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When a bong is not just a bong

If you google ‘bongs’ on the internet, you first get to read about the various pipes through which you can smoke weed.

After you read reams of jokes about the other kind of Bong on the internet, you wish that you were a junkie and go back to the part about how to assemble a bong at home. Bongs of course are born, goes an old and tired joke, through Immaculate Conception. Ha ha.

Ever since that gent from Maharashtra went to Bengal and made some comment about Bengal today equals India tomorrow, the natural superiority of Bengalis received a massive fillip — recognition!

It’s hard to imagine, despite the Bengal renaissance, the huge number of writers, artists, scholars and film-makers that have poured out of that state for the past 300 years, that there is still need for reassurance.

But no. The web world is crawling with Bong blogs, usually written by Bong blokes. The first time you read about the famous monkey cap and that Brecht and Derri-da are honorary and real Bongs, you scream with laughter.

The 15 millionth time the same jokes do the same rounds, you just scream. Bongs, it seems, are the new Santa-Bantas and most jokes are made by the Bengalis themselves.

Look at us, how self-deprecatingly funny we are, just like the English. (Actually buster, the English made jokes about other Brits — the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh and furriners of course).

And now, since the days of Ghatak and Ray and Mrinal Sen are almost over and Tollywood knows that while Bipasha Basu and Koena Mitra can wow Bollywood no Bengali girl can really do the bump and grind without being naaka, we have the new breed of Bong film-makers, discovering themselves.

Forget Durga and the train. This is the new Calcutta/Kolkata which has malls and at least two flyovers. These new Bongs now make connections. They make in-jokes, like about Jesus and the Bengali mother and monkey caps. (All right, I admit it, a Bong kid in a monkey cap is a damn funny sight.

Once a crazy high-pitched Bong mother screeched so loudly at her kids to cover their ears with their monkey caps all across the Ranthambhore sanctuary thatthe tigers ran away to China and I never got to see any. I, for one, know why India’s tiger population has come down so drastically.)

The film-makers study the Calcutta milieu and make films that fit into a genre, pay attention to the meta-context while staying within the subaltern sub-text and never forgetting the semiotic variations that can plague your soul. I didn’t understand that sentence either, actually. I made it up as I went along. It’s part of my Bong superiority, you see.

So why am I whining? I’ve lived and worked in Mumbai for years being the only Bong in the whole city. Never did I meet a Chatterjee or Mukherjee, Bose or Ghosh, let alone another Banerji. Now every second migrant to Mumbai is a Bengali.

Film stars, fine. Film magazines in the olden days called everyone a Bengal tigress from Sharmila Tagore to Rakhee to even Keshto Mukherjee. Now there’s an invasion as the new Bengali finds his self-confidence and escapes from the Marxist-imposed stupor of the last 30 years.

So, happy as I am in my Banerji-ness, my admiration for Rabindranath Tagore, my ability to make paturi and payesh and my cravings for mishti doi, That Is It. I’m not making any other connections. Smoke that.