A Joyful Experience

The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-28T04:45:00.000-05:00

When a director makes a movie, one of the most important things to keep in mind is the target audience. Sometimes, a director has to make a children's film that faces severe scrutiny from adults. Very rarely does such a film match the expectations of this adult audience since typically their expectation is based on a childhood love of comic books (or normal books). Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a notable exception in this respect. Not only does the movie do an excellent job of keeping the viewers on the edge of their seats throughout the 107 minutes of its running time, but it also pays due attention to the smallest of details that were so important in Hergé's original comics.

The movie starts with a Catch Me If You Can-style animated silhouette opening credit sequence that uses the same font as in the Tintin comic book titles. This sequence itself is full of references to other Tintin stories. Then when the opening shot was an animated Hergé painting a street portrait of Tintin, I had a feeling that the movie was going to be respectful to the original creation. I wasn't wrong.

The movie combines story elements from three comic books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Tintin meets Captain Haddock in this movie. The Thompsons and Nestor are in the movie as well. Important comic book characters Omar Ben Salaad and Bianca Castafiore make brief appearances too. We see references to The Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Broken Ear and King Ottokar's Sceptre, among others. As for Professor Calculus, he does not appear in this movie. He will probably be introduced in the sequel.

In a motion capture movie it hardly makes any sense to talk about the cast since anybody can be made to look like any character, but the cast here looks good. The Captain Haddock of the film is more the Haddock of The Crab with the Golden Claws and less the Haddock of the latter stories which I think is understandable. The camera work is amazing, although it is all done with a virtual camera. The detail in the graphics is breathtaking. The music is good, though I have heard much better from John Williams.

And then there is Snowy. No review of this movie can be complete without a special mention of the CGI Snowy. As in the comics, in every scene Snowy is doing something or the other on the side even when the main characters are engaged in something else, and the time the artists have spent in drawing the actions and reactions of this realistic little dog is really praiseworthy. In one particular scene Snowy comes face-to-face with a sitting camel, and the silent little interaction between the two animals keeps coming back to the mind.

Some of my friends expressed displeasure at the amount of Batman-like action packed into the movie but I disagree. The Tintin fans know all about the story, and yet, these very fans want to remain entertained throughout. These fans, like me, have grown up reading Tintin comic books and now, as adults, want to be entertained by a movie that retains the simplicity of the comic books and combines it with the superb film making techniques we normally associate with Spielberg. Almost two decades ago he gave us Jurassic Park, and to this day I cannot find a single flaw in the computer generated dinosaurs. The quality of the animation in Tintin is so good that a few times during the movie I felt some character's movement looked unnatural, only to remember that it was not a live action movie.

I had been waiting for a long time to see this film. Tintin released in India on 11.11.11 when I was in the US. It released in the US on December 21st - the day I left for India. Back in Kolkata, only one theatre is still showing the movie in one show. I had to travel for two and a half hours to get there and could buy the ticket for the 11:45am show only at 11:45am. I ended up seeing the movie from the front row. But for the two hours the movie was running, I forgot all about everything outside the Tintin universe. In the end, every second of it was worth the wait and the trouble.

Checklist

2011-12-14T20:59:00.001-05:00

Here's a checklist that I have been checking off over the last month.

Buy gifts for family. Done.
Buy gifts for others. Done.
Buy chocolates. Done.
Buy cosmetics. Done.
Pack suitcase. Done.
Order stuff online. Done.
Order cards and calendars. Done.
Weigh suitcase. Done. No problem, it's jut 42lbs.
Cancel monthly rail pass for January. Done.
Get I-20 signed. Done.
Arrange for year-ending party for the CS dept. club. Done.
Edit and print a newsletter for the CS dept. club. Done.
Tell advisor that I'm going for vacation. Done.
Set final exam paper. To do.
Damn! I left the chocolates in the fridge while weighing. Re-pack suitcase. Done.
Re-weigh suitcase. Done. It's 47lbs now.
Print tickets. To do.
Finish food in the fridge. Nearly done.
Get back to gym. Done.
Reduce weight before going to India. No chance!
Go pick up the stuff ordered online from the post office because the postman came when I was away. Done.
Forgot to buy something... last minute shopping. Done.
Go to take pictures of Christmas decorations in NYC. Done.
Repack and reweigh. Done. Suitcase now weighs 55 lbs.
Distribute cards and calendars by hand. Nearly done.
Mail cards for USPS delivery. To do.
Talk to phone company to reduce billing for a month when I am away. To do.
Report submissions to advisor (2). To do.
Do laundry. To do.
Unpack and repack suitcase by reducing some stuff. To do.
Re-weigh suitcase. Have to get it under 50 lbs. To do.

That should explain why I am not writing these days. As you can see, most of that stuff is done. Hope to be back to blogging soon!

The Occupiers of Wall Street

2011-10-25T01:13:00.000-04:00

They want a good story

These days a much talked about protest is going on in the streets of New York City, and the protesters like to call their movement "Occupy Wall Street." Their demands are not very clear, but by what I understood, it seems they are really angry about 1% of the people (the rich) controlling all the money. So they are shouting slogans and asking the corporations to stop being so evil. Here are some pictures to show what I saw there on my two visits to downtown Manhattan last week. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

They want jobs. And music. And free lunch.

The protesters had occupied a park near World Trade Center and they were completely surrounded by tourists, the police and the media. There were large TV cameras on tripods everywhere, with pretty reporters arranging their dresses and combing their hair before sending in their live updates. The streets next to the park were filled with news channel vans with their satellite dishes hoisted high over the street level on telescopic poles to ensure interruption-free transmission through the downtown skyscrapers. The police was not letting pedestrians hang around for long. I was curtly told to either move on or enter the park as I paused to take photos. However, I could manage a few photos while walking to and fro around the park.

She wants to lose weight

He wants free speech

A large percentage of the protesters seemed like hippies and the rest were young people, probably students. "So they are protesting against the rich, eh?" I thought, "So far so good." As a poor grad student myself, I felt I should be sympathetic to their cause, whatever that was. Some of them held up placards. Others danced or played music. Some were eating pizza sitting beside signs saying something about hunger strike. The bronze man with the open briefcase who sits on a bench in that park had been adorned with a woolen monkey-cap and an American flag, probably to show that he was supporting the protesters. From a grotesquely tattooed man with weird costumes and wild piercings, to a young man sitting in a tiny cage with a jug of water, everybody screamed for attention. Not everyone had the same demands, but everyone wanted to be heard. I wondered if I should join them and ask for an increase in my TA ship. Nobody would notice what I was asking for anyway.

Source

And then I saw some poor men who were unlike any poor men that I had ever seen. One of them who was sporting a carefully-nurtured hippie look had these barefoot shoes on which, as I later found out, cost about $100 a pair. Right next to him was a man who was holding up a slogan written on an Apple iPad. He would change the slogan from time to time.

iPads and Barefoot Shoes - probably there's a reason why they are poor?

A man protesting for the poor.

A man protesting against the rich corporations.

A man using an Apple iPad as a placard.

Whatever these men were, they were not poor. They had no idea what poverty was. To me, these guys looked like just a bunch of losers jealous of the successful people. They would abuse Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, while spreading their hate messages via Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.

He later went to McDonalds for lunch.

The model

Then I saw an old man wearing a barrel with "Poorman's Nation" written on it. He was standing on the sidewalk and two men were busy taping a large sheet of white paper on the wall behind the him. Once that was done, one of them took out a couple of large DSLR cameras from inside his parked van and started taking photos of the barrel-man. The sheet of paper was for a nice backdrop, and at the cost of sounding cynical, I would say the backdrop was needed so that it could be easily replaced with a suitable scene later while editing. The old man grinned in front of the camera, only to be sobered by a gruff "Don't smile!" order from the photographers. The old man was incorrigible though, and he flexed his biceps and smiled at me whenever I pointed my camera at him.

After a few clicks, the photographer took some papers (probably a model release form) to the old man and had him sign them. Then he was made to parade up and down the sidewalk while two photographers had a field day following him around, getting as many shots as they wanted. "So the poor guy sold out to the media house while protesting against corporations," I thought. I had not understood the whole story at that time.

The photoshoot

Five minutes later, in a quiet spot around the corner, the old man had discarded his barrel and was getting dressed in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. So was this whole thing an act? An elaborate costumed photo shoot arranged by some newspaper? I decided to do a little research on it and I found that old man is "Poorman" Jim Trenton, who has a radio channel and a Wikipedia page to himself and is a well-known resident of Los Angeles. Reading through his Wikipedia entry revealed him to be the classic sore loser, who despite getting innumerable opportunities, failed to make it big, and now wants to get cheap publicity by blaming the successful people for everything wrong with the world. And that quite summed up the attitude of all the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. "The Rich have a lot of money. We don't. We want some part of it." If they had a nobler demand, or a better message, I didn't get it. I just saw a band of hippies and unsuccessful people expressing their bitterness on being unsuccessful by abusing the rich and successful.

Not that I was trying really hard. I had to get back to my work where I have to at least pretend to work 20 hours a week to earn my measly salary. Protest? That's a luxury reserved for people who can afford to own iPads and $100 shoes without having to work for them.

A protester in a monkey cap. How else do you define a Bengali?

Thirty

2011-10-16T01:54:00.000-04:00

Wishful thinking and trying to ignore my birthday were of no use. My ageing problem reached such alarming proportions yesterday that I turned thirty overnight. The good thing is, I got to eat good food, received gifts, and was wished by Kuntala on her blog and by over a hundred friends on Facebook. As Garfield points out here, it is easy to decide whether I like birthdays or not.

A more detailed post on the occasion of my birthday appears in a Bengali blog post on my other blog.

The Shoulders of Giants

2011-10-14T03:12:00.000-04:00

Two men died in the past ten days.

The first was a college dropout who stole the idea of a GUI from Xerox to create his own GUI-based OS which, till date, hasn't found popularity. He then got fired from his own company due to his obnoxious and headstrong decision making. A decade later he was called back to this company and revolutionized the technology industry with the iPod and the iPhone.

He was Steve Jobs. The ex-CEO of Apple Computers.

Within hours of his death, the Internet was alive with the news. From Apple fanboys who claimed they felt like losing a family member, to Google and Microsoft who set aside rivalry and paid tribute on their respective web pages, everyone had just one thing to say: the world had lost a visionary.

And as with all topics discussed on Facebook these days, be it Anna Hazare or ZNMD, either you speak with the majority or you are an insensitive and evil idiot. So everyone agreed that Steve Jobs was a great innovator who changed the life of mankind for the better. Everyone seemed to forget that the thing that the man was really good at was selling stuff. He built a business empire out of selling things that were, to a large extent, inferior to competing products and costlier at the same time. Yet, his products sold more and he managed to gather quite a fan following.

He was not a nice man. He never shared a penny of his earnings with the poor like Bill Gates did, he liked to have complete control over all the devices that Apple sold, and he hated criticism. I never liked his business policies. However, I admired his ability to see a market where none existed before, and the ability to tell people what they needed even before they knew they needed it. Even then, I did not appreciate the hype following his death. And that hype seems even more inappropriate and embarrassing now in view of how the second death was reported.

A friend's status update on Facebook on the 12th of October told me about the death of Dennis Ritchie. I searched for a news report on Google and did not find a single proper English news site reporting it. The few (less than five) search results that did show up were forum discussions. Wikipedia, however, seemed to confirm that Dennis Ritchie had died on... the 8th of October 2011.

He died four days earlier, and not a single media mention! Who was this guy anyway?

Dennis Ritchie built the C language. And he was the co-developer of the UNIX operating system. Those two things together make up nearly everything that we see around us in the computing world today, and definitely all of the Internet. As this article discusses, the two operating systems that Steve Jobs built his business empire over - the MacOS X and the iOS - were both derived from UNIX. Bill Gates built his business empire over Microsoft Windows which was written in C originally, and today all of the Internet runs on programs that were either written in C or written in languages derived from C. And while Gates and Jobs went on to become the richest men on the planet selling their respective operating systems, Ritchie's operating system formed the basis of the open source software movement.

