The man who changed Bengali music forever is now a legislator. Kabir Suman, Member of Parliament and Kolkata’s most dogged rebel, looks back on a ‘political’ life
A storm is raging in Kolkata. The wind whips windows and snaps old branches off trees. Rain falls in blinding curtains, driven by the mad drum roll of thunder. In a dimly-lit room, on a square of a rug, sits the man who whipped up another kind of storm in Bengal’s life in the 1990s, with a guitar and a song: Kabir Suman, songwriter-musician, journalist and author, and now Member of Parliament from Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency.

At 61, his frame is a little bent with age, his hand trembles as he lifts the cellphone to his ears. But the eyes look steadily at you and the voice is still rich with vigour as he takes you back to that time in 1985, when as a broadcast journalist in America, he travelled to Nicaragua to see “what revolution looked like”. The Sandinista Liberation Front had just overthrown the dictatorship in the Central American country and Suman was among the handful of journalists in the combat zone. “Unlike in a war, a journalist has to be trained to survive a combat zone where guerrilla warfare is on because you don’t know who your enemy is or your friend,” he says with a puff on his cigarette. As part of the training, Suman and another journalist were asked to cross a field riddled with mines. “‘Campaneiro, go cross the field. Good luck,’ was all they said to us. I pissed six times in my pants, so did my friend. We hugged each other and walked. Death and us, never closer. But it drove the fear out of me,” he says thoughtfully.

... contd.