Happy Bengali New Year 1420

Bless Us. Bless Us to Be Pure.

Today is the Bengali New Year’s Day — the first day of Baisakh, the first month in the Bengali calendar. Today is also the Punjabi New Year’s Day — Baisakhi.

In many other parts of India and Bangladesh, today is a very special day. On this day, small merchants and business owners — along with their employees — celebrate their trade with worshiping Lord Ganesha and Goddess Lakshmi, the two Hindu deities of wealth, success and prosperity.

Many parents decide to give the first formal education lesson to their children on this auspicious day. A Hindu or Muslim priest or an elderly in the family hand-holds the child and makes them write a vowel or a consonant with a piece of chalk or a pencil. Then, there is a sumptuous Bengali feast: the proverbial fish and sweets. Bengalis and Punjabis are both known for their food, fun and festivities. No fun festivity is full without food. Food. First! Food. Fast!

Today is also the day when at Vishva Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore’s university in the West Bengal village of Shantiniketan, they celebrate the birthday of the poet of all poets. It’s the tradition of the school to celebrate it today, even though Tagore’s real birthday is the 25th day of Baisakh, which normally falls on the 8th or 9th of May.

The Poet of All Poets.

In Bangladesh also, many people follow Shantiniketan’s tradition and celebrate Tagore’s birthday on this day. In all, globally, at least a couple of hundred million people celebrate this day as their traditional New Year’s Day. Western media do not know or care to know. They never report it.

Regardless of the West’s ignorance, apathy and exclusion (I now call it Journalism of Exclusion OR Education of Exclusion), today is a very special day in our lives — lives of Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Sikh Indians and Bengalis across the world. It’s a happy day. It’s a day to forget about the ills of the past and move on to embrace the future.

I wish you all — my readers, friends and sympathizers all over the world. I wish you all a happy, prosperous and peaceful year ahead. May Goddess Lakshmi and Lord Ganesha bless you. May all your wishes and dreams come true.

The poet of all poets Tagore wrote:

“Jeerna ja kichhu jaha kichhu kheen
Nabiner majhe hok ta bileen.”

“জীর্ণ যা কিছু যাহা কিছু ক্ষীণ
নবীনের মাঝে হোক তা বিলীন”

It means:

whatever is old ‘n doomed and whatever is low
may they all vanish in the young and green’s glow.

I hope we can usher in a new era of knowledge, wisdom and insight. I hope we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and walk together on the shiny, glowing path of a prosperous, progressive future.

In solidarity,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

###

The Proverbial Roso Golla

I Am Bangladesh, I Am Palestine

A garment sweatshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh just killed over one hundred poor workers. UPDATE: A building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh on April 25, killing at least 1200 workers. Many more are permanently crippled.

Bangladesh Body Bags, Again and Again.

This is a repeat slaughter of Bengali workers — mostly young women aged 12 to 24 or so — at a Wal-Mart, Disney, Gap, H&M, Hanes or Tommy Hilfiger outsourced factory run by these corporations and their international and domestic agents. Even New York Times expressed their disapproval. Even CNN thought it was not pleasant to have so many sweatshop workers killed so often.

I wrote before about Trayvon Martin when they killed the seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid because somebody thought he was a criminal and could therefore be killed. I said Trayvon was my kid. I wrote about Troy Davis when they killed him strapped on an electric chair. They killed Troy because somebody thought he did not deserve justice.

I wrote about Sikhs in America after 9/11. They started killing and hurting Sikh men and women because somebody thought they looked like Osama Bin Laden and therefore deserved hate.

I wrote about Muslims in Brooklyn after Afghanistan and Iraq. They started killing and hurting Muslims because some people thought all Muslims were terrorists and therefore they deserved random arrests, imprisonment and mass deportation.

I wrote about Latino immigrants in Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft’s America. I wrote straight from the Arizona-Nogales border — straight from a van we took to cross through the Sonoran desert when it was 115 degrees Fahrenheit. I wrote from the morgue where they kept unidentified dead bodies of women and children who perished walking across the scorching desert into the U.S.

I wrote about my experience in Israel and Palestine when I had an opportunity to visit the Middle East as a journalism student from a prestigious journalism school here in New York. I saw how Palestinians lived and suffered at the hands of the powerful. I went to see Golan Heights at the Syrian border where the Six-day War back in 1967 permanently displaced Palestinians from their own land and international big brothers made sure they remained destitute forever.

We Keep Mourning.

I wrote about the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation Struggle when some people decided a British-pauperized, partitioned East Bengal and its millions of newly-impoverished people had no right to food, freedom, dignity or even their own language, and they decided to send a Kissinger-crafted CIA war into that land through Pakistan, and killed ten million people, raped half a million women, and evicted ten million more from their homes and lands — to repeat a similarly bloody and catastrophic 1947 history in less than twenty five years.

I went to work on the borders of India and Bangladesh to see the suffering of those refugees first hand. I wrote about them.

I am now writing again to express my feelings about the poor Bangladeshi garment workers who were burnt alive yesterday in a repeat inferno at a Wal-Mart, Disney, Gap, H&M, Hanes or Tommy Hilfiger sweatshop at the outskirts of Dhaka.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about the barbaric killing of innocent Palestinian children in Gaza. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Obama’s drones that killed innocent children in Pakistan, Yemen and Mali.

I don’t know if my writing has any impact at all on the minds of the otherwise intelligent, educated and human rights-minded liberals in America and India — the two countries I know the best — or for that matter, anywhere else in the world. I have every doubt that such killings are now transient news blips that come on the surface, shake up a few minds for thirty seconds or less, shake up their conscience for an even smaller amount of time, and then disappear into oblivion.

They Keep Mourning.

Worse, these otherwise intelligent, educated, human rights-minded liberals in America and India — the two countries I know the best — or for that matter, anywhere else in the world keep supporting the Democratic Party and its leaders like Obama or Clinton, or the Congress Party and the Gandhi Dynasty in India…or…you put your favorite country and its political system and leaders…and by doing that, they sustain an inhumane, corrupt and cruel, exploitative socioeconomic system that is responsible for all these horrendous acts that are killing and torturing and maiming and starving and displacing and destroying millions of poor men, women and children — all over the world.

I have no hope that bringing up these horrendous acts of violence — political or economic — on the surface would make any long-term change within the status-quo minds of these intelligent, educated and human rights-minded people.

I have learned how not to hope anymore. Not from the elite liberals anways — American or Indian.

I just write about it because I have no other way to cleanse myself of my own sin — of being a part of this system.

She could’ve been my child. Or my sister.

Thank you for at least listening. Now if you want, you can go back and do your Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart, Disney, Gap, H&M, Hanes or Tommy Hilfiger. If you’re in India, find your favorite shopping mall for Diwali shopping. Soon, you’ll find Wal-Mart and Disney too…across the country.

Please do it. I wouldn’t mind at all.

Sincerely Writing (without caring about the outcome),

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

###

The Global Inferno That Kills All of Us. One at a Time.

Death Of A Bengali Poet

“Mon bhalo nei, mon bhalo nei, mon bhalo nei

Keu ta bojhe na, sokoli gopon, mukhe chhaya nei

Chokh khola, tobu chokh buje achhe, keu ta dekhe ni

Protidin kaate, din kete jaay, ashay ashay ashay ashay ashay ashay…”

Feelin’ blue, feelin’ blue, feelin’ blue

No one knows, all hidden, eyes too

Eyes open, yet closed, no one saw

Days fly, nights fly, hopin’ over hopin’ over hopin’ over hopin’ …

________________________________________________________

Now, this poet made me blue many times. He always had this habit of making his readers blue. He did that again, one last time this morning, when I got the news of his death. I wept one last time, for him.

I hope this is the last time I did it, for him. I hope this is the last time he did it, to me. We are too old for such corny stuff, right? Weeping and all? I know he wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like it either. It’s time to grow up. So, this is just once, only once.

“I won’t cry, I won’t cry, no, I won’t shed a tear.”

Our ever-young Bengali poet Sunil Ganguly — more formally Sunil Gangopadhyay if we used his Sanskrit name — is no more. But because I’m writing this blog sitting in New York, ten thousand miles away from Calcutta, Bengal, India where he so suddenly passed away, and I’m writing this blog primarily for an English-speaking audience across the world, I prefer to use his Anglicized last name Ganguly. Sunil Ganguly. Like the way the Western “user-friendly” world forced me to use my Anglicized last name Banerjee, abandoning my Sanskrit last name Bandyopadhyay. In this life in exile (however hard I try to be a part of a global world, pretending this exile really doesn’t matter to me that much and that I’ve really become a universal citizen), there are times when you feel how enormously these musicians and artists and poets and authors and filmmakers and humanists matter to you.

Their departures stun you, shake you to the core. Because they have always been such an important, inseparable part of your own existence. No matter if you’ve ever met them or talked to them. No matter how much physical distance you’ve had with them, with no possibility to meet them or talk to them at all. They have always been with you — as a friend, as a brother, as a sister, as a mentor, as a family member. As if you could always talk to them, had there been an opportunity, about their most recent novel, music CD, or maybe, the rise and fall of the American empire…or even, the place in Calcutta where they have the best Indian Chinese, biryani and spicy fish…and in Sunil’s case, a healthy dose of a mighty-hard drink. (And I thought those drinks could do no harm to his ever-young heart!)

