What if – A New Beginning

What If… The Tragedy Was Not Sudden?

Rudra Bose’s diary | Kolkata 23^rd October 2026

The newspapers this morning carry photographs I find difficult to look at for long.

Chorbagan. Saptami. A Durga Pujo pandal that had welcomed thousands, now a scene of devastation. Nineteen lives lost, families shattered, and a city struggling to understand how a celebration could turn into such a catastrophe.

The initial findings reported in the newspapers make for uncomfortable reading. A narrow exit passage. A locked emergency door. Temporary stalls obstructing movement. Inadequate lighting. Questions about crowd density, police presence and the arrangements for moving people to safety. Heavy rain had pushed people towards the pandal. An announcement about a possible collapse reportedly triggered panic.

The Chief Minister announced compensation of ₹25 lakh for each bereaved family. Arrests followed. A Special Investigation Team was appointed. These are immediate responses. They matter. But I find myself wondering whether we are once again addressing the aftermath of a disaster more urgently than the conditions that made it possible.

“What if the tragedy was not simply the consequence of a panicked crowd, but the culmination of many small failures that nobody stopped in time?”

I have watched Kolkata celebrate Durga Pujo for decades. Our pandals are expressions of imagination, community pride and collective enterprise. They are also increasingly elaborate, drawing enormous crowds into temporary structures and carefully choreographed spaces. Yet a pandal is not merely an artistic installation. It is a place where thousands of human beings must be able to enter, move, gather and leave safely—even when it rains, an exit becomes blocked, or panic spreads through a crowd.

Which brings me to questions that the investigation must answer: ‘Who approved the layout? Who inspected the exits? Who certified the safety arrangements? And who was responsible for ensuring that the conditions of approval were actually met?’

The organisers have responsibilities. So do the authorities entrusted with clearances, inspections, crowd management and emergency preparedness. If there were lapses, we must establish all those who were responsible for them, rather than assume that responsibility begins and ends with the person who happened to make an announcement or the individuals who have been arrested. An arrest is not a finding of guilt. Nor is the appointment of an inquiry proof that the system has corrected itself.

And compensation, however necessary, cannot compensate for the absence of a mother, a father, a child or a loved one. It can provide financial relief. It cannot answer the question that will haunt the families long after the headlines have faded: why was this allowed to happen?

I worry, too, about what comes next. A committee will submit its report. Officials will examine the findings. Standard operating procedures may be revised. New instructions may be circulated before the next Pujo.

But will anything fundamental change? Will every pandal be independently checked for safe exits, unobstructed passages, structural integrity and realistic crowd capacity? Will inspections take place on the ground rather than merely on paper? Will responsibility be clearly assigned, with consequences for those who ignore safety requirements? And will organisers and authorities be prepared to turn people away when capacity is reached, even at the cost of disappointing a crowd?

These are not questions of bureaucracy. They are questions of how much we value human life when it competes with convenience, prestige, spectacle and the pressure to accommodate just a few more visitors.

As I folded the newspaper, I thought of the families who had gone out to celebrate Saptami and returned home without someone they loved. We will rebuild pandals. We will welcome the crowds again. The drums will sound, the lights will come on, and Kolkata will once more surrender itself to the enchantment of Pujo.

But if the next year’s arrangements look reassuringly familiar, while the underlying failures remain untouched, then the inquiry will have served only to document a tragedy—not prevent another. A tragedy is not truly investigated when we discover only what went wrong. It is investigated when we make it harder for the same failures to happen again.

And perhaps the most sacred offering we can make to Ma Durga is not another spectacular pandal, but a city that refuses to treat preventable deaths as the price of celebration.

— Rudra Bose , The Last Writer of Kolkata

#rudrabose, #thelastwriterofkolkata, #whatif, #chorbagan tragedy

The Coloniser Within

I have been thinking about a rather uncomfortable idea. We fought colonialism to win our freedom. But what if, somewhere along the way, we began surrendering that freedom all over again? What if…. this was happening as I write?

Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explored how colonialism leaves behind something far more enduring than the physical presence of the coloniser. It seeps into the mind. It changes how people see themselves, what they aspire to, and what they come to accept as normal. The coloniser may leave. The colonisation does not.

I wonder whether we are witnessing a new version of this today. Except that this time, there is no foreign flag to pull down. No imperial army to drive away. We are doing it to ourselves. We have willingly entered a world where almost everything has a price, and increasingly, a value is assigned to everything. Our time. Our attention. Our relationships. Even our dreams.

I look at myself; I look at my friends and acquaintances. We measure success by the size of our bank balance, the value of our investments, the houses we own and the lifestyle we can display. We work longer, consume more and keep running, often without stopping to ask what exactly we are running towards. Somewhere in this race, life itself becomes an entry into a balance sheet.

