Change of Status

I started this blog in 2006 as an antidote to boredom when I was sitting idle on the "bench" at my first job in Hyderabad. Since then, I have written about all sorts of topics under the sun, from movie reviews to reminiscences, from travelogues to frustrated rants, from recipes for making mummies to translations of Bengali poems. However, this blog has strangely fallen silent for many of the biggest events in my life, such as my preparing for GRE and getting admission in PhD in 2008, my getting robbed on the street in 2009 and 2010, my PhD funding stopping in 2012 and my near disastrous car accident in August this year. Some of these events were good, while most were bad, but all had something in common - I did not want to tell the world about it when it was happening. I am somewhat of an introvert and shy away from discussing my present private life too much on this blog. In some cases, the matter had to be kept a secret from certain people - my employers in case of the PhD admission, my parents in case of the robberies - and were later written about here when the need for secrecy disappeared. Besides, a series of unfortunate incidents has made me a perpetual pessimist and somewhat superstitious. I believe if I talk about it too much beforehand, it may not work out in the end.

That situation has arisen again. I have not been updating my readers with events going on in my private life for quite some time now, writing on a variety of nonsense such as fall foliage and movie reviews while most of my time and my thought has been occupied by only one thing - preparations for an impending event that could prove to be the biggest life changer for me, and also for somebody else. But this time, I have decided to announce it here before it happens, so here it goes.

I'm getting married tomorrow, and although I started by comparing it with my getting robbed on the street, I really hope it will be a much better experience.

The start of my journey at Washington Dulles airport on Friday.

So I landed in Kolkata on the 7th of this month after a month or more of hectic shopping, packing and six months of heavy dieting, followed by a safe but unpleasantly eventful plane journey. I could write about how pathetic Jet Airways' customer service is, but I'll save that for later. For the last four days, life has been a hectic collage of attending my cousin's wedding, last minute preparations for mine, commuting to Kolkata multiple times for renewing my US visa, and playing with my seven month old niece while battling severe jet-lag. And by the looks of it, the next few days will only be busier.

Hopefully, when I write the next post on this blog, I will have entered a different phase of my life. Or, as they say on Facebook, my "relationship status" will have changed. Till then, goodbye!

Of Time and Its Chronicler

Busy as I've been, I still found the time to see two movies last week. The two are of absolutely different genres, one being a sci-fi thriller and the other a biopic. Yet, there was a common thread connecting the two movies.

The first one was Interstellar. Christopher Nolan's movies often tax the viewers' comprehension abilities, and Interstellar was no exception. While many movies have fantasized about interstellar travel and visiting alien planets, there are hardly any that have approached the subject in such a scientifically accurate manner. Black holes, wormholes, time dilation, gravity waves - these are concepts which boggle the mind even in their unadulterated form. Add a little creative license and the result becomes truly remarkable.

I do not want to talk too much about the plot of movie here since it is easy to give away spoilers, and it would be a shame to do that. The movie reminded me of several movies, but primarily of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rotating spaceships a lot of other things refer to that movie. Interstellar also reminded me of WALL-E and the book Rendezvous with Rama. As a matter of fact, Interstellar is almost an unintentional prequel to WALL-E. The robots of Interstellar were very lovable too, though they were not like WALL-E. They reminded me more of Marvin from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. With the lovely music by Hans Zimmer and some never-before seen scientifically accurate visuals of a black hole and a wormhole, the movie is a very out of this world experience, although one might need to do a little homework in order to understand it fully.

One of the concepts presented in Interstellar is that of time dilation. Time runs slowly for astronauts close to the event horizon of a black hole and they age more slowly than their friends and relatives on earth. This was somewhat difficult to digest for a lot of people, as was the idea of dimensions more than four. I, however, was aware of such things since my school days and I understood most of the movie. I may sound arrogant when I say this, but actually knowing these concepts was not my credit at all. I read a couple of excellent books on these subjects which made me knowledgeable. The first of these was the book "A Brief History of Time." This book has shaped many of my ideas about the universe, and strangely, much of my idea about God as well. The second movie that I saw this week was about the life of the author of this book.

Most people accept Stephen Hawking as the greatest physicist of our era. He was diagnosed with an extremely rare motor neuron disease when he was a student. The doctors said he had only two years to live. Yet, Hawking mysteriously went on living well beyond those two years, married and had children, besides telling us much of what we know about the universe and authoring one of the most-sold books in history. Today, the 72-year old wheelchair-ridden Hawking who speaks with a speech synthesizer is a familiar face across the world. The movie "The Theory of Everything" tells the story of how a normal college student became the Hawking of today. It tells the story of the day-to-day struggles of a young Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane. It tells the story of one of the most brilliant brains on the planet struggling to break free of the most unfortunate imprisonment of its body.

The Theory of Everything is an extremely well-made film. The casting choice is phenomenal: Eddie Redmayne does not look like Hawking, he is Hawking. His portrayal of the famous scientist's physical disabilities, his slurred speech, his strained movements is so realistic that it is painful to watch at times. Felicity Jones is adorable as Jane Hawking as well. This movie also has a beautiful theme music, though not as intricate and exotic as that of Interstellar.