These are people that have always been a part of your identity.

Sunil Ganguly, whom I actually met once and talked twice here in New York at the power-poet-couple Jyotirmoy-Meenakshi Duttas’ place, was one such personality. The persona Sunil Ganguly and the poet Sunil Ganguly have always been a part of my cultural consciousness. From that point of view, he was as close to me as Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam, Satyajit Ray, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Maxim Gorky, Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Bob Dylan, Beatles, Bob Marley, Mahashweta Devi, Ritwik Ghatak or Mrinal Sen.

Sunil Ganguly was the big brother who taught me how to fall in love, make love and hurt in love. He taught me how to imagine a woman’s love. He taught me how to write love letters. He taught me how to grow up — loving and hurting, and then loving again. He taught me how to hope…and imagine hope.

This is a milieu of a consciousness that made me the “me” that I am today. This half century-old me. If they were not with me all along, I would not have had this identity, this brain, this belonging to this human, thinking, moving, seeing life.

When they leave my familiar world, one after the other, they also take away a part of “me” forever with them. Their departure is truly like severing with a limb or an organ. It’s excruciatingly painful — physically and emotionally, and it’s extremely difficult to deal with it their post-departure. Especially if you do not go through a major therapy… and rehabilitation. And sitting here ten thousand miles away, there is hardly any rehabilitation. The society of familiar people with familiar, shared emotions, knowledge and values that you need for the rehabilitation is simply absent. Here I write about poet Sunil Ganguly, Tagore, Satyajit Ray, et al., and you know you’re not making your readers cry. You bereave — all by yourself.

Therefore, the tragedy and the pain and trauma associated with that tragedy remains with you forever. It literally debilitates you. You’re now dealing with a lost limb or organ, with nothing to make up for it. Worse, you know this is not the first time it happened to you, and neither would it be the last time.

Tagore died way before my birth. My mother died a painful death when I was a young man in my early twenties causing major, lifelong bereavement. But at least I was back there, in the midst of a supportive society. Satyajit Ray’s death in 1992 and Suchitra Mitra the Tagore singer’s death in January of 2011 touched me, impacted me this way. The news of Sunil Ganguly’s death this morning was a similar jolt…perhaps a bigger jolt because first, he was so forever young…as if he was born in 1974 and not in 1934. Most importantly, deep inside, I never thought Sunil Ganguly could actually die. I never thought he would be old one day, and die.

But he did. This is the first time when he kind of let me down. Well, at least he didn’t lay sick in some nursing home bed with tubes coming out of his nose and arms and legs to keep him alive. No, he would refuse to wear those tubes and artificial ways to sustain “life.” He would refuse to be a part of such artificiality.

Sunil, or Apu?

A Bengali, Indian poet just died in Calcutta — ten thousand miles away from New York where I live. I know in the next day or two, millions of Bengalis from both the West and East sides of the artificial border would pour down on the streets of Bengal to pay their last respect to the ever-young poet. I won’t be there. I was not there when they paid their last respect to Satyajit Ray or Suchitra Mitra. Or, Tagore in 1941. No, I won’t be a part of that million-man march accompanying the poet and his mortal remains to the Hindu crematorium.

But I can only imagine. Sunil Ganguly was one of the major imagination teachers I’ve had. I can imagine.

I’ll show to the world that even though he kind of let me down, I did not let him.

I can still imagine, even in this dreaded exile. I can still hope.

I can still imagine that even in this dreadful, horrific time with the wars and violence and bombing and beating and droning and waterboarding, a beautiful, rain-soaked sun is slowly rising in the Eastern sky.

It don’t matter if you’re in exile or not.

_________________________________________

Jodi nirbasan dao

Ami osthe anguri chhoabo

Ami bishpan kore more jabo

If you send me in exile

I’ll touch my ring to my lips

I’ll take poison and die

Bisanno aloy ei Bangladesh

Nodir shiyore jhuke pora megh

Prantare diganta nirnimesh

E amari sare tin haat bhumi

This Bangladesh in a pale dim light

Clouds hover on river banks

Borderless horizon of bountiful fields

This is indeed my three and a half yards of space

Jodi nirbasan dao

Ami osthe anguri chhoabo

Ami bishpan kore more jabo

If you send me in exile

I’ll touch my ring to my lips

I’ll take poison and die

Dhankhete chap chap rakto

Eikhane jhorechhilo manusher ghaam

Ekhono snaner aage keu keu kore thake nodike pronam

Ekhono nodir buke mochar kholay ghore luthera, pherari

Shohore, bondore eto agni-brishti

Brishtite chikkon tobu ek-ekti aparup bhor

Blood splatters on green paddy fields

Men shed their sweats right here

Even today some bow heads to the river

Before they take a dip, bath

Pirates speed their float boats down the river

Towns and ports with relentless rain of fire

Yet, rain shower emerges one or two indescribable, beautiful dawns

________________________________________________________

Sincerely (and Sadly) Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

###

To Indira Gandhi

 

By Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-2012)

 

 

Dear Indira, please don’t visit the Gujarat flood
Sitting by your airplane window

It’s a dangerous game
Angry waters raged and uprooted train tracks
Bridges collapsed, scattered kids near the belly of
dead animals
An old man’s eyeglasses float down the waves
Man found desperate friendship with treetops
These are fragments of the sight – a type of truth
Partial, yet too intense
These partials truths indeed become primary
During these terrible times

 

Indira, dear girl, you must not forget
Even if you cried out of your cloud castle
It would never resonate with the collective tragedies
down there
Your chapped lips
For how long they did not get streaks of a kiss
Dark, deep fatigue visible under your eyes
Faces bear marks of a dejected loverBut you chose this path yourself
With no more ways to return no more
Indira dearest, please do not fly by North Bengal skies
Or those of Assam,
sitting by your airplane windowIt is a dangerous game
Yet I warn you one more time –
You look down and find miles of barrenness
You see rules of nature and ruthless rulelessness
And their great devastation

You see huge currents of new flood waters
As if the cloudy sky lay upon the land, upside down
Interspersed by houses like small islands
Lush green heads of trunkless trees

Seeing the sight of those floods
Some day, Indira, these words might slip off your tongue:
“Oh, how beautiful it is!”

###

Still Dreaming…in Bangla.

Obama, Support Chicago Teachers. Or Lose My Vote.

Terrorists, communists, socialists…teachers…mothers…grandmothers! They’re all the same!

Note: This is purely my personal opinion. I wrote it using my personal time and resources.

_______________

I almost titled it: Bangladesh or USA, Italy or Greece — it’s the same union-busting game.

Then I changed the title to: Find cross-labor solidarity (the UPS way). Rahm and Romney will cringe!

My third title was: Rahm, Romney and Ryan are on the same side. Which side are you on?

(In case you don’t know, UPS won its 1997 strike garnering cross-labor solidarity. Fedex and many other unions came out in support of their UPS brothers and sisters. I always talk about solidarity across the moderate working class — both from the so-called left and right. You can read about my alliance-building model by clicking on this link.)

Anyway, either title would have been just as fine. I could’ve also included IMF and 1% in the title. All of the above would have been just as fine. And just as true. And just as powerful. And just as appropriate.

But I settled on the Obama and vote title. Just because I thought it might find a wider audience if I made is a little more controversial, sensitive, sexy.

Now, my title might backfire. Chances are, if the strike drags for a few more days, big bosses would heap praises both for the striking teachers and Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel (a close Obama ally and a Democrat, for those who don’t know), throw some temporary, stop-gap solutions…until after the big elections are over. And then, as soon as the elections are over, and either Obama or Romney becomes the next president, Rahm Emmanuel will crush the teachers’ union — just the same way Scott Walker, the viciously anti-union Republican governor of Wisconsin clamped down on the state’s public employees’ union.

Now that Rahm Emmanuel has found such strong support from Romney and Ryan — Republican candidates one of whom is far right Tea Party and the other is a known union basher and private outsourcer — who’s going to block his path? Plus, Koch Brothers and Murdoch and Heritage Foundation and some other big media (and foam-in-the-mouth Rush) will pump in big money and other resources to support Rahm. Who knows, maybe, he will be the education secretary in a new Romney-Ryan cabinet!

In fact, New York Times wrote a scathing anti-union editorial just when I was writing this blog! Read it here. And read their own readers’ responses too.

Unbelievable to see the anti-labor-union sentiment in this country called USA where the entire middle class was built with the blood, sweat and tears of the working people and labor unions — for at least forty years. Most of these people who are calling the striking union names, blaming the teachers for all the problems of the poor and failing students, and expressing outrage that these teachers are asking for better wages and benefits either lie about or are ignorant about that glorious history from not too long ago.

It’s absolutely unbelievable to see that there is so little in-depth information and analysis on mainstream media about the key demands of the striking teachers and what forced them to finally come to this point where they have no other way but to strike. Why historic? Because they risk losing and they’re fighting to expose both big parties and their anti-union agenda — one explicit and the other hidden.

