Victor Banerjee
Actor and writer

Change. From the alleys of Harlem to the bylanes of Dharavi and golis of Kalighat, people everywhere are looking for a renaissance of traditional values. Or are they. With the price of food and vegetables at its highest ever, Bollywood has moved from aping everything American from basketballs they carry without ever having played the game and the pride of transforming burgers into spicymactreats, in the mistaken belief they have conquered the United States and Ronald McDonald, to now celebrating ‘Tomatiyas’.

What’s that you might ask? Well, go see the new box-office hit ZNMD (because every excretion is constipationally abbreviated these days) and you’ll know all about La Tomatina and why Spain is the latest destination for Hindifilm afixionados.

And Bollywood will make Spain’s Tomatina look like a dollop of ketchup on the streets of Buñol and will no doubt do their best to top the 1,10,000 kilos of tomatoes that Spaniards fling at each other on a given day in August every year. Personally, I think a bull run through parts of Lokhandwala and Juhu would serve the nation’s cultural cause a great deal more. A little research will reveal how Tomatofests held in upstate New York raise funds for food for the poor and homeless.

Yes siree, no abs-undulating celeb climbs human pyramids at Janmashtami to break the handi of dahi, in case he hurts his fragile body, but then spends lakhs on weights and electronic equipment that help him exercise his muscles to look like a clone of his neighbour at the gym where he hires trainers, who are nothing but well-shaped and glib flatterers, at exorbitant rates per hour or per month, to use their muscles to ripple through bars and bistros. Meanwhile, champions of the slum and ordinary folk practice malkhamb and have the physique and agility of leopards.

So, can Calcutta be far behind? That, as the chill of another winter descends upon us, is what every monkey-capped Bengali, trekking through the Himal in laced canvas keds, is asking Ma Durga who auspiciously arrives this year riding an elephant, a symbol of abundant hope and prosperity and great harvests. This should wake the truncated conservative who moralistically upholds the scriptures and traditional social values but who for three decades was overridden by asinine oppression that robbed us of health, education, jobs and self respect. Bihar, the symbol of depravity and poverty, had steamed ahead.

The earliest cultural change Bengalis brought about was the rescheduling of Durga Puja from when it was observed during spring in ancient times. Ma Durga was always worshiped in spring but there was too much happening then from Shivratri to Holi, so by our own serious Inter Gravissimas, before hedonic Epicureanism and laid-back Vaishnavism enveloped our consciousness, we moved to the ‘Awkal Bodhon’, the mistimed puja.

From the spring festival of Basanti Puja, we preponed (to use a wonderful Indian-English word that will soon be incorporated in Oxford lexicons) the Durgotsav to the autumnal Sharadiya celebration, on a lunar calendar, in keeping with and out of deference for the change Lord Rama had made on his way to rescuing Sita.

Strangely, one of my favourite pujas to this day is the Basanti Puja I attend on the banks of the Ganga in Hrishikesh, held in Omkarnath Thakur’s ashram. Bengal starts its annual celebrations by the Gregorian calendar’s proclamation of Bishwakarma puja, the one day when attendance at factories is perfect and tools are set down and machines shut down.

In recent times, our cultural reawakening began by renaming Calcutta’s most swinging, rocking and sinful street after Mother Teresa, whose statue in bronze has a curious cuprous blush on her cheeks, and now our own Mamata-di, in a frenzy to label everything like Litle Dot painted dots on everything that surrounded her, is naming our sports stadia after, no, not Dhyan Chand the hockey wizard or any of our great football stars, or Mr. Universe Manohar Aich, but after our national bard Rabindranath Tagore, who came closest to the playing fields of Eton (never Eden) in his association during ‘Harrowing’ days with Nehru’s daughter in Shantiniketan. However, he took life’s vicissitudes and personal tragedies so poetically, that he just had to have been a good sport and painted words into immortal lyrics and magical webs of solace and that comfort us all to this day.