And then there is time itself, as one of the characters of the movie, the same time that holds the story of Interstellar together. Both the movies are a race against time. In one the human race struggles to survive while time runs out for them, and in the other it's more of a struggle for one man while time claims yet one more of his normal bodily functions. It is not a race that can eventually be won, of course, but can time be temporarily held at bay? Watch the movies to find out.

I recommend both of them, but if you decide to watch just one, then go for The Theory of Everything. It may then interest you enough about time so that you change your mind about watching the other.

Fall in Virginia

As I wrote a long time ago during my first fall in the USA, no amount of preparedness can take away the surprise of experiencing an American fall first hand. I must clarify of course, in case it is not already clear, that I am talking of the season fall, and not the act of falling down upon black ice, although that also takes you by surprise in spite of all preparedness.

Fall foliage in Chantilly, Virginia where I go for grocery shopping

Last October, I had moved to Fairfax, Virginia to start my post-doctoral job. Naturally the second half of October and the first half of November was spent in a frenzy of activity related to packing, moving and unpacking my stuff and I hardly had time to really see what fall looked like in Virginia. This year, when I got that chance, I finally realized that if fall in New Jersey was breathtaking, fall in Virginia is beyond all adjectives. And I am not even talking about the national parks and rural areas. Both Falls Church, the city where I live, and Fairfax, the city where I work, showed spectacular fall colours along with all neighbouring urban regions that I happened to visit during the last month.

Fall foliage in downtown Fairfax

Fall foliage inside my apartment complex

So this year, I photographed fall colours at all these places to my heart's content. I even parked my car in downtown Fairfax while going to work and photographed the trees there which I see everyday on my route. Apart from that, in keeping with the spirit of the season, I put up coloured lights on my balcony before Diwali and left them until Halloween. I bought a pumpkin and carved it to make the face of the King of Ghosts from Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen as a jack-o-lantern. I also bought chocolates in case some occasional trick-or-treaters decided to come knocking (which they did).

Now fall is almost gone. The trees are gradually turning a golden brown and the roads are covered with dry rustling leaves rather than the bright red carpet of a few weeks ago. The temperature is reaching for the freezing point and the wind is making sure that fall lives up to its name. I threw away my rotting jack-o-lantern and took off the lights from the balcony. Daylight saving time ended this weekend, which means the evenings will now be intolerably long. There was a time when I loved winter and waited for it all year long. Now, however, winter seems bleak and depressing and I feel like quoting Robert Frost and say:

Fall foliage inside my apartment complex

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

October is already over, but the last few snow-free and occasionally warm days of this year are still left. Then it would be time for winter, and when the world outside turns white, I would be left looking longingly at the warm colours of fall in these photographs until the arrival of spring.

The view from my balcony

Fall foliage inside my apartment complex

Fall foliage in downtown Fairfax

The Day That Ended Differently

The day dawned dark and gloomy, with intermittent downpours of rain punctuated by a warm, heavy stillness uncharacteristic of this season. I woke up and reluctantly got ready for work. Rainy days make me want to stay at home.

Outside, the world was not altogether dull and gray as one would expect on such a day. It is almost the peak of fall, and the trees are displaying some magnificent foliage. The maples, the oaks, the cherries, and others that I do not recognize, are all looking bright and colourful. Each tree is painted in its unique hue ranging from yellow-green to flaming orange and beet red. The roads, the sidewalks and the grass lawns lay covered with a checkered quilt of fallen leaves. The cars were covered in shiny glass beads, large raindrops that were just a little too small to roll away and fall to the ground. As I drove to the university, I turned on my mp3 player which is connected to my car stereo, and was soon lost in a wintry evening of long ago in a far off place called Vermissa Valley, also known as the Valley of Fear.

When I was growing up in Allahabad, this was one of my favourite times of the year. For most people staying in West Bengal, the ending of Durga Puja means the biggest festival of the year is over, and this season comes with a sadness and a longing for the next arrival of the goddess a year later. In north India, however, the biggest festival is yet to arrive, and every house is being prepared in some way or other for the occasion. Some people have their houses painted, while others simply clean their gardens and make the house look better. Everyone decorates their house with strings of lights, and houses with lights grow in number day by day, until on the day of the festival, every house on every street is outlined in lights. Diwali is not all about Chinese electric lights, of course. It is also very much about tradition, and small earthen lamps called diyas are used for lighting up the houses  on Diwali night even today. The flickering little flames of diyas in a row look much better than any electric light could. And of course, then there are the fireworks, which are burnt by all to light up the night sky and scare the life out of animals, birds and evil spirits.

But I digress. I am far away from the Allahabad of my childhood, and although Diwali is indeed a week away, there are no preparations to be seen in this country for that festival. Besides, when I talk of Allahabad and use the word today, I actually indicate a time period some eight years in the past, so the accuracy and relevance of my description is doubtful anyway.

I reached the university and immersed myself into work. The rain beat relentlessly at my fourth floor window all day, occasionally with enough ardor to make me look up. Sometimes I looked down at the road below and saw people walking about with colourful umbrellas.  I had my lunch sitting at my desk. Occasionally chat boxes would open up and friends would write a line or two. Most seemed to be asking what my day was like and what I was planning to do later today. Morning became afternoon and afternoon rolled into evening. I put my laptop inside my bag and walked out of the building. The rain had stopped, and the sky was even clearing up a little. I took my car out of the parking lot and headed home, listening to The Valley of Fear once again.