Even in the mighty, all-important New York Times, there is hardly any serious analysis of the CTU strike with drawing connection between this strike and other recent strikes across the U.S. and other places of the world. I have already mentioned the UPS strike of 1997. There is hardly any serious discussion of labor unrest and what economic and political games global powers are playing to crush organized labor. How many people know what International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Program is that works so closely with global political powers, as well as multinational corporations — GE, Wal-Mart, Disney, McDonald’s or Monsanto — that are so infamous for their long history of oppression and violence on any labor mobilization?

How many people know the deep-rooted connections between all these dots?

Yet, that discussion would be so critical at this point. New York Times and Wall Street Journal and CNN would not get into that discussion. So, as I often say, the onus is on us.

Huge labor solidarity in Chicago today! Way to go, brothers and sisters!

Now, today on September 11, Jobs with Justice — an activist group that emphasizes rights and justice for the working people of America — threw their support behind the CTU strikers, and huge rallies came out on the streets of Chicago. That is reassuring, even though I have doubts how long the public school teachers’ union would be able to sustain their energy and strength, especially when mighty forces such as Obama and Clinton on the Democratic side and Romney and Ryan on the Republican side would clamp down on them so heavily, with help from corporate and mentor media.

I have worked with unions closely here in America, and also in India — for many years. My father was a factory employee most of his life. I have seen good unions with honest and caring and efficient leadership. I’ve also seen unions with dishonest and inefficient bosses.

But regardless of the good or bad union bosses and their good or bad politics, I have every drop of blood in my body to support the cause of organized labor. Labor unions are the last stumbling block for the elite, powerful 1 percent and their absolute, global economic tyranny against the poor and middle class working people and families. I’ve talked about it before. Check it out here.

Now, people who are expressing their outrage at the striking teachers of Chicago, have the same-old points that anti-union power such as Scott Walker or Mitt Romney or the union-busting corporations (yes, some companies only specialize in union busting, for a hefty fee) always use. They are:

(1) Union workers (in this case, the striking public school teachers) are asking for too much salary and benefits; they already make a lot. Plus, this is the time for austerity: the country is going through a severe recession. There must be austerity now.

(2) Students are failing because these teachers are incompetent and lazy. So instead of giving them tenure, the education department and mayor should fire them.

(3) Labor unions (in this case, the striking teachers) only care about themselves; they don’t care about the larger society, or the students or their parents. That’s why the striking teachers are against the teacher evaluation system.

(4) Union leaders are all thugs and crooks; they make big money and cut secret deals with the government.

(5) Public sector enterprises (in this case, public education system) have failed; it’s time to kill the government and government organizations. People should not finance public employees, public teachers and public health officials, etc. with their hard-earned money and taxes.

There may be more points. I am sure you can find more points to add here.

Sure! We all know where you’re coming from. You can find it all in Heritage Foundation or IMF’s manuals. Or, just read Ronald Reagan’s biography.

Let’s take these points one at a time.

1. Union workers make too much money. — Chicago striking teachers make too much money already. How much do they make? In a major city like Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or New York, where the living expenses are way too high, a $70,000 per year salary for a family of four is not that high. In fact, if you have to pay back your high income taxes, student loans (or help your grown-up children to pay back theirs), car loans, house mortgage (or apartment rent) and car insurance (most places in America do not have public transportation: you must have a car to go to work) on top of your other monthly expenses, it’s definitely not much. In fact, with that kind of salary with no perks or bonuses, you have to be very careful not to get into additional debt.

But most importantly, why not talk about the obnoxious, outrageous, unconscionable income gap that middle class (including these teachers) has with the affluent of this country? I’m not even talking about the nauseating money Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Chase or AIG executives made before or even after the 2007-2008 crash. How much Lehman Brothers CEO made when he was actually driving his company into ground? I’m not talking about how GE didn’t pay their income taxes. I’m talking about an AVERAGE worker’s salary at Goldman Sachs, which is over $600,000. Why do they make so much, and produce or manufacture or create NOTHING (except more wealth for themselves), and yet nobody talks about their outrageous earnings?

Why don’t these people talk about the fact that in the U.S., an AVERAGE CEO makes 450 TIMES more than the average working person at the same company? In other words, for an average worker to make the kind of money their CEO makes in one year, they have to work for 450 years. Nice!

A New Jersey comparison of teacher’s salary with corporate reformers’ salary. Bloomberg’s ex-education czar Joe Klein, now a Rupert Murdoch ally, is one of the reformers!

What about the corporate reformers who always tell us that teachers make too much money? Here’s a recent chart.

2. Students are failing because of these incompetent teachers. – Is it really the teachers or a failed education system that funnels and shifts money and resources from public education to charter schools or other elite schools, sucking the already-malnourished public schools dry? I’ll give you two examples from my own experience. I know very well about Stuyvesant High School, located next to Ground Zero (today is a stark reminder: some of our students saw the WTC terrorist attack from their chemistry lab on 9/11). New York City pumped in maximum resources for their prestigious public schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech — and you wouldn’t believe how affluent these schools are. Yet, so many public schools in the vicinity of Stuyvasant have practically nothing: they are in such as sad state of affairs with no money to repair their classrooms, fix their toilets, and upgrade their chemistry lab. Or, maybe, they don’t have a chemistry lab. I know they definitely don’t have an Olympic-size swimming pool that Stuyvesant has — indoor.

I also worked with an East Harlem public school when I was a journalism student at Columbia University; I wrote a feature on one of the teachers there. She showed me their biology lab; the entire high school had only one microscope for its entire body of students. She showed me how the ceilings were leaky and students sometimes had to sit outside of the classroom when it rained hard. The students told me how they worked hard, but were depressed that they would not be able to go to a good college because they were not well-prepared, or didn’t have money for college.

I published a letter in the New York Times some years ago when the education chancellor of NYC expressed surprise that the elite public school had so few Hispanic and black students. Nobody but the chancellor was surprised; do you know what it takes for these students to get into Stuyvesant and Bronx Science? Only the kids that had the best education and best family support system at elementary and middle school could do well in the extremely competitive entrance tests.

And I’m not even talking about the privileged private schools. Even within the public school system, there is so much outrageous disparity. Teachers’ fault? Really?

3. Teachers are against the evaluation system and uncaring about the students and parents. – I’ll answer the second part first. I have been a teacher all my life. I have taught in an extremely poor village in India for years before coming to America. Here in the U.S., I have taught at schools near Chicago and then I have taught in two cities in New York. I am a teacher now. Teachers care. Teachers care about the students, and teachers care about the parents. Teachers go out of their way to help their students. This is true across the board — public or private school teachers. Guess what…many of these teachers are parents themselves! They experience the process of education both various sides of the issue. In fact, these teachers know how parents feel when the student doesn’t do well; they know what needs to be done. But again, public schools everywhere have gone through major budget cuts draining their scant resources even more. In many places in the U.S., pro-privatization governments with help from corporations have funneled money from public schools to charter schools.

In case of the striking Chicago teachers, they have never said no to a fair evaluation system. But Rahm Emmanuel’s administration has imposed more and more rigorous and threatening evaluations on the teachers: they’ve recently increased the share of student performance in the evaluation process from 25% to 40%. Teachers failed to negotiate with the arrogant mayor; in fact, Rahm refused to see the teachers at the bargaining table for months. Many say that had he not been so arrogant to sit down with the teachers, this strike would not have taken place.

How many care to know? This is all taken for granted!

4. Union leaders are all thugs and crooks; they make big money and cut secret deals with the government. – This is a ploy anti-union politicians and media use all the time — all over the world. But U.S. media have taken it one step further. You never hear a pro-union story on radio, watch on TV or read in the big newspapers. You never get to see the working, struggling side of labor. You never get to see the Labor Day parade. You never know the contribution of the labor movement in building a strong middle class. Organized labor, through many years of anti-labor propaganda on the media, has lost its popularity and reputation it had. Most people here in America believe that labor union is a bad thing and has no relevance in a modern society. Nobody knows that Dr. Martin Luther King was a labor leader too; in fact, the last speech he gave the day before his assassination in Memphis was to a group of poor, striking sanitation workers. Nobody knows what collective bargaining really means. Nobody knows what some of the rights and benefits we enjoy today — and ALL workers blue-collar or white-collar enjoy them — ONLY because labor unions fought so hard for them, for generations. Anti-union propaganda has really reached a new low in this country. I know from personal experience that India is the other country where similar propaganda has tarnished the image of labor unions.

5. Finally, pro-privatization forces are now extremely powerful. USA and India are two places I know where the public sector has suffered enormously. Public schools, public hospitals and health care facilities, public employment, public transportation and all such government programs especially for the poor and middle class have declined miserably. Conservative think tanks and corporate media have blasted anything connected with the government; in the U.S., the schools of Ayn Rand, Milton Freedman and Alan Greenspan with their powerful libertarian followers in the seat of power have maligned the concept of the government altogether. Now, both the Tea Party far right in the Republican camp and Blue Dog Democrats have given away the economy of this country to private corporations. That was the primary cause of the current financial disaster.