Our health, our years, our quality of life — everything gets quietly converted into economic value. The hours we surrender become somebody else’s profit. Our anxieties feed markets. Our attention becomes a commodity. And the wealth created by millions of such small surrenders accumulates, disproportionately, in the hands of a few. The irony is that the balance sheet records the wealth we create, but not the life we spend creating it. It will record our assets when we are gone. It will not record the conversations we postponed, the sunsets we missed, the friendships we neglected or the years we cannot get back. It will not even note our passing.

I am not arguing against wealth, ambition or enterprise. They matter. Money can provide freedom, dignity and choices. But there is a difference between using money to live well and organising our entire lives around making more of it. Perhaps the real question is not how much wealth we accumulate, but how much of our lives we are willing to exchange for it.

Colonialism once took away our freedom without asking our permission. Today, we may be surrendering it voluntarily, one working day, one unfulfilled promise, one postponed pleasure at a time. And the most disturbing part? We have begun to call this freedom.

Perhaps the last act of liberation is not to overthrow another ruler, but to recognise the one we have installed within ourselves.

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

What if…..

….. Education Stops Educating?

I came across a post recently about Palantir that made me pause.

It quoted its CEO, Alex Karp, as saying that the company is no longer relying entirely on traditional university degrees to identify talent. Instead, young people are being given the opportunity to work on real problems, demonstrate what they can do, and learn by doing.

The post made a provocative observation: “The university had centuries to shape the best minds. Entrepreneurs will do it in a decade.” That stayed with me.. Because it raises a much more uncomfortable question: Have our educational institutions slowly forgotten what education is supposed to accomplish?

We teach children what to think. We rarely teach them how to think. We reward the right answer more than the difficult question. We celebrate memory more than curiosity.
We measure achievement through certificates rather than through the ability to see what others cannot. And then we wonder why so many highly educated people struggle to imagine a different future.

I realised that companies like Palantir are beginning to look beyond degrees. Young people are being given real problems to solve instead of certificates to prove that they are ready to solve them. It reminded me of something we seem to have forgotten. Perhaps education was never meant to manufacture employable people. Perhaps it was meant to create unmanageable minds. Minds that question. Minds that doubt. Minds that refuse to accept “this is how it has always been done.”

Perhaps the real crisis is not that AI will replace education. Perhaps it is that AI will expose how little education was actually about thinking.

As I closed the newspaper, the thought came to me. What if the future doesn’t need better educated children…… but freer minds?

— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata

WHAT IF…

THE VOTER LIST FORGOT YOU?

This morning I opened the newspaper to find that democracy had acquired a new battlefield.

Not Parliament. Not the streets. It was about the voter list.

There were allegations, counter-allegations, objections, explanations and demands for resignation. The Election Commission said decisions were unanimous. Others said two Commissioners had repeatedly raised objections. I wondered what happens when the referee becomes part of the argument.

Newspaper report on the ongoing controversy.

Then I imagined something more frightening. What if, one morning, I walked into a polling booth and discovered that my name was no longer there?

Not because I had died. Not because I had moved. Not because I had stopped being a citizen. But because somewhere inside a database, a decision had been made.

And suddenly I realised: Democracy does not merely depend on the right to vote. It depends on the quiet certainty that when you arrive to exercise that right, your name will still be there.

Perhaps that is the real test of an election. Not who wins or loses. But whether the citizen still trusts the hand that counts his vote.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

WHAT IF….

... we have forgotten to slow down?

I came to Langkawi expecting to see another beautiful place. I found that the sea was beautiful. So was the Rainforest, so were the beaches.

But after a while, I stopped looking at the beauty and began noticing something else.

The pace. The trees did not seem to be in a hurry to grow. The waves did not seem anxious about reaching the shore. The clouds moved without consulting a clock. Even the boats seemed to understand that there was nowhere more important to be.

And as I watched, I wondered when we had forgotten this simple rhythm. We hurry to work. Hurry to meetings. Hurry to finish. Hurry to achieve. And then, having spent years rushing towards the future, we discover that the present has quietly passed us by.

Perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have enough time. Perhaps we have forgotten how to inhabit the time we have. Standing by the sea, I found myself asking: What if slowing down is not falling behind? What if it is actually a way of moving forward—with greater awareness of where we are going?

Perhaps we don’t always need another destination. Sometimes we simply need to stop long enough to notice the journey.

I closed my notebook and watched the waves return to the shore. They had been doing it for thousands of years. Unhurried. Unconcerned. And somehow, always on time.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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What If ……….

We Have Misunderstood Our Place in the World?

I spent the morning watching the animals move across the Kenyan savannah. There were wildebeest everywhere. Zebras moved among them almost casually. An elephant and its cub stood beneath a tree. In the distance, the landscape seemed to stretch endlessly, without walls, roads or buildings to interrupt it. For a while, I simply watched.

