Disciplining college street - The case of Presidency wall and Bhawani Dutta Lane

Two kinds of politics linked with colour Kaleidoscope knows, the 'politics of colour' and 'politics with colour.' The very idea that makes him feel fortunate that his species is not as colourful as birds and other animals. Has it been the case, history of homo sapiens would have seen more bloodshed in the name of colour. Meanwhile, he is witnessing what can be termed as politics with colour.

The blue white combination which now represents his cityscape and the 'statescape' - the paints of all public properties he believes adds to a great visibility to the state led development initiatives.

However, there are other forms as well. Most notably, at college street, as part of beautification the historical presidency university has transformed all the shanty like different looking old book stalls into similar looking smaller shops. They are painted in creme yellow colour and have thus lost their distinctiveness. One can rarely differentiate between them any more.

While, disciplining happens to be one of the primary aims of the late capital civilisation, Presidency, one of the important hotbeds of the promotion of distinctive, radical and often antiestablishment thoughts and actions is sadly following the similar trend. Not much ago nearby college square experiences a ban on display of protest politics!

The disciplined shops in Presindency wall

However, there are still those colourful shanty like shops providing a rainbow just inside Bhawani Dutta lane. For now at leasr 'corporates' are busy with the conspicuous spaces. This is why there are alleyways with wonders that embraces the old us... the happy us.

The old, colourful Bhawani Dutta lane

When you can not let go.

Its only that your dog doesn't want to come back from the courtyard where we kept you before we said our last good byes to you.

 Its only that we knew you will leave us forever, I thought the sooner the better, as you have suffered for so long, but deep inside we were never prepared to let you go.

Its only that the moment you left us forever, the moment when you looked at me and mother knew for sure you are leaving I didn't cry but only wanted you to stay back for one more time.

Its only that i have never cried, because, something kept reminding me of the things to be done when you are alone.

Its only that your sitar, esraje, tabla, tanpura look at us and i could hear you are saying ''my fingers are changing, I wont be able to play Sitar any long."

Its only the smell of your cancerous cells which I started hating now I miss.

Its only the sound of your pain that I miss...

Its only the world that has changed once and for all... because non believers know there is no comeback except for those tiny little memories you make. Its only that your dog knows so do we... there were more memories we wanted to make... there were more life we could have lived, together.

National anthem and alcoholics - Simulations in ' Country Roads'

Just another drink or two perhaps three in just another day in a kind of familiar space is what makes you grow with time. Its more than the drink or the food and the increasingly loud western remix of 1980s songs the company
 Kaleidoscope keeps that matters. The conceived space contrasts itself from the yet to occupy status of the unfinished war affected like high rises, within the unoccupied and finished mall. The space in itself is in a dilemma to brew its own beers and then name them as scotland, germany or the like. It gives ample room for the frozen paradox. Its more paradoxical when it calls itself "country roads" which actually stands on the murdered country roads! The paradox of a new city - the urban lifeline of Kaleidoscope's country. What can be more interesting? Asks kaleidoscope more often than he actually visits the micro brewery.

The answer has been delivered yesterday. More interesting is when you see a group of five young men having rounds of whisky, beer, vodka  for hours and then standing up for national anthem played in the television before India Sri Lanka match begins.

Yes, the nation needs such programmed responses even after rounds of drinks in a pub build on murdered country roads, brewing beers named as scotland and playing remix of 1980s popular western tracks.

While Kaleidoscope was on his way back in American Uber someone whispers that its not Simulcra out there to study, you are tricked to be trapped inside and you too simulate everyday in a liquid reality.

An old photograph of country roads 

Letting go 18 - coffee cups, co-authors and future stories

While impossibilities can sleep together under the velvety bejwelled blanket - the night sky, there are untold stories to be co-authored. Stories of the beginning and continuation of the impossibilities. Quite the like the departed souls who climb mountains just to clear up the distance and spaces in a world that otherwise tries best to push souls to drift away, there are stories with with invisible trails.

Trails that melt the ice to make the travel possible. Trails that make you feel secure, to know for sure the connections exist between drifting planets. Possibilities for two and many different stories that are told and retold to the distance places but never co-authored, because so long as there are scores of trails and long vein connections, there are constructed spaces.

Spaces exist between cities, neighbourhood, apartments, floors and within the same bedroom! Space puzzles you as trails exist between thousand miles and there are disconnection within the soul frozen bedroom.

No matter how many galaxies away, for you and your co-author is there is one balcony with two coffee cups steaming to a distant future. Kaleidoscope can smell the caffeine and cigarette and the smell of the river nearby! Souls never let go! Never ever... never forever.

Everyday menaingmaking and the absent structure:The lost workshop trail and Derrida interaface

There was a pre-Kaleidoscopic time, and it is mentioned in past, but that does not mean that it is over! It is not over because the meaning of the pre-Kaleidoscopic time is never settled just as none of the meanings are well settled ever. This story is rooted in moments before the Kaleidoscopic beginning in a workshop in 2010. He was looking for an avenue to vent out himself, and he planned this blog. However, the workshop gave Kaleidoscope unique experiences. It was then disappeared in an unfinished trail and lost (not completely) in the layers of time. What today Kaleidoscope experienced Derrida would have said "Différance it is." Derrida in his relatively little easier books Speech and Phenomena (1973) and Writing and Difference (1978) talks of an impossibility to settle with the meaning of the signifiers because there are too many signified attached and each of them is directing to some newer bunch of them. Its like a never-ending circle of meaning making which is Différance indefinitely.