Sir Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Dennis Ritchie was the giant on whose shoulders Steve Jobs stood. He was the giant on whose shoulders we are standing even now. Five days after his death. With hardly any media mention. The world doesn't even know who he was.

Steve Jobs got mentioned in millions of tweets. Fine! He earned them. But please, people, spare a little thought for the man who was behind it all.

Rest in peace Dr. Ritchie. You were the man who made me fall in love with programming.

The Jersey Devil (Bengali Post)

2011-09-19T00:15:00.001-04:00

I wrote this Bengali blog post on a strange creature supposedly found in the plains of New Jersey. A request to my Bengali readers: if you like my writing and want to read more of it, please follow my other blog independently. I may not be making an announcement like this here every time I write a blog post there. As of now, I am just testing how blogging in Bengali goes. Hopefully, updates will be more frequent in the near future.

Slice of Life?

2011-09-14T17:20:00.000-04:00

That's how you enjoy life

Recently I happened to watch the movie "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara." The movie had been so spectacularly praised by almost everyone around me that I was expecting a pretty much life-changing experience when I sat down to watch it. And what did I feel afterwards? Not only was the movie not great, it was not even ordinary. Cliched and predictable to the last degree, the movie dragged on and at one point I was just wanting it to get over so that I could move on to better things in life. The ordeal lasted a full two-and-a-half hours.

Later, when I confronted a friend who had highly praised it, he said the dialogues were nice and the jokes were hilarious. The actors looked good. What more could anybody ask for?

"A plot? A story, you know, with a beginning and an end. That would have made it really watchable. I don't think you can watch jokes and dialogues for over two hours," I said. "Dude, this is a slice of life movie! That's the way they are supposed to be - no need to have a well-defined storyline. You need to acquire a taste for them." He sounded smug.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Three points actually. Firstly, I know there has been a sudden increase in the number of "different" movies recently with smaller multiplexes and all that, but is just being "different" enough for a movie to be called good? There is no dearth of good looking people willing to act, and if you have money you can go and shoot in scenic locations. But don't you need a story and some semblance of reality to make a good movie? Or are the Hrithik-Farhan-Abhay-Katrina fanboys numerous enough to make any movie containing these stars a success? One of my friends said she loved ZNMD because of the lovely underwater scenes (which account for less than 10 minutes of the movie). "But you can see that even on Discovery Channel," I told her. Her answer was that Discovery Channel could not be seen on a big screen. Then is it enough to show some Discovery Channel-like visuals to make a movie good? Which leads us onto my second point.

My second point is a little controversial. Who decides whether a movie is good? Of course, everyone should have the freedom to like or dislike a movie, and I have no right to say nobody should like ZNMD just because I didn't. But I do have a problem with people saying that the message of the movie was something that I didn't "get." I mean, come on! What is the point of making a movie where your message will be lost in bad film-making and will have to be explained? For me, the message of the movie is what I got from it, and not what somebody else explained to me. To paraphrase Bengali columnist Chandril, directors these days aim to make a movie that will make every viewer feel, "I understood that, but I doubt if the general public will." That's what these so-called offbeat movies are all about- making every viewer feel superior to the others- and this leads to the problem that I am trying to focus on here. The media, the celebrities, the fanboys on Facebook and Twitter, everyone gets together and indulges in something that can only be compared to the story of the emperor's new clothes. If you don't like the film, you are unworthy.

A railway platform in Mumbai

I noticed the same phenomenon recently with the Hindi movie "Delhi Belly" and the Bengali movie "Autograph." I haven't seen the first one and saw the second one but didn't like it. Autograph is a lame attempt at recreating scenes from a Ray classic using a big star. Throw in some good music and things cannot go wrong. However, my point here is not about the quality of the movie itself, but the assertion that some people make that you HAVE to like the movie or you didn't get it. Don't these people realize that they actually do more harm to the movie by raising the expectation? The English movie Slumdog Millionaire is a case that comes to the mind. Is it an enjoyable movie? Yes it is. Does it have a hidden message about triumph of love blah blah blah? Nothing that is not there in the most routine of Bollywood flicks. Is it a realistic depiction of life in India? Nonsense! It is a complete "don't apply your brains" movie as I said before.

Singham: How real people fight

And this is my final point about these "different" movies (and ZNMD in particular). Depiction of reality. Do you know anyone who buys a handbag worth €12,000 for a friend's wife? Have you ever met someone who went skydiving and deep sea diving on the same trip without any prior experience of either? Have you ever heard of a person who could maneuver in free fall and hold hands with other skydivers in mid-air on their maiden jump? Let alone the maneuvers, do you really think anybody would be allowed to jump alone on their first skydive? Do you find it believable that a girl talks with her fiance on phone from India in the morning, and then reaches Spain that very evening to check on him without any prior planning? I wonder if Sonia Gandhi could do it that fast! And the ending sequence that has no relation to the rest of the movie? It's so bad that it's good! Of course, suspension of disbelief is there in every movie, but then why call it a slice of life? Call it fantasy, like Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings. Why is a Dabangg or a Singham or a Robot worse than a ZNMD? Just because they have unrealistic action sequences? What about unrealistic storylines, unbelievable characters and plot holes the size of swimming pools?

So please guys, give me a break. All I want is to draw my own conclusions after watching a movie and not listen to your interpretation of it. If you think I am dumb, so be it, but I will call a spade a spade. And I will not call a movie like ZNMD good.

Me, Myself and Irene

2011-08-27T04:44:00.001-04:00

The summer holidays are about to end, and apparently this year's summer holidays are not among those holidays that prefer to end silently, fading into the last sunset of the last Sunday. No Sir! These holidays are about to end with a bang. Two bangs actually. An earthquake and a hurricane. And in the middle of New York City too!

It has been raining regularly for the last couple of weeks, and I have been enjoying it because I miss the Indian monsoon here. In fact, as I have noted here before, these thunderstorms are my favourite weather phenomenon here in the US because even with the double-paned windows of my climate-controlled room closed, thunder and lightning can make me sit up and take notice like nothing else can. I even went out in a thunderstorm one evening and took a picture of the Manhattan skyline. But even I was not prepared for a hurricane in the middle of New York City.

First there was the earthquake. I had just stuffed myself with free food from the international student orientation at the school and had settled down for an afternoon siesta in my lab chair when I felt dizzy. Before I could understand anything it was over, but then Facebook came alive with "Earthquake?" status updates. Later I learnt that people had run out of tall office buildings in Manhattan when the Richter Scale 5.9 earthquake hit.

But scary as it may sound, the earthquake was no match for what was in store for the weekend. Hurricane Irene is hitting New York City and the New Jersey coastline right now as I type this. For the first time in history, a partial evacuation of New York City has been ordered and the city that never sleeps may turn off its power. All airports of the city are closed. Public transit has been shut down in New York City and New Jersey, and parts of Maryland, Washington DC, Pennsylvania and Connecticut are affected as well. In fact the whole of north-eastern USA from South Carolina to Maine are under threat from Irene.

After repeated warnings from various sources regarding emergency-preparedness, I went to the supermarket to buy some ready-to-eat canned food this morning. The supermarket was crowded beyond what I had ever seen, and everybody was buying those canned foods. The most shocking sight was the bottled water isle - it was empty.

So here I am, sitting at home surrounded by candles and canned food, waiting for Irene to arrive. The situation can only be described as "Haate hurricane," a Bengali phrase which is so impossible to translate that I wrote a complete Bengali blog post on it. Now I better publish this before the storm hits and the internet goes away, although I have a real strong gut feeling that nothing worth mentioning will happen. Firstly, because the weather office is seldom right, and secondly, from what I have seen in these last three years, the Americans overreact to everything!

The Future of Books

2011-08-06T00:38:00.001-04:00

All three Borders bookstores in New York City went out of business recently. For me the Borders store on Broadway and Wall Street was not just a shop to buy books, it was one of my favourite hang out places as well. Whenever I felt low or bored and had a few hours to spare, I just went to the city and submerged myself among the rows and rows of colourful books until I lost track of time. I would always look forward to the next Borders visit. The other two stores were much smaller, but I visited them too from time to time. I won’t be able to do that anymore.

From a very early age, books have been my best companions. My grandfather owned nothing short of a library. I grew up with ceiling-high bookshelves in our rooms. The books my grandfather owned were very old, but then my father started buying new and shiny hard bound books for me right from my first birthday. So I have been the owner of books like The Inventions That Changed the World and The Family Encyclopaedia of the Animal Kingdom even before I could read. The animal kingdom book was my all-time favourite and my father showed me the pictures and told me all about them when I was very small. As I grew up, books poured in as gifts from my parents, my grandfather and my maternal uncle. All that I am today – researcher, photographer, blogger – I am because of those books. How can I even begin to explain what effect books like The World’s Best Photographs (seen in the photo), Encyclopaedia of the World, Physics Can be Fun, the Tell Me Why series and The Giant All Color Dictionary had on me? Yes, call me crazy if you will, but I actually spent hours reading that dictionary (and The Charlie Brown Dictionary too) like a novel, just because it had such nice pictures.

Add to that the numerous books on birds, animals, history, geography, science and arts whose names I don’t even remember, tons of Bengali and English poetry and prose, and magazines like Anandamela, Shuktara, Readers’ Digest and National Geographic, and you will get an idea of how I grew up. No computers, no iPhones, no video games, no Internet, hardly any TV or movies – just books all around me. Was it good? It was more enjoyable than the Internet could ever aspire to be.

The closing down of Borders seems surprising to me because I have seen smaller bookstores with far less business go on for decades in Kolkata. Maybe it has something to do with the business model here that makes large companies turn turtle in an instant. Maybe it is because of online bookstores that sell the books cheaper that it is no longer profitable to run physical bookstores. I, as a matter of principle, never browsed a book at Borders and later bought it online at Amazon – it seemed unethical to me. Surely everyone wouldn’t think that way. But coming to think of it, there is nothing surprising about bookstores going out of business. I could have predicted it long ago.

My father’s company gave him a desktop computer at home in 1996. It was one of the earliest multimedia machines and there was a free CD with it. It was Microsoft Encarta 1994 – one of the first multimedia encyclopedias. It was like magic – while reading about any country you could listen to its national anthem, you could listen to Pt. Ravi Shankar play the sitar, you could hear the voice of Gandhi, Einstein and Neil Armstrong, you could hear the calls of animals and birds and spoken language samples, and you could see photos of any place you wanted – from the Nile flowing by a Sudanese village to a sunset in San Francisco. Want to know how a volcano is formed? Want to know how a lizard catches its prey? No problem! Encarta had animations and videos to explain everything. You could browse the content in a variety of ways, and click on links in one article to move to another.

And that was just one CD. Compare that to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will see why bookstores are going out of business.

Books are a bulky, inconvenient and environmentally hazardous way of gaining knowledge or entertainment. Why, the Sony Reader that I bought for my sister can fit in a coat pocket, and yet can hold hundreds of books. You can move between books, save multiple bookmarks, look up meanings of words and annotate. Moreover, e-books are either free or much cheaper than their real-world counterparts which must be made by cutting down trees. No wonder paper books are becoming less popular with each passing day. When National Geographic Magazine gives me one year of subscription for $15, I know it means that the 125 year old magazine may not exist much longer in its familiar form.

Of course, the advent of e-book readers is not the only reason for books dying away. Our attention spans have been so severely shortened by the Internet and satellite TV that spending a few hours with the same reading material seems a waste of time. Why, I would be able to browse through a dozen blogs and hundreds of tweets in that time! Our brains no longer want to process a lot of information in the form of written words – everything must come with some audio/visual stimulus or we feel cheated. Everything that books gave us – knowledge, entertainment, pleasure – the Internet and TV give us better.

Everything, except for the limitless imagination that comes with slowly taking in the description of a place or an event word by word, line by line. That, and the smell of fresh printing ink or accumulated dust as you turn each page. Clicking on a “Next” button, even if on a touch screen, is just a poor substitute.

That is why the closing of Borders makes me sad. In spite of all the logic in favour of e-book readers, I love holding the real books in my hand, savouring every word, every picture as I turn each page. That is why, going against all logic, I ordered another year of National Geographic Magazine today. Borders was one place where I could browse through real books. Now I will have to look for other stores, like Barnes & Noble.