With help from IMF, World Bank and such global organizations, and with special help for corporate media, a so-called economic reform has neocolonized the entire world: the two largest democracies such as the U.S. and India perhaps have suffered the most. In my classes and workshops, I simply this process for the students and show them the four most important policy doctrines that have expedited this global economic aggression. They are:

(A) Deregulation of every aspect of the economy, which has caused havoc to the U.S. economy.

(B) Tax cuts for rich individuals and corporations, which has created even more debt to an already-depleted U.S. treasury. Federal Reserve, which is anything but federal, has been given historic, unprecedented powers by the government to print money and loan it to the government itself, at a high interest rate. Major wars have contribute to the debt.

(C) Drastic cuts in public assistance and welfare for the needy and underprivileged. Ronald Reagan started the process, and Clinton continued it through cutting the U.S. welfare system, virtually ending the New Deal economy that was the cornerstone of American democracy for forty years.

(D) Clamping down on labor unions. There won’t be any collective bargaining anymore. Do away with all the pro-labor laws that working men and women fought for over centuries.

I began this article with a few other tentative titles for it. I mentioned Bangladesh to show how in the less-law-enforced Third World, labor leaders who are mobilizing against this global tyranny are being repressed and killed. Just a few days ago, Aminul Islam — noted textile workers’ leader in Bangladesh — was killed. In the eighties, many say, CIA broke down a massive textile workers’ strike in Bombay, India and planted its own man Bal Thackeray — who has turned out to be as much a bigot and fascist as there can be: perhaps only KKK would come close. In more law-enforced countries such as U.K., Italy, Greece or USA, the people in power and their media have clamped down on the labor movement differently. The newest barrage of hate on the right-wing media and more subtle, moderate-looking opinion pieces in so-called neutral, liberal media are doing just the same.

Who could have saved labor unions, and at this particular moment, the striking Chicago teachers, from such draconian repression?

I would think it’s someone like Barack Obama.

Think about it, Mr. President. I don’t have much power. But I SHALL decide on my vote — based on your actions.

I’ll wait to hear from you.

_____________________________

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

###

You tell me, President Obama. I’m waiting to hear from you.

Why I Am Boycotting London Olympics

India and Ireland: examples of British barbarism.

Update: Prof. Noam Chomsky just wrote about my London Olympics boycott blog: “All too accurate. You could have quoted Adam Smith instead of Marx, on the “savage injustice of the Europeans,” particularly the British in India who changed “dearth into famine” among other monstrous crimes. [...] Bernard Porter in the TLS [Times Literary Supplement, U.K.] a few months ago … pointed out that the early British imperial conquerors could stand alongside the grand genocidists of the 20th century. And to the British we can add comparable or worse contemporary examples.”

____________________________

The “fun” Games have begun and Indians are watching with major glee and awe (with their unbroken world record of one Olympic medal at the rate of every one billion people)! Here in USA where I live, people are watching with supreme patriotism and pride American media’s supremacist, Orwellian propaganda. But I am not. I am boycotting London Olympics of 2012.

To voice my strong protest against the British tyranny, violent occupation, colonization, artificial famines, pauperization and bloody partitioning of India (and countless “other” deaths by prison, torture, hanging and shooting)– which caused me, my family, my ancestors and my people lifelong misery, hopelessness and trauma, I am boycotting the global, athletic theater of corporate media and billionaire establishments — now known as the Olympics.

I am boycotting the Summer Olympics of London, 2012. Read my reasons below. Thank you.

(For those who might say: “Big deal!” Or, “So what?” Or, “Who cares?” You might read it too. Thank you.)

If you know me, this IS a big deal. For the first time in my sports-loving life that included religiously following decades of Olympic athletes and their superhuman feats — starting from Bob Beamon, Larisa Latynina, Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci, Carl Lewis, Teófilo Stevenson, Dick Fosbury, Usain Bolt and Abebe Bikila (even including our lone Indian gold medalists the field hockey team) — I shall not be watching the games or the opening ceremonies on TV, reading news on the progress of the games and medal tally, or getting sucked into the massively profiteering corporations’ 24/7 commercial blitz, continued under the guise of a not-for-profit, global sports movement.

(And I could never afford to watch the games sitting in a stadium, ever in my life.)

Today’s Olympic games are anything but not-for-profit, and they are anything but a movement. Michael Jordan and his so-called Dream Team, with help from global corporations and their media, have destroyed once and for all the pristine athletic camaraderie.

I offer my profound apologies to Bob, Larisa, Mark, Olga, Nadia, and everybody else. Sorry, I had to outgrow it, my lifelong idols.

A noted observer named Helen Jefferson Lenskyj  said this.

“Olympism is more about profiteering, exploitation, and cynicism than sport.” Read more about what the Olympic games are really all about. Click on this link here.

She is absolutely right! But for now, I want to concentrate on the London and British part of it.

My childhood hero: Bob Beamon and his 29ft-plus historic long jump.

Because this is perhaps going to be the last Olympic assembly in London before my death, my boycotting is even more significant. I invite you to join this cause. I have no other power to protest on behalf of myself and the generations of suffering of people I mentioned above. This is my personal political poster.

I say, “Down with British barbarism!” I say, “Down with Downing Street!”

I demand an official apology for the two-hundred-year-long, violent British occupation of the Indian subcontinent and the bloody 1947 partition, and I demand reparation from the British government (just the same way South Africa demanded apartheid apology and reparation)– to the ordinary people of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma. No, this is not an academic debate. For me, this is real! I shall keep demanding until my death — Olympics or not!

There is a good chance that some conscientious and thinking people from many countries will read what I have to say, and share it with their family, friends and colleagues. Given the healthy size of blog readership I somehow managed to create over the past few months, I am optimistic that some ripple-effect actions will take place. I pin my hopes on that synergy of activism.

The Irish blog from where I took the the “British Mafia” photo above, however sharp in its language, actually finds reassurance for me that I am not the only one protesting the London Olympics. This is what the blog says:

Lifelong Prisoners of British Greed, Exploitation, Violence and Lies.

“The British Government are political hypocrites and war criminals waffling on about human rights overseas, while being found guilty of torture and human rights abuses in British Occupied Ireland and interning political prisoners of conscience, even in their own Olympic city of London 2012, which all non-infiltrated human rights activists worldwide, are calling to boycott !”

Given where you are from, if you are from a country that once went through the horrific, bloody British occupation, rights and justice abuse and economic destruction, you can replace Ireland in the above paragraph with your country, and get the same, sharp message! I am doing just that for India and Bangladesh and Pakistan.

It’s about time we sent that message of protest across the globe. “Down with Downing Street!” (Just the same way we recently said, “Down with Wall Street!”)

Karl Marx wrote about the British occupation of India many years ago. I am not a Marxist in my beliefs; but you don’t have to be a Marxist per se to admire and appreciate what Marx wrote to expose the tyranny of corporate capitalism and global aggression of powers such as the British Empire. In the twenty-first century, U.S. corporate powers have taken over the mantle the British powers left behind; the modus operandi and results have, however, remained the same. I wrote about it elsewhere in this blog.

Marx said: “There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan [i.e., Hindu land of India] is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters…

British hanged a rebel Bengali boy named Khudiram Bose. That was just the beginning!

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.”

[Quoted from http://sabhlokcity.com%5D

But because I am not a Marxist, and these days, quoting Marx has become out of fashion, I want to write about my own life and lives of my predecessors (and our next generation) from a non-Marxist, “non-political” point of view. I want to talk about the British looting of India — and in particular, looting the economy of the once-golden land of Bengal — where I came from. I want to talk about how my family members — both from my own side and my wife’s side — became destitute overnight because of the trickle-down, arbitrary and bloody partitioning of Bengal and Punjab. I want to talk about a colonial education system that never taught us how to think critically, and actively discouraged us from questioning the conventional wisdom or sociopolitical hierarchy.

Nobody in Golden Bengal ever knew starvation before the British came and created famine.

I want to talk about the British government’s and East India Company’s destruction of Indian farmers and forcible, rapacious plantation of indigo, accompanied by barbaric torture of the farmers and their families. I want to talk about British government’s solitary confinement in the horrific Andaman Cellular Jail and hanging of thousands of Indian young men and women who fought back against the occupation. I want to talk about British police’s brutality against Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu or Marathi revolutionaries of 1920′s and ’30s as well as North Indian peasants who revolted in 1857. I want talk about British government’s blanket press censorship and absolute suppression of freedom of speech to quell rebellion.

I want to talk about the British colonial rulers’ creation of artificial, man-made famines numerous times in numerous places of India between 1757 and 1947, including the two grotesque Bengal famines of 1769 and 1943 — one immediately after they occupied India and the other just before they left. You can find a chart of some other catastrophic famines the British aggressors caused during their two centuries of occupation of a very prosperous land where nobody had ever imagined death of starvation!

You can read about how Churchill caused the 1943 Bengal famine. Click on this link here. Amartya Sen, Nobel economist from Bengal, wrote about it too. Satyajit Ray made a major movie on this subject.

