2012

In one of my favourite scenes in the superhero movie "The Avengers" that came out earlier this year, the evil god Loki tries to threaten Iron Man by saying, "We have an army." Utterly unperturbed, Iron Man promptly replies, "We have a Hulk." For the last twenty-three years, whenever we have been threatened by cricketing armies from anywhere in the world, we could always retort in the same way as we always had our own Hulk ready to fight for us, to give us hope, and probably even lead us to a victory. Not any longer. The world didn't end in 2012, but the god of cricket definitely stepped down.

Manhattan after Sandy (Source)

Speaking of the apocalypse, the real 2012 was in no way as interesting as the movie version. Yes, the city that always gets devastated first in any disaster movie since King Kong is still recovering from hurricane Sandy, but it is still a far cry from the end of the world. There are, of course, hundreds of hurricanes in the world every year, but it's not everyday that I end up in the middle of one. Those three days without power and little contact with the outside world would be hard to forget, at least for some time to come.

The Mayan apocalypse was obviously an urban legend. The world can hardly be expected to end just because the guy making their calendar ran out of paper (or stone). However, humanity did suffer a number of setbacks in this year, be it in the deaths of people like astronaut Neil Armstrong, writer Sunil Gangopadhyay and sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, or due to inhuman crimes like the Newtown school shooting and the New Delhi bus rape case. Once again, I find my opposition to gun ownership in the USA and support for capital punishment in India justified, although I would have preferred if I had been proved wrong. On the positive side, Ajmal Kasab was finally executed, although some people said he died of dengue before he was finally hanged. Either way, it was a good riddance.

For me, the year was a mixed one, exactly like all other years. On the negative side... actually there's a lot, the least of which were my laptop's hard disk dying abruptly, and I losing my iPhone. On the positive side, I have been super busy with my research and I think I can finally see the light at the end of my Ph.D. tunnel. Whether that is daylight or the headlight of an oncoming train, only time will tell. But for the time being, the only thing that I can do is move steadily towards that light. In the process, I had to forego my annual India trip this winter, although I did manage a couple of other trips, to Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.

Moth art created by Alex Hatjoullis

As the five regular readers of this blog know, I am an amateur photographer and I post my pictures on a few websites. This year, a number of these were liked by critics (which means other photographers, probably) and showcased on the homepages of the photo websites aminus3.com, jpgmag.com and fotoflock.com. I was asked to write a short article for the last of those websites and even won a prize for a photo posted there. What's more, I got offers from two different people wanting to buy my photos, although I am yet to see any real money. Also, Mr. Alexander Hatjoullis, who is an artist living in the UK, created a pretty artwork based on one of my photos. As opposed to people who steal photos without informing the photographer, this gentleman actually asked for my permission before using the photo, and then sent me that limited-edition high quality digital print of his artwork which you see here.

So that's pretty much it for this year. For the time being I have my hands full with a lot of academic and non academic work, which includes reducing weight and learning to drive. You can say I have started on my resolutions even before the new year arrived. I won't make any false promises - blog posts here will be sporadic at best for the next few months to come. However, I'll try to write more posts on my Bengali blog from time to time, so that should be counted as good news if you can read Bengali. Or maybe that's bad news, depending on how you look at it. In other words, 2013 will be just like 2012, as far as I am concerned.

Except for one thing. I will not be able to see one little man play for India in a one day match again. A man who has played in more than half the matches ever played by India. A man who has scored more runs in World Cups than eight complete test playing nations. In spite of everything else that happened around the world, I'll probably remember 2012 most as the year when Sachin Tendulkar retired from one-day cricket.

Shenandoah Caverns

Underground rock formations

When we travel and see fascinating places, how much of the experience is our own?

I mean, obviously the sights and sounds that I experience are completely mine, but the thoughts that they evoke - aren't they shaped by the books that I have read and the movies that I have watched? Can I ever visit Jaisalmer and not think of Sonar Kella? Is it possible to see kash phool and not remember Pather Panchali? Similarly, when I went to see Shenandoah Caverns last Sunday and spent an hour in a real cavern for the first time in my life, at least half my mind was occupied with the experience of little Tom and Becky down in their cave, and fears of getting lost. But the other half was filled with natural wonders beyond my imagination - sights that I had not expected even after looking at pictures of underground caverns.

The "Diamond Cascade"

Not that I didn't know what to expect. The principle is simple enough - the minerals in porous rock layers get dissolved in water and then, as the water drips down into a cave one drop at a time, a little bit of water evaporates from each drop and leaves behind a small mineral deposit that grows into rock icicles over millions of years. Stalactites (the ones that hold "tightly" to the ceiling), stalagmites (the ones that "might" join the ceiling one day), flowstone and draperies are a few of the rock formations that result from such a situation.

Flowstone

As I have said before, I cannot fathom geological time periods. My patience is of the variety that wears thin when an egg takes too long to boil. So when I see impressive rock chandeliers and frozen waterfalls of shimmering crystals, I can hardly imagine the time Nature took to create them. It's not even a volcanic landscape - a lava plateau - that suddenly explodes in front of everyone. This work is of the slow but steady variety, and water drops falling around me in the cave were a constant reminder that Nature's masterpiece is not yet finished. The caverns may look the same to us humans ever since they were discovered, but slowly and surely, they are changing before our very eyes.

