Partha on the Phone!

Our friend Partha Dey went to Kalimpong recently, and these lovely pictures were clicked on that amazing phone camera of his!

A River Called Diana

The first time I saw the river Diana was in 1986, and after all these years, I still don't know for whom it was named. That Sunday, in 1986, we were four young and happy people on the river bank. My newly married husband held my hand and helped me descend to the river while his bachelor friends looked away discreetly. 'Mohan, the married man!' they must have been wanting to yell, like a character in V.S.Naipul's A House For Mr. Biswas, but they were too sweet to rib him in front of me.

Sandeep Ghosh was new in the Dooars, like me, but he and Saumitro Sen were old friends, as were Saumitro and Mohan, my husband. Soon we were all talking like old friends, that day at the riverside, and we all sang together in the car on our way back. The song, 'Yeh Dil Na Hota Bechaara' by Kishore Kumar.

The reason for singing that song : we had just started getting Doordarshan in the Dooars, and were happily looking forward to watching the film 'Jewel Theif ', which features the song, that night.

High Tea?

A Tea Board of India promotional poster with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay endorsing Indian Chai

Dooars Sunset

Take a look at Skywatch!

On the Road, Again?

Where are we heading?

On the topic of roads once again - it seems to be a pet peeve now. These days, the PH -- Pot Hole -- factor plays a big role in determining whether we go out at all. The roads in our area have not been repaired for months. In some places, they haven't been maintained for years. Why remains a mystery. Another monsoon has us in its grip, and the rain-fed rivers are washing away what remains of them.  These roads are National Highway 31 and National Highway 31 C, which pass through Siliguri, and then go east through the Dooars, including Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar districts, to connect the North Eastern states to the rest of the country. I’m talking here about stretches of road that measure over 100 kms. These pictures were taken on NH 31C, between Banarhat and Mal Bazar (a distance of around 45 kms). I have yet to recover from this ride to go on to NH 31, where greater horrors await. One road bridge there seems to be hanging in there by sheer cussedness. 

This one over the River Diana doesn't look too sturdy, either. 

The drive to Mal Bazar used to take us around thirty-five minutes each way in the good old days (two years ago). It took us an hour and ten minutes yesterday. When we returned home, shaken (and stirred), we were happy that we hadn’t been hurt, or even lost our tempers. It isn't a very smooth ride, you see. It is difficult to remain calm when you're being bounced and tilted dangerously into craters, and when every bone in your body is rattled about. 

Craters, Banarhat

The picture below shows a stretch of a road  near Nagrakata leading to a culvert that was washed away by a stream more than six years ago. 

The crumbling 'wall' of boulders is supposed to serve as a barricade.

There is no warning sign, either about the missing culvert, or about the diversion. Our friends' son crashed into the boulders one foggy January night and was lucky to be alive - after six months in hospital.  

We don’t need any politicians calling for blockades on our roads - our roads themselves don’t allow people to move around in anything like comfort. What is the solution? The sustained neglect of these highways by the authorities is alarming. The public isn't making any effective protest. We all complain, all the time, but nothing has come of it. Traders, schoolchildren, shopkeepers, tea garden workers - every resident of the region is affected. It was amusing to see that our daily newspapers, published from Kolkata, brought out coloured supplements last week on North Bengal to attract tourists during the Puja season. Tourists? I wouldn’t put my enemies through travel on these highways!  

The bridge over Jaldhaka River. The cows aren't affected - perhaps, like them,we'll become completely placid, too, and travel only on foot.

Delhi : Jammin'

I spent most of my time in Delhi on BRTC. 'Bread, Rice, Coffee and Tomatoes?' asked a friend. You wish.
BRTC is Delhi's Bus Rapid Transport Corridor. A good plan, but badly executed. It covers an almost 6km long stretch of road in densely populated South Delhi. It is supposed to be on trial. It is a trial - to commuters. Unfortunately for us, who are visitors to Delhi, it covered the distance between where we stay when we visit, and where our children live.
The idea of a dedicated bus corridor with well-built, comfortable buses that provide a regular service should have been put into practice long ago.See how good the new buses look?.
Delhi's public transport system has been in need of improvement since the 1970s, at least. Its buses have always been over-crowded, ramshackle, and irregular. Not to mention the horror stories of women commuters, or the number of people on the roads who are killed by rash bus drivers.