Until that closes down too. Eventually it will. I am sure of it.

Its Magic!

2011-07-24T17:02:00.002-04:00

Some feelings never change.

I have always loved magic shows. I can still remember the time when I saw a magician perform live on stage. I was in the second standard and the show was in my school. As I sat open-mouthed on the ground in front of the stage, the magician poured endless quantities of water from a jug, changed the colour of feather dusters, made things disappear and reappear at will and performed numerous, but as I now realize, fairly easy tricks. I and all my friends had our theories about how each of these tricks were done, but we couldn't be sure, of course. As we grew older over the years, the magician's bag of tricks remained equally awe-inducing for us and we waited every year for the annual magic show.

Then I saw P.C. Sorcar Jr. perform on stage during my engineering college days. He had come to perform at Chinsurah Rabindra Sadan and I had gone to see it with my grandmother. I was a grown-up now and had come a long way from that wonder-struck boy sitting cross-legged in front of the stage in the school auditorium. I myself knew a few magic tricks now, or at least the secret behind them. But when the show started, P.C. Sorcar Jr. sent me back into that school auditorium of twelve years ago. In the thirty odd tricks that he performed on stage, he not only twisted my sense of reality as he wished, he also seemed to know how exactly we, the spectators thought each trick was performed. After performing some of the tricks, he would reperform it in a manner that would nullify our hypotheses. He escaped locked boxes, solved integrals while blindfolded and as a finale to the evening, let himself to be sawed in two.

That was some eight years ago. I hadn't seen another magician's performance live in all these years until last Wednesday morning at the Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas. I have, however, watched a lot of those "Masked Magician" episodes on TV and Youtube where a lot of complex magic tricks are explained, reducing them from magic to a clever combination of science and acting. However, at this performance at the hotel, a man and a woman changed their costumes on stage repeatedly at the blink of an eye, and I did not know the secret behind this one. There were people crowding all around the stage this time, as close as ten feet away, but that did not deter them from performing the trick with the bare minimum of cover, and in one case, with arms and legs tightly bound. The performance was somewhat like this video, but better and more complex. I couldn't even start to imagine how they did it, because at least the woman was wearing fairly short and revealing dresses throughout and one dress could not have been hidden underneath another. I only know they made me feel as thoroughly muggle-like as P.C. Sorcar Jr. did all those years ago.

If I Google for "magical dress changing" I am sure I will get half a million websites trying to teach me exactly how that trick is performed. However, I am not going to do it. I have realized that there are certain things in this world that I am better off not knowing, and the secret behind magic tricks are some of them.

Google may be like magic in some respects, but it can never make me feel what not knowing the secret of a magic trick can.

The Botched Ending

2011-07-23T17:01:00.001-04:00

[Warning: Spoilers ahead. Do not read this review if you haven't read the last book in the Harry Potter Series and don't already know the ending.]

The Devil, they say, is in the details. And it is in the details that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 fails as a faithful adaptation of the book. But since it has its own share of enjoyable moments, let me first gloss over the bigger picture.

The Gringotts episode was amazing. Right from the acting of Helena Bonham Carter to the depiction of the light-starved and tortured blind dragon breaking free over London, it was flawlessly executed. So was, to some extent, the battle of Hogwarts, phase one. I mean, they did not show Fred Weasley die, but they showed his body later, so that was enough for me. Voldemort didn't meet Snape in the Shrieking Shack but in some Hogwarts boathouse (Hogwarts had a boathouse?) but that would be forgivable considering that they showed the teachers, the Order members and the students defending Hogwarts in a very nice manner. I only wish they had shown some of the ghosts.

The Chamber of Secrets, the Room of Requirement, the episode of Kings' Cross station - everything was perfect. Then there was the Prince's tale. Alan Rickman proves once again why he has been given the opportunity to portray the greatest character in the series. The short and beautiful memory sequence which jumped back and forth in time between Snape's childhood, youth and recent events bought tears to my eyes. Yes, Alan rickman is Severus Snape, and nobody could have done it better.

Now the botched up details. First, the minor ones.

This movie never bothers to explain how Harry knew Hufflepuff's cup was the horcrux in the vault, and just how Tom Riddle had found the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. It does concoct some lazy excuses for patching up these plot holes, but we miss the beautiful detailed analysis of Voldemort as a person that Rowling so beautifully wrote in the last two books. Also, at the very end (19 years later), why oh why couldn't they have aged the actors properly? Only Bonny Wright looks convincing as the older Ginny. The rest of the cast... c'mon guys! This is Hollywood, for heaven's sake! Just adding a paunch to a 20 year old does not make him a 40 year old!

Harry used the elder wand to repair his own broken wand before returning it to Dumbledore's grave in the story. Here he breaks the elder wand and tosses it away. No harm done, you say? Agreed. However, it will make any Potter fan unhappy.

But the worst mistake of the movie was the handling of the wandfight between Harry and Voldemort. In the book, they had fought in a room full of people, circling each other and Harry calling Voldemort by his muggle father's name. In my opinion, Harry's real moment of triumph was not when Voldemort died, but when Harry told him, in front of a room full of people, that Severus Snape was Dumbledore's man all along. And they cut out that part! Harry here killed Voldemort who died alone like a sad old man, never knowing what the flaw in his plan was. Why, I thought the last fight of the book was too dramatic, "almost like a movie." And now when they do make it into a movie, they remove it from the script. What irony!

In short, it could have been a great movie, but David Yates narrowly missed that. If you have not read the books and want to understand the plot from the movies alone, stay away. If you are a Pottermaniac like me then you will be disappointed with the ending to the series.

Very, very disappointed.

Load shedding

2011-07-22T17:14:00.000-04:00

With the mercury up at 41 degrees Celsius and "feeling like" 46 (according to weather.com), only one thing was left to make Newark feel exactly like back home, and it happened today.

Load shedding. Power cut. Black out. Whatever you call it.

I was already bathed in sweat this evening when the fan suddenly slowed down, then sped up again, then slowed down and went off with the light. Instantly the room was plunged into darkness. The street light outside the window was off too.

I was at my friend Atreyee's place for dinner. We had candles, but the heat was unbearable, so we decided to take a short walk outside, hoping that the power would be back soon. We found another friend sitting outside her house with her three month old son. We stopped by for chit-chat. Many others in neighbouring houses were out in their gardens too. There was some music coming from the park, so I walked there with Atreyee to investigate.

Some Latin American festival was going on with some loud music blaring from the loudspeakers and a lady singing live on stage. The whole field was transformed into a fairground, and just like fairs back home there were Ferris wheels, carousels, bubble-blowers, balloon sellers and small stalls selling fried foodstuff and drinks all around. We walked around for a few minutes, staring longingly at the food. Unfortunately, none of us had our wallets with us.

We walked back to the friend who was sitting on the stairs with her kid. Her husband had joined her, and so had her mom and another friend. We sat down on their front steps as well and had a good old Bengali style "adda" (useless chit-chat) where we discussed all topics under the sun from sleep patterns of babies to the weather in Iceland. In that sultry, dark evening gathering I felt at home in a way I haven't felt in a long time.

Back home in Hooghly, we spent periods of load shedding lying on the terrace staring at the sky and talking among ourselves. Sometimes we would try to recognize stars - we could still see a lot of stars from Hooghly in those days, and more during power cuts. All breeze seemed to mysteriously stop as soon as the power failed, but the conditions would not be too uncomfortable altogether. In fact, sometimes we enjoyed it so much that nobody would bother to check if the power was back, we simply spent the time lying on the roof talking.

But the country is USA after all, so we could call up PSE&G and ask about our power failure, and soon the lights flickered back on around us. The meeting broke up, and I followed Atreyee to her apartment for dinner. Dinner was a hurried affair and part of it had to be completed in candle light as the power went again.

The power has since been back and stayed on for the last few hours, but the voltage is dipping low now and then and the lights have dimmed more than once, so I decided to type this up and upload it before the feel-good factor faded away. Load shedding may have made me nostalgic for a while, but if I have to sleep in this heat wave without a fan at night, my feelings would be along entirely different lines, and all of it won't be joyful enough to post here.

Creativity and Boredom

2011-07-16T18:05:00.001-04:00

While going through Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ blog the other day, I came across an interesting idea: boredom breeds creativity. I had never thought about it this way before, but since I read that article I realized I could explain a lot of what is happening in the world today with this single idea.

Essentially the idea is very simple – the brain generates new ideas when it is bored, and with the modern lifestyle we have reduced the periods of boredom to near zero. We have hundreds of TV channels to choose from, we have the Internet with e-mail and chat and Facebook and Twitter to keep us boredom-free every moment of the day. Even when we are traveling, we have our iPods to listen to music or smartphones to browse the Internet on the go. In short, we are never bored. Consequently, Scott speculates, we see an abundance of creations that are less creative, like reality shows and sequel movies.

In my childhood days, the TV had only one channel, and you had to imagine the colour. The transistor radio in our house didn’t work, and the radio programs in Allahabad weren’t worth listening to anyway. That was when I started on drawing and painting to spend time, and also took on origami. Looking back at more recent periods of my life, I also realize that I started writing this blog when I was bored out of my wits sitting idle in my office, and that was the time I started taking photos as well. And when one of my favourite bloggers, Kuntala, describes herself in her profile as “Bored” she unknowingly divulges the biggest secret of her writing ability.

After typing the previous paragraph, I went to Kuntala’s blog to get the hyperlink. I read the latest post there and by the time I was finished writing a comment, I had lost the chain of thought that I had for my own blog post. This is a very good illustration of what happens when our brains have too much of stimulating stuff. No wonder the frequency of my blogging has gone down since I came to the US and particularly in the last few months when I got a walkman phone. Instead of thinking up blog posts at the gym or during the times I travel, I now simply listen to music. In the last few weeks I could have written blog posts on the July 4th fireworks show, the latest Mumbai bomb blasts or the photography exhibition in Kolkata that showcased five of my photographs but I did not. It’s true that I have been busy with my paintings and some other research-related work, but five years ago this would not have deterred me from writing. Thank God I don’t have a smartphone yet or I would probably stop blogging altogether.

So I have decided to spend some time getting bored from now on. If I want to remain creative and generate new ideas, be it about blog posts or anything else, I must get time to think. This American lifestyle is getting on my nerves. I have to spend some quality time doing nothing or else… I will be unable to do anything worthwhile.

I think that’s what Jorge Cham, creator of PHD Comics refers to as “The power of procrastination.”

And yes, among the lack of creativity predictions that Scott Adams made on his blog was an increase in the number of blog posts that discuss other people’s blog posts.

Do I need to say more?

Hobbies

2011-06-21T17:30:00.001-04:00

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time. And blogging is losing out at the moment.

I always had a lot of hobbies. Collecting stamps took so much of my time during my childhood days that the word “hobby” was almost synonymous with stamp collecting. I would not have thought it possible at the time, but I don’t think I can tell where my stamp albums are now.

Other hobbies came and went. Some, like spirograph, caught on and stayed for a while. Some others, like matchbox-collecting, failed to make an impact. Some remained close to my heart, even if they were not getting the most attention all the time. Origami, coin-collecting and reading would fit this description.

After I joined my first job in 2005, I developed two new hobbies – blogging and photography. Slowly, as I gained expertise in the latter, it grew and threatened to push all my other hobbies out of the schedule. Digital photography demands a lot of time, especially if you own a DSLR and shoot RAW. I did not have time for much else except the occasional blog post. Even reading, once my first love, had to be cut down severely.

And then, last month, my school closed down for summer vacation and I started indulging myself in a very old hobby – painting. All of it isn’t painting actually: technically I use three kinds of media. I have used charcoal to draw people’s portraits and watercolor to paint landscapes and other things before, but the medium that I have fallen in love with recently is oil pastel. And I have been drawing almost one painting a day since then – some of them imitations of other people’s work, and some of them copies of my own photographs. I am also continuing working with watercolor and charcoal. Here are a few of my latest creations. All of them are done using oil pastels on paper.

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time, and painting seems to be emerging the winner right now.