This is how they decimated our precious wildlife.

I could write about the British rulers’ destruction of forests, farm land and environment in India. I could talk about their massive, forced conversion. I could talk about their total derision and belittling of an ancient civilization. I could write about their sinister divide and conquer policies creating permanent rift between Hindus and Muslims.

I could go on and on. But I shall stop now. I am tired and I am tired of impressing on, not surprisingly, my fellow Indians and Bengalis about the importance of such a boycott. History is now another out-of-fashion subject; nobody wants to spoil the fun Olympic games because of some old, difficult history. Especially, I do not have much hope from a strange variety of greedy, selfish-individualistic, MTV and MacDonald’s-following younger generation. Maybe you can help me to spread the word. If you can, reach my blog to Warren Anderson, ex-CEO of Union Carbide of Bhopal, who now lives dandy in the Long Island Hamptons, and whose former company renamed Dow Chemicals is now a major sponsor of London, 2012.

I pin my hopes on people around the world who share my story — those who share India’s history of a barbaric colonization, partition, forced destitution and death. I pin my hopes on people around the world who understand how the violent West has occupied, subjugated and raped civilizations and human minds everywhere — in the name of their masters — the British or Dutch queens or more recently, MTV, Monsanto or IMF.

I am paying the price of such violation of humanity and forced occupation all my life. I have no other way to symbolize my lifelong anger. I am a non-violent man. I am, therefore, boycotting the London Olympics, 2012 to vent my protests. I did the same when India hosted the now-infamous Commonwealth Games a couple of years ago. The rulers looted, exploited and lied then; and they’re doing it now. I am voicing my strong opposition against those rulers and their violation of human rights.

Would you join me in this cause and protest against the British government and monarchy? Demand an apology and reparation!

Thank you for your global solidarity and support. Please share your protests with others you know. Believe me, there are millions of people out there — all over the world — who would want to join this cause. Let’s reach out to them.

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

###

Of Boson, Bengal, God and His No-Name Particles

Bose with His Esraj (FYI: Bose was from India and so was Esraj)

Note: Professor Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, another world-renowned intellectual originally from Calcutta and Bengal, read this blog and wrote me a message of support.

She wrote:

“He [Prof. S. N. Bose] came quite a few times to our house. He was our Satyen [uncle] because he was friends with Montu [uncle] (Dilip Kumar Roy, Mother’s 1st cousin). If I remember right (these are very old memories), he sat on the floor of the living room and sang with us. A very simple man, absolutely unassuming.”
_______

I am writing about the Boson half of the now-famous Higgs-Boson — the God Particle.

I’m writing about kind of the half-life of the half-word: like, how it evaporates — in this case, quite rapidly, as if it never existed.

No, it’s not a scientific article; I do not have the necessary qualifications to write about physics, particle physics, mathematics or statistics.

I’m writing about Professor S. N. Bose — an unassuming physicist-mathematician from Bengal — who first conceptualized the Bosons, with help from Albert Einstein. I’m writing about my frustration about Western media’s near-zero coverage of Prof. Bose, even when they’re going gaga about Higgs, Boson and the so-called discovery of God Particle.

I’m writing about a historic, predictable pattern of Western media and establishment’s way of reporting, underreporting and no-reporting of news: how they selectively report and include their preferred facts and names behind the facts, and at the same time, exclude or downplay their non-preferred facts and names behind the facts.

Western media — especially British and American media — have always done it. I shall cite some examples out of a long list we have. I could talk about how New York Times repeatedly mentioned Rabindranath Tagore as Babindranath Tagore (Read Dutta and Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore the Myriad-Minded Man). But I shall concentrate for now on the media exclusion of Prof. S. N. Bose from Calcutta and Dhaka — from West Bengal, now India and East Bengal, now Bangladesh. (By the way, these are the two halves the British cut open and severely bled when they left India after two hundred years of occupation, brutality and pauperization — that’s a story I told a number of times already — on this blog and many other places.)

It is unbelievable that in this 24/7 hyped-up coverage of Higgs-Boson, the so-called global media do not find any serious obligation to tell their global audience what in the world this strange name Boson came from, even when they’re telling big stories about Professor Higgs and what kind of a major genius the British scientist is. (I have no dispute about Prof. Higgs’ genius.)

Bose was from Calcutta and Dhaka (now you know what media says about those God-damn places, right?)

Briefly, it’s like this. Someone hears or reads a news item about Higgs-Boson — also known as the God Particle. A reader or viewer, or two, have this question in their mind, and they ask their Media God (actually, nobody asks: media decides what to say and what not to say, or how much to say it):

“Dear Media God, can you please tell us what or who Higgs-Boson is?”

The Media God replies: (actually, I borrowed the description below from Wikipedia):

“The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is a proposed elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs who, along with others, proposed the mechanism that predicted such a particle in 1964. The existence of the Higgs boson and the associated Higgs field explain why the other massive elementary particles in the standard model have their mass. [...] The Higgs field interaction is the simplest mechanism which explains why some elementary particles have mass. The Higgs boson—the smallest possible excitation of the Higgs field—has been the target of a long search in particle physics. One of the primary design goals of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—one of the most complicated scientific instruments ever built— was to test the existence of the Higgs boson and measure its properties.

Because of its role in a fundamental property of elementary particles, the Higgs boson has been referred to as the “God particle” in popular culture, although virtually all scientists regard this as a hyperbole. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson, a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. Furthermore, the model posits that the particle has no intrinsic spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying almost immediately after its creation.

On 4 July 2012, the CMS and the ATLAS experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they observed a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson, noting that further data and analysis were needed before the particle could be positively identified.”

Great!

At this point, most of the readers and viewers would be satisfied and resign to the dinner table. Just a handful of obstinate and stubborn people would not be satisfied, and ask:

“But Dear Media God, what then is Boson? Where did the name come from? I like that name — Boson. Could you please tell us, Oh Dear Media God, what the hell Boson is?”

But Media God would now be silent.

I just heard that Tagore, Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen were also from Bengal. Like, are you kidding me?

See, even in the detailed Wikipedia description, there is no mention of the fact that this no-name Esraj-playing scientist from some God-damn corner of God-damn India and God-damn Bangladesh actually conceptualized the Boson particle way back when — in 1924 or something — through a series of pers. comm.’s (personal communications) with Western scientific and political establishment’s poster child Einstein (no disrespect for the great genius here, believe me!). But science? Physics? Quantum physics? Statistics? In Calcutta? Dhaka? Like, when did they learn how to read and write, let alone do science?

See, nobody except for a handful of obstinate and stubborn people would even suspect that Boson had a lot to do with Bose — this guy from a dilapidated corner of British-partitioned, blood-soaked Bengal — if you only go by the Wikipedia or as of today, major Western media: print, TV, radio or the Internet.

God, His God Particle and all such major discoveries and prizes — such as the Nobel Prize — would be owned, re-owned and renewedly re-owned by God’s preferred men, women and children. Western establishments and media — along with their clone Indian establishments and media — will make sure it happens that way.

So, because they’re not going to do it, let’s see if we can educate and enlighten ourselves on our way. Here’s what I learned over the past few days since the Higgs-Boson news broke big time. Not that I understood it all. But like Sheriff Andy Taylor’s deputy Bernie Fife said to him, I knew “It’s big…like…real big!”

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle that “belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number.” The term “boson” is related to the forgotten Indian contribution to the discovery. It owes its name to Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata, whose pioneering work in the field in the early 1920s changed the way particle physics had been approached. (Quoted from: http://www.ibtimes.com – read the full article here on this link.)

Just couldn’t resist showing these two men together.

The above article writes more about his fortuitous connection with Einstein:

“Born in 1894, Bose specialized in mathematical physics. He became a lecturer at the University of Calcutta in 1916 and joined the Dhaka University as Professor of Physics in 1921. While teaching the theory of radiation and ultraviolet catastrophe at the University of Dhaka, Bose attempted to show his students that the predicted results did not match the existing derivations of Planck’s radiation law. He made a simple mistake, which accidentally gave rise to a third prediction that produced accurate results! He derived Planck’s blackbody radiation law without the use of classical electrodynamics as Planck himself had done. He later developed a logically satisfactory derivation based entirely on Einstein’s photon concept and sent his paper on quantum statistics to a British journal, which refused to publish it, calling it erroneous.

Rejection of his paper might have frustrated Bose but he sent it it to Albert Einstein himself, with a request to arrange its publication in ‘Zeitschrift für Physik’.”

[...]

Einstein immediately grasped the immense significance of Bose’s paper, translated it into German and published it in the August 1924 issue of Zeitschrift für Physik under the title, “Plancksgesetz Lichtquantenhypothese” (the English title was “Planck’s Law and Light Quantum Hypothesis”). He also added the following comment to Bose’s article:

“Bose’s derivative of Planck’s formula appears to me to be an important step forward. The method used here gives also the quantum theory of an ideal gas, as I shall show elsewhere.”

Einstein later applied Bose’s method to give the theory of the ideal quantum gas, and predicted the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation that became a basis of quantum mechanics.

