A full year has gone by. Have things changed? I do not know. I only hope so for the sake of the world that we live in, for the sake of the millions of innocent people who inhabit that world, for the sake of India and Indians. I can only pray that no one has to stop doing things in order to live; lest he or she be in danger of being killed by unknown, unseen, uncompromising and unwanted sub-human beings who masquerade as "saviours" but are no less than the lowest of low terrorists.
So what can I say today - one year after the disaster of Mumbai 26/11/08? So much to say in so little space. It may be a good idea to recall the words that had come to my mind last year...during the actual trauma that India experienced. At that time I had addressed my piece to Mumbai and the indomitable Mumbaikars. A year later I rededicate it to all who were hurt and touched by the horrors which are , nodoubt, ingrained in the hearts and minds of every Indian and all good people, anywhere in the world. Do read on and relive the anguish we all shared last year.
MUMBAI!
I was born in Purnea, an obscure town in Bihar. I traveled with my parents to various places till I reached Kolkata at the age of seven. I lived in Kolkata for seventeen years before I shifted to the National Capital Region. It has been forty years since then that I have lived in North India. Yet, on the 26th and 27th of November ’08, I cried my heart out for Mumbai, a city where I have never lived, and its showpiece the Taj Mahal Hotel!
My relationship with Mumbai was initially restricted to a few business trips during my working days. Nowadays, ever since Rupa, our daughter, moved there along with her husband and children, my visits to the city of dreams have increased manifold. My wife Kumkum, however, is a frequent visitor, courtesy her job. She invariably stays at the The Trident, still popular under its former sobriquet of The Oberoi Towers. And thus it has come to be that there has been hardly a trip to Mumbai when Kumi or both of us have not taken a turn along the Apollo Bunder, taken a launch ride from the Gateway Of India, enjoyed a leisurely cup of coffee at the Sea Lounge, dined at the Kandahar, and invariably, gazed long at and photographed the magnificent façade of the Taj Mahal Hotel, either from the vicinity of the Gateway or from aboard some vessel out at sea. At every step I would recall a few words from my childhood, spoken by my father, that the Taj in “Bombay” is one of the most photographed buildings in India, because of its sheer immensity and grandeur.
What a sight the Taj hotel presents to any seafarer as he cruises the waters off the shores of Mumbai….an iconic beauty which proclaims to all the world that this is India; a modern face of an ancient civilization! So it must have been for the emperor of British India in 1911 and so it must be for any tourist coming into an independent India from distant shores, the Elephanta Caves, or for that matter from anywhere across the seas, near or far.
Was it any different for ten young men who set sail from Karachi on a fateful November night with black destruction in their hearts, destruction of the soul of humanity, yet again? Did they, even for a moment, pause to think in remorse that they were setting out to obliterate a magnificent symbol which has drawn millions of people from far and wide to embrace this enchantress of the east called India? Did they, on first gazing at the splendour of the Taj Mahal’s facade from the Arabian Sea, even for a minute feel the futility of violating this beautiful symbol of a vibrant nation?
Did they hold so much hatred for the people of India to be the agents of a massacre of such devastating proportions? Did they have no human compunctions about killing, killing, killing…..hundreds of innocent people who did not know them from Adam and who had harmed them in no way, ever?
Thousands of Indians who have never visited Mumbai conjure up pictures of the Taj in their minds when they think of the city. Children are taught to recognize photographs of the palatial building and told to identify it with the city of Mumbai. Every visitor poses in front of the imposing building to be captured in cameras by their loved ones. A trip to see the Gateway and the Taj is a “must do” on every itinerant traveller’s check-list.
For, the Taj Mahal hotel is not only a preserve of the lucky Mumbaikars who get the opportunity of frequent interface with it, but also a proud symbol of a proud nation which holds it as a symbol of India and its great Indianness. The Taj Mahal hotel is as much their own as it is for the Mumbaikars. The Mumbaikars are as much fellow-Indians as the people of the rest of the country. When Mumbai bleeds so does the rest of India. Mumbai’s miseries are also our miseries. That is why I cried my heart out this November.
