Poll Tales

The battle now is at fever pitch. The effects are getting to us - am currently down with fever - the daily onslaught of a 1000 blaring mikes, posters, banners, hoardings, flyers, processions, meetings is as bothersome as the hot humid weather.

It had began sedately enough but gained momentum, the battle being mainly between TMC & CPM (but ofcourse). A few lotuses here and there and I think I saw one hoarding (smallish) of Pranab Mukherjee. Local para Party offices opened up - CPM and TMC have theirs in ground floors of vacant buildings at right angles to each other, near my office.

BJP is content to a few flags tied to posts at the bus stand, accross the Diamond Harbour Road - which are there one day and gone the next.

With about 2 weeks remaining, the final onslaught is on. Work keeps me to this side of Kolkata and so I don't know what the scenarios are in traditional CPM strongholds - but unless they come up with something drastic, TMC seems to be winning the battle (of visibility) hands down!

Didi's is everywhere...Slightly larger than life size cut outs are dotting the landscape. There is one just down the Kalighat bridge - on your right. In her white saree, peering in through over hanging branches...standing a top a small cement stoop...like she is about to hail a bus and step in!

And yesterday - the Coup de Grace: I got the schock of my life when I looked out of the bus window and saw didi, hands folded, serenely suicidal in the middle of the tram tracks. On a closer look ... it was a cutout in the space between the tracks ...but pretty effective one!

How do others or even TMC itself top this? Atleast the others have the option of saying that they don't indulge in such gimmicks! But hey...if nothing else, it does provide much needed comic relief.

United we sweat

Phew. It's been unbearable.

Temperatures ranging around 40, 41, 41.8, and if we are lucky (like today), 39 degrees. Plus Humidity - according to Yahoo it is 84% today (felt like 100%). And ofcourse power cuts everywhere and in a bizzare turn of affairs, Kolkata - Dumdum to Behala had 6-10 hours of powercut on Sunday, except for some 16 -20 houses in the Hazra- D'Park - Triangular Park area (us included) and couldn't enjoy our good luck for fear that we'd have a power cut too. And ofcourse there have been outages ever since - mostly as soon as we step into our office and throughly sweaty and tired even before we can began work and around 3pm each afternoon when it's hottest.

There was a met forecast of cyclone Bijli. It never came. (Which has come as a relief for people along the coast). Not only did Bijli bypass us completely, my ever cautious, ever prepared father insisted on having every window tightly shut for a few days after the met announcement which meant our nights - ones inside our appartment were as sweltering as the days.

What the multiple captain theory for KKR, CPM vs TMC couldn't do, the heat wave has. Kolkata is united in endless discussion on how hot it is, whose place is hotter, who suffered the most, prickly heat, boils and boil-lets (phora and phuskuri)...

Chaprasi to CEO everyone feeling the heat which shows no signs whatsoever of abating.

Not much Kolkata in Knight Riders

And there it was: Sourav won't be the captain of Kolkata Knight Riders - rotating or not. Brendan McCullum it would be.

At once the IPL balloon punctured for me. I was amazed at what I was feeling. I tried telling myself that its only a game and one which to my frequent angst gets way too much attention than any other sport in India; that it will be over in a month or so and life will simply move on for everyone including Sourav. And there are more important things in life. But I couldn't dislodge the stiffling pall of gloom which descended. I didn't feel like indulging in a screaming, shouting angry rant against everyone (real or imagined) who was responsible for it. Lost some interest in IPL.

What's left in KKR then? Only the KR? SRK's KR? John Buchanan's KR?

I did try to leave work early to catch the 2nd match last night and made the mistake of telling the auto driver to go super sonic fast: which he did: and had all of us speechless with fright - but I came home with 15 minutes to spare. Watched Chennai lose to Mumbai, saw Dimitri Mascarenhas's fantastic bowling in the first over. And yet that thrill I felt at the last IPL wasn't there. South Africa must have fantastic facilities, everything ship-shape, no power failure (like at Edens last year) but somehow -- that crazy passion wasn't there. Just not the same as seeing it happen in your own hometown (and not only at Eden, but anywhere else in the country), the hordes of manic about cricket fans. That palpable excitement, buzz, build up, the collective agony and ecstacy...not there.

I will be watching the 1st KR (and not so Kolkata KR) match tonight. (hurt and betrayed as I feel...eeeks....can that be me? Aparently it is....despite my telling myself its only a game)!

Bengali New Year 1416

Best wishes for the Bengali new year 1416! Obviously a big ocassion with bengalis worldwide and in Bengal. Alas. No holiday for me this poila baisakh (the first day of the month of Baisakh).

And this morning was sultrier than usual. On top of that I got onto a crowded bus and got no seat for a very long time. There I was sweaty, hot and bothered and hanging on for dear life as the maniac driver (pre-requisitive for all mini bus driver) zoomed and swerved his way through the roads of Kolkata. Until we got stuck in a massive jam on Diamond Harbour Road. On our side of the road, vehicles stretched behind and in front of us as far as the eye could see. And on the other side? One after the other, various processions, boudis and bhadraloks carrying banners, others dressed as Swami Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohan Roy etc, women doing dandiya for some odd reason, men in pristine white dhoti panjabi! And in midst of all this, autos, taxis, big and small buses, matadors, vans, cycles simply climbed onto the tram tracks in the divider in the middle throwing up a thick blanket of dust.

