In One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, thanks to some Professors of Comparative Lit at Jadavpur University, where my wife was reading for her graduation, I read a year before that greatest genius of novel wrting so far, Marquez, got the Nobel prize, says at one place that the people of Macondo began forgetting everything. And they started labelling everything, like CHAIR, TABLE, etc.
I am brought to this analogy time and again. In the current state of coal mining in India, we have forgotten the common efficiency that was taken for granted in the industry as it existed then, till Madam Gandhi nationalized the coal industry of India. And 35 years after the first round of nationalisation we are moving further and further away from normal simple things that are a matter of course in any industry. The Deputy Chief Personnel Manager in charge of administration of the largest coal mining company of India does no work at all and senior national level TU leaders scream before a coprorate meeting that they have been put up in guest houses, two to a room, that have become shabby because of apathy of the Admin Deptt staffed by blokes with just a graduation degree from unheard of places called Muzffarpur or Bhagalpur, (no HR degree, mind you, may be just a dimploma that can be had in Ranchi or even Kolkata for a pittance). Why ? Because the Director(Pers) is a very rough, very corrupt person whom no one approaches to complain because the complainant would be packed off before he can bat an eyelid to a jungle beyond Dibrugarh in Assam.
I hope, with all the faith in the progress of humanity that my father instilled in me that may be one day we shall recover and reach the state of managerial excellence of the IT industry sometime within the next 15 yrs ( I cant see it happening in a decade).
The same analogy is true of the state of WB. First the CPI(M) destroys all industry existing in the state through virulent Trade Unionism, which though it has admitted, but is yet to come out with a clear apology before the people, not to talk of compensation, not to the capitalists who lost their property, but to the people whose fathers and brothers committed suicide out of poverty because their factory was closed and there was no hope of its reopening.
And then it takes over rich agricultural land to lure capitalists back to open factories so that the voters of CPI(M) must now be provided with jobs and this cannot be delayed much longer.
We have to rediscover things. Time and again. Because some hot-headed people who remained adolescents all their lives and created a very efficient party called the CPI(M) which grabbed power, mislead the people, coerced and corrupted the Government servants and even the Police and continued to mislead the people through their total control of everything, now even the principal opposition news-media house called Ananda Bazar, through their street corner propaganda machinery more efficient than that created by Goebbels and destruction of all opposition through a spy system more efficient and more ruthless than that of Saddam Hussein, so that no voter of rural Bengal can dare to vote for the opposition.
Marquez, a communist, is a genius. The above is another proof that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic that will stand the test of time.
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