As I drove through the winding streets of Old Town Fairfax, I realized that although Diwali was not imminent in this part of the world, the houses were being decorated here as well, albeit in a different manner altogether. Although Halloween is a good two weeks away, some houses had put Jack-o-lanterns at their front doors, and others had spooky decorations and scarecrows on their front lawns. I made a mental note of buying a pumpkin on my next visit to Walmart. I wanted to carve it and make my own Jack-o-lantern too. I also wanted to put up some lights for Diwali on my balcony. Probably I'll do both during the coming weekend.

On reaching home I found a large box at my door. It was the suitcase that I had ordered online a couple of days ago. Then I spent some time reading, before cooking and eating my dinner. Then, as I was having my usual two-mile walk around the apartment complex, my friend Shreevallabh and his wife Snehal came to my house with the cake and the gift card.

In case I hadn't mentioned, it was my 33rd birthday today.

So then I cut the cake, and we had a piece each, and we sat down and chatted for three quarters of an hour. This was the special ending to a day that was perfectly ordinary in every way.

And after they had left, I arranged the cake and the gifts on the table and took a photo. The much drooled-over Humans of New York book had arrived yesterday from Atreyee and the Great American Short Stories was something I gifted myself. After all, however ordinary the birthday may seem, one does not turn 33 every day.

Adios, Amigo!

Those were different times, with longer days. The days when I was doing my Bachelor of Engineering. The Internet came through a dial-up modem, but was somehow more fascinating. My Yahoo and Hotmail inboxes had about ten megabytes of space each and had to be cleared regularly. Checking mail was a once-a-day activity. The rest of the day was spent with real-life friends, indulging in activities with real-world objects, like playing cards and carrom boards. In case I wanted to communicate with a friend or a relative living far away, I could use email, or chat.

Yahoo Messenger was used for chatting. Google was just a search engine. 

Then one day, I received an email from a school friend. He was inviting me to join something called Orkut. I wondered what Orkut was, and how would it ever be useful. After all, the only person I knew on Orkut was my friend who had invited me. True, between us we invited a few more friends soon, but interacting through Orkut was an overhead. In the next year or so I dad collected about ten scraps on my Orkut profile. Then I went to join my first job, where I had nothing to do.

Sitting idle for nine hours a day in an air-conditioned office, in front of a PC with a broadband connection, and getting a fat salary at the end of the month for it may sound like the dream job, but believe me, it is the most boring existence imaginable. To avoid going crazy from boredom, I turned to other activities - this blog, photography and Orkut. In the next three months the number of my scraps grew from ten to about a thousand.

Those were different times. The words "social networking" meant nothing. Blogging was a new fad. Facebook was yet to be launched. A tweet meant a bird call. And Indian IT companies had still not blocked Blogger and Orkut on their networks.

Orkut was a social network all right, and the very first one for most Indians of my generation. It allowed us to keep in touch with friends, stay updated on the latest gossip in the friend circle and post our photos for the world to see. We could even make new friends on Orkut. Two of my very good friends - Monami and Smita - found me through Orkut, both of whom I later met in the real world. However, the biggest attraction of Orkut for me were not the profiles of people, they were the concept of "Communities." Communities were forums where like-minded people could discuss (or argue) about any topic under the sun, or beyond it. From Ray's films to digital photography, from Javan temples to Java applets, from origami techniques to oregano recipes, there were communities for everyone.

Those were different times, innocent and carefree. Anyone on Orkut could read anyone else's scraps and community postings, and view their photos. Privacy settings had not yet been invented, identity theft wasn't a concern. People did not fish for "likes" on their posts. Sure, comments felt good, but otherwise we were content to just have a corner of the Internet for our photos and opinions for people to see.

I first heard about Facebook in 2008, a few months before I came to the US. I opened an account, but even long after coming here, Orkut remained my preferred social network. There was too much happening on Facebook - applications, games, wall posts, updates. Facebook was like Times Square. Orkut, in comparison, was like the quiet suburban town where I grew up. It was not cool, not happening, but for a heated discussion with friends, it was still the best place. Until the friends started moving to Times Square.

I gradually stopped visiting Orkut sometime around 2011, and my biggest complaint about Orkut was, "They are copying Facebook too much." Since then, Facebook has grown by leaps and bounds and peoples' interest in Orkut has dwindled away. Some of the communities that I visited often, like the ones discussing Bengali literature, have moved to Facebook. Also, Google+ took off, and it was unlikely that Google would be running two social networking sites so I had been expecting to see the notice for some time. It finally came.  Orkut is closing down on 30th September 2014. People are requested to move all their content to Google+ or elsewhere.

And although I had not visited that website in three years, I felt a pang of sadness. Orkut was a remnant of the bygone days - days when we were immature enough to write public "testimonials" for our online friends, and shameless enough to display testimonials written by others on our profile pages. When people would rate their friends on how trustworthy they were, and become "fans" if they liked them too much. Facebook may have 1.3 billion users, but it lacks that personal touch that Orkut had with less that 100 million of us.

But all good things must come to an end, and Orkut is no exception, Maybe, someday, Facebook will be shutting down while some more popular social network with even less personal touch will be taking its place, and I will be lamenting about the memories associated with Facebook. But till then, I will miss Orkut and its scraps and its testimonials and the good times it gave me,

Goodbye friend! Those were good times, the time we spent together. Those were different times.

