It is always unfinished business with God/Cosmos/Universe/Other people. In a slightly grim song Rabindranath writes, 'noi, noi e modhur khhela/tomai amai shara jeebon, sakal sandya bela/....koto baar je nibhlo baati gorgey elo jhader raati/samsarer ei dolai dilo sangshai er thela..'

Translation ( my own, the sense of the words as i understand them..)
It is not a sweet game with you, Oh Lord. Disruptions, discontinuities and question marks come in all the time..certainty changes to uncertainty..one can't be sure of anything..

In The Waste Land Eliot for instance says,
',,,On the banks of the Thames, I can connect nothing with nothing..(approximate quote--can't get up and check)

Children leave. One ends up negotiating the universe on one's own. It speaks elliptically, sometimes. You have to catch its language. Sometimes it helps you with dreams..

So Rabindranath once again writes,

'Aji jhoder raate tomar abhishaar, paran sakha bondhu hey amar'
Oh you journey to meet me my Lord on a night of storm and darkness

Bodo bedonar y moto bejeccho tumi hey amar o praane..
Oh you have plucked so heavily on my heart strings, my Lord

'Tomar holo shuru amar holo shara'
You begin and I end..
[Of course, this needn't be the Lord. It is the dialectic that exists between two kinds of people--those who are radicals and those who prefer security..

In my life, English Literature has been one of my greatest teachers. My great teachers--the great Greek tragic dramatists (Sophocles, mainly but also Aeschylus), Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore...

Thakur and Ma have taught in different ways.

Excerpts from a diary of 2015.

Close to Februrary 7, 2015. Exact date not recorded.

Thakur a man of the people, who spoke a language that people understood.

Richness of personality, intellect, experiences. Even dramatic. The many interactions. In a way he too is like Krishna (Krishna aptly part of his name); in that he knew and interacted with so many people.

Householder and sannyasi at the same time, many people had access to him, which often makes him say the same things (in different forms) to different people at different times. This causes a rich variety, many interrelations and also overlapping.

The Kathamrita is concentrated with many spiritual ideas/discourses but incredibly warm and interesting for the quality of his human interactions, with lay devotees from many walks of life; with sannyasis.

So we also note the marvelous empathy of this man—his protean sensibility.

17.02.2015

The kanchon is in full bloom as I write from my verandah at 9 a.m. in the morning. Listened to ‘dekhechi roopsagore moner manush kancha shona’. Wonderful, wonderful. Shikhbo. Sanghamitra diyecche. I blessed her.

22.02.2015

Blown away by  ‘dekhechi roopsagore moner manush kancha shona’. Learnt it today.

24.02.2015

..the light is already hot. The purple pink kanchan against the blue sky.

The Katthokra with its alert expression checking out the trees.

Amazing. The marvelous currents of life. They should well up more in me and meet the ones flowing in the universe.

In the end what does one give?

In the end it all boils down to how much love one can give. How much. The ultimate manifestation of this love is perhaps to meet the light that is in nature with the light that is within oneself. To feel that the sky (especially) and the trees and birds are one's relatives and inmost beings.
Once a friend of mine had commented about the self-absorbton of someone closely related to her and had said, 'She does not watch the seasons go by'. At that point I was very young and did not exactly understand.
But I understand now. I understand why Rabindranath laments (he comes up so frequently in my posts because I have learnt his songs for many many years and my mother is a great Rabindra bhakta) in a song, 'Jodi prem dile na praane keno bhorer akash bhore dile emon gaane gaane?' (If you didn't give me love then why have you filled the morning sky with so much potential for music?') He means that the glory, the beauty the softness of the morning sky should raise an answering melody in the heart of the human being.
In sonnet 116 Shakespeare resonantly states:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove..
Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is not shaken..

My quotation may not be exact because I use my memory and not my text book.
'Ami roope tomai bholabo na bhalobashai bholabo....jaanbe na keu kon tuphane torongo dol uthbe praane/ chander moton olokh taane joware dheu tolabo..'
I will not tempt you with my beauty but immerse you in my love..that love which has the compelling power of the moon on the tides (Rabindranath, again)
In Pied Beauty Gerald Manley Hopkins says, 'glory be to dappled things' (meaning deer)
Posted on FB on 14.12.17

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If one has the opportunities one must always renew oneself. Remake oneself, redesign oneself and refashion oneself. Now that I am older I understand the full import of Yeats's cry in An Acre of Grass where the aged poet says, 'Myself shall I remake till I am a Timon or a Lear'..
Amare tumi ashesh koreccho
Tomai notun kore pabo bole harai khhone khon or mor bhalobashar dhon. The 'bhalobashar dhon' could also be the Self.
In one his last songs Rabindranath writes, 'Hey nuton dekha dik aar baar'. 
Notun chhada je bancha jai na. One always needs to reinvent oneself in order to live fully...

