By Sreyashi Mazumdar
"While crooning away to Anjan Dutta's 'Ranjana aami ashbona' and paging through the crumpled pages of an old newspaper, I ran into the scribbler's corner. Since I was 4, I used to see my Dadu scribbling some odd graphics and letters on the extreme right-hand side corner- or the scribbler's corner as I used to denote it- of the newspaper…I was too young and naive to look over those amorphous paragraphs which failed to unveil any hidden meaning before me. It was after his death that I started fidgeting with the scribbler's corner.
Dadu Bhai will become a doctor one day…Dadu Bhai will become a journalist one day…(the grey-haired used to address me as Dadu Bhai)…I really don't know whether he used to ever lament the deplorable condition Kolkata might get into after like 20 years….I am neither a doctor nor a journalist…I think, I am a bemused fellow nibbling on a mirage, a mirage that mirrors Kolkata's lost vigor–once a plush place with opportunities thronging it and culture touching new heights with stalwarts like Tagore, Michael Madhushudon Dutta, Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray, Ritvik Dutta creating history. May, be my future has donned the history and has got reduced to a withered leaf with no air to breath in or develop", laments Kritika Sarkar, a third year Calcutta University student.
Kolkata or the city of Joy once emanated vivacity, with the city's young minds shouting their lungs out, essaying their ideas through words, films, movements, with vigor etched in their minds to bring a change. A change that would meliorate the city and flesh out the potential the city once bore– the high-spiritedness rendered by its citizenry and the vitality that it's economy took to.
Despite the teeming crowd of intellectuals herding the posh hubs and confabulating over post-modern ideologies flavored with their personal experiences, with prolonged drags of cigarettes satiating their unrequited want to fill the void, the lacklustre city stands still at the honking horns while passers-by stare at the city with sullen eyes, hoping to reap the yield of their hard work.