Although the Shenandoah Caverns are very small as caverns go, my words are still inadequate to describe them in full. Thankfully, there are electric lights installed that enable photography, and guided tours available that explain every feature for captioning the photographs. Therefore I will stop here and make way for a few more photographs.

Draperies and stalagmites. Everything here was formed naturally

The "Capitol Dome Stalagmite"

"Rainbow Lake," an underground reflecting pool

This translucent rock formation is called "cave bacon"

Superstorm

When one wants to tell the story of a hurricane, there are several ways. First, there is the first-hand account of one whose house was destroyed, or whose dear ones were killed. Then, there is the impartial newsreader-style narrative: winds at x km per hour, y million affected, z gallons of water flooded the city, etc. accompanied by pictures meant to shock and awe. I realized this week that there is also a third way - that of a person who is affected just enough so that they do not have any means of knowing exactly what hit them, and how much. I am going to try and tell the story of hurricane Sandy the third way. I will give a chronological account of what happened, and stay away from superlative figures as much as possible, since I came to know those figures much later.

Thursday, October 25: A friend tells me there's a hurricane headed this way. Since I had seen the hype surrounding Irene last year, I hardly pay attention. Besides, I had too many deadlines to meet.

Saturday, October 27: I cancel last minute plans to go to Central Park to shoot fall foliage the next day, and to attend a special service at Ramakrishna Mission in New York City on the occasion of Durga Puja. Weather.com predicts strong winds and rain over the weekend, but I am too busy with my other work to check a detailed weather report.

Sunday, October 28: My cousin calls me up from Edison to find out how prepared I am. He expresses concern that there is a 10-15% chance of his roof being blown away. In the meantime, my university announces a holiday on Monday. New York City closes all public transit within the city as well as to and from New Jersey. Deciding to make some preparations, I go out to the supermarket in the evening and buy a few cans of cooked beans. There are no candles to be found, and like last time, the bottled water shelves are empty. I also fill up all the pots and pans in the house with water and charge all electronic devices.

Monday, October 29 (Morning): I and my friend Atreyee go to our friend Amrita's house down the street around 10 in the morning for a lunch invite. Amrita's husband, who works in NYC, has his office closed as well. Amid strong winds and drizzle, the power flickers on and off as we have lunch and watch hurricane Sandy hit Atlantic City about 200 km away on TV. Around 5:00 pm, I and Atreyee return to our respective apartments. By now, it is clear that something is about to happen.

Sandy in action - taken from my room

Monday, October 29 (Evening): The wind grows strong and the drizzle turns to steady rain. By 7 o'clock the storm is already shaking the trees in front of my apartment like crazy. Then, the power goes. I switch off my laptop, light a candle and listen to the storm outside. My apartment building is a sturdy brick building and it does not budge; my only concern is the windows may be blown in. My ex landlord calls to check on me, and informs me that a huge tree has fallen in his garden, probably damaging the roof. My university declares Tuesday a holiday as well. Over the next few hours, I hear the wind make sounds like I have never heard before, and see the trees shake like I have never seen them shake before. There is also a persistent violet-blue light that lights up the clouds intermittently. It  is probably lightning, but it is unlike any lightning I have ever seen before.

My friends keep updating Facebook - our neighbouring city Harrison is being evacuated due to flooding. I suddenly notice that my new smartphone only has about 25% charge, and feel like kicking myself for not charging it since the morning and checking Facebook on top of that. I start up my old laptop and charge up the phone with that until the laptop battery goes dead. Then slowly, with a small battery-operated radio plugged in my ears, in spite of the most terrible howling outside, I drift off to sleep.

The reason why we had a 66-hour powercut

Tuesday, October 30: The sky is cloudy, but bright. The storm has stopped, and the rain is almost a nonexistent drizzle. The apartment is cold and without power or hot water. I step outside with my camera. Fallen leaves and broken branches everywhere, but doesn't seem like it did any real damage. I call home to let my parents know that I am fine, then wake up Atreyee and call her to my apartment. Together, we cook the most delicious mixed vegetables using whatever we had in our refrigerators, which included a large potful of pumpkin scrapings that had come out of my Halloween pumpkin. We also cook frozen chapatis until we lose count, fry large pieces of fish, and then have the most elaborate lunch in ages. We keep the leftovers out on the fire escape since the outside temperature is under 10 degrees Celsius.

That's the house where I lived before

The radio, in the meantime, has been spewing depressing news. Lower Manhattan is waterlogged, two major hospitals evacuated, millions of people without power - things seem bad. The storm, it seems, teamed up with the full moon to form the most magnificent storm surge ever recorded. The 13.5 feet surge had filled the subway and PATH tunnels with water and clean-up would be painful. After lunch, we decide to walk to my old house to see the damage. Here, we get to see what the storm must have been like. During the half-mile walk, we find eight full size trees completely uprooted. They have brought down electricity wires and poles with them, and the whole place is a mess. The tree in the garden of my old house has missed it narrowly, but fell on top of the lovely Japanese maple in the garden. On the way back, we realize that traffic lights are also out of power, and traffic is unusually unruly. Our university, meanwhile, declares that it will remain closed until further notice.