Six

Exactly six years ago from today, I landed in the United States of America to do my Ph.D. Since then, a lot of water has flowed through the Hudson, and I have traveled ten states and District of Columbia. Don't believe me? I have been to New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia and Ohio in that order. That number is almost equal to the number of Indian states I have visited in the other 26 years of my life.

As one grows older, each year seems to pass more quickly than the previous one. So it is not surprising that these six years have passed fast. It seems like just yesterday that I flew here, met some of my closest friends at the TA workshop at my university, saw New York for the first time, and stood under the Niagara Falls. But although it seems like yesterday, these six years have been eventful. I finished my Ph.D., showed my parents around the US, and learnt to drive. In the meantime, my sister got married and gave birth to a baby. Of course, the most important things that happened to me were none of these - they were changes in my way of thinking. Not only did I learn a lot academically, but my general outlook towards life has changed greatly. I cannot say whether all of it is good or bad, but there is no doubt that I am a different person now from the person who landed in Newark six years ago.

Unfortunately, I am too busy today to write a longer post "celebrating" my US visit anniversary. I did not want to ignore the date, so wrote this short one just for the sake of it.

Six years ago. I'm wearing the most colourful sweater.

The Unexpected Photo Shoot

"I have arrived. You can start for the airport."

"Oh, you have arrived at Columbus airport, have you? Your flight will take another hour or so I guess? I'll be there when you reach."

"Dude, I have arrived at Washington Dulles airport. From Columbus. I'm expecting you to be here now to pick me up."

"What? I thought your flight arrives at nine!"

"I messaged you on WhatsApp when I started. Didn't you see?"

"Sorry Boss. Actually a friend arrived from India suddenly on a surprise visit and we were showing her around DC. Can you wait until nine? We'll come directly to the airport from here to pick you up."

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past eight. If I wanted to get a cab it would not be possible before another ten minutes, so if I waited for my friend Shreevallabh, I would have to wait only about forty minutes or so. Besides, there wasn't much to do at home tonight, and tomorrow was a Sunday.

"OK. Take your time. I'm waiting."

I walked out of the plane, waited for my baggage, and then walked to the nearest exit. I was returning from a conference in Columbus, Ohio. As I settled down into a bench, my phone beeped. It was a message from Shree.

"We are on our way. You can Google for Poonam Kaur to pass the time if you are bored."

Poonam Kaur was an inside joke between me and Shree. She was a model and actress who had been in school with Shree and his wife Snehal. She had just been crowned Miss Andhra in 2005 when I and Shree both worked together in Hyderabad. At that time, he had shown me Poonam's photos and had proudly announced his childhood acquaintance with her, although he had to accept that they were out of touch for many years now. The girl was very pretty, and I had seen her photos all over the Internet over the years that followed.  I knew she was an actress now but I had not seen any of her movies because I did not understand any of the south Indian languages. And over the years, I often asked Shree about his beautiful friend. But why was Shree telling me about Poonam now? Had he forgotten that I already knew about her?

"I have Googled her much more than you have since 2005." I replied, and went back to my 2048 game.

A little after 9 o'clock, Shree's car arrived at the airport. As I climbed into the passenger seat next to Shree, I noticed there were two people sitting in the rear seat along with Snehal. "This is our school friend Suraj," said Shree, pointing to the man, "and of course, you know who she is," he said pointing to the woman, who smiled shyly at me.

Of course I knew. I should have known why Shree was asking me to Google Poonam Kaur out of the blue. I should have known when... my train of thought was interrupted by Suraj as he extended his hand to shake mine. "Shree has told us a lot about you, and we also saw your message." I wanted to sink into the ground.

All of us were hungry, so we went to an Indian place and had biryani. There, when Poonam and Snehal were fooling around at the table, taking weird selfies, I offered to click their photo with my phone. That's when Shree and Snehal told Poonam that I was a very good photographer.

Modesty is not one of my virtues, and although I still consider myself an amateur photographer, I usually make no secret of the fact that I know a little more about photography now than the average Joe with a camera. Here, however, the situation was different. Shree and Snehal were advertising my photography to a real-life model and actress who works with real photographers everyday. Photographers with full frame camera bodies and prime lenses and studio lights. "Can't they see," I thought, "how embarrassing it is even to mention my photography skills to the Poonam Kaur?"

But Poonam seemed genuinely interested. "Do you do photo shoots? What lenses do you have?" she asked. I admitted that I had done a few photo shoots with some friends, and I normally used a 50mm and a 70-300mm for portraits. "That's good enough." she said. And then, I don't remember who proposed the idea first, but the outcome was "Sugata will do a photo shoot for Poonam."

Everybody was smiling. Everybody seemed happy. Nobody saw the panic behind my smile. I felt I was about to be exposed. I was just another guy with a DSLR and some old lenses, and I was going to blow the best opportunity to come to me as a photographer.

We came back home around eleven. First we had decided to do the shoot the next morning, but then, Poonam said she was not much of a morning person, and besides, she had a flight to catch the next morning. So she asked me if I was too tired to do the shoot that night. I said I wasn't. We shot a few pictures at Shree's apartment, and then drove to the Georgetown waterfront.

