The Poetry Kit |
| Srinjay Chakravarti | |||
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CALCUTTA AND THE ZEROTH LAW
OF THERMODYNAMICS "If two bodies are each in thermal equilibrium with a third body, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other." A universe contained in itself, sprawling inside out in entropic pull towards a grey slurry of time. Defying margin releases, the city spills every passing day beyond the indents and the borders set in reams of typewritten sheets in the Municipality office. The streets bursting at the seams with chaotic traffic: 2004 Mercedes and 1952 Landmaster, Seventies Toyota and Sixties Leyland, pre-war Fiat, post-war Volkswagen. Caught in the inexorable suction of gravity into a uniform heat death. Traffic constables don gas masks at Shyambazar, Gariahat, Esplanade where the exhaust fumes and pollution clutch at their throats. With its guts spilling out, bloodied by Marxist slogan and graffito, the metropolis tugs newer, more sordid suburbs into itself -- Kasba to Sonarpur on one side, Parnasree and Oxytown on another, Keshtopur and Birati on the east. Canals can no longer mark out its limits. No longer can the bypass circumscribe its borders or railway tracks fence in its squalid slums and ghettoes. It spreads out its tentacles, myriad and desperate, to keep afloat in the cesspool of slime -- multi-storey mansions and shabby tenements cohabit with each other gloriously in adiabatic confusion. Its feet sucked under in a quicksand of migrants, settlers, multitudes of the naked and the hungry: it clutches at the straws of girder and truss floating in the wind. To survive, Calcutta recycles itself into itself: to thrive, it turns itself inside out. Ever-renewing, ever-creative. Gamins pick up rags and torn envelopes to turn into newsprint. Newspapers regurgitate lies, half-truths and politician's promises. Ideologies come full circle, remixed into cacophonous albums of hit parades from the Sixties while poets turn old clichEs Into new mantras of despair. For the very poor, the lines blur between the living and the dead -- for, the living themselves recycle death. Here, in Calcutta -- a small-scale industry to collect discarded syringes and hypodermic needles from hospitals, wash them and seal them in new packets, for sale to unsuspecting new patients. |
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