In the evening, my cousin's email tells me that the sidings of their house have been torn away, and they are staying with the neighbours, also without power. We spend the evening reading books by candlelight, something that I cannot say I did not enjoy. In the meantime, inquiries have been pouring in from my friends and relatives in India - they say they are horrified by what they see on TV. We do not have power or Internet; we don't know what they have been seeing. We have another elaborate meal and then Atreyee heads home to her apartment as I settle down for an unusually early bedtime.

Wednesday, October 31: Same routine as yesterday. Cook elaborate meals with still-intact materials. Use the fire-escape as fridge. Go for walk after lunch. Read by candlelight in the evening. Only difference - some stores are open today, as well as an ATM. Most stores are still out of candles, and people are buying the rest like there's no tomorrow. People are also charging their phones in the power outlets at the stores - something that had not occurred to me. I charge my smartphone in the morning using the charge of my laptop and then keep it off all day, switching it on every 5-6 hours to check mail. Walking is a pain - no driver wants to stop at an intersection with the traffic lights out, and pedestrians who want to cross must stop cars by their gestures and cross dangerously, India-style.

Oh yes, Halloween is postponed to November 4 by governor's order.

Thursday, November 1: Finally, at 1:00 pm, power returns. The weather is usually gloomy, with occasional sights of the sun. A squirrel finally tears through my packaging and claims his share of food from my outdoor larder. Our university says they will open on Saturday. We go for a walk in the park and see even more fallen trees. We also look at the images from the coastal areas, from New York City, and from other storm affected regions for the first time. Houses floating in the ocean, boats on the road, entire parking lots submerged, water rushing into subway stations like the movie Titanic. Horrifying indeed!

Meanwhile, Edison, Harrison and other parts of New Jersey remain without power, and there is a 6:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew in many cities.

Friday, November 2: Today. There was a half-hour powercut, but otherwise life is fast returning to normalcy. Trains to our university, however, are still not running and there is no news when they might start. Let's see if I can go to school on Monday.

Candle-light reading away from the Internet:
the only thing about hurricane Sandy that I truly enjoyed

Momentary Rhyme

"স্ফুলিঙ্গ তার পাখায় পেল ক্ষণকালের ছন্দ।
উড়ে গিয়ে ফুরিয়ে গেল সেই তারি আনন্দ॥"

"The spark, in his wings, found momentary rhyme

He flew up and burnt out, that's his happy time."

~Rabindranath Tagore (translation by me).

I lost my iPhone even before I could use it for six months. So it is back to a normal phone for me for the time being - one that cannot be used for reading/ writing blogs. I bet my laptop must be rejoicing right now.

One longs for home

Things have been busy around here.

Things being busy is of course, not a situation that one is unfamiliar with around these parts. When one decides to leave a comfortable employment that is bringing in the good stuff by the handfuls and and jump into a Ph.D. programme that pays less than a job at a McDonald's outlet, one does not have any doubts about busyness of things. But there are days that are busy, and then there are days when one does not find time to listen to Mahishasurmardini or write a post on P.G. Wodehouse's 131st birth anniversary. One would go so far as to say that he was being flattened by workload, but since such a statement would be deemed untrue in view of the bulge around one's midsection, one refrains from saying so.

The reader, however, should not jump to hasty conclusions. The writing of a 90-page thesis may have temporarily impaired one's ability to write in first person and active voice, but that thesis is only partially responsible for the recent scarcity of blog posts. A Ph.D. student tends to procrastinate, and the presence of a sackful of thick Wodehouse novels in the house doesn't actually add hours to a day that is already deficient in that aspect. Then there have been other distractions - photography, painting, pumpkin-carving, gambling conference in Las Vegas, movies, and last, but not the least, research.

But, as one said before, one must not miss birthdays. It's not every day that one turns 31, is it? Oh, one is not talking about P.G. Wodehouse anymore - he stopped growing older quite some time ago. The individual in question is one whom this author is in the habit of referring to by means of the perpendicular pronoun. Exactly 31 years ago from one two days before today, the city that is often known as The City of Joy truly became worthy of that name.

The birthday is now over, and the surprise cake that the friends brought to the lab is now finished. Gifts have exchanged hands. Envelopes have been opened and the greeting cards within them viewed. Now is the time for homesickness. New York has some excellent qualities as the late P.G.W. has so often mentioned, but come October and she cannot hold a candle to the other city mentioned in the latter half of the previous paragraph. And then, if one is in the suburbs during Durga Puja, one has an experience that would be difficult for any other place in the world to match. One longs to be back in that small suburban town one calls home. Just for the next ten days.

