Traffic fines and misplaced priorities

Everything is upside down in India. The new motor vehicles rules kicked in recently with significant increases in fines for all kinds of traffic violations.

And people are pissed off.

Why are traffic fines so high in a country with such low income? Everyone is asking this.

When people get back saying that many advanced countries have such high fines. The retort is that they have high income and we are poor. And off course, the other guy is stamped as a bhakt.

I recently received a WhatsApp forward which listed traffic fines for different advanced economies. It made the point that fines in India are not the highest in the world.

Someone in the group did not like it and said that it should have also shown the per capita income of these countries to make a fair comparison. It was argued that a country which cannot ensure three square meals for all its citizens cannot have such high fines.

And this is exactly where things are upside down in our country.

People have forgotten that traffic fines are not implemented to ensure food safety but to ensure road safety.

While food is necessary to survive, ensuring that I get back home safely and not get killed by a road accident is equally important.

India is the country which has the ignonimity of having the highest number of road accident deaths in the world. To check such outsized impact on public mortality by road accidents, there has to be an outsized negative incentive for people to follow traffic rules.

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

It's because we are upside down. Our thought process is upside down. We wear helmets so that the police do not fine us, we put on seat belts only when we are near traffic signals due to the same reason. As if helmets and seat belts exist just because these are tools for the government to levy fines.

We are just so completely messed up!

Cleaning Kolkata

Kolkata has been called the City of Joy. However, not many people know that the source of this name is a novel of the same name by Dominique Lappiere. He celebrated the city of Kolkata with all its flaws. However, that celebration was gritty, dirty and painted a picture pf Kolkata's underbelly like never before. In Lappiere's novel, Kolkata is not so much a joyful and beautiful metropolis but a city of slums and destitution. Anandanagar was the slum he wrote about which translates to the City of Joy in English.

While Kolkata has come along a long way and the city's skyline now boasts of highrises and suave office buildings, the city still has that dirty look around every corner. The streets are cleaner no doubt but not as clean as it should be.

When Swachh Bharat was launched with much fanfare in 2014, I was excited like never before. I thought that finally the cities garbage dumps will get cleaned, that people will not throw garbage in every available empty plot.

Reality, however, is a harsh mistress. In the last five years, there has been no visible change as far as urban solid waste management and general cleanliness of the city is concerned. I do not know if the reason is that Swachh Bharat had more focus on building toilets than solid waste management, or because of the political differences between the center and the state governments.

I do know that nothing much has changed. Just today, I was taking a walk around my own locality Lake Town, around the lake and I was shocked to see the amount of filth and garbage people have dumped around the lake. It really made me sad. Is it really so hard for the municipality to do a one time clean up and plant some plants and shrubs and start a garden?

There are ample research and anecdotes which shows that once a place is cleaned up and made into something beautiful, people reduce or stop loitering. That the municipality has not cared for years is the reason why people think that the lake is a garbage dump. What is just one plastic bag thrown into the dump when there are thousands already?

I do not know when will people's mindset change. I do not know when will our political leaders be made really accountable to the environment.

I am not very hopeful. Sometimes I feel that perhaps, I am also responsible for this. What action do I take to stop this? Me and people like me who care about the environment should do more but the fact is that cleaning up the city requires across the board political support and government action.

And that's precisely the reason why I am not very hopeful because most people don't seem concerned and by extension, most politicians are not concerned.

This will probably not change anytime soon and while things continue to remain the same for the foreseeable future, I will continue to do my small things, like trying to reason with people about not burning plastics in front of their shops.

I will talk about this sickening phenomenon of burning plastics in a follow-up post. That post probably will be a little more hopeful. With this positive note, let me stop my rambling for now.

First real exposure to Hollywood

Movies are part of growing up for most of us. When I was growing up in the late eighties and early nineties, movies meant Saturday and Sunday afternoon broadcasts on Doordarshan. Hindi movies at 4pm on Saturdays and Bengali movies at 5pm on Sundays.

We watched whatever was shown, mostly very old Bollywood films with the likes of Raj Kapoor or Dilip Kumar.