Summer Schedule

2011-06-01T15:46:00.002-04:00

Last Friday, I was voice-chatting with a friend who is in India. I told her I was cooking. “Didn’t you go to college today?” she asked.

“Well, school is closed these days…” I started, but she interrupted me. “School? Don’t tell me you have gone back to school!”

“Er… actually I have. Here in the USA undergraduate students go to college, but graduate students go to school.” I hastily explained.

“Undergraduates? You mean school students? They go to college? And didn’t you finish your graduation in Kolkata? I thought you were doing post graduation there!”

This was getting messier than I had anticipated.

“No, actually what we call graduation in India is known as under-graduation here. So the engineering I did in India is under-graduation here. The Ph.D. that I am doing is known as post-graduation in India but here it is graduation. The engineering students here come to college to do their…”

Before I had a chance to finish, she had started again.

“Ah now I get it! The engineering students go to college, just like in India. But how come they don’t let you do Ph.D. in the same college?”

“Of course they do. I study in the same college, and in fact I teach those engineering students.” I said proudly.

“But you just said you don’t go to college but go to school!” she sounded exasperated.

“Er… we go to the same college, but we grad students call it school.”

“I see. So after passing college you get an urge to go back to school and since the schools won’t take you back, you start calling your college school?”

I would have liked to say that it was not quite so, but unfortunately I didn’t have a better way to explain it. So I grudgingly agreed.

“So your school is closed for summer vacations? For how long?” She never ran out of questions.

“Mid-May to August. It’s more than three months.” I wanted to make her jealous.

“Then how come you were in lab yesterday?” There was suspicion in her voice.

“Ph.D. students have no holidays, you know.” I tried to sound smug. “We have to go to lab even during the vacations. However, since school is closed on Fridays during summer, I thought of staying home.”

“Doesn’t vacation mean school is closed on all the days of the week?” she asked.

“Ah yes, that is the regular school. However, the university offices and the summer classes, if any, are open only four days a week.”

“I see. You Ph.D. students go to lab only on the days when the university offices are open. Basically you are following the work schedule of government employees. So you have a long weekend every weekend then.”

“Yes, and this one is even longer!” I said happily. “Monday is Memorial Day and practically everyone in the US is going somewhere. I have also decided to take off on Monday even if I stay at home.”

“You seem to be following the holiday schedules of everybody around you, taking holidays within holidays, while lamenting about working more than everybody else. Am I right?”

Again, I would have liked to say she was simplifying things too much, but I couldn’t find a flaw in her explanation.

“Y-es. Quite right.” I conceded. “That’s why I left the real world job and came here to do a Ph.D.”

Toy Story

2011-05-26T17:15:00.001-04:00

Kuntala defines a friend as someone from whom she can borrow a blogging inspiration, but for me, a friend is someone whose blog posts feel as if they were written by me. I like a lot of bloggers on the Internet, but there are very few that I identify with. This is the reason why I consider Kuntala a friend. This is also the reason why she is almost useless as an inspiration for me – when she has written on a topic, she has written the exact same things that I would have written if I had chosen to write on that topic, and in a much better way. I hardly ever have anything to add.

So while I can, let me steal a subject and write a post before she gets a chance to spoil it for me. For all I know, she may have written something on toys already that I missed.

What is a toy? As my nephew gets a tablet PC as his eleventh birthday gift, I wonder if that can be called a toy. The boy already shows amazing talent with his Wii console – a thing that, when I was his age, would have been more fairy tale than science fiction. The toys that his younger brother owns make some kind of electronic sound if I happen to step on them lying about the room at night. For me, the state-of-the-art in toy sophistication was a battery operated “remote controlled” fire engine that was actually connected to the remote control via a cable. Anything else that moved, lit up or produced sound was operated either manually or by a wound-up spring.

But even these toys, although they belonged to me, were mostly from my sister’s childhood days. Before that, when I was the only child in the house, things were considerably simpler.

When I was a small child, almost every toy that I played with was a rubber doll of some sort – be it a human baby, a bear or a monkey. The most they could do was squeak on being squeezed (a functionality that didn’t last too long) and everything else was left to my imagination. Even the cars and the airplanes that I owned had to be rolled on the ground to make them move. There was a green rotary telephone whose dial had a spring just like a real one – imagine my delight when I would dial a number and the dial would return to its original position on releasing. If, on reading this far, you think we were dumb, then it’s better if I don’t tell you about the functional telephone that I had for some time – it consisted of cups attached to the ends of a long plastic pipe. Other short-lived toys included monkey-shaped balloons, a paper crocodile fitted with a dried mud wheel controlled by a string (description useless unless you have seen one), or a plastic horse which jumped forward by means of an accordion-like pipe in its stomach when air was pumped via a long tube fitted with small bellows. Probably nobody understands what I am talking about anymore, because these were the days before the battery operated “Made in China” toys hijacked the market.

But if you think our toys were boring, think again. The black Leo submachine gun could have been the perfect prop for a kid playing “Navy Seal Team 6” had such a role playing game existed back then, but it was detested by the elders because it made so much noise, and hence had to be used with moderation in order to avoid confiscation. I also had real sophisticated toys – the boy with the cymbals who clapped them when wound up, the white horse and the furry dog that walked when would up, and the little Leo ladybug that also walked with a buzzing sound when wound up. These were kept in our showcase and I only got to play with them once in a while. And I only wanted to play with them once in a while.

Oh yes, I almost forgot the various kinds of building blocks and one jigsaw puzzle that consisted of a dozen cubical blocks which could be arranged to make six different animal pictures.

As I grew older, toys increased in sophistication. My new gun fired bullets and I soon developed an amazing skill in shooting the plastic bottle that came with it. More and more toys had spring-driven mechanisms. When some rich kids got something new called “video game,” I got the poor man’s version of it which was a small transparent box filled with water. By pumping a soft part of the box, small objects like beads or hoops inside the water could be made to jump about. And when my parents went to Europe they brought that fire engine for me. They also brought cars with – would you believe it – opening doors! It never mattered to me these cars had no driving mechanism; I just spent hours and hours with those scale-models of a Jaguar and a Porsche.

My sister had her own share of toys, of course. She had several dolls that closed their eyes when they were made to lie down, but her favourite was her daughter Timi – the white teddy bear from London. But for most part, even her toys were static things like doctor’s instruments and small kitchen utensils that required imagination to play with. And yet she played with her toys way more interactively than a kid does today. Much later, she got her first Barbie.

In spite of the lack of sophistication and battery power in our toys, we never felt we were missing out on something. Now it may be argued that people miss something only when they know it exists, but that’s not the point here. The point that I am trying to make is that the enjoyment derived from a toy depends mainly on the imagination of the child and not on the sophistication of the toy. That is the reason that I could spend more time playing with tiny metal balls in a circular maze than the kids of today can spend with their Gameboys without getting bored.

You may call it a case of the sour grapes, but I think our toys were way better as playthings. They let our imagination run wild. For instance, we were free to imagine what the teddy bear’s voice would be like rather than having to accept some pre-recorded electronic voice. And we also played with lots of odds-and-ends: broken bits from real world objects that could be put to various uses in the toy world. And lastly, I may not have had electronic toys in my childhood, but most of the toys that I had are still in “working” condition. I would like to see my nephew’s Wii console after twenty years. And there's no way his tablet PC can outlast my tablet - the slate chalkboard.

I agree to what Kuntala says: our childhood days may seem poor when we try to count the things that we didn't have back then, but the things that we did have would surely surprise the current generation kids.

Identity

2011-05-08T22:54:00.009-04:00

Rabindranath Tagore's 150th birth anniversary is here, and I am here with the English translation of another Tagore poem. This year, when I was selecting a poem to translate, I came across this gem that reminded me of a little girl whom I had met recently. And although she has a name that her parents selected for her, we, the people who know her (including her parents), like to call her by any name that comes to our minds. So here's a tribute to Tagore that is also dedicated to our Little Gherkin.

Identity

~Rabindranath Tagore

There’s a girl that I know,

She rules over our village small

She’s the one who is worshipped

And called little goddess by all.

But let me tell you something

Trust me and hear me out---

That her qualities are godlike

Is what I really doubt.

Early morning, when it’s still dark

Where does her sleep flee?

A row ensues on her bed

By her little shouts of glee.

By her loud chortles

Half the street wakes up,

She runs doing mock fights

Away from mother’s lap.

Arms stretched, she looks at me

I have no choice then,

But to take her out on a stroll

On my shoulder again.

Getting the ride of her choice,

In her great joy she insists

On pummeling me repeatedly with

Her plump and soft fists.

When I hurriedly tell her ---

“Wait a little, stop it please!”

She promptly tries to grab and take

The glasses from my eyes.

With me she quarrels so much

In words un-understood.

What an uproar! Could you ever

Call her manners good?

And yet, it hardly befits me

To engage her in a fight.

Without her, the music stops,

The household feels quiet.

Without her, will flowers

Still greet the morning light?

Without her, will the evening star

Still rise every night?

If the mischief-maker isn’t home

For a moment if we part

It seems impossible to fill

The void in my heart.

Her naughtiness is the southern breeze

It wakes a storm joy-laden

It makes all the flowers sway

In my mind’s flower garden.

The only thing that worries me

Her name, if you ask,

To call her by a single one

That is a difficult task.

Who knows about her real name?

I call her as I please –

Miss Mischief, Little Bandit,

Black-face or Ogress.

The name given by her parents

With her parents let it rest.

Let them find the sweetest name

And lock it in a chest.

One person names a baby

In some ceremony,

For everyone to adopt that name

Is nothing but tyranny.

Each calling as they please is how

Naming should be done

The father may call Chandrakumar,

The uncle Ramsharan.

A Sanskrit name is something that

Our girl can hardly carry,

The only thing it adds worth to is

Cost of the dictionary.

I for one, call her by

Whatever I think of

The one I call knows it’s her,

Let the others laugh.

A hundred different games

That little one plays

Is it right to call her by

A single name always?

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

Completely Dead

2011-05-04T12:37:00.001-04:00

Rama: Last night I saw a beautiful dream. I saw that Ravana guy was climbing a tall palm tree. As he was climbing, suddenly he slipped and fell and - cadens mortuus est!

Jambuban: Then that fellow must have really died. The king’s dream is never wrong.

Everyone: Never, never, it can never be wrong.

Rama: I told Hanuman “Go and throw the fellow into the ocean.” Hanuman came and told me, “No need to do that – he is completely dead.”

Everyone: Wow! Great! Completely dead! What else do we need? Let us all rejoice!

[Commotion outside]

That’s Ravana’s chariot there, see? And that’s Ravana himself, that guy with the stick on his shoulder…

Everyone: What? Still the fellow isn’t dead? He seems to be quite tough to kill!

Jambuban: This fellow Hanuman here spoiled everything – throwing Ravana into the water then would have settled everything for good – but no, he had to show off his intelligence – “He is completely dead!”

Vibhishan: No use shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted…

------------------------------

The above opening lines, loosely translated from the play Lakshmaner Shaktishel, Sukumar Ray's immortal humorous take on the Ramayana, must have been at the top of Barack Obama's mind on last Sunday when the US Navy SEALS finally managed to kill Osama Bin Laden. But Obama was not making the same mistakes as Hanuman. Even though Bin Laden was apparently "completely dead" the US Navy threw his body into the Arabian Sea.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Jokes aside, the act of a hurried sea burial for the terrorist leader only shows the dilemma the US government finds itself in after finally being able to kill Laden. On one hand, the people want to celebrate, to rejoice having avenged the death of their countrymen ten years ago. On the other hand, the more importance Osama gets now, the more free publicity the terrorists get for their cause.

The government, I think, got their act right. Obama made a matter-of-fact speech saying Osama was killed, and they dropped him into the ocean like another nameless common criminal. The media, on the other hand, completely lost it. On Monday morning, every newspaper in the world looked like this:

Could Osama Bin Laden have asked for better publicity? Ten years after he hijacked those four planes, he hijacked the front page of every newspaper in the world. And what message does all this press coverage send? The message that I see here is that you can attack the US and get away with it for ten years. Laden's death sentence was written the moment the first plane hit the north tower of WTC, the only question was when and where. And for us Indians, even the answer of "where" was more or less known. Then why is this such big news? Even Osama himself must have known this was coming.