I shall never know what compels a few human beings to feel and transmit such vitriolic hatred for other human beings. I shall never know what drives them to plunge their souls into such titanic depths of barbarism. I shall also never understand what motivates people who teach others to hate for hatred’s sake, to seek out and kill unknown people by the thousands, and who preach and glorify what resides in the darkest of dark recesses of the sub-human mind. If this means that I do not understand religion and the tenets of life, then so be it!
As Mumbai lies maimed and crippled, I grieve for the wonderful people who live in this wonderful city of ours. The oft-quoted “spirit of Mumbai” will no doubt rise in quick-time and help the city once again to stand up on its feet. The only dark cloud that hovers overhead is the cloud of politics and our politicians. For, who can forget that, heinous as it was, this attack managed to unite all Indians to the core like seldom before despite the best efforts of our politicians whose collective and myopic vision hardly ever extends beyond the lucre of the vote bank!
I reach out to Mumbaikars….I know that you will soon pick yourselves up and resume your separate journeys with little fuss, great fortitude and immense dignity….as usual. When you do that as indeed now, we, the rest of India, shall be with you, right alongside.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Riddle of Politics
I never got attracted to politics. In fact, I do not understand what politics is all about. After all, what in heaven's name is politics? To seek an answer I turned to the trusted friend...the O.E.D. According to it politics "is the art and science of government; political affairs or life; (as pl.) political principles." Well, clear as mud-water, isn't it! Nevertheless one can safely conclude that politics does have something to do with government, and hence, governance as well.
If that be so, then what kind of art prompted some wise men of Norway to bestow the Nobel Peace Prize on Barack Obama, the still-wet-behind-the-ears President of the USA who was practically unheard of before his nomination for the big job came by? This gesture does smack strongly of politics since it defies any logic, rhyme or reason. Unless of course it was not politics but economics! Or was this no piece of art at all? Was it the enunciation of some esoteric theory of modern science?
Take the case of our home-grown Manu Sharma. He shot and killed a young lady in a night club in full public because she refused to serve him yet another drink. He was convicted with great difficulty and sentenced to life imprisonment after initially having been aquitted by the law courts. (For God's sake!) It was outraged public opinion that forced the justice system to have a re-look at the case and bring about the conviction. But the coup-de-grace is that, after all this, Sharma was let out on parole for two months ostensibly to attend to his ailing mother who was found busy campaigning for her husband's election! No prizes for guessing that Sharma Snr belongs to the ruling party! Manu Sharma was also to perform the last rites of his grandmother who had passed away months previously! And the piece-de-resistance, as it were, is that the criminal had the temerity to also request for parole in order to attend to his business! And we are talking about a criminal convicted for cold-blooded murder! What kind of subtle art or science was being indulged in by the goverment in providing this out-of-turn parole to a vicious killer?
Our Union Cabinet Ministers choose not to operate from the seat of the nation's government, i.e. the capital, but rather from the state which returned them to the parliament, with both eyes firmly fixed on the Chief Minister's chair. They ignore cabinet meetings with disdain. They oppose moves of their own government. They do not even look towards the Centre, where they belong in the first place, when things go grossly wrong in their own ministries. But they thrive they prosper in the nation's Council of Ministry, since "politics" does not permit anything otherwise.
And the people, poor us, the bulwark of a democracy that India is, is powerless to do anything about this"art and science of government". We vote but we do not choose our government nor the way we want to be governed. This is politics. This is what I do not understand. No wonder a great man had said that"democracy is the worst form of government, except for the others!" But does it mean that we the people have to unendingly resign ourselves to suffer under undesirable governance just becaus of the so-called "compulsions of politics?" Will the good people in government continue to be arm-twisted by the bad ones, not in the interest of the nation and its populace, but in the dubious interest of politics? There is obvious truth in the belief that good people have just to do nothing to enable evil to take root.
Because of this and much more, I do not understand politics, O.E.D.'s contribution notwithstanding. The persisting fear is....what other acts of horror are in store for us in its name or in its compulsions?
If that be so, then what kind of art prompted some wise men of Norway to bestow the Nobel Peace Prize on Barack Obama, the still-wet-behind-the-ears President of the USA who was practically unheard of before his nomination for the big job came by? This gesture does smack strongly of politics since it defies any logic, rhyme or reason. Unless of course it was not politics but economics! Or was this no piece of art at all? Was it the enunciation of some esoteric theory of modern science?