This went on for many years before Hindi movies slots on Doordarshan were moved to 9 pm in the evening which was late night as far as me and my brother were concerned.

So movie watching went down for many years. However, during all these years I had very little exposure to Hollywood.

If I am not wrong, the first English movie that I saw was First Blood. Bose uncle, our neighbor asked me one day if I wanted to watch Rambo or not. I had heard about Rambo from my friends but had no idea who or what that was. I went to Bose kaku's place and watched in wide-eyed admiration and adrenaline-pumping exhilaration what John Rambo could do. He jumped from a cliff, he stiched his skin and went mad with his guns, pumping hundreds of bullets into his enemies.

Just magnificent.

I can't remember all the other movies I watched, but I remember Men in Black, again at Bose kaku's. I kept wondering for quite some time into the movie who MIB was :D

Next was perhaps Titanic. Boy, was it awesome! The biggest draw for us school kids was the portrait scene and the lovemaking scene. Titanic was the first exposure to nudity which we knew was always present in English films, for that matter it was the first exposure to nudity and the world of adults for many of us kids.

Through all these years, however, I never became a fan of cinema. Perhaps, I was not old enough to really become movie buffs at that age.

That love for cinema, especially Hollywood movies first took seed when I watched Braveheart when I went to college. Braveheart opened the whole wide world in front of me. I became aware for the first time what cinema could do. The kind of stories it was possible to tell through the lens, the reality of it, the emotions of it. I loved every frame from that movie. I always loved history and Braveheart added fuel to my quest for reading and knowing about history in a more profound way than any history book from my school could.

And the music. The music transferred me to the cloudy, foggy mountains of Scotland. The fight for Scottish freedom struck a chord deep within me. William Wallace became my hero.

I am thankful to Braveheart and Mel Gibson for opening my eyes to cinema. I went on to see many great movies, some of them are way better in many different ways but Braveheart will always have a very special place in my heart.

Freedom!

How to ruin good television shows

When I try to drag conversations beyond a certain point, my mother has always reminds me in Bengali that if you squeeze a lemon too much, it turns bitter.

This is a fact of life. All things must pass as the great George Harrison once said.

However, this basic tenet of life is oftentimes forgotten by filmmakers and especially TV series makers.

Not everything that is created becomes popular and very few become sensations. So I get the desire to cash in as much as possible on something which the public already loves. However, in my limited exposure to TV series and shows, it seems to me that in that desire to milk the cash cow, they make the cow ill many times.

I loved Sherlock till season 2 and after that they ruined it. It just became shit on season 3. From the suspenseful brilliance of the first two seasons, the third season became just comic bullshit.

I have not seen the later seasons of House of Cards but what I have heard is not encouraging.

There are many such cases, I am sure you have similar experiences.

What prompted me to write this article is the utter deterioration of quality in Stranger Things 3. We waited for it for a year and what they give us is complete crack. I am on the last episode, hope it proves to be the saving grace but I am not very hopeful.

And I will not even talk about what they did with Game of Thrones.

The best thing I have ever read

Just after Endgame was released, there was a discussion going on in a Whatsapp group I am part of. The group's name is Game of Thrones. So you can imagine what the discussion was about. If you remember, Endgame and GoT final season came around the same time.

So we were discussing about the different possibilities for the remaining few episodes of GoT. The discussion, however, veered towards Endgame and MCU and I sacrilegiously made the mistake of saying that I have not seen any Marvel movie since The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton.

Imagine that.

I was fried by one of our group members and was told that I missed the most awaited thing ever, that is, Endgame.

I could not agree at all. Not one bit. 

I made it very clear that the most awaited thing ever, as far as me and many millions like me were concerned, were the Harry Potter books.

While I have not watched the Marvel movies as and when they were coming out, I did follow the frenzy surrounding Endgame. It was just mindblowing of course.

Endgame was obviously one of the most awaited things in pop-culture ever.

But was it even close to the Pottermania that was witnessed when the last few books in the Harry Potter series were released? 