There was something strangely humbling about seeing so many creatures occupy the same landscape without any apparent need to possess it. They did not own the land. They did not draw boundaries across it. They did not put up signs announcing that a particular piece of earth belonged to them. They simply lived there.

And then a thought occurred to me. What if we have misunderstood our place in the world?

For centuries, we have measured human progress by our ability to control nature. We cut down forests and called it development. We dammed rivers and called it progress. We covered open land with concrete and called it urbanisation. We moved mountains, redirected water, altered landscapes and exterminated species after species, making them disappear. And while doing so, we often congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity and intelligence.

But somewhere along the way, we perhaps began to confuse our ability to control something with the right to own it. The savannah seemed to offer me a different philosophy. The animals did not appear to be conquering the land. They were part of it. The elephant did not need to dominate the tree beneath which it stood. The zebra did not need to fence off its patch of grass. The wildebeest did not need a title deed to the earth beneath its feet. They belonged to the landscape without claiming it. Perhaps that is what we have forgotten. We speak endlessly about what we will leave behind. Be it buildings, businesses, fortunes, roads or institutions. We would strive to leave our names on plaques and our photographs on walls. But perhaps there is another kind of legacy…….

The Zebra did not need to fence off its grass….

What we choose not to destroy. The forest we would leave standing. The river and the waterbody we would allow to remain clean. The animal(s) whose habitat we would protect. The open space we chose not to convert into concrete. The silence we did not fill.

Standing there in Kenya, I began to wonder whether civilisation should really be measured by how much of nature we can bend to our will. Or how much of nature we chose to leave as it is. Perhaps the more difficult measure is how much power we possess—and how much restraint we exercise. Because restraint requires something that conquest does not. It requires us to recognise that we are not the center of everything. The realisation that the earth existed before us, the wild existed before our cities, our borders and our ambitions. And, if we are wise enough, much of it will continue to exist after we are gone.

Perhaps we are not the owners of this world after all. Perhaps we are merely its temporary custodians. We arrived without asking permission. We will leave without taking anything with us. Between those two moments lies the brief privilege of being of who we are and our presence here.

We remain privileged to have been here…….

And so I find myself asking a different question. Not simply, what will we build while we are here? But, what will remain because we were here? I closed my notebook. The animals continued moving across the savannah. They had not heard my question. Perhaps they did not need to. They seemed to know the answer already.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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What if…

….. a city allows danger to become normal until tragedy makes it visible.

August 2026

The fire in the Free School street building which housed hotels, offices and homes may have started with a short circuit. But tragedies of this magnitude are rarely caused by a single spark. Nine people died in a building where hotels, offices and homes had somehow learnt to coexist within a maze of cramped spaces, narrow passages and questions about fire safety.

I kept wondering: who allowed this to become normal? Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable question. A city does not become unsafe in one day. It becomes unsafe one ignored violation at a time. One certificate not checked. One inspection postponed. One illegal alteration overlooked. One warning that nobody thought was urgent. And then, one night, the building catches fire.

We will now demand accountability. There will be investigations, committees, audits and perhaps arrests. All these are surely necessary. But does governance have to begin only after people die? The real test of a city is not how efficiently it rescues people from a burning building. It is whether it had the courage to prevent that building from becoming a death trap in the first place.

As I folded the newspaper, I wondered whether we have become too accustomed to calling preventable tragedies accidents. Perhaps the most important responsibility of governance is not to manage disasters better. It is to make fewer disasters possible.

— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata

What if…

……societies change not because they have become wiser but because they become preoccupied with different anxieties.

August 2026

Nineteen years. That is long enough for a child to become an adult. It is also long enough for governments to rise and fall. Long enough for a city to forget the sound of its own anger.

The other day, the newspaper told me that Taslima Nasrin has returned to Kolkata after nineteen years. The same city that once burned over her presence now seems to have greeted her mostly with routine, security cordons and a curious indifference.

It made me wonder. What has really changed? Did we become more tolerant? Did we finally learn that books and what is written within need not be answered with barricades? Or have we simply acquired newer fears that leave us with less energy for old ones?

Perhaps every generation chooses its own battles. Yesterday it was identity. Today it is jobs, examinations, inflation, technology, security and an uncertain future. The loudest outrage of one decade quietly becomes yesterday’s headline.

As I folded the newspaper, I realised that a mature society is not one where everyone agrees. It is one where disagreement no longer needs to be escorted by violence. If Kolkata has truly changed, the victory does not belong to any government, any ideology or any writer.It belongs to the simple belief that ideas should be answered by better ideas, not by frightened crowds.

That is how civilisation grows—almost unnoticed, one quieter street at a time.

— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata

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