The BRTC is carved up into three lanes on either side of the central divider. 'These are as ugly as Kolkata's tramlines', said our friend Saumitro, 'but at least you can cut across those!' Cars far outnumber buses and two-wheelers in Delhi. They should have been provided with wider lanes for smoother and faster movement. Take a look at these deserted lanes. These are the lanes for buses and two-wheelers.

The BRTC idea is far better suited to Delhi than the Metro, says my brother.
'But how many years will it take us to learn discipline?' he adds. We still have a long way to go.

What’s worse than being stuck on the BRTC?
Listening to the bad jokes about BRTC.
However, when we saw this sign, that said, Delhi's Smart New Way to Travel' I couldn’t help adding 'Is To Stay in One Place'.
The driver of our auto rickshaw threw his head back and laughed in appreciation. He gave me a smiling salute at the end of our ride. Another day, we were saying how it would be realistic to celebrate one's birthday on the road, since no one could reach the party on time. At which that day's auto driver turned around to ask, 'Aaj aapka birthday hai?' (Is it your birthday today?) The husband said, 'Nahi, lekin aise baithhne se ho bhi jaayega' (If we sit long enough it will be my birthday soon). We were all fellow sufferers. The best crack came from one of the drivers himself. BRTC, he said, stood for 'Bahut Ruk ke Traffic Chalti hai' (I guess that would translate to But Really, Traffic Crawls. For us, who neither work nor live in Delhi, it was merely tedious. I felt for the cheerful three-wheeler drivers, who lost a lot of time - and fares - everyday. And almost forgave the surly ones who refused to take us.

Blogged On The Tracks

Mohan Checks It Out  - It Works! 
It is about 10.00 a.m. on another typical July morning, all grey skies and rain-splashed windows. What's interesting is that I'm reporting all this from the Guwahati Rajdhani Express, somewhere near Moghulsarai and on the way to Delhi. Technology, Indian Railways : you've come a long way! Someone's playing the Beatles' 'In My Life' on FM Radio. Train journeys have always been fun, but this is too good!

Flying

Pretty (and) Sturdy

That's what these plants are, having survived a month of the monsoon. Gallardia is an ugly-sounding name for this really pretty flower, which I have never seen in this shade of yellow before.

                                        The 'standard' colour is orangey red - like this one, here.

Gomphrena -- Another awful name for these bright and unpretentious 'Bachelors' Buttons'. They are tough plants, and they're nicely filling up the bed where the zinnias died out.

White crocuses spread like a rumour, outnumbering my favourite pink and yellow. They're bordered by portulacas, (below)which only peep out in the early morning.

They close up tight after 10 a.m. There are two varieties: single and multi- layered. Again, the common name, Moss Rose, is so much prettier than the 'nursery' name. They did very well in our Delhi home in the early eighties.
We grew them in two old kitchen sinks. When my nephews came home for the summer holidays, these flowers were beautiful in the cool early hours of the morning. They looked like fragile little roses, and the colours included magenta, bright orange, white and yellow. An image comes to mind - of my father smiling as he watched his eldest grandson sitting and watering each tiny plant gently.




 

 I love the shape of this ixora bush

Below: A pot-pourri by Mithoo the flower artist - an arrangement combining bamboo orchids, heliconia, some geraniums that bloomed by mistake, bachelors' buttons and foliage.

                                                                                                                                                                   

Monsoon : Rath and Wrath

For many years, I thought the Jagannath Rath Yatra – Chariot Festival -- was something that only took place in Puri, Orissa. It is held in cities all over the world. There is a Jagannath temple in Banarhat town, which is close to our tea garden, and a Rath Yatra takes place there every year. The deities of the temple are taken out on a carriage, which is pulled through the main street. After a short ride, they are installed in the grounds of the Banarhat Bengali High School. Seven or eight days later, the 'Ulta Rath' or return journey takes place. It is believed that the act of helping to pull the carriage, or even of touching the ropes, brings great blessings. There are Rath ‘Melas’ - fairs - at several places in the Dooars. They’re not as big as the traveling fairs that move from town to town during Durga Puja and Diwali, but they create a lot of excitement and activity.