Take the case of our home-grown Manu Sharma. He shot and killed a young lady in a night club in full public because she refused to serve him yet another drink. He was convicted with great difficulty and sentenced to life imprisonment after initially having been aquitted by the law courts. (For God's sake!) It was outraged public opinion that forced the justice system to have a re-look at the case and bring about the conviction. But the coup-de-grace is that, after all this, Sharma was let out on parole for two months ostensibly to attend to his ailing mother who was found busy campaigning for her husband's election! No prizes for guessing that Sharma Snr belongs to the ruling party! Manu Sharma was also to perform the last rites of his grandmother who had passed away months previously! And the piece-de-resistance, as it were, is that the criminal had the temerity to also request for parole in order to attend to his business! And we are talking about a criminal convicted for cold-blooded murder! What kind of subtle art or science was being indulged in by the goverment in providing this out-of-turn parole to a vicious killer?
Our Union Cabinet Ministers choose not to operate from the seat of the nation's government, i.e. the capital, but rather from the state which returned them to the parliament, with both eyes firmly fixed on the Chief Minister's chair. They ignore cabinet meetings with disdain. They oppose moves of their own government. They do not even look towards the Centre, where they belong in the first place, when things go grossly wrong in their own ministries. But they thrive they prosper in the nation's Council of Ministry, since "politics" does not permit anything otherwise.
And the people, poor us, the bulwark of a democracy that India is, is powerless to do anything about this"art and science of government". We vote but we do not choose our government nor the way we want to be governed. This is politics. This is what I do not understand. No wonder a great man had said that"democracy is the worst form of government, except for the others!" But does it mean that we the people have to unendingly resign ourselves to suffer under undesirable governance just becaus of the so-called "compulsions of politics?" Will the good people in government continue to be arm-twisted by the bad ones, not in the interest of the nation and its populace, but in the dubious interest of politics? There is obvious truth in the belief that good people have just to do nothing to enable evil to take root.
Because of this and much more, I do not understand politics, O.E.D.'s contribution notwithstanding. The persisting fear is....what other acts of horror are in store for us in its name or in its compulsions?
Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Chhordi she was
She left quietly for eternal peace, from a non-descriptive hospital room. But she had arrived in this world amid the noisy bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese. It was the 2nd World War. The city was dark then, under black-out. It was the 8th of November exactly 67 years ago, to the day.
I wonder if she realised, that till the last active moments of her life she was destined to always arrive with a bang, wherever she went. Nobody was ever left in doubt of the fact that she was around. Always bursting with the joys of life, as it were. Fun and laughter formed a vibrant leit motif of her life.
Since, I was only 2 years younger than her - the three other siblings are at least nine years older than me! - we spent the maximum number of years together till she married and left the Chatterjee home in 1968.
When I recall the days of Chittagong, (yes I do remember bits and pieces of our stay there!) , of Darjeeling, of our years in Kolkata spent with gusto in Lake View Road, Mahanirvan Road, Ballygunge Place and Lake Gardens, what stands out is that Chhordi and I were the only siblings together throughout those memorable two and a half action-packed decades. Naturally, we were the best of friends, even till her very last days. We shared a lot of our joys, miseries and secrets that nobody else knew of. However, the one thing that remained the common denominator through all those years and decades was the inevitability of laughter and more laughter!
She even laughed when she realised that the pony I was riding on died shortly after choosing to suddenly sit down, with me precariously hanging from the saddle! This was in Darjeeling during those heady childhood years of carefree abandon, when we went through time playing, riding and exploring the beauteous wonders of the Himalayan town, often with Bapi(our dad) as our guide and mentor. Bapi had taken some wonderful photograhs of the two of us during those excursions. In fact, two of them, taken on the lawns of Government House and on the famous promenade around the Observatory HIll, used to adorn the walls of Chhordi's home, wherever she lived.