Especially since the colony Puja is celebrating its 25th year with unprecedented fanfare this year. The goddess is already in place in a pandel decorated with scenes from the epics depicted entirely with old newspapers and magazines. There are lights and loudspeakers and drum dhaak beats and unimaginable chaos and pandemonium in the narrow crowded roads.

Oh only if one could leave this orderly, silent place and be part of that chaos and crowd and noise now!

Just for the next ten days.

On a Leash

Yes, that is a dog.

Some time ago I had gone to the city on one of my regular prowls when I saw a man walking a goat on a leash down the Fifth Avenue.

Let that sink in for a while. A goat. On a leash. In New York City.

Now one might argue that a goat without a leash in New York City would be catastrophic, and I can say from personal experience that unleashed goats can be very dangerous creatures, but that is beside the point. What sort of person who lives on the Fifth Avenue keeps a goat as a pet? Unfortunately, both the goat and its owner vanished in the crowd before I had a chance to take my camera out. But they did leave me with an idea for this post - a post about all the strange things that can be seen at the end of a leash in New York City. Sometimes both ends.

There are more to the right

Most of these things are, of course, classified as dogs. You have the normal dogs, and the the fancy looking ones, and the cute tiny ones, although the cutest and tiniest ones are usually dressed in little frocks and have ribbons in their hair and are carried by ladies in their handbags. Sometimes you see too many dogs and too many leashes with one person and then you know she's a professional dog walker.

Seen at Central Park

Then there are cats. There is nothing surprising about cats being kept as pets per se, of course, but I was surprised to see one on a leash. A cat is such a different creature from a dog that the very idea that it can be taken for a walk seems alien to me. The cats that I have known since childhood would die before being seen on a leash with humans. Some would probably enjoy being carried, but being walked on a leash? Really?

The list doesn't end there, it only gets weirder. However, the next photo on this post was not taken by me. It was taken by a Humans of New York fan who sent it in, and it was published on the Humans of New York Facebook page.

  

Photo courtesy: Humans of New York

A lot of questions passed through my mind when I saw that photo. Who is that lady? Does she own those pigs, or is she just a pig-walker? If she owns them, where does she keep them? Do they stay in her apartment or has she built a pig-sty where she lives? Is she Myra Schoonmaker or related to Lord Emsworth in some other way? Although it is highly unlikely that Lady Constance would have allowed such a thing to become a trend in her family, one never knows.

But alas, it seems that walking unusual things on leashes in New York City is too common to simply dismiss it as the peculiarity of a single crazy family. Just when you think you have seen it all, you come across this:

Actually looking at that stance, I think the leash is a good idea

 And in case you think it is only one poor baby with queer parents, here's another one to let you know that it is a trend. This one isn't even trying to escape.

Technically speaking, the leash is attached to the monkey on her back

I would end the post here, but since I have already shared a photo from Humans of New York, this post about leashes would remain incomplete without this photo by Brandon. He saw this dog walking itself down the Eighth Avenue. From the comments on this photo, it seemed that the dog does this regularly. Or maybe he's an animagus. I cannot tell. Can you?

Photo courtesy: Humans of New York

Storage

The other day, when I was passing by a big pile of unnecessary "trash" that my department had thrown out, I saw some things which reminded me of a bygone era.

Those bookshelves go from the floor right up to the ceiling

The first was a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica. The hard bound off-white volumes with glittering gold lettering held me spellbound for some time and as I picked up a book and thumbed through its pages savouring every word and every picture, it made me more than a little sad. It was indeed ironic that the first time I was holding a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in my hand, it was picked up from trash. Many people would probably call the books a little old; they had been printed in 1963. I have, however, grown up in a house where books printed in 1963 would be considered fairly new. I have spent so many hours since my early childhood turning the pages of much older books that I am never unnerved by cloth-bound heavy volumes with dusty smell and silverfish crawling in and out. These books didn't even have silverfish!

I shook my head and put the book down again. Hopefully someone somewhere will find some use for this amazing collection of facts. I have outlived the era of large paper books. I have too short an attention span now to actually search things from a 30-volume encyclopedia if I cannot use Ctrl+F. Google has replaced all my reference books now. Besides, I don't have space in my apartment.

The other two things that I picked up from that pile of discarded junk were these.

All the storage that one could ask for in the early to mid-90s.

I am old enough to remember a time when I actually used that large black thing. It is an original "floppy" disk.  It could hold a full 1.2 megabytes of data and that was way more than whatever I owned in the world. It wasn't too little - an operating system, a BASIC interpreter, a folder full of BASIC programs and a few games, and an utility called Banner Mania that could print beautiful banners across connected sheets of dot-matrix paper. And I had another one to act as a backup copy. What if I needed to copy data from one to the other one? That was well, interesting, because the computers in our lab had just one floppy drive and no hard disk, and their RAM was about 640 kilobytes. One had to insert disk 1 and disk 2 alternately several times before the backup was completed.

We thought this was the height of technological advancement. You could copy all that stuff in a flat disk that could be carried inside a notebook? Wow!