And then as we moved ahead after a long wait, I saw the other signs of Poila Baisakh: Long queues outside mandirs and equally long ones outside meat shops! Start the new year with puja and end it with a good mangshor jhol (almost a religion in Bengal). Nothing quite like it!

And ofcourse there were the ubiquitous blood donation camps (as important as mangshor jhol it seems). I counted three in the 10 km stretch...must have missed others while I was watching the procession.

Even a long and tiring day at work couldn't stop us from being in a general good mood that is usually associated with all holidays and ofcourse poila baisakh. Subho Naba Barsha to all!

Dawn at Murguma

Impossible work load, overload in fact. Home-work-home-work monday to saturday and very frequently sunday too. Work took me out of station - last month - to Guwahati twice, Bhubaneswar and Nagpur once each (airport to hotel to meeting to hotel to airport everywhere) and Shantiniketan thrown in (for holi) but alas, with office laptop and deadlines looming large. So I live vicariously, through other's travel for travel's sake. Below are some mindblowing photos of Murguma in Purulia. Murguma means mayurer bari - peacock's home. Photos taken by my cousin B.

Viewpoint

V thought it looked like a mountain...

I thought it looked like a fish.

And both were correct in our own ways and from where we were coming ... Me from Bengal and V from the hills!

The Torrid Zone

It has become unbearable. Already. The temperature has been varying between 35 to 39 this past week. And April has only just begun. I look up the exact location of Kolkata on Wikipedia {don't want to do the daab on taal gach trick again} and find that we miss both the tropics Cancer and Capricorn and though we miss Equator as well, we are closer to it than the tropics. However, {aha} we are in what is called the Torrid Zone. Sounds ...umm.. interesting? Well actually that means it is the hottest part of the earth.

The high levels of pollution {my favorite kolkata rant}, combined with high humidity means by the end of the day, we are covered {would go so far as to say, we are actually weighed down by it} a thick layer of grime.

And yet, "sultry tropics" would mean people lounging around in huge cane chairs under slow ceiling fans drinking some thing cool in a tall glass. Must be all those Raj stories. How silly to think romantically of the tropics while sweating it out, with no respite in sight? Afterall, its onlyApril, with May, June, July, August, September, October ahead and the Kolkata summer might stretch into perhaps even November.

For now, I sit back and imagine the coolness this morning, in Gurgaon where there was a a hail storm, and how V must have rushed to get her camera to take the photo and email it to me:

Looks like a fish, doesn't it?

Occupational Hazard

All buses without exception and I mean ALL, slow down at the 'Naba Graha' Mandir on the left of the Kalighat bridge. They don't stop. Just slow down and the conductor or the helper, throws a coin or two which sails out the bus door, over the bridge rails, missing the trees and straight through the mandir door. This must be a regular, routine, daily deed judging by the bulls eye scored by conductor after conductor. I have in the 5 months of commuting to work on this route, never seen a mis throw. I catch a bus between 8:30 and 8:45 - don't know if each bus offers daskshina each time it passes by or just at that time...perhaps by when the purohit is offering morning prayers.

But just imagine if coins came flying from each bus as it passed by ... several every minute .... the amount of dakshina piling up each day. But that's not all I am referring to: I leaned out yesterday and watched the coin arc beautifully inside the mandir narrowly miss the purohit who ducked at the right moment. He did this without missing a mantra! He must be so used to it by now that the chant-duck-chant-duck-chant is now old hat for him! Just another Occupational Hazard.

Its never too late...

This is a narkal gaach - Coconut tree - and not a taal gaach. We get coconuts (brown ones) and daab (fresh green ones) from it.

Its been there outside my window ... just out of my arm's reach for atleast 18 years and maybe even before we moved in here. And yet I just found out about it now. After my Sunday picnic post ... thru aghast phone call (from my friend and host of the picnic) and other blogger(s) via comment. Well its never too late to learn!

Maybe it shouldn't have rained in Assam or No rains for Rupali

I left an already-warm-and-humid-at-6:40 am-Kolkata for Assam. Just an hour and half later, I landed at Guwahati. It was cold. Not cool. Cold. It had apparently rained all night or atleast for the better part of the night. I shivered in my Kolkata summer wear and eyed locals clad in sweaters and shawls enviously. And it rained several times during the two days I was there.

Taxi drivers, hotel manager, waiters, auto drivers, colleagues I met all told me that this was the first rains they have had in 8-9 months.

No rains must have been a terrible ordeal for scores including the father of one Rupali Bhuyan living in Tinsukia. However, the rains couldnot have come at a worse time for Rupali. An article in the Guwahati edition of TOI rerported that Rupali, 17 was yoked to a plough and made to plough her father's fields. It was indeed 8-9 months of no rain, her father kept cursing her and saying a boy would have made things different. And the villagers picked it up from there and somehow things took a strange and unfortunate shape: Rupali Bhuyan plouging the fields in place of her father's bullocks would propitiate the rain gods.

And then the skies opened and it rained and how.

Rupali probably hates her miserable lot in life. But she must be hating the rains even more. In superstition riddled India, no amount of explanations, reasonings would convince her family, neighbours and community. It probably never be written off as a coincidence. THAT would be a miracle.

The report also stated that Women's Rights Group has taken this up but the police said they weren't aware of any such happening since no one had registered a complaint.