Moreover, Bin Laden's serene smiling face is hardly the kind of image that we need to mark such a person's death. Sure, the masses are happy, but why can't we have focus on pictures of the celebrations? Anything other than that full-page face would do - the media is almost making a martyr of that man. This is why I feel the White House should have released pictures of the corpse - it would have given newspapers something solid to publish. Now every newspaper in the world is behaving like an Al-Qaeda mouthpiece, giving the killed man a voice beyond his watery grave. Does the word restraint mean anything to the media? As I mentioned once before, the media goes all out in showing photos of mutilated dead bodies after a terrorist attack. Then why can't we have some humiliating photos when the perpetrator dies?

The story that should be of interest now is Pakistan's role in the war against terror. Indians have been crying themselves hoarse for the last few decades about Pakistan's active support of terrorist groups, and USA has always chosen to remain silent on the issue while giving billions of dollars in military aid to them for their alleged involvement in the war against terror. Now, when the Pakistani officers say they had no clue of Laden's whereabouts it raises some serious questions. Firstly, what kind of war against terror are they fighting if they never tried to find out who was living in a million dollar fortified mansion right next to a military academy? Secondly, does USA really trust their allies if they kept them in the dark about this operation for the last few years? And finally, and this point goes against the other two, if Pakistan was indeed in the dark about this operation, why didn't the Pakistani air force detect and attack the US helicopters when they flew hundreds of miles inland over Pakistani airspace to Abbottabad? It is pretty evident at this point that Pakistan has been playing a double-crossing game, helping terrorists to hide on one hand and when under pressure, helping the US find them on the other. The government is too scared of a backlash from the fundamentals if they accept they had anything to do with Osama's death. On the other hand, if they deny it, they lose face in the international community.

When I saw the people in New York City celebrating on the streets, I knew exactly how they felt, even though I also knew the war on terror was far from being over. Almost exactly a year ago, when I had rejoiced at the death sentence to Ajmal Kasab (a sentence yet to be carried out), I had faced a lot of criticism from my friends. "How can you express happiness at the death of another human being?" one friend said, while another reminded me that killing Kasab was useless since it would do nothing to stop terrorist attacks in the future. I had said at the time that I wanted Kasab to die because that was justice, and today, when thousands of Americans feel justice has been done to their dead relatives and friends, I completely agree with their feelings. "Civilized nations such as the US don't hand out death sentences," another friend had told me. I would like to know what they feel about this now. I don't believe the highly trained Navy SEALS couldn't have captured an old man alive if they wanted to, when he was trying to hide behind a woman. But they chose to shoot him in the head - an excellent decision to ensure that he was indeed completely dead.

I just hope he is completely dead. As a friend pointed out, he may have horcruxes, and that would really spoil the party.

Dream Come True

2011-04-22T17:00:00.001-04:00

At a time when Nintendo DS and Wii had not taken over as children’s only means of keeping themselves entertained, when the TV had just one channel, when computers were not considered home appliances and toys did not need batteries, at such a time if you looked into our Allahabad home you would find my sister keeping herself busy teaching students.

A teddy bear was the one student that was visible to us. The other students were invisible. You could call them imaginary, but then, they answered her questions, handed in assignments and got shouted at when they did not do their homework. My sister would sit on the bed surrounded by her invisible class and teach them using a slate chalkboard. She would take their assignments (which were probably some old notebooks of her earlier classes) and then check them using a pen. Day after day after day, that was her primary indoor pastime, and becoming a schoolteacher was her dream.

I remembered those scenes when she informed me this week that she had got a job as a teacher in one of the better-known girls’ schools in Kolkata. She is teaching mathematics to classes VI to XI and she’s even the class teacher of a section of class VIII. She was overjoyed when she walked into the classroom and everybody stood up saying “Goodmorning ma’am” in unison. Evidently, although I have difficulty in imagining someone referring to my little sister as ma’am, she is held in high esteem by her students. Coming to think of it, I realize that some of my own teachers at school had been pretty young when they taught us, and that fact never diminished our respect for them in any way.

I am so happy for her... I wanted to write a blog post on this occasion, and now that I have actually started writing it I realize I don’t have much to say about the matter. It is a thing to be felt and not described. When you see some near and dear one dream of something from early childhood and then see them achieve that goal years later in life, the kind of elation you feel is quite beyond words. At least my words.

But when I see some children of the current generation (especially here in the USA) I wonder whether they will ever get that feeling of achieving their dream. Imagination and creativity are actively discouraged these days and someone who sits teaching imaginary students would probably freak parents out. Besides, the other kids would label them nerds. They would rather play video games, visit online forums and watch TV when indoors. Everybody is happy that way.

At the cost of sounding like exactly a grumbling old man, I would say I am glad we were born in less prosperous times.

A Superstition and a Coincidence

2011-04-02T14:18:00.000-04:00

Are you superstitious? No? Not at all?

I don't stop when a cat crosses my path. I don't come back if someone sneezes when I'm leaving. I don't believe in most superstitions that a lot of other people do. However, there is something that I strongly believe - when the Indian cricket team is playing, they lose if I watch the match. I mean it. I have seen it happen too many times.

That is why when India went into the semi-final of the 2011 World Cup, I decided not to watch the high-tension match against Pakistan. I did steal a glance at the scoreboard time and again, and I tuned into the match only when Pakistan had lost six wickets and were already hoping to catch the early flight back home.

So India were in the final against Sri Lanka. In 1996, the semi-final match against Sri Lanka (which I was watching) had ended disastrously. In 1999, Ganguly and Dravid had murdered the Lankan bowling attack in an epic partnership that, curiously, I could not watch as I had to go shopping.

I watched the India-Australia final of the 2003 World Cup. I did not get time to watch all other matches fully, but the final was different. I sat in front of the TV and watched the match starting from the toss right up to the end. Or up to the point when it stopped mattering. People may blame Zaheer Khan for our loss, or Ganguly, or Sachin, but I know whom I blamed.

I was not going to watch the final today, at least not until an Indian victory had been assured. Let those guys at the university tempt me with their large-screen live screening of an HD stream, Team India comes first for me.

I woke up early and checked the score board. Sri Lanka was batting for about 15 overs then. I fell asleep again and dreamed that they had set up a score of 250. I woke up with a start to see the actual total was 274.

It was too high. But then, nothing was too high for a team that had Sachin and Sehwag.

I was still in bed when my friend pinged me from Kolkata. "Sehwag gone," she said, adding a ":(" at the end.

I asked her not to do a ball-by-ball commentary to me. It was a bad omen. If I wanted to follow the match I could have done it. I got up, brushed my teeth, and was about to have breakfast when another friend called.

"Sachin gone. India will lose today," she said. "So are you coming with me to the city for lunch?"

Around here, "the city" means New York City. Going to the city for lunch meant a several-hour long round trip on a weekend. It also meant I would not be able to see the end if India won by chance. I made up my mind.

"Meet you at the station at 12:15, " I said, and went to get ready.

Around noon, I called my cousin and asked him the score. He said we needed about 80 runs from 80 balls and had seven wickets in hand. He sounded confident that we would win.

We reached New York and walked to this North Indian restaurant. We could not decide whether to go in and have a go at the buffet, or walk to Saravana Bhavan across the street and gobble dhosas. We decided to go in and take a look at today's menu.

As we reached the buffet, we saw there was a small TV (or computer - I don't remember) behind the counter, and some of the staff were watching the match there. India was batting on 270/4. As I watched, Yuvaraj Singh took a single and the score climbed to 271. I looked at my friend and asked her whether the target was indeed 275. I could not believe my luck. And as she said yes, Dhoni hit the next ball out of the ground and the Mumbai sky lit up with fireworks.

Yes, I did not miss the ending after all, by an amazing bit of coincidence. I also called up my cousin again, just to make sure.

Saravana Bhavan was out of the question, now, of course. We sat down to have our lunch, and as the Indian team carried Sachin around the stadium, the restaurant suddenly started playing "Chak de India" full volume, much to the surprise of the Chinese and American customers. We looked up to see a small Indian flag hanging over the counter. By a strange bit of luck, I was in a small piece of India at this historic moment in a city that by and large does not know what cricket is.

Everybody has seen the visuals after that - the victory laps, the interviews, the celebrations. I will try to catch some of that stuff on Youtube in the coming days. But thank Gambhir, or Dhoni, or Yuvaraj as much as you want for this win, I know who else should be getting a tiny portion of the credit.

The Tour Guide (Updated)

2011-03-20T19:00:00.002-04:00

“They didn’t respond after the first one, so we dropped another one after three days.”

I was walking around inside the Udvar-Hazy Center of Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, seeing exhibits by myself when that sentence, spoken in a loud, proud voice reached my ears. I looked up to see a plump gentleman with white hair and moustache address a group of visitors. He was standing under the nose of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay,” arguably the most infamous plane to ever fly the skies. He repeated his sentence, probably for the effect.

“We dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima (and by the way, it’s not Hiro-sheema, it’s Hero-shima), and when they didn’t respond, we dropped the second one on Nagasaki. Make no mistake about it; the nuclear bomb ended World War II.”

While there was probably no factual error in the words spoken, I was stunned at the inappropriateness of the way they were spoken, especially when Japan was fighting with another major nuclear disaster. I stopped to listen.

“This was the plane that Paul Tibbets flew carrying ‘Little Man’ and his plane was one of three planes on that mission. Both the bombing missions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki used three planes each. The first plane flew ahead to make sure everything was all right, the second one carried the bomb, and the third one flew to take pictures and make scientific measurements after the bomb was dropped.” He opened an album and showed us a photo of the bomb, and the actual mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, presumably photographed from that third plane. “We are proud to say that we completed the two bombing missions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a single injury or death,” he paused briefly, “among the crew. There were psychological problems afterwards, but no physical damage,” he smiled, almost as if hoping for applause. “We Americans don’t like war, but if someone kicks our butt, we kick them back twice as hard.” Then he continued his explanation of the Hiroshima bombings, details of the two bombs, the promotions the pilots had received, and the current nuclear capability of the US, with quotations from important people and pictures from his album. I was about to interrupt him and ask him whether vaporizing a hundred thousand civilians instantaneously was the way peace loving nations fought wars, but then he said something more – something about people like me.

“Paul Tibbets died a few years ago, and he desired that he be cremated and his ashes be dispersed over the English Channel,” the tour guide said. “Now that really shows how smart a man he was. If he had been buried, these anti-nuke-nuts would probably have done something humiliating to his body.”

Hearing this, I decided to just turn around and walk away. I did not want him to include the anecdote of the anti-nuke-nut who confronted him in his next speech. But I will try to bring this incident to the notice of the Smithsonian Institution. I tremendously enjoy visiting all of their museums, and I would not want such visits to get spoiled because of people like this gentleman, whose name I had forgotten to ask. And although nobody spoke out that day, I am sure a lot more people will share my sentiments. Hopefully the world still has more anti-nuke-nuts than sane people like this elderly tour guide.

Update: I received a mail from the Office of Communications of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum this morning and then the director spoke with me on phone. They apologized for the incident and also mentioned that they take matters of objectivity very seriously and do not provide the docents with any album, and they would look into the incident. All this happened without even my registering a formal complaint.

I sincerely thank the Smithsonian Institution for their proactive stance on this issue and prompt action. No wonder their museums are some of the best in the world.

Furniture Weekend

2011-02-21T11:46:00.000-05:00

Friday was a warm day.

A daytime temperature of 17 degrees Celsius and a night temperature of 11 degrees Celsius may not qualify as warm in the part of the world that I come from, but here in New Jersey, it was a welcome respite from one of the severest and most snow-laden winters of recent times. At school, people were already walking around in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts. The weekend was going to be sunny too. A lovely weekend for going out and enjoying the fresh air, one could say.

So although a strong wind had started on Saturday morning and the temperature had dropped below 10, I decided to wear just a fall jacket with my jeans and sneakers while going to IKEA with a friend. I did not take my gloves or earmuffs – they are notoriously difficult to manage inside a warm store. And previous experience had taught me that IKEA was warm inside. On second thoughts, I just pulled on my woolen cap and left.

