Heart to Heart

  On Being Mahua Moitra   Play Audio        To write on Mahua Moitra is to miss a heartbeat or two! A feisty lady, exuberant in spirits, and exuding both charm and gutsy defiant air, she turns many a head as she bounds about in the corridors of power, or anywhere. She is a stormy petrel in our political landscape whose fiery eloquence with a tadka of desi phrase, a Shakespearean quote, a Mahabharata metaphor and a Bengali/Hindi simile to boot, serves a steamy, sizzling stew fortified further with a battery of facts. That’s what lends her speeches in the parliament so special and a must-see, must-hear, for everyone. Those whom her fiery stuff is aimed at squirm in their seats with her red mirchis burning hot on their palates, while the benches on her side applaud in stunned disbelief at her heroics. Her academic and professional credentials are impressive: in a house where even ministers can’t tell Einstein from Newton, and a Baba’s herbal concoctions get a ministerial nod

  On reading Marcel Proust I have for long nursed a dream: to read Marcel Proust. I knew he wrote in long, winding sentences and while navigating those byzantine lanes and by-lanes, one was prone to lose way. An atrociously slow reader that I am - averse to all twists and puzzles whether mental or those inflicted by our digitalized lifestyles - I always thought that Proust and ‘yours truly’ would never make good bedfellows. But I have a secret infatuation for French books, wines and women of whom I can at least solicit the first (by just loosening my feeble purse strings), and just fantasize about the other two! And then having read Victor Hugo’s life-altering classic ‘Les Misérables’, and later Balzac’s (a contemporary of Hugo and Alexander Dumas) heart-tugging biography ‘Jeevan Madira’ (‘Wine of Life’) reflecting his extraordinary writing genius standing in sharp contrast to his flamboyant lifestyle and innumerable trysts with women, my rendezvous with Proust was inevitable. And