That evening in
end-July a Bangla family friend came to our house in Kolkata profusely sweating
and drenched in it from head to foot. However he was carrying with him a packet
of smoking hot beguni (Brinjal
fritters) and Chops (Cutlet fritters). Before he could cool himself enough
under the full-speed ceiling fan he commanded us to partake of the items before
those cooled off! And yes, we had those gobbled up quick in extraordinary gourmet
delight and also supported by hot steaming cups of tea! Well, in our
traditional belief that ‘heat neutralizes heat’, particularly when the heat (like
May) is oppressively humid (like monsoon)! This dictum is of the utmost
importance now, because the supposedly wettest months of the South West
Monsoon, June and July, have gone with absolutely no rains in South Bangla and
Kolkata city. In fact, the month of July has proved to be the driest July in
history in the Eastern and North Eastern regions of the country. And into August
now, there’s hardly any sign of the monsoon in any mood to expedite its
proceedings. The seemingly blackening sky along with false thunder eventually pierced
though the merciless sun, countess times!
At a time when
we’d have loved a few days of genuine rains and cooling weather we were instead
forced to have a literal rain of hard cash thanks to the equally hot episode of
one minister of the Bangla state government and a stalwart of the ruling
regional party getting arrested along with his lady associate, supposedly. About
half a billion of rupees have so far been recovered from the lady’s flats along
with other properties in hiding and a few missing foreign cars. The veteran
minister after being distanced and rebuffed by his own party started crying ‘conspiracy’
saying the money was not his and the lady clamoring out haplessly that she was
not aware of the money being hidden in her flat. Well, her connections with
ruling state party had been somewhat exposed by the media and therefore, it’s
come as a huge setback for the party with its Chief Minister projecting her
national ambitions since her landslide assembly election victory in 2021,
making the strong ruling national party a poor second.
The people of
Kolkata are like the people of Mumbai as far as the ‘spirit’ is concerned. While
the Mumbaikars always show their
indomitable spirit in terms of continuing the hard work and making more and
more money come what may, the Kolkattans
always show their spirit in continuing to enjoy life in terms moderate living
but high eating come what may. The mouthwatering array of chops, rolls,
cutlets, samosas, fish fries, fish and meat curries and so on at cheapest-in-the-world
prices anywhere, from the street side open joints to the limited posh restaurants
notwithstanding, I think, the Bongs should start worrying now, because the Met
office has reportedly made a forecast of less rain in August and in September
too which means that Bengal’s main festival of Durga Puja, starting this time
right from the start of October, is in some real danger of getting washed away.
Therefore, they should give less attention to the ‘heat neutralizing heat’ experiment
and should not let themselves be swayed too much by the huge corruption in the
education sector, the arrested minister being the former education minister,
and should focus on chanting some prayers in advance to God and Mother Nature so
that Durga Puja does not come under any threat.
The local media
is not giving enough attention either to Nature’s heat let loose on most parts
of the state and in Kolkata or on the farmers staring at a Kharif crop season
crisis; no wonder, the way they’ve been consumed up by the hard-cash thunder
showers. They’d better started rolling back the focus fully on the ‘monsoon
crisis’ so that the lip-smacking people turned their attention to some prayers
as we just said so that their thakur
dekha (Puja pandal hopping) did not get hampered too.
Finally, as to
why this writer has suddenly decided to adopt this ‘truncated’ approach to
combine several well-planned pieces into a single piece, enough be said that he’s
no longer game for the miserable 10 or so hits to the pieces on a rich variety
of subjects that he’s devoted a lot to time and energy upon to make those
interesting. Often he’s accidentally or even deliberately made mistakes hoping
for some discerning readers to point those out. But no! Pointless expectations!
So yes! He’s not interested any more in dishing out free matter that nobody
cares about, with apologies, of course, to the handful of genuine readers he
still has. The writer thinks that it’s better to redirect his energy to writing
more books, because even if nobody, again, reads the books, the books would
always remain on record as his works. Besides, if the Indian cricket team can
go on experimenting with international matches (stopping those only during the
IPL for the sheer force of the money power) without bothering about winning or
losing why not this humble writer! This writer does possess the power, even
though it’s useless, to show his disdain for Indian cricket and stop writing anything
about it in future which he’s already and actually started doing, to be honest!
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