HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

It's been a while since I last wrote a blog entry. I have been home to India, and did not have regular access to the internet, since I haven't yet wired up my home with broadband access, or bought myself one of those V-data cards that can make a laptop internet-accessible even while on the move. At various points, I wished urgently that I did, and caught myself "blogging" verbally to members of my family and to friends on a range of issues. Blogging systematically requires the discipline - one that I have only sporadically managed - of noting the source of an interesting observation immediately, or the seed of a bloggable idea as soon as it appears. Although we returned from India at the end of August, various professional preoccupations have kept me from blogging as much as I would have liked.

The chief anxiety that I find myself facing each year before going home is: how am I going to cope with the deadly combination of muggy heat and intense pollution (in Calcutta). I am ashamed to admit that this (and I hope this alone) puts me in the same category as a particularly loathsome and arrogant kind of NRI. Each year, the actual experience of living there leaves a variable margin of opportunity to fret about this. Some years I feel surprised, in retrospect, at how calmly I coped with the heat and dirt; this year, the need to drive several times to Harrison Road and other parts of the city through roads choked with traffic led me to savour the experience of having to sit immobile in the heat with sweat draining off my face while the neighbouring bus blew copious effusions of black exhaust smoke directly into our taxi. [I keep wondering how we ever managed to live in this city thirty years ago, travelling mostly in minibuses and public buses. The only public transport I use nowadays is the metro, which I have to say remains surprisingly clean and efficient by Calcutta standards.] I find it difficult to maintain calm and equanimity under such conditions, especially when others around me are wailing and gnashing their teeth at being compelled to undergo such penance during the one long vacation we have. So the weather and pollution have certainly taken some of the joy out of returning home.

But there are pleasures as well that I look forward to: the food at our Kalyani home, cooked under my mother's direction by the indefatigable Rekha. The company of friends and some relatives as we meet again after a year's absence. Bookshops and new books. Discovering new places to eat. Sitting on the rocking chair in Kalyani. Conversations with my mother. This time - the first at Kalyani since my father passed on - spending a few days together with my mother and brothers, along with most of our families. Such occasions are of course always attended by laughter at in-jokes and wit, especially if Tapan, my younger brother and family comedian, is around, but also by interminable arguments around the dining table, discussions of the foibles and failings of various more remote members of the wider family, and tensions about what can or cannot be said or was or wasn't said in whose presence or absence. A calmer, more rational and tolerant or charitable environment probably wouldn't suit our family traditions.

My attempt to buy property in the new urban development building up outside Calcutta ran into problems that reflect an aspect of the bigger picture of what is happening in West Bengal. The property is a row house that is part of a project being developed by a very reputable firm of builders on land that has been converted from agricultural land into residential. Before beginning construction, but after the usual surveys mandated for such land, the builders paid the conversion fees to the local government, and regarded the conversion as being constructively approved. But the state land reform minister had decided to put a stop to all conversion, and therefore the local government was stopped by a court order from issuing any conversion certificate that would confirm the builder's proper title on the land. The builder, who had by then started construction in anticipation of receiving the certificate in due course, subsequently obtained court permission to continue building. But the effect of this was that most of the financing banks refused further financing, and decided to stop all further disbursements from loans approved for the development, including my own bank. I was repeatedly assured that the builders are too reputable to run away without refunding the money, and that I would get back all the money I had already paid. I was also informed that the builders are too powerful to be stopped by the land reform minister, and that this case would eventually be settled amicably. And, surely enough, I heard from a friend who is fairly highly placed in government that the builders had agreed to donate a large sum of money to the party to have the conversion certificate released!

Shortly before I left, the controversy over conversion of agricultural land had embarrassed the ruling state administration, because it meant that one faction of the government was about to lose face over its commitment to provide several thousands hectares of agricultural land to an Indonesian group that promised to invest about $10 billion in all kinds of urban and industrial infrastructure in the districts surrounding Calcutta. The other faction, mindful of its support among the peasantry, refused to allow agricultural land to be released for urban infrastructure development. The media presented the former faction, led by the Chief Minister of the state, as being the progressives, interested in industrializing the state, welcoming foreign investment, and generally business-friendly. One of the ministers in this faction repeatedly reminded his opponents that industrialization cannot occur in the sky. Those who were opposed to the conversion of agricultural land were presented in the media as the obstacles to progress, steeped in the past, uninterested in modernization. Eventually, a compromise was reached: land which was used intesnively for multiple cropping would not be comandeered, and even where land was converted, it would be ensured that the owners of the land were adequately compensated.

Anyone who knows the history of development in India will recognize that this is the standard ploy for grabbing land from the rural to the urban sector. If they really believe that the government compensates poor farmers "adequately", they are just as gullible as the peasants who fall for this lie. Of course, the educated public seldom find out what happens to the peasant households AFTER they sell their land, mainly because the media rarely interest themselves in the consequences of "development" for the poor. But one only needs to read P. Sainath's despatches or the investigations of civil liberties groups like the PUCL to realize the extent of the war that the Indian government conducts on its own people, or to grasp how destructive our model of "development" really is. And before I am accused of exaggeration in characterising our "development" as a war, let me remind you that our very own Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil has recently assured India's shining middle class that he would not hesitate to use air power against Maoists. A distinctly Churchillian development.

Never try and enquire why the Maoists are there in the first place, despite all the "shining" progress of the last thirty years. Just think: earlier we had to set up awkward police encounters in our jails and forests and the backlanes of our cities. Now we can simply bomb them from the air! How's that for sheer simplicity and elegance? Progress, anyone?

Comments

[Cihan Baran]

Glad to have gyanoprobha back.

I was afraid that it had shut down forever. (By the way, I was reading some of your earlier posts and admiring their poetry. The Inclined Plane of Morality? That's as colorful and tasty as any prose can get.)

Best.