While two poor and ignorant peasants pushed a Nano slowly across the stage, 2008 culled chickens from a luckless Comrade’s farm hung upside down on the cyclorama at the back, their chosen number to mark the beginning of another unfortunate year in West Bengal’s commerce, their blood dripping into halved and overturned eggshells, while for footlights at the bottom of the stage was a huge bonfire into which at the end of the evening’s proceedings the chickens — after their feathers had been plucked to tar and feather effigies of George Bush who, with the CIA and ISI, would somehow have to have influenced the court decision that made senior parliamentarians protest about the highhandedness of the judiciary — would be ceremonially cast by all those dignitaries assembled on the Town Hall stage to pronounce the inauguration of the book fair, and then eaten roasted with a side order of Chandramukhi potatoes squashed and mashed like the wills of ordinary farmers whose souls, with their produce, were ransacked by FMCGs in the state.

You have to admit that what happened at the Town Hall the other evening, viewed with some humour and a quirky imagination, was nothing short of a Kafkaesque abstraction of stark realities wherein our city’s vagrant intellectuals found themselves playing ring-a ring-a-roses around themselves and their opinions, like puppets on a string, clacking jaws incoherently and strutting around cockily like broiler roosters with their cockscombs flopping limply on their prosaic achievements, unable to steer minds and opinions any longer with the burden of misinterpreted Marxism and the impossible discipline of a Red Book they wooed. Put together, far too much fire for idle Vaishnav minds steeped in laid-back superstition which devoured romantic poetry for exercise and whose children’s only guaranteed inheritance was acidity, hypertension, diabetes and flatulence. As the Bard would have put it, “They have lived long on the alms-basket of words.”

And I, dear reader, have exhausted and muddled you beyond belief with a series of words and transmigratorial images as ineffectual as all the amusingly directionless utterances of our chief minister, our mayor, our Lok Sabha speaker, our scribes and a host of noble individuals who believe that the book fair is a secular religious festival that we can all draw swords for and, let’s face it, there is little that Buddhadeb’s cadre with red pennants for scarves hadn’t been able to achieve in the past even if it meant a harmless nick here and a broader slash there and a touch of torching buses and trams and cars or looting or vandalizing and simply spreading a reign of terror under which our cultural heritage, every principle and vestige of human dignity, bowed, bent and finally snapped.

Our new municipal boss who should never have overthrown Subrata Mukherjee who, at the very least, respected our green acres, said, “We have to protect the honour of Calcutta with our blood.” But, learned mayor, “Honour hath no skill in surgery.... What is in that word ‘honour’?.... Air.” Like honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labour’s Lost, it’s all a tad more difficult to swallow than a flap dragon.

Now, we all know that, by “our blood” what is meant is “your blood”. A little “y” added to “our” makes life so much simpler for the politburo and its chums in Alimuddin Street and a heart-broken CM whose wings have been clipped or perhaps just tucked into his panjabi while he hobs charmingly with big nobs of industry and offers them sops and havens that no other place on earth, but where Feudal Marxists rule, would dare hand out. Remember Nietzsche’s famous observation: “He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.” So with our deep-rooted honour at stake and an emboldened Sukanta on our lips, when we know why the book fair must happen on the Maidan who gives a hoot about bourgeois hows and their misplaced concepts of pollution? Wake up, Mr Chief Minister.

What every sane and concerned citizen wants to know is how, in a city where we are willing to shed blood for a book fair, we have the temerity to pander to minority vote banks by showing absolutely no respect for an author. What freedom do we seek for ourselves when we have never respected the freedom of our ordinary citizens to work and not go on strike, to strive for economic progress instead of closing down every major industry and little factory and workshop? Where every social freedom has been smothered by an imported and then distorted ideology that never matched our psyche ?

Now that communists don’t dare use the muscle power that they did to rule over us for years, come on, let’s get back to the business of becoming bhadraloks again. We Bengalis are a proud race but, with the negligent killings that happen every day in our state-run hospitals and political massacres in our innocent and hapless villages and Singur and Nandigram as bloody icing on the rotten cake, and then, with television sets in every corner of India proclaiming “Bengal Shame”, our leaders surely have a lot to answer for. But let them know and understand that times have changed forever and we have moved into an era when chief ministers and their cadre or political leaders and cheap lackeys of any and every hue, none of the netas, can any longer walk roughshod over us and ruin our city’s greatest patch of green with slogans of “Brigade chalo” and host exhibitions and fun fairs that totally disrupt life, are an ecological disaster, sometimes an aesthetic disgrace and quite often a health hazard for the young and aged alike. We, one and all, owe a big thanks to the judiciary who finally stepped in to rescue Bengal from the hands of frenzied, self-propagating and visionless ideologues.

The storks that fly overhead in Rajarhat today, watching water-bodies being filled by giant earthmovers, dip down to take a look at lakes beside the Jewish cemetery whose boundary walls are plastered with symbols of our mythology of hope and promise and then coast over the Alipur Zoo, wondering what’s keeping those blessed ducks from communist Siberia from landing in friendly territory.

Let us take a good fresh look at the ‘why’ we want to live and then make absolutely sure we get the right ‘how’ going, and to work tirelessly and selflessly to achieve it, before time makes a mockery of our shortsightedness. This whole boi mela affair can open a new chapter for us if we consciously close the book on communal abuse, our disregard for human life, our manipulation of young minds for political gain and our foolhardy attempt to change a beautiful environment in the Maidan where flowers bloom, children play, our elders and pensioners stroll, and lovely birds sing. Let this lesson be a new beginning for us all, to ensure that we don’t hand over a moribund cityscape and a living hell to our children and grandchildren.

And so ends my catechism.