CRY MY BELOVED BENGAL

CRY, MY BELOVED BENGAL

Wednesday, May 11, 2005



At long last we have an A class murderer hailing from a well to do Bengali family. Long have we lamented the paucity of hard core criminals among the sophisticated Bengalis. Whatever crime of deadly passion or deadlier cunning, that were committed in Bengal were done by the hired guns of Bihar or by the Urdu speaking minority living in filth and poverty in the fringes of Calcutta.

But now we have a criminal whose accomplishments will put many scholars to shame. He is a scientist with impeccable credentials; a nuclear physicist attached to the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre at Salt Lake, Calcutta. He is Dr. Probir Dasgupta, whose wife Ileena belongs to one of the more prestigious families of Calcutta. Her father was a Barrister of repute who had a rather insidious hobby; he used to buy gold ornaments whenever he had the urge and that was not too infrequent. He had amassed a Pluto’s harvest.

Ileena’s mother was a teacher and later Principal in a reputed ladies college in North Calcutta. Ileena had a younger sister, a spinster Pritha, by name, who used to stay at her father’s house and who to complicate matters had lately taken a lover, although a shady one.

Now the picture crystallizes: between Dr.Dasgupta and the inheritance of his in-law’s property there is one woman who was on the verge of matrimony.

Dr.Dasgupta was ably assisted in his design by Ileena, the fruit of the same womb that bore her sister Pritha.

One fine morning in the month of April 2005 the unsuspecting Pritha paid a visit to her sister’s at Salt Lake, Calcutta. What transpired in the house is not clear at this point in time but Pritha was found dead and her brother –in –law was in an unseemly hurry to dispose off the dead body by cremation. It was an act of some quick thinking by the driver of Pritha’s car that saved the day for justice. Post mortem examination revealed that Pritha was smothered and throttled .Her brother in law was the prime accused and as of date it seems that he has confessed to his crime.

Whether third degree methods were used to get the confession is not known but it is an established fact that Calcutta Police is notorious in this respect.

Therein lies the rub; here we have a scholar who does away with his sister-in-law for furthering his already substantial property. What value education? A well born person turns out to be ill bred. What were the lessons he learnt at school? What did his parents teach?

There is another interesting case that shocked the discerning reader. A private teacher murdered his daughter to marry his teen-aged student! O Tempora, O Mores! This teacher
took his son, daughter and his paramour to a hill at Rajgir, Jharkhand, and finding his opportunity pushed his daughter over the cliff. Murder most foul, most repugnant! This teacher had carnal knowledge of his student’s mother [consensual] and also of his student [forcibly].When was the last time a veritable Casanova fornicated with the mother and daughter? Now this teacher is cooling his heels behind bars. The mother of the student easily dispensed her sexual favours for her daughter’s education; it seems she was also aware of the illegitimate relations her daughter had with the teacher. Avarice knows no bounds. A woman of modest means plumbs the very depths of depravity to enhance her daughter’s prospects!

What more are we to behold? Are we living in Buddhadeb’s Bengal or in Caligula’s Rome? Our sexual proclivities are getting so bizarre that Tiberius would have approved and Nero would have applauded. And we Bengalis claim to be the most cultured people in India! Agreed one swallow never a summer makes, but then such horrendous crimes come to notice in so quick a succession that we are at a loss to think otherwise.

Bengal, my beloved Bengal, what have we done to be subjected to such devilish aberrations? What God or Goddess do we worship to merit these monsters in human form? Its time now for all Bengalis, nay all Indians, to wake up and take notice of these malignant sore afflicting our body. Its not poverty that is our curse but the most ancient of the vices, greed, that is suffocating our soul.