A friend who is a few years younger to me and who had actually pointed out that floppy disk to me had never seen a large floppy disk. But she was familiar with the other object in that photo: the 3.5" micro floppy disk. I still remember what my father had said the first time he brought one of those home from office. "This little thing could contain the whole Mahabharata," he had said. 1.44MB was big deal in the mid-90s. In college, I used to walk around with a box of 10 of those. I would need to split up any larger file that I wanted to copy into several 1.44MB sized  parts, but that was the norm. And then, a disk containing one of those parts would refuse to be read, and I would feel like throwing the desktop down from the building.

The next few years were a blur. Floppies were gradually replaced by writable CDs, then rewritable CDs, then rewritable DVDs and finally by USB flash drives. Today, I have over 4 Terabytes of external hard disk space in my house and I feel I need more storage. I keep a 1.5 TB hard drive in my bag in place of the box of floppies. More convenient, and it takes less space too. It can easily store over a thousand Encyclopedia Britannicas, and another thousand copies of the Mahabharata as well I suppose.

Just that I don't have time to read the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. I hope someday I will find the time to read the unabridged Mahabharata. Till then, I'll fill up all that storage with stupid videos and funny pictures from the Internet.

Transit of Venus

Today I witnessed a special celestial event. I saw Venus pass in front of the sun. It will not happen in this century again.

I had carried my camera and lenses to the school, but when the event started at 6:04 pm, I was not sure if I would see the sun at all before sunset. The sky was overcast and it was even drizzling from time to time. But I kept my faith in Weather.com who had predicted it would be "partly cloudy" and took up my pre-planned position on the roof of our Campus Center building.

The sun came out for about a minute - in fact came out would be an overstatement - it looked just like what you see in that photo. The Venus came out along with it. I could click only a few photos - all more or less the same. Then the curtains fell again, for good, but I was thankful to have even got this much of a view.

In retrospect, I now realize that if the sky had been clear, I would not have been able to take this picture at all. The sun was too high in the sky and I did not have a solar filter. The cloud provided me the required protection. In the end, the conditions proved to be just right.

The Song of Envy

Last week I posted an English translation of a Bengali poem by the Late Sukumar Ray who, inspite of being a multi-faceted genius, is primarily known for his nonsense poems for children. Here is another one of his short poems , on a special request from Kuntala. My translation is evidently unable to decipher the complete humor hidden in the Bengali original, but I have tried to maintain the rhyme and the essence of the poem.

The Song of Envy

~Sukumar Ray

All of us are good and nice, you are bad and nasty,

You will drink a bitter serum, we will eat a pastry.

We will get all toys and dolls, we will get sweet vittles,

None of you get any of that, and if you do, too little.

We will sleep on spacious beds right by mother's side,

You sleep in the dark alone, scared and trying to hide.

We will visit a hill station and we will ride a train,

If you cry, "Take us too" we'll say "Eat plantain!"*

We strut with a proud gait, clicking colourful shoes.

You are dirty, with runny noses, greedy, brains no use.

The clothes we don are rich brocade, we wear jewelry too,

Since you never get all those, they're unbearable to you.

We will be all lavish-minded, you will be stingy folk,

Ask us for something, and we'll squeeze you till you choke.

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

* "Eat Plantain" is a mildly offensive Bengali idiomatic phrase which one says when one wants to deny someone's request in a mocking manner.

Humans of New York

Being a photographer myself, I am always on the look out for eye-catching shots to steal ideas from. That is how, about two month ago, I landed on a Facebook page called "Humans of New York." It was maintained by one man, Brandon Stanton who walked around New York City with his camera and took portraits of strangers. His ambition: to make a photographic census of New York City. He also has his own website.

I was an instant fan. I have always wanted to take portraits of strangers on the street but could never muster the courage to ask them. Now here was a guy who spent his entire day doing that very thing. I closely followed his updates on Facebook. He uploads about three to four pictures each day, and each one tells a story. Each one is unique. All the photos in this blog post (other than the last one) are taken from Brandon's Facebook page where there are hundreds more.

As I looked at his images over the last  two months, I realized a lot of things. Firstly, beauty lies in the eyes of the photographer. A good photographer can simply ask a stranger for a picture, and turn him or her into an Internet sensation overnight. Secondly, it can be said with certainty that not all the humans of New York City are muggles. Here are some examples. The gentleman on the right even has a card that says, "Jean-Louis Bourgeois, Professor of Limerick Infliction at Gotham University, A student-free university encouraging S.L.O.T.H. (Slow Luscious Opportunities Toward Happiness)"

Dumbledore?

Animagus

Thirdly, I learnt that apparently unimportant strangers can be inspiring. Take a look at this lady. The text accompanying this photo says, "Unemployed librarian employs herself by collecting donated books and setting up make-shift libraries around Brooklyn."

Also, I learnt that one can never know what apparently different people may have in common. Take these two, for example. Could you ever imagine they share a passion for chess?

Speaking of diversity, Humans of New York made me feel that while we are immensely different from each other, we are also very, very similar in a way that transcends culture and race barriers. Take a look at this young man selling jokes. He reminds me of this other man I photographed at the Kolkata Book Fair in 2008. There is something so similar and so honest about their effort at making a living by selling jokes that you feel good knowing such people exist.(The bottom gentleman's sign says, "Buy for two rupees. You'll read for twenty minutes and laugh for half an hour. As you start reading, you'll start laughing. When you stop reading, you won't stop laughing.")