As Amit Chaudhuri explains in The Guardian, “Einstein saw that it had profound implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, ‘boson‘.”

Bose’s discovery, along with its subsequent development by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, provided the basis of categorizing the fundamental particles into two groups – “bosons” after Bose and “fermions” after Fermi.” (End of article excerpt).

Great too!

Prof. Bose lived in this house in Calcutta. We used to see him on our way to school.

See, the entire set of facts was published in an Indian publication and written by an Indian author named Kukil Bora (and he quotes another Indian author who wrote in the Guardian, a “lefty” paper). I can’t thank him enough. But what do you think: at this important time when the entire, civilized and developed Western world and its media publish so many stories on Higgs-Boson, shouldn’t they also have reported on the Boson half of Higgs-Boson?

Like I said before, it’s a historic, predictable pattern of Western establishment’s coverage of facts — according to their preference. Very soon, after some initial “disrespectful” reporting, their clone Indian media and establishment would also sweep the Bose and Boson half of the Higgs-Boson particle, by God’s Grace, under the eternally oblivious rug.

Acharya J. C. Bose, legendary scientist and author (and a close friend of Tagore) with students such as S. N. Bose and Meghnad Saha

Just like another Indian scientist Sir J. C. Bose’s name was erased from global memory, first by British media and then by Indians (read article here — click on this link), Prof. S. N. Bose’s name would also be erased from global memory, first by the Euro-American media and then by their clone Indian corporate media.

Neither S. N. Bose nor J. C. Bose was awarded the Nobel Prize (in fact, there’s strong evidence that J. C. Bose was denied by the then-European rulers of India of his invention of the radio — in favor of Marconi — see the article I linked in the above paragraph). And, then, a whole host of Bengali and Indian writers and scientists were bypassed by the Nobel and other international awards committees for we often say and we all know, prejudice, bias and political reasons. Like, Gandhi was never awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (but Kissinger was)! That tradition is on.

There will be some no-name reporting in some no-name publications; but God’s no-name particles rising from this no-name, God-damn, pauperized corner of the globe would soon be erased from human memory by the global media and their puppet masters.

Boson’s connection with Bose, Bose’s connection with Bengal and India, and all these no-name God’s particles from those God-damn, uncivilized corners of the world will remain just like that — no-name — by God’s Grace.

Or, at least, by the grace of God’s more civilized children from the Western half of the world.

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

I remember seeing them when I was a pre-teen. They lived right next to our Scottish Church School in North Calcutta.

One Last Tagore Birthday Before My Death

Satyajit Ray, an agnostic, thought Tagore was like a God.

It took me a long time to decide on the title. I thought about it and thought it over.

I read it once. I read it twice. I paused and read it again. Finally, I decided. This is it. This is the title.

No, I don’t want to make it sound corny. That’s not the purpose. I truly feel that it could be one last time I get to live on the 25th of Baisakh — Tagore’s birthday — which normally falls on the 8th of May. This year, it’s the poet’s one hundred fifty-first birth anniversary. This year, just like any other year, much fanfare is happening in West Bengal and Bangladesh, various Bengali neighborhoods of India, as well as cities across the world wherever there is a community of Bengali people — big or small.

There will be Tagore’s songs. There will be Tagore’s plays. There will be Tagore’s poetry. There will be Tagore’s dances. There will be talks about the poet-philosopher’s poetry and philosophy. More resourceful Bengali communities in places such as Calcutta (Kolkata) and Dhaka and London and Toronto will put out special literary publications to observe the special day. Some will try experimental music — using Tagore’s songs. Some will stage Tagore’s famous plays — Post Office, Land of Cards or Red Oleanders from a new, refreshing point of view. Some will perhaps have an exhibition of Tagore’s paintings.

I know here in New York, a group of Bengali musicians and artists is putting together an audio book of Tagore’s short stories — the Man from Kabul, Return of the Little Boy, the Postmaster — with help from young-generation, college-age Bengali-American boys and girls. Kudos to them.

I have no doubt there’s going to be countless other events, programs and performances all over the world to celebrate this occasion. Especially, Tagore’s 150th birthday was particularly celebratory; it is likely this year many places are perhaps completing their year-long observance with special wrap-up celebrations.

Tagore Dance Drama in U.K.

I could not be a part of any of the numerous gatherings — either in America or Bengal. I am not a part of any of the numerous Bengali clubs, societies and organizations — either in America or Bengal. I do not live in India anymore. I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood where there is a small smattering of immigrants from West Bengal; I know once they had an association that held Durga Puja and therefore, perhaps, Tagore Jubilee as well. But I know the group slowly dwindled, some old inhabitants left this unsung corner of New York City and some others went back to India. In any case, we never hear from them.

There is a large Bangladeshi community within walking distance of where we live in Brooklyn. In fact, working as an immigrant rights activist especially among the South Asians, once I had made an estimate that only this community counted about 30,000 people. It is a large community that has associations from many known and unknown districts of Bangladesh; they frequently host their picnics, street fairs and Eid dinners. But I am not sure if they ever hosted any Tagore birthday celebration. I learned from various friends that most of them came from conservative-Muslim areas in Bangladesh where “Hindu-liberal” Rabindranath Tagore was not such a household name. That is not to say all conservative Muslims are anti-Tagore or anti-Hindu.

In some other West Bengali and Bangladeshi communities in New York and New Jersey, there will be programs and performances. But these days, after working with and for especially the Bangladeshi community, it has dawned to me that inviting someone like me who is not from political Bangladesh is not a priority. After living in New York City for so many years, my family and I have accepted the fact that in spite of our desire to belong with a larger, undivided Bengali diaspora, we are not, in any real sense, part of either a “mainstream immigrant” Bangladesh or West Bengal. (Apologies for using an oxymoron.)

Chances are, we will not know if there were Tagore celebrations in New York or New Jersey where my long, post-9/11 activist experience once had an estimate of some two hundred thousand Bengalis — over eighty percent of whom were from Bangladesh. Practically all the weekend Bengali-language parochial schools and practically all of the two dozens of weekly Bengali-language newspapers and magazines operating and publishing out of New York are Bangladeshi.

The Land of Bengal: a Glorious History of a Thousand Years.

For a long time, my family and I were actively involved with one of the weekend schools where I taught advanced-level Bengali to just-graduated students, and my family members participated in their cultural programs. For a number of years, especially after 9/11, as an important part of my immigrant rights activism, I wrote columns in a number of Bengali weekly newspapers and magazines — Thikana, Ekhon Samoy, Bangalee, Sangbad, Porshee.

With the schools and publications alike, I always did what I always do: educate the community about the difference between culture and kitsch, and speak and write about human rights and justice. When I worked professionally for two immigrant advocacy organizations — one in Jackson Heights, New York City and the other in New Jersey, I also worked with Bangladeshi immigrant families who bore the brunt of a terribly unjust and primitive immigration system here in the U.S. Among other activities, I worked with a few men and women who were in prison for a long time for minor immigration violations; I also worked with some others who were spared from prison detention or deportation because of our work.

I have many friends and acquaintances. I built precious connections with journalists, activists, writers, singers, playwrights and music teachers. I always felt proud to have thought I was a member of the larger immigrant Bengal and immigrant South Asia.

Tagore Festival Toronto

Yet, there is a strange disjunct — an insurmountable wall — between me and my family and the societies both in the Bangladeshi and West Bengali community. West Bengali immigrants do not know us well: we live in a not-affluent area in Brooklyn mostly inhabited by African-Americans, Jewish people, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. Bangladeshi immigrants do not think we are one of them because we came from India — a country they do not know anymore. The conservative-Muslim Bangladeshis (the variety I mentioned above) do not like or understand a liberal-progressive, one-nation Bengal that Tagore and his predecessors from Bengal Renaissance envisioned. The young-generation, liberal-educated Bangladeshis do not know the common history and heritage of two Bengals shared over one thousand years before the British cut the land of Bengal in halves, erecting insurmountable, blood-soaked borders.

Yet, a very large section of Bangladeshi Bengalis (it’s a very strange term, in my opinion) — most are Muslims — are moderate in their religious and social views, avid music, theater and literature lovers, and are the biggest consumers of music and movies from Calcutta and West Bengal — even today. Strangely, however, some of them have a general apathy, indifference, ignorance and often anathema about political West Bengal and India. When they find out I am from India and not from Dhaka, Sylhet or Chittagong, they talk to me differently. Again, I’m not generalizing. How can I, when I have so many special friends from Dhaka, Sylhet or Chittagong?

New York’s Bengali paper Thikana published a nice review of my Tagore album. I keep working with them.

There are quite a few other Bengali immigrants both from Bangladesh and West Bengal — highly educated, scholarly and erudite — who are satisfied with the small society they have and therefore do not feel any particular urge to invite outsiders like us. New Jersey or Long Island — where most of these more affluent, educated West Bengalis live — is like a group of islands only connected by long-distance, car-driven highways, creating more distances between people. We do not have the time or desire to go out of New York City to see either a Durga Puja or a Tagore performance, and return more depressed that we never felt truly welcome.