Calcutta, where both of us lived from 1951 to 1968, was to be the place where we spent time growing up, through school, college, university, et al. Those were truly fun years because, no matter what she was engaged in or I was busy with, we would have plenty of time for each other, more often than not, to laugh together. This included some common parties we would attend. She would come to watch a few of the cricket matches I played in, never failing to create a ruckus from the boundary line, often resulting in my embarrassing misses on the field!. I reciprocated the compliments by attending her college exhibitions (she was qualified in Fine Arts from the Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta) although, I must confess, I was more partial to visiting her in college when she was in her 3rd year when the nudes would be posing for the students!! It was fun to watch her trying to shoo me and my friends away, no doubt wishing every moment that the earth would open up and swallow her!
The mid-sixties saw Chhordi and I spending a lot of time with the Cosmopolitan Club, a club founded by our parents together with several other original residents of Lake Gardens. This was a club which subsisted on the spirit of the members more than anything else. It had no premises.The objective was for the members to have a lot of wholesome fun amongst themselves, through weekly tea meetings and monthly dinner meetings at their residences by turns.
This is the forum in which the two of us were given the unenviable task of teaching some leaden-footed enthusiasts, by far our seniors, the rudiments of ballroom dancing!Needless to say that this endeavour was soon abandoned, not so much for the lack of aptitude on the part of the
participants, which was considerable, but more for the fact that Chhordi, the chief instructor, was apt to spend the time rolling with laughter at the antics of the amply-proportioned learners!! Invariably, the sessions would end up in a riot!
I shall never forget the fancy dress party that the Cosmopolitan Club organised. Chhordi and I appeared as a newly married couple with she being the groom and me the coy bride! This, I am sure, is the only "case of the giggling groom" on record!!
There used to be two pretty girls, sisters, living right across the road from our house. One night, three of my friends who were sleeping in for the night and I decided to have some fun by scaring the wits out of them. It was around 2.00a.m. We thought that hurling missiles against their bedroom door and windows would be the best ploy. Soon Chhordi was amongst us and was promptly roped in for our game. Lo and behold! Not only did she help us prepare the missiles with her used paint tubes, but also in no time she was busy hurling them with irrepressible glee alongside us!
Not that she was a tomboy. Oh no, not at all! During her college days, she was like a veritable moth to a flame, the way she drew attention from numerous male aspirers. In fact, several times she insisted that I accompany her to stave off the more dogged ones. This itself was a source of hilarity to her because, those days, I resembled a cadaver far more than a normal human with my miserable lack of the much needed avoir dupois!
My nephew Bunty has written about Tuku Shome (then Air Force officer) and how he would strike a pose and literally go cross-eyed while singing for Chhordi's benefit. He was not the only one. Kushal Singh Bisht was a sturdy, stocky Kumaoni tea-planter in the Terai during the 60s. He too would burst into song every time he saw Chhordi! I remember a scene where Bisht (my brother-in-law, a fellow planter, insisted on calling him Beast!) threw back his head and launched into "hey rajnigandh tumar gandh sudha dalo, chander hansir bandh bhengo che....!" while sitting, as we were, in the verandah overlooking the front lawns of Simulbari. Chhordi shot up like a jack-in-the-box, ran inside and laughed her guts out for about half an hour! Meanwhile, Bisht carried on singing! And believe me, this fact caused Chhordi to laugh even more!
Then there was Bonny, yet another planter aspiring to be her suitor. A product of North Calcutta, his upbringing had obviously not exposed him to smart young women of the "forward type". So Chhordi was like a bombshell in his life. Boy, was he smitten? After his efforts in or around Simulbari (we used to visit that place every year) he gathered up his courage and landed up in Lake Gardens to press his suit with my parents. Unfortunately for Bonny, at a rather early stage in the evening, he chose to comment on the mosquito menace of Lake Gardens to Chhordi, in his pronounced North Calcutta accent and remarked " ekhane bheeson mosa!" As a conversational gambit it was an abject failure. For, it only resulted in Chhordi beating a hasty retreat from the room in a paroxysm of laughter! Exit Bonny! (short for Bonnerjee)
And who can forget about her mimicries! She was par excellence! There was hardly anyone we knew who she, and I, did not imitate. Any such comic act was always there, delivery with or without demand!
