Nandigram: a Report and an Ode to the Firebirds

Nothing written by me…posting an entire report of a visit to Nandigram (I might add some pictures of the visit if I get them and incorporate revisions if they are made) and excerpts from one of my favorite blogger-friend:

Interim Report of an Independent Citizens’ Team from Kolkata

on the Current State of Affairs in Nandigram

30 November 2007

As a result of an initiative instituted by women’s groups, women’s organizations and individuals, an eleven member women’s team of concerned citizens from Kolkata comprising teachers, social activists, researchers and students visited Nandigram, on November 24, 2007. Concerned about the repeated disruption of peace in the region, the members decided to visit the affected areas and talk to the local people, with the objectives of showing solidarity with the survivors of violence, documenting people’s needs in the current circumstances, and drawing up recommendations based on our understanding of the situation.

The people who constituted this team were Kavita Panjabi, Anuradha Kapoor, Rajashri Dasgupta, Saswati Ghosh, Shyamoli Das, Swapna Banerjee, Trina Nileena Banerjee, Shuktara Lal, Sushmita Sinha, Shubhasree Bhattacharya and Sourinee Mirdha.

On arrival in Nandigram at the Relief Camp at Brij Mohan Tiwari Shiksha Niketan, the team split into two groups. One talked to the people in the Relief Camp, the other to a woman who had been sexually assaulted, and the injured in Nandigram Hospital. One group then proceeded to the villages of Sonachura and Garchakraberia, also stopping at the Bhangaberia Bridge where the CRPF is stationed; the other half of the team went to the village of Daudpur.

This interim report comprises the general findings and recommendations of all the members of the team that visited Nandigram on the 24th of November. The specific testimonies and individual stories will be included in the final report.

This must be the place I waited years to leave…

Those readers who don’t reside in the city I live in, those who haven’t visited it and is reading my blog for the last two months…you must be thinking that I live in a scum of a city where strange third-worldish things happen…but I am quite content living here, with certain reservations. I thought that the gains are more than the losses…

Something happened last day in my city. I am not interested why it happened any more. It ceased to be my city for a day as bunches of clueless lumpens had a gala day out of banging whimpers. it had the semblance of a riot, but it was not, therefore it was nothing short of a tasteless gag keeping the city hostage for hours. No one died except an image of the city. No body was burned alive except cars. And those burning cars smelt in a eerie way of possible burning bodies…

Everyone is sure that there is a design behind it. Someone says it is the ruling party to distract people of all those recent discontents, someone said it is either of the two leading oppositional ones to prove the messy government to be messier. It is a foolish guessing game where all reasons seems feasible and ridiculous. Ridiculous is another name of the feasible in realpolitik these days. So speaking politics has been elevated to speaking out intricacies of nothings.

When possibilities of people dying was almost eliminated after Rizwanur and Nandigram, the media got an event to cling on. I saw the military personnel are also sporting digital cameras these days and they are shooting a lot.

I told a blogger-friend last night: “A bizarre and obnoxious thing…I was not even able to write something about it…Will be showcased by the police how they were perfectly behaving beings since they shot and killed no one. Providing a puzzle to the media which they will pursue forever forgetting more real wounds and blood! Would have written something but was incapable of summoning a muse of the comic and the grotesque and the burlesque; it has the element of a bitter farce and right now I am in a stupidly emotional and alarmed state. My language would have been ridiculous…”

I was afraid for hours, and now I am bored. Enough from me! Read better writers whom I quote below: