Subir Roy: Engaged at the periphery

From being periodically bashed up in students' politics brawls in Kolkata's Presidency College to the fringes of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is a long journey that has lasted nearly half a century. Its most dramatic and recent turn came the other day when the inaction enforced by the midday heat of summer was broken by a cryptic message from one-time fellow journalist Mudar Patherya saying that he had secured the AAP's nomination for the South Kolkata seat in the coming parliamentary elections.

Excitement hit the roof and furious texting and congratulatory calls followed. When I moved to Kolkata from Bangalore after retirement, one look at the city told me we needed to do something. The fatal flaw was not in the government doing nothing but in citizens waiting for the government to solve all the problems.

Soon enough, there we were in one stinking corner of the Maidan, just off the entertainment nerve centre Park Street, removing garbage, helped by schoolchildren and cadets of the National Cadet Corps. Equally soon, I realised that to make a difference - so that the garbage did not come back - you needed to put in place a system.

Mr Patherya, who had more energy than he knew what to do with, kept organising a string of initiatives - from helping spruce up the Dhakuria Lakes (Rabindra Sarobar) to the adjoining Vivekananda Park, where broom-wielding schoolgirls were mightily amused one Sunday morning to find coloured condoms among the stuff left around from the night before!

Arguably, his great achievement till date was helping clean up Santragachi Jheel, the large water body to the city's west, a favourite spot for migratory birds in winter that was threatened with suffocation by a dense layer of water hyacinth. He networked business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to bring together resources and willing hands for the clean-up job, and migratory birds again came to Santragachi the next winter.

Great as these initiatives were, I kept wondering: if only we could institutionalise, have a system going in which concerns close to the ground would be addressed automatically, in the normal course. That meant changing the country and its politics. Only, the country's politics was broken and I had taken a decision long ago to both stay in and out of it.

One of the best pieces of advice I had while starting off as a journalist four decades ago came not from another journalist but from an older person who worked for the information agency of a foreign government. Remember you will live in the world of politics but must not become part of it, he said in oracular fashion, and added for good measure: you will have a ringside view of history, but never make the mistake of thinking of yourself as a player in it.

The wisdom of what he said became clear years later when in Delhi Press Club I ran into a senior political correspondent who was on first-name terms with an array of front-line politicians, telling the wide-eyed group around him: "I told Charan Singh this is what you must do." He had become a player, and lost the detachment of a ringside view.

An all-consuming interest in politics automatically made me an active foot soldier of student activism in college. We first-year greenhorns could easily see that our third-year dadas already had one firm foot in mainstream politics. The decision of whether to follow them into the political world or not was easily taken. I realised it took a lot of grit, gumption and more to survive, if not succeed, in politics. I could make a good grass-roots volunteer, but that was it. It was best, I decided, to be near it without being part of it - become a scribe.

So it had been until the AAP came along and made the worm within me turn again. Here was a group of people, like me and my friends, who wanted to challenge the system from within it, making grievous mistakes, earning ridicule and praise in equal measure, and raising again the banner of hope that refuses to die. Where could I fit in?

Mr Patherya has, in a way, resolved my dilemma. A successful businessman who has been connecting business with civil society to get things done from issue to issue, he has now partly institutionalised it into a platform, "Kolkata Gives", which has brought together donors and NGOs, and recently raised Rs 1 crore for various causes, such as the betterment of the children of sex workers and medical help for the poor. So here I am, back at the only craft I know - taking a ringside view of history and chronicling it.

subirkroy@gmail.com