Yet, this woman was not really without a care in the world, as it may seem from hearing or reading about her.
Life was not easy for her, right from her birth. She was borne with an unusual growth on her forehead, over one eye. This would, it seems, hang like a bunch of grapes and bleed buckets every now and then. Imagine the plight of a little girl bearing the pain and mortification of such a problem! After going through numerous forms of treatment, all to no avail, God smiled on her in the form of Dr. Subodh Mitra, a pioneer in radium therapy in those early years of the 40s. Chhordi was to become Dr. Mitra's first guinea pig in this experiment with radium. And she triumphed over the unknown with such completeness that, after a few years, anybody who cared to look closely at her would have been hard pressed to notice the faintest of scars over her right eyebrow, the only relic of her post-natal afliction.
After a relatively carefree life through school and college, Chhordi's marriage made things really tough for her. Hers was an arranged marriage to a chap with impeccable credentials. But he was an alcoholic and this fact ultimately, after several years, drove them to the inevitable divorce.
She never married again. Instead she worked herself silly trying to keep her daughter and herself in some degree of comfort. At the fag end of her life she did find someone, but, true to her wretched luck, did not live long enough to enjoy the relationship.
She worked in several companies, travelled abroad extensively and, all in all, enjoyed a relatively good corporate experience.....some were excellent, others were not.She saw the best of times and she saw the worst of times.
In the hospital I was privileged to meet her boss, colleagues and subordinates from her last job ... a few days before she passed away. I was privileged because it is not everyday that one hears such glowing 360 degrees tributes about the achievements of a person in an organisation. Her Big Boss's words still echo in my head..."the impact that Gopa made in 6 months had not happened in the entire two decades of the organisation's existence". At that moment I indeed felt privileged to have been the "kid" brother of such a person.
Chhordi was a magnificent human being. I can say with full confidence that nobody, but nobody knew her as much as I did. After all, right till her last month, we always talked to each other, if not face to face, definitely over the telephone, or as in recent times, through text messaging and email. There was never any secret between us...not when we were young, not when we were grown up.
Although she went through several bad patches in her life, she did not ever allow herself to wallow in self pity. If she appeared moody and sullen at times, she, more than anybody else, had the right to, for life had been often unfriendly to her. She did not deserve any of it. But like the person she was, she always stood up and fought. And what a heart she had! Always giving, always generous to a fault, totally unmindful of her circumstances. I have been touched so many times by this inherent goodness of her heart that I used to marvel at her magnanimity. Every body is not at that level. I was always humbled by this trait in her for I knew that I could never hold a candle by her in this regard. She was a true Champion!
She was an artist, a corporate executive, a businesswoman,a social worker, a comedian and a friendly human being...all rolled into one ball of joy and exuberance. But to me, at the end of the day, she was a sister extraordinaire!
Rest, chhordi. You deserve to.
I wonder if she realised, that till the last active moments of her life she was destined to always arrive with a bang, wherever she went. Nobody was ever left in doubt of the fact that she was around. Always bursting with the joys of life, as it were. Fun and laughter formed a vibrant leit motif of her life.
Since, I was only 2 years younger than her - the three other siblings are at least nine years older than me! - we spent the maximum number of years together till she married and left the Chatterjee home in 1968.
When I recall the days of Chittagong, (yes I do remember bits and pieces of our stay there!) , of Darjeeling, of our years in Kolkata spent with gusto in Lake View Road, Mahanirvan Road, Ballygunge Place and Lake Gardens, what stands out is that Chhordi and I were the only siblings together throughout those memorable two and a half action-packed decades. Naturally, we were the best of friends, even till her very last days. We shared a lot of our joys, miseries and secrets that nobody else knew of. However, the one thing that remained the common denominator through all those years and decades was the inevitability of laughter and more laughter!
She even laughed when she realised that the pony I was riding on died shortly after choosing to suddenly sit down, with me precariously hanging from the saddle! This was in Darjeeling during those heady childhood years of carefree abandon, when we went through time playing, riding and exploring the beauteous wonders of the Himalayan town, often with Bapi(our dad) as our guide and mentor. Bapi had taken some wonderful photograhs of the two of us during those excursions. In fact, two of them, taken on the lawns of Government House and on the famous promenade around the Observatory HIll, used to adorn the walls of Chhordi's home, wherever she lived.
