I first met Prasanta Das in his spacious two- storey house in Beraberi village in the latter half of 2007. By then, the 997 acres of farmland in Singur had long since been acquired, but Tata was yet to depart. I was in the company of a good friend from Kolkata, who knew Singur well, and we had hired a car for the day to make the journey to Singur as quickly as possible; but simply getting out of Kolkata took us nearly 45 minutes. Yet once we had made it to the highway, we were able to reach Singur in just over half an hour. Along the way the scenery changed dramatically as the metropolitan intensity of the state capital gave way to the peri- urban industrial sprawl north along the western bank of the Hooghly River, and finally into the interior of Hooghly district to the census town of Singur, after which the block, or administrative subdivision, took its name. Singur town, with roughly 20,000 inhabitants, was a bustling place with a cinema hall, colleges, its own annual boi mela (book fair) and more than 1,000 shops selling products ranging from televisions and electronics to agricultural machinery, clothes, jewellery, fertilizers and books, besides restaurants and fast food stalls of many kinds. Singur town was well connected by rail and the national highway to Kolkata and other parts of the state and country. It was an administrative centre, home to the block development office (BDO), the thana (police station) and the zilla parishad, or block- level local government.

As we left Singur town behind, the scenery soon turned increasingly rural, with agricultural fields stretching almost as far as the eye could see. We made our way down the single- lane Bajemelia- Kamarkundu tarmac road, raised in some places half a metre or more above the adjacent fields to protect it from flooding during the monsoon. The fields appeared brown and barren, the amon paddy having only recently been harvested and the potatoes not yet planted. Here and there a couple of cows or goats grazed the fields, birds picking at the soil, but apart from that there was little activity to be seen since most agricultural labourers generally took a long break, ate lunch and rested during the hottest hours of the day.