The only activities around the whole of Bengal are 1) puja every Thursday and Monday 2) endless cups of tea and jabbering away to nothing. Anybody trying to work hard to better their lot is put down mercilessly with ridicule and waylaying
Recently, I had another experience with Waste Bengal’s incredible lazy commie attitude. They have a publishing house called Karigor. The Bengali actor Ambarish Bhattacharya had published his father Shri Abaninath Bhattacharya’s book, ‘A Short History of Bengali Cinema’ through Karigor Publishers. The book is in Bangla. I could not find the book anywhere. I somehow found one phone number after Googling a lot for any kind of contact. This phone number was not easily available as Googling for the book does not reveal anything in quite a few attempts. Well, the mobile phone kept ringing on December 24, 2025. Nobody picks up.
A lady calls me on December 26, 2025 and asks me if I want anything. I tell her I want to buy the book. She says she will check and get back to me. I presume that will happen within the hour. All I needed was the price of a book that they have published, and the cost of sending me that as a packed parcel to New Delhi from Calcutta. Right? Well, this lady gets back to me 10 days after my first call and eight days after she had called back with two lines of text on WhatsApp. I am amazed at the super lack of energy of these communist no-gooders. All I can do is grind my teeth in anger. These Bangladeshi refugees have destroyed my birth state. Disgusting. I ask her in text why she got back to me after 10 days of my call, she says she was busy preparing for the book fair in Calcutta. My goodness. Give these morons one job and the rest of their life shuts down.
It is the same story with companies in Bengal. Some of them are only engaged in showing to the world, how loss making they are so that they can claim subsidies from the central and state governments. There is no attempt to create a brand and earn a steady stream of revenue from around the world in exports or domestic sales. MSME company owners think of themselves as not any lesser than the largest companies in India and enjoy kowtowing employees who are always punctuating their sentences to their maaliks with pranam baabu pranam baabu.
The only activities around the whole state are 1) puja every Thursday and Monday 2) endless cups of tea and jabbering away to nothing. Anybody trying to work hard to better their lot is put down mercilessly
Actually, Bengal’s glorious past is nothing but a society getting fat and lazy over crumbs thrown to the masses and elite from the dinner table of the British rulers for 250 years. That is what Bengal’s so-called Rennaissance was. Nothing else. Bengal’s much-celebrated “glorious past” is often presented as an era of intellectual awakening, cultural brilliance, and moral leadership, popularly termed the Bengal Renaissance. Yet this narrative, repeated endlessly in textbooks, seminars, and drawing-room conversations, deserves far more critical scrutiny than it usually receives. Stripped of romanticism, what is often described as renaissance can equally be seen as a society that grew complacent, intellectually dependent, and structurally lazy while feeding on crumbs dropped from the colonial dining table of British rulers over nearly 250 years.
The slow death of a culture rarely announces itself with a bang. It creeps in quietly, disguised as normalcy, rationalised as “how things are done here,” and defended with excuses that grow more inventive as performance deteriorates. My recent attempt to purchase a Bengali-language book published in West Bengal became yet another reminder of how deeply institutional apathy has sunk into everyday life in the state. What should have been a simple commercial transaction turned into a case study of indifference, lethargy, and a deeply ingrained hostility toward efficiency that has long plagued Bengal’s public and private institutions.
The book in question was A Short History of Bengali Cinema, authored by Shri Abaninath Bhattacharya and published by Karigor, a publishing house based in Kolkata. The project itself is culturally significant. Bengali cinema has played a foundational role in Indian film history, influencing global auteurs and shaping artistic discourse far beyond the state’s borders. The fact that a respected Bengali actor, Ambarish Bhattacharya, took the initiative to publish his father’s work should have been reason enough for the publisher to ensure visibility, accessibility, and basic professionalism. Yet, finding the book proved nearly impossible. Online searches yielded little. No functioning website, no e-commerce presence, no clear distributor listings, and no readily available contact details. For a publishing house operating in 2025, this absence alone speaks volumes.
After considerable effort, I managed to locate a mobile phone number. On December 24, 2025, I called. The phone rang. No one answered. Repeated attempts yielded the same result. Two days later, on December 26, a woman called back and asked if I needed something. I explained that I wished to purchase the book. She said she would check availability and revert. At that point, the transaction required precisely two pieces of information: the price of the book and the cost of shipping it from Kolkata to New Delhi. In any functional commercial environment, this would be resolved within minutes, or at most a few hours.
Instead, there was silence. Ten days passed from my initial call, eight days from her return call. Eventually, I received two lines of text on WhatsApp with the requested information. No apology. No explanation for the delay until I explicitly asked why it had taken so long. The response was revealing: she had been busy preparing for the Kolkata Book Fair. This explanation was offered without irony, as though focusing on one event necessarily meant abandoning all other responsibilities.
This attitude is not an aberration; it is a pattern. In Bengal, one task is often treated as justification for ignoring every other obligation. The concept of parallel processing—managing multiple responsibilities simultaneously, which is basic to modern work culture—seems alien. Planning, delegation, customer responsiveness, and time sensitivity are routinely sacrificed at the altar of excuses. Cultural events, festivals, political meetings, or personal engagements become all-consuming reasons for institutional paralysis.
