The town where I grew up, is called, Mathabhanga. It is very small peaceful idyllic town, where life is slow, people are lazy and kids are happy since there is nothing to worry about except study.
Old people like this town very much, young people want a better educati
on system and children play and watch television to be influenced by the popular culture. Sometimes their parents remind them that television is an entrainment box and if the kid wants to get into the box, they need to hone their skills like the prime time anchors, singers and 'stars' since they are doing it as professionals. So there is no other choice but to study. So here one studies and takes everything else as entertainment. Again while doing and growing up so some kids go frustrated and leave study for earning money. Some of them end up in becoming a driver, some open up small pan shops, some take care of their family businesses, some go to Kolkata for a better education and return hopeless to open a cybercafe, a bunch of them even go to South India after finishing the education in Kolkata for getting a better job and another bunch returns a
gain to be school teachers, both primary and high school. And a very few aspires to be a state administrator, or a teacher in a college or university or to enter the IIT, Indian Institute of Technology and thus move abroad.
Many of these highly educated bunch call this idyllic place a backwater, which is true to many extents, for having a free and educated life of high thinking. But they never forget there is one river, Sutunga, which surrounds the whole town, always flows despite the lazy life of this town. She flows irrespective of whether a group of young boys take the first puff of cigarette by her bank, whether a young couple kisses each other hiding themselves in the catkin bush on her sandy stretch, whether an old teacher breathes fresh air during her evening walk along the riverside road, whether a bunch of people gossips reg
arding the latest political trends looking at floating and tied-up wooden boats on the babbling water, whether the hot film stars heat up a gossiping session of young fresh breezing chaps, who stop suddenly for a while when a young perfume passes by on a Lady Bird cycle without knowing the fact that the lady bird comes to the river bank to breathe more freedom everyday and whisper it out to someone. But hardly any one can hear. Only the river current never makes a mistake to listen to that whisper - 'freedom like babbling water' -of that lady bird and to carry it forward to the vast free bay of Bengal through Koch Bihar and Bangladesh.
P.S. Mathabhanga is a small town, on the top north Bangladesh border , in the district of Koch Bihar and the state of West Bengal, India.
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