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Life is short, uncertain, precious... it should be fun, even the dying
Different strokes
Rodin's famous Thinker, spray-painted!
'I should not be thought to be serious only when I am solemn'... Bertrand Russell
About Me
- Suvro Chatterjee
- Durgapur, West Bengal, India
- I am 61, and for 22 years now a confirmed home-bird. I read, write, teach, counsel, listen to music, exercise, watch movies, have fun with kids including my own, have tried to be a good husband, think all the time, and generally endeavour to live the good life as I have understood it. It's tough, and it's been a long trudge.
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'There's a pleasure, for sure, in being mad, which only madmen know': John Dryden
12 comments:
inspite of all such developments ,i have discovered a strange thing about durgapur . when i send my letters to the national dailies of india , i rarely find them mentioning durgapur beside my name(when my letter gets published). what they say is "debotosh chatterjee,burdwan". here is an example : http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/article1157778.ece (fourth comment from the top) .if at all my hometown has undergone drastic changes, then why not this? why do national newspapers think twice before mentioning durgapur beside my name ?
If a 'romantic' day cannot be spent without 'hanging out' or 'hogging' at Flurry's...without visiting Sony Center and KFC restaurant...then maybe, it is better not to have such a "sweet love story" at all...What would this 'ideal' couple have done, had the places in mention, had remained shut down for the day??...or had not existed??...Such special stories deserve the front page..wherein possession of goods takes the cake nowadays...reading that, I aspire to be a very rich business person...just imagine!...I will have all the love that people can just dream of...and what hullabaloo about some gadget from Sony Center??...I will buy my "beloved"..the shop itself...Now, won't my "great love story" make me famous...and direct national media attention towards me?...
What an utterly useless write-up!...
Sir, what do you feel?...Nowadays, scamsters rule the roost..but they are now even selling 'love' for money?..
And the portion about Durgapur...who is she to judge it?...it looks like if the malls in question are not built...then we cannot claim Durgapur to be a "civilized","happening","hot-spot"...let's start by closing down all educational institutions..hospitals..what a waste of place!!...let's build more malls!..
Yours sincerely,
Debarshi.
That was a 100 mile write-up. I'm afraid I didn't go through the entire thing. But it's very good to know that a Crosswords might be coming up in Dgp...yes? If I didn't entirely miss what I was reading. And Mainland China - if I remember right - is a horribly overpriced restaurant with entirely forgettable food.
Shilpi
I am willing to bet that the Crosswords outlet, if it does open here, will either wind up within a year or concentrate on selling toys, CDs, bric-a-brac and toiletry...
As for restaurants, I give them as wide a berth as multiplexes. The young riff-raff can have them; I draw the line very firmly at certain places (the best day to visit an eatery in Durgapur is a weekday, towards the end of the month, preferably when exams are under way).
What is the point of having these stores? They are manned by people who are as ignorant as the patrons. On my last trip to India, I was very happy to see that the city my parents live in has a brand name music store. Eager to spend my money and buy some classic Hindi film music, I went to the store with high expectations. Not being able to find what I wanted I asked for some help. On learning the name of the album I was looking for, I was asked the following question by the store employee: "Who is Mohammad Rafi?"
At that point I just gave up.
Dear Sir,
Having been born and raised in Durgapur, I have a natural affection for the town. So it annoyed me immensely the last time I went there- with all these "winds of change" sweeping the place over- to find out that what once used to be a quiet, peaceful and generally clean town has metamorphosed into a haven for hell-raisers disguised as mall goers and rowdy college students. Driving in Durgapur happened to be a comparatively easy task. Thanks to these developments, it is a huge pain in the neck now. The streets are crowded with college students trying to pull off stupid bike stunts with no regard to rules or safety whatsoever. You don't need to go beyond Pump House to see what I am talking about. The town has become dirtier, the air is heavily polluted, the roads are thickly congested, power cuts are much more frequent, and people are even more rude and undisciplined. If this is development, I don't even want to know what underdeveloped towns are like.
And yes, Crosswords will do just fine as long as they take care to ensure that the book shelves are filled with Joint Entrance cram books. Also, they should hide all other kinds of books away. I have a theory (validated with practical experiments, of course) that the mere sight of interesting books disgusts much of the young generation (the mall hopper type) nowadays, but more on it later. I think my cynicism regarding Crosswords is not entirely unjustified. There used to be a fine library in City Center not too long ago. We all know what that ended up with.
Take care and bye.
Thanks,
Joydeep
We have often visited the local crossword store here in Rajarhat and have noticed how the usually deserted book store suddenly teems with all kinds of people on 'special' days like Christmas and Valentine's day. Strange reading habits our 'eduacted' people have these days!
Warm regards
Rashmi
Careful with typos, Rashmi!
Yes, these days nothing has any intrinsic value any more: it's all just about having 'fun'. I wonder how sick society can get that people so desperately need 'fun' all the time, and look for nothing else...
Anand, I don't find your story unbelievable at all.
Joydeep, I know of many sad stories besides the one about the library at City Centre. Durgapur is a 'highly educated' town - so books have always been anathema here. And if anything, the recent 'developments' have made them even more so. What Durgapur residents want is maybe more nightclubs!
So we were at the horribly jam-packed Kolkata Book Fair this year, wondering how the city generates so many bibliophiles during the 'boi mela' season, (and don't ask me about the 'Food Court'; more crammed than our most overcrowded buses, it seemed like a place where one would literally have to stand on one leg and eat, which so many seemed to be managing quite gracefully)when, in a certain store, we caught sight of a couple of young college goers leafing through a book titled 'A short introduction to Nietzsche'. We might not even have noticed them had one of them not shouted "Nietzsche!" so loudly and with a kind of girly enthusiasm, which made us think that perhaps she was meeting up with a long lost boyfriend. With pages about two-thirds the size of the average 'Reader's Digest' and having, at most, sixty to seventy pages, I was wondering what the definition of 'short' might be when we noticed that their expression had grown grim and somewhat confused. At this point one of them turned and looking askance at her friend, asked - "Nietzsche-r philosophy ta ki, exactly?" Both of them remained silent for a while. Then they neatly tucked the book away and moved on to the next section.
Sayan Datta
kolkata book fair this year,as i saw it, was high on foot-falls but low in sales ! people running here and there in the fair with no specific objective in mind !
Well, I don't know... I just read in the latest issue of Desh magazine that Rs. 16 crore worth of books had been sold at the book fair this year, which is a record. However, the article-writer made it clear that it is not certain that most of the buyers were serious readers and collectors.
In any case, this blogpost was about Durgapur and the way it is going. I want to know more about what my readers feel in connection with both the content and the tone of that newspaper article.
Dear Sir,
I found a couple of lines really hilarious:
'“We want Junction to be a complete destination mall, where the customer’s every need is satisfied. ...'
'Old residents say malls are altering the aspirations of the people here and living the good life is no more reserved for the occasional trip to Calcutta.'
I'm not quite sure what a 'destination mall' is. Have malls nowadays, rather than the Trekker's Hut at Sandakphu or the backwaters of Kerala, become destinations of sorts?
I don't know what aspiration has got to do with malls. And a visit to Calcutta for 'Living the Good Life'?
I hope Crossword manages to do business selling books and doesn't have to close down or resort to selling toys.
Sincerely
Nishant.
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