Resolution to re-name West Bengal

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The West Bengal assembly passed a resolution, though not unanimously, to rechristen the  state Bangla in Bengali, Bengal in English and Bangal in Hindi. In fact, renaming was necessary after the emergence of Bangladesh which was earlier called East Bengal in English and Purba Banga in Bengali.’West’ now stands irrelevant as there is no “East’.Change of name of a place, may it be a country , state or street,even though  it is associated with  a rich  heritage, is nothing new across the world..In the present instance no political motive, nor any  regional passion was involved. However,it would have been better if a single name Bangla were chosen in English and Hindi as well.Again, it would have been  decent if the resolution  could be passed  without  any dissent.

Human rights brazenly trampled upon!

                                                         

Recently Odisha has come to lime light for pathetically wrong reasons. A video clip of a poor man carrying the dead body of his wife for cremation at home, 60 Kms away from hospital where she died of Tuberculosis shocked one and all. He was accompanied by his young daughter who was sobbing. The man was refused an ambulance as he’d no money. This blood-chilling unbelievable inhuman clip went viral and hospital  staff was busy defending themselves claiming the man didn’t wait for the ambulance to come in, which was  in fact far from true. The poor husband was, however provided with an ambulance after he trudged 10 Kms, thanks to the initiative reportedly taken by some kind hearted youths in this regard. This incident bears testimony to the fact how poor people are sometimes treated like subhuman beings in our society

In another incident in Odisa  the dead body of a poor octogenarian woman  was crushed to fit it in a sack  at a hospital to facilitate carrying the corpse.It;s also an abjectly inhuman act that is unthinkable in a civilized society. More often than not the poor and the down trodden people are treated with equally similar cruelty and indignity when alive and even when dead. These incidents reveal how pathetically all norms of human rights have been  trampled upon. We should be ashamed and try to make amends.

Incidentally,just hard on the heels of macabre incidents that took place in Odisha, came the video clips of  some heart wrenching incidents in social media that laid bare how the marginalized people are treated in our society. In Madhya Pradesh a man along with his 5-day old baby, his old mother and his dead wife were  shoved out of  a bus  amidst forest in torrential rain .It happened immediately after his wife  who was  unwell died on the bus. In another incident in Tamil Nadu a boy was found begging to bribe an officer for sanction of money to cremate his father who had just passed away

Presumably, many more such heart-rending incidents are taking place but only a few are reported in press or social media.