Remember the nightlong queues in front of bookshops? The extreme secrecy with which the books had to be delivered to the stores?

Boy, was it awesome!

I still remember. It was most likely on July 21 2007 when Deathly Hallows was released.

I just cross-checked, it really was July 21 2007. I remember the date! Holy cow :D

So I took a bus to College Street. It was a Saturday. I had less than one hundred rupees in my pocket and only around seven or eight hundred rupees left in my bank account from the partial salary I had been paid for working for two weeks in June (I had joined on June 18).

I went from shop to shop in College Street asking for the lowest price on offer. I went to the ATM to take out the cash only when the price fit my budget.

Boy, what a book it turned out to be!

What times were those, when Harry Potter was being written and we were waiting for the next book to come out. Nothing like that has happened in the entire popular culture industry across the globe since then. Not in literature, neither in music nor movies.

This year I read all the books after a long gap of twelve years. And I can say with even more confidence now, when I am 35 years old, that those books are the best I have ever read.

Nothing comes close. I will read them again in a few years time and will probably re-read them again.

And again, and again...

No hits on my website

Sad truth. No one is reading my blog.

No one. Literally.

That's unfortunate but expected. After all, I have not written anything here for 10 years straight.

So I can't expect people to come flocking to my website right away.

In any case, I am writing nothing special here. It's more like some kind of writing practice. I am trying to see how many posts can I make in a month.

I aim to make at least one post a day but even that doesn't seem to be working. But I am trying and I will persevere.

I learnt something from a brilliant book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I learnt that in order to get good at something or create a habit, you should take small steps, repetitive steps, daily. You need to build atomic habits.

So this is one of my atomic habits in practice. To write short articles daily.

So that someday, I become a good writer. A blogger.

I will write about atomic habits in more details some other day, for now I have met my daily goal which I kept missing for the last few days.

Well done me!!!

Triple Talaq Bill - Towards a more equal India

The very controversial triple talaq bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha yesterday. Soon it will become law.

This is a welcome step and will go a long way in alleviating injustice to muslim women.

A practice which should have died long ago was allowed to perpetuate in a democratic republic like India. Baffling.

I understand that there are many more social ills and evils which need to go and hope they will go away one by one.

However, we need to be cautious about the possibility of misuse of the criminal clause in
the bill. We have seen how the 498A domestic violence and dowry law has been misused as a tool for destroying families. I am not a legal expert and I do not know as yet all the intricacies of the law, however, I sincerely hope that it has enough checks and balances to make sure that there is no misuse.

This is a big step towards women empowerment in India and should be used as such.

Jai Hind.

Wearing shorts or finding a place to live

What's wrong with you Kolkata? Why don't you let people be?

I was reading today how some apartment complexes have taken issues with women wearing shorts. How medieval is that!

This is not the first time I am reading about such instances. There have been many reports of schools and colleges having issues with the attire of female students or teachers.

There are lots of other things Kolkatans need to worry about. Pollution is a great example. The loss of green cover and murder of trees across the city is a matter of serious concern but how many of us really care about it? How about the rampant burning of plastics and refuse?

But no, Kolkata residents have issues with bachelors being given rental accommodation in apartment complexes. Folks, don't you send your kids to other cities for education or jobs? Are you saying you will be okay if your beloved son has problems in finding a rental home in Bangalore or Pune?

How big hypocrites are we? It just baffles me. The sheer medievalism in attitude of my beloved city.

It does not end there. I know from some of my Muslim friends how they found it difficult to rent an apartment just because they were Muslims.

These problems are perhaps symptomatic of a much wider and deeper problem all across the country. I have heard that people from Bengal find it difficult in vegetarian Gujarat where residents have issues with Bengalis cooking fish inside their freaking homes.

We Indians love to poke our noses into other's affairs and it is just sick.

Grow up Kolkata. Grow up India. Be a little more liberal. Be a little more loving and helping. Trust me, it will make you happier and fulfilled.

Just let it be. It's okay.

International Tiger Day - Encouraging Signs

1411. 2226. 2967.

That's how the wild tiger count has rebounded in India as per the last three official census.