That was at 1:00 a.m. For the next two hours, I was doing one of the most difficult photo shoots of my life. On one hand, Poonam is an amazingly down-to-earth person and she was very encouraging. Actually she was so comfortable with posing that she practically directed the shoot, which was a relief. On the other hand, I only had street lights and shop-window lights to shoot by, and the one thing my 2009 camera is not good at is low-light photography. Shree, Snehal and Suraj helped as much as they could, holding cellphone lights and reflectors, but in the end it was often too dark to focus with my manual lens. Since that manual lens is the only f/1.4 lens I have, I did not have any option but to use it in such low light.

Photo by Snehal

We tried different poses, different backgrounds, different outfits, and even got inside a fountain for some unusual shots. At some point during the shoot, my panic disappeared and I forgot I was photographing an actress. I was ordering her around, suggesting poses, just as  I would do to a friend. She was open to ideas, and all of us had a lot of fun the whole time.

We came home after 3:30. I wanted to look at the photos right away, but was too tired that night. I cleaned them up over the next few days and mailed them to Poonam. A lot of the photos were too blurry or too grainy. Some had shadows at weird places. Still, some had come out well, and Poonam said she wished we had more time to do a proper shoot. I felt the same way.

But whatever the quality of the photos, when I look at that folder on my laptop, I still cannot believe this really happened. I had no idea that I could ever do a photo shoot with a real actress even one hour before it happened. And as a photographer, the thing that I like most about this experience is the thought that maybe in future, when people Google for Poonam Kaur, some of the photos they find would have been taken by me.

Photo by Shreevallabh

A Conference, Columbus and Celebrities

I have said it before on this blog, and I'll say it again: we Indians do not know how to make statues. Maybe we knew it once, when our sculptors were carving out the temples of Ellora and Konark, but these days most of the statues that are made in India are vaguely human lumps of rock or metal, with no touch of life in them. I was reminded of this sad fact once again when I saw the Umbrella Girl statue at Schiller Park in Columbus, Ohio last Friday.

Since I live in Virginia, a bit of an explanation about how I came to be in Ohio would not be out of place here.

A big conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (unimaginatively called CVPR) causes all the celebrity scientists in my field to flock together and show off their research once a year. This year the venue for CVPR happened to be Columbus, Ohio. The reason for this choice, if certain inside sources are to be believed, was to ensure that people attend the conference and don't take sightseeing breaks as they usually do in, say, Hawaii or Las Vegas. I had gone to meet the celebrity scientists of course, if creepily standing near them and ogling at their name tags could be considered "meeting." But in spite of a packed conference schedule and the relatively uninteresting venue, my trip was pretty good.

I travelled to Columbus on a turboprop plane that was delayed by over two hours - a significant amount considering that the flight itself was just an hour long. The girl sitting next to me was a professional model from the UK whose name I will refrain from mentioning here. OK, even if I did mention it nobody outside the fashion industry would probably recognize her, but to me it seemed I was travelling with a celebrity. I always crib about the lack of celebrity encounters in my life. While some of my friends and relatives regularly run into Bollywood and Hollywood stars and cricket players at airports, restaurants and even on the street, I have been singularly unlucky in this regard. Little did I know that I was going to meet many more famous people over the span of the coming week.

Our motel, the German Village Inn, is in the middle of an area called the German Village which was created by German immigrants in the early part of the nineteenth century. The lanes are narrow and brick-lined, and the houses have gardens and a distinctly old European style. They even conduct a "Haus und Garten Tour" on the last Sunday of June every year but unfortunately I left on Saturday and so had to be content with looking at the hauses and gartens by myself.

Downtown Columbus, or at least the two miles of it between our motel and the conference venue, has the more conventional American city look, with glass-covered skyscrapers. We took the #7 bus every morning to the conference, and in the evening we came back by the #7, #8, or sometimes the C bus which is free. I made two of the trips on foot during the week to take photos, but my other friends did not share my enthusiasm. Walking was easy, since both our motel and the Greater Columbus Convention Center are on the same street, the High Street, but for a greater variety of visuals one has to step into some of the side streets. I did that, and found old stone-walled Gothic-style buildings covered with ivy, cute little pedestrian bridges and open air restaurants. High Street, of course, is not all skyscrapers. It has its fair share of old breweries and the Ohio State House, which sits amid a large garden with statues, is also on High Street.

The conference went smoothly. With breakfast, snacks, lunch, tea, dinner and drinks provided, there was hardly any motivation to go outside. I met many famous researchers as described above. I also met a Caltech student who had acted in The PhD Movie. Apparently people who go to Caltech are so good that they have time to write papers good enough for CVPR even after acting in movies in their spare time. The exhibits by the companies were no less attractive than the food and celeb-spotting. One doesn't get free T-shirts, pens, notebooks, bags, caps, Lego puzzles and other assorted stuff everyday, so I grabbed whatever I could.

The Internet says Columbus has a very good zoo, a science museum, a botanical garden and a topiary park. Now I don't want to sound smug or anything, but when you live in New York and Washington DC for six years, you don't feel like visiting museums or zoos or botanical gardens anywhere else anymore. Besides, I did not have much time. So these things were out of the question. To find out more about what to see in the city, I pinged Kuntala one morning and asked for suggestions. After all, Columbus was the city where she had started her now-famous blog.

