Kumartuli or Kumortuli is located in the northern part of the city of Kolkata . The locality is a traditional habitat of the potters for nearly three hundred years. The potters or the artisans or the artists settled here during the restructuring of the Kolkata colonial region by the British East India Company . Earning a livelihood by making earthen pots and utensils first they gradually shifted to the making of the idols of Gods and Goddesses for various festivals round the year. With increasing demand and quality of their creations over time the artisans became famous and Kumartuli came to be known as the hub of idol makers supplying thousands of idols, particularly of Goddess Durga , to whole of the state of West Bengal and to NRIs of around 90 countries across the globe. At least three months before Durga Puja , the biggest festival of West Bengal and one of the biggest across Eastern India, more than five hundred workshops come alive with hyper activity day and night. Fir...
Long back Mahatma Gandhi advised us ‘Do not listen to bad, do not see bad and do not speak bad’ ("Bura Mat Suno..Bura Mat Dekho...Bura Mat Kaho"!). Now in modern hyper competitive times we are helpless about the first two don’ts. And persistent exposure to the first two makes us lose the third too!
We cannot help but listen to or watch an endless stream of ‘bad’—all around us from home to the streets, in the newspapers and news channels, in the television serials and in the movies and at every act we have to do like walking praying jogging or driving—everyday and every step of our existence.
Such continuous barrage of ‘bad’ is fast making us speak and utter a lot of ‘bad’ too. We are becoming doubtful and suspicious of everything around us and we are learning to blurt it out freely and openly.
The main ‘bad’ drive comes from politics. We are hounded constantly by all sorts of stories being hammered into us forcing us to form our opinions or go on changing these and finally give vent to it by expressing which often borders on the ‘bad’. We better take one or two illustrative examples here.
We supported the anti-corruption fight by Anna Hazare in India wholeheartedly and in huge numbers. Then slowly seeing the politics building around it we started speaking badly about it, but still supported the cause which was ‘good’ and this ‘good’ was to be solemnized into a Bill in the winter session of the Indian Parliament. The winter session came, but could not function for a single day in the first two weeks thanks to politics being made out of issues like inflation, black money and lately the issue of Foreign Direct Investment in the Indian retail sector. So, some of us are already saying that the political parties have joined forces deliberately to stop the Parliament from passing the anti-corruption Bill!
Cricket—the craze of India—is another hotbed of politicking and the fixing phenomena. We have been so fed up with reports of match fixing over the years that now we cannot accept any cricketing result without being suspicious of the ‘fixed’ kind! We smell a rat in anything our team or ‘their’ team does. So, some of us used to say that the full World Cup-2011 tournament was fixed to help Pakistan come victorious, because terror-torn Pakistan needed some solace! But when India defeated Pakistan in the semifinal stage only those of us were not at all disheartened. They started uttering now that the whole tournament was fixed to favor India, because of big money! Normally, whenever we see India winning big we say the other team fixed it and whenever we see India lose big we say Team India fixed it!
We cannot blame ourselves. The alarmingly enlarging ‘bad’ of modern times has almost forced us to lead paranoid existences smelling a rat at every step. What is the solution? Well, we must still try to follow the great Gandhian dictates. We like it or not!
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