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If anyone feels disoriented by the events in the country, in West Bengal in particular, in the last few weeks, no one can blame him or her. Things are happening as if in a rapid-fire montage, too quick to grasp at because the next scene appears soon. The ground beneath seems to slip away sometimes moments, a senior citizen of Kolkata confided in me, his face lined with bewilderment. Where are we? Why so much violence at the drop of a hat? Have we changed so much that we don’t have a modicum of decency and kindness, he asks rhetorically. I don’t have any answer, equally dumbed by the mindlessness of it all. Or conveniently look away from unpleasant truths.
And the irony! My friend (does age matter in friendships?) elaborated a little further. Being a cinema aficionado, he makes a beeline to the annual film festival in Kolkata religiously. On the day he caught the famous Brazilian film Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe), the controversial film by auteur Glauber Rocha, there were people arrested, artists, writers, poets, on the main thoroughfare because they silently protested against the violence in the villages of Nandigram that singed the common people. Back home, when he was ruminating on the film the TV screen burst with images of very real scenario enacted in his own city, images he looked at unbelievingly because they seemed so alien to his sensibilities!
And he was thinking of the fictional El Dorado in Rocha’s film where politics of convenience and corruption engulfs and disillusions the protagonist, Paulo Martins, an idealistic journalist. Martins is witness to the flip- flops of both Right and the Left political parties because he changes sides himself hoping for a better deal to his people in the country. He writes and recites his poems frantically to keep a sense of balance in this ever-shifting world but fails. In the penultimate image Paulo takes on the sky with a gun.
No wonder my friend feels bewildered, caught between fiction and reality. Like many others.
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