A Kaleidoscope WorldWhile the problem of rural electrification continues to baffle us, a silent progress has been taking place in different parts of India and, in particular, in West Bengal. Before I reveal to you what the nature of this progress is, here are some district wise details concerning the state of electrification of rural households in West Bengal.
Over the river, the rains are falling
The waters have risen in a tide
Like hopes one keeps concealed …
Have you ever come across a frank-FART-er? I always thought that the being was extinct. Indeed, if it did exist today, it would surely have qualified as the eighth wonder of our planet, don’t you think? Wait though my son, wait. It seems now that you and I, as well as other specimens of humanity whose footsteps have been guiding us, were utterly wrong in our convictions. Frank-FART-ers exist in profusion, or so at least the menus of a delicatessen or two are advertising in Kolkata. In large letters, capitalized that is. At the very entrance of the shops. You can’t miss them.
Come to think of it though, most of us might have been exposed to a somewhat lesser variety of the species, frank-FART-ers minus the boldness of it carried by the first five letters. They exist and perform with gay abandon in night trains as well as crowded buses, as evidenced by the diverse range of noises one’s ears are exposed to every now and then.
Neither Karl Marx, who authoured The Poverty of Philosophy, nor M. Proudhon, who wrote The Philosophy of Poverty in 1847 could perceive how relevant the titles of their works would be for the state of West Bengal’s Assembly elections 164 years later. It is not as though the subject matter of the controversy between them has any bearing at all for the election at hand in 2011. Sometimes though, the shell assumes greater significance than the nut itself, or else why should they have coined a word such as ‘nutshell’? And what, in a nutshell, is the situation of West Bengal?
The rains’ turn it was — to usher in the morn,
As the sky stood lost — in the embrace of the dark,
Come to think of it, you can’t really blame God for failing to make all men equal, or all women for that matter. Not to speak of the rest of the living world, starting from cats, dogs and grasshoppers, all the way back to dinosaurs.
Inequality notwithstanding, God has ensured that what one loses on the swing, one’s almost certainly compensated for on the turnaround. To wit, a spider doesn’t feel too disappointed, or so I presume, that it’s not endowed with a Cleopatra charm.
Barack Obama’s desperate bid to rescue the recession-plagued American economy stands in sharp contrast to events that occurred in the early 1970s when Richard Nixon was in charge of the country. His bête noire at the time was the then president of France, Charles De Gaulle, who demanded that the United States of America pay for its mounting trade deficits by gold shipments from Fort Knox valued, according to the Bretton Woods agreement, at $35 an ounce. The US refused to honour the agreement and forced upon the world the tour de force of an oil-backed dollar. Oil imports, in other words, had to be paid for by US dollars and this made it imperative for everyone to hold eagerly on to the dollars printed by the US government to support its mounting trade deficits. The US trade deficit turned, therefore, into an advantage for its creditors, especially the ones, such as Japan, who were in dire need of oil imports to keep their economies running.
There is a proverb in Bengali which, translated, runs,
While Emperors and Kings merrily fight,
The small fries suffer a dreadful plight!
The words conceal deep wisdom, as amply borne out by the treatment life meted out to Nishith-babu.
Nisheeth-babu sold books, but he was more of a hawker than a seller.