A visit to IKEA is, of course, less about buying necessary home furniture and more about touching, feeling and getting tempted by unnecessary ones. After a few hours of uneventful browsing which consisted of sitting on sofas, lying in beds, climbing atop bar stools, opening and closing cupboards and admiring ourselves in mirrors of all shapes and sizes, we felt we were sufficiently hungry to do justice to the free dining offer from the cafeteria. During this weekend, IKEA would deduct the cafeteria bill from the store bill for a purchase of over $100. To maximize the benefit of this offer, we filled ourselves up to bursting point with stuffed salmon fillet, buffalo chicken wraps, chicken tenders with fries, some lovely Swedish princess cake and coffee while watching planes taking off and landing at the Newark international airport. We shopped some more for things that my friend needed for her new home and then we proceeded to stuff our bags with random irresistible stuff like stainless steel trivets, photo frames, wooden wall-racks, tool kits and potted cacti until we could barely drag the bags behind us. We would, of course, have the heavy furniture shipped home, so we had nothing to worry about.

At the checkout counter I had the first inkling of doubt that all was not right. The never-ending line eventually delivered us to the lady with the bar-code scanner at a snail’s pace, and there we learnt that we had to actually bring the heavy furniture out too, like everyone else, before we could get them home delivered.

Now this was a problem. We had already paid for our two bagfuls of not-so-light stuff when we were informed of this. Since we could not carry this stuff inside, one of us would have to stand there with the two bags while the other (in this case, I) would have to go and pick up a bed, a sofa and a few chairs single-handedly and re-navigate that queue which had doubled by this time. It wasn’t easy. Apart from the fact that the things would be heavy and hard to place on a cart single-handedly, I would have to somehow fit everything on a single cart.

Which I eventually did. I single-handedly tamed the cart which was constantly trying to roll away and loaded the sofa, the bed, and all the chairs on it, and finally joined the line which was now several times longer. By the time I paid for this stuff and finally passed the counter it was nearly six which meant we were still not too late. We just had to get it home delivered now.

And overcoming the home delivery queue took us… around two hours.

Carrying two large bags of heavy stuff, apart from our heavier backpacks and pushing a cartload of furniture, we waited for two hours. Every few minutes, someone would try to push a cart through our queue and somehow they always chose the gap around me to squeeze in so that I had to readjust my cart. And while the queue passed close to a door to the outside world, we suddenly realized the long queue was no longer our most unpleasant experience of the day. The outside air had cooled beyond our wildest expectations and even standing ten feet inside the sliding door made us shiver.

“Stay warm,” said the gentleman at the counter as he took the payment for our shipment and handed me the receipt. We knew how ridiculously impossible it would be to follow that advice. As we stepped outside the wind hit us like a wall of ice and the next half-hour wait for the bus may very well have been my longest half-hour. Even with the help of a muffler from my friend, I could not get rid of the feeling that I was going to freeze over. The temperature, as I saw later, was a -4 feeling like a -12 and so no wonder my fingers felt like they were going to fall off any moment even inside my pockets. We were thankful when the bus came, even though it was filled to capacity. The standing ride back to civilization on the twisting road which had us hanging on to the handles with the heavy bags may not have been my most comfortable ever, but I can hardly recall another time when I have enjoyed being on a bus more.

And in the end, all this was totally worth it. When the furniture boxes arrived the next day and I looked at my brand new sofa bed and bar stools at the end of four hours of inexperienced carpentry, it seemed to take away all the bad memories of the previous day’s misadventures. This was much better than asking friends for months to help out with car rides – this weekend made us feel that we could actually do something without their help. This was just another enjoyable-in-retrospect weekend activity that was part of the American experience, and now both of us have brand new furniture to show off.

And show it off I will.

Saraswati Puja

2011-02-15T11:33:00.002-05:00

As Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa USA finalist Rasika Shekar finished singing her rendition of “Munni badnaam hui” and an auditorium full of people stopped their dancing and made a dash for the dining hall to queue up for mutton curry, I reflected on whether this enthusiasm was befitting the festival it was supposed to celebrate. I, as a Bengali, have always considered Saraswati Puja a special day of the year, but most of my Saraswati Pujas had been special in a completely different way.

As anybody growing up in Bengal over the last few decades would say, Saraswati Puja is the Bengali equivalent of Valentine’s Day, for that was one day of the year when the boys got to enter the girls’ schools without fear and vice versa. Now, of course, the boys and girls see too much of each other around the year anyway. But I, for one, never had the good fortune to celebrate the Bengali Valentine’s Day because I left Bengal at the early age of five. All I knew about Saraswati Puja before that is the fact that it was the day when we worship the goddess of learning, and all I remember is that my grandfather used to conduct the puja at our house in Hooghly. Also, one of those years I had had my “first writing ceremony” or haate-khoRi. Maybe I don’t even remember that. I just know that from the photographs.

The Saraswati Pujas that I do remember were at Allahabad. North Indians don’t celebrate this particular festival, but the day was always a holiday in school as hordes of pilgrims thronged the city of Allahabad to take a holy dip in the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna on Vasant Panchami (another name for the day). There were a few Saraswati Pujas organized by Bengalis around the city, and we attended those.

We fasted since the morning as we got dressed in our ethnic best. I usually wore a kurta-pajama and my sister, like most little girls, wore a yellow coloured sari. We accompanied our parents to the nearest Puja and offered anjali (flower offering) to goddess Saraswati before we ate anything. We usually visited a couple of other Puja places too, so our breakfast consisted of fruits and sweets offered to the goddess. We prayed for good marks, and when we felt we had gathered enough blessings to last the year, we returned home.

I almost forgot to mention the most special thing about Saraswati Puja. That was the day when we were not supposed to read anything. No text books. No story books. No newspapers or magazines. Nor was writing allowed, and only a child who had no concern for his exam marks would dare to defy this ban. The good part was that nobody could tell us to study for the entire day. The bad part was that passing the time sometimes became a problem because when I was not studying I was usually hunched over a story book.

But there was only a small amount of time to be passed. There were other events left.

Lunch was khichRi at the Bharat Sevasram Sangha. This is a charitable non-government organization that (among other things) arranges free lunch for people on several days of the year and the food was something that had been offered to the goddess. Somebody who has not had the experience of sitting in rows and eating the scalding hot food can never imagine how delicious such plain vegetarian cooking can taste. We always had our lunch there on Saraswati Puja. Then we walked home in the delightful winter sun. As I sit down to write this, I cannot think of even one Saraswati Puja when the weather was gloomy or rainy. I may be mistaken, because Saraswati Puja is one of those days that are permanently etched in my memory as a sunny and joyful occasion. Gloomy ones may have occurred, but my young mind didn’t store them that way.

In West Bengal, there are usually a lot of cultural activities during the evenings on this day. Dance recitals, elocutions and singing performances by children are held in many schools and colleges. Some schools have exhibitions. In Allahabad, however, we did not have any such cultural celebrations. Some of my father’s colleagues and their families were invited to our house and we ate peas-kachauri and alur dom that my mother made for dinner. We stuck to a vegetarian menu on this day as we did on several other religious festivals, and this was the only menu that seemed appropriate for this night.

Things changed after I moved to college in Kolkata, and then went to work in Hyderabad. Or did they? I can’t seem to remember much about the Saraswati Pujas of my later years. Maybe I am growing old, but somehow the image of the sunny Allahabad Saraswati Puja overshadows every other memory of the event. The only thing that I can remember is that I no longer followed the total ban on reading and writing on this day. My parents moved to Hooghly in 2007 and they restarted the Puja at our house the next year. Soon afterwards, I flew to the other side of the Atlantic to worship the goddess of learning in my own way.

And here I was – wondering whether flashy item numbers were a fitting tribute to the white-sari-clad veena-wielding goddess, and slightly worried whether my eating meat for dinner would somehow delay my graduation date. I explained to myself that although I had offered anjali that morning, it wasn’t really Saraswati Puja but just a convenient weekend close by. Then I realized that I had eaten meat and taught a class on the real Puja day too.

I told myself to grow up and joined the queue. Someday I will get to celebrate Saraswati Puja the old way again, but till then, I have to adapt myself to the American way.

Mixed Emotions

2011-02-02T11:43:00.008-05:00

Can a journey of nearly 12000 km with an 11 hour wait in between be enjoyable? Mine was, because apart from the fact that I was going home, I also saw something from the plane that I had not expected to see. I saw Aurora Borealis, or the northern lights, through the plane window during my night flight over Iceland.

It was a strange experience, and frankly speaking, not totally unexpected. I had hoped to see the thing when I bought the Finnair tickets in September and that is why I had chosen a left side window seat. Yet, when I peered outside the darkened cabin and saw the flickering green light dancing in the sky, I could hardly believe my eyes. The whole plane was sleeping, or so it seemed to me. As far as I could see, I was the only person who was looking out with face (and later camera) glued to the window and gasping as the light played around in the star-studded clear sky like a giant green curtain twisting and waving in the wind. In the incredible joy of being able to see such a thing, I didn’t seem to mind the long and boring journey at all.

Similarly, when my sister Jolly bade goodbye to us and left for her new home with her husband at the end on my month-long stay in India, it did not matter at all that I had known for the past 24 years of my life that this day would come. I still couldn’t hold back my tears. It was an occasion of great joy, and one that was completely expected and prepared for. I knew she would be happy where she was going. And yet… and yet… speak of mixed emotions!

An Indian wedding is, of course, a lot more than the silent tear-shedding goodbye part. Bollywood movies seem to have given the western world some idea of what it is like (“Was it a big splashy three-day Indian wedding?” a colleague asked me after I returned) but what people here know is still the tip of the iceberg, especially if it is a wedding in your own house.

The month leading up to the wedding was busy – I and my sister were preparing the trays of gifts that go to the groom’s house on the day of the wedding reception. “Is it dowry?” once an American friend had asked me. It is not dowry as the gifts contain mostly items of clothing and toilette for the bride, the groom and close family members, and then specific items are completely chosen by the bride’s family. Similar trays of gifts arrive from the groom’s house as well. But coming back to the story, these gifts are sent in trays or platters and every family tries to decorate their trays and platters in some unique way. For us, the decoration consisted of an origami model stuck on to each item, and I had been making these models for a month when I was not helping Jolly pack and catalogue the other items. Then there was some shopping to be done, some other important work to be finished (like taking Jolly to see Harry Potter 7), and some old friends to be met with since I was back in Kolkata after a year. Overall, it was a vacation that was busier than the average semester at school.

The hard work was not without its rewards, of course, and the fact that I am scared to step on the scales now should suffice to indicate the nature of that reward. In our parts, it is customary for the bride-to-be’s relatives to invite her for an elaborate lunch in the time leading up to her wedding. In this case, the invitations were for me as well, and even if my sister got away with eating less with her “I am dieting for the wedding” excuse, I was always confronted with “You don’t get this stuff in America, so eat it now.” Not that I need any confrontation when served food, but whatever.

The wedding itself was four days. Those four days now seem like a colourful blur of space time where I was too busy most of the time. Now, as I sift through the tens of gigabytes of photos taken during those days almost half a month after the event, small sights and sounds come back to the mind. We did not employ a professional photographer for the event – it was I and some of my cousins who covered the entire event. The first day was the day before the wedding, the day when Jolly ate her last lunch as a spinster. The day started with me photographing the cutting of the fish at the caterer’s early in the morning, and then passed in a rush as scores of friends and neighbours and relatives joined us for lunch. Jolly’s friend painted her hand with “mehendi” which is an herbal dye made of powdered henna leaves usually worn during weddings. The evening passed in last minute preparations.

After a sleepless night, the next day started very early, quite some time before dawn. A Bengali wedding is full of so many rituals that there is hardly a moment during the whole day when something or the other is not going on. The gifts from the groom’s family arrived sometime in the middle of this. The house was full of guests once more as Jolly proceeded to have her “gaaye-holud” or ritual turmeric bath. After a hurried lunch, professionals arrived to adorn her for the wedding. She was dressed in a red-and-gold Benarasi sari, gold jewelry made for the occasion and her face was adorned with sandalwood paste designs. In between other work, I went and took pictures of this process. Then we left for the wedding venue which was on the lawns of an outdoor swimming club. Sayan, the groom, arrived directly to this venue for the wedding.

