Calcutta Diary

December 8, 1973 Calcutta Diary A M EVERYTHING seems to be fine and excellent in this country, says Comrade Brezhnev, and Comrade Brezhnev is an honourable man. In the course of the bare five nights he stayed here, he had no chance of seeing any bit of the country apart from banquet rooms and conference halls and the Red Fort; so what, Comrade Brezhnev is an honourable man, and everything is fine and excellent in this country. You and I, who are citizens of this country, who love this country, who take pride in its people, may be still slaves of the philosophy of logical positivism. You and I may consider this to be the worst year since Independence; we may feel that, with the rate of economic growth dwindling down to zero, income inequalities getting aggravated, and the authorities practically washing their hands off any responsibility to provide even minimum relief to the poorest and most wretched sections, a total economic collapse cannot be averted for long; the number of registered unemployed may reach frightening proportions; hopelessness and frustrations may be writ large across the faces of people in different walks of life; despite the new harvest, newspapers may continue to carry stories of deaths from starvation, or, if you are mindful of your official connections, malnutrition. But Comrade Brezhnev says everything is fine and excellent in this country, and Comrade Brezhnev is an honourable man.