New York 2012

Kolkata 2008

So here's wishing you all the best Brandon. Keep photographing the people of New York. We, the (112,325 and counting) people who like your Facebook page will keep refreshing our newsfeeds several times each day for fresh updates from you. Because we know, nobody sees the people of this city like you do, and so, nobody can show them to us like you can.

Someday, I hope, I will bump into you on one of my visits to the city and then each of us can be a subject for the other.

Fear me not!

I usually choose Rabindranath Tagore's poems when I feel like translating Bengali poetry to English. However, today I felt like doing something different - I chose an all-time favourite poem by noted Bengali poet and author Sukumar Ray and translated it to English. The original can be read here. The illustration is by Sukumar Ray himself.

Fear me not!

~Sukumar Ray

Fear me not, fear me not, I'm not going to hit you;

If you were to wrestle me, I could never beat you.
My heart is terribly tender, my bones devoid of anger,
I could never chomp you down even to sate my hunger.
Are the horns upon my head making you afraid?
Don't you know I don't head-butt, due to a diseased head?
Welcome, welcome to my den, stay for just four days,
I'll preserve you properly, with the greatest care always.
Are you not approaching because of the club I carry?
A clubbing wouldn't hurt you, my club is light and airy.
You're ignoring my assurance, eh? Should I grab your feet?
You'll be forced to listen, when your head becomes my seat!
There's me, there's my wife, and my nine sons -
Shed your baseless fears, or we'll bite you all at once.

 (Translation by Sugata Banerji)

Small and Big

Here's my annual Tagore translation, on yet another birth anniversary of the poet. This one might seem a little concocted at places, since I lost my original translation in my hard drive crash and hurriedly had to cook up this version from what I remembered of my own translation. The original poem can be found here.

Small and Big

~Rabindranath Tagore

I am not grown up yet,

          I'm young hence I'm still small.

I'll be much bigger than big brother

          When like father I grow tall.

Then, if brother doesn't study,

Wants to play with his little birdie,

How I'll chastise him then!

           "Study quietly!" I'll scold.

"How naughty you are!" I'll say,

            When like father, I'm old.

      Brother's bird-cage I'll get,

      And keep little birds as pet.

When the clock goes past ten,

            I won't hurry for my bath.

With an umbrella on my head

            I will amble down the path.

Seeing my tutor on the porch

I'll call him to sit indoors.

If he asks, "Where's your slate?

             Don't delay, read your book."

I'll say, "I'm no longer a child,

             I'm as big as father, look."

       Hearing that, he'll say,

       "Then, Sir, I'll go away."

In the evening, when Bhulu comes,

             To take me to play in his tow,

I will scold him and say,

             "I'm working, don't make a row."

However crowded be the fair,

I'll go alone, without any fear.

If uncle comes running and says

                "You'll get lost! Ride me, son."

I'll tell him, "Uncle, don't you see,

                 Big as father I've grown!"

       Seeing that, uncle will say, "Wow!

       Our child is not so small now."

The day when I first grow up,

                  Mother, after her river-dip rite,

Comes wondering through the back door,

                  "Why is the house so quiet?"

Meanwhile I've learnt to use the keys

And I'm paying the maid as I please.

Mother, seeing this, will say,

                   "Child, your game is so wrong!"

I will say, "I'm paying her salary, mother,

                    Like father, I'm now big and strong.

          If we ran out of money, or food,

          Replenish it mother, I would."

In October, in the festival-break,

                   During Gajantala's annual fair,

Father's boat will come from afar,

                   And dock at the Babuganj pier.

Father, with his simple mind,

Will think his son's still a child.

Tiny shirts and shoes he'll buy,

               Give them to me and say, "Wear!"

I will say, "Let big brother don them,

               I am now as big as you there.

         That shirt is too small, don't you see?

          If I wear, it will be tight on me."

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

Attention Seeking Problem

I always say machines have a mind of their own but people laugh at me. Now, it is once again proven beyond any doubt that machines not only have a mind but thet have serious attention seeking issues.

Not that I needed any proofs, of course! The incident with the car was enough to prove everything.

We had a very old Fiat car (with the registration number DLX 666) from 1989 to 1997. It was our first car and all of us liked it very much. However, it was getting older each day and finally, the inevitable happened. My father sold it. He was going to buy a newer car. I don't know about others, but I felt the kind of stupid sadness you feel when you are in school and your father sells the first family car. But it had to go.

About a fortnight later, our second car arrived. A Maruti 800. Father brought it home that evening and parked it in the driveway for the night. Next morning, my mother opened the door and started shouting for us. We ran out to see DLX 666 parked across the street. Our old car had come back to see the new shiny thing that had replaced her. She was standing there for about an hour afterwards. Of course, one may argue that the car had merely been driven there by its new owner who was free to do as he pleased, but I know better. Why else would the  old car turn up just the day after the new car arrived? We never saw it there ever before or after that day.

