Red Sunday

The weathered building sported fluttering blood-red on this muggy Sunday morning. The flags signalled a CPI(M)-hosted seminar on parliamentary democracy. The turnout, however, didn’t suggest anything remotely linked to the loaded deliberations that would spool out in the seminar hall. Well-groomed boys and girls sauntered in, nimbly flitting between small talk and SMS. Parliamentary Democracy? Is this the stereotype debunked, finally? A dapper teenager put doubts to rest, in an acquired accent: “There’s Also a seminar on IT entrepreneurship.” Ah.

The Other seminar. Nilotpal Basu, acerbic as ever, was on the drill: Engels, counter-reactionary forces, India’s Sham Socialist Constitution, conceptualisation of The Change. Nandigram. The bourgeois mainstream media double up as champions of Socialism, while charging the Left forces with a diluted ideological premise, went Basu. A good part of the Sunday down, Bourgeois Journalist walked out, even as the crowd — a neat mix of hope and prudence — was just warming up. The debate is pegged to the old point: How to take Socialism to the people. How to work within the “limitations” of parliamentary democracy and strive for that Tomorrow.

Two boys from the Also seminar, heard outside of the hall.
“What’s with all the flags?”
“Some party meeting.”