The tragedy is that this mindset extends far beyond publishing. It pervades much of Bengal’s commercial ecosystem, particularly among small and medium enterprises. Many MSMEs operate not with the ambition of growth, brand-building, or market expansion, but with the primary objective of survival through subsidies, concessions, and state support. Loss-making is often worn as a badge of authenticity, almost as proof of ideological purity or victimhood. Profit is viewed with suspicion, efficiency with hostility, and customer-centricity as an unnecessary concession to “market forces.”
This inward-looking posture has predictable consequences. There is little effort to build export-oriented businesses, tap national markets, or adopt modern distribution channels. Digital transformation is resisted rather than embraced. Websites, if they exist at all, are outdated. Customer communication is irregular and dismissive. Payment systems are archaic. Logistics are treated as an inconvenience rather than a core function. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs often cultivate feudal workplace cultures where employees are expected to display exaggerated deference, substituting respect with subservience. Hierarchy replaces competence; loyalty replaces performance.
What makes this particularly damaging is the contrast with Bengal’s intellectual and cultural legacy. This is a state that once produced world-class institutions, thinkers, artists, and industrialists. From Tagore to Ray, from Bose to Saha, Bengal shaped modern India’s intellectual foundations. Yet today, that legacy is invoked more often as a substitute for action than as an inspiration for renewal. Past glory becomes a comforting blanket under which present failure is excused.
The roots of this malaise lie in decades of ideological conditioning that devalued enterprise, demonised private success, and normalised mediocrity. Over time, this worldview seeped into administrative practices, educational institutions, and social norms. Initiative came to be seen as disruption. Ambition as arrogance. Accountability as harassment. The result is a culture where delays are normal, inefficiency is tolerated, and poor service is defended as inevitability.
The everyday rituals of the state reflect this stagnation. Life is punctuated by endless tea breaks, prolonged adda sessions that rarely translate into action, and a calendar crowded with religious observances and cultural events that increasingly serve as interruptions rather than enrichments. Celebration has displaced creation. Performance has been replaced by posturing. Activity is mistaken for productivity.
None of this is to deny the hardships faced by small businesses or the structural challenges of operating in a difficult economic environment. But hardship does not justify indifference, and constraints do not excuse contempt for customers. Around the world, enterprises operate under far more adverse conditions and still manage to deliver professionalism, responsiveness, and reliability. The difference lies not in resources alone, but in mindset.
Bengal’s problem is not a lack of talent. It is a surplus of excuses. It is the refusal to accept that time has value, that customers matter, and that institutions—cultural or commercial—must evolve or become irrelevant. When a publishing house cannot sell its own book efficiently, it is not merely a logistical failure; it is a cultural one. It signals a deeper unwillingness to engage with the world as it is, preferring instead to retreat into a cocoon of self-justifying inertia.
If Bengal is to reclaim its stature, it must first confront this uncomfortable truth. Pride in heritage must be matched by discipline in practice. Cultural leadership must be supported by operational competence. Ideals must coexist with execution. Until then, stories like mine will continue to repeat themselves—small, infuriating episodes that together form a damning indictment of a system that has made peace with its own decline.
The British did not nurture Bengal out of altruism. Calcutta was their imperial capital, their administrative nerve centre, and their primary commercial hub in the East. Investments in education, bureaucracy, law, and infrastructure were driven by colonial convenience, not civilizational uplift. A small section of the Bengali elite benefited disproportionately from this arrangement. They gained access to English education, clerical and administrative positions, legal practice, and cultural proximity to colonial power. Over time, this elite mistook access for achievement and proximity for progress.
The so-called renaissance was largely confined to this narrow social stratum. Reformist debates, literary movements, and philosophical explorations flourished within drawing rooms, colleges, and salons that existed because colonial rule required a compliant, English-educated intermediary class. The masses, meanwhile, remained poor, disenfranchised, and economically stagnant. Industrial decline, rural impoverishment, and repeated famines—including the catastrophic Bengal Famine of 1943—coexisted comfortably with elite self-congratulation about enlightenment and progress.
More damaging than the economic imbalance was the cultural conditioning that followed. Dependency was normalised. Intellectual validation increasingly came from British approval—degrees, titles, publications, and patronage. Creativity became performative rather than productive. Moral superiority replaced material capability. Over generations, this bred a mindset that prized debate over execution, critique over construction, and rhetoric over results. Being “aware” mattered more than being effective.
This historical conditioning also dulled Bengal’s entrepreneurial instinct. While other regions developed trading, manufacturing, and later industrial cultures that adapted to post-colonial realities, Bengal remained trapped in a nostalgia loop. The elite, once comfortable under colonial patronage, struggled to transition into competitive capitalism. Instead of building institutions that generated wealth and innovation, the state drifted toward ideological comfort zones that distrusted enterprise and celebrated poverty as virtue.
The long shadow of this past is still visible today. A disproportionate faith in intellectualism divorced from outcomes, a tolerance for inefficiency, and a reflexive hostility to profit-making can all be traced back to a society that learned to survive—and even feel superior—without producing tangible value at scale. When crumbs sustained both the masses and the elite for centuries, hunger for growth inevitably diminished.
Re-examining Bengal’s past is not about self-hatred; it is about intellectual honesty. A society that mistakes colonial accommodation for renaissance risks perpetuating the same complacency indefinitely. True renewal can only begin when myths are dismantled, dependency is acknowledged, and dignity is rebuilt on the foundations of productivity, accountability, and self-reliance rather than inherited narratives of borrowed glory.
