Let us open a new chapter

[Ritwick Ghatak makes CPM nervous in Kolkata Subrata Nagchoudhury Posted: Sunday , May 10, 2009
Kolkata: However, the new play comes against the backdrop of a sustained campaign by a section of the city’s artists since the Singur land acquisition and the Nandigram police firing. That campaign now has a new twist timed for the Lok Sabha elections: “Vote for Change.”
Said Shaonli Mitra, a renowned theatre personality: “There is a suffocating pressure from the ruling party in all spheres of life. I have personally toured extensively in the past two years to see the ground reality for myself. It is pathetic. We are not regimented, we do not want to be in anyone’s good books. We want change.”
In fact, this intellectual pressure group even released a poll manifesto with signatories including author Mahasweta Devi, Shaonli Mitra, filmmaker Aparna Sen, playwright Bivash Chakrabarty, academic Sunanda Sanyal, former bureaucrat Debabrata Bandopadhyay, singer Pratul Mukhopadhyay and artists Jogen Chowdhury and Suvaprasanna.
Releasing the manifesto, Mahasweta Devi said: “State terror has been let loose from Keshpur to Nandigram and from Singur to Lalgarh. These people (read the Communists) do not believe in democracy. Decade after decade, they have been running an autocratic single-party rule. They have entangled everything like an octopus... we need to change this. We need to change this for the sake of a healthy society, culture and for humanity. Let us open a new chapter.”]

A regime not too dissimilar in nature runs the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry. We want change. [TNM]