The wedding went on uneventfully and by the time we came back home with the couple, it was well past midnight and we were utterly exhausted. However, nobody slept in the night and the night was customarily spent in singing, chit-chat and general merry-making among the couple, their friends, cousins and siblings. We even saw part of a movie on Jolly’s laptop. Next morning, by the time Jolly and Sayan left, we were sad, but tiredness and relief were both more important feelings for all of us.

But our work was not finished. Although I did sleep like a log for a few hours after lunch, I was back at finishing the trays in the evening. The house was empty now – only my parents and I were left, and parents were busy with other work. A cousin dropped in to help for some time, but I could still sleep only at 1:30 a.m. I had to wake up again at 6:30 and continue the work. We went to deliver these gifts to Sayan’s house (which is an hour and a half by road) a little later. By the time we reached, delivered the platters, had lunch there and came back, it was evening and it was time once more for us to go to the reception in their house. Friends and relatives had started coming in once again to join us.

Jolly was sitting on a throne in the reception, and her only jobs were grinning at guests, accepting gifts and posing for photographs. I realized I needed some more time to get used to the idea that she was not a part of our household anymore when I started looking for her absent-mindedly when we were eating dinner at the buffet to see if she was done eating, and then remembered with a start that she was sitting on a throne downstairs.

A one-day gap between the reception and my return trip seemed too quick and unfair, especially for my parents. But my school had already reopened and I had my teaching job to take care of, so I bade adieu to my family once more on the 20th of January. Jolly had Sayan had joined my parents and some other relatives at the airport, and as I talked with her using our exclusive jargon and laughed at the little internal jokes known only to the two of us, I overcame my earlier sorrow. She was happy. She was still the same sister to me, and what’s more, I now had more members in my family.

But time was running out. I had the 63-hour long journey back to Newark in front of me, with 12 and 24 hours of waiting at New Delhi and Helsinki respectively. What’s more, I was leaving home this time, and there would be no Aurora Borealis to cheer me up. So here I am, back at this snow covered depressing city which I had once described as a winter wonderland but which now looks like a huge construction zone with snow instead of earth heaped higher than my head all around. The only good thing about being away from home this time seems to be that it makes it easier to accept my sister’s absence in the house.

One way or the other, life is full of mixed emotions.

Chicago with the GSA Family

2010-12-28T23:00:00.007-05:00

Reflections. Short and fat, wavy and bulging, they were all around me. Standing under the Cloud Gate (or “The Bean” as it is popularly known) in Chicago’s Millenium Park, I was fulfilling a dream that I had since the day I had seen pictures of the stainless steel outdoor sculpture. Based on a design by Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor, the giant reflective structure could be called a photographers’ paradise and I had long wanted to shoot it. But that was only one of the many dreams that were being fulfilled during the Graduate Student Organization-organized Thanksgiving trip to Chicago.

The four day GSA trip started early on the gloomy Thanksgiving morning from NJIT. By the time we reached Chicago at night the mercury had dropped to 26 degrees Fahrenheit and most cafes and restaurants near our hotel had closed. However, thanks to a Dunkin Donuts and a Seven-Eleven within the block, everyone could soon settle down in their respective rooms. Well, everyone except the GSA President who had been “accidentally” allotted the same room as a honeymoon couple and he realized it only after he walked in. But that’s another story.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny, and soon we were in the bus once more, headed for the Museum of Science and Industry. On our way we crossed the Chicago River, saw the magnificent skyline, and drove along the shore of the majestic lake Michigan. Chicago, I felt, is a mix of the best things from New York and Washington DC since it has both open spaces and a lovely skyline. The museum itself was seen in a hurried manner, for GSA had given us CityPasses and we had a lot of other things to see. Among the things we saw there, a display of Christmas trees from around the globe, a US Navy submarine and an IMAX dome theatre show on the Hubble space telescope deserve special mention.

Since my childhood days, I have always wanted to see an aquarium but never got around to seeing one. That wish was destined to be fulfilled in Chicago. The Shedd Aquarium was the next on our route where we spent the rest of the day in a fish-watching frenzy. We also saw a 4-D movie and a live show with performing dolphins, seals and beluga whales. When we emerged from the aquarium it was already dark and the illuminated Chicago skyline stretched out sparkling beyond the lakeshore in front of us. It was a mesmerizing sight. I live near New York and I have seen Boston, Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Washington DC in the last couple of years. Each city has its own charm, but I feel as far as skylines are concerned, Chicago has the most unique skyline out of these cities. After gaping at the lights and taking pictures for some time, we rode the bus back to the hotel.

We had almost spent a day and still had a lot of other places to see. The next day was going to be busy, but that did not deter me and two friends from going out in search of some special dinner. Pizzeria Uno was only a few blocks away from our hotel, but the walk seemed a torture in the sub-freezing temperature and Chicago’s infamous wind. I had ordered an iced coffee to look cool and that compounded my miseries. Our problems did not end once we reached Pizzeria Uno. “Want to sit in? The waiting time is two hours. For take-outs it is just one hour,” said the girl at the counter. We chose the latter, but since the place was too crowded to sit and wait for an hour, another long hour of wandering about the freezing streets ensued. Eventually when we did get the deep dish pizza, we fought among ourselves to carry the hot box as we walked back to the hotel. I and three hungry friends could not finish a medium sized pie for dinner, which is pretty impressive even if you consider the fact that the three were girls on diet.

The next morning started with a cab ride to “The Bean” in the Millennium Park followed by the shooting spree described earlier. Later we walked to the Chicago Field Museum by the road along Lake Michigan. The weather, although cold and windy, was gloriously sunny and so the walk was very enjoyable. Our visit to the Field Museum was another touch-and-go affair. We had a Panini lunch at the museum café and then visited Sue, the most complete T-Rex fossil in the world. After that we visited a real Egyptian tomb and looked at some stuffed birds and animals from Asia and Africa. We left at four and took a cab to Willis Tower. There was no time to see the Planetarium.

Willis Tower, formerly known as Sears Tower, is the tallest building in the United States. When we arrived at Willis Tower, there was still daylight. I had always wanted to see Chicago from Skydeck – the observation deck on the 103rd floor of the building. It was my idea to choose a time when we could both see the daylight and the night view. However, my plan would have failed pathetically if we did not have CityPasses. As we stood in the serpentine queue below the building, an official called for visitors with CityPasses and ushered us into the elevator ahead of the queue. Through the closing elevator doors, we heard the official tell the rest of the visitors that their wait time would be two hours. Ours was only a few minutes though. After a security check and another minute-long elevator ride, we found ourselves on top of the world. The sun was low in the sky and the place was heavily crowded. We took a look at Chicago and the lake from every side as the sun went down, saw the sunset and then proceeded to the most unique experience of all – The Ledge.

The Ledge at Skydeck is a glass box protruding out of the wall of Willis Tower into the sky. Or rather, there are three boxes like that. They are like tiny hanging balconies with glass floors. Standing in one of these boxes, one not only gets a 360 degree view of that side of Chicago but also gets the sickening feeling of peering between one’s feet and seeing nothing but a thousand feet of air. Scary as it may seem, it was evident that the glass floors are very, very strong because the boxes were filled like cans of sardines with tourists. We squeezed in somehow, saw the lights come on in Chicago and then slowly slipped out. As we walked out of the building, we noticed that the queue had grown even longer.

By the time we returned to our hotel, the Red Roof Inn, we were tired. Initially we had planned to go and see Navy Pier, but then laziness got the better of us. Also, all of us had a sudden urge to eat Chinese and so after a brief walk around the Chicago River, we walked to a nearby Chinese restaurant and had a delicious dinner. I and my friends ended the day with watching a movie on one of our laptops. Next morning the bus started early, and nearly everyone slept the first part of the journey. Later, however, as energy levels increased, we had a lot of fun playing games and singing songs in the bus. We reached NJIT at ten in the night.

When GSA had first proposed the Chicago trip for Thanksgiving, I had been sceptical about its success. “It will be too cold up there during Thanksgiving,” I had said, “and besides, the 15-hour long bus journey each way will be a pain.” What I had not considered at the time is the importance of spending the holiday with friends. During the actual trip, however, the cold and other problems took a backseat as we enjoyed the warmth of friendship and saw a new city with the only family members that we have in this home away from home. This trip made me realize once more that in spite of our differences, we at NJIT are all part of one big family, and this trip was one big family get together. And what’s a better way to spend a Thanksgiving break than spending it with family members?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

2010-12-02T16:14:00.000-05:00

I have been busy.

Too busy to blog. Too busy to shop on Black Friday. Too busy to upload photos on my photoblog. Too busy even to read my favourite blogs and comment on them.

But I wasn’t too busy to go watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on the day of its release, and to put it bluntly, the movie rocks. This is exactly what a Harry Potter movie should be like.

I would have been skeptical if this same opinion had come from another reviewer, because the last movie by the same director was everything a Harry Potter movie should not be. With unnecessary deviations from the storyline, large chunks of vital plot points left out, and important characters and details reduced to mere passing references, David Yates reduced the gripping sixth story into an intolerable headache. This time, however, by splitting up the story into two movies, he has been able to do justice to the little incidents that make the book such an interesting read. Another major plus point of the movie is the absence of Michael Gambon and his insufferable performance as a hot-headed Albus Dumbledore.

To be honest, the expectations were high. They are always unfairly high for a director directing a Harry Potter movie, because there are people like me who would go splitting hairs about specific dialogs and what a particular character’s hairstyle looks like. But at the end of the two and a half hours, even I had to say that I was as satisfied with the movie as I was with Chris Columbus’s first two movies.

Right from the initial seven Potters sequence, to the teen trio’s adventure in the ministry of magic, to Harry and Hermione’s visit to Godric’s Hollow, Harry finding the sword, and finally the happenings at Malfoy Manor and Luna’s house – every scene was nearly as I had imagined. There was the added bonus of a fantastic animated story-telling sequence within the movie. I won’t say much about the plot, although I doubt if there is anyone who hasn’t read the book and is still worried about spoilers while reading this blog. Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Tom Felton are magnificent as usual in their acting, and even Daniel Radcliffe seems to get the hang of it now.

Was it perfect? No. The failure to mention the taboo on Voldemort’s name left a vital plot point unexplained. I hoped to see the paintings on Luna’s ceiling. Wormtail was supposed to die because Harry had once saved his life – the film failed to mention that. Most importantly, the semi-nude kissing scene between Harry and Hermione was totally uncalled for. I know what the book says, and it could have been shown differently considering it is only a children’s movie. But then, no movie is ever perfect. Some only come very close to perfection.

Like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 did.

The Customary Durga Puja Post

2010-10-12T13:35:00.002-04:00

Over the last one month and a half, I moved into a new apartment, started teaching a full course for the first time and worked on my first research paper. I spent the weekends buying stuff for my apartment and spent my free time doing some other work that I do not want to discuss here just yet. Also, a free one-month membership from Netflix hijacked my lifestyle completely and hopelessly and made me realize once more that blogging is perhaps the lowest priority work in my life. Still, I promised to write a blog post before Durga Puja to one of my half-dozen regular readers, and this festival seems a good subject to restart blogging.

But what will I write? I wrote all about my childhood memories before. I also wrote about seeing Puja in Kolkata, in Hooghly, in New Jersey and seeing idols being built in Kumortuli. Besides, some of my friends with similar childhood memories wrote beautiful blog posts and I am left struggling to find a story that is new.

When I was very small, I lived in a house that was almost across the road from the local puja pandel. As a result, I and my cousin Ananda got to spend a lot of time at the pandel, admiring the idols and bursting caps in our little silver coloured pistols. During this time, I became aware of a lot of facts about the goddess and her children by acutely observing them at that pandel and elsewhere.

For instance, Ganesha was badly in need of a workout.