"Trust me, there is nothing to see in Columbus," she was prompt in replying. "The only thing that I suggest is, try the Vietnamese banh-mi sandwich at North Market, and then try Jeni's Splendid ice creams." Therefore, eating at North Market became one of my priorities. Since the market closes at five on Mondays, I could not eat there on the first day, but on Wednesday, I slipped out of the conference slightly early to explore North Market before it closed at seven.

At first glance, North Market reminds one of Quincy Market in Boston since both of them are full of eateries from different countries. However, closer inspection reveals that North Market has raw food shops along with cooked food shops, and a shop selling cards and flowers as well. Also, the atmosphere at North Market is much more homely and friendly than that of Quincy Market. This is emphasized by the collection of brochures near the entrance, one for each of the 35 shop-owners. Lan Viet Market, located near the northwest corner of the market was easy to locate. The banh-mi sandwich there was delicious as predicted by Kuntala, and Jeni's splendid ice cream lived up to its name afterwards.

That more-or-less covers what I did at Columbus for six days. The only other thing left is the statue that I was talking about at the beginning of this blog post. The Umbrella Girl.

It was a little hard to find, since the local people seemed to be oblivious of its presence. However, by repeatedly asking people, with a little help from Google maps, I finally found it. In a small fountain surrounded by benches in the middle of trees, stood a bronze girl with an umbrella in her right hand and holding her shoes in her left. The water was coming out of the top of her umbrella and then flowing down the sides just like rainwater flows down a real umbrella. The statue was so beautiful in its simplicity that it was almost mesmerizing. And besides being a beautiful work of art, it told a story. I sat down on one of the benches. My friend George sat on another. We kept sitting there, watching fireflies dancing in and out of the grass, listening to the fake rain, watching nightfall. We were tired, but we also loved staying out late that evening, our last evening in Columbus. The dark shade of trees, the sound of the water and the fireflies somehow reminded me of my hometown Hooghly. Columbus was not New York or DC, but Columbus had won my heart. Long after it was dark, we finally returned to our motel.

The rest of my stay was uneventful. The same could not be said for what happened after I caught a plane back to Virginia the next day. When my friend Shreevallabh came to pick me up from the airport, I realized he was accompanied by his childhood friend who is a South Indian film actress. She was a guest at his house for two days. One thing led to another, and I ended up doing a photo shoot with her till 3:00 in the morning on the Georgetown riverfront. But that is probably a story for another day.

At the conference reception

The Lady and the Orangutan

I had been meaning to revisit the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington DC for some time, and I could finally make it this Saturday. I had already been there twice, but this time there was a special reason for my visit. This reason was Bao Bao, the baby giant panda born at the DC zoo nine months ago. The Chinese government supplies giant pandas to zoos all over the world with the condition that any cubs born would have to be returned to China. This happened with the first cub born at the zoo. My first visit to the DC zoo was a few days after baby Tai Shan had left for China. This time I did not want to miss the opportunity to photograph the cub, especially since I was one of the people who had helped to choose her name over an Internet poll (Bao Bao means "treasure," you can see her live here).

The zoo visit went well. Bao Bao and her mom Mei Xiang posed for photos. The other animals behaved as expected, except the gorillas, all of whom decided to sit facing away from the visitors. But then I saw something else, also at the ape house, which became the highlight of my zoo visit.

The room was large having one glass wall, with one occupant - a large female orangutan named Lucy. As I approached the room, I noticed a crowd in front of the glass wall and went in further to investigate. I first saw the orangutan sitting just inside, face pressed against the glass, staring intently at something outside. Then I saw the lady, sitting near my feet, just outside the glass, facing Lucy. She had placed a rubber frog on the ledge outside the glass and was now carefully adorning it with a strip of paper. Lucy was watching her intently, mesmerized by the colourful objects. As I watched, the lady opened her handbag and took out some small objects, while talking to the ape all the time. I'm sure the orangutan could not hear her, but she seemed interested all the same.

The lady took out some colorful nail files and proceeded to unwrap them with great care. she peeled off the price tags and stuck them on Lucy's glass wall. Then she turned around and apologized to us. "I know this place is a little crowded, but please excuse me. If I get up, she will leave. I know her since the last ten years." She was surrounded by curious children and adults.

Then the lady took out some blush and applied it to her face. This was followed by lipstick and eyeliner. Each time she pretended to apply the stuff to Lucy's face through the glass as well after she was finished herself. Lucy seemed to enjoy all this immensely, but some of the adult humans around us were smirking. One woman seemed positively disturbed, and she made some snide remark about people being crazy and left with her children. I sneaked as close as possible through the crowd and tried to take photos of the whole thing, but only managed to take a few photos with my cellphone, and a close-up of the ape's hand which looked very similar to a human's.

By now the lady had used a hairbrush on her own and Lucy's head and was now applying some sunscreen lotion to her hand. I finally left and proceeded to a different window to take photos from another angle. Soon, the lady got up and left. Sure enough, Lucy also walked away from the glass wall and left the room.

When the lady came out of the ape house, she was talking to another visitor who was interested in her story. "I have been visiting her for the last ten years," she said. "She likes to come sit near me and watch me put on make-up. She can recognize me in a crowd and comes to the glass as soon as she sees me. People think I'm crazy, looking like a clown applying make-up in public."

I didn't think she was crazy of course. I only thought that the orangutan had managed to capture one out of the thousands of humans who come to see her in captivity, and had trained the human to do tricks for her. I considered myself lucky that I was able to witness this beautiful relationship.