Our Government hospitals are finally being converted from death traps to care centres, under the non-holistic eagle eye of our new chief minister who pays surprise visits to government-run hospitals and if anything is amiss, heads roll.

Mamata has also flummoxed those who funded her predecessors’ elections and have economically swallowed our city and state, by not raising a penny from them and thereby owing them no special favours. I know a bunch of them feel aggrieved and affronted by the snub. Now if that’s not a cultural sea change, what is? I am hoping the ordinary Calcuttan has the last laugh.

But the area where we need a cultural reformation is party politics that breeds hatred and kills young people every single day in Bengal. Some are shot, while most are literally bludgeoned and hacked to death. This must stop and the strict order for cessation and severe punishment for political vendetta-seekers, must come from the top.

Eve teasers being lynched by irate neighbours, NGOs being chastised because of stampedes where they have been distributing food and clothing to the poor, the politicising of college unions and the disgraceful indoctrination of school children, the senseless and untruthful appeasement of economic and social minorities, the extortion of money from businessmen and members of the general public, by political party hoods who can claim immunity because of their allegiance, are some of the filth we had grown accustomed to.

Mamata has inherited and has unwillingly turned a Nelson’s eye towards these; it is an exercise that will take time and patience but must be achieved if Bengal is to shed its image of violence, poverty and commercial instability and regain its past glories.

We must begin to shed our slavery to western ideas and teach our people that Dominique Lapierre called us a “City of Ananda, the most disgraceful slum in the world,” and conned us by a simple translation of the word Ananda, to make it the “City of Joy” and that the longest running musical on Broadway that became famous for frontal nudity and put us on a warped map, was called “Oh! Calcutta” after a pun on Clovis Trouille’s painting “O quell cul t’as!” which loosely translated means, “what an arse you have”.

But in the three months that dear Mamata has taken charge there are visible changes in administration and public works. Chowringhee now has a divider almost three miles long that has lovely potted plants in them and flyovers are being finished faster than before, people are roaming the streets in the evenings, unafraid of local-para bombers and hooligans, Rabindranath’s birthday was deservedly declared a compulsory state holiday and apart from all the Duronto trains that take travel-crazy Bengali tourists to every corner of our subcontinent, Dinesh Trivedi, her party’s Minister of railways, has announced the dream of India’s first Bullet Train running from Howrah to Delhi. All this is enough to stretch our cheeks to a pleasantly painful smile that we have been deprived of for far too long.

And as the delightful drama of a new Bengal unfolds, commanding centre stage is our new Durgati Nashini, Ma Mamata Banerjee. Leonard Mosley, a British journalist, had remarked about Surhawardy that “there was something about the smell, squalor, poverty and even the wickedness of the city which appealed to his temperament." It smacks sadly of a popular view of many of our country’s leaders’ attitudes towards our people.

Fortunately, the winds of change have hit Delhi too and many a cocky snoot is being compelled by an impartial and powerful judiciary, to eat humble pie. This trend will not stop. I’m sure. And now we are on the verge of becoming “Paschimbanga”, instead of “Bengal” as Mamata had rationally recommended, and for once I regret her not bullying her idea through the legislative assembly. In her relationship with industrialists and politicians at the centre, I am reminded of a Kashmiri legend of Chanakya.

It is said that a thorn had once pierced Chanakya’s foot. Instead of uprooting the thorn bush, Chanakya daily poured a bucket of buttermilk on the plant so ants by the hundreds would gather at its base and then, one day, by finally attacking its very roots, would destroy it. Sri Ramakrishna was once asked “Why, if God is good, is there evil in the world?” He wittily answered in characteristic Bengali humour, “In order to thicken the plot.”

It’s time we Bangalees created a cultural manthan that brings traditionalism back to the surface, stockpiled mishti ghol, and supplied tankers of the sweet stuff to our dear Didi, to help her realise her dreams of a great Bongobhoomi with implacable charm and elan.

Victor Banerjee is an actor, writer, film maker, photographer, social activist, bird watcher and trekker who has retired into the Garhwal Hills of Uttarakhand.