Yesterday in Banarhat, I caught a glimpse of the Rath as it went ahead of several vehicles and large scattered crowds of people. Little children were out on their way to the fair, smartly dressed, and all of them had hair that looked as if it had been combed very fiercely by their mothers.

For my husband, and for all the tea planters in the area, the Rath Yatra is a very important date. The saying goes, 'Rath Brings Rain'. Sure enough, we recorded over 18cms of rain on the night before the Rath Yatra, and almost half as much on the day of the festival. For the next few days, until the 'Ulta Rath', the planters have their faith to keep them going.

I wonder why the rainy season has so many religious dates associated with it. In an earlier age, the monsoon weather was celebrated in art and song. There are a number of classical ragas in Hindustani music based on the moods of the monsoon. The Raag Kafi sings of thunder, lightning and sharp showers, while Raag Des is the raga of gentle drizzles. We all look forward to a good monsoon because rainfall continues to determine the fate of food crops every year in our country. Undoubtedly, the first rains cool the earth and bring happiness everywhere.

What follows is weeks of humidity, spells of heat, water logging, blocked roads, damaged railway lines, and cancelled trains. Buildings collapse after prolonged spells of rain. We see television images of people stranded for hours on rooftops in flooded villages or in vehicles on city roads. The news channels could use the same footage every year, and we wouldn’t even notice. It’s as if the phrase regular as rain has acquired another meaning.

Virulent fevers and water-borne diseases spread rapidly. The monsoon is the season of epidemics. We’ve already seen fetid puddles of water in potholes on the National Highway here. The open-air food-stalls at the Rath Mela couldn’t possibly serve food that is prepared hygienically. Not really a good time to celebrate?

Waiting for the rains in Mumbai with niece Deepa

Last year, we were in Mumbai just as the monsoon hit the city. It was incredibly beautiful; the rain clouds formed shifting pictures over the sea at Marine Drive. My sister Viji was disappointed not to find her favourite Bhel-Puri wala at his usual place. We’d all been keen on tasting that Bhel-Puri! When we learnt why he was gone, we felt quite good, really. The city’s health authorities had closed down all open-air food stalls - a very sensible and necessary precaution.

No Words

The song 'No Words'from the album Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and the Wings - my favourite.

A Killer Strikes

On 25th June, Manwar Ali, a resident and former worker of the tea garden where we live, was attacked and killed by a wild elephant. The elephant, a lone tusker, had entered the Bara Line - a workers' colony - early in the evening, and it had hidden itself quietly for some time before the people living near Manwar's house saw it. They gave chase, as they usually do, frightening it away with crackers and strong lights, and by making a lot of noise. Tea garden people are resigned to sharing their living space with elephants.
A tractor with powerful lights was driven around to send the elephant back in the direction of the forest. The chase ended - or so it appeared - and people went back home. Manwar Ali turned off to the side street where he lived, and stamped the dirt off his chappals. At the sound, the elephant came out from where it had been hiding, unseen, and hurled him to the ground, into the tea area. Manwar rolled into a little drain and hid there. The elephant sniffed around him once, and walked away. Manwar got up, and walked until he found someone. He told him what happened, and asked to be taken to the hospital. It was around eleven thirty in the night. People gathered at once and they took the poor man to the garden hospital, where the doctor examined him. He didn’t have any external injuries. However, the doctor recommended that he be taken to the hospital in Birpara town. Someone was sent to call the driver of the ambulance, but before he rushed back with him, Manwar died. He must have sustained heavy internal injuries. His head had hit against a tree trunk when he fell.

The shock was terrible. What a sudden, unexpected, fearful and painful death. Manwar's brother had been with him less than an hour before, in the big group that always runs behind elephants - keeping a safe distance, of course. No one tried to injure the elephant or to harm it in any way. It killed without a reason, and without any provocation.
The Assistant Manager alerted the Wild Life squad in the area, who turned up soon enough, but not before they expressed the fear that they might get beaten up by angry tea-garden workers. It has been known to happen. There was no trouble. The people were agitated, but not aggressive.
The state pays a compensation of Rs.One Lakh in the case of deaths caused by wild elephants. The Squad paid a small part of the sum as an advance towards funeral expenses.
There are so many cases of elephants killing people. According to a report in The Times of India dated 5 June 2008, 250 people die on an average every year in the country's eastern states in the man-elephant conflict. There is a website called 'Elephant News India' where I spotted the link to this article, and it carries 18 stories of man-elephant conflict for the month of June alone. Now there is one more.

Elephants are dangerous animals, and we in tea gardens have a healthy respect for them. There are as many elephant stories as there are tea planters. They are part of our lives, the tall tales that are told and retold over evening drinks in friends' bungalows. I don’t feel like recounting even one here now.
Visitors to tea gardens get really excited when they hear about elephants coming out for an evening round from the nearby forests. 'Don’t say you that you wish you could see an elephant,' my husband always tells them. That elephants can kill, and for no apparent reason, is something visitors find hard to believe. That they can destroy huge areas of cultivated land, including vast areas planted with tea, sounds impossible. My husband has more to say about elephants. They are huge, but light-footed. They can chase their quarry at great speed, running at something like 40km an hour. They have tiny eyes in proportion to their bodies, and weak eyesight, but their sense of smell more than makes up for that. An elephant is a master at concealment. It can hide in the darkness, even in the shadow of a tree.

The night after the attack, everyone was worried. A killer elephant generally returns to the place where it has struck. Manwar's brother, his closest surviving relative, was filled with sorrow, but he had no anger. He had a sad story to recount to my husband when he met him in Bara Line early in the morning. Their uncle was killed, over twelve years ago, at almost the same spot, and by an elephant. He'd been carrying a little child in his arms. The child was lightly flicked aside out of harm's way by the elephant before it struck the man down and killed him.

Harry Potter and You-Know-Why It Works

The Harry Potter books may have started off as a set of 'different' school stories for young readers, but the final work in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , is nothing less than a full-pitched effort to sell England, Old and New.

The use of elements of Western mythology and folklore (including Classical, Celtic and English elements) ensured the early success of these books. They are the 'Amar Chitra Katha' of the English speaking world. The names Minerva, Pomona, Sirius, Bellatrix, Severus, Lucius and Draco are all Greek and Roman; Arthur, Percy and Ginevra are from Arthurian legend, and Hagrid, Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade have Gaelic/Celtic resonances. It is fascinating, it's entertaining, and educational.

How many young children read novels today? And yet they read these, or they have them read out to them. Myth and magic in their pure forms rule over any other form of fiction any day. Add to this the episodic format - with Harry and his friends growing up with their readers, one book every eighteen months, and you know why it all succeded. We're a civilization that loves to wait for the next episode, while we wonder what's going to happen. The number of websites devoted to guessing what would happen in the last book was mind-boggling.

The fantasies on sale are admirable : An orphaned, neglected, unloved and unremarkable boy discovers that he is a hero of sorts in a parallel, hidden world of which he first hears when he is eleven. He's a wizard; he can perform magic, but only after he's been to the school which teaches magic. He is invited to join Hogwarts, a residential school where he doesn't have to pay fees ( a sure-sell fantasy for parents), where every meal is a feast, and where he gets to sleep in a four poster bed with silken hangings. And he's inherited an enormous fortune from his parents.
He is the saviour for whom the 'other world' is waiting, because he is the only known survivor of the killing curse, which rebounded off him and neutralised its perpetrator, the evil Dark Wizard Voldemort. Once in school, he discovers that he has extraordinary skills, including sporting skills. School matches, house points and championships; night-wanderings, misadventures and punishments share the reader's attention with the hero's quest to destroy the returned Voldemort, who still wants to rule the world, but now wants to kill Harry first. The series could have coasted along these lines, but there was scope for much more, which someone was quick to realise.

