Reflections

This is the first guest post I am carrying in my blog. I am grateful to Mr Swapan Sen for contributing this valuable article to Reflections. I only hope that it will be only the first of many more to come. The fateful night On the fourth of October, 1968, at about 2-30 A.M., a lone Fire Brigade bell desperately tried to wake up the sleeping town of Jalpaiguri, located on the bank of the river Teesta in North Bengal, India. It had been raining incessantly for the last 72 hours and the rivulet Karala, which meanders across the town to meet the Teesta, had inundated most of the low-lying areas of the town, unable to discharge itself into the already overflowing Teesta. For two days and nights, the townsfolk had toiled hard hanging on to their houses, hoisting their belongings to the safety of the wooden ceilings, sleeping on makeshift beds arranged on table-tops and collecting and saving water and food. Now they were dog-tired...

The pictures are of Mr Sen, the first one taken last year and the other in 1969, just one year after the floods. Whatever else my blog may or may not have done, it has brought me in contact with several men and women whom I would never have met, or been in touch otherwise. Among others, it brought me in close touch with Nipon ( of Niponwave and Bong Buzz), Pranab ( Of Septicemia) , and many others . My latest friend (if I may be so bold as to call him that) Is Swapan Sen. Mr Sen was brought up in North Bengal, passing his Higher Secondary Exams from Jenkins School In Cooch Behar. Founded in 1861, this school recently completed 150 years and is still one of the better schools in the region.. In 1961, Mr Sen went to study Civil Engineering in the Bengal Engineering College in Shibpur, today a Deemed University. After passing out, he worked for a couple of years as Assistant Engineer of the Irrigation and Waterways Directorate of the West Bengal Government and was posted in...

Gandhians leave me cold. One possible reason for this is the essential hypocrisy that masks their actions. Gandhi himself was a dictator and singularly intolerant of differing views. He knew best and woe betide Bhagat Singh, Rajguru or Subhas Bose if they refused to fall in line. Nothing that unusual about this, most leaders tend to think they know best and sometimes they do! However what I object to is Gandhi’s sanctimonious behavior in letting loose his minions to undercut and destroy his opponents while he himself pretended to be above all this political machinations stuff. Subsequent Gandhians have had all his failings without any of his redeeming features. Take Morarji Desai for instance. This gentleman, despite glaring proof that his prohibition policy was a complete failure in the erstwhile Bombay State persisted in it giving rise to a culture of law disobedience that had disastrous results. And even so, would he admit being in the wrong? God forbid, a Gandhian could never b...

It is fashionable for the media in India to put on long faces and bemoan the difficulties that the country may be going through especially during the run up to Independence Day and Republic Day. As my readers may have noticed I am an incorrigible optimist and I feel that over the past 40 odd years that I have been following political events, I have never failed to read a host of articles that prophesied doom for India during this time. Unfortunately for the Doom sayers and fortunately for all the rest of us, India is alive and doing reasonably well, thank you very much. When I first started reading newspapers in the sixties, they were saying that we would starve to death in a few years time. Far from it, we became self sufficient in food and it became possible for us to waste foodgrains by keeping it rotting in inadequate storage areas. Then in the seventies, corruption was going to make us collapse and we were lost as a democracy, Unfortunately (for them) we overcame all that an...