(This article was first published on 8 July 2015. It is being reposted from The Quint’s archives to mark Jyoti Basu’s death anniversary.)
Here’s the thing, I was born in the late 1960s, in Calcutta. Then seething with political unrest: thousands of migrants were streaming in from what would become Bangladesh. Our northern areas were inflamed by a movement named after the Naxalbari district, inflation was sky high, political unrest, which would lead to the Emergency of 1975 and 34 years of Communist rule, after 1977, was far away.
But my mother, now in her 70s, tells me that in those days of rationing and deprivation – a shortage economy – as we were taught later, the local grocer still got his supplies through the door and Sunilbabu, who ran the largest pharmacy in the area, always managed to smuggle a little bit of ‘baby food’ to our house. For me.
Well, all that ended in 1977, when the CPI(M), led by a dhoti-kurta wearing bhadralok from Calcutta stormed to power in the state. His name was Jyotirindra Basu – or as we learnt later, Jyoti Bose, or just Jyotibabu.