Of Dreamworlds and Catastrophe ( Part 2)

The railway station is an elevated platform in the middle of rice fields. I am told that a racket of land speculation is on the rise as many companies want to buy these lands. Agriculture is increasingly financially unviable, and the farmer prefers to sell off and have his sons do something else, than find himself entrapped in debt. Where was the middleman all this while? I ask. He was here, but operating more covertly. Now he has come out in full glory. He buys a cauliflower at 50p and sells at Rs. 5 in the market. The consumer worries about rising prices. The grower remains impoverished.

A story of a violent transition towards non-agrarian services on agrarian land is told to me. A structure of services exists, and a new one is called for. A broker steps in to make money off of this precarious void. Often quoting prices that the existing structure cannot support. Essentially an entrepreneur. Looking for the best opportunity. Its his business to sniff around and foresee change. The entrant of a company is heralded as an invasive outside force, determined to loot and ravage. If you manage to plug in, some of the loot will be yours. A scene, historically borrowed from the harboring of foreign ships up the Hooghly. Except, in this chapter, there is a ready grammar of interpreting the outsider. The outsider comes from the government to ask you the weight of your newborn, give him polio medicine, give you credit or fertilizer. The outsider comes to inspire you towards war against the powerful. The outsider comes to invite you meetings and micheels, for cha and biri. The outsider bats traveler-lids through digital lenses to capture your cowdung by the afternoon shadow. The outsider tells you – you are beautiful, you should not change one bit. Change comes banging at your door, and prices of land scale up.

The outside woman wears a hat on the stage. Jatra audiences laugh out aloud. A marker of the foreign is domesticated with disdain and wonder. She transforms into the good agrarian wife. She wears a red and white sari and comes back from her morning temple trip. The inside has conquered this round. Woman remains the last bastion to be held on to. The one that nurtures an old amour for her brother-in-law is a damned whore. For disturbing the equilibrium of Home. Home – the last fortress. Where woman waits for you to come back from your wars and carnivals, with a warm meal, clean towel. She is eulogized, just so she is not tempted to run off with one of the outsider, just so she doesn’t seek an evening out in the town. But she find ways out. Her heels reflect a mirror of outside fashion. On the odd carnivalesque occasion, she pulls up her tight jeans, brings out their lipsticks, and gets on the bus. It takes two and a half hours to reach Kolkata. Then a longish to the college. She secretly spread wings of desire on the way. She has a Facebook account. Woven in tinshed cyber cafes. She looks out for the next wave of change. To get a new pair of heels. You can’t hold her back. You can’t hold onto the land. You must move and make way. The middleman has moved onto to the next almanac of change.

Communitas

Along the bridge, I passed sequin-shirted young men with surma-laden eyes, women peeping out of their scarves with eager eyes, children licking ice-cream off their fingers. This was the scene of any carnivalesque gathering. Except a threatening energy that the procession emitted as it slowly moved through the crowd. Four teenaged boys followed me in youthful vigor. The Grand Trunk Road (North) narrowed into Pilkhana. The crowds here were denser. On the diases, PA systems installed at corners proclaimed words of caution and camaraderie. Party banners made explicit the support of of this MLA or that in making this festivity possible. There came a deadlock in the movement. The crowd was being physically stopped in order not to create more chaos. I struggled to breathe. Looked around in horror and fascination. Tall bright triangular flags hemmed in silver sequin, glittery mausoleum sculptures mounted on rickshaw-vans floated slow and confident. Young men huddled in their bleeding shirts. Tall, slim swords quivered with every chant.

Royals and Pigeons

The Andul Rajbari is a magnificent ruin, a short rickshaw-ride from the bus-stand. Its majestic pillars tell the old, tragic story of decay, as a sign-board Andul Sporting Club peeps out from behind. Coke chips cigarettes saris and dress material are sold in one of its corners. Next to the sporting club. I walk in through one of its tall broken doors. And pigeons trapeze through the quadrangular space inside. Long stretches of corridor look down upon me. My feet strike at piles of ruin, and upset an inner equilibrium of debris. Nostalgia meets nonchalance here. So what if this is a testimony to a long-gone moment of power and opulence, we are here now and it is our game that narrates this space. Say the pigeons. At one of the corners, petticoats of an occupant are hung out to dry. In a different quarter, quaint velvetted royal couches are obliterated by a loyal servant. No one who might be able to answer your questions is here now. Yes you can come back during the weekend.

