The Immortal Writer

Negative capability of a writer, so celebrated by romantic poets like keats doesnt actually mean that the author doesnt hav an opinion. or for that matter, dialogism and polyphony in modern novel, conceptualized by the Russian critic Bakhtin do not imply that the author is unopinionated and voiceless in a text...

What can be a stronger stand than choosing to author a text? The writer's urge to write something is itself a very strong opinion...

Take Herbert by Nabarun Bhattacharya. Herbert, the eponymous protagonist is a semi-retarded simpleton who claims to communicate with the dead and is eventually hounded out by the Rationalists Association. After he commits suicide, when his body is about to be cremated, an explosion takes place... he was being cremated alongwith his old bed and it comes out that there were dangerous explosives beneath his bedding, which were kept there long ago by a Naxal relative of Herbert. A stronger critique of enlightenment and bourgeios reason hasn't ever been written in Bengali language... In any oppressive society, traditional wisdom is the justification of oppression... and how easily the fool becomes an inadvertent rebel, and how tragic is his rebellion...

The author has a crusade to fight... well, all writers worth their salt do that... they resist hegemony. The basic idea of creative writing is to defamiliarize... ever wondered why all craftless writers appear monotonous? because they align with hegemony and in that process surrender the basic literariness of a text....

so yes, the witer didn't die, no matter what Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and their Indian counterparts said...and the author still has a voice in his text...its just that now she lets the reader think, and doesn't do the ex-gratia thinking on behalf of the reader...

graffiti on th walls of rain
thatz the older profile name which we retained for no less than two and a half years.
As 2009 makes us embark on a new journey, the old becomes history.

My Older Orkut Profile

Tamal Dasgupta
is..
an elaborate planner with a very lamentable record of implementation..
a cynic who tries to convince others and himself about possibilities...
a hard core Bengali who is settling to spend the rest of his life in the cow belt...
a lover of uncertainty principle, quantam physics and relativity,who barely managed to save his skin in highschool physics...
a committed husband who was unfortunately always perceived to be a flirt in his class...
a passionate, amused and indulging observer of this great flux called humanity and yet one who can never observe the colour of the shirt you are wearing, not because he is colour blind, but because he is actually an absent-minded observer...
a PhD researcher in literary theory and also a lecturer and often getting exhausted of both..
well,also an occasional poet in private...
Some time ago he discovered(May 2, 20071:45pm) that he's cleared UGC-NET and is awarded a JRF,Junior Research Fellowship, that is. A trivial & rather unnecessary info is that on that very date & time he finds that he's cleared the Waste (I have a sinking feeling that I have got the spelling wrong) Bengal school service commission as well...
One who had the choice of joining between Bamangachi High School and Amity University
I was a day passenger at Kutb Minar at the time of my first job in Delhi, and now I cross Yamuna daily (not by swimming, silly). everyday, I pass by Hauz Khas, Safdarjang, Rashtrapati Bhavan, India Gate, Lal Quilla, places which are exotic for the tourists and quotidian for me

What ails Bengal’s higher education?

Nepotism and favoritism are the most thrilling achievements of our wasted Bengal’s system of higher education…and its very easy to point out the culprit, as rudrangshu mukherjee thunders in his article in Anandabazar Patrika, dated 21 June, 2007. Why, the culprit is of course the CPM. Our critics of the left regime are such embodiments of relentless promotion of pure quality and quality alone in their haloed spheres of work, that your first reaction will be an overwhelming feeling of reverence to them and hatred to the left , these critics are holier than cow, and certainly holier than thou..

From a reliable source, I happen to know that a CPI veteran privately carries a statistics with him which shows how many relatives of CPM leaders/ministers got questionable employments at schools/ colleges/ universities… There's no denying that CPM has been doing this systematically for last three decades..

But the fact is, no Left Front partners (or even the oppositions) are exempt from this nexus of nepotism, CPM is more visible at this malpractice because of its massive size, relatively greater power to wield authority, and a strategy to keep this power intact by filling the posts of college/university teachers with their own people as far as possible, because that particular stratum is one of the most vocal/influential section of the Bong middle class.

The fact is, interestingly, every organization/individual (including our very liberal, anti-CPM profs in academics) in a position to exercise influence DOES this here in Bengal. The reason is not very hard to understand. In any backward economy, teaching sector is the most accessible guarantor of jobs…but owing to the fact that Bengal has the highest number of unemployed postgraduates, there have to be some eliminations… and nepotism is a very simple, effective, easy and user-friendly method of elimination/selection.

So, let the Maharashtrian man of influence get his daughter a trade licence, our venerable Bengali Bhadralok will be content to get his favorite female student a job at the newest school of abracadabra studies within the university established with lucrative grants from UGC…

Just stop singling out CPM, or let him cast the first stone at CPM who is influential and yet has never exercised favoritism…