Reflections

Kalingrad Today The Russian city of Kalingrad is a seaport and lies in a Russian enclave bordering Poland and Lithuania. In the eighteenth century this city was in the Prussian empire and known as Konigsberg. This city was founded in 1254 by a group of Teutonic knights under the order of King Ottoker II. After the Second World War, it came under Soviet rule and was renamed after Michael Kalinin one of the heroes of the Russian Revolution. Konigsberg had a special geographic peculiarity. It lay on 4 separate landmasses, two of which were islands and the other two the banks of the River Pregel. One of the islands, Kniephof lay at the junction of Pregel and the Pregolya river. During the heyday of the Prussian empire, the four landmasses were connected by 7 bridges. These bridges were named the Blacksmith’s bridge, Connecting Bridge, Green Bridge, Merchant’s Bridge, Wooden Bridge and High Bridge. The outer landmasses were connected by 3 bridges each, while the central ...

( An old picture of Writers' Buildings.) Now that the Madam (of Bengal) has completed about 4 and a half months on the job, it is possible and fair to evaluate her doings and prepare a tentative report card. While it is manifestly unfair that we compare her work for such a short time with the activities of our commie friends over three and a half decades, it is not more that she had let us to expect when she promised to change the face of West Bengal in days. What has she accomplished? The first thing that she has accomplished is, that by simply sitting in the CM’s chair she has showed those of us (including, I am not ashamed to admit, myself) who had thought that the CPM could never be shifted from Writers’ Buildings that we were wrong. With implacable courage, unshakeable determination and an iron will, she showed us, and I quote “Impossible is nothing”. And how! If the verdict was less than the total rout that we witnessed in the May revolution, I am sure that the Opp...

Marking the sasi area Leave the pinang alone! Leave the coconuts alone! Leave the bananas alone! Leave the trochus there! From the mountains to the coast, Leave it all alone! Ritual chant, Saparua island, East Indonesia. Most societies which are dependent on the bounty of nature for their survival have community based systems which preserve these natural resources. The Eastern islands of Indonesia, particularly the Makalu group of islands (1029 in number) have such a community management system for natural resources. This is the practice of sasi, a traditional system that has protected the fish, coconuts and other natural sources from times immemorial. Sasi can be loosely described as a prohibition on the harvesting of certain natural resources in an effort to protect the quality and population of such resources whether it is plant or animal. It is also an effort to maintain the social structure of the society by equally distributing among all local inhabitants the benefits from the ...

( This picture of Salvador Allende has been borrowed from Flickr) There has been an outpouring of sentiment, and rightly so, for the victims of the 9/11 tragedy in New York on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. Islamic militants, sitting in caves and safe sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan, planned and executed a dreadful plan which led to the death of thousands and has set off some intended and some unintended consequences that have consumed many more thousands of lives and look set to consume many more before the fires are doused. However of those of us with less longer and less Americoentric memories, 9/11 was the anniversary of one more tragedy, again planned with chilling callousness and for gain in distant offices and executed by local mercenaries. That tragedy, for various reasons, did not achieve iconic status (American lives being much more precious than others), but it still stands as one of the biggest criminal acts ever committed for ideological reasons....

This picture of the Paddy fields of Bengal is borrowed from Wikepedia. Nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Ne la miseria. There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy In wretchedness In one of his collection of essays, “The Imam and the Indian,” Amitav Ghosh has quoted Dante from his Divine Comedy as the title of a moving essay on the pain of exile. Not the sort of exile that we face here in Malaysia, , brought on by ourselves, in the lure of a better life or some better working conditions, but of those men and women who have to leave their land and their memories behind as they are forced out of land which they considered their own. The plight of many Palestinians, and nearer home, the Kashmiri Pandits are apt reminders of this terrible fate that can fall on men and communities. As the Partition generation dies out in West Bengal and wherever the East Bengali diaspora dispersed, the memories of East Bengal slowly fade from our...