It's hard to be cheerful at this beginning of the new year, yet it's impossible not to laugh. Here we are, in Bengal, with our backs against the wall, or, rather, with our collective back pressed against perhaps as many as four different walls, if that's an analogy you can visualize.
Even taking into account the worst moments of the Left Front years, we haven't really seen a time like this since the chaos of the late 1960s. Here we have a rudderless state government, barely three and some years into power, singularly bent upon one thing and one thing only - its own survival. As they flail at some very real and many imagined enemies, Ms Banerjee and her core team seem to have forgotten that they are also here to govern, and to be responsive to people's needs. They have never realized that accepting one's mistakes and correcting them is part and parcel of governance, and, thus, they have tripped from botch up to scandal to misadventure without giving themselves a chance to do things better. For example, it would have been quite simple to cooperate with the Central security agencies in the whole Burdwan fiasco, but just as they treated the Park Street rape as a conspiracy against the ruling party they also decided - if that's the word - that any investigation by the National Investigation Agency or other Central agencies was, likewise, actually an attack on themselves, let the serious security issues go take a jump. Similarly, the shameful, ongoing fiasco at Jadavpur University could have been nipped in the bud with the withdrawal of a vice-chancellor who richly deserves to be removed. Instead, the Trinamul Congress has tried to dig in their heels and found themselves twisting in the air, even as the powers-that-be at the Centre smilingly watch them spin, all the time murmuring schadenfreude shlokas under their breath. In the meantime, the fact that JU, one of India's best universities, might suffer long-term damage bothers neither the TMC nor the Bharatiya Janata Party because both narrowly see it as a den of leftist thought and resistance, and both are currently treating the place primarily as a site that will yield political gain.
The phrase 'between a rock and a hard place' seems to have been invented for Bengal. If you look outside the state to the next tier of government, you have yet another group of malevolent comedy artists ruling from New Delhi. One could try and put aside the surgically sutured Ganesh and the (real) Dr Swamy's absurd tweetings, but the massive potential land-grab via ordinance, the removal of environmental safeguards, the freebies to the paymaster oligarchs, the incendiary '***** zaadey' comments, these will lead to misery and blood. If the mistreatment of Muslims will make Muslim-majority countries reconsider business-partnerships with India, the ridiculous attempt to efface Christmas will draw ire from Seoul to South Carolina. In the meantime, the Central government is making the same mistake we saw Mamata Banerjee make when she came to power: the newly elected leaders continue with the smoke and mirrors that won them the election, without any nominal, counter-balancing, substantial change, save the returns on investment promised to their paymasters. Our choice, in Bengal, is to be simultaneously striped in toxic blue and white while being painted under a wash of poisonous orange. It's a terrible colour combination.
Look next at the neighbourhood just outside our borders. To the east, our cousins seem to be undergoing a sympathetic infection connected to the TMC, leading to a slightly different type of loss of control: instead of valuing the people who've contributed so much to making the 1971 mass murder trials possible, their tribunal is busy attacking journalists on the ground that someone, three years ago, (quite reasonably) challenged the figure of the actual dead in the '71 massacres! To the west (admittedly it's on the far side of us), Pakistan seems ever closer to multiple-organ failure, with the spillage unlikely to miss seeping over our borders, some of it likely to jump across and infect us locally, as we've seen in Burdwan.
Given the state of the rest of the world, we are unlikely (even with the best will in the world, not something we have) to see a London-like city on the banks of the Hooghly, or a Switzerland-like province in the nearby hill areas, any time soon. Nationally, we are equally unlikely to see in the near future the making in India of any kind of a swachhBharat. Over-weening ambition and clueless incompetence make for a bad colour-combination, whether you're installed in Writers' Buildings/Nabanna or Race Course Road/PMO.
So, the question arises at the beginning of this next perambulation around the sun: what is one to do? What is one to do in this city, in this state and country where the rich hate the poor, and the poor - with far more justification - hate the rich? What is one to do in a country where short-circuits of religion, caste and regionalism continue to domino in a constant loop of conflagrations?
Trawling the net, I recently came across a site where a behaviour- guru offered us his programme. The burden of the man's song went thus: forget about New Year resolutions and forget even about goals, just concentrate on developing positive new habits, one for each month of the year, and then on maintaining those habits, and the resolutions and goals will automatically be met. Though the macro was clearly laid out, the micro-gains of this wisdom came, naturally, at a nominal commercial price: something like $10 a month, where the guru would, virtually, shepherd you into staying on your course for habit-forming on things like 'meditation', 'being present', 'kicking a bad habit', and so on. I chose not to spend my hard-earned on signing up but the programme got me thinking - what could be twelve, or, since one moves slowly in Calcutta, say, six habits that would be useful to develop at a dire time such as this? I'm sure other, sharper, brains than mine can come up with better ideas, but here are my suggestions to start off the new year.
Put all news and media through the junk-food/street-food test. We are told to avoid fast-food since it's bad for us. Yet, we know, living in Calcutta, that some of our street food is among the best in the world and quite okay, healthwise. Similarly, news and entertainment can do with some sifting through: figure out which sections of the newspaper, which programmes on which TV channels, suit your constitution and cut out the rest. In fact, try and see if you can find which bits of news have been cooked properly and which are pfaff and avoid the junk. Once you've warmed up, at some point in the year, try a full month of strict vipasana, where you don't absorb any news or internet whatsoever.
Try and make your local environment just a little bit better. Plastic bags are banned in some states, not in others. Try and have a month where you don't use any plastic bags at all. See if you can continue this. If you're one of those people who don't deal at all with household shopping, then try and see if you can avoid using your car horn for a month, or make your driver do this, or the taxi-driver, good luck with the bus-drivers (but then find something else). If you're a student, pester people about recycling. Get slapped if necessary, but pester.
Try and spend time outside your geographical comfort zone. So, if you drive everywhere, you could try walking on the street during the busy times and not just for your morning walk. If you're used to orbiting between one or two neighbourhoods, tell yourself that you will discover a new, different neighbourhood each week. Explore the city and your environs to get a real, empirical picture of where you are placed. Change your footwear, try walking around in hawai chappals or, if you dare, even barefoot.
Try and spend time outside your social comfort zone . Try and talk, every day, or every other day, to someone from a different religion, from a different caste, from a different class. Try and really have a conversation, get them talking and then let them speak. Be open and speak from the heart yourself. There is a theory that we humans are actually one massed organism, from Pranab Mukherjee to Rakhi Sawant, from Rahul Dravid to Mahendra Singh Dhoni, all unbelievably one, so try and get to know as many other parts of your being as you can. If you are an artist type, then talk to someone who does cut and dried, like an administrator or scientist, and vice versa . One month, and then continue.
When facing a choice between anger and non-anger choose non-anger. Everything makes us angry, the traffic, the TV, our colleagues, family, friends. Choosing non-anger doesn't mean backing down in front of injustice or bad behaviour, it means finding ways other than anger and harsh words to deal with it. The best way to do this is to remember that everyone has a huge reservoir of anger, whether justified or not. This is not Gandhian (that's a different thing), this is about saving those brain cells that explode when you explode, internally or externally.
For one month, find an occasion to laugh every two hours. You're allowed to laugh at others, but only one out of three times; the other times you
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