MAN AND HIS MISSION ... 27

MAN AND HIS MISSION ... 27

THE DEMISE OF BENGAL?

All your pretensions of the mind are your extensions of the body. This organic living to this despicable degree nauseates me. It creates a crevice to the dark waters of deepest hell. There is none to redeem, no redemption but a desolation in this dark dungeon of delusive desire that eats and eats into the vitals of the being.

The flesh rots as the fire singes the nerves to call in the current of the corpse even as life ebbs away. This is the predicament of oft-quoted modernity, of a decadent society whose hypocrisy knows no bounds even as it rebels against the classical constructs of conservatism, of time-honoured traditions and of a heritage that is steeped in the search for immortality through the observance of purity of the body and the mind and thus aimed at the sublimation of all desire. The aim is to be free of the shackles of the body-bound man and a liberation unto the realm of the pure spirit that transcends the limitations of the senses.

But this aim is failing and floundering among the intelligentsia of Bengal. Bengal has revolted against the Ganga and is drawing the ditch-water of desire, and that from quite some time now, even a century. The patriarch is as much a party to this precipitous fall as the pervert who has made art his degenerate tool of cultural desecration. The former used the subtleties of seduction while the latter has thrown caution to the winds in open confrontation against all that is pure and sublime in our spiritual civilisation. The cosmic drain will open up soon to swallow this breed of heretics if a reversal is not sounded quick unto classical patterns of creative thought.

Written by Sugata Bose

6Nilanjana Chakraborty, Sharmistha Chatterjee and 4 others