Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:In the last fifty years Mumbai has reinvented itself, Madras has become the mother lode of a new economy, Bangalore has turned into a traffic jam that no one wants to leave, Hyderabad has gestated into a skyscraper melee, and Delhi has become so fat as to need surgery. Calcutta sits still where it has not deteriorated, saved a little on its fringe by new townships but wrapped in hectic, haphazard, crowded gloom within.
The people who live astride the narrow lanes have become jaded. They smile and chatter for life must go on, but they know that elections will change nothing. Calcutta may be at the extreme end of fatigue, but there is a great danger looming over the east of our country as it stagnates below national levels of growth. Every road is an escape route for the young who cannot find jobs, or dream of a better future, which is a fundamental right of the young.
Time connotation
Time has a different connotation for the young. For elders, five years take a decade to pass; for those on the brink of expectation they fly by too quickly. By the end of this decade, nearly 60 per cent of our electorate will be less than 35; and 90 per cent of them will be 21st-century children.
In the 1960s, less than two decades after freedom, the first generation of free Indians lost their patience with the establishment. A volatile mix of Naxalite murders and communal violence turned Calcutta and half of Bengal into anarchy. The tinder is trembling again. Which spark will set off a flame? Which flame will light a fire? Which fire will ignite a conflagration?
An anecdote whose meaning might need further discussion, for those who seek power through the sixth season: A grandson of the famed Sultan of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid became a Sufi. The angry monarch told his grandson: “You have ruined my reputation among kings.” The grandson replied: “You have ruined my reputation among Sufis.”
The Third Moment
There is nothing much left to see once you have seen your dearest friend smile broadly over a shared reminiscence one moment, convulse over a spasm of pain in the next, and die in the third. Three sudden moments, in quick sequence, at a pace which the eye could barely witness and the mind refused to understand. Three moments that swept together more than four decades of laughter, love, exuberance, travel, the adventure of decisions, some beneficial and a few reckless; and then dispersed them into the patched spread of that uncertain space called memory. The Third Moment changes everything. It changes you as well.
Life then may be much more than matter, or perhaps not even what matters, but remembrance of things past whittled away by the amnesia of things forgotten. Is memory, always a diminishing asset, the only substantive reality as we move from past to future since time never recognises the present? A clock does not pause to register the present. It ticks from past to future. Memory is an inflection mirror, a chameleon. It can recall joy with as much abandon as pain from the atonal and inconstant rhythm of existence. The memory of a lifelong friend sits on a bed of dull pain. It is personal. To share it is to diminish it in some way for it cannot mean to the other what it means to you.
Au revoir, Sunil. There is some hope in au revoir; goodbye is too final. Surely the divine comedy of our world cannot end with a definitive curtain; that would make life a divine tragedy. Or, so meaningless as to be hysterical. Every lifespan is temporal, and temporary. We must heed the wisdom of the ancient sages; they told us to invest in maya, the illusion of normalcy, as we continue to navigate through the shards and fragments of time until that Third Moment arrives for all of us.
