April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T S Eliot; The Waste Land (1922)

This April, things could change for Bengal, and this is unnerving its people.

In many ways, The Waste Land would aptly describe West Bengal. Industry hollowed out in the 1970’s in the face of populist and retrograde Marxist action. Intellectual ostentation has died out over the last decade and a half, as poets and directors of sullen dark art films have moved over to yield spotlight to a rude, earthy and unsavoury brashness.