I have visited Kolkata twice, but I had stayed there not more than two weeks on both the occasions. Meanwhile it might be my single observations or some exceptions that doing work in Kolkata is bit difficult, as people very rare turn up on time and sometime I ended up wasting the whole day just to have one or two meetings, and sometime most of the day got wasted in waiting any particular person. Though people were good, they were intelligent and hear you carefully with interests. One day I had an appointment with a senior professor of political science in a university at Kolkata. I could not resist my impulse and asked “sir I feel that most of the people in Kolkata or Bengal seems to be very much obsessed with their past, what do you think the reasons are”.
He smiled and said “we were the great people in past, we have great history, and you know people feel pride when the greatness of history associated with them”. Apart from this we went on discussing with other general things”. I was about to ask him further that communist are ruling West Bengal for last 32 years and does he think it will ever change. But I resisted myself to ask as this was a political question, and I was neither a political analyst nor a media person to ask such a concrete question, I was just an employ of a publication house looking for some manuscripts.
So during my short stay in Kolkata I noticed that to judge this city, or to see this city, or you observe this city, you should have your particular vantage points. It is not how city looks to you simentenously important is how you see it. You may find it city in ruins or city of palaces, city in depression or city of joy, great leaders or dying dogmas.
Overall it was the city belongs to everyone who lives there, food was cheap, fares were less, or in simple words things were accessible. It might be the effect of long communist rules, whose theories are based on common good and abolition of private property and capital, social good, welfarism and popularism, many theoretical concepts I don’t want to elaborate in this post. But city required Investment, and need modernanization, not in the form of big retail chains, but modernization for the right cause.
Now communists have gone, but do you think the Ideology on which Mamta Banerjee works different than communists. I still doubt. So is it the end of communism in India. Nobody can predicts, just a question.
