FOREWORD

It is distressing for me to be called upon to write about Sugato Bhattacharya, my departed sister Manimala’s youngest grandson. Not yet out of his teens, this prodigy (-well, this is what I must call him-) took his own life, while at the zenith of his student career. There is a cruel irony in an eighty-year-old person presenting to the world the literary work of an eighteen-year-old genius.

Yet I consider it a privilege too to introduce Sugato to the literary world at large. Placed in the correct perspective, Sugato’s life and his work could act as eye-opener to all humans living at this hour of engulfing darkness masquerading as a dazzling, maddening shine. This is the hour when the world, brought to the brink of an Armageddon by an ideologically bankrupt leadership of the world, can be saved only through the noblest exertions of the mind, which alone lend meaning to sacrifices of the physique. This is the hour when the pen has to prove its superiority over the sword, and mind has to assert its supremacy over matter. Sugato lived and died for his creed ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’

Quite expectedly, the competitive spirit was totally alien to Sugato’s nature. Yet his mental faculties – his mastery of language and his grast of abstructions, philosophical as well as mathematical – were of so high an order that he could not almost help excelling others in academic contests. The case with which he crossed hurdles placed in the path of aspirants for leadership in science, industry, and commerce, was simply amazing. Whatever admission test he sat for, he was always a topper. He never tasted disappointment in any academic pursuit.

After an easy admission to the much-coveted main course at the internationally reputed Indian Statistical Institute of Baranagore, Kolkata, Sugato was again the most outstanding student in his batch. He was friendly to all, and in a way he was respected by others for his intellect, his civilised manners and his innate goodness. Yet for his unconventional views and for his near-total indifference to questions of a career in the narrow sense, he was considered a crank by his fellows.

Sugato however enjoyed this isolation. In nonchalance which reminds us of Socrates almost, he scripted a play with his own self figuring in it as a crazy eccentric. Moreover he himself played that role, much to the amusement of his fellows and his own delight too. Nevertheless, he had a kind of camarederie with his fellows, and he helped his classmates, specially the drooping ones, to grapple with abstruse problems of science and mathematics.

No one could suggest Sugato suffered from any sense of inadequacy, ignominy, or injury. He had no reason to be beset by any sense of inferiority. Besides his academic prowess, he had his penchant and aptitude for music and painting. As for books, he used to read even at that tender age serious philosophical material, such as Plato’s Republic, and literary classics like Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, James Joyce etc. Lastly, his familiarity with the byways of cyberspace made him an updated polymath, though somewhat on a miniature scale. He could well claim, using the word of Bacon, ‘I have taken all knowledge to be my province.’

Yet without a prior hint to anybody, he put an end to his life by hanging in his single-seated hostel-room in the Statistical Institute Campus in the small hours of December 3, 2008. And all this only a few hours after he had posted a brilliant poem on a website, his swansong ind fact (‘a december night in laughing’), and played bouts of table tennis in the hostel. The only clue left behind was a cryptic two-line note, later scooped out of his shirt pocket: For no reason / One reason moron.

We will perhaps never know the reason why Sugato chose to quit the world in such a fashion. He himself had written for no reason’; we too have not yet come upon any reason for his action. He had not been jilted in love, nor had he tasted disappointment in of his pursuits. He had not any clash or even a tiff with anybody in the family or outside it. As for the remote background of his action, one may refer to his dear elder brother Sambodhi’s departure for the college hostel in 2005 and the death in February 2006 of his dearly loved grandfather Benoy Krishna who lived with the family and kept him company for years on end. These two misfortunes were shocks no doubt when they came, but Sugato had found time enough to live them down.

Perhaps we will be inching towards the truth if we juxtapose the qualities of his heart with those of his head. Soft by nature, Sugato was never loud in his ways with others. Yet he expressed his disapproval whenever his parents failed to evince enough compassion for poor and unfortunate people. With no weakness for any kind of pomp and luxury, he chose an austere life style for himself. While others around tended to live by the rule of self before others, he himself would be a loner and practise the very opposite rule. An observer might well wonder whether Sugato was not a medieval knight or monk at heart.

I however find a clue in Sugato’s spiritual affinity with Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who is Shakespeare the man’s surrogate in many people’s eyes. Only those who cannot see the wood for the trees, can suppose Hamlet’s melancholy to be due mainly to his mother’s ‘frailty’. His sickness at heart predates his mother’s lapse, and it had not its origin in any sense of personal frustration or loss. His first utterance ‘O, that this too too solid flash would melt’ shows him toying with the idea of ‘self-slaughter’. ‘All the uses of the world’ seem to him to be ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’. He mourns ‘things rank and gross in nature possess it (the world) merely’. Not much later he laments most significantly: ‘The time isout of joint: O cursed spite,/ That even I was born to set it right!’ The sense of a mere personal injury could not have led to such a state of mind.
Where Sugato differs from Hamlet is in externals only. Sugato was no prince wielding a sword in pre-Industrial days. The mother or the lady-love factor also does not quite work here. But the spirit is essentially the same – tender, soft, compassionate – in fact too, too human for the rough and tumble of a competitive society. His lack was in pugnacity and with a bruised heart he brooded over how men and women could be more human in a more meaningful world. Sugato’s poems and his scattered notes contain ample hints that he was no decadent aesthete, retreating to an ivory tower and finding his solace in a substitute reality conjured up by fancy or same psychedelic potion.

Yet what could he do alone, a mere adolescent of eighteen? He himself could rise to the top of any ladder in society, but what use would be that rise, if the larger world were hell-bent on blowing itself up in perpetual vendettas? His friends have reported Sugato was very much upset by the Mumbai massacre of 26.11.2008. He saw no ray of hope on the horizon. Nor was there anyone by his side to share his fears, hopes, and dreams of building up a ‘brave new world’ for posterity. Life therefore lost its meaning for him, and the vital urge to live on was fast draining out of him. No wonder, at some critical hour he threw overboard all other considerations and took the decisive step of ending his painful sojourn on this ‘sphere of sorrow’.

We can of course read many other factors into Sugato’s story. We can put the blame on his English-medium education, which must have cut him off from the cultural roots of his own Bengali race. We can also find fault with the contour of his family, which was by and large nuclear in character. But no one can tell for certain what factors ultimately drove him to his suicide.

We by-standers however have little right either to condemn or to pity him. What Sugato has left behind is enough to excite our awe and admiration. His elder brother Sambodhi and his parents Devasish (Rana) and Aparna (Mithu) always held him in high regard. They knew all right that Sugato was a versatile reader and that he often wrote poems and prose scraps, but they never could guess the volume of his literary output. He used diaries, note books, and even stray pieces of paper to note down his compositions. But as he became more and more familiar with the computer and the facilities of the internet, he stashed away a huge quantity of his literary output in different corners of the Cyberspace. After his death, his elder brother and parents, helped by uncle Arindam Chakravarty and cousin Shubhankar Bhattacharya, have already garnered a lot from these sources. Their work of retrieval is not yet over. Now, only the material collected from one website, viz., xanga.com is presented to the community of readers. Further publications will come up in due course.

Before I conclude I tender one apology to readers, I have felt the essential poetic quality of Sugato’s work, but debility did not permit me to go through the entire corpus. I therefore have refrained from making any comment on the poetic worth of his work. I leave that job entirely to the cognoscenti and the lovers of poetry in general.

Konnagar
22.01.2009
Ravi Chakravarti

N.B. Though his name was recorded everywhere as Sugata, I have opted for the form Sugato which is much closer to the actual pronunciation.