressive people in the Brahmo samaj movement in Giridi, he was naturally attracted because their core beliefs tallied with Kalimohan’s own – the most important of them being that all humans were equal. This belief he had absorbed from Rabindranath, and not from Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath Tagore was very careful in not rubbing any particular brand of his spiritual belief on to others. But Rabiindranath’s own life practices were great examples for Kalimohan. Kalimohan, following his mentor Rabindranath, did not allow his eating or living habits restricted within a  narrow religious and caste  corridor that made it impossible for people of other faith systems or other castes to exchange views freely. Tagore did not keep a fence between himself and other humans. Kalimohan had dismantled that fence around himself very early in is life, thanks to Rabindranath.

Getting back to Brahmo Samaj, he started visiting Kolkata to attend every annual Brahmo Samaj meeting in January. This is a practice he started when he was brought to Santiniketan by Rabindranath. But, after a few years, Kalimohan stopped going there, and entered a suitable comment in his diary. He was tired of listening to theoretical topics and arguments on finer points of the correct interpretation and definition of God, or the right way of conducting social or religious ceremonies, and other symbolisms and protocols. He was tired of hearing about differences between various fractions of the movement. But most importantly, he only found arguments about methods, theories, definitions and symbols, but did not find discussions about man. The exchanges involved too much description of god and not enough of understanding of man. The universal man of Tagore was missing from the arguments going on in those meetings.

Service for humans and for humanism was the prime religion Kalimohan had learned from Tagore. He did not find it among the Brahmo Samaj people in Kolkata. And therefore, he stopped going there. Did he find that in any other religious groups? I doubt it. He followed a personalized religion that he had inherited from Tagore, and had fine tuned to suit his own perspective on life.

And it is here that I find I share genes with him.

What he found about the Brahmo Samaj, can be multiplied across all the organized faith systems across the world, and I came to a similar conclusion in my own life, about institutionalized religion in general. They were not for me.

But this habit of analyzing what he saw around him, and judging if the practice was meaningful or not – this questioning mind – is an aspect of Kalimohan that I can immediately relate to. I have the same bug that he had. And for that reason alone, this topic of Kalimohan‘s visit to GIridi and his exposure to the Brahmo Samaj movement deserves a mention in my post here.

So, coming back to the issue of writing about my grandfather’s work with rural reconstruction, giving shape to the efforts on the field that Tagore more or less invented in the Indian subcontinent in modern times – nobody really cared to know it.

For that matter, main stream does not care about re-analyzing the socio-cultural situation anywhere, India included. Main stream does not cater to middle class any more. The middle class is not socially conscious any more.
There is however, a growing number of minorities in the western societies that were beginning to realize that our civilization is lopsided and unsustainable. But Tagore’s name had not yet entered into that sphere. Nobody identifies Tagore with socio-economics or sustainability, or environmentalism, or rural reconstruction, or much anything other than writing a few songs. Gandhi’s name was was more readily associated with these things, because of the image he projected through national politics of freedom. Gandhi ran an ashram those days, and did try to address the cast system. But his involvement did not go as deep as Tagore’s had those days, with focus on finding pathways to address the economic disconnect between the rural and urban India, and to also address its class distinction and segregation, apart from all other kinds of walls man was erecting around himself. Gandhi, on the other hand, is a much more salable name today. The ruling families of Indian post independence political world, though hardly Gandhian in philosophy, do find that owning that name provides a convenient billboard for political mileage, and therefore has seen to it that the name endures.

Out of a thousand persons I knew, both from India and the world, I could count the number of people that really cared about sustainability in our civilization, and social justice, or true humanism, or preservation of the environment, in the fingers of my right hand, and still have room left for more.

So, I was not interested to write a book to join the Book writer’s club. I had, in short, become quite cynical about those that write books on Tagore, and those who read them.

Then why do I think about writing anything on the man? The reason, I guess has to do with introspection about myself, and where some of the oddities of my character might have come from.

That I was a bit different from my cousins. The difference came from two factors, I thought. One of them was that our family was the only one of our generation among our relatives, that stayed back in Santiniketan and did our schooling there, excepting for Kukul. Being partial to ourselves, I tend to think this might be about the last generation that could have absorbed a bit of something, about Tagore’s universalism, or his internationalism, or his views on sociology and culture. But I do not feel that confident any more. Anyhow, that was one reason – our growing up in Santiniketan.

The second one was my introspection. And in this, I was mostly alone. I had tried to engage others into discussion on issues that bothered me. I could not see, for example, how India could solve its poverty and illiteracy while still maintaining a healthy population growth, without going into a super-expansion mode which would likely exhaust earth’c capacity to supply material. There was a need to re-think the concept of development. But, no one else shared my views among my old friends from the Santiniketan days. I had to search further, and wider, to find compatible thinking.

I thought, even as a school child, that the world would even run short of fuel, paper, slate, pencil, eraser, and a host of other items before India would catch up with the rest. But no matter how many people I presented this questions to, I never could find one that seemed interested, or bothered about the implication. Many thought it laughable that I should worry about limits to producing paper, or ink, or pencil, or slate, or chalk, or even money to build so many hundreds of new schools every day for ever, just to keep up with the population growth. I was a mere school kid, but these things bothered me, and I found nobody that could give an answer. I could not even find a book that attempted to answer it.That these things bothered me, but did not bother much anybody else, was an indication that I might be a bit odd, compared to the rest.

Recently I have gotten my mitochondrial and Y-chromosome genes analyzed and have been studying the results as well as the subject of genetic analysis itself. I understand a bit more about inherited traits and self developed ones.

Then it occurred to me that I was not the only one given to introspection of this nature. My father did too. More importantly, my mother did this, and very frequently in her later years. Also, she was given to write her thoughts in her diary, including poems. So, it seemed logical that I must have inherited this from both of my parents, but primarily from my mother, since the channels of her thoughts often were very similar to my own. They often related to socio-economic issues, knowingly or unknowingly, and to ponder the meaning of existence and so on.

And where could she have inherited these traits from ? Were they mere mutations that manifested only in her and on me? Or were they prevalent in my Grand father too, and also perhaps go back further into the past. I knew a few things that applied to all three of us. These where :

1)  An inclination towards deep introspection – mostly relating to making sense of the life and time around us.
2)  A deep rooted realization that Tagore should not be remembered primarily as a poet, even if he was a poet par excellence. He was a humanist first and not divorced from reality. His reality, however, was deeper and not superficial.
3)  All three were not too strongly attached to institutionalized religion, and believed, in our own ways, that the best path for humans is to find an equitable and balanced way to live without degrading his neighbourhood.

