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From a distance, I gaze upon Bengal, India, my people, my roots—frozen in a warped dream, where time oozes away like Dalí’s molten sundial, dripping into a formless void. The glorious past, once so vivid, now bleeds into a distorted present and possibly a desolate future, twisted by years of political machinations, finally severely mutilated over recent years, leaving behind nothing but a hollow reflection—the last nail in the coffin of its fading identity.
In Bengal, decades of political patronage, institutional corruption, and complicit silence have allowed the political to invade the psyche, leaving behind a corrosive blend of compromise and fear. The absurdist predicament of Bengal’s citizens mirrors Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, where, ensnared in a domain of political servitude and moral compromise, they remain unable to escape the very systems they despise, even as the path to freedom lies wide open, unbarred, and beckoning. In a similar vein, quite hauntingly, the psychological breakdown and moral descent into malfeasance seen in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Das Experiment offers a chilling parallel to what we witness in Bengal today, where denizens remain captive in roles that reinforce moral decay, both as masters and the shackled. The real tragedy, as in both reel narratives, is not the captivity, but the paralysis of those who, even when faced with their own ruin, stand futile before the open door, unwilling to seize their freedom. This paralysis is palpable in Bengal’s electoral machinery, where, despite the pervasive awareness of graft and electoral subterfuge, vast segments of the populace remain entangled in upholding these decaying political structures. Fear of retribution or the allure of transient comforts keeps many tethered to a system that thrives on manipulation and quashes dissent.
But who to blame? Is it some sinister force, an insidious demon pulling the strings from behind the scenes, shaping this chaos? No, it is far worse: it is us. We, the deceitful, the passive masses, have become our own executioners. The greatest crimes are often carried out not by sociopaths, but by ordinary people caught in the apparatus of a system; this rings especially true in Bengal. The political bandwagon here feeds on our connivance, on our willingness to participate in our own degradation for the sake of convenience, moral compromises, and expediency. In doing so, we perpetuate a cycle of moral turpitude and mediocrity, solidifying the inertia of the status quo and dragging us into the abyss. Like the faceless bureaucrats of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have allowed the slow poison of apathy, the silent rot of indifference, to rust through our spirit. We have succumbed, piece by piece, to the gear of corruption, letting it fester in plain sight. The decay has been conjured by no external curse, but by our own hands, fed by years of silence, of turning a blind eye, of cozy complicity.
Thus, the sudden uproar over the grotesque tragedy at RG Kar in Kolkata is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to a singular horror; it is the spark that has ignited a long-buried inferno. Decades of artifice have now swelled into a tidal wave, with the public seizing this moment as an opportunity for a greater reckoning.
Nevertheless, the uprising in the wake of RG Kar may not be an unblemished or flawless movement, and veritably, it never needed to be. Rather, we must embrace the imperfections, contradictions, and failures, where citizens are engaged in an ongoing process of defragmenting and deconstructing their own conscience. The moment we believe we have broken free is the moment we become susceptible to slipping back into complacency. As the saying goes, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Thus, Bengal faces a stark choice: it can either continue to sink into moral decay or break free, reclaim its conscience, and demand a new order—one where ordinary citizens are no longer complicit in their own oppression, but become the architects of their own liberation.
To paraphrase Dostoevsky: “Above all, let us not lie to ourselves.” The souls of the streets must face the consequences of their own choices, for we cannot escape our role in shaping our fate. The rewards we earn or lose are a direct result of our collective will and actions. Let it be clear, once and for all: we seal our own grave with our own hands. As Ivan warns in The Brothers Karamazov, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” In Bengal’s struggle, the gauntlet of truth will be whether its citizens can reclaim their moral compass or continue to walk willingly into the abyss of unbridled politics, just forever changing its color from red to blue to saffron to white and so on, but never escaping the corruption and decay beneath, being caught in the ouroboros of despair.
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