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Remembering Past

I am spending time with friends in India trying to understand how best to cope with our anxieties over parents without suffocating them. Being in a different city than their parents, puts many of them in a situation not unlike mine. There is not much to do but pray, stay indoors as hope for the test. Most importantly talk about things that would once used to be normal. 

Recently, my mother mentioned a movie that she had watched and enjoyed. I was glad to have that opening and checked out Gumnaami myself so we could discuss it. The rants of journalist in the early part of the movie before he takes on the cause of investigation what really happened to Subhas Bose, would resonate with many a Bengali. He mocks our people for their obsession with the few icons we have left and make a production out of everything because we have so little left to be proud of. The pride of heritage is a relic of the past. He says its great the deaths of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are well documented or we could create conspiracies out of that too. 

Present day Bengal is a disaster and continues to unravel with no end in sight. In such times as these, it is not unusual to seek inspiration in something larger than life like the character and exploits of Bose are. It would be safe to say they don't make Bengali men like him anymore - they haven't in a very long time. He had rattled the empire and attracted powerful enemies. Figures like him cannot but be controversial and admirers have to find a way to make peace with those contradictions.

I get my Bengali brethren want to feel energized rehashing various conspiracy theories about their hero. My mother's family had a few freedom fighters and they turned disillusioned by India post-independence. One of them had done serious jail time and refused to ever talk about it. This was not the free India that had dreamed of and fought for. The life of Netaji and the mystery around how it ended gives our people a way to imagine a different ending to the story of India's freedom, what if Bose had been in charge, what if freedom had been won by blood, sweat and tears as he had wanted, what if India (and particularly Bengal) had met a better fate than partition. To many, Netaji embodies the dream of what India might have been.

I can see why my mother would find this movie comforting in a time when the system is completely falling apart. 

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