All of them were essentially lonely, and not very well understood by those close to them.
From these, I had suspected that there is something in our genes, that perhaps my mother got from him, and passed some of it to me. It did not come from mitochondria, because he did not pass that on to his kids. It could not be a direct copy of the Y-chromosome because he did not pass that either, to his daughter. And yet, I have inherited, I feel certain, in some fashion, a bundle of genes somewhere, from my grandfather. Perhaps it is partially mixed with that of my father. But somewhere, in some chromosome, I have a bit of a protein or an amino acid, that somehow prompts special sets of neurons to fire in my brain at odd times, and turns me into an oddity among my relatives.
And I do no even have a good picture of my grand father.

Kalimohan, around 22 year old, England, around year 1911-12

The above is one where he was sent to England when he was a mere twenty year old young man. The reason he was sent is in itself a bit strange. Tagore has written here and there about Kalimohan. But one of the reasons had to do with the British India Police. My grandfather, before he came to know Tagore, was engaged as a teenager in some freedom movement, giving lectures here and there about the need to organize and strive to get the British to leave India. Somewhere there, his name got into the police records. Meanwhile, having met Tagore, he had already realized that pushing out the British was the least of the problems facing India. The root cause was a weakness of the social foundation that made it possible for British or others to rule India. This foundation was rotten and falling apart, and needed to be re-strengthened from the ground up. That was a very difficult task, and there is no good roadmap available. One would have to find ways and improvise and solve problems that came up. It was going to take many lifetimes of work, and it would be a thankless task. But that was what was needed, for improving the real lot for India.
My grandfather was the first of Tagore’s converts. He remained the most dedicated to it, till his death.
Tagore sent him to England to throw the police off his scent. Whoever went to England to study anything, always returned as an Anglicized babu that was fully converted to believe in the British system and its suitability for India. These people never became freedom fighters. And so, the Police would leave them alone. This was the policy being followed that time.
History would eventually prove this policy wrong. Tagore himself had studied in England, as had Gandhi, and Subhash Bose. None of them wanted perpetual rule of Pax Britannica. But that was in the future. The British Police did not know about Gandhi at the time, who was many years away from entering Indian politics. Subhash Bose was a mere toddler at the time.
And so, my grandfather, wearing a most unusual dress for him, in suit and wearing a bow tie, got himself photographed somewhere, and a copy of it ended up with me.
But I am not ready for Kalimohan yet. I am still not through with my introspection about my character traits and its failings.
I had always had two sides of myself. One one side, I liked hanging out out with people. This was the more prevalent trait in my youth. Perhaps I even dominated conversations with friends to some extent, while also being the source of generating fun and a lot of entertainment for everyone. I do not know where I got it from, but I can trace parts of it in my father as well as some of my maternal uncles. But, even in my youth, I displayed a separate trait that set me aside from my friends and relatives – about introspection.
That side of me was pensive, analytical and often wished to go deep rather than stay at the surface. A lack of clarity into the depths and a shortage of information or people that liked to engage in such topics was a source of both frustration, and disappointment for me.
This pensive side wished to put everything I saw or felt, into a process of analysis, study and examination. There was also a creative side, that might express itself in writings or sketches or even a poem or two, in Bengali or in English. This side required me to spend time by myself. This side also made me into an avid book reader. I was fortunate enough to be self sufficient at an early age, and could afford to buy an unending stream of books throughout my adult life. I do not have a clar tally, but must have bought more than a thousand books that had no direct bearing to my profession. There was almost no subject that I was not interested in. I read all the major religious books around before deciding that I was not very religious. I read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as well as Mao’s book, before concluding that communism as practiced was not for me. It took me many years and absorbing many more books, podcasts, essays, papers, and TV interviews as well as constant introspection and watching the world with my eyes, and thinking things over, before it dawned on me that the western civilization was bankrupt and unsustainable, not only because it was consuming faster than the planet could provide, but also because the philosophy itself was on weak foundation. In other words, there was no civilization that I knew of, of historical times, from any part of the globe, that could provide the answer of running a perpetual machine.
I often ended up on introspection on how I might have engaged Tagore on some of the issues that was clearly close to his mind. One of them was what he wrote at the end of this life, as the world entered its second world war. He stated that he had lost faith on every human institution, but never lost faith in man. He believed that man would emerge victorious, and would eradicate the maladies and distortions that the human institutions impose on each other.
I would have liked to challenge Tagore, had I been his contemporary, on this notion. I know it is absurd. If I was born in his times, I would not have had the privilege of seeing what the western civilization was capable of doing. I would not have had the time to introspect on the two sides of the expanding Indian diaspora around the globe. This overseas Indians represented a success story on one side of the coin. The Indians themselves are so full of it that it is beginning to inflate their brain, I suspect. The other side of the coin is their extreme apathy and inability to understand even the basics of justice and equity. Talking to some of these “success stories” is like talking to an imaginary Martian.
Anyhow, I would have argued with Tagore even on his own comment. How could he lose faith in human institutions and not on man, since men created all those institutions and men operated them. I know he would likely have mentioned that, for him, the “man” was not among the exalted class. He was not from the political, or social or economic, or academic elite. Man, was to emerge from the masses. In those sentiments, Tagore was a Marxist in some ways. And I would have argued him to the end of the day about this conception. I did not think anybody coming from the masses was any less selfish than others. I could rattle off a long series of bad men that came from the ranks and went berserk once they got entry into the corridors of power.
I would have argued with him, historical era by era starting with the first time man invented fire, to the first time he invented agriculture, produced metals, manufactured paper, to when he found coal, invented electricity, all the way to the present. Tagore died four years before Hiroshima. He had no idea what man was capable of doing, all of which negative in a way.
Anyhow, that is just a day-dream. Tagore is not here, and I was not there. I doubt I would have had the personality to engage Tagore into any serious discussion where I disagreed with him. I know Tagore was very bitter about human civilization, and about the Indian middle class by the time he was in the last year of his life. I became bitter about human civilization while I was middle aged. And I got access to reading material far in excess of what was possible in Tagore’s times. I have taken full advantage of it, and do believe have read more books on more topics than even existed in his days.
But he had a very great advantage over me. He had personally met, and discussed with, almost the entire worlds intelligentsia, from the east, to the west, north and south. There were so many famous people he had met and exchanged views with, that it might be a fair statement that there was just nobody, in the west or in the east, that could boast of that kind of a wide circle of acquaintance. Mine in comparison is – so insignificant that it could not compare at all.
But the results have been largely same. He was disappointed in human civilization because he had pinned high hopes on them and they came up short.
I too was disappointed. I could see every civilization at the end of the day suffering from an identical malady – inability to see what is obvious to an outsider – that their system is bankrupt and heading towards a collapse.
I could also see that the procession of civilizations was not perpetually cyclical like the dance of the Hindu God Nataraja. There would be a point where a civilization would go, and another would not replace it. I could clearly see, that we had reached that point. There was not going to be another civilization greater than this one. And this one was doomed.
I would have tried my damndest to make Tagore see my point of view.
But, the issue here is not Tagore, but my grandfather.
I have no idea where his thoughts roamed. But I could see that he was a lonely man. His close relatives did not speak with him except for mundane family issues. My own mother was in her early teens, and not yet an adult.
Tagore was a generation older and busy with so many other things. Kalimohan often spent time smoking his hookah and contemplating by himself, writing his diary and meeting people. He exchanged some of his views more freely with people that were not close to him – such as villagers and folks that came to see him.
In this, he shares a common trait with both my mother and myself. My mother had remained lonely throughout her life. Those close to her did not understand her well. She was not even very easy to get along with. And she introspected on topics others did not even think about. She had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and very low tolerance of dishonesty.
I have inherited some of those traits too but with some moderation. I do not go berserk if I see a dishonest person. That is because I have been exposed to so much of it, thanks to an advanced lifestyle than my mothers simple one. She had the advantage of not having to deal with too many crooks.
Both Kalimohan and my mother knew loads and loads of people – many of them very important. And yet, both of them were very lonely in their personal life, in spite of having so many relatives.
And I am subject to the same set of conditions.
I do not believe this is an accident, or an act of God. Besides, I do not really believe in God anyway. The reason for this must be my own behavior or character. Likewise, my mother was mostly lonely because of her oddity, or her individuality. Same, I suspect, was the case with Kalimohan.
More I thought about it, more I came to conclude that, without knowing which sequence of the gene it might be, I have inherited some of my grand father’s traits, through my mother. In that, I can now feel a bond with the man.
I have never been involved with anything where any police should want to keep a tab on me. But that does not mean I am a better person. It just means that I was born in a politically independent India and did not have to push the British out.
I did not go to England for easy studies, although I did end up there later for a few months for some study, and found it rather easy to pass those exams compared to the standard in india on those topics.
There were other differences in the life of each of us. But in general, we were so very similar.
This side of me was not properly understood by my friends and relatives, and went largely unnoticed.
I was likely heading for the same realization that my grand father had – being bitter about the mean and petty minded ness of his contemporaries in Santiniketan. He was so fed up with it that he tendered his resignation to Tagore, which Tagore tore up and refused to accept. I had seen Tagore’s written response to Kalimohan on this issue.
I had read my own mothers posts and had heard her speaking with me about her disappointment about life and about people around her, in Santiniketan, in the local and national Government and elsewhere.
And then I have myself.

Thinking about it all, it came upon me that, I might have some insight into Kalimohan the man, even if I had never met him, even if I was born a decade after his passed away.
And here, you have the first installment of that effort, written off the cuff and more as an introspection in itself.

Mukheno Maritong Jagat

I am not sure if I could properly translate that sentence, or rather, that expression. Originally presumed to be in Sanskrit, but it came down to a Bengali idiom, and found itself in standard vocabulary relating to the Bengali propensity of entertaining intellectual debates, or what others might consider as light banter.
The translation of the Sanskrit meaning is not too difficult because Bengali and many other Indian languages derived from Sanskrit, and the roots of many of the contemporary words can be traced to their Sanskritic origin. This particular expression means something like – conquering the world by mere talk. Its a satirical expression. In English, the corresponding term could be – talk is cheap.
I had written a previous post, about my closing down the Khata blog site (http://web.me.com/tonu/Santiniketan_Papers/). I was closing it down. But, it contained some of my own musings and thoughts about life as I perceived it. It contained some years of my thoughts, and some of them came from observations that went back years into my conscience or perception of the world around, or my past.
And so, even while I decided to wind it down, I began a half hearted effort at archiving some of those writings, or rather – bringing them into a newer installment here in this blog, with my more recent views on the topic.
The thing is – I liked the heading, and the way I arranged the image at the top of the page, borrowing one line from Tagore’s poems, and placing my own question below it. To me, it appeared both humorous, and satirical, and in some ways followed Tagore’s own satire, coming out of frustration, at the people around him.

The line in that image is part of a Tagore poem. That came from the middle of one of Tagore’s satirical poem. The line itself stated that, instead of belonging to this useless group of Bengali society, the poet might have preferred to belong to the nomadic Beduin tribes of Arabia. They might not have showed outward traces of culture and civilization that the Bengali intelligentsia was so busy displaying, but they had self respect, and unlike the Bengali babu culture, the Beduin would stand up for their beliefs and confront danger to defend their lifestyle.
The poem started like this, with my own translation in brackets :

Title : দুরন্ত আশা (Unruly Hope)

মর্মে যবে মত্ত আশা সর্পসম ফোঁসে, (When injustice of the powerful hiss at us like a venomous snake)
অদৃষ্টের বন্ধনেতে দাপিয়া বৃথা রোষে, (False anger tied up invisibly by fate)
তখনো ভালোমানুষ সেজে (even then, being the good boys that we are)
বাঁধানো হুঁকা যতনে মেজে (we shall stack tobacco in our water pipe carefully)
মলিন তাস সজোরে ভেঁজে খেলিতে হবে কষে! (and shuffle our faded deck of cards and start our card game)
অন্নপায়ী বঙ্গবাসী স্তন্যপায়ী জীব ( we the rice eating and milk drinking species of Bengal)
জন-দশেকে জটলা করি  তক্তপোশে ব’সে। (can sit around on the mat and have our entertainment)

I had not copied that poem as such on that post, but merely borrowed one the lines from the later section of that poem. That line was IHAR CHEYE HOTEM JODI ARAB BEDUIN (meaning, I’d rather have been born a nomadic beduin in Arabia). Instead of copying that entire poem, I ended up writing one of my own in Bengali, along with a piece of English text. Here is what I had written.

Sunday, March 14, 2010
I had written a light hearted Bangla poem, of mediocre quality, just to lighten up the mood while bad things were being reported everywhere. There was this drip drip bad news about climate change, the new noth-south divide, the gloomy outlook of a world less controlled by nations and more controlled by a shadow group behind giant corporations, coupled with global conflicts raging everywhere, and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, which are merely one sphere of American interst that seem to mesmerise the meida. Add to that the issues of the world food crisis, and to cap it off the continuous drip of bad news leaking out from Santiniketan.
So, I wrote that poem:

তনু এটা লিখেছিল

ভাবার কথা, কত ভাবার কথা,
গোলকধঁাধায় খাবি খাবার ব্যথা।
বিশ্বভারতী কিম্বা বিশ্ব রাজনীতি,
কোথায় হদিশ পাই তার মতিগতি
চঁেচামেচি, লাঠালাঠি অার হাতাহাতি,
Instant পণ্ডিতদের বানী যথা তথা।

বুলেটিন বোর্ডেতে লেখে কত লোক
প্রতিবাদ, মন্তব্য অার কত শোক।
লোকে কত কি না বলে, বড় বড় theory।
ঘরে বসে ভজ শুধু হরে কৃষ্ণ শ্রীহরি।
সবইতো ভাগ্যে লেখা – যা হবার হোক।

