Calcutta… Kolkata… or Home!!! The first time I’ve been in the City in the last almost 2 years… with both time on my hands and friends!!!
The Obvious Question… How much has changed? The Not-So Obvious Answer… Nothing!!!
If I had the same set of people around in the same Presidency Canteen, Today, I know the discussion would still very much be the same… may not be the topic, which may have shifted from Mr. Marx to Mr. Obama, but surely nothing else…
There was a time… when in between rounds and teas, time itself came to a halt… morning passed into afternoon and then into night and then into morning… life was warped around a culture… an attitude… not merely subjects, booze or people!!! Not a boozer back then but you get the point… surely…
Kolkata, or College Street was like a colourful postcard pasted in a fabric of time… Even today, when great-insecurities such as beer-belly, falling hair and monotony govern our daily living… the faces round that canteen are still the same… not the same people but the same look, the same atmosphere… even now women-smokers far outnumbering the men, the one-bearded history/pol-science/philosophy student, the one Eco-Cool dude, the one Physics- I Know it all- just huddled into the morphed existence around the cultural melee…
If I had to ask the Canteen guy who’s been around for over 30 years, what’s changed… probably the only thing other than his hair, and kids would be the dressing of the people around his canteen… which I would say has undergone a distinct improvement, but then again that’s just me!!!
When people criticize “My City” and say that nothing moves, nothing changes, no one cares in the more ‘Real’ monetary aspirations, career-istic instinct, I have often wondered… is the guy critical or jealous…?
In a purely hypothetical scenario, if every guy like me could come back into the City once every 5-10 years, and just see that ‘His Canteen’, ‘His Wall Painting’, ‘His Ideology’ and ‘His Life’ were still ‘His’ wouldn’t that be the most secure moment in an otherwise ‘complicated’ life – whether great or not-so-good??? Maybe the people have changed, but not the faces, not the lives not the ‘Being – composed of heritage-culture-values’…
Call me just a ‘Stupid-Bong’ with ‘Nostalgic-Sentiments’ in his breath and no ambition to be forward-looking, even for the state… but I sincerely believe (although I really don’t have the statistics to prove it), that more number of us, that believed in freedom from petty-classroom-driven-academics, believed in a sense of one-ness, believed in gossip and fun, and have spent most of our college-lives practicing such beliefs, have done far better, in every societal-driven definition of success than many of our counterparts!!!
I guess the critical bit was ‘Freedom’!!! Freedom from conformity… freedom to do what one wanted… freedom to choose!!! If I compare such a culture with most of our so-called ‘Educators’, they would be misfits!!! If I compare such a culture to most of our ‘successful’ academics, businessmen and literary… they match!!! Thus the more-than-obvious inference, “Most of our ‘Educators’ are simply not ‘Successful’ in their own definitions of the term”!!!
I was lucky to have been part of a culture, an attitude than was largely non-conformist… and when I go down to the same canteen, year-after year- after year (ok, stop!!! It hasn’t been so long… yet!!!) I still hope to see the same… the same look on their faces… the same attitude and above all the same bonding force… the Culture… The ‘Calcutta-Way’!!!