Officially India's wild tiger population has doubled since we hit that ignominious trough of 1411 wild tigers a decade or so back.

This is an encouraging sign but not a comforting one.

If I understand it correctly, this is the first time tiger count from some of the remote mountainous terrains of the north-east has been included. While this is great because now conservationists know about the tiger population in those regions, it also dampens the tiger population growth rate in the rest of the country.

There's lot more work to do.

While I read the happy news of tiger sighting in North Sikkim, I was heartbroken and horified by the news of the tiger lynching in UP.

These acts of violence show the kinds of challenges tiger conservation and other wildlife still faces.

The hellish image of a mother elephant and her calf being harrased with fire which was widely circulated a couple of years back is often the reality of our wild animals in many parts of the country. Even now.

So work must go on, especially in reducing man animal conflict. We cannot sit on our laurels now that we have doubled the tiger population.

The roar of the wild tiger needs to be preserved for posterity. The future generations will thank us if we are successful in doing this.

Ramblings on Gully Boy

I have never liked rap music. Like ever. Maybe I have listened to a song or two when others played it in a car but that's about it.

That was before Gully Boy.

Boy, what a movie! And what songs! Just watched it on Prime the day before.

The movie is several months old now, so most of you would have already seen it. If not, then stop everything else you are doing and go watch it.

It's that good.

But I am not writing a movie review. I just want to share some thoughts which came to me.

Hip hop. Hard hai.

If what MC Sher says in the movie is true and if hip hop really is not just about the sexually explicit, women denigrating crap that most rap songs seem to be, then I am tending to think that it can become palatable to some extent.

Hip hop fan boys, I have nothing against hip hop music. It's just that my exposure has been limited and I don't seem to like it much.

I loved the music in Gully Boy, though. Gully Boy really stood out and spoke about his position in society, about his dreams and his struggles, about the injustices and the discriminations he and his ilk has to face.

It reminds me of classic rock music. They used to sing about these things.

Perhaps, hip hop has become so popular because it speaks about real people. I hope and think that is the case.

Bengali music scene.

Another thought that keeps coming back to me is the state of Bengali music now. We are stuck in time. After the jibonmukhi movement of the nineties, and the bangla band movement from the 2000's, Bengali music seems to be stuck in doldrums. 

There are good singers, there is good music. But most of it is film music. 

There is no rock star is Bengal now. No artist is bringing something new to the table, at least in my limited understanding there is nothing revolutionary which has captured the public imagination in recent times.

Hope that changes.

Hope we get our very own Gully Boy from the streets of Kolkata.

Hope he tells us something new.

10 years later

I had almost forgotten about this blog. It's been 10 years since I last wrote a post here.

2009.

Back then this used to be kind of a travel information blog on West Bengal. Nothing fancy, just some trivia & information put together. Not sure why I stopped writing, though. Perhaps I lost interest or could not manage time as is so often the case.

2019.

I don't think if I start writing here regularly again, the blog can go back to its travelpedia days. If I write, I will most likely write about current affairs in Bengal and in India as a whole.

10 years.

10 years is a long time. So much has changed since 2009. I have changed, you have changed. Bengal has changed and India has changed.

I have grown older. Got married.

Bengal has embraced Mamata and India Modi.

Pollution has worsened, a severe heatwave is frying people in Kolkata and people are drowning in floods in other parts of the country.

Extremes.

Not only in the weather, but in how we think and talk as well. More about that later.

I don't intend to make these posts long and boring. If short can't keep you interested, long definitely will not.

I don't at all expect anyone to read this, but in case you are that loser, do comment and we can start a conversation through this blog.

On loser: Pun and fun intended dude, no offense.

The Panchmura Horse

The famous terracotta horse from Bishnupur has been widely recognized as the symbol of the artistic excellence of Indian rural handicrafts. It is in fact the official motif of the Central Cottage Industries Emporium.

This long necked horse is made by the artisans of Panchmura village about 10 kms from Bishnupur. These are generally brown in color and made of terracotta.