Calcutta, where both of us lived from 1951 to 1968, was to be the place where we spent time growing up, through school, college, university, et al. Those were truly fun years because, no matter what she was engaged in or I was busy with, we would have plenty of time for each other, more often than not, to laugh together. This included some common parties we would attend. She would come to watch a few of the cricket matches I played in, never failing to create a ruckus from the boundary line, often resulting in my embarrassing misses on the field!. I reciprocated the compliments by attending her college exhibitions (she was qualified in Fine Arts from the Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta) although, I must confess, I was more partial to visiting her in college when she was in her 3rd year when the nudes would be posing for the students!! It was fun to watch her trying to shoo me and my friends away, no doubt wishing every moment that the earth would open up and swallow her!
The mid-sixties saw Chhordi and I spending a lot of time with the Cosmopolitan Club, a club founded by our parents together with several other original residents of Lake Gardens. This was a club which subsisted on the spirit of the members more than anything else. It had no premises.The objective was for the members to have a lot of wholesome fun amongst themselves, through weekly tea meetings and monthly dinner meetings at their residences by turns.
This is the forum in which the two of us were given the unenviable task of teaching some leaden-footed enthusiasts, by far our seniors, the rudiments of ballroom dancing!Needless to say that this endeavour was soon abandoned, not so much for the lack of aptitude on the part of the
participants, which was considerable, but more for the fact that Chhordi, the chief instructor, was apt to spend the time rolling with laughter at the antics of the amply-proportioned learners!! Invariably, the sessions would end up in a riot!
I shall never forget the fancy dress party that the Cosmopolitan Club organised. Chhordi and I appeared as a newly married couple with she being the groom and me the coy bride! This, I am sure, is the only "case of the giggling groom" on record!!
There used to be two pretty girls, sisters, living right across the road from our house. One night, three of my friends who were sleeping in for the night and I decided to have some fun by scaring the wits out of them. It was around 2.00a.m. We thought that hurling missiles against their bedroom door and windows would be the best ploy. Soon Chhordi was amongst us and was promptly roped in for our game. Lo and behold! Not only did she help us prepare the missiles with her used paint tubes, but also in no time she was busy hurling them with irrepressible glee alongside us!
Not that she was a tomboy. Oh no, not at all! During her college days, she was like a veritable moth to a flame, the way she drew attention from numerous male aspirers. In fact, several times she insisted that I accompany her to stave off the more dogged ones. This itself was a source of hilarity to her because, those days, I resembled a cadaver far more than a normal human with my miserable lack of the much needed avoir dupois!
My nephew Bunty has written about Tuku Shome (then Air Force officer) and how he would strike a pose and literally go cross-eyed while singing for Chhordi's benefit. He was not the only one. Kushal Singh Bisht was a sturdy, stocky Kumaoni tea-planter in the Terai during the 60s. He too would burst into song every time he saw Chhordi! I remember a scene where Bisht (my brother-in-law, a fellow planter, insisted on calling him Beast!) threw back his head and launched into "hey rajnigandh tumar gandh sudha dalo, chander hansir bandh bhengo che....!" while sitting, as we were, in the verandah overlooking the front lawns of Simulbari. Chhordi shot up like a jack-in-the-box, ran inside and laughed her guts out for about half an hour! Meanwhile, Bisht carried on singing! And believe me, this fact caused Chhordi to laugh even more!
Then there was Bonny, yet another planter aspiring to be her suitor. A product of North Calcutta, his upbringing had obviously not exposed him to smart young women of the "forward type". So Chhordi was like a bombshell in his life. Boy, was he smitten? After his efforts in or around Simulbari (we used to visit that place every year) he gathered up his courage and landed up in Lake Gardens to press his suit with my parents. Unfortunately for Bonny, at a rather early stage in the evening, he chose to comment on the mosquito menace of Lake Gardens to Chhordi, in his pronounced North Calcutta accent and remarked " ekhane bheeson mosa!" As a conversational gambit it was an abject failure. For, it only resulted in Chhordi beating a hasty retreat from the room in a paroxysm of laughter! Exit Bonny! (short for Bonnerjee)
And who can forget about her mimicries! She was par excellence! There was hardly anyone we knew who she, and I, did not imitate. Any such comic act was always there, delivery with or without demand!