Walking with the Madding Crowds

[First published at http://www.mylaw.net/Article/Walking_with_the_madding_crowds/]

The word for ‘intellectual’ in Bengali is ‘aantele’, a rather derogatory word in some circles. One immediately imagines a man leaning back on an armchair, puffing intently, looking for the perfect word to end his sentence. His eyes are sunken after long tussles with insight. The ‘intellectual’ straddles the boundaries of art, science, philosophy, and politics with ease. He usually approaches these domains with fascination or despondency. The luxury of wallowing in thought, Marxians would say, is available to those in the higher rungs of economic structure – who then use the substratum of economic power to weave the film of ephemera around the material body of a society. An attractive political utopia is born out of this weaving exercise. The intellectual is blind to the insularity of his own universalism. The occupants of the worlds that he imagines do not always want to participate in his dreamworld. They might even be troubled by his formulations about the nature of their being. The intellectual’s imaginative empathy is often desirable only to him.



In the world of abstraction, the intellectual switches channels and looks for new friends. He imagines distant times and spaces in his intoxicated or mystic state. The wronged peasant or the mysterious terrorist emerge as live actors in his script. To them, he must speak. His ideal changes often. But the ideal is his only fodder. If at all there were to emerge a world of green pastures and secure livelihoods and pacifist sovereigns, the intellectual would certainly find some other discrepancy between the real and the ideal to carry on his dream-sojourns. This could propel him to articulate a new theory, as much as it might call for a tragic immersion in the world of utter decay.

In my attempt to think about thinkers, let me bring in Walter Benjamin’s flaneur. The flaneur is marked out by Benjamin as a peculiar product of early industrialism in Europe - subjects who have found an individuated existence strong enough to narrate with critical distance, as though in a tragic amusement. A light-footed urban stroll is the wont of the flaneur – the lettered dandyman. On the boulevards of Paris, he experiences the rhapsody of modern capitalism. The last incarnation of the flaneur is the sandwichman, and his last haunt the department store, says Benjamin. The surrounding of attractive commodities enlivens his inner life. The flaneur’s traipse on the cityscape is not the solitary walk of a thinker, neither is it the accompaniment of a rational declaration towards membership of a body politic. His vision is hazy, his gait unsteady. He absorbs the sights and sounds of the urban thicket in a dreamlike reverie. Soon however, he sees unity through this dreamwalk with fellow-street-urchins – the whore and the sandwichman. He is stimulated as also let down by the series of wish-images posed by the boulevards of Paris. Benjamin describes the flanerie - the mass-form of the flaneur - of the sandwichman, who lives and earns on the street, retaining in him the mass-form of the flaneur, constantly collecting the city as montage. This state of urban aimlessness is a form of intoxication, according to Benjamin.



The flaneur often watches the masses collect around a political party meeting or a product launch event. He walks with the current, but maintains rueful distance. His distance is his key to the immediate. Many things of the immediate reveal themselves as ruins of a distant past. Many loiterers of a distant social stratum spell for him a dreamy camaraderie on the canvas of the street. The waves of mass culture wash over the flaneur. He retains some grains in his fist. These grains tell him apart from the mesmerised collective. He does not run away into the wilderness to find solace, neither does he address the collective the way statesmen do. He spreads himself out on the landscape in a masterful camouflaging act.



Benjamin imagined the grains of the flaneur-fist to be the matter of written words for the newly produced urban readership. The flaneur - the journalist, the photographer, the blogger - mirrors for the urban consumer, his frenzied gait. He might have a concrete goal set by a magazine, but he jumps into the street-scene hoping for many distractions and associated dreams. Many among you are flaneurs. You traipse the cityscape with a camera slung on your shoulder. Or a notepad. Or an iPad. You know the quaintest chai-shacks in its farthest crevices. Eight-lane highways and landscape gardens irk you. You watch suffering in anguish, and strum your guitar to its hidden melodies. You read epics and scriptures and find their shadows in the frenzy of the bazaar. You hang around at bars and cafes, amused at the high-pitched political debate. You walk away as the crowd convulses to song or slogan. The crowd is essential to your being.