All of the above — the entire, personal, true story I told here — is a slow but sure recipé for death. If I was not a high-energy, activist, never-say-die-type personality who would go out of his way to find new friends, colleagues and communities and stay involved with newer and ever-challenging, creative activities — immigrant movement or labor education or Brooklyn For Peace or Durga Puja or Bengali New Year celebration (or even the Tagore-150 we organized in Manhattan last year with help from New Yorker) — death would have come much faster. In my twenty-five-plus years of living in the U.S., I have seen a number of people — a few of them being highly talented but decidedly loners — falling victims of this extreme alienation followed by depression, dark diseases and death. I always, always carry that fear deep inside that one day, I’m going to be a victim of a similar alienation and die untimely.

My new Tagore album: maybe you’ll like the songs — I hope you do

Every year, therefore, at this time when the rest of the world is celebrating the life and work of this incredible genius named Rabindranath Tagore, the question comes to my mind: am I going to live one more year to see the next Tagore birthday celebration? Which song would be the last Tagore song I hear before I die? Which Tagore poem would be the last one I read? Which short story would I translate the last before I perish — and perish prematurely?

I hope I didn’t make you too sad or perturbed and I certainly hope I didn’t make it sound too corny, as if I was trying to draw your sympathy — sympathy for a forlorn soul.

If you feel that way, I am sorry. I do not have anything to offer you to compensate for it — other than the two dozens of Tagore songs I recorded. I also have a few translations of these songs as well as translations of a few Tagore short stories.

I also have a YouTube of one of my talks on culture and Tagore — a talk I gave recently at an Indian university. And if I may say it, I have recently managed to compile a whole host of my essays on Tagore in relation to cultural erosion and globalized kitsch. I’m actually in the middle of writing a book on the above.

I hope you receive these gifts I leave for you, and forgive me for my personal, not-so-cheerful rambling.

Celebrate Tagore. He showed us an educated, modern, progressive way to live. He was not a perfect man. In fact, he had many flaws. I do not consider him a God. I consider him a very important, humanist philosopher-poet teacher who taught us human spirituality, universality and peace.

Tagore taught us the message of emancipation: in Bengali, the word is Mukti. It means inner freedom: liberation of the soul. Nandini showed us the way in Red Oleanders.

If this is the last Tagore birthday before my death, I want to remember him that way.

I hope you get to know him.

Sincerely Writing,

Partha Banerjee

Brooklyn, New York

Land of Cards

My Very Special Birthday Wish

A Reason to Celebrate: My New Tagore Album. Please visit, listen and download (click on the picture).

Today I’m writing to celebrate my birthday. But today is not my birthday. It’s tomorrow.

I’m writing today because tomorrow I won’t have any free time. Birthdays here in the U.S. do not wait for a free day (or a day when you can make yourself free), and just like some other days I love to celebrate — such as Durga Puja or Tagore Jubilee — they often fall on a busy day in the middle of the week, and I cannot celebrate them the way I want to.

That’s not what I call a free country. (But that’s a different story.)

I also want to celebrate those days I love to celebrate with a lot of people and family and friends, and that don’t ever happen either.

(But that’s a different story too.)

I really love to celebrate my birthday. I’ve always loved to do it. I’ve done it in our small, limited-means way both in Calcutta, Kolkata — where I spent the first half of my life when Ma cooked some of the best Indian-Bengali dishes you could ever get anywhere in the world (ask any of my old friends); and then here in the U.S. — where I spent the second half and where my wife cooked some of the best Indian and Bengali dishes you can ever get anywhere in the world. Believe me: I’m not making it up.

So, great food is not a priority no more on my wish list. I’ve been blessed with great food — homemade and heartfelt — all my life. I seek something else. My mind asks for something more. It’s a spiritual yearning.

Perhaps, my very special birthday wish this year is: would you be mine? (Now, I know that’s cheesy

This is a very special note at this very special time. I want to smile. I want to chime.

Would you remember today to smile and chime? Mr. Bright? Ms. Bright? (That’s also perhaps again not so cheesy, right?

I need to see a lot of smile. I need to hear a lot of laughs. I want to hear a lot of songs. Happiness has been in seriously short supply. Seriously. Recently, it’s reached a critically low level.

Yeah, that’s it!

My family and friends — especially those who I know deeply care for me — often tell me these days that I have changed slowly but surely from a sprity, forthrighty, frothy, fizzy, frolicky, fun person always with a big smile and grin and loud laugh and sense of humor to a rather sad, glum and grumpy old man. Now, that’s major bad news. I want to change it.

This is a major tipping point.

So, on this very special day (like, starting from tomorrow), I want to remember the good things that happened to my life and be happy thinking about how lucky I am that those good things indeed, actually happened to me — things that do not happen to most people I know (and I know a heck of a lot of people — like, thousands, literally). I’ve sort of decided to come to a resolution that I shall, in my mind, focus on those positives and ignore, delete and de-focus the negatives.

Now, I know it’s easier said than done.

I also know it sounds like one of those Deepak Chopra books — comics that people actually buy and read and make-believe they are happy now. But Deepak Chopra or not, I know I ain’t got no more choice. Or, it’s gonna be fast and painful death for me. I don’t want to die fast and painful. More importantly, I don’t want to die and be remembered a sad and glum and grumpy man. Oh, no no no, man! Because, I am not a sad and glum and grumpy man. I never was. I never will be.

I’ve actually thought about it long and hard: what is it that pulls me down and makes me sad and angry?

I could perhaps post a long laundry list of those things in layman’s terms — events, experiences and feelings all of which happen to be true and raw and depressing and dirty — that could pull any human being with a heart and brain down. Like, deaths of loved ones — and way too many of them too untimely. Like, leaving India practically for good — out of compulsion. Like, being born too poor and seeing too much poverty and starvation too up close. Like, going through a hell of a lot of physical and mental injury and insult. Like, extreme verbal and physical abuse…like, sexual abuse. Like, hiding them all…way too many of them…and pretending they didn’t happen.

Then, there is more. Like, being forced to go through a social, educational, economic and political system that absolutely, totally, unquestionably cheated you. Like, not being able to use your delightful, lovable, warm personality and sprite, blotting-paper-like desire to learn and respect for your teachers, God-given talents, knowledge, experience, analysis and proven leadership to put to use to change the society and system in a significant way…and at the same time helplessly witnessing one of the darkest and dumbest and most exploitative and violent chapters in human history unfolding in your own life…one event at a time…like a bad, obnoxious movie…acted, directed, produced and promoted by some of the most corrupt and inefficient-yet-arrogant crooks in human history. Compared to them, yes, Caligula or Nero or Kissinger or Cheney is like child’s play.

I’ve come to a major resolution. I can never be president of the United States. Heck, I know I can never even be the chief minister of West Bengal. Only people with tons of money, a Bush-like one-of-a-kind predecessor, a major-media-sponsored genocide or a despondent-hopeless-pathetic regime and equally hopeless electorate could make you a president of the U.S. or a chief minister of West Bengal. I’ve therefore given up on those secretest desires.

That’s sarcasm, as you can see.

My parents-in-law became destitute refugees, overnight. Thanks, Gandhi.

But truly and cross-my-heartly, I’ve resigned to believe a few other not-so-idiosyncratic thoughts. Like, the two Golden Bengals will never be reunited and Bengalis will forever be blasted and looked-down-upon by the West and East alike as a failed race (and nobody will read the history book and know either the Pala Dynasty, Sri Chaitanya’s Bhakti movement, Raja Ram Mohan Ray, Derozio, Vidyasagar, Lalan, Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, Tagore…and of course, on the flip side of history, the British barbarism). Nobody would ever know how prosperous Bengal was where after the Battle of Plassey, Lord Clive and his women looted so much gold and jewelry that they went absolutely wild berserk. (Read about Clive’s atrocities here.)

I’ve resigned to believe that at the London Olympics of summer, 2012, there will be no demand from the millions of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants-turned-British citizens for an official apology and reparation for the British Raj’s two centuries of occupation, brutality, mass-killing and mass-looting. I’ve resigned to believe that in India, the same illiterate and feudal-chauvinists who were responsible for a bloody partition, riots, refugees and famines will keep in power for many years to come. I have resigned to believe that very few people even in the so-called enlightened West would ever care to know exactly how many hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were raped and killed by the Kissinger-backed Pakistani army in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

I have resigned to believe that people who I thought would care would not care. I have a number of examples of that disillusionment. Obama has been the latest example on that list.

My Alma-Mater Speaks Loudly.

I have resigned to believe that Tagore’s Nobel Prize, stolen from his own Vishva Bharati University’s national museum, would never be found. I know the British monarchy would never return Koh-I-Noor and numerous other treasures they looted from India. I now know the British government would never tell us how Subhas Bose — whom Gandhi sabotaged — perished in exile. (Am I digressing too much?)

Okay then. I’ve come to realize that nobody in the elite academia in the “free-thinking” West — especially those in the seat of power — would ever care to learn or promote philosophers and intellectuals outside of what Harvard, Columbia or University of Chicago asks of them to freely think. They would not want to know Tagore. They would not know Bengal Renaissance. They would refuse to know or teach anything majorly un-Euro-American.

