Was reading a very nicely-written article about the day-to-day Bengali life at Calcutta. Here is a small part of it. "When asked about themselves, my Calcuttan friends tend to reckon that Bengalis are proud, brilliant and nonchalant. Most of my friends here are middle class urban professionals turned sceptical about economics and big prophecies, thus searching the keys to, or the outposts for a new world. They meet several times a week in informal but determined encounters called addas where they read poetry and short stories aloud, discuss politics and philosophy, drink not too much beer, smoke cigarettes but also bidees, and enjoy their life as it goes. Brilliant, they are indeed. My presence first of all switches them into English. Then it induces debates about the wake of colonialism in the day-to-day life, about the creativity of contemporary Indian cinema or about the history of the Naxalite movement. But we also go into very up-to-date subjects, offered by a rich and intense political activity. Everyday, the papers bring new evidence about Nandigram and the topic seems to inflame most Bengalis. All these debates are precisely argued and most of the speakers can quote VS Naipaul, Tagore, but also Edward Saïd, Fukuyama and, to my surprise Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Nonchalant, they probably are; they never worry about time and love to meet in the Jadevpur coffee house whenever they can. In a way, they even pretend to be irresolute, but that, I can assure, is untrue. Two accidental discoveries gave me an hint of how active Calcuttans are. One is the number of modest but active magazines published here. Small format, from 50 to 80 pages, treating many subjects from art to politics, from economics to literature, and so on, each of these reviews offer a specific perspective on the world and the city. Not reading Bengali, I cannot give an opinion on the content but I can testify to the determined effort made by those sustaining these reviews and the radical viewpoint asserted by the managing editors who invest most of their life into this achievement. In Calcutta there is even a museum of those reviews where they can all be found and compared by readers who have missed an issue or want to deepen their knowledge of a subject. Apart from serious discussions, my friends were a joyful bunch of good humoured people, men and women alike, from different origins and apparently harbouring no suspicion of caste borders or social backgrounds. Another discovery was more accidental but, a late one, I had no time to really investigate it. Dozens of pocket theatres are spreading throughout the city. One of those theatres was next to my hotel so I could observe it. Beyond a tiny courtyard edging Rash Behari Crossing, you can guess by a blackboard filled with names, titles, prices and dates that you are near a performance hall. Actually you already had that premonition because in front of the blackboard was the kind of ticket kiosk you are accustomed to see at alternative theatres. If you carry on across the courtyard, you pass a porch and there you are in front of a stage, facing the steep slope of an amphitheatre. Lights and rails, curtains and velvet, you are indeed in a theatre. There, my guide tells me, you can attend many kinds of plays, mostly modern adaptations of long running traditional dramas such as Mahabarata or Ramayana. But some theatres perform only modern stuff, some only satirical reviews, some poetry, some contemporary authors, etc. These groups are not funded by state or federal institutions. Sometimes they get money from a philanthropist. But the great majority are militant, that is to say, free." _____ Marc Olivier Hatzfeld
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 11:37:48 +0000
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