That is why, when I wrote a whole blog post from my newly acquired iPhone last weekend sitting close to my laptop but still ignoring it, I should have expected some nasty tantrums from the latter. Next morning, my laptop refused to start up.

"Cannot find boot device" it said. "Please try reseating the hard drive."

I tried that in vain. I took out the drive, cleaned it, rubbed it, caressed it, blew on it and, when all else failed,  knocked it on the floor to get it to work. Nothing! My computer insisted there was no hard disk attached. The hidden message was, of course, "Why do you need me? Where's your iPhone now?"

So here I am, typing out a blog post from my lab laptop which is my home computer at the moment. I am about $80 poorer by ordering a new hard disk for my laptop and an adapter for my old hard disk. I have to try to recover some of the data from that disk - it contains all my reserach work from the last one month, and all photos that I took in spring 2012. I have a feeling that the crashed hard disk will work once the new hard disk has been delivered.

Meanwhile, I want to make it clear that this laptop that I am using now is just a stop gap arrangement. I do not like it at all (it runs Fedora) and it does not come close my personal laptop. As for the iPhone, I have stopped giving it too much time. How can a pesky device like that even compete with a versatile laptop  like the one that I own?

I hope my laptop will be satisfied with all this attention it has got for the time being. On the other hand, it may not take kindly to my sleeping with this other laptop - or the other laptop may not be very happy to go back to live alone in the lab. I don't know what will happen then.

I think I need to buy a lot of external drives and back up my data more often if I plan to switch my attention from device to device in the future.

iPost

A lot of important things happened over the last few weeks none of which was worth blogging about. So we are back to the standard dilemma: should I write about something that does not interest me, or should I write about something that does not interest you?

The decision was easy. I chose the latter option.

So here's my first blog post written with my iPhone. Before you start asking me why I bought an iPhone if I don't like Steve Jobs and Apple, let me tell you that I did not buy it. I jailbroke an old iPhone that my cousin gave to me.

My verdict is that it is a cute little toy too small and slow for any serious work. It is bad as a phone since its charge hardly lasts a full day. That is, however, not as big a problem for me as it sounds since I don't browse the net on the go.

On the plus side, it has some nice apps for stargazing, a plethora of games and various other stuff that very conveniently distract me from my stressful work and help me spend my already precious time in more innovative ways. Now without spending a dime I can indulge in tremendously useful and interesting activities like playing musical instruments, count every step I walk and mark every spot I visit on the map. Oh yes, I can tell people where I am on Facebook too!

Wait, did I say that was a plus? Sorry, the real plus is that I can type out a blog post while my laptop is busy with my experiments. The iPhone spell checker and autocorrect, although irritating when I am typing a text message in Bengali were a great help while typing this post.

Speaking of Bengali, I have an app for typing in Bengali too.

এইরকম ভাবে |

So enjoy your weekend while I enjoy mine. I must end here because I think I am getting late for my taanpura practice.

A hundred years later

On April 15, 1912 the biggest man-made moving object on earth moved to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Exactly a hundred years later, I went to watch the movie Titanic today in a 3D theatre. However, this short post is not a review. There's no point reviewing a movie that came out fifteen years ago and has been seen multiple times by most people of our generation.

I know what a lot of critics say: Titanic is like the Twilight of disaster movies. It is a melodramatic, mushy, Bollywood-style over-the-top and unrealistic romantic film which did not deserve many of the eleven Academy Awards that it received. I would probably agree. I'll also confess that I like the movie. The movie brought back a lot of memories of my childhood - of school and early college days when I would listen to "My heart will go on" in endless loop.

When Titanic came out in 1997, I was in school and did not get a chance to watch it in theatres. English movies did not run for multiple weeks in Allahabad and the theatres in Allahabad were not too technologically advanced at the time anyway. I watched it much later on TV. I watched it several times since then. The last time was probably a decade ago. For me, Jurassic Park and Titanic were two movies that really redefined what technology could do in a movie. We have had all kinds of special effects since then - be it in the department of large animals wreaking havoc or in the portrayal of colossal loss of life and property - but we have never had anything that can beat the experience of watching Jurassic Park or Titanic for the first time.

My experience was incomplete. I completed it today by watching the RMS Titanic go down on big screen, in 3D, with surround sound. Who cares if it is a mushy love story? I enjoyed every moment of it!

Sleuths on Screen

Uttamkumar as Byomkesh in Chiriyakhana

Cinema, and by this I mean both the big screen as well as the small, has virtually replaced the book as a medium of storytelling. Movies are being made from all genres of fiction and virtually nothing seems out of reach for them. Movies like Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings have demonstrated what technology can achieve, while numerous great directors have demonstrated time and again what can be achieved without technology. In view of all this, it seems a pity that few directors, if any, understand how detective stories work.

By detective stories I mean detective stories, not thrillers. I do not mean Robert Langdon, Jason Bourne or James Bond. I mean the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And our own Byomkesh and Feluda. Is it too hard to understand? A director may have made great films and yet, he often messes up a on a detective story. Why? I think the answer to that question is straightforward. One simply has to understand why those of us who love detective stories do so.

