Yesterday I watched the film Sankar Mudi which made me look back in time and think about the changes that started more than a decade ago. I was in my early teens in the late 2000s. As a result, neither did I fully understand what was happening around me at that time, nor did I have any inclination to understand. My world revolved around school and friends and sports and TV. But the film I watched last night made me ponder over the things I had missed during my childhood.
The late 2000s was all about the decline of the left regime and the rise of TMC, an offshoot of Congress. Every now and then, there would be a strike that would bring our city to a standstill. Aside from a handful of so-called educated people, most were unaware of the reason of the strike and just went with the flow and treated the strike as an unavoidable but not really unwelcome holiday. I know I did. The reason of our ignorance was the high-handedness of the comrades who thought that the common people were too much of an idiot to know and understand what’s good for them and what’s not. So, they didn’t make the common people understand the socio-economic changes happening in the world that would inevitably transform our society as we knew it. The result was that the comrades created a high-class posh educated society and alienated the rest of the common people. and there were some people, popularly known as ‘parar dada‘ who called themselves communists and exploited this division to further their own selfish needs. Thus the gap between the government and it’s people only got wider and wider.
The Left Government has received flak for a lot of it’s actions and rightly so. Abolishing English at primary stage was one of them. The compulsory teaching of English has long been abolished in almost every state in the country, but nowhere has such a decision provoked as much controversy and opposition as it has here: a fact that the ruling Left Front had discovered to its great dismay. The result was the production of many graduates who were incapable of constructing even a single English sentence correctly. But if we dig deep and actually think about what could have been the possible reason behind such a naive and illogical decision, we may be able to understand. We should understand the scenario of that time. Pro-English trends were doing rounds. The middle class people were leaning towards English medium schools, courtesy our long-standing fascination with the Queen’s language. Our mother tongue was in danger of being ignored. In addition, since only the privileged section of the society had access to English medium schools, it posed the danger of a division being created in our society. The Left government wanted to stop that from happening.
My Humanities professor in college told us a story about how the Left had opposed the start of computer education in Bengal because of which our people took to computers later than other states. The Left Government had feared that the people would be out of jobs because of computers, not realising that they can’t do anything about it and should make the best of the situation and use this new technology for the benefit of people.
The film Sankar Mudi correctly explained the consequences of Globalisation in layman terms. The Left Government had even opposed FDI (Foreign Direct Investment). But they couldn’t stop it. The World was changing and the Government had no choice but to join the bandwagon. The Left Government had foreseen the changes happening in the world and they understood the effect it would have on our common people, how it would drastically change the society. But sadly they were not foresighted enough to understand that they can’t turn their back on change but should rather adapt to the change as best as they can.
The massacre of Singur, Nandigram was another instance of failure of the Left regime.
Most of the things the Left Government had introduced had a lot of reasons behind them, but because of their terrible terrible way of solving the problem and equally horrendous implementation and their inability to connect to the common people led to their downfall. The Left Government had lost touch of reality and had alienated the people who had put them in power in the first place. And our current Chief Minister Mamata Bandopadhyay capitalised on that. Her ability to connect with the common people is the reason the people vote for her again and again since 2011.
But in all this, the collateral damage was the deterioration of our society and the martyr was the ‘para culture’ . Today we don’t know our neighbours, we don’t talk to our neighbours. Our ambitions and greed has created a generation of loners who are most interested in their expensive android and iPhones. But this is life and change is the only constant. Rather instead of turning our back on it, we need to adapt as best as we can.
Splendid experiences 