Baul

Baul are a group mystic socio-religious singers from Bengal. They form are a distinctive religios and musical tradition underlying which is the eternal theme of 'all men are equal' and 'love is the ultimate truth'. The tradition which has its roots in the Bhakti and Sufi movement is equally prevalent among Sufi Muslims and Vaishnav Hindus.

The One Horned Rhino

The Jaldapara Wildlife Sanctuary is the only place in present day Bengal where the one horned Asian Rhinoceros is found. This species of rhino which was once found all across Bengal in the districts of Darjeeling, Coochbehar, Maldah, Murshidabad and even in the Sunderbansa was, in fact, on the verge of extinction at one point of time as a result of indiscriminate hunting and loss of habitat.

The Bengali Kantha

Traditionally associated with rural Bengal, Kantha (pronounced Kaanthaa) is one of the most prominent of Bengal's embroidery and textile traditions. Kantha originally evolved as a form of blanket used during the bitter winter. Rural women would not throw away the old saarees and dhotis but would place them in layers, one on top of others, and stitch them together in simple running stitch to form a thin quilt to be used as blankets. Another important aspect was that the thread used to stitch the kantha would come from the edges of the cloth which is being used.

The Buxa Fort

The Buxa Fort is located at an altitude of 867 m in th Buxa Tiger Reserve. It was built by the rulers of Bhutan and was used by them to guard the trade route that passed through this area.

During the British Rule this was used as a high security prison and was the most notorious and unreachable prison in India after the Cellular Jail in Andaman. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose was said to have been imprisoned here for some time. The prisoners had once wrote a letter to Rabindranath Tagore from this prison and the venerated poet had sent them a reply. The replicas of these letters enscribed in marble can be seen in the ruins of the fort.

The fort was last used by the police to keep the Naxal rebels during the Naxal rebellion in the seventies.

Only ruins of the fort can be seen today. What remains of the formidable fort and prison of the yesteryears are three small cells where prisoners were kept. We were lucky enough to spend a night in these cells.

This is one piece of our history which is very much worth preserving.

The Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

"Let us use love and compassion to win the world" - Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa is one of the greatest champions of peace and charity the world has ever seen. Born to Albanian parents as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, she came to Kolkata in 1931 as a teacher. But soon she was so moved by the sufferings of the poor ans especially of the children and the lepers on the city's streets, she started working in order to help them and to raise awareness and consciousness around the city about those who were not as blessed as te most of us.

Her voice slowly was gradually heard across the city and the country and in some time she became the Mother of the whole world.

She formed the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 and devoted her life to the poor and the needy. The mission of the Sisters of the mission is to help the poor and the needy. The Sisters dressed in blue-bordered white saarees have become a symbol of hope all over the world. The Missionaries have centers all across the world.

Mother Teresa recieved the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980 for her humanitarian work.

Mother Teresa was beatified by Pope John Paul II following her death and was given the title the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

The Bridges across the Hooghly in Kolkata

The Howrah Bridge is one of the most popular landmarks and symbols of the city of Kolkata which can only be matched by the Victoria Memorial. This bridge, inaugurated in 1943, is one of the busiest bridges in the world with over 80,000 vehicles and more than 10,00,000 pedestrians crossing it everyday. It was built with 26,500 tonnes of steel. It is a suspension type bridge with a central span of 457 m, the two towers being 85 m high. It was renamed as the Rabindra Setu in 1965. The influence of this bridge on popular culture and the tourist map of Kolkata is huge; in fact a major movie had been named after it.

Completed in 1992 after 20 years of construction the Second Hooghly Bridge or the Vidyasagar Setu, this is one of the world's largest cable-stayed bridges with a length of 457.2 m.

The Vivekananda Setu (erstwhile Bally Bridge) was built in 1932 as a multi-spanned steel bridge much before the Howrah Bridge near Dakshineshwar. This is further upstream from Kolkata.

The 880 m long Nivedita Setu about 50 m downstream of the Vivekananda Setu was inaugurated in 2007.