After the weighty and messy Book Five, it appears that the author and her editors got down to giving a coherent shape - and a slightly different direction - to the last two books. Already the elements of the saviour and the chosen heir are in place. The last book, as many commentators have noted, has an increased number of elements of the Arthurian legend and the Grail Quest.(Remember the success of The Da Vinci Code ?) Only, this Quest is for something unholy, all the enchanted objects which enclose bits of Voldemort's soul and which must be destroyed. It is like the Dark Ages; the castle is without its king, the social order has been subverted, and fear and suspicion prevail everywhere. The school story is dropped abruptly. Harry, Ron and Hermione drop out, and are on the run through the English countryside, hiding in forests like Robin Hood and his band of men. Snape, the teacher who is Harry's tormentor and appears to be on the wrong side but is a double agent, morphs into a chivalrous lover: a Sir Galahad. He'd loved Harry's mother all his life, and he chose to suffer silently all along, maligned by both sides, to protect her son, eventually sacrificing his life. The transformation of Snape is a master-stroke.

All the elements of the Middle Ages are used to create an allegory with today's world. Voldemort is on an ethnic cleansing spree, ridding the magical world of all but Purebloods. He rules by fear, and he rules absolutely. Feudalism, hierarchies, servitude, and social discrimination are the evils which the young adventurers of the book seek to destroy. The world clamours for Harry, ' The Chosen One', Albus Dumbledore's anointed successor, but he chooses to relinquish the sceptre.

This formula has worked marvellously in an age of 'Us' and a nameless 'Them', whom it would be quite politically incorrect to name, and in an age that can't get enough of Prince William and Page Three Royalty. The Lost Heir motif is cleverly introduced in the last book, and Harry turns out to be the last in the line of the Peverells, the most blue-blooded of magical families! Potter's world becomes a metaphor for an idealised, multi-racial, tolerant and enlightened England, with an Heir-in-Waiting who chooses to abdicate! And the final flourish - J.K. Rowling puts a black man in the hot seat by making Kingsley Shacklebolt the Minister for Magic.

While Enid Blyton and the writers of her age appear hopelessly racist and xenophobic today, Rowling and team have spared no effort to produce something that is politically correct, and guaranteed to please everyone the world over. And in case they'd trodden on any toes - they seem to have done a quick review after the book was actually released - J.K.Rowling beamingly announced that Dumbledore was gay. It was like saying, 'See? We made sure no one's left out.'

Under June Skies

Topiary. When you say that word in Tamil, you might be saying 'Throw your cap away.' Topi - erry! In that sense of the word, there's been a lot of 'topiary' in the twentieth century. I wonder why? With temperatures touching new highs every season, we need to keep our heads covered and cool.
If you wear a cap or a hat, you get funny looks. As a woman who wears a topi in the sun at all times, I've faced amusement, ridicule, cockiness and wisecracks, and I'm not exactly thick-skinned. In fact, it’s because of sensitive skin that I always wear protective head-gear. My brother in Delhi completely stopped wearing topis after a motorcyclist flicked one off his head when he was taking an evening walk.

A good alternative would be an umbrella, but the things you get these days are all made of synthetic material which compounds the heat. Instead of getting a little circle of cool shade, like what the black cloth umbrellas of old provided, you find yourself perspiring in a claustrophobic heat capsule. 
Now that the monsoon is here, we know it's going to rain at any time, and without any warning. No one in a tea garden is going to leave home without an umbrella. Rainy, sunny or cloudy skies, that umbrella is indispensable.

 Young Badal - his name means 'clouds'

Idler's Reverie

I wish we only spoke in verse:
If prose was not allowed in speech,
And minds rephrased each thought before
It fitted into patterned lines,
Think how much less of hurtful noise
Or harmful rage would be expressed?

There'd be a world of silences,
And we would all then thinkers be,
And only that which qualified
As poetry would pass our lips.

Picture : Watercolor by Swedish artist Anders Zorn, from the Internet
Heartfelt thanks to sister Eliza

Haiku : Good Poets

I am not averse
to verse, if it tells a tale
and tells it well.

Haiku : Bad Poets Society

In verse the inverse
holds : imitation is not
a form of flattery.

Z is for Zinnias