It was fairly early in the week but two friends independently said: See you next week, I will be back from Santiniketan on the 26th. What was happening, I wondered, surely the system wasn’t closing down for a longish puja break. The details slowly unravelled. The 23rd was Netaji Subhas Bose’s birthday, as sacrosanct a day as any on the Kolkata calendar which had to be given its due importance by not working. Then 24th was Saturday and 25th Sunday, and 26th was a sacrosanct holiday again, so that we might quietly contemplate the state of the republic.
What about the 22nd? Ah, said my interlocutor, pained at the ignorance of the newly arrived: The Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) (they are to the left of the official left and rubbing shoulders with the Naxalites) has declared a 12-hour bandh for that day. Perplexed, I asked, What for? The government’s inability to lower diesel prices, he replied looking a bit embarrassed. But diesel prices are not in the hands of the state government, I persisted and finally gave up when my friend begged to be let off.
Kolkata is of course not new to long shutdowns. There is that great annual nine-day break beginning from the first day of the four-day Durga puja up to Lakshmi puja. But what is of comparatively recent vintage is that with growing prosperity and changing lifestyle, even in this radical outpost of the country the love for long breaks and their numbers is growing. There are the weekends and any number of secular (national and state) and religious holidays. And when a promising string of these is threatened by an odd working day at the beginning or the middle, some political party or the other obliges by calling a bandh.
These long breaks are not wasted by simply lazing around, they are helping sustain an emerging leisure class which knows what to do with itself while officially doing nothing. In the old days it was just the government employees who got a bad name for doing nothing for long periods. Today they have been joined by two prominent groups of professionals, lawyers and doctors. They are hard working, earn very decently and know how to grab their leisure and use it well.
During a long break the courts may or may not be officially open but little actually can happen in the absence of large numbers of lawyers and court clerks. As for doctors, you are hardly anybody if you are on emergency call duty. You have arrived if you have become a specialist and try getting an appointment with a specialist during one of these long breaks, snorted my friend. The new leisure class is getting to enjoy the long breaks by discovering retreats and the topmost emerging retreat in emerging India’s emerging east with emerging shopping malls and builder-enriching apartments is Santiniketan, greatly helped by fast trains and new expressways.
Tagore’s physical idyll has of course been there for around a century but the well heeled of Kolkata has discovered it more recently. Those who today sport a Santiniketan address belong to two groups old and new. The old had strong links with the calendar of Santiniketan, its many utsavs and the tapestry of a lifestyle that wove together fine and performing arts and the rural world around it. Today for many newer property owners it is trendy to own something there and use it during a long break, its weather more salubrious and pollution lower than Kolkata’s.
More From This Section
I got an idea of the new Santinikatan when I idly speculated to a friend that it would not be a bad idea to spend one’s sunset years tracking the sunset during long walks through sal forests. She firmly told me: Forget that kind of Santiniketan, all you can get is a replication of one of the upper middle class neighbourhoods of Kolkata before the traffic, noise and pollution wreaked havoc.
How does the new leisure class pursue its finer pleasures, I asked my friend. Again, see what the doctors are upto, she replied. The cultural events they organise among themselves, where they are also the performers, are growing. This is all made possible by handsome sponsorships by not just the pharma firms but others also.
Long breaks do come to an end but the pursuit of the good life continues. On returning to Kolkata on the 26th, people will be back in the saddle on the 27th and the fabled annual book fair of the city will start that day itself. It has had a tumultuous life lately. Banished from its traditional adobe in the heart of the city by environment activists and the high court, its current new home is on the eastern bypass. Not all had escaped to Santiniketan for the big break. A travel obsessive and her friends had got away to a forest near Bhubaneswar. Those that remained behind bemoaned the number of weddings they had to attend and how the number of events per wedding, if you are close to the families concerned, keeps increasing. And weddings mean taking forward the fine art of eating. Menus change with the times and get more eclectic but the old and the new coexist in the endless celebration of food.