সুভ নববর্সো , সুভ অনুশীলন

নববর্ষের পূর্ব সন্ধ্যায় সুধু আমার মাটির মুক্তি কামনা করি .....

 

Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore to young generation–An open letter to a Bengali school boy.

To talk about the relevance of Tagore is to see him in the greater light of his personality and the time he walked the earth as we do today.  And to do this we need to see him beyond his literary achievements. We need to look into the essence of this man, the things he stood for and the legacy he left for us to follow.

He is an international figure widely respected—home and abroad, and has been inspiration to many a great man and woman—the poet Wilfred Owen, Scientist Albert Einstein might be taken as example. But if we talk about his relevance he is more relevant to us Bengalis than any other race in the world, because he with his life and action and with his conviction showed what a Bengali needs to be, and what we have really come to.

The time that is gone is gone forever and the time that is to come is a mere presumption and the same premise holds good in our life as well. People who have lived their lives contributing to the ethos, or people who have been simply demolishing what took ages to build have equal influence on all of us. So the future lies in our hand, the young generation, the students, on whose shoulders rest the world.

The life of Rabindranath was a multifaceted one that ideated the need of a questing mind something that is far above the muddle of pre-conceived familiarity we are so much given to now. Today we need to have this originality of thought and action in our day to day life. Over the years this sense of enquiry so vital to our ancestors has now indeed taken a beating. We have lost the legacy of being a rebel and poet, of being people of great courage and vitality and of original thinking.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale once said, “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow.” The question is do we still have that conviction? Does the accolade still apply on us? Do we really deserve it in the present run of time?

Today our intellectual world is steeped in mediocrity and self complacency. But what we have really inculcated post independence is a pathetic snobbery that has made us incapable of seeing things worth seeing, somewhat robbing us of the very sense of pragmatic analyses. In the short story ‘Daakghar’, Tagore showed us the danger of losing our intrinsic judgement to half baked understanding of things around.

We live in a world where we have no respect for our language, and the world once glimmered with the likes of Sarat Chandra, Jibonananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay Bishnu Dey is crumbling to cheap and vulgar Bollywood mediocrity. And we see no offence!

Ergo, today we need to re-live Tagore, resurrect the Tagore that we all have in us because we need him to survive the world, to keep our name on the atlas of people and great nation and be proud of being a Bengali.

We cannot expect to change people who won’t change, but we, the young generation can as well gear up to imbibe those true qualities epitomised by our beloved Poet laureate that we might one day be the precursor to a great Nation of great people.

Anna Hazare--Support this Man, Stand up for humanity...

                                                                                                                Anna Hazare

Great Souls are troubled not because of misfortunes but because they are destined to find ways to loftier summits, the path hitherto unknown to man.

We Salute the Spirit that is in You and the path You have travelled...!!!

You are really an inspiration....!!!

We support You on your march to victory against corruption and injustice, and want to emulate you in the uplift of man and subsequently uplifting our own self mired in wickedness and greed...!!!

Why must Bengalis awake...??? The dangers lurking in the darkness around and ahead.......!!!!

(Part-1)

Bengalis or the true sons and daughters of Bengal must awake for its own sake. Given its progressive and cosmopolitan outlook largely because of its historical significance for being the driving force of Bengal Renaissance, the Bengali speaking people culturally inherits a questing mind with a romantic view of life and things about themselves.

This romanticism influences much of its ethos that took in its purview an entire precinct of socio-economic and cultural spectrum including religion.

Its emergence in the historical backdrop of pre and post independence India rests largely because of this questing mind and dissident note, which even questioned and refashioned and in some cases revolutionised many pre-conceived thoughts and practices deemed otherwise irreprehensible.

Needless to say a majority of great thinkers, authors, musicians, artists, academics and statesmen etc were born of its soil, and which were later to become the yardstick of anything that implied India.

This precocious development of the Bengali race against a vast humanity that was still much in its natal stage over the entire eastern and northern plains of India had ripples sent across that were both discordant and enlightening at the same time; and the after-effect which has lived up to this day.

The awakening of Bengali mind apart from all other nuances created two distinct contradictory forces in the common psyche, especially among the Hindi speaking people. It was the acknowledgement of this enduring Yardstick at one end and hostility stemming from their racial incapacity on the other. In fact the rest of India barring the South nurtures this antagonism that is deeply rooted in history. It is an overview of a general mindset that has been fuelled by vested interests to further their cause of unrestrained hegemony subservient to the imperialists.

Historically Bengal’s re-awakening dug up two great pitfalls for its people:

1.      A generous, highly accommodating and justice loving cosmopolitan attitude.

2.      A sense of narcissism with its glory and new found identity over the years.

 Both these aspects in one way or the other have shaped its path through numerous social upheavals and violent backlash, which muddled its political uprightness and reduced its masses to petty partisan politics full of gore and futile promises san the intellectual fervour that was once fundamental to its very spirit.

Again on the other hand these two aspects left the people blind to issues that were more prominent and vital from the point of survival as a race and its destiny. It filed them with an intoxication of self-indulgence that superciliously ignored the writings on the wall and subsequently failed to address the growing needs of the time, issues like cultural and economic insulation against outsiders too eager to reap on its riches.

The flawed notion of India.

Irrespective of the many good it might have appealed to the rest of India including Bengal, the flawed notion of being an Indian has much to do in the destruction of Assam and Bengal.

Hindi speaking people who have no history of its own in the ilk of Bengal and southern India began to see these places as Promised Land. With south being insulated much on account of its language, Bengal and Assam fell easy prey to their aggressive onslaught.

In the absence of formidable resistance, Assam much in common with Bengal due to geographical and linguistic proximity suffered the brunt of these people seeking greener pasture. When the Assamese finally realised, the damage had already been done and it was done beyond repair.

Consequently the ethnic population sensing danger of losing land to the outsiders went ahead with the demand of separate statehood and Assam underwent two partitions—one is Mizoram and the other is Tripura.

What was left behind was much of a no man’s land with Assamese compelled to share with others at equal footing fuelling mass scale anguish that eventually gave rise to ULFA.

Though gaining popularity riding on the people’s dissent in its initial stage, ULFA ultimately lost ground to centre’s high handed tactics and its own incapacity. Furthermore terror as a means to political end was bound to end in a fizzle.

With ULFA neutralised, the future of Assamese people remains as elusive as ever with outsiders grabbing their land and opportunities and all set to outbreed them to a minority.

(End of part-1)

প্রেম--(Love)

আমি চাইনা আর কথা দিতে 

না আমি চাইনা 

আমার কথা ধুলোয়, কাদায় 

রং মাখা ভাঙ্গা চড়া 

মানুষের পাইর তলায় 

একটি ভাদ্র গৃহস্থালি ভেরুয়া 

হেয় দাড়াক .

আমি আছি সুধু 

সেই রাত্রির অপেক্ক্হে

যেদিন আমার টুকরো টুকরো কথা 

সজীব হেয় দাড়াবে আমার পাসে .

আর পরদিন সকালে 

একটি বেস্সার মেয়ে কে 

দেব আমি 

আমার নাম--

সংগ্রাম .....সংগ্রাম ....