What is so special about Sherlock Holmes or Feluda? What makes Hercule Poirot unique? Is it the story? A novel plot is only novel the first time. Then why do we go back and read those books again and again, even when we know who the murderer is?

Elementary, my dear Watson. We love our detectives. We know them inside out and love their every fault, their drug addictions, their lethargy, their arrogance, their obsession with cleanliness and symmetry. We are not bothered about who the criminal is. We want to predict how our detective will react in a given situation and then see if our predictions come true.

We want to learn up their dialogs, mon ami, we want to laugh at their mannerisms. We are not simply interested in seeing a crime being solved. We want to see the man (or woman) we know solving the crime. This is what the directors fail to see. 

The name's Bakshi. Byomkesh Bakshi. 

Sandip Ray, for instance, does not understand that we don't want to see Feluda punch somebody to a pulp. We would rather have a Feluda who gets occasionally intimidated by knife throwers or beaten up by thugs. We know his time will come and we patiently wait for that moment. Feluda in a fistfight? Come on, that's like asking Rahul Dravid to prove his worth by wrestling. Not that wrestling is bad - its simply not his game. It took the junior Ray three amazingly bad films and one moderately bad one to finally realize that. His father, of course, didn't do much better when handling Byomkesh. Uttamkumar may have been the biggest superstar of his time, but he was no Byomkesh. Byomkesh never had a pet snake. Couldn't a man like Satyajit Ray see that it mattered? Of course, it is quite another matter that the poster of the upcoming Byomkesh movie by Anjan Dutta (right) hints that Ray's Chiriyakhana may not have been the worst Byomkesh movie ever.  And yet, it has nothing to do with budget. Most Indian fans will agree - and not just Bengalis - that Basu Chatterjee's small screen Byomkesh has never been bettered. How did that happen with a small budget?

Look at the hair, not the moustache

Supposedly the 1974 classic The Murder on the Orient Express was the best representation of Poirot on screen till then. Really? Ladies and gentlemen, what you see on the left is the best representation of a man who would die before he parted his hair asymmetrically. Do they really take us seriously? Sherlock Holmes is the fictional character who has been depicted on screen the most number of times. I have seen many of those, and never liked them. Firstly, the representation was either too literal and bookish which combined with the old London sets made the movie unrealistic-looking. Secondly, they failed to get the essence of the stories. In the version of The Sign of Four that I saw, Watson's fiancée finally finds her treasure. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the criminal was found and arrested. When Warner Brothers announced their multi-starrer big-budget Sherlock Holmes movie, I thought they would finally get it. I should have known better. This is what Sherlock Holmes in that ninety million dollar movie turned out to be:

Not shown: bullet-time punches and Jude Law as Watson

The reason why I am ranting about this here is that I recently came across a BBC TV series called Sherlock which is based on Holmes, but puts Doyle's detective in present-day London. He uses a laptop and a smartphone, maintains a website and searches the Internet when needed to solve crimes. Watson is an army doctor back from Afghanistan who blogs about Holmes' cases. Compare this with Sandip Ray's Feluda who, even after having time-traveled from the 1970s to the 2010s, does not own a cellphone or a computer. Ray does not even make an attempt to explain this anomaly, let alone try to modernize the story-lines and incorporate the changed technology realistically.

Strangely, this modern Sherlock is the best Holmes I have seen on screen so far. This is the man I have known and loved since the day my father gave me the Complete Sherlock Holmes in two volumes. He has the same arrogance, the same disregard for rules, same spite for the Scotland Yard and the same thorough knowledge of the world he lives in. The real Sherlock Holmes was a man of science. This one is no different. His instruments have changed, but he is still the master of the best methods. He uses texting instead of running errand-boys now. He uses Google search instead of going to the library. He still beats up dead men at the morgue because he wants to see how corpses bruise. He talks lightning fast, thinks faster, and when he speaks he is usually obnoxious and conceited. In short, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes exactly how he would have been if he lived today. Here's a trailer for the first season of this mini-series.

Of course, I have only seen the first season (three episodes) and I don't know yet how this has turned out in the future episodes. I have seen great movies ruined by bad sequels before, and it may well happen here too. However, from what I have seen, this first season is good enough to teach Sandip Ray a lesson about handling Feluda in the 21st century. He could, of course, choose to stick to 1970s like the original stories, but that would only increase his budget. If something must change, why change the character's personality and make him fight thugs? Why not make his deadliest weapon deadlier with the help of smartphones and cameras and laptops and the Internet? A tablet would serve the purpose of his blue notebooks perfectly. He need not even write in Greek - he can simply password protect it. He can still smoke his Charminars, and he can still switch off his phone when he needs to disappear for a few hours. As long as he does not look like a behind-the-times anachronism, anything works for me.

As far as Byomkesh is concerned, I do not need to give suggestions. With Anjan Dutta as the director, the movies are going to be like... piles of ash, as Byomkesh himself would put it. Only, there wouldn't be any treasure to uncover underneath.