Perhaps the 'something missing' in nature of the discourse enables kaleidoscope to connect, to bring out the long lost flow of narratives after a while - the time which seemed lost, but was snoozing in a long pause. While Kaleidoscope in his textual experiences with Derrida was afraid of the loss of signified and being lost in the game of signifiers can now see another dimension to it. It is because of the lack of settled nature of the communications itself he could trace the trail of the qualitative workshop that happened and moved his understanding about the issue seven years ago. Its not that he lost the entire connection to the intellectual vibration created in the workshop through his work and rework on the article which finally got published with Routledge along with other participants of the workshop! Meanwhile he, just like others started making other meanings through life experiences. However, he found the trail back in track immediately the moment of another series of short but intensive game of signifiers - the discourse in a little coffee-shop. Kaleidoscope could immediately connect to the cloud of intellectual vibration that he had to leave for a while in a long snooze!


The meaning making in Différance is troublesome as it continues to question what Kaleidoscope's species ultimately communicates - ultimately, its communication that enables them to coordinate actions and rule the world. However, todays immediate connect and revival of the vibration after the long snooze assures Kaleidoscope that it is this Différance that makes the connection possible. The meanings were never objective, unchanged and moreover, hence was never settled at all. Kaleidoscope knows even today it was "the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier... which gives the signified meaning no respite... so tat it always signifies again!"




Therefore, thoughts can be exchanged, untold stories can be collected, an article - a book might be born with Différance, over a cups of Darjeeling tea - perhaps fleeting like a Himalayan forest ground. There will be more stories to be told.


Hence, Kaleidoscope like many others continues to survive all the disruptions as he knows none of the meanings are well settled and that is a wonderful thing. The trail continues between researchers, between books and articles, between blogposts and between words and discourses.




Yes kaleidoscope now understands there are "certain relationships, unperceived by the writer, between what s/he commands and s/he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses. This relationship is... a signifying structure that critical reading should produce... production attempts to make the not seen accessible to sight." (Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. 158, 163)

How do you know that you are in a hierarchical society?

Kaldeidoscope happens to live in a society which is hierarchical. He has studied it in the name of caste, class, prestige and many others. He often visits spaces which are supposed to challenge the assumptions behind the hierarchies. However, does they? The significant question henceforth is whether one can at all withstand the programme installed in the name of socialisation in the phase of child development. Malinowski decades ago mentioned something about the difference between what people say they do and what people actually do! To comprehend and make sense of the difference he mentioned something like participant observation. Participation to such an extent that you can actually write a whole ethnography based on Memory – remember Srinivas in his The Remembered Village – after his field notes were accidentally burnt.

To know the habitus of the people you really don’t always have to have a long years of participant observation. It is possible, even more so, when you slither yourself through a microscopically different habitus carrying a sufficient experience of the underlying structure of the social whole. Hence, while you have read Homo Hierarchicus by Dumont, you also tend to find hierarchies beyond the arrangement of people, but also in the arrangement of objects. For example, caste is casted in our dreams, in ghosts (petni is lower than Brahmadatti), in flower (jaba happens to be a low graded flower), so on and so forth.

However, all of a sudden Kaleidoscope is slithering through organisations which are supposed to question and deconstruct the existing order of things, is ingrained within.

Hence, when the power centre arrives all others stand on their feet. Whenever, some power embodied persons are being felicitated the rest are on their feet. Kaleidoscope, incidentally referred a junior’s name before naming the senior one’s in their joint work he was immediately reminded about who works with whom in the ‘proper’ hierarchical order.

Hence, the mechanism of doing research remains to be the same. From the definition of the delivery of resources, the power equation remains to be the same.

Simulacra in a shopping mall

Space creates meaning in the endless process of signification. You see, learn, experience, and make sense of the externalities through internal and unknown mechanisms - we often call the cognition. Kaleidoscope discovers newer experiences from the same 'objective' material world. While he is not too far from Kolkata, spending most of the time within the outer peripheries - fringes of the city, however, there isn't any of the traces! Just when kaliedoscope started to believe in the fate of the 'new town' as a place devoid of history to have a depthless present in the making, he discovers the howrah bridge.

It is not that he didn't see the miniature bridge near the place he is having late afternoon coffees every now ans then, but the Baudrillardisation didn't happen until now.

Kaleidoscope says new town to be a space without time or history because it has wiped off the entire dimensions of old place, landscape and names. There are street snd roan numbers and not names, no localities based on landscape or other features. A complete out of nowhere cityscape. Soon all the memories will die with the death of the physical bodies of the people who still have nostalgia embedded.

Meanwhile, the Howrah bridge - the miniature of it,  makes simulacra. Simulations of an imagined experience routed through miniature takes kaleidoscope to the memories of a distant past when he had to cross over the bridge every now and then. He could remember the day he was caught by the police for doing photography of the bridge in early morning or the day he purposefully missed few trains to his workplace miles away. However, such memories could only restore the space in time 'New Town - kolkata.'

Meanwhile Kaleidoscope can see Baudrillard as he sips his black tea, smiling and saying 'you too are saturated in constructs... truth conceals that there is none!'