DEBATE: CALCUTTA BETTER RULED FROM LONDON???

[Varunastra]

I know this might start a flame war(that kinda is my intention)........but yhere was a debate on this topic in calcutta hosted by the telegraph..........where kapil dev and co. were for the motion and the oxford university gradues were against the motion!!!.........feel free to comment and troll!!!
here is the article-

If there’s one thing that good debating is not about, it’s the courage of one’s convictions. In fact, the fewer convictions you bring to the podium the better. You’re up there sparring with your opponents, not because you believe passionately, but because you relish putting people down spectacularly, and because it’s a lot of fun listening to intelligent and articulate people being intelligently and articulately horrible to one another.

Debating is as gladiatorial as, say, arm-wrestling — except that you use your brain instead of your arm. Yes, a belief in free speech is behind this lovely game of enlightened nastiness, as the chairperson, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, reminded the audience at the beginning of The Telegraph National Debate 2012, presented by Ballantine’s in association with Birla Sun Life, on Saturday. But ultimately, the whole thing is about the art of being wittily and wickedly mean without taking this meanness seriously at all.


The Telegraph team: (from left) Swapan Dasgupta, Barkha Dutt, Kapil Dev, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Rituparno Ghosh
On Saturday, the house was of the opinion that “Calcutta is better ruled from London”. With its typical delight in being perverse, The Telegraph formed its own team with a clutch of veteran Indian gladiators who upheld the motion, arguing for the “re-colonisation” of their own country.

Their opponents were members of what might be called the mother of all debating societies, the Oxford Union Society.

So a bunch of Oxford graduates and undergraduates were caught in the delightfully ironic time-warp of trying to convince another bunch of wilfully regressive Midnight’s Children (and Grandchildren) that they, the Indians, should stop longing to be ruled again by them, the British, because look how badly we are ruling ourselves and how much fun you seem to be having in your functioning anarchy when we seem to be looking towards you, in our postcolonial misery and boredom, for spicier food, livelier cricket, and warmer behaviour and weather.

So, the evening was not only about London and Calcutta, but also about youth and experience, earnestness and irony. For how could one take on a motion like this without being thoroughly tongue-in-cheek?

So, for the motion, film-maker Rituparno Ghosh put out the “aesthetic” notion of dreaming about better public statuary and road-names when London rules. Rajiv Pratap Rudy — MP, BJP spokesperson and air-pilot manqué — hailed, using the Brutus-is-an-honourable-man ploy, the triumph of the Westminster system of democracy: look at the great boom in the consumption of Maggi noodles and mobile phones and journeys to the moon (never mind the diabetes and the poverty).

Kapil Dev, iconic cricketer and entertainer, talked about his first trip to England when he was 19 and didn’t know any English at all. So his first century was a “century of pardons”, when he would say Pardon? to everything said to him by an Englishman, who would, in turn, say Pardon? to Kapil and the pardons would go back and forth until conversation became impossible. Yet, it is cricket and the English language that unite India today, where “every Tom, Dick and Harry has an ego”.

Tommy, said Swapan Dasgupta (“India’s leading contrarian”, according to the chairperson), was the name that most Calcuttans gave their Alsatians. Dasgupta observed how Bengalis always break into English when they speak to their pedigree dogs (“Always Sit! and never Bosho!”) and when they get really angry. Sweeping aside “postcolonial drivel”, he claimed that “the decline of Britain is a direct result of the decline of Empire”: Macaulay cannot do without Ma Kali (or is it the other way round?)

It was Barkha Dutt who gave the postcolonial tale the evening’s most cunning twist. She pointed out that the motion says Calcutta is better ruled from London, not by London. So, with our indomitable knack for Indianising everything, why don’t we just march into London, take it over, and rule from there? In any case, Calcutta is ruled less and less from Delhi each day, so it might as well be ruled from London — not by the British, but by Calcuttans themselves, who are said to be the last Englishmen left in the world. In Dutt’s rumbustiously confident India of today, the debate around colonialism has become “entirely irrelevant”.

In the face of all this new Indian rumbustiousness, the Oxford University team — Hasan Dindjer, Katharine Meadow Brooks, Rachael Crook, Matthew Handley and Zoe Fannon, studying law, international relations, history and PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) in various colleges — was left, rather unenviably, with the liberal ideas of freedom and self-determination for their arguments against the motion.

They valiantly marshalled all their academic training to defend an essentially serious position, bringing an altogether different tradition of debating into the fray, compared to their opponents’ more homespun, colloquial styles.

It was a playing out of how far the most vital forms of Indian argumentativeness have moved from the Westminster manner. And was it a coincidence that the most vigorous Oxonians were a Scotswoman and a Northerner (unless I’ve got Matthew Handley’s accent wrong)?

The audience voted against the motion: it wasn’t persuaded that Calcutta is better ruled from London. Earnestness, and not irony, won the day.
Earnestness wins the day

 

[IND151]

brits debating that they are not good rulers and Indians debating that Calcutta should be ruled from london

that must be very funny scenario