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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Bengalis are tired of being ashamed of Kolkata. BJP is the last train to civilisation

Young Bengalis are tired of 'culturally superior' Bengal. They want economic development.

I was in Kolkata a few weeks ago. I stayed at one of its iconic, slightly crumbling, colonial institutions. I met uncles and aunties I have known all my life. I went to Naihati, to Bardhaman, to Birbhum, to Bolpur. I ate at the hippest new restaurant in Kolkata, Yokocho, and an old Durga Pujo favourite of my childhood, Aaheli. I went to Salt Lake, where my parents still have a flat, and to Park Circus, where our clan once lived.

The overwhelming sense was that Kolkata was Schrödinger’s City—at once dead and alive.

The tragedy of modern Bengal is not merely a story of economic stagnation; it is a profound narrative of cultural and existential disorientation. For nearly half a century, the state has been caught in a pincer movement between two styles of populism that, while ideologically distinct, have been remarkably similar in their results: The erosion of the individual, the glorification of the lumpen, and the systemic destruction of the Bengali middle-class aspiration.

To understand how Bengal lost its path in the last fifteen years, one must view the era of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) not as a departure from the Left Front’s thirty-four-year rule, but as its logical, more aggressive continuation. The shambolism that defines Kolkata today—the crumbling Victorian facades layered with blue-and-white paint, the streets choked by political hoardings, and the pervasive sense of a city that has stopped dreaming—is the physical manifestation of a deeper intellectual rot.

When the Communist regime fell in 2011, there was a fleeting moment of hope that the party-society model—where every aspect of life, from getting a job........

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