পিয়ালি পালিত তবু দিল্লী পালায়
তনু মাঝে মাঝে কিছু চিঠি লিখে যায়
তাপসদা বৈতালিকে রোজ ফিটফাট
টুকু চিকু push করে চন্দ্রের হাট
podcast’এ গান গায় তমোজিত রায়।

বসন্ত উৎসবেতে যত উপদ্রব
কালোবাড়ি ভাঙচোর, মারপিট, ক্ষোভ
রজত কান্ত বলে – যাব অামি কাশিতে
অানন্দরূপদা বলে যোগ দাও SASI’তে
পার্থের যুক্তিতে হারেন প্রণব।

এই করে কেটে যায় অারো এক মাস
প্রচুর সময় হাতে – খেলা যাক তাস
সমাজ উন্নয়ণ রাখো চিন্তার বাইরে
বাথরুমে গান গাও তাইরে নাইরে
তনু এটা লিখেছিল – কোরোনাকো ফাঁস!

And then, like most folks, I got back to the normal grind, going about my work, reading books and listening to interesting speeches by folks, watching a bit of the Winter Olympics highlights, and speaking with other exstudents of Santiniketan. I even ended up writing individual letters to a number of MPs of the Indian Parliament lower house, and got a response too, on the issue of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill 2009.

Regarding Santiniketan, I ended up sending a few joint emails to Delhi, along with Piyali Palit, and searched out a few Rabindrasangeets by Partha da, from iTunes. I included one of them on a recent Podcast – ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু, and updated the খাতা web blog.

On the side, I was exchanging a few emails with folks. One topic under discussion was if Rabindranath should be separated from Santiniketan, thereby freeing Rabindranath and also Santiniketan – presumably because the two became incompatible with each other – like a marriage gone sour.

But, my thoughts actually turned away from that. I guess I shall never make a good marriage counsellor. The thoughts turned to something else – about ourselves – those of us that seem to engage in debates and discussions on what to do with Santiniketan.

I often get bogged with this dimension – or lack of dimension – in the debates. It appears to me, rightly or wrongly, that such debates have one fundamental flaw – they are conducted by the middle class, for the middle class and only the middle class.

The middle class, I often felt, might be ill-qualified to understand either Rabindranath, or indeed anything outside of the middle-class bubble. Also, I suspect, Rabindranath, while being inclusive and universal in his thought and action, did not rate the Bengali middle class too high on his list of priorities.

In other words, neither Santiniketan, nor Rabindranath, should have been restricted to the middle class world, It is perhaps a tragedy that the middle class Bengali community first kidnapped and then improsonned Rabindranath and all his dreams till this day.

So, perhaps Rabindranath needs to be released and set free. The question is – how does one free Rabindranath from the Bengali middle class? And how does one conduct a debate on these issues, when the only people engaged in such debates are the very middle class that Rabdinranath often had so low an opinion of? Gurudev’s comments come to mind – ইহার চেয়ে হতেম যদি অারব বেদুইন.
Another thing that often amazed me is how the middle class Bengali crowd seem so interested in having a debate but not interested in concluding that with any plan of action. It is as if debates should he held only for the sake of debates, and folks should never have to worry about actually working towards some goal. As if following the mantra of মুখেন মারিতং জগত is the only path worthy of them.

Well, food for thought, along with some coffee.

——————–

That was what I had written, merely two years ago. And how much things have changed since then. I was showing signs of frustration even then, as it appears, with the middle class mentality of not wanting to involve in any good community work, and invariably got drawn to Tagore’s frustrated or sarcastic musings on those issues.
And now, I am closing that site down altogeher, and moving on to the next chapter. It is not proving as easy as it should have been, but the movement is happening, I can see.
Take AID Vancouver chapter for example. It was within a few months of my writing that, when I attended the annual AID conference in Seattle and got so highly motivated with it and by the people there. That started a two year effort by some of us to start a Vancouver chapter of AIDS and a fresh set of frustration, this time aimed not at Santiniketanites, but the general diaspora of affluent immigrants from India for their own frog-in-the-well lifestyle, albeit in well decorated silver lined plastic coated  and electronically climate controlled well rather than the moss covered, close to the nature old wells of India. But, at the end of the day, I guess a frog is a frog is a frog. We have evolved from placental mammals to the simians to the homo lineage, only to revert back to the advanced frog-in-the-well type of comfortable humanoids of the twenty frist century.
But then, two years on, out of hundreds of thousands of expatriates Indians, we did manage to collect half a dozen dedicated people willing to do something more than chew pan and look at Shah Rukh Khan and sing bollywood songs in way of intellectual and spiritual sustenance. We found the necessary minimum to be able to think about – gasp – doing something constructive, starting with making a change in our own lifestyle, within our means, to represent the change we wish to see in others.
And we are going to be, slowly, steadily, be moving towards deeds and not just idle talks, towards making a tiny little difference, somewhere, somehow. The first few steps are already taken – that of meeting up once a week, either face to face, or over the wire.
And, with just a handful of folks, the world suddenly begins to look a lot brighter.

Returning from the pilgrimage

It was time to close my Khata blog down. Like so many things, the Khata web site was one that was so exciting to start and open, and now, feels like a discarded old house.
I remember going through the Binoy Bhavan road, on the outskirts of Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, where the rows of brick houses stood in line before a narrow asphalt road that bent around a cemented well. We spent some of the growing up years there. Last time I saw it, it appeared dilapidated, as if no one lived there.


Santiniketaner Khata was opened with some personal fanfare. The excitement was mine alone. Those days, the world of Santiniketanites was just getting smaller through internet. A new avenue was opening up for re-establishing contact with each other. Folks were rediscovering old friends. New friendships were blossoming. Times were great.

It would not be long however, before the frog-in-the-well mentality of the general masses, of which the Santiniketanites were no exception, would surface, irrespective of if the frog in question lived inside the well, or outside.


An aversion to doing anything together, constructively with a long term goal, was the signature trait of this group. The group would be recognized not for all it would do, but rather, for all it did not do. As a result, the atmosphere would follow slow atrophy and decay, leaving behind some folks engaged in reminiscence and trivia.


I had hoped that internet might provide a new and unique bridge allowing entry of fresh thoughts and a new sense of belonging and camaraderie. The new atmosphere might help glue together a disparate group of disconnected and remote number of ex-students with folks connected with Santiniketan. The new media might somehow usher in a meaningful transformation, inject new life into an otherwise moribund near non-existent entity, that of the ex-students and Ashramites of Santiniketan.


What eventually happened is, to me, rather less than meaningful. The world of Santiniketan turned out to be a two headed monster. One one side, there is this supreme apathy. This apathy is not just extended towards the legacy of Tagore, but covered every issue that was not of some direct benefit to the person. On the other side, the sheer lack of sincerity, extent of laziness and selfishness, compounded with dishonesty left me dumbfounded.

I was naive. I had not realized that they were in essence same as the rest of humanity, which too lacked humanity to deal with the issues of today. My fault was expecting these Rabindrik uber-culturists to be above average. They turned out to be actually much below average. What a let down!
And so, the Blog of Santiniketaner Khata, which in english might mean the notebook on Santiniketan, contained mostly my own writings, and almost no one else’s. I tried within my means to encourage others to contribute and engage in healthy debates and discussions. It would cost them nothing to post there. But I did not get much luck. Exercising one’s brain in constructive energy appeared to be counter to their concept of appreciating Tagore.

The very name, Santiniketaner Khata, began to lose its appeal. The web based blog-notebook contained its share of ideas and observations. But ultimately it turned out as useless as most anything that Tagoreans have done so far. It turned useless because few read its content, and even less would contribute any idea or add any value to the topics. The pages of that blog would wither away, and drift in the wind along the dusty grounds of Santiniketan. I could well imagine it.
And so, it was time to close it down. I wondered if Santiniketan too should just close itself down, and blend with the red earth of Birbhum. Perhaps one day it could rise from the ashes again, resurrected in a second coming.
I could imagine how Tagore ended up writing:

Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Tagore was describing, I felt certain at this point, what he had observed about the middle class around him, and how they were responsible for perpetuating the crippled society in India. He could see that removal of the British was not going to make things much difference to the rudderless Indian society.

চিত্ত যেথা ভয়শূন্য , উচ্চ যেথা শির ,
জ্ঞান যেথা মুক্ত , যেথা গৃহের প্রাচীর
আপন প্রাঙ্গণতলে দিবসশর্বরী
বসুধারে রাখে নাই খন্ড ক্ষুদ্র করি ,
যেথা বাক্য হৃদয়ের উৎসমুখ হতে
উচ্ছ্বসিয়া উঠে , যেথা নির্বারিত স্রোতে
দেশে দেশে দিশে দিশে কর্মধারা ধায়
অজস্র সহস্রবিধ চরিতার্থতায় —
যেথা তুচ্ছ আচারের মরুবালুরাশি
বিচারের স্রোতঃপথ ফেলে নাই গ্রাসি ,
পৌরুষেরে করে নি শতধা

The English translation was never as good as the original in my view, and so I copied the section from the original here. The translation was Tagore’s own, and he had changed the words around, perhaps out of concern for the western readership, who might not interpret the literal translation of the Bengali in the right spirit. I however find his original Bengali text a lot more forceful and direct.

I considered the sentence যেথা নির্বারিত স্রোতে দেশে দেশে দিশে দিশে কর্মধারা ধায় অজস্র সহস্রবিধ চরিতার্থতায়. Tagore changed the translation of this sentence. He talked here about that environment where folks will take great ideas to far flung lands and convert them into countless thousands of deeds in an endless stream of constructive endeavors. Tagore decided to change the expression when he said,  “Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection“ but I liked the Bengali text better. Either way, Bengali or English, his wish was not to be fulfilled by people that had the maximum exposure to his views – by a very long shot.

We, the Tagorians, did not carry any of the great ideas to any far flung land and did not convert anything into timeless deeds of human endeavor. There were no tireless striving or stretching of arms towards perfection. Only time the arms stretched were to line one’s own pocket, or to beat one’s own drum. We merely buttered our bread while providing a suitable lip service to Tagore’s grasp of beauty, language, rhythm, and rhyme – restricting him to the rank of a mere poet.
He also used the words পৌরুষেরে করেনি শতধা. He was still talking about that environment where the manhood of the Bengali bhadralok clan, and by extension to the Indian middle class had not been neutered by thousand year old layers of dead social customs, religious bigotry, ethnic shortsightedness and hollow status and caste segregations.
Fast forward a century, and some things are the same, while others have gone far worse. The babu still shows signs of being morally castrated.

So, I got disenchanted with the Tagorian diaspora, and stopped pushing the Santiniketaner Khata. Nobody cared. By closing down the Santiniketaner Khata, by diverting the direction of the Santiniketan Podcast, by deciding to close down the Uttarayan bulletin board, I was seeking freedom from the well, wishing to leave the fellow frogs to their devices. I was tired of the collective croaks.

Is that all?
Well, there is still this one thing. I was still alive, and having discarded the Achalayatan or the immovable unchangeable dead boulder of Santiniketanism, where I was spiritually cloistered for most of my life, I still have energy and exuberance and a wish to engage constructively on something, with someone, somehow, somewhere, on some cause. I was not quite the Rabindrik rebel-without-a-cause. I had a cause, but it did not sit well with the place-without-a-cause. Santiniketan represented a state of causelessness. And so did Santiniketaner Khata – a reflection of the real thing. Santiniketan was full of such rippling reflections from a myriad of angles – all of them gaunt and displaying signs of decay.
Meanwhile my wish to remain a sizable and recognizable contributor to the history of my own ramblings is still very much present. In other words, I was not yet dead.
 Khata can be closed, but Tonu was not yet burnt to ashes or buried under six feet of earth, or submerged at the bottom of the ocean. I was alive and kicking, and I wished to leave behind my views, my hopes, my aspirations and my frustrations, and how I felt about the whole situation with the Tagorians.

He had written himself – আমি ঢালিব করুণাধারা, আমি ভাঙিব পাষাণকারা, আমি জগৎ প্লাবিয়া বেড়াব গাহিয়া আকুল পাগল-পারা. He wrote in in his youth, and edited it later, and trimmed it a lot. But, as an early teenage lanky and tall boy, he had been to the Himalayan foothills and seen how the glaciers, locked up for years among the rocky peaks in high mountains, were slowly released by the warm rays of the sun. At that time he did not know that the warming of the sun was going  to be assisted and accelerated by man, and that the glaciers would vanish one day. To him, at that time, the release of the rock bound ice into the liquid flow of life supporting river was a sign of freedom, or release from imprisonment, a blossoming of life itself.

Those lines in Bengali meant, in my translation – I shall pour forth a river of compassion, I shall break out of the stone prison, I shall inundate the world in a deluge of exuberance, romping and singing as if one possessed.

Well, I was not the headwaters of the Ganges, but I too had some pent up energy still left in me. And so, even with the Blog site on Santiniketan closed, I would not only continue to write, I would even write about this very shutting down of my blog notebook. For anyone with an over-fertile imagination, my opening and then closing of the site, could well be taken for a cyclical story of a beginning leading to an ending which in turn triggers a new beginning. It follows a similar cycle to the story in that famous Tagore Poem, of moisture that rises off the ocean and gets trapped as snow on the Himalayas, only to be released by the warmth of the sun and come cascading down as life sustaining river, returning back to the ocean, only to be reborn into another cycle of being vapor, ice and water. One could think of this as creation and destruction locked in a conjugal dance  of the cosmos in the ever-dynamic world of Nataraja, the God of dances.