I know for the fact that none of the above would ever read my blog.

So, as you can see, I have my reasons to slowly but surely transform from sprity, fun, frolicky to sad and glum and grumpy. But at this rather critical juncture of my life, I refuse to be a victim of their doing and die and be remembered a sad, glum and grumpy, bitter man. I shall not give in to their grand plan: destroy the thinking mind, dumb-down the non-thinking others, keep the trouble makers on the edge, and kill all the smiles.

No, I won’t die their prescribed death.

I want to celebrate this birthday. I want to celebrate it with a smile. I shall live on the many positives that happened to me.

I hope you do too.

Smile with me.

Let’s celebrate life. Let’s celebrate it together.

That is my very special birthday wish today…and tomorrow.

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

Another Reason to Celebrate: Teaching American Labor Rights!

Nightmare on Boyhood Street

A special note: I’d like to take a moment to thank all the readers especially those who read it from places I otherwise have no way to reach. It is a matter of great comfort that this post was read in countries — other than India, USA, Canada and U.K. — such as Austria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Spain and Thailand (and some more). I believe the cruelty and violence I described in this blog is global, and there is enough reason to believe that we are trying to find solidarity here — to stop this brutality. Thank you, readers. I hope you take a moment to share it with others. -Partha

________________________________________________________________

Nightmare on Boyhood Street

Today, I remember a day from my school life. I was thirteen at that time – an eighth grader. It was Calcutta, India. It was perhaps a late summer day.

Calcutta’s name has now changed to Kolkata. Bombay has changed to Mumbai. Madras is now Chennai. A lot has changed in India since then…a lot…especially with the invasion of new shopping malls, MTV, McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut.

Has child abuse changed in India? If your answer is yes, show me how. Give me some examples. If your answer is no, tell me why not.

Here is a real story from a real life.

Bang, bang, bang…

Punch, punch…

Whack, whack, blow…

Slap, slap, kick, thud…

A stout, muscular man in his forties held a young boy by the hair. He held him down with one hand. With his other hand, he beat up the boy mercilessly. He beat him up continuously. He punched him on his head and upper body. He slapped him fiercely, repeatedly, on his tender cheeks. He pulled his hair so hard that the boy was almost airborne. He pulled his earlobes so strongly that they were blood red. The slaps made reddish pink finger marks on his cheeks.

Along with the beating, the man groaned, ground his teeth, and grunted, “Huh, huh, huh…”

The boy took the abuse…the horrible beating. But he did not fight back. And he did not cry out, or ask for mercy. He did not ask him to stop. He did not show any visible sign of pain.

That made the man even angrier. He became more violent. He forced the boy to sit in an animal position, with his palms and knees touching the floor. The man then climbed up on him, and started to hit his back with his bent elbow. He also kicked him…or did he?

The violence went on for nearly ten, fifteen, twenty minutes…maybe, half an hour. The man lost his sense of time. The boy did too. He was nearly unconscious at this point.

The entire episode happened in a classroom. It happened in front of some forty or fifty frozen, traumatized, eighth-grade students. They watched it with horror;  some covered their faces. A few of them fell sick. Another boy urinated in his pants. One of their teachers was doing this to one of their classmates: they couldn’t believe their eyes! But none of them stood up or said a word against the barbarism. They watched it in complete silence…for the entire time.

Ashu Kar, a teacher in our famous, 150-year-old, missionary Scottish Church Collegiate School, was famous for his bad temper. There were a few other teachers who were even more notorious than him. They were never known for their quality of teaching or love for the students; they were only known for their dexterity to mercilessly, violently beat the kids.

But luckily, these men would not teach us, some of the best students. Back then, Scottish had merit-based promotion; they would always place us in Section A because we topped in the final exam. The abusive teachers would not take our classes. We were privileged to get some of the phenomenal educators of Calcutta whose presence in the classroom was like a gentle breeze coming off the ocean. Shyamadas Mukherjee of Mathematics, Bijan Goswami and Amiya Roy of Bengali, Rev. Santosh Biswas and Sudhendu Deuri of English, Nitya Sengupta of Chemistry, and Tarun Datta of Biology. Then, there was our famous headmaster A. R. Roy, known for his personality and poise. They were great teachers. We learned from them as eagerly and as fast as blotting paper would soak up water or ink – through every possible capillary of our young, inquisitive minds. We’d look forward to their classes.

The horrible hangmen would get the poor, “backward” students in Section C, D or E. We’d often hear horror stories from them. Even in elementary school, in fourth grade, there was severe student abuse. And I’m not even talking about the verbal abuse that was commonplace: teachers would make personal, intrusive, insulting, snide, negative remarks, constantly on a daily basis, to students that did not do well in tests or failed to turn in the homework; particularly, students who came from underprivileged families. Indian boys and girls were used to verbal abuse. At home, they got it from their fathers, uncles or neighbors. At school, they got it from teachers. The verbal insult and undermining would dash their self-esteem once and for all.

Now I’m talking about the more serious, inhumane, physical abuse. We the “good” boys from Section A came to know about them in middle school, since maybe, when we were in sixth or seventh grade.

Police beating a child

There were two men named Mr. Jana and Mr. Dafadar who took Section E classes only: boys who did the poorest in last year’s finals. They brought in class their own special teaching methods and tools. Every day, they’d enter the classroom, and before doing anything else, call out some students they decided the worst backbenchers. They’d line them up outside the classroom facing against the wall, with their arms all the way up, the length of the arm touching the wall, as if cops doing a shakedown on them. I’m convinced these teachers were cops or military men before they became teachers; they did it to their sixth, seventh or eighth-grade students exactly the way cops did it to suspected, frisked criminals. Or, in case of today’s India or USA, anyone the cops or military might suspect to be trouble makers.

Jana and Dafadar – I don’t remember which one was more dangerous – would then return to classroom, take attendance for the remaining students, give them some meaningless work to do – maybe, a bunch of arithmetic or English grammar problems from the textbook without showing them how to do it, and return to their “favorite” students waiting outside. Now, they’d stick out their personal, two-feet-long, wooden ruler scale or a long, bent cane, and spank the students real hard until they all cried out in pain. Some diehards would not budge; some of the kids were so used to it that they’d look the other way, and chuckle while the bad cops kept beating the others. If they’re lucky, they’re spared. If Jana and Dafadar caught them chuckling, they’d have some more special treat that day.

Some E or D students regularly cut classes. They also nicknamed the abusive teachers: Jana and Dafadar were called Jharudar or something, meaning the sweeper; alternately, it could mean the one who beats badly.

That was them. Then there was our Ashu Kar. In between, there were some more child molesters – big or small.

Why do people get so violent? Why are some people so cruel? What pleasure do some big, powerful men get out of beating young boys or girls who can’t resist or fight back?

Sigh…tears…sigh…tears…sigh…

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York

Owner beating child worker at a textile factory

Solidarity: Wall Street, War Front

Solidarity: Wall Street, War Front

Do you see any solidarity across the globe? Do you see any reasons for solidarity across the globe? Do you see any hope for solidarity across the globe?

Can my poems help find it? Can your poems touch my poems? Can they meet and talk?

___________

(1)

Iraq

(Acknowledgement: Sourav Datta, Durgapur, West Bengal, India)

 

A Collateral Damage

 

My home was in Iraq, did you know?

There, by the Baghdad factories

Ma, Dad and with a little sis

We had fun – laughs, songs and stories

 

First time they bombed our block

We shivered with radio round-the-clock

Dad’s bus got hit ‘n exploded

Sis cried out, “Mother, he’s dead!”

 

My dear father’s grave, yes I kissed

Whispered in fear — eerie, awful

“Dear Dad, you come out now you can

Gone are those violencing beasts.”

 

***

Again they now hit back my land

Hoping to shove democracy down

Experts on oil addiction

This time more pain, starvation

 

***

 

Firm resolve, no fear of death

They’ll defeat Babylon empire?

I’ve joined forces millions

How dare that Dubya Dumb and Blair?

 

***

 

I’m too a son of a great nation

Daddy’s on the Iraq battlefield

Peter, Becca, little Sam and I

We got it in our hearts ‘n eyes

 

I screamed, “Dad, leave Iraq at once

If you kill but one-o their childs

Consider you killed one us yours

You now no mo’ one-o our heroes.”

 

____________

 

(2)

Bangladesh Border, 1971

Bangladesh Border, 1971

 

those small men and those small women

with small, tiny hopes and smaller desires

all their lives they weep in vain

and none cares ’bout their futility tears

 

…tears shed away slowly, lowly

like late-night dew drops, slowly, lowly

 

d’you ever listen to their subdued cry

o’er late-night wind the cries quiver

d’you hear them, tell me, why

d’you ever hear them, tell me, ever?

 

____________

(3)

Occupy Wall Street

(November 15, 2011)

We Are the 99 Percent.

 

They’re gone now

But they shall be back.

 

This is the last battle.

 

They know.

 

Even New York Times

Can’t stop them.

 

###

 

Sincerely Writing,

Partha

Brooklyn, New York