#4: Illuminating Poets, Brilliant Women and One Bright Tiger

Illuminating Poets, Brilliant Women and

One Bright Tiger

This post is overdue to be sure. In order to bring back memories from a relatively distant past it became necessary for me to reflect on the present and then kind of work backwards to another era. So here we are. 

I

Much has been happening in the world of killings and counter-killings recently, but nothing particularly significant in the world of literature and the arts—in my view. I mean, nothing to turn heads. Multiple murders continue across the globe to be sure, but to the extent the city of Paris has been in the news, I feel obliged to recall some poetry from another era. That’s when combating Fascism was a singular task for partisans and poets. In fact, all the people I have named in earlier postings—people who made my childhood luminous—were part of a global anti-fascist movement in the arts that included, for example, Pablo Neruda of Chile, Nicolas Guillén of Cuba, Federico Garcia Lorca of Spain, Nazim Hikmet of Turkey, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon of France. And many others throughout the world. In Kolkata too, Bengali writers and artists collaborated on many fronts, for example in the founding of the Indian Peoples Theatrical Association (IPTA) and the staging of Nabanna.

Parisian poets like Aragon and Eluard wrote much during WW II, and their poems from those years are still read and recited by many. To my knowledge, even in India. Poems like Aragon’s “La Rose et le Réséda” and “Les yeux d’Elsa” find their way into collections, and Eluard’s “Liberté” remains an astounding declaration of the French Resistance. I remember my father reading aloud many of the poems, and I can still hear the rhythm of the verses, the lilting refrains if I concentrate on his voice. From Aragon: 

"Celui qui croyait au ciel
 Celui qui n'y croyait pas..."                                                                             
    
 And again, 

“Je ne sais plus vraiment où commencent les charmes
Il est de noms de chair comme les Andelys
L’image se renverse et nous montre ses larmes
Taisez-vous Ah Paris mon Paris

Lui qui sait des chansons et qui fait des colères
Qui n'a plus qu'aux lavoirs des drapeaux délavés
Métropole pareille à l'étoile polaire
Paris qui n'est Paris qu'arrachant ses paves”

And again, the last few verses from Eluard’s famous poem:

“Sur la vitre des surprises  
Sur les lèvres attentives
Bien au-dessus du silence
J’écris ton nom

Sur mes refuges détruits
Sur mes phares écroulés
Sur les murs de mon ennui
J’écris ton nom

Sur l’absence sans désir
Sur la solitude nue
Sur les marches de la mort
J’écris ton nom

Sur la santé revenue
Sur le risque disparu
Sur l’espoir sans souvenir
J’écris ton nom

Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté.”

The believer and the non-believer wait in their city with faded flags and wrenching cobblestones. A city, still steady as the North Star, lets them fight for liberation as they write unflinching the name of freedom—with utmost discipline and dedication, their destiny in their own hands. This was the context for struggle and the language of poetry with which I became familiar during days of wonderment at Sadananda Road. 

(Translations of the French poems I have quoted can be found everywhere.)

As we know well, there was also the dark side of Europe and of France, not precipitated by the victories of the Third Reich or the Nazi occupation of several countries. This colonial-imperial mission of Europe affected us directly and deeply because much of the world remained colonized by European powers even as WW II was unfolding on various fronts. So we can’t grasp the flight and plight of immigrants from those old colonies—the destiny of Algerians in France, for example, without an honest examination of this colonial past. 

At the moment, the owners and their agents of corporate media in the West simply don’t allow such discussion, and I haven’t seen or heard any reference to our poets of the Resistance in the wake of the recent Parisian shooting sprees. I have noticed, however, many expressions asserting the moral superiority (and military dominance) of “The West”. I’m not sure what is meaningful about the constant reference to “Western values” in the media but any fool would know the implications. Even CNN’s Farheed Zakaria, our yes-man from Mumbai and a program host often accused of plagiarism, poses as an expert on global politics and insidious violence while proudly praying before his Wall of Western Values. 

As far as the French are concerned, I see a dire need to go back and read the works of Fanon and Césaire, Camus and Sartre again if we are to seriously contemplate our own destiny, wherever we are, let alone the fate of people far away. As I have promised, I shall return to the “thingification” of human beings as one precondition for mass murders. For now, a couple of sentences from Ernest Renan—the 19^th Century philosopher from Brittany and champion of the French empire—will suffice. Renan writes, quite earnestly of course: 

“The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is always a déclassé nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to his first estate (my emphasis).” 

How much of this kind of thinking has really disappeared from Mr. Zakaria's  “Western Values”? 

A couple of thoughts related to the end of France’s colonial empire come to mind. One is a poem by Subhash Mukhopadhyay based on the Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. The simplest news report stated that on May 7, 1954, the French colonial forces were defeated at Dien Bien Phu by the Viet Minh in a decisive battle, and the days of the French empire in Indochina became numbered. Subhash M. took the rhythmic sound (including the homophone for the Bengali “phu”) in “Dien Bien Phu” and made it into a refrain. He wrote, “I know the chant that drives away snakes—Dien Bien Phu!” (সাপ ঝাড়ানর মন্ত্র জানি—দিয়েন বিয়েন ফু).

The other thought has to do with the uncompromising Jean-Paul Sartre. It is well known that beside his philosophical works, Sartre wrote several plays and novels, essays, travelogues and political tracts as well. His three-part narrative, Les chemins de la liberté covers, without nostalgia, the period just before WW II, then the Nazi occupation of France, England and France’s Munich pact with Germany and other events of that era chock-full of so many contradictions. This may be a good time to revisit Sartre along with our poets of the Resistance. There is one other aspect of Sartre’s life that must be recalled in the present context. 

Sartre’s commitment to anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles evolved, quite logically, to his fierce opposition to French colonialism and equally fierce support of the Algerian war of independence. His denunciation of French militarism (including the use of torture) in Algeria and his public (and illegal) support of the revolutionary violence of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) and also of the moral courage of French army deserters, made many French citizens very unhappy. Algeria wasn’t just a French colony, Algeria was a part of France. (During this time, at some point Sartre’s Paris apartment was fire-bombed.) 

My father read us a news story one day from the French press which said that in spite of the intimidation and terror let loose on Sartre, when he was interviewed following a trip to South America, he boldly asserted that had he the power, knowledge and resources to do so, he would supply arms and ammunition to the Algerian rebels. This did not sit well with many tri-color waving French “patriots” and they appealed to General de Gaulle—who was the French President then—to put Sartre in prison. Although there was no love lost between de Gaulle and Sartre, the General is reported to have answered, “I can’t do that. Sartre is France.”  

Perhaps Gillo Pontecorvo’s films—The Battle of Algiers and Quemada! (Burn) deserve another look along with Sartre’s writings on Algeria.

One other interjection here about France. I heard many stories from my father about his days in Paris and France when he was studying at the Sorbonne. Then later, when I was a teenager, Satyen Bose told us many stories about his time in Paris, when he first traveled there to study with Marie Curie. (That was before SNB’s journey to Berlin and his time with Einstein.) I hope to retell these tales in the future. For now I’ll close with my first ever encounter with Paris. This was the summer of 2000, and we arrived in Paris precisely when my father passed away in Kolkata. A strange coincidence. Arun Mitra was 91 then and was bedridden after he fell and broke his hip, but his mind was completely lucid. 

I had called him from the U.S. wondering whether we should change our plans and go to Kolkata instead of to Paris. He said, “No, no… First you must go to Paris, and you can come to Kolkata in the winter. My French dictionaries are falling apart, bring me new ones.”

I told him that I could get all the dictionaries he wanted in the U.S. and I didn’t need to travel to Paris for them.

“Well, I have another idea then,” he said. “When I was in Paris, the city was full of beautiful women. Perhaps you could persuade one or two of them to come see me. Don’t worry, I’ll be around for their visit… and charming too!”

We laughed together, and just before the end of our conversation he added, “And yes, take a walk down my street, Rue de la Tombe Issoire… I’m forgetting the house number... Paritosh used to live there too.”

I promised to walk the walk and reminded myself that Paritosh was Paritosh Sen the artist who had been, I believe, a student or apprentice with Picasso at some point during his Parisian days. 

“One other thing… you should also go the next street over… sort of…  Rue Marie-Rose was it? You’ll figure it out… That’s where Lenin lived when he was in exile… you know, running from the Tsar and planning a revolution!”   

As it turned out, those were the last words my father spoke to me because he died in his sleep a few hours before we reached Paris. While I didn’t anticipate his sudden departure just then, from that day on I have relished his words about the conjunction of Lenin and beautiful women somewhere a bit south of the Sorbonne. So on our first morning in Paris, Joy and I roamed that neighborhood along Tombe Issoire, Marie-Rose and many other streets, shedding a few tears now and then. Joy was sure we would run into Kamila (Camilla in some languages) on some street in Paris—Kamila who “made so many things familiar to me: time streaming blood baby steps…” Arun Mitra had written. But Kamila too had vanished with her poet—at least for the time being. She may reappear quite unexpectedly, I surmised. Others too must discover blood, baby steps and time.

The end of this story came when we met up with Paritosh Sen in Kolkata in 2001 and he let me make copies of pictures from their Paris days, including their building on Rue de la Tombe Issoire. I know for sure I was given the house number by somebody then, but I don’t remember it anymore. But this shortcoming, the inability to remember a house number in Paris is nothing compared to the collective loss of memory—in France and elsewhere—I notice with sadness. Memory of events that have made Paris the city it is today.

II

From the late 1970s to about 1990 I gave and attended a number of talks and took part in a couple of conferences too at Kolkata’s Jadabpur University. The inspiration behind my willingness to participate in these activities—alongside long “addas” on and off the JU campus was a friend who died way before his time. I am thinking of Ranajay Karlekar—our Toto. Another person I’ll come back to as I plod across my map. No doubt stumbling on occasion.

One of the seminars I attended as a spectator and listener was on a topic related to women’s movements in India and more generally, Indian feminism. The exact title I forget. I think back to this forum because the speakers were women from across the country, several of them reputed “austere scholars” and experts in Indian history too. So, two things struck me about the various presentations. 

One, there was a lot of time spent on how feminism in India was significantly different from that in the West. Much of what was said on this topic was—as mathematicians say—trivially true, as far as facts were concerned. (For example, in India class and caste privilege quite often trumped gender inequality.) But there was no theoretical insight coming forth based on such empirical findings. Theory remained confined to a mystification of knowledge, manufactured in factories of the Western world and brought to the colonies as finished goods. I couldn't figure out how to use these precious commodities. I couldn’t afford them anyway. A couple of women students of history who talked to me later didn’t comprehend the discourse either. Their intellectual currency had little value in that situation.

Two, there was some quibbling over regional heroines. I had hinted about this in a previous post. In fact, the dispute I remember was about the real first woman physician in India. Was she the Bengali Kadambini Ganguly, or the Marathi Anandibai Joshi? The utter inanity in this kind of a question considered by scholars who were my contemporaries, baffled me and disturbed me. The dispute was from another era. Shouldn’t we celebrate the lives and accomplishments of both these women without setting them up as regional competitors? Does anybody care which of them first touched another human being with a healing hand? (These days it’s easy to access information about Kadambini and Anandibai. One item I found the other day is indicative of internalized values. Back then, some journalist had resolved the debate by writing that while Kadambini was the first Brahmo lady doctor, Anandibai was the first Hindu woman to have that honor. End of argument.)

In reality though, that Jadabpur University forum was a reminder of how much regional/ethnic/linguistic identity affect social consciousness and political activism of progressive Indians, in this instance scholarly women, even after rejecting outright caste, class and gender barriers. Is there a connection between all this and the character of Indian feminism? Well, that’s for scholars to discover. When I think back to the women who surrounded me as I was growing up in Sadananda Road, I remember the goodwill and affection they showed one another. The animosity they expressed, in speech, writing and in action, was toward orthodoxy and oppression. That’s where I’ll travel now.

I am looking at a notebook of my mother's writing. I had come upon it by accident and I believe this handwriting of hers belongs to the 1940s. There are many poems here and also an essay titled, “Rabindranath’s View of Women.” It is a short piece with many examples, lines scratched out here and there, rewritten and revised in many places, yet very refreshing coming from a young critic of her generation. Ma concludes that Tagore’s women had real character and on the whole he was quite sympathetic to the plight of women in his society. My mother as Shanti Mitra the storyteller felt most at home speaking of and for women whose lives were disrupted in a hundred different ways because they were shackled in a hundred different ways.

III

Shanti Mitra dedicated her last collection of stories—Green Bangles (সবুজ চুড়ি) to disenfranchised and deprived women who “carry with them every day— their unspoken agony.” Her characters like Madhabi, Surama, Munia and others often channel their pain and anger inward, even to self-destruction. The span of her own experience and her perspective on life allowed Shanti to be one with those women who could have easily got lost, disappearing out of sight, but didn’t for my mother. Unlike many contemporary writers, these women came to her life and her mind from different strata of society—as friends, not as subjects of research. Shanti didn’t have to travel to remote villages or distant lands to find her material, to gather her raw data. 

Whether Ma wrote in the turmoil of WW II, or tucked in corners of the Bengal famine, or walking with the uprooted after the partition of Bengal, or discovering her “immigrant” life in Uttar Pradesh, in truth only a handful of her shackled friends found their way into the pages of a book. In that sense, Shanti was not able to be a prolific writer, and there were many reasons for that. On the other hand, there was nothing unusual or inauthentic in dedicating her writing to those oppressed women, although after watching the evolution of her selfless and self-destructive characters, it is quite possible that some urban, educated, affluent champions of women’s rights may get a bit rattled and annoyed by the outcome. I am thinking of some of the erudite scholars I heard at Jadabpur University. 

Therefore, as my mother’s son I must declare that her compassion for all those who suffered and her unconditional affection for me, made me aware, for the first time, of the genuine lack of respect and of rights for women in a patriarchal society. Of course, as a child I didn’t understand debates concerning a women’s liberation movement, or differences in talent, ability, rights and privileges attributed to women and to men. But without the companionship of my mother, I doubt my childhood experience would have returned to me as an incisive and decisive realization and as a political conviction when I became an adult. My mother understood that the oppressed could find different paths to liberation, and perhaps that’s why she took me to meetings, discussions and performances, and welcomed to 3B Sadananda Road, memorable women of that time. Ma also directed the play—a political musical of sorts—in which I got on stage for the first time in my life! 

Before I recount what I remember from such confluences, I should speak a little bit about what shaped my mother’s values. Her father Ashutosh Bhaduri was a country lawyer in North Bengal—too kind and absent-minded for his profession—with nine daughters and finally a son. This uncle of mine was only a couple of years older than me. My mother was the oldest child and her youngest sister was Gita who married and acted with Sabitabrata Dutta, another well-known Bengali theatre personality and founder of the group Rupakar. My aunt Tripti Mitra, the more celebrated theatre icon from the Bhaduri family, was the fifth sister.

My grandmother Shailabala was a teen bride when she had my mother and taught her first-born Shanti how to sing and act and write, sew and cook, and later, how to take care of her younger siblings. Shailabala and her older daughters sometimes went to see theatre of the jatra (যাত্রা) variety, and also to hear music and poetry recitals. Ashutosh very much encouraged these undertakings of his wife and daughters. But on the other side of the family divide stood unflinching his widowed mother, an extremely orthodox Brahmin lady who not only opposed the education of women, but also condemned lower caste Hindus, all Dalits and Muslims to hell quite easily. So Ma and her sisters had to read in secret, for example, by resting  books on top of a mosquito net and reading with a flashlight, or taking magazines into the woods, braving the appearance of a snake or two. 

The daily pronouncements of her grandmother based on such a distorted view of the world became a difficult challenge for Shanti, but also a decisive learning experience. Here’s a telling example. The chief government representative in that area (the Sub-Divisional Officer) happened to be Muslim. His daughter Sofia (later my Sofia-Mashi) and my mother had become close friends, but because of the social and religious authority that supported the outrageous bigotry of his mother, even Ashutosh couldn’t allow Sofia to come inside their house. The result was that Shanti and Sofia played outside, and when they got thirsty Ma had to bring out water in a clay cup for her friend and a sweet or two in her hand so that no household dishes was ever touched by that Muslim girl. The clay cup could be smashed after it was used by her, and that was that. 

The real consequence of such debasement was that the two women became close and remained friends for good. Sofia-Mashi used to be a regular visitor to our Kalighat house and my mother took me with her to Sofia’s flat on Dharmatala Street when it was her turn to visit her friend. I remember well Sofia’s husband Dr. Pradhan who was a prominent surgeon in Kolkata. I remember too they had two boys somewhat older than me. Where would they be now? I wonder.

Beside a singular moral steadfastness, as a young girl Shanti developed a physical independence and her own kind of courage in that most of the time she could take on the world without fear. (I don’t think I mentioned that she had no formal education beyond high school.) I think early encounters in life are decisive in this domain. So one other story before moving on. 

On occasion Shanti went with her dad on journeys to nearby districts and towns when he had court cases away from home. From what Ma used to say, these were quite liberating trips for father and daughter who traveled by horse buggies or even ox carts because Ashutosh couldn’t afford anything better. He was a prime example of the indigent country lawyer. One evening they were returning from one such trip in a horse drawn carriage of the stage coach variety. It was well past sunset and there was nothing but complete darkness enveloping the country road. Only the dim kerosene lanterns the coachman displayed and the sound of horse hooves reminded the two passengers that they were still part of a world where humans lived. 

Ma had dozed off for a while, she recalled, when she woke up with a start. Suddenly the carriage had come to a dead stop.

“What’s the matter?” Ashutosh asked the coachman as he poked his head out the coach window. There was the sound of quick, terror-stricken breathing before the reply came.

“Sir, there’s a tiger!”

Ma said she then looked out the window on her side and to her amazement saw a dazzling shape about fifty yards ahead of them covered by what seemed to be tiny bright lights, right in the middle of the road. 

“Can’t you turn back?” Ashutosh asked. This time with some anxiety.

“No sir. The horses are frozen to this spot. They won’t… they can’t move.”

Ma said she fixed her gaze on that ethereal apparition, that incandescent shape on the road, but couldn’t tell for sure it was a tiger. But the horses knew and that’s why they had stopped. The tiger wasn’t bothered in the slightest by the sound of a carriage coming to a halt. The beautiful beast remained perfectly still, flanked on both sides of the road by a dense forest and encircled by impenetrable darkness. Ma realized there was nothing they could do, but didn’t feel particularly terrorized. It was clear the tiger had to make the first move. Of course, she hadn’t read any of William Blake’s poems, but whenever I visualize that scene in my mind’s eye, I have to think back to his tiger. What he had imagined in another land in another century was now in my mother’s sight. Amazing, what poets can do for us!

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

             In the end, the tiger got up, looked around, and strolled into the forest, disappearing inside his beloved homestead. After a minute or so Ma felt a jerk as the horses moved again, instantly into a full gallop. They knew not to stop again until they sensed familiar ground close to my mother’s hometown Thakurgan (ঠাকুরগাঁ). And those innumerable specks of light that made the tiger burn brightly—those were fireflies. Apparently, their luminous selves play with tigers and other animals all the time.

IV

             Back to my beginnings in Shanti’s company. My memories may not be complete, but they are clear. I remember holding Ma’s hand as we walked to Ashapurna Debi’s flat, and that she too came to our house occasionally. Ma used to say that Ashapurna wrote wonderful stories and as a writer her name should be up there with the best of Bengal. I paid attention as Shanti and Ashapurna talked about their writing and also about everyday household problems. That’s how I got interested in reading stories and I didn’t stop too much. I remember Ashapurna always covered her head with her sari (ঘোমটা) even when we sat on her balcony. My mother, on the other hand, seldom covered her head. I was very intrigued by their conversation because much of it was serious in content and professional in tone. We easily accepted and respected that kind of a connection between men, as I think of scenes from our living room, but it was different when it came to women. Perhaps that’s true even today.

             One evening we rushed off to a special event of the Women’s Self Defense League (মহিলা আত্মরক্ষা সমিতি). There was an Englishwoman—Dora Russell—on her way from England to Australia, and she would be speaking at the event. As we sat down in the hall my mother lowered her voice and said to me, “In all countries of the world women have many problems and few rights. This lady has fought for women in many places, in many ways.” What I remember from that evening is that Dora was unwilling to be a leader from the stage. She began a discussion with the women present only after she sat down in the middle of the crowd—at the same level. There was a lot of talking and applauding that evening, and seating in the middle of a hall full of women, I had felt a strange excitement. I learned years later that Dora was a prominent feminist and socialist of that era, and she got her last name from being married once to the great philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell.

             In the course of these postings, I’ll try my best to bring back whatever I remember about all those exceptional women from my years at Sadananda Road. I remained close to some of them as I grew into my teens and even later, and I’ll have occasion to talk about them in the future. Others disappeared from my life much too early, even tragically. I’ll end this post with my memory of one such person—another close friend of my mother—Lotika Sen. 

             I remember going to Lotika-Mashi’s house many times and playing with her son. And she would come to our house with that boy as we were good playmates. It also happened to be a fact that Lotika-Mashi and her husband Ranen Sen were both prominent members of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Bengal. 

             In January of 1948, the nation was stunned to learn about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi—the despicable act of a deranged fundamentalist, most people said in our Kalighat neighborhood. Others thought Gandhi was a victim of his own confused politics. I remember radios turned up and blaring all along our street with news updates following the assassination. I didn’t fully understand the political turmoil of the rest of the year, except that within months after Gandhi died, people I had never seen before began to seek refuge in our house under a cloak of secrecy, most of them for a one night stay. As it turned out, in March of 1948 the CPI was declared to be illegal in West Bengal. All party publications were confiscated and party members went underground after some 200 of them had been rounded up. Even members of a protest committee against the state’s lawlessness were arrested. I believe the physicist Meghnad Saha was a member of the committee but I don’t know whether he was picked up by the police. I do remember conversations about teargas and “lathi-charge” in various parts of the city, and realized ours was some kind of a “safe house” for people who were sought by the police. Because of my grandfather Satyendranath’s status as a journalist the authorities didn’t force themselves on us. Inside the house, my mother held fort and managed all comings and goings because my father had sailed for France that same year. (I can’t find any documents which has the date of his departure, but he must have left India around the middle of 1948.)

             Well, Lotika Sen was one of those who stayed with us off and on. By that time in my life, I had read many stories about martyrs and murderers, about injustice and the struggle against it. Many of the stories came from the Indian independence movement and European resistance to the Nazis. I didn’t understand the details of political demands and strategic goals, but I was sure people like my Lotika-Mashi must be right. Then one day we heard that nine students had been killed by the police at a demonstration—I now know that was in January of 1949. After that there seemed to be much agitation in voices of people who came in and went out of our house. Then one day Ma said that Lotika-Mashi and a bunch of her friends would be coming for dinner that evening after a demonstration in Central Kolkata. 

             “You know the Women’s Self-Defense League? They have organized this huge march and rally by thousands of women—against all the killing the police are doing. Lotika and her friends will be really hungry by the time they are done.”  Ma then went about organizing a meal that would feed a multitude, invited or not, and we kids scurried about waiting for all the people to arrive.

             Our excitement turned into utter disbelief that evening when the first reports came via radio. The police had fired on the women’s march and several people were killed. Everyone in our house was tense and waited for my grandfather to hear from his newspaper contacts, expecting that there would be many reporters on the scene. And so it was, as the phone rang and my grandfather wrote down some stuff. It was confirmed that four women at the head of the March were killed, along with two young boys. Dadu sat us down—I mean whoever happened to be in the house at that time, looked at Ma and said that the women killed were Lotika Sen, Protibha Ganguly, Amiya Datta and Gita Sarkar. The reporter who called didn’t know yet who the murdered boys were.  

             What I remember about the rest of the evening is a collage of floating instants. Ma was weeping as she tried to comfort others. Voices arose from different corners—some sad, some angry. The phone rang many times, several people left hurriedly. I don’t remember going to sleep that night, or waking up next morning. It took me a while to realize that Lotika-Mashi would not come to our house anymore, and a lot longer to understand that not all deaths are the same—that indeed, sometimes the death of a human being is like a huge mountain crumbling to become a field of crops. Perhaps that’s why I still remember the smiling face of Lotika Sen and wonder what happened to my playmate she used to bring to Sadananda Road.

© Ranadhir (Gogol) Mitra, January, 2015