Fight

Your moustache glistens in afternoon sweat. Bristles quiver in rage. How dare they call you a pickpocket. Maaderchods the whole lot. These were your wad of notes. You dreamt of them the night before. That you would drink with them, gamble with them, pay bills, go to the doctor, get some love. They came your way by God's will. Maaderchods the whole lot. The man continues to shout expletives. You should be kicked out of the bus, he says. But what about the bhara you paid. You're as good a passenger as he. The conductor holds you back by your collar. The kajal-girl stares at you as if you were a wounded animal. Aami ki kutta naki saala. They pull the notes out of your hand. A day's dream is lost. The afternoon sun sniggers. Maaderchods the whole lot.

Of Dreamworlds and Catastrophe

You weave dreamworlds and catastrophe out of big-city rejects. Reject cell-phones, footwear, football jerseys, tie-up bras, sunglasses, CDs. Counterfeit doesn’t quite catch it. A mofussil version of commodity is created. A purely original creature of limited resource and fantastic urge. You may scoff at these products and their adolescent desire to be like the real thing. They adorn many adolescent breasts filled with eager sexuality. The morning runner carries around leaping jaguar on his thighs. Cell-phones are repaired with new batteries and new keypads. Carefully blanketed in plastic covers. These are blessings of modernity. They must not get blemished by rain and dust. Maruti vans are repainted. With a message for Champa at the back. Champa wears a shiny butterfly on the butt of her jeans. She smiles coyly and expects you get the message. If you don’t, she conveys her indignation in SMS short-form in the dead of the night. You would not want her wait too long at the bus-stop next to the B-grade movie hall. Next to a blown-up photo of exposed breasts and an angry man. Probably called Sunehri Raat. Or something in Bhojpuri. It would ruin your nightly fantasy if she stood there too long. Her innocence corrupted in the evil company of murky sexuality. But you’d like her to waver in the hedge behind the park sometimes. Retaining guilt and shame, of course. Or else your nightly fantasy would be ruined. It’s the only thing this nightly fantasy. It keeps you going as you hang out of the trekker, as you jump across heaps of garbage, brave the kicks in your lower abdomen, fall asleep in your sweaty armpit, expect the next dot to appear soon after you join the first two. You pull together leftovers and rejects from everywhere. And weave this world. Whatever floats across the river. Whatever the big city doesn’t care for anymore. Whatever turns into mouldy obsolescence, you pick up. It’s your next dot.

Platforms

Waits for trains can be lazy or anxious. If the train is late and you are in a hurry, you may want to contract the time of wait that is inevitable. Worrying about whether you will get to your destination at the stipulated time or no. If the train is early, and you are late, you will dash across, trying to expand the pre-determined span of time that the train means to halt for. If the train is yet to arrive and you are not in any hurry to get on it, you will bide this time leisurely. Speaking to the timespace created by the elevated concrete dias called Platform. Plastic watches and fruit juice and urine will dance in front of you. Making you inhale time through the concatenation of thing and being that make space. You might also use this time to pull out of your pocket your own peculiar worries, pleasures and exhibits. Your prominent double chin or a lost lover will resurface at this point. It might mingle in the mixed company of urine and potato chips. The beggar might enter your personal thicket of worry and joy. A wafting tune of a B-grade film might entertain your wait. I am presuming that you, like me, are shy of talking to strangers. If you're not, then, you will probably make small talk about the declining state of the railways with a neighboring office - goer. I do not understand the lot of you chitchatters on platforms. I watch the peaceful sweat on fatty arms from a distance.

In a different timspace, platforms stage struggles with the harsh north wind. That one would have to pull one's wool collars up against. One might run into the glass cabins for waiting passengers. But I always found those nauseating. Grey residue of snow collected on the tracks. Grim, stout railway guards nodded as they passed you. You wondered if they liked their job. From the hazy grey, a pale light sharpened as your train approached. The drama of the cold ended, leading you into the respite of heated nausea.