Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Digha-November 2007
The drive was glorious. The south bengal countryside was green and verdant. We crossed Kolaghat on the way, a place full of happy childhood memories.
7 hours of driving through NH6 and then taking the single lane road to Digha from Mecheda we were in Digha in the afternoon.
The hotel resembled someone's residence but when you went in the long corridors with doors leading to hotel rooms tell you that you are in a hotel.
The beach was crowded. The sand was full of detritus, empty coconut shells, cigarette butts. Hawkers were everywhere. Some families, the women fully clothed, some men wearing the red-white checkered bengali towel called the gamcha were rolling in knee deep water. Elsewhere more adventurous young men in large groups were out in the deeper waters.
The beach front was broken by temporary stalls setup by hawkers selling tea, cold drinks and green coconut.
The evening was spend in an even more crowded old Digha beach. The atmosphere was festive, more like the happy crowds and the jostling you see around the Durga Puja mandaps.
I have never been to Digha before. I guess I was expecting something different something quieter. What must have been a small fishing village have now been transformed into this busy crowded touristy place.
How is life for an Indian then in distant foreign shores. The novelty has wore off. So you would no longer see travelogues and reminiscenses like that of Annada Shankar Ray or Jajabor.
It is now quite a routine thing for an Indian to study, work and in many cases settle abroad.
I liked Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" which I thought sketched a very moving picture of the Indian-Bengali diaspora experience. Much before when in college I was moved by one of Buddhadev Bose's poems called "Nostalgia". It was a good poem but then I didn't really feel inside what that was all about. Only now, as I travel in silence on a London Tube, careful in the London commuter way not to exchange glances with fellow passengers, I can appreciate the depth of the longing. Like in that poem, as you walk out of the underground subway, images of a rain drenched Lindsay street on a June afternoon flashes in your mind, very familiar comfortable images of a past life spent in hot crowded buzzing streets come to you like a gentle nudge from the past.
It is now quite a routine thing for an Indian to study, work and in many cases settle abroad.
I liked Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" which I thought sketched a very moving picture of the Indian-Bengali diaspora experience. Much before when in college I was moved by one of Buddhadev Bose's poems called "Nostalgia". It was a good poem but then I didn't really feel inside what that was all about. Only now, as I travel in silence on a London Tube, careful in the London commuter way not to exchange glances with fellow passengers, I can appreciate the depth of the longing. Like in that poem, as you walk out of the underground subway, images of a rain drenched Lindsay street on a June afternoon flashes in your mind, very familiar comfortable images of a past life spent in hot crowded buzzing streets come to you like a gentle nudge from the past.
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