It may have been the consequence of trying to satisfy his elephantine taste-buds, but it could be seen that Ganesha was not making things easy for his ride – the mouse. Okay, the mouse was sometimes the size of a small dog, but you would still clearly see the helplessness of his situation when you looked at his master. During pandel-hopping, one of the things that I watched keenly was the size of the mouse that Ganesha had there.

Then Kartik was the dandy man. Right from his choice of pet, to his wardrobe and hairstyle, everything reeked of show-off. The detail with which the peacock was made told a lot about the skill of the artist and the budget of the organizers. Sometimes, Kartik did not wear a crown to show off his hairstyle. Ganesha also did not usually wear a crown, but that was probably because no crowns fitted his head. Kartik wore ornate dresses in some places, but usually he was bare bodied. Sometimes he wore a golden fishnet shirt, just to be fashionable. A person in a glistening silk and gold dress holding a silver bow and arrow riding a peacock – no wonder the gods made him the commander of their army. No enemy can remain calm after facing such a shining adversary.

The daughters were more conservative looking, and honestly speaking, more respect-inspiring for me. I mean which child really cares about wars and armies and success in business? But even as a child I understood the basic necessities of life: money and food and marks in the exams. As a grad student, these things are still of utmost importance in my life, so I better not crack any jokes about the nice ladies and their avian pets. Only, as a child I often wondered how come the owl never ate the mouse when they came together. I also noticed that although Lakshmi and Saraswati looked almost like twins, Lakshmi had got her mother’s complexion while Saraswati seemed to have got her father’s. That conclusion wasn’t easy to reach, of course, because the father was rarely visible with the rest of the family. However, where he was visible, it was evident where Saraswati’s white complexion and Ganesha’s pot-belly came from. The Shiva I saw was such a nice amiable looking gentleman – sort of a long-haired laughing Buddha with a pair of Hercule Poirot moustaches – that it was difficult to imagine him as capable of any kind of dance, let alone being the destroyer of the universe. He appeared to be the gentle husband completely overshadowed by his wife.

His wife. Ma Durga. The destroyer of the buffalo-demon. The daughter of the house visiting her father. Hence the centre of attraction.

She was the one we children stared at for hours. Balanced atop a lion, she held weapons in her ten hands. She had already impaled the buffalo-demon Mahishasura at most pandels. A mutilated buffalo with a severed head lay at her feet. Sometimes her expression was angry, and sometimes sweet and calm. With flowing curly dark hair visible under her crown, the three-eyed goddess was the definition of unearthly beauty. Our favourite pastime was trying to identify her weapons, and matching which of the weapons were common between different idols. We got particularly excited if one weapon was a live snake that was biting Mahishasura.

I did not realize it at the time, but now when I think about it, it does not seem strange at all that a child, when told that a three-eyed, ten-handed, lion-riding woman is his (and everybody else’s) mother, believes it. The most beautiful woman in the world, protecting me from all evil and doing everything with five times the efficiency of a normal two-handed person. Sometimes angry and sometimes smiling. That’s how I would have described my mother as well. So what was so different about the goddess?

Probably that is why she always seemed so close, so beloved. That would explain the lump in my throat on the last day of the festival. That would explain what I feel like sitting here in “the Land of the Free” on Panchami evening typing out childhood memories. There are some things that do not lose their charm even when we grow up, and the festival of Durga Puja is one of those things for me. With each passing year spent outside Bengal, the desire to be part of the puja in my hometown grows more intense in my heart. I want to go and stand at Ma Durga's feet and look up into her eyes. I want to be awed by her weapons, her ornaments and her heavenly beauty, just like my childhood days.

Liberty tries to be impressive too, but she only has two hands.

Twitter's Tale

2010-08-23T13:42:00.000-04:00

God has a twisted sense of humour, because there is no other way you can explain my meeting with Twitter.

While returning from college, I either get off at the station nearest to my house and walk home through the park, or get off at the next station (if I have some work there) and walk home over the road. It can’t be both. It was never both until last Tuesday. On Tuesday, I alighted at the next station with a friend who had some work there, and as he was returning, I just boarded the returning train with him. “I’ll return to my station by train,” I thought. “The walk through the park is better.”

And while in the park I noticed an unusually shaped dark mass among the leaves under a tree. I could have easily trodden over the small thing if it had not uttered chirping sounds. When I looked properly, it was a baby bird. As I stooped to get a better look, a tiny beak opened into a yellow gaping mouth that could mean only one thing in any language.

“Food!” it said. I wondered what to do.

On one hand, if I left it there, it could be trampled by humans or mauled by dogs. That spot is very popular with dog walkers. On the other hand, taking it home would almost certainly mean removing it from nature forever. I could not be certain the parents were still feeding it, and surely they would not be able to lift it back into their nest. Death was certain for a bird on the ground. But I had no idea what to feed it, and so I called up a friend who looked up what to feed a baby robin on Google. Then I carried the little creature back home in my hand, King-Kong style.

Feeding it was not easy. While I boiled an egg and thawed some frozen fish, the chick decided to explore the kitchen on foot. A little later, I was mashing the hot boiled egg and boiled fish with cold milk and raisins soaked in water and desperately trying to bring everything to room temperature (that is more variety of food than I eat in one meal). Finally I placed the bird in a tissue-lined deep Tupperware container that it could not jump out of and tried to feed it. But it would not open its mouth for me. After some time I gave up and went upstairs. I updated my Facebook profile with all this news and was instantly bombarded with suggestions. None of that was needed, though, because the bird decided to eat whatever I offered once hunger defeated fear at dinnertime.

A friend said one of her professors keeps abandoned birds and she would ask him to take this one. I decided to take it to the school the next day to hand it over. And so, as I packed my own lunch, I packed a tiny lunchbox with the bird’s food. I kept the bird on the window of my bedroom at night and went to sleep.

When I woke up with frantic chirping in my room, it was 5:45 by my watch and darkness was just fading. I was probably being told to fetch the early worms, but I just cursed the bird under my breath and tried to sleep until my alarm went off at 7:00. Then I got up, got ready for school, fed the bird, fed myself and just as I was about to leave, the friend called to let me know that the professor was out of town. So I was back to my earlier dilemma.

I had done some reading about birds the previous night and a website suggested leaving baby birds in trees or makeshift nests near their original nest often caused the parents to resume feeding them. However, the sooner it was done after rescuing the bird, the better. So I put the chick in a “nest” that I made out of a cardboard box lined with foam and tissue, and put it in a tree near where I had found it. After I went to school I updated this on my Facebook profile.

Over the next few hours, I was berated, booed and criticized by friends on Facebook and Gtalk who accused me of “writing a certain death sentence” for the bird, and also told me what a more compassionate person (such as Gerald Durrell) would have done. By late afternoon I was feeling so guilty and overcome with visions of the chick being devoured by hawks that I left for home early to check on the bird. I could see the box from afar where I had left it, but when I came near and peeked into it, it was empty.

Something told me the chick was alive. So a thorough search ensued which first revealed the original nest on a branch just out of my reach, and then revealed my chick in the grass about 100 yards from the tree I left it on. As I reached for it, it opened its mouth and asked for food. I couldn’t tell whether the parents had fed it, so I put it back in the box and brought it home. As the tired bird fell asleep after a hearty meal, I put a net over the face of the box and considered my options. But before that I gave it a name. Since I was not sure about its gender, I decided to call it Twitter.

I was to realize over the next few days that giving something a name is a sure-shot way of falling in love with it.

Over the next three days I tried various methods to get rid of Twitter. I took him to the university police, the SPCA and some other humane society. Everybody kept redirecting me to somebody else, and finally one of them gave me an address five miles away and told me to drop off my bird there. Everyone also made it amply clear that they primarily handled stray cats and dogs and it was my fault that I had picked up a bird. I wasn’t sure whether they would feed Twitter the way I was doing, or feed him to one of their stray cats. So I decided to stick around with him until the professor returned. By this time, I was an expert in reading Twitter’s gestures and Tweets. My friends jokingly called him my child and tried to convince me to keep him. But I had my objections – I spend the whole day at the university. I go off to Edison on weekends. I go to India for a month every winter. So keeping him permanently was out of the question – Twitter would have to be given away. But before that, I wanted to try one last experiment.

On early Saturday morning, I took Twitter to the park with to put him back in his original nest. I had not done it yet because I was afraid of scaring the other chicks that I had seen there. Now as I climbed on a chair and put Twitter into his nest, I realized just how twisted God’s sense of humour is.

The nest was empty. No sign of the two chicks that I had seen the day before.

As Twitter sat in his nest, I sat a little distance away and kept watch. Gradually he got bored and came out onto the branch, before jumping down and landing softly onto the grass below. I realized the other chicks couldn’t have learnt to fly either, and would surely be around if they were alive. Over the next three hours, Twitter roamed around in the grass mostly alone. The adult robins approached him a couple of times but they maintained their distance. There was no sign of the other chicks, and I was sure they had been eaten by predators.

Wikipedia says robin chicks have a 25% survival rate in the wild. By a strange quirk of fate, Twitter was the first one to fall out of the nest, and he was the only one alive.

At the end of three hours I decided to take him home. He seemed relieved to see me and remained perched on my finger as I walked home. I also shot this video of one of his first attempts at flight.

I had to leave him at home for a few hours on Saturday evening and Sunday morning as I went shopping. Every time I re-entered the house, I was greeted by his joyous tweets. Everything seemed to be going nicely. But all stories do not have a happy ending.

Last night as I was about to take him downstairs for dinner, he fluttered out of my hand and landed on my chair with a thud, before fluttering down to the floor. This did not seem alarming at the time, because this was usual behaviour. However, that thud must have been different, because he was not the same anymore. I could feel he was in pain, and hardly ate anything. He didn’t tweet much and just lowered his head and slept in his box. I knew what was coming. However, being prepared did not prevent me from crying when I woke up in the morning to find that Twitter had not chirped at daybreak, and was sitting still and limp in his box. He was still alive when I picked him up, but very relaxed – not his usual clawing and fluttering self. He did not ask for food, nor ate anything when offered, and within fifteen minutes, he slowly lay down, curled up, and breathed his last as I caressed his little head and neck. I could tell the precise moment when he died as my mother consoled me over phone and told me not to feel guilty for his fall the previous night.

How does one explain these six days? Was it just coincidence or destiny? Being a Hindu, I would probably like to believe that we had shared some bond in a previous birth, or will do so in some future one. Although I was sad as I buried him in the garden, I knew what happened was the best thing that could have happened to him. Twitter was a wild bird. I would not have liked to see that free creature spend his life behind bars. I don’t know for sure, but I would like to believe that he has gone to a place where he can be free. At least until God decides to play a little cruel joke on someone else.

Two Years in America

2010-08-13T14:00:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I went to the airport with a couple of friends to pick up three new students who arrived from India. As I stood waiting for the delayed Jet airways flight with a sheet of paper announcing the name of my university, I remembered that I arrived in a similar fashion exactly two years ago.

I landed in the US on 13th August 2008. True, my arrival was very different from this – I arrived with my cousin sister-in-law and my cousin brother took me to his home. I didn’t have to worry about food, money, phone or any other basic needs for the first few days. Yet, something about these girls reminded me of my first day in this country. The apprehensive glance, the genuine wonder at seeing a lot of things, the evident disappointment on seeing some other things (Newark and Harrison are not among the cleanest and best-looking places in the US), the inability to understand any English spoken by a non-Indian, the too-tired-to-care body language and the melancholy of homesickness hidden ineffectively under their beaming faces – everything indicated to a state of mind that I recognized very well. I had been through it two years ago.

So how was “America” different from my expectations? I had written about some of it back then, but one does not realize everything in the first month. So here I’ll discuss a few more things that surprised me during these two years.

As soon as I came, I was surprised with the lack of people on the streets – especially in the residential areas. I wrote about that earlier. What I did not realize at the time is that New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the United States, and New York City has the highest population. So if I felt these places wore a deserted look, then places like Ithaca, some places in upstate New York en route Niagara and almost everything we saw between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon felt like out of this planet. In this country, you can drive miles without ever coming across a pedestrian. Although I like crowds sometimes, this lack of people along large stretches of highways does create a very