Anyhow, I became a disenchanted devotee returning disillusioned from a disappointing pilgrimage. I was a pilgrim that had gone to the holy land only to find that it was not quite so holy after all.

Milton had written that epic, over four centuries ago, about the Biblical tale of the fall of man to the lure of Satan, and expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Satan, the antagonist of John Milton's Paradise Lost c. 1866

Well, I had neither seen nor been lured by Satan, the flying bad man. But then I was not Adam either. For me, the loss of paradise was not because man was banished from it. It was rather a case of there being no paradise to begin with. Man will make what he will of the place he lives in. And, once Tagore was gone, my holy land had degenerted eventually to a cultural wasteland. Worse, it was on its way to being a sewer.

I could not quite accept it as nobody’s fault. It was the fault of all, starting with the army of Rabindra-disciples that make a career out of squeezing the Tagorian lemon. They brought forth the greatest expansion of a new species of lemon squeezers.

My paradise had no place for lemon squeezers.

I had lost my paradise when I was confronted with its non-existence.
And thus, I went over to the opening page of the Khata, and copied the top section into an image, as a snap shot before the dead body could be placed in the morgue. My pilgrimages was over.

I looked at the partial image of the home page of the Khata blog. The image included a stooping man with wild beard and wearing a sort of an asian frock coat, armed with a spear on a gold coin with letterings I could not follow and did not remember which language it belonged to. Next to it was an artists rendition of the same man, perhaps a bit younger. He was Kanishka. The front page, like the cover of most magazines, was supposed to change with time. The last entry was about Kanishka and my question – if folks in India were at all curious about their own past. Whether Indians cared about their history or not, that was my last entry on that site, which itself had become part of history.

Moving on from the front page and the most recent article, I came upon a picture of Tan Lee da and his presentation in Bengali on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Rabidnranath Tagore. I too had joined whole heartedly to participate and contribute to the global celebration of the event. But that was then. I have since lost considerable amount of steam for this endeavor, and have begun a serious introspection on the purpose and significance of these efforts.  Today, I do not feel convinced that such celebrations are worth much, and what purpose it at all serves.
But thats a different issue. Right now, I felt sad that Tan Lee da is no more as agile and alert as he used to be. Just last year he produced that beautiful writing and poem about his beloved গুরুদেব (gurudev Rabindranath Tagore). And I had put that up on the ASRAMIK section of the Khata blog.

Myself and Tan Lee da have some work to do. I also intend to coax him into taking the first step towards writing his book.
But we remain respectfully disagreed on the issue of helping to promote the vision of Tagore. The differences are subtle, and Tan Lee da and Leena di do not disagree with my view wholly. Nonetheless, we stand apart on this issue at this stage. To me, it seems both pointless and misdirected, to expend energy to promote Tagore to the outside world. To me, he should have been better understood by his own country men, starting with people of Eastern India.
Anyhow, the best way to promote his views, at least in my eyes, would have been to promote the kind of a world that he tried his best to create, inside India, and internationally.
I have come to realize that Tagore was an excellent writer and essayist in more than one language. There is really no need to translate his world view or socio-cultural views about India or the east for western consumption. Some of the best analysis on these have been done by people that do not know Bengali and have read as much material written by Tagore himself as written by others about Tagore.

India is not ready for Tagore. The great herds of Tagoreans are cultists without a grasp of the man. The East is not ready for him either. And neither is the west ready for his brand of Internationalism blurring the boundaries of national fervor. I do not see the point of running about everywhere, trying to force an uninterested world to think about universal humanism. We were not changing the world. We were not even promoting Tagore. We were promoting ourselves – selfishly at Tagore’s expense.

It was time to put Santiniketaner Khata into a mothball. I could have written about Tagore, the east and the west and his efforts at contemplation on what path laid ahead for mankind, but, why not write here in my new blog? At least it does not have the name of Santiniketan as a false promise. It is in my name.
The East is in a deplorable state of affairs, in a headlong and absurd rush to ape the West. Meanwhile, the West is busy hurtling towards a financial and civilizational wilderness. The world today is very very different from his times. The world actually has turned on its head, and yet folks are drugged into complacence and do not find it odd that the landscape appears upside down.

Tan Lee da’s case is different. He is mentally too attached to Tagore and Santiniketan. It is a faith for him, and not a matter of logic. Santiniketan represents a pilgrimage, and he will go there as long as his health holds up. To him Tagore is the ultimate balm for his soul and the image of Tagore in Santiniketan is indelibly etched in his mind. This image is his morning star, his sunset over the horizon. It would be cruel, as Leena di said, if one was to advise him against going there because of health reasons.
Tan Lee da remained a lifelong pilgrim. His spiritual horizon was illuminated with the glow of Tagore. He never lost his paradise. It stayed with him, wherever he went.
He had not lost it, but I had. I did not wish to keep returning to Santiniketan. It offered memories, but I wished to make new memories, watching the mountains the streams and the glaciers myself. I wanted to see the eternal dance of creation and destruction with my own eyes, and compare them with Tagores expressions. I wished to observe humanity with my own eyes, and apply myself to it. I was mindful of Tagore’s efforts in promoting an universal humanism, but I needed to experience it myself, and outside of Santiniketan. Santiniketan did not offer either universalism or humanism, or much anything else worthwhile, anymore.

I had lost my paradise, but was at peace with it. I was happy to let go of the symbol, while holding on to the real thing. Unlike Tan Lee da, or my parents, or uncles, or so many others, I had not seen Tagore with my own eyes. And yet, I had understood him enough to know that I did not need Santiniketan.

It was time to let go of a dead habit.
It was time to close my roadmap to and for Santiniketan.

Missing the world of his father’s paintings

“There was a movie, in Bengali, with that name – Storm Warning” Neil mused.
“Really ? What did it say about the climate? Was it in English?”
They were sitting on a large boulder by the side of a small river fighting its way through an iced up landscape, early in the afternoon on the Easter Friday, in among the Cascade mountains. They had a few hundred kilometers still to go to reach their destination for the night – in the town of Golden.
They had been discussing climate change, and what might be in store for the planet, for the continent, for Canada and for British Columbia, a very loaded subject. They did not have depth of comprehension – but both knew things were reaching a crisis point, and information was not easy to get because the authorities seem to be either in denial, or unwilling to alarm the public. They were not calling a spade a spade.