The Jainti Mahakaal

The Jainti river valley in the Buxa Tiger Reserve is one of the most beautiful and sere places in the country. The river Jainti zigzags through the hills of the tiger reserve. Apart from the beauty of the place and numerous birds which makes it a favorite of the bird watchers, the Jainti River Valley is also famous for the shrine of the Jainti Mahakaal.

A Mahakaal is generally referred to the Shrine of the Lord Shiva in the Hills of the Himalayas. These caves are mostly hard to reach and very small. The Jaini Mahakaal is no different. In order to reach the cave formations where the abode of the Lord is, you need to do a steep climb of about a thousand feet from the river bed.

The stalactite and stalacmite cave formations have several caves the most important being that of the Mahakaal, the Mahakaali and Paglaa Baba. The Mahakaal cave is a very small one and to enter it is in itself an ordeal. The opening to the cave is so small that if you do not follow specific steps while entering and coming out, you can get stuck in a very awkward position. While entering the cave, first your left hand, then you head, after that your left leg, right hand and at last your right leg should go in otherwise you are doomed. Its the other way when you come out.

The priest who used to worship the deity when we went there in 2007 would sit there day long and bless the pilgrims to the shrine. When I saw the place I was awed by the nature of it and asked him, "Baba, how old is this place? Since when is the Mahakaal being worshipped here?" I had thought that he would say something around a hundred or a thousand years but the answer was "Since the Satya Yuga." Now that is an answer.

This place is very popular among the trekkers in the region. It is also accessible to the casual visitor from Rajabhaatkwaowa.

The Story of Satyajit Ray, Ramesh Sippy and Sholay

This is a story I heard somewhere but I do not remember the source. I was told it in such a way that I tend to believe that it is true, in fact it was claimed to be a true story. But I, until this point, have not had the resources or the determination to find the trutth behind the story for myself. I must, however, admit that I like the story the way it is and if I come to know that it isn't true, I shall be sad because the story is some kind of a hero worship for me.

It is about the renowned film maker Ramesh Sippy when he came to visit the master of them all, Satyajit Ray in Kolkata.

Ramesh Sippy had just made the best movie of his career, Sholay. With the release of Sholay, the whole of India was caught in a frenzie never seen before. It was a blockbuster the likes of which was never to be seen again in Bollywood. It was the making of a megastar: with this film Amitabh Bachhan had become the heartthrob of millions. It was also the flm to give Bollywood the most notorious villain in its history. Amjad Khan had made a sensational debut. Dharmendra, the big star as he was had delivered one of his best performances and so did Sanjeev Kumar. There was not a flaw to be seen in the movie. Everyone was watching it over and over again and Ramesh Sippy was the proud creator of the masterpiece of his career.

Sippy had come to Kolkata on a business trip. He decided to visit Ray, the biggest and most respected figure in the entire Indian film fraternity. Sippy was tentative and nervous about meeting Ray but he was truly surprised to find the man comfortably approachable. They talked for some time about many things. Finally with some effort, Sippy managed to ask Ray the question he wanted to aak. He said, "Sir, I have just made a movie named Sholay. ave you seen it?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it Sir? I would definitely like to know what you think of it."

"You have made a good movie Mr Sippy but there is a problem with your film."

Sippy was taken aback. There was a problem with Sholay? No one had told him that. The whole country was watching the movie. "What Sir?"

"This is a film in present day India about a village in Central India infested by bandits and dacoits, right Mr Sippy?"

"Yes Sir. Absolutely."

"Do you think there is electricity in those parts? I don't believe you do. You have yourself shown Radha the daughter-in-law of the Thakur lighting oil lamps in the evening. Haven't you?"

"Yes Sir. I have."

"Then, Mr Sippy, how do you think water is pumped into the huge water tank at such a height where you showed Veeru jumping around trying to commit suicide?"

Sippy was awed by the observation power and the minuteness with which Ray noticed avery single detail of a film. He said, "I am flattered by the fact that my film is lucky enough that you have seen it with so much interest." Thank you Sir for your feedback."

I think this is a true story at least the essence of it, if not all the words which I have placed just to make it coherent and readable.