‘Oh to be in Kolkata, now that poll-itics are here!’ Yess, shotti, the battle cry was mother’s milk to me, and i was deliciously weaned on the historic clashes of the 60s. Reduced to yearning from afar during CPM’s invincible sway and then the fall of the ‘red fortress’, this time i’m happily in the thick and thin-ice of it all. It’s music to my ears. With Modi slipping from the Top of the Pops, the NextGenElection has been jazzed up; and who knows who’ll sing the blues. This week in my volatile hometown, the rock ‘n’ roiling was in full swing, but as the state government and CBI armies clashed on Sunday evening right inside South Kolkata’s cossetted heart, the appropriate genre was rap. And an expectedly hard one too, considering how much is at stake for Mamata. Not just warding off the BJP rattling her gates, but the conquest of Delhi itself. Strangely, the two amazons in the fray are similarly and incongruously named, showing no mamata/maya to thwarters.
The nation watched with disbelief as the fierce stand-off between Modi and Didi ‘leapt from the seats of power to the street’. The first round went to the seasoned street fighter. As cops grappled with CBI corps sent to question the Police Commissioner, even pushing a team member into their van, Mamata marched to Esplanade in a truculent flap of hawaii chappals, began her dharna at 9pm. In arguably a first anywhere, Monday’s cabinet meeting was held on the roadside.
So what would be Mamata’s chosen shongeet? Clearly not ‘Didi tera Modevar diwana’. Hard Kaur’s 2018 ‘Detective Didi’ rap would suit our hard-boiled lady. But better still is Khaled’s 92 chartbuster ‘Didi o di’. Doubly apt in football crazy Bengal: Didn’t it anthem the 2010 FIFA World Cup?
So here’s Mamata’s cover version. “On a dark Sunday eve, you tried to take my Top Cop away./ Now here’s the price you pay./ I’m the state’s one and only lover./ You think they’ll leave me for another?/ I tell you no, no, never, ever./ BJP Baby, can’t you see/ Of your caged parrot I am free./ Bangla’s refrain will always be ‘Didi Didi di-o!’/ Brigade Cholo!?/ Na, na, na,/ Ebar Dilli Cholo!!”
source: The Times Of India