by ARNAB GANGULY
Baisakhis, Nusrats and Shrabantis have shattered the prism through which the middle-class viewed society
Linen has been around since the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians used the fabric. No one gave much thought about how and where to wash attire until a Frenchman by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte objected to the act of cleaning dirty linen being turned into a public spectacle. Decades later, Victorian Brits acknowledged Bonaparte’s suggestion and soon all its colonies were following their masters till a former capital of the British empire in the present time thought otherwise.
These days, a lot of dirty linen is coming out for cleaning in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal than ever before with more and more ruling party members putting on display their private lives, leaving no question answered.
Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest had found scandalous, “the amount of women in London who flirt with their husbands… It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.”
Clean or unclean, women in Calcutta are no longer ashamed to hang them out to dry.
Why else would a newly elected MLA rush to a hospital at midnight where her estranged husband was kept following his arrest by the CBI? Why would the man’s live-in partner keep crying and knocking on prison doors with cameras focussed on her?
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