Sunday, December 17, 2000		Feedback

Saying bye to Basu

APROPOS of Chanchal Sarkar’s write-up "Saying bye to Basu" (November 26), you can admire him or admonish him, love him or lothe him, but you cannot ignore Jyoti Basu. If you do, you will be ignoring the history of West Bengal for the last three decades of the second half of the 20th century — the history of its accomplishment and achievements and of its failures and frustrations. For Jyoti Basu was intrinsically and inextricably connected with, and deeply involved, in all that.

Anyone who can be an elected chief minister for nearly 25 years has obviously something within him, some strength, some resolve, some dedication, even some greatness. I do not think any person in the future will be able to emulate this.

Why was he able to achieve this remarkable record? Perhaps because he was financially honest and straight forward. His integrity in this respect was beyond question. He was neither a wheel-dealer nor a crook. I do not think he has any hidden money or a secret bank account offshore or elsewhere.

However, there are many voices heard in Bengal today, many views expressed, many contradictory assessments made of Jyoti Basu’s work as chief minister. People accuse him of being the C.M. who has destroyed Bengal economically, financially and industrially. It is said that he turned Bengal, a first rate industrial state and one of the finest in the country, into a second rate trading state. No doubt, under his leadership, Bengal has lost its industrial pre-eminence and economic importance that it had under Dr B.C. Roy, P.C. Sen or S.S. Ray. It is alleged that industrial figures have reached a new low and unemployment figures a new high.

His departure is bound to cause considerable unease not only within the CPI-M about the future but also in West Bengal as well as in Left circles outside his party. It will really be an uphill task for his successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, in view of the critical phase in history through which West Bengal is currently passing. Bhattacharya may have to pay a price for this decline as well since it gathered pace during the last two decade of the Basu regime.

K.M. VASHISHT
Mansa

Apropos of "How to keel cool in crises" by R.C. Sharma (December 3) author has only talked about a scenario where a person is unjustifiably angry. What about the scene, where a person is unnecessarily provoked with wrong allegations of invectives? He is likely to get upset and in case he appears calm on the surface, he might be seething inside and only expressing his anger would give a vent to his feelings. So, what is the harm if he airs his views, preferably in subduced tones which shall definitely keep him stress-free and prevent him getting depressed later.

ANSHULA GUPTA
Chandigarh

Apropos of the column Dream theme by Vinaya Katoch Manhas, Dream analysis as given by Sigmund Freud, involves free association. After a person reports a dream to his analyst, he is instructed to say everything that comes to his mind when every element of the dream is narrated back to him.

Freud’s dream theory states that a dream comprises two elements, the manifest content and the latent content. Manifest content is the dream as experienced and remembered by the dreamer and the latent content which is discovered through free association. Dream interpretation involves replacing the manifest with the latent content.

It is not possible to analyse the dream of a person by knowing his or her age, occupation etc. The interpretations may be accurate on the basis of mythological beliefs but psychoanalytically, it is inaccurate. This is so because the basic requirement for dream analysis is information about a person’s childhood and his or her personality development as a whole. One cannot assign meanings to the objects or inanimate objects appearing in a person’s dreams without having an exhaustive knowledge about the person’s past and present.

Freud never assigned particular meanings to a particular symbol that might appear in the dream of a person and said that the same symbol might convey different meanings for different people.

SAMITA SONI
Patiala