Neil picked up a pebble and tossed it down the slope to the edge of the water. He wondered about the high concentration of sharp stone fragments below them. These were not pebbles that were pushed a long distance by a fast flowing river, helping to grind and polish them into smooth spheroids. He briefly wondered if these were crushed from the nearby peaks through past seismic tremors, or broken from the rocks by an ancient glacier and left at the current location. They were not exactly at the foothill of a sliding slope, so they did not get here from a recent rock fall or an avalanche.
He sometimes wished he was a geologist, or at least knew a bit more about geology.
His thoughts returned to Mabel’s question.
He had been talking about tell tale signs of impending trouble, and used the term Storm warning to drive a point. It was then that he remembered the Bengali movie. It wasn’t about Climate change. It was a different time, and the warning was of something else equally menacing for the people of Bengal – an impending famine that would kill millions, in the middle of the second world war. It was now acknowledged that the famine was man made, and not by natural calamity. The world war had something to do with it. The British Empire’s handling of the situation which perhaps indicated less regard for life of Indians than lives of the British, also were likely factors.

Anyhow, the name of the movie – by Satyajit Ray, came to him.
“It was not about climate change, but about an impending famine. It was in Bengali, and the name of the film in Bengali was Asani Sanket, which means storm warning. Somehow, the situation now reminded me of that movie. Villagers at the front line of the worsening situation did not have a good grasp of what was happening and why, since there was no draught and drastic drop of food grain production. Things appeared to go on as it always had. But there were tell tale signs, some folks were beginning to starve for no good reason. News was difficult to come by. Folks did not know things were slowly reaching a crisis point, till the crisis actually hit them in the face.”
Mabel was listening, tilting her head as if cocking an ear in a typical way that only she could do. She was also poking at a bit of snow tucked at the corner of a boulder near her feet.
“I’d like to see that movie, if you will explain the scenes to me. And also explain why and how the famine came by.”
“Hmmm… I have to see if its available on line, or if I can get a DVD” Neil nodded.
“Situation with the coming Climate Uncertainty is not too different. We are living in the information age – with the world wired up and news traveling around at the speed of light. And yet, the silence about the impending storm is mind boggling.”
“And you like Mukherjee and Dyer.” Mabel observed.
Neil chuckled. He had told her about another book, by Madhusree Mukherjee, on Churchill’s actions, or lack of it, with regard to the ill-famed Bengal famine of 1943. And Gwynne Dyer had written a book that he had in the eBook format, and often referred to, called Climate Wars. Dyer’s book was written more like a science fiction, written based on a future date. It did not predict what might happen in the future. Rather, the book pretends that it is already in the future, and is talking about historical things that has happened in the past. But the past involves the future for the current Calendar.
“You gotta read Dyer. He predicts what happens to Canada, but more importantly, what happens to the US-Mexico border and what happens to Mexico, when the world runs short of food and more or less stops selling excess grain in the world market. Mexico descends into anarchy and its population shrinks by thirty or forty million people.”
“My God !”
“Well, you should read it. It is not designed as a science fiction, but a very likely scenario with a lot of supporting comments and explanations. Things do not end up well for a whole lot of countries – and not just Mexico.”
Mabel signed. “What is one to do?”
Neil stretched his legs. “Singularly, there may be nothing one can do. Collectively, surely there are things one can do. But I have a feeling even the strongest of the Climate Change believers and sustainable living proponents are not coming clean and not calling a spade a spade. And that, for me, is a bit frustrating. However, I can understand some of the reasoning. One can compare the public with lemmings on one side, or the flightless cormorants of the Galapagos, on the other.”
It occurred to Mabel that Neil probably had a vivid imagination.
“Lemmings ?”