Strange Ambitions

Here's my translation of this little poem on Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary this year. With all this research work leading nowhere but taking up my entire day, I cannot say I do not have ideas like this child sometimes myself.


Strange Ambitions

~Rabindranath Tagore

Daily when I go to my class,
        By this lane where our house stands
At ten each morning I pass
        The vendor with wares in his hands.
“Bangles! Bangles!” he calls
His basket has porcelain dolls,
He takes the path that he likes,
        He goes home to eat when he wants.
Whether it is ten or half past,
        Never does he once fear delay.
I wish my slate I could toss
        And go selling things that way.

Source: Google Images

I come home, hands ink-stained
        Half-past four is the hour.
The gardener digs with a spade
        In the rich man’s patch of flowers.
No one ever tells him to stop
On his feet lest the spade he drop.
His head and body gathers dust,
        But his work no one shouts over.
Mother doesn’t give him clean shirts,
        To wash the dirt she never wants.
I wish I could have been
        The tender of those flower-plants.


It is hardly very late in the night
        When mother sends me to bed.
I look out the window and sight
        The guard with the turbaned head.
Darkened lane, few people go,
Dimly the gas lamps glow
Dangling a lantern in hand,
        He stands at the doorstead.
The night goes from ten to eleven
        “It’s late!” he never has to hear.
I wish I could be a guard
        Awake alone in the lane here.

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

Timi

On 10th June 1988, my mother came back from her month-long Europe trip with my father. That day, Timi was born.

My sister Jolly was not even two when my parents had gone to see Europe leaving us with our maternal grandparents and uncles. While I don't remember feeling any extra sadness for them during this period, Jolly missed my mother severely during the first few days, and then completely forgot about her towards the end of the month. Imagine my mother's surprise when her daughter failed to recognize her upon her arrival, and then started calling her "Didi" imitating my uncles. That did not last long, however, and mother and daughter were reconciled within an hour or so. But I digress. We were talking about Timi.

Timi was a snow-white teddy bear with a red ribbon around its neck that my mother bought in London for Jolly. In those days, teddy bears weren't everywhere like they are now. In fact, that was probably the first teddy bear I had ever seen. While tiny in comparison to some of the bears visible in malls these days, Timi was still pretty big when compared to my sister, and she was terrified of it at first. My mother named Timi after a black rabbit that her cousin had in Germany (whose name, as I now realize, was probably spelt Timmy). Soon, Jolly and Timi were pretty much inseperable, and Jolly adopted Timi as her daughter.

Let me make it clear. Timi was not my sister's teddy bear, she was her daughter. Timi was not even considered a bear, just a human child who looked a little bear-ish.

We did not know about Winnie the Pooh then. We did not know about Binker. But since then, Timi was as much a member of our family as the rest of us. She slept with Jolly at night. She even travelled with us on summer vacation from Allahabad to Hooghly sometimes. This was deemed necessary as her birthday came in the middle of the said vacations and it would be weird to have a birthday party without the birthday girl.

As Timi grew up, she started speaking. Her voice would differ from time to time, depending on who she was with. A grown up girl needs clothes, of course, and Timi was provided with clothes: some hand-me-down from her mother and aunts and some bought or made just for her. She supposedly went to school too. She had little books, little notebooks, small thin pencils, small report cards from school, a tiny stamp album. She had distinct personality traits - she loved to eat, she loved bears. At one point we even felt awkward changing clothes if Timi was in the room. She was hidden in the cupboard if particularly violent kids visited our house. My mother bathed her once a year. Drying took a week.

Timi is of course very much still in existence. She lives in Jolly's room in our house in Hooghly. She isn't snow-white anymore, and speaks less now, but she listens to everything. Jolly may not have taken her when she went to her husband's house after marriage, but it will be wrong to assume she loves her any less. Even now, she is furious if she comes home and finds Timi sitting on her table instead of her bed. It seems prolonged sitting on a hard surface will hurt Timi's bottom and her mother is more concerned about that than any of us.

The reason I wrote this post about Timi is that Jolly gave birth to a daughter today. So Timi has a younger sister now. We haven't yet thought of a name for her, but whatever she is called, I would like everyone to remember that Timi was here earlier. Apparently I am not the only one who feels that way. If eyewitness reports are to be believed, the first thing that Jolly said after regaining consciousness and being told the baby is a girl was, "Oh, then Timi will get lots of clothes now." That's what a loving mother sounds like.

The world may be congratulating Jolly on the birth of her first child, but we family members will always know that Timi came first.

Relaxing at home

When you are in an aeroplane flying above the clouds and switch on a movie for relaxation, and the movie starts with the camera moving through the clouds and a voice saying, "One small fact: you are going to die...when the time comes, don't panic," it is hardly a relaxing experience. I am not making this up, it really happened to me on the Emirates flight from Washington DC to Dubai on Saturday. The movie The Book Thief starts that way.

The fact that the plane was a Boeing 777, the same model as the Malaysian Airways plane that vanished a week ago was hardly reassuring.

Nevertheless, I relaxed like I had never done on a plane before. I watched 12 Years A Slave, Brave, The Book Thief and Wolverine in a row, listened to some music, photographed ice crystals outside the window, and even managed some sleep during my thirteen hour journey from DC to Dubai. I was going home after two years and two months, and the thought of seeing familiar faces and experiencing familiar sights and sounds made me happy. The journey from Dubai to Kolkata was relaxing too, but I only slept during this one.

