Asol Poriborton
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My connection to Kolkata is for a very long time. Since the early 90s may be I started absorbing the city and its denizens. It was a reasonably contended city then. Every data about Kolkata was different. ACs? Not interested! Mutual Funds?

Give me Insurance! Maurti Esteem? No, Ambassador boosts our esteem!
It was then the Bhadralok kids started flowing out of the city...to America, to Delhi, to Bangalore. All of the IT folks and Business Mgmt kids were only Bongs (they were the only ones talking while the rest

were working or listening to them in awe). There they collided with the kids of parents who left a generation ago. The dotcom boom and BPO waves lifted the boat. I could feel that in the air whenever I would visit my sister's home and walk about Ballygunje Circular road.

Kids would be running in and out of one tuition to another. Music classes jostled with JEE and CAT preparations. And tiger moms were almost killing each other to feed Hindustani and Western classical music to their precocious kids.

Still, by 2005-06, Kolkata was a half way house - cultural pride tainted by economic shame. Even its "First metro" was now a dark symbol standing in the shadow of a "world class Delhi metro."
Among the Bongs I met outside, the Bangalore Bongs carried the most of their

political angst. Jostling for greatness, edging out the Madrasis, filling most senior mgmt positions, and easily beating the rude Hindi belt rustic IT kids to big increments, they kept telling themselves "We are far brighter than these "lazy" Kannadiga fellows.

Yet they have a better city." Some would openly sneer down "Kolkata is dead!" (I would look at them with bewilderment. Ayatollah would have issued a fatwa for their heads!).
In their mind's eye, Kolkata lost its charm a long time ago under the communist comrades which in their

view an earlier generation was conspiring to preserve out of sheer nostalgia. Food was the only thing they wanted to acknowledge about Kolkata (may be Tagore and Satyajit Ray...as it was before their time and b/w era did sound sophisticated enough).

They didn't like Amartya Sen or Mother Teresa. They were icons of a traumatic poverty they didn't want to remember. And after the global financial crash, even the Salt Lake City dreams were beginning to sour. Their investment in that "city of future" felt like

it was sinking inches everyday under those marshy lands.
And so the stage was set for Mamta to enter in 2011. Didi came at the right time and swept away the cause of all this trauma hiding in the minds of the millenials: "those terrible communists who screwed my state!"

Poriborton was in the air. I was in Kolkata when the election results poured in. The millenials were ecstatic. It reminded me of Arab Spring. Capitalism was finally coming to Kolkata they said. And about time too!
But by 2014, with Modi's rise, poriborton was not

keeping up with baloooooning aspirations even as the country slackened. Didi's methods now felt like another variant of communism. For the upwardly mobile millennial, socialism and communism sound similar and akin to goondaism.
And so, many of the Bhadralok kids are now seeking

authenticity. Asol Hinduism. Asol poriborton. Asol Kolkata (whatever that is).
//I hope Bengal understands the meaning of it; I fear that it may not. I fear, even more deeply and despairingly, that it actually does. That a securely buried demon seed from the past has been watered

& coaxed to sprout. And that such sprouting has become, tragically, a vociferously celebrated thing. Do more Partitions await Bengal? Or to put it more bluntly, r Bengalis happy to build welcome arches to another one? And if so, where do they intend to sow the wall? And how many?

@earthwormjhark1 @BhaduriRajendra @GhoshShilpi3 @sen_abhik @razumikhin888 @mahuadey20 @drmanishranchi @anitatagore @doseofhumanity1 @Suslovelygl @AandolanGV @priyaspotpourri @pratsd @FreedomSutra @OManojKumar @sandeeproy1 @RoopsSaxena

Even though not a born bong, but having spent a considerable time of childhood and early youth Bengali culture is an integral part of life now. The degradation that we all have witnessed over few decades just breaks from inside.

For me it's like choosing between BJP and Lalu.