How Fucked Up is My Valley! (An Apology To A River)

Anyone who has read works by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is bound to notice his fascination with the Magdalena river, which he referes to as the Grand Magdalena River.Gabo also mentions that, as a student, he had to take eleven boat trips over the Madgalena river to and from Bogota, a city in which he always felt an outsider. The Grand Magdalena River is 1200 kms long.

I come from a place through which a 2900 km long river flows. As an undergraduate student, doing my studies in a college just across the river, and being in the company of a friend who grew up in the banks of this river, I was introduced by him to the beauty of Brahmapurtra, and the love affair continues, notwithstanding the fact that Brahmaputra (Son of Brahma) is male!

And yet, not many people outside ever knows about this river. But then whom to blame? None except ourselves. We fucked the whole valley up so badly, that sometimes one wishes that the whole thing did not exist at all in the first place!

The valley, which was once known for tea, natural beauty and one-horned rhinocerous, is now known for terrorism (or revolution, if you like, please!), extortion, lawlessness, complete absense of progress and above all "bandh".

If someone from outside India reads this blog, he/she perhaps won't probably know what a "bandh" is! A "bandh" is, in simple terms, a declaration of strike by some organization, which provides all the people of the state with an opportunity to avoid going to work for a day (or two or three or more). Usually, most second fridays of a month , somehow or other, has a call for som kind of bandh. As far as my knowledge goes, my state celebrated 67 bandhs during the calendar year! Holy mother of God!

All these is a product of unlimited power in the hands of students and student politics. This is a state where University students decide when their classes as well as examiniations will be held.

(On a sidenote, this reminds me of VM Khanna who, when once we bunked our classes en-masse, said to us, "If it were a few years ago, I would have delivered my lecture to the walls or the blackboard and then made sure that none of you could get a double-digit score. This is my last year of teaching and so, I decided not to teach an emply class." VMK was not boasting; people used to dance if they got 10 out of 50 in his paper -- while they compianed about other papers if they got 35 out of 50 -- because they expected only 5 and not 10, to begin with!)

My remote state never had any heavy industries or anything. Repeated and destructive flooding of the Brahmaputra river each year since the 1950 big earthquake make sure that the roads are never good. Above that, extreme bureacracy and very corrupt executive and legislature make sure that there is no scope for any infrastructure or anything!

And then along came the student movements. Some of them wanted to flush all the illegal Bangladeshis out; some of them, on a later day, would have to live permanently in Bangladesh and so would choose others instead as the bad guys.

But the sum total of all is this that my valley is so fucked up that the only comparison that we have been able to draw during the last decade or so for my state is with Bihar, the most backward of all states! Politicians back home often say, "We are better off."; what they don't say is: "We are better off than ONLY Bihar."

I don't think that I need to say anything more as to why nobody in the state gives a fuck about Brahmaputra, and why nobody outside the state even knows about it! And we claim ourselves to be the descendants of the Aryans, a people who made their river, their Mother Goddess, the Goddess of Wisdom, Saraswati.

(Thus, like the Fox 11 ad where they say, "What? You expected harmony", I may also say, And what, you expected wisdom.").

This also perhaps proves that all Hindu Gods are dead, because otherwise Brahmaputra would have dried up in shame by now!

And so, like the people of Macondo, the people of my valley is a race comdemned to many thousand years of solitude, who, I sincerely expect, would not have another opportunity on earth; they simply do not deserve that!