Kolkata:
Controversy, it seems, will not leave the Hillary-Mamata meeting alone. First there was the row over Foreign Direct Investment or FDI. Now there is turbulence over the gift that the US Secretary of State gave to the West Bengal Chief Minister. The gift was a piece of cloth with Rabindranath Tagore's face embroidered on it. And the words of one of his songs embroidered round the edges in Bengali script. No one noticed initially. But when photos of the mat came out in newspapers, it was found that Tagore's lines were full of spelling mistakes.
"Its the pride of Bengal," Mamata Banerjee said at a press conference after the meeting as she held up the gift for the TV cameras. "She has given me this...
aguner poroshmoni choawo praney. She even remembered the great song."
Aguner Poroshmoni is indeed one of Tagore's most popular songs.
With Mamata waving the gift around, the fine print escaped notice. But on Tuesday, a day after the historic meet, when newspapers blew up photographs of the gift, there was shock.
Not only are there spelling mistakes in the lyrics embroidered around the edges of the mat, even the words are wrong.
For instance, the song goes...."
e jibon purno koro"....but in the gift, "
purno" has become "
rhinno" and "
dhonno".
The "
e ki matra" in the word "
jibon", too, is wrong.
With the Mamata-Hillary meet still fresh in their minds, people would not comment on the faux pas. But in the cyberworld, pictures of Mamata holding up the mat have gone viral.
So has the condemnation.
"I think this is an insult to tagore and to all bengali speaking people," says one netizen.
And it's a sentiment echoed by dozens.
In fact, there is at least one online petition demanding an apology from the US embassy in Delhi for the mistakes and a correction of the same, though how that can be done is not clear.
And that's not all. While the mistakes were not Mamata's, her baiters have found fault with her nevertheless. She described the gift as an
aashon, which is something you sit on, sacrilege as it has Tagore's portrait on it.
"She has given me a small
aashon. There is a picture of Tagore on the
aashon," Mamata said.
Most feel the gift was a wall hanging or a wall mat, and many are wondering if somewhere along the way wall mat and Walmart got mixed up leading to confounding confusion.