Yet, this woman was not really without a care in the world, as it may seem from hearing or reading about her.
Life was not easy for her, right from her birth. She was borne with an unusual growth on her forehead, over one eye. This would, it seems, hang like a bunch of grapes and bleed buckets every now and then. Imagine the plight of a little girl bearing the pain and mortification of such a problem! After going through numerous forms of treatment, all to no avail, God smiled on her in the form of Dr. Subodh Mitra, a pioneer in radium therapy in those early years of the 40s. Chhordi was to become Dr. Mitra's first guinea pig in this experiment with radium. And she triumphed over the unknown with such completeness that, after a few years, anybody who cared to look closely at her would have been hard pressed to notice the faintest of scars over her right eyebrow, the only relic of her post-natal afliction.
After a relatively carefree life through school and college, Chhordi's marriage made things really tough for her. Hers was an arranged marriage to a chap with impeccable credentials. But he was an alcoholic and this fact ultimately, after several years, drove them to the inevitable divorce.
She never married again. Instead she worked herself silly trying to keep her daughter and herself in some degree of comfort. At the fag end of her life she did find someone, but, true to her wretched luck, did not live long enough to enjoy the relationship.
She worked in several companies, travelled abroad extensively and, all in all, enjoyed a relatively good corporate experience.....some were excellent, others were not.She saw the best of times and she saw the worst of times.
In the hospital I was privileged to meet her boss, colleagues and subordinates from her last job ... a few days before she passed away. I was privileged because it is not everyday that one hears such glowing 360 degrees tributes about the achievements of a person in an organisation. Her Big Boss's words still echo in my head..."the impact that Gopa made in 6 months had not happened in the entire two decades of the organisation's existence". At that moment I indeed felt privileged to have been the "kid" brother of such a person.
Chhordi was a magnificent human being. I can say with full confidence that nobody, but nobody knew her as much as I did. After all, right till her last month, we always talked to each other, if not face to face, definitely over the telephone, or as in recent times, through text messaging and email. There was never any secret between us...not when we were young, not when we were grown up.
Although she went through several bad patches in her life, she did not ever allow herself to wallow in self pity. If she appeared moody and sullen at times, she, more than anybody else, had the right to, for life had been often unfriendly to her. She did not deserve any of it. But like the person she was, she always stood up and fought. And what a heart she had! Always giving, always generous to a fault, totally unmindful of her circumstances. I have been touched so many times by this inherent goodness of her heart that I used to marvel at her magnanimity. Every body is not at that level. I was always humbled by this trait in her for I knew that I could never hold a candle by her in this regard. She was a true Champion!
She was an artist, a corporate executive, a businesswoman,a social worker, a comedian and a friendly human being...all rolled into one ball of joy and exuberance. But to me, at the end of the day, she was a sister extraordinaire!
Rest, chhordi. You deserve to.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
I am back!
Yes, I am back! The 16th 0f September was a long time ago when I had put in my last post. ( groans! that last bit sounds as though the buglers had announced my exit from this world!) A lot has happened since then - some good, some bad. As such, that is no big deal since, after all, life is like that, and inexorably so. But the sudden and totally unexpected passing away of a beloved relative leaves one, not only numb with shock and despair, but also desperate to find answers where there are none!
Yes, she has left us, the youngest of three sisters of mine. We spent a lifetime together, shared a lot, (mainly the lighter side of life) till she moved on to a higher life. Very definitely, I shall remember her in words too, apart from in the heart and mind. But later. Not now. When the heart is less heavy and the mind that much clearer.
Till then.
Yes, she has left us, the youngest of three sisters of mine. We spent a lifetime together, shared a lot, (mainly the lighter side of life) till she moved on to a higher life. Very definitely, I shall remember her in words too, apart from in the heart and mind. But later. Not now. When the heart is less heavy and the mind that much clearer.
Till then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