Neil was watching the reflection of the white patches of cloud on calm waters of the river below them.
“You know what they say. True or not, they explode in population till they are so many that they have eaten through the food source and there is nothing left to eat, and the land cannot sustain such large numbers. A big chunk of them must die in one shot. Story goes that they go shoulder to shoulder and jump in the ocean to drown and die. Some folks say this is not correct, and that lemmings are not stupid. They do not commit mass suicide, but are forced to die in large numbers when their super fast reproduction system goes out of control and the populations shoots well past the sustainability level for a lean year. Anyhow, I have never seen a lemming in the wild, suicidal or otherwise.”
Mabel tossed another pebble towards the water, but it landed short, in the snow. Her folks were not too religious. She had a girlfriend whose mom was a liberal activist and passionate about individual rights and human rights, anti-war, feminism, open borders and so on. But Mabel could not remember her talking about any impending doom with relation to climate or human population, or about the constant degradation of the environment, a move from a sustainable plane to an unsustainable one.
“I do not have relatives or friends that talk or think the way you do, about the declining quality of our environment to the extent that it is an existential threat to all higher order animals.”
———-
At this point, Tonu stopped and looked up at the cream painted ceiling of his study. It was quarter to six in the morning of Saturday, a week after his trip to the mountains. It was going to be a sunny day, and he was planning to check out the Squamish estuary area in the morning. It would be a hundred kilometer northward drive along the sea-to-sky highway. The ocean, a tiny finger of the pacific, pokes into the land with towering mountains on both sides. The Squamish river meets the ocean at that point, creating a narrow strip of sea level estuary, rich with its own eco-system and wild life.
Meanwhile, he had woken up at his usual early hour and contemplated writing a few more pages. There was no important emails waiting for him, and the earth had spun a few more degrees without further incidence other than the general degradation of things.
He wondered if Neil, his creation, should be influenced by the paintings of his, Tonu’s, father. Tonu remembered the sketches and paintings his father worked on, mostly following the general theme of simple rural life and landscape that were captured on board. He was a student of Nandalal Bose, the esteemed Indian artist of the first half of last century, who himself was a student of Abanindranath Tagore and was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore during his days in Santiniketan. Depiction of rural landscape and rural lifestyle had priority in their view. He, Tonu, thought of this movement as a theme that had two objectives. One was a recognition that rural background was where India was culturally, aesthetically, artistically, economically and spiritually anchored and rooted. Therefore this back to the village artistic movement was not a backward motion against modernism, but a realization that modernism in India had missed the sustainability bus.
The second part of the movement was to create an appreciation in the collective psyche of the Bengali and Indian middle class, of the timelessness and beauty of things simple and rural. India was fast creating an additional layer of a caste system, between the city dwellers and the villagers. This psychological as well as economic and cultural division, over and above all the other divisions that man had created for himself in the Indian subcontinent, was a further humanitarian blow to the evolving social order in India. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet with a vision, realized that this needed to be eradicated. That vision showed up everywhere, including in the art created in his time and in the immediate aftermath of his demise.
Modernism, however, was going to come to India, and it would ultimately muddy the water about rural and urban divide as well as take the focus away from the village so much, that future artists would be, Tonu felt, hanging in suspended animation, attempting to give their art a somewhat “ethnic” Indian flavor, while same time pandering to the western world for recognition, and take advantage of the recent western accommodation for appreciation of non-western art forms.
The whole thing, Tonu felt, was bizarre. Art was supposed to imitate life. But life itself had gotten so artificial, that this falseness was bound to be reflected in art, especially of the second and third generation of artists that come out of the same school as founded by Tagore and now spread across the globe. And those that still remained anchored to the original theme of rural India, faded in the backwaters in the world of Indian art. Artists that cannot draw a tail on a donkey, but can make false copies of western cubism or impressionism, where the hot topics in the drawing rooms of the new rich. Industrialists that have come into money, and feel the urge to promote art – define art in their own myopic view of India and the world, and the rest, Tonu felt sadly, is history.
However, this sad story too needed to be told, in his own tiny way, as the world, including India, were busy recklessly following a false modernism and sliding down the ever steepening slope of an existential crisis with regard to squeezing the planetary lemon dry.
He was hesitant about jotting down his feelings openly, as he personally knew a lot of people that came out of the art school. Besides, he was no expert in art. In fact, he was no expert on anything. And yet, he was tired of pseudo artists and pseudo writers and false intellectuals, unscrupulous industrialists and phony political ideologues who unnecessarily muddy up any issue till there is no clear perspective left on any topic. He was also tired, in a way, at the hapless public dancing at the end of the trivia string.
But his comments were not directed towards people he knew. It was at the general direction where mankind of taking itself and the rest of existence as humans could perceive it. To him, these are connected. He could relate to the changing scene in Canada, to that in India, or USA or Africa. And most of it was man made. Most of it was unsustainable. Most of it was a direct result of man’s increasing level of interference with the planet’s health.
One of the earliest visionaries to have realized the imbalance, at least partially, was perhaps Rabindranath himself. He saw it as a grotesque takeover of india’s cultural, spiritual and aesthetic steering wheel by a newly emerging urban class that lacked a depth of perception, or willingness to investigate long term effects of their presumed lifestyle goals, and a blind intoxication with a western definition of development that was itself bankrupt as a perpetual formula.
Tagore instinctively understood that the urban class may turn out to be the agent of destruction for India, unless it could be made to appreciate the need for a healthy balance between the rural and the urban. The western societies understood it. But a modernizing India did not. Tagore spoke about it and wrote about it. But it is doubtful if his countless admirers and hangers on actually understood the cause of the poet’s anxiety.
Tonu’s father used pastel and earth colors on boards more than water or oil color on canvas. Tonu had spend hours with his father, grinding hollow rocks on a grinding stone, extracting earth colors, which would be solved in water and kept in glass jars, to be used on future paintings on boards as well as in murals on walls. Collecting earth colors from the earth was a big adventure for him in his youth, and likely played a big role in his love for undisturbed nature and how it trumped man-made alterations of the landscape.
The thought of his father’s sketches and paintings were not a random intrusion into the flow of the story where Neil and Mabel were traveling into the Cascade mountains of British Columbia. There was a connection here.
His father drew and sketched scenes that, in Tonu’s own life, had slowly vanished from those very spots where his dad had observed them. Those open lands had now been concretized,  asphalted, civilized, crammed with people, turned into a filthy near slum urban sprawl.
This, to him, indicated two things that were inter-related and going on, generation to generation, perhaps all over the world. One of them was the destructiveness of an over-producing, over-consuming, over-altering, over-mechanizing civilization. The other was an ever greater expansion of the human population.
So, on one side, each human in progressive generations was demanding a greater and greater footprint for himself on this planet. Then, on top of it, people have brought more people and even more people, on the planet, each striving his best to increase his own size of footprint. This was another kind of an out of control snowball – a positive feedback loop gone wild. This was, in Tonu’s mind, not too different from what is happening in Europe, in the Americas, or even in the Antarctica. The difference should not be measured between regions. Rather, the change is within. Greenland might appear remote and cold compared to Singapore. But Greenland is less remote, less cold and less pristine, than Greenland was a century ago.
And so, Tonu decided to include his own fathers painting into the story, but pretending that to be Neil’s recollection of his own father. Tonu had, in that way, converted his own dad from a real to a fictional personality. One that was, just like the scenes he painted of, slowing fading from the planet.
————
Neil nodded. “Its not that I have a lot of relatives that scream about the changing world in any realistic way. My grandmother used to talk about times when things were very cheap and how everything costs so much more these days. My cousins might talk about how it was easier and more relaxing to be in school and college in our times and how things have gotten so stressful in India for a student. The pressure to perform is so great, the stakes are so high, that sometimes a student is pushed into committing suicide because she or she scored 95 out of a hundred instead of 99.”
He thought for a while, constructing the views and images swirling around in his head.
Mabel took a sip of coffee from the cover of the flask, which also served as a cup. Neil took the cup and took a sip himself. They had gotten to the point of sharing their coffee. He liked it with milk and sugar. She liked it without. They had met halfway – with a dash of milk that barely turned the color lighter, and a spoon of sugar for the entire flask of coffee. Life was a compromise. Neil was getting used to it. So was Mabel.
“But no one”, Neil continued, “actually spoke about the inexorable push of human civilization that engulfs the planet as we know it. But, generation by generation, the change is happening, I feel somewhat certain. Take life ten generation ago. I cannot name folks ten generations back in my line, but I can guess how things were, a couple of centuries ago, just as the British, for example, and the French and the Dutch, were increasing their trading with eastern India, and how the repressive society of religious orthodoxy, social taboo and enlightenment were slowly permeating through the village life. I can imagine how a high caste Hindu or a Muslim would have multiple wives and how poverty drove people to do things he would not otherwise do. How a woman had to adjust to the lifestyle dominated by men at all levels. How surviving from day to day involved not only eating enough and not getting sick with cholera or typhoid, but also not getting bitten by a cobra or taken by a crocodile in the water or attacked by a tiger in the field.”
He paused for a moment, looking at Mabel. She watched him, wide eyed. “And then, I can guess how, even in their times, things would change, generation upon generation. How jungles will be cleared, wood would be sold, tigers would retreat further away. Extra housing and population would bring safety on one side and more sickness and infection on another. Life would be changing, generation by generation, even in their times. And if one was to look at it from afar, it would have been possible for them to use those changes they saw in a small scale, to project on the planet and on mankind, on a larger scale for future. Those that did contemplate these issues, and made predictions, right or wrong, where considered either mystics, or God men, or pundits, or mad men. But, change was happening then, and it is happening now. MY own dad made paintings and sketches of rural Bengal not five miles from his home. Today, that scene is no more there. It has retreated, just like the tigers of a few centuries back. Things are constantly retreating into the background, and getting smaller in the distance, till they become a point on the horizon. Finally a day comes when it is no more there. It has retreated into extinction. And this change is not for the better.”

Mabel had seen a handful of Neil’s dad’s paintings that Neil had mounted on his wall.
She thought of telling him how she loved those paintings. But somehow, that seemed not an appropriate thing to say. The scenes he drew were gone now, according to Neil.
“Some day, you have to take me to Bengal and show me where you grew up, and where your dad made those paintings.”

Wish I could write like them

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.

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

(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