Post on 11.12.17  in  Facebook . Felt that the thoughts were valuable..

Srijit Mukherjee’s Zulfikar

I went to see the film because I am committed to seeing what Srijit is doing.  The opening moments of the film are outstanding—the cinematography—the palimpsests of camera vision, the frame of the Howrah Bridge, and then of course, the blue waters of the Hooghly. This is one reason I like watching well made Bengali films—because they catch Kolkata in surprising, unexpected and beautiful angles and colours. I remember Kaushik Ganguly’s Shabda—what a tour de force of imagination and execution.

The acting for the most part, was brilliant.  The male actors, particularly. In the opening scene, Parambrata. He has only got better, from his early days as Topshey to Sabyasachi Chakrabarty’s Phelu Da.  He looked the role; the Rastafarian dreadlocks really suited him. What I like about Parmabrata, is that he is truly a professional. He is always ready for the role. In top condition. Kaushik Sen, too.  They never look out of place, are never tentative, their professional correctness is paramount and their state of readiness, admirable.  I had felt that way about Akshay Khanna in Baby. He must have been close to 50 when he played that role. What a display of litheness and fitness, without which that particular profile of a RAW officer would not have come to life.

Coming back to Zulfikar. The tightness of structure, of the plot, of story line, of movement of story, intertwining of plot, character, pace, perfect till the intermission. Of course, it is a very male centered movie. Women hardly figure much in the ethos of the underworld. Destiny is male, tragedy is male, and society is also figured in terms of male actors and doers. However, the Begum, a recasting of the role of Calphurnia, is somewhat haunting. Dope addiction, loneliness, childlessness, living out an abandoned marriage, her walking on the Second Hooghly Bridge, epitomizes the loneliness that marks the lives of many.  A Death-in- Life existence. That could be more a woman’s trajectory than a male’s, if one is living in a world where only men call the shots. In any case, women are more involved in careers as psychiatric patients, than men. We all know the etymological root of the term ‘hysteria’.  Paoli is very convincing in her role as this haunted woman.    

In the Begum’s walking, the starkness of the human being was very movingly etched. What do outcasts and pariahs do? They walk. The street is their home. For the Begum, walking frees her from the confinement of her home, where there is no convivial sound or presence. Not even a pet. Not even a maid. She is alone with her mind and her addiction. Yet, it is a mind that is gifted, in that it is capable of prophetic vision.  Cassandra too had prophetic vision. She warned Agamemnon that she saw blood all around. But no one heeded her. What one notices about the Begum also, is that she is not hooded behind a purdah. Her isolation is both classical and contemporary and gendered. She is stark in the way the tragic hero (Oedipus, Macbeth, Lear, Othello) is stark, stark because she has a mind in a heavily male dominated society, stark because she feels unwanted and rejected. She is the alienated woman in any society.  

That it was structured along the lines of Julius Caesar, I caught on pretty late. Only when the soothsayer warned Zulfikar about the coming of Eid. The Ides of March and Eid, have an interesting resonance. There was nothing overt about the recollection or recasting of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The recall and the weaving in were very subtle.  There was nothing loud or overt.

The transformation of the artist into the Mafia Don was for me, the most spectacular transformation, and an affirmation of the darkness of Destiny, sometimes. Art did not offer this young male, release. Crime has its own seductions, its power, and its own relentlessness. In this respect, the film seems to concur with the Classical view of Destiny as all powerful. Shakespeare too, does not discount Fate.

The casting of Dev in the role of Mario was very intelligent. Srijit certainly brought the best out in Dev vis à vis the role he plays here.  I have never seen Dev in as restrained a role as he plays here.  The romantic sequence was not very impressive. It seems slightly out of place in a film that is so darkly realistic. It brings back echoes of the marriage of Don Corleone’s youngest son to the young and beautiful Italian girl, who later dies in a car blast. The love story however does not strike the poignant note that it did in The Godfather. The actress however, did her best.

Kaushik Sen was outstanding. He brings out the conflict between nobility and the desire for revenge in Brutus, very well.  The splitting of the role of Mark Anthony into the two Anglo Indian brothers was superb from a dramatic point of view.

Rahul Banerjee too played his role very well. He is another highly competent actor who takes his profession very seriously and whose professionalism comes across to the audience.

Music was excellent.

The film however was too long. The deaths too many. Reminiscent of Seneca and Kyd.

I really like your work Srijit. I hope you will not mind my criticism.