That was exactly three weeks ago. I have been relaxing at home ever since, steadily growing in girth. I came with a two-week leave to get my visa, but that has been delayed for some administrative processing, and now I have no idea when I will be able to return. The only problem is, I am not enjoying this forced relaxation much since I am losing my hard earned leave days, and also losing valuable time from my research.

When I appeared on Zee Bangla

So it has finally happened. I was on TV last week, in a programme watched by millions of people, no less. While I cannot say that my desire to appear on TV was exactly fulfilled, it cannot be denied that this is the closest I have ever come to the real thing.

What happened is this: a popular reality show called Didi No. 1 that airs on Zee Bangla wanted to discuss Saraswati Puja on their February 4th episode, and they wanted a slide show of photos to accompany the discussion. They must have turned to Google for help and ended up on this very blog where they found a very photogenic child getting his haate-khori from his very photogenic grandfather.

To cut the long story short, my photo ended up on that show (at 17:05, in case you are interested). Here's a screenshot to prove it.

Zee Bangla has supposedly "blocked" their YouTube channel in the US, but that if they thought that would prevent me from stealing a look at their episode featuring my stolen photo, they need to think again. Before I end, however, I would like to mention that it is no less surprising that although my parents don't watch this show, at least two other people saw the photo independently, recognized my grandfather and called up my parents. That's how we came to find out about it.

The Detour

As I opened my eyes and tried to come out of my sleep, I was greeted with an ocean of glittering lights beyond the darkness outside. The bus was moving towards those lights. Within a few seconds I was able to discern the all too familiar shapes among the lights: the semi-dark Freedom Tower with the tall spire on top, the irregular shaped Bank of America Tower, and most distinct of them all, the Empire State Building bathed in a deep red and yellow glow. I took out my phone from my pocket and messaged Amrita, "About to reach NYC."

And then I lay back in my seat and tried to take in the scene outside. The scene that was so commonplace for me a few months ago that I would have probably slept through it. People around me were trying to capture the city lights using their cellphones. I knew it was futile, because apart from the technical difficulties of the situation, a photo is only a pattern of light and darkness that does not capture the feelings of the photographer who took it. The brain is far better than any camera in capturing those. The bus moved closer and closer to the city before plunging into the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson. When it came out on the other side, our bus had become part of that ocean of lights.

I collected my things and stepped out of the Port Authority Bus Terminus onto 42nd Street. It was 11 o'clock in the night, but who could tell that from the state of the streets? I couldn't walk a step without bumping into people. I could read a newspaper by the neon lights. The ambient noise was such that I couldn't hear myself speak. Living near Washington DC had spoiled me. Midtown Manhattan assaulted all my senses at once and welcomed me with the fierceness of a long lost friend. The Friday evening crowds streaming in and out of the AMC theater, the women in mini skirts braving the near-zero temperature, the huge LED video displays advertising the Disney musicals, the smell of burning meat emanating from the roadside hot dog stands, and the steam curling out of the street manhole covers here and there, transforming 21st century New York to 19th century London without a moment's warning. Everything was so familiar, yet so new.

I stopped to appreciate all of this for a moment, then smiled to myself and walked on. I smiled to myself because I knew I wasn't supposed to be here at this time if everything had gone according to my plans. And how boring that would have been!

I had booked this trip when Atreyee had informed me from India during her month-long visit that she was bringing some Bengali sweets for me, and I should come and get them if I wanted them. This weekend was chosen because there was a Saraswati puja celebration in New Jersey on Saturday and I could hit two birds with one stone. But New York City was nowhere in my plans. I was supposed to take a bus from DC to Newark, and go directly to Amrita's house for the night. New York City, it seems, had other plans, and I ended up catching the wrong shuttle from work on Friday evening and missing the 6:15 Bolt Bus to Newark. The next best option was taking the 7 p.m. Greyhound to NYC and going back to Newark from there. Hence this detour.

And I smiled to myself because I realized I actually liked it. In an otherwise tiring day that had gone downhill from the moment I had got on the wrong shuttle, this plunge into Times Square was like a splash of cold water that rejuvenated me instantly. I was no longer my exhausted and nervous self standing at an unfamiliar Virginia bus stop looking at my watch a few hours ago. I was a cheerful and confident local trying to reach New York Penn station by the shortest route, and pausing to admire the chaos every few minutes. Once again, I could see that in spite of all that empty talk about wider roads, more greenery and a higher standard of living, Virginia has failed to diminish my love for this crowded and dirty human anthill.

That night I reached Amrita's house after half past twelve. The rest of the weekend went by like a movie played in fast forward mode. The playful half hour with Amrita's son, the Saraswati puja, the hours spent at Arnab and Suchandra' house, collecting the stuff from Atreyee, the time spent with my cousin's family in Edison, everything was enjoyable, everything was too short. But as I write this on my phone in the bus returning to Washington DC, I understand that without the short unexpected visit to New York City this trip would not have been complete.

And when I start the workday tomorrow morning, probably already tired from returning home late tonight, I'll be longing for my next visit to the city that never grows old, the city where it's always festival time. It will probably not happen for months, but I know for certain that when it happens, I'm going love it.