Suffer they do, but for whose sin

I was woken up this morning by the terrible news that an earthquake of high magnitude shook large parts of India. The grey morning in London coupled with drizzles after a week of glorious sunshine made me pensive and apprehensive too.

My home state of West Bengal in India has been voting in the second phase of civic elections today. The first phase and the campaign have been marred by violence and bloodshed. I dialed my parents to make the cursory Saturday call and inquire about their health, the heat and dust in a normally sweltering April, the political and social tension surrounding the polls and added to that today was how they coped with the tremor that shook large parts of India.

My parents in Kolkata, relations in North Bengal and the North East of India are all fine. Relieved, I switched on the television set and tuned in an Indian news channel not for the news on the tremor, but to keep myself abreast about the possible poll violence in West Bengal. Little did I know that large swathes of the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal were razed to the ground as tremors struck only to be followed by regular aftershocks.

Nepal earthquake: How you can help victims of the Kathmandu disaster

The heart wrenching footage of people running amok, cracks on multi-storied buildings, uprooted trees, broken temples and monuments and casualties came as a pall of gloom. Many faces crossed my imagination. My former colleagues in the BBC Nepali Service, many of whom were deputed to Kathmandu from London. My good friends Rabindra Mishra, Yubaraj Ghimire and Jitendra Raut - all former colleagues in the BBC.

I suddenly recalled 'Daiju' - an elderly person with wrinkles crisscrossing his face, who looked after us well at a guest house in Gaurikund on our way to Kedarnath in the late 1980's. Daiju then told me that after a few years he longed to retire in his home town in Nepal and spend a peaceful life with his grandchildren. Since we left Gaurikund, I was never in touch with Daiju, but somehow his affection crossed my mind as I imagined that he might be in Nepal now and feared about his well being.

The name of 'Sundar' also cropped up in my mind,  although I have never seen or spoken to him in my lifetime. Sundar was a Nepali boy who accompanied my father to Kolkata in the 1960s. My father was visiting Darjeeling and poor Sundar wanted to travel to Kolkata with him. He stayed at our ancestral house in Belgharia for a few years, helping my late grandmother in her household chores and being like the fifth son in the family. In the process he grew from being a boy to a man. But as politics in Bengal became tense with the rise of the radical left, Sundar had to be sent back to Darjeeling for his own safety. Notwithstanding Sundar's departure, he remained so ingrained in the memory of our family that even I heard about him from my grandmother, father and uncles long after he was gone. I imagined that Sundar might be with his family in Nepal and feared that the high-magnitude tremor struck the place where he lived.

As the news of the terrible loss of life, property and heritage trickled in through out the day, the faceless number of hundreds of affected people was embodied in those I knew or was aware of. I was reminded of a comment made by one of our teachers in school. "Disasters happen when nature takes its own action", he told us quoting a German philosopher, whose name I couldn't remember. Taken aback by the extent of the disaster in Nepal, I tried finding out who the German philosopher was. And I did as the day unfolded and night fell in quake struck Nepal.

Wrote Frederick Engels in 1876 in "The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man":

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves over much on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."

The "victory" that Engels talked about might have added to the comfort of the rich and the relatively well off but it was the poor people of Nepal who were bearing its brunt.

Please donate generously to help the Nepalese people. I have done so myself. 

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 

He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.

Why India's Daughter is a non-starter

I watched Leslie Udwin's documentary "India's Daughter" for the third time. The last time when the heat and dust have settled and the humdrum gone. Still my views on the documentary haven't changed. The perverse mindset of the perpetrators of the heinous crime and those defending them is not India-specific but universal in nature.

I pondered over the issue for sometime now and tried some social experimentation in my day to day life. Despite the unsophisticated process of my social experimentation and the rudimentary nature of the outcome, the trend available demonstrated that whenever someone does something illegal and unethical, there is a broad tendency to defend it.

I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychoanalyst or a criminologist and hence can't delve into the reasons behind such an action. At a superficial level though it seems that the defence mechanism sets in through which one justifies his actions both within oneself and outside, and this is a universal phenomenon.

So what Udwin showed in her film is universal and not specific to India and hence there is no justification to ban it in India. In fact, by banning it the Indian Government has provided the film with the much needed political succour to keep it afloat, not because of the content but by virtue of the political controversy. The controversy notwithstanding, the documentary has failed to reveal anything that was hitherto unknown to us.

My problem is mainly with Udwin's methodology. The way the perpetrators were given a platform to articulate their views and justify their actions, and that too unchallenged, defy all norms of effective and responsible journalism. My feeling is that Udwin being a veteran in documentary making was aware of this methodological lapse and hence allowed herself to be swayed by sensation and emotion, Recall how Udwin kept on stating in interviews that she herself was abused. However unfortunate it is, this in no way makes one any more competent  to direct a documentary on the said issue.

In the final analysis, Leslie Udwin's India's Daughter managed to create some surrealistic ripples but failed to take us even an inch further from where we were before.

The controversy surrounding the documentary on the gang rape of a paramedic in Delhi in December 2012, however, raises questions similar to the critique of the development model professed by the West in the post-war years. The assumption that the West is a moderniser and has an obligation to civilise humanity encouraged them to thrust upon development models and processes without trying to understand the essence of prosperity for individual nations in the global South. The homogeneity in western society and the inability of the policymakers and development practitioners to appreciate diversity are the biggest detriments for the one-size fits all prescription of the West.

It seems that the framework used by Leslie Udwin when conceptualising India's Daughter suffers from the same shortcomings.
  
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.

It's time to say good bye, Richie Benaud

The demise of Richie Benaud brings back memories of a vintage flavour of cricket. Always a moderniser of the game, the man who had the most distinctive and authoritative voice on cricket, however, never claimed that cricket was better in his time.

Benaud became popular in our early days through the social and collective viewing of highlights of foreign tours of the Indian side. Television sets were yet to graduate to the level of being products of mass consumption then and the ordinary others would flock into the living rooms of a lucky few to have a glimpse of how the foreign turfs and the cricket watchers looked like, besides the match.

If Benaud's voice was that of cricket itself then the lanky man sporting the white coat, Dickie Bird was the conscience keeper of the game. The gentleman's game was yet to be commercialised and its flavour was more of merrymaking than moneymaking.

 The flamboyant elegance of Tony Greig, who kneeled down before a full packed Eden Gardens in 1977 to appease a crowd rendered restless by the home side's disastrous performance against the MCC, is a far cry in this age of cut throat competition and stress, when every action has a commercial value attached to it. So is the orthodox spin bowling by the likes of Derek Underwood and Bishen Bedi, when the bowler would have the luxury of experimenting with the turns and the flights despite being punished to the ropes. 

Cricket has become more instantaneous these days and the five-day carnival called test matches are like the vintage car rallies. Like the English summers the Indian winters then were a time for holidaying, to relax and sink into laziness, and cricket was the vehicle to transport one from the reality to the dream world of fantasy and romanticism.

When Pakistan was touring England in 2001, I came across an English farmer from Essex who has to his credit the rare privilege of watching all first class and test matches being played at the Lord's since 1961. Having a bite of his cheese and cucumber sandwich, an English delight and is also allegedly liked by the Queen, and sipping his Sherry, the middle-aged farmer told me how he picked up this trait from his forefathers and wanted to carry it on till he went to the grave. His son, however, was more into the shorter format of the game, he told me. A generational thing, some would suppose. 

Despite our fantasy with the yesteryears, it would be unfair to infer that cricket was better in the bygone days, especially on a day when a moderniser to the core Richie Benaud said good bye to his viewers for the last time.

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.