Calcutta Corner

The Deluge of Decadence
It’s almost unbelievable how unsafe the streets of Calcutta have become not just for women but also for men. With all the deluge of news about rapes and molestations, we are getting shockingly inured to such incidents but every single woman I have spoken to lately in Calcutta has expressed that they fear that at anytime anywhere anything can happen to them. 

Consider this: This week at 10:30 at night an 18 year old girl and her mother became the targets of a sexual assault bid when their car was chased down a highway by three goons on a motorbike. What’s even more telling is that the circumstances were so-called ‘normal’. There were no so-called ‘safety precautions’ that these women had ‘flouted’ (without going into the arguments about the birthright that women should have to walk down streets however late at night, perfectly inebriated if she so prefers without becoming victims of sexual assault). The motorbike tried to block their way and pursued them undaunted with the girl’s father desperately speeding and even swerving the car violently from side to side to keep them off. The motorbike disappeared momentarily when the car stopped near a police patrol van but reappeared later. One of the men got off and threw a slab of cement and broke the rear window of the car and the girl was injured. At last the father managed to somehow get himself to a police station and give a description of the men on the motorbike and part of the license plate number. The police picked up two of the three from an eatery that same night.

This is no longer a stray incident. Such incidents are happening almost everyday, every night. Something has happened that has emboldened larger numbers of men to think that they can do this. Something has happened to even encourage them to do so. What is it? I have spoken to sociologists, economists, political analysts. There are many answers. More speculations. There is the suggestion that the media has taken the stories, the details and examples to committers of crime without being able to instill fear of punishment adequately. Others feel there is a skewed ratio between the horror of the crimes committed and the punishment, which often, it is felt, doesn’t measure up to the magnitude of the crime. Political patronage of criminals too is cited as a reason.

Heroes Sans Capes
The good news is that Calcutta is replete with bravehearts and this week the city hosted a bravery awards ceremony which honoured a host of them, some posthumously. Among them was Barun Biswas, a Bengal school teacher who had crusaded against criminal gangs in his village which had perpetrated gangrapes in the area, getting them arrested but was later shot dead by unidentified criminals. But then since when has the possibility of death ever deterred the braveheart?

The Campaigning Cops
Encouraged by the popularity of their road safety campaign – especially its use of the Beatles' Abbey Road cover to urge pedestrians to use the zebra crossing – the Calcutta Police is on a major experimentation drive. While some – like the Beatles poster – is rather clever, others are downright corny. Sample a few: “Hellow Honey Bunny…cholo ayne mani” (Hellow Honey Bunny …Let’s obey the law) says one poster with comic illustrations of men and women on motorbikes wearing helmets and forcing a rhyme on the recent hit Hindi movie number – “Better late than never” says another, taking the familiar figure of speech to drivers –  “No hurry, no worry,” reads another self-explanatory one.
(Watch this column for more next week)

Pining Over Pyne
I wanted to thank one of our readers, DC, who wrote in from New York last week. He asked about the reaction in Calcutta to losing one of its most cherished citizens, artist Ganesh Pyne. Calcutta, the city where Pyne spent his entire life and which provided him with all the inspiration that he needed in order to create some of the most memorable works of art that the world has ever seen, mourned as though it had lost a family member. Very precious but very private, his passing away reminded the city of what it had. Calcutta never quite showed him off as it did say Tagore or Ray but it knew that Pyne was the loyal son who kept the lamp of Calcutta’s rich heritage of art and culture burning like a quiet flame that you only really notice when it gets extinguished. 

He refused to leave Calcutta. In an article in the Economic Times columnist Ashoke Nag wrote, “Pyne never yearned for fame. At times not even gallery space.” Before the morning papers hit the stands on March 13, 2013, the news had already been broken to Calcutta. Pyne had died, at age 76, the previous day at 12:30 pm at a private hospital and local television channels dedicated their prime time for paying tributes to the great master. Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said, “I am deeply saddened by the demise of one of the brightest stars of modern Indian art. His death is an irreparable loss.” But Pyne was an artist who was so successful in keeping his canvas above political hues that we had an almost unified voice of adulation for his art which cut across political leanings of the myriad news channels beaming these. That’s of course as it should be. But in Calcutta the palettes of even artists often reflect the political colours of patrons. 

Ganesh Pyne was above it all. Indeed his art was – or rather, is – a reflection of that transcendence where death often remained a haunting presence in the midst of the humdrum imagery of life. Isn’t that the image of Calcutta itself? The dance of life in the midst of all the decay?

And so between the lines of newspaper prints and television tributes what was evident was that the city of Calcutta was paying the most appropriate tribute it could to Ganesh Pyne. Just by being Calcutta. Ganesh Pyne’s Calcutta