Film making is very difficult. All those who try to bring wholeness and unity into character, event, and all else that goes into the making of a film, deserve our applause and I give it to youJ

                                   Losing my Phone (Phone Churi)  11.1.15                                                     

Blissfully going to Parnasree on a blue and white ‘no refusal’ taxi. Was talking to Swaraj da just before that, he told me that my article had been accepted/or was going to be published in the February Holy Mother Special Issue of the RKM bulletin. I was happy. He had said that he had felt bad that he had not spoken to me very nicely when I had called the other day and that he felt sad about it.

But I should not have searched in my bag for the phone when it rang as I walked from home to the taxi stand around 10.15 in the morning of last Sunday. I was very tired, and somewhat nervy and it would be great to have just stayed home and recuperated; 

So somewhat shaken and not quite with it, I walked in a sea green kameez and white salwar, with the blueberry color jacket given by Priya, to the taxi stand, and still on the phone.

The blue and white taxi said that it would go. I had Geraldine Forbes’s Women in  Modern India, with me. It is that book that caused my fall that day. I hesitated to take it before I left, it seemed to invite me from the bed, I came back to the room (after having made steps to leave it), and took it downstairs. I went down to eat. On the point of leaving  the bag I was carrying with me, in addition to my purse, seemed very full (because I had put priya’s new lotion in  it, with the faint hope that I would apply lotion at Parnasree), and I did not want to stretch my Shantiniketan-y carrying bag, so I took the book in my hand. BIG MISTAKE.

Then the Swaraj- da, call. As I spoke to the taxi driver and asked him if he would go to Parnasree, he said ‘ yes’, a young, perhaps Bihari, driver. I had the book in my right hand. What I did not remember, is that I had the phone as well. I put the book next to me and then the phone. When I got off, I took the Forbes book, not only because I valued it, but also because it was an MRP book. I forgot the phone.

I went up and within 15 minutes thought of calling Deepa and asking her that if she was at Parnasree, she could come to my house. The bag, that is the purse, was overturned and phone not found. A frantic rush to the neighbour’s flat upstairs, and Mona’s husband gave me his phone from which to call. My number was called and the voice said ‘switched off.’ The bearded muslim older relative who was in the flat , said that if I could get another no refusal taxi, they could direct me to their headquarters in Jagu bazar and that they might be able to help me.

As I walked sadly and in a state of flurry to the police station, I did meet such a car, but the driver was completely indifferent to my situation. I arrived at the police station, and the lady police first asked me, if I had noted the car number, I said no. then she asked me for the IMEI number of the phone. I had no clue what that might be. I was already shaken and I said to her in strong tones, ‘you expect me to go to New Alipur now, and get that number’? Then she gave me a yarn about how the GD would require that number and then it would go to Lalbazar, etc. To whatever I understood of that, I said that you now want me to go to Lalbazar to trace a phone that was 3.5 years old? I should have just stuck with the demand that they make a note of the number of this phone 9831775725.

But I too allowed myself to get caught in circles and circles of discussion, with various police officers or SI’s. None of them would accept my contention that it was ‘stolen’. They said, ‘you have misplaced it’. Of course, not in proper English. They insisted on ‘misplaced’ and I on ‘stolen’. I said, but if he (taxi driver) did not want to steal it, why should he switch the phone off? One guy, who had done me the courtesy of listening to my story, got up at this point, said to me, ‘ amader bidya buddhi khub kom; amra eta misplaced bole jani. Sheta je stolen hote pare, ta bujhina.’ then he walked up to the junior police, woman, inspector and told her summarily, ‘just write her number down. make a report with just that detail. No need to write anything else down.’

By that time, I said that I would get the bill. The woman inspector kept telling me ‘apnake to kotobar bollam.’ Then I said, ‘what is point of saying all this? What does it matter? When someone does something wrong and then wishes to rectify the mistake, do you keep saying, kotobar bollam?

Went back to 318 Parnasree Pally, hurriedly ate the ordered meal from Gopa Chakladar, rushed home in a taxi, took the airtel post paid bill and went back in the same taxi. Noticed on the way that the taxi driver smiled and talked to himself.

 When I eventually arrived, a senior superintendent, overall kind, who had previously heard remonstrations from the woman superintendent, about how recalcitrant I was, kindly tried to explain to me how they did not have scanners that would trap if my phone was being used. Initially, I had asked them in sheer helplessness, if it was not possible for them to do anything without the IMIE number, if I gave them the time of the taxi ride and from where and to where it had been. This had been two hours ago from the present moment of narration.

He looked at my Airtel post paid bill with a great deal of attention. And then said, but we need the bill of purchase. I looked at him tired and dejected and said, I had not kept the bill of a  phone purchased 3.5 years earlier. He said that he had kept his even if it was 8 years old. They explained like they were explaining to an eight year old.  

That is why I think it is a sin to think one self intelligent. In a police station, unless you are prepared to be very patient and submissive, your intelligence will hold no value.

Came back at the end of the day to New Alipur. Had a plan of meeting Shelley in the park. Don’t know why I had  agreed in the first place.  At this age, and given my style, a park is not where I would meet someone. Sat there for 15 minutes, felt the cold penetrating my body and then walked home. My mother said that Shelley had found my phone switched off, had called home and Ma asked her not to go and meet me. I had kept the appointed hour, because I had not told Shelley anything. Since I had not been able to get in touch with her, I had gone exactly at 5 in the evening, when we were supposed to meet.

On Tapan Sinha's Harmonium

The film is a classic. As far as central story structure goes, which is having a lost thing end up in the possession of many people, and finally the true owner, I guess it has precedents. But the manner in which Tapan Sinha has used this central narrative technique to weave several sections of society together, ridicule the middle class, and poignantly and sympathetically represent both the aristocracy and the world of sex workers, is impressive to say the least. 

I was very moved. The closing song "Mon bole tui moner katha jano na," finds echoes in many songs of Rabindranath, that play with the idea of "mon" and what it does know and does not know. At the same time, the song also affirms the folkloric or rural roots of Bengali culture, thereby bringing the entire social sweep of the film into a unity or whole. 

Letter written to a friend after watching the play  Gabhir Asukh (Deep illness)..

Excellent play. Very well done. Well scripted and well directed. Energetic flow of action, coherent plot, excellent stage designing and very competent acting by the lead characters. Dr Chakrabarty and Bhonsle were the best. Male characters did sort of take center stage today. Is it because psychiatry was a male dominated profession for a long time?

 Isn't it interesting that the story teller and psychiatric patient narrating the story is a woman? Doctors male, patient woman. There were more women than men, as patients, did you notice? Years ago I remember reading in some feminist theoretical essay that women were more involved in careers as psychiatric patients than men. Apparently men have some hormone or God knows what, that makes them more forward looking and better engaged with the world, which ensures objectivity.

Yet,interestingly, Manashi is also the 'Kathak' (story teller, script writer, rhapsode) who is cogent and coherent enough to tell the story. Thank Snehashish Bhattacharya  for making this woman psychiatric patent, also the story teller or the artist.

Perhaps there is some releasing force in undergoing the pain of psychiatric illness. It made Dr Chakrabarty ask some very penetrating and humane questions. 

By the way did you understand how Dr Bhonsle became converted to Dr. Chakrabarty's point of view? Some gift of personality that the older doctor must have possessed. Some charm, some force, some energy of belief that had the power to sway another man/being who was also sensitive. Artists have this power of swaying, moving,energizing others. The greatness of theatre lies in its power to move many. Hence political movements have used theatre to get their message across. And this one does too. 'India is incredible' because it 'diminishes' those with 'mental illness'. It is 'insane' says a poster on the sets. Wonderful. Yes, 'Great art is inevitably political but irrevocably beautiful as well' (Toni Morrison)

Dr. Bhonsle was very well played. The cool business like non-Bengali, who finally acquires some of the passion of a Bengali. From cool and self possessed he becomes passionate and engaged. Interesting.

The story reminded me of Chekhov's Ward No Six. Very similar. How the doctor treating mental patients eventually becomes insane himself. '

'Transference' is so dangerous isn't it? I believe psychoanalysts live in real danger of absorbing the 'transfer' of the analysand's personality into themselves. But unless you comprehend through imagination and understanding and through affect, how will you cure the other person?

Very interesting questions raised from the point of view of Medical Science. How much empathy? How does one monitor exactly how much to give? Whether a pat on the head is more than what professionalism demands. In America one can NEVER talk to the doctor outside his/her chamber. He/She may not recognize you when they see you on the street. Perhaps it is very different in a hospital where you are in constant contact with patients. 

I think Snehashish Bhattacharya truly understands the situation well. Or else he would not have been able to act with such engagement. 

Please parle shobai ke bolish je bheeshon bheeshon bhalo legecche. Khuby moving. Sima Mukhopadhyay and the entire 'parivar' of this theatre goshthi deserve kudos.

 Well done. May they produce many more such thoughtful and well designed, well written and well directed plays. Ora je theatre 'japon' kore shune bodoi bhalo laglo. E chhada theatre hoi na. Ekhane passion na thakle theatre e praan ashbe na. Devi puja'r motoi theatre aradhona ebam sadhana korte hoi.  

I would be curious to know how Kolkata takes thisplay. Exactly how many people  actually go to see it and like it.