On a recent visit to Kolkata a strange sight greeted my eyes. The famous trident lamps lining the city’s streets have now been entwined with blue and white fairy lights. This wasn’t for some local Puja, to be dismantled once the deity had departed. The dim trident lamps (their procurement by the Trinamool Congress-led Kolkata Municipal Corporation was mired in controversy) have been strung up with these lurid lights ostensibly to endow the city with a perma-festive look.
In reality, however, they are a testament to the bad taste that’s become part of the zeitgeist of Didi’s Kolkata — a veritable affront to the city’s “Bhadralok” culture.
It would be a stretch to link Kolkata’s ghastly street illumination to Bengali bhadraloks (respectable gentry) wanting to turn their backs on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee this election season. But those sickening blue and white lights (‘tuni bulbs’ in local patois) that’re here to stay are one more symbol of the growing disconnect between Mamata and the Bengali bhadralok — the genteel, educated, middle and upper middle class, the upholders of cultural refinement, who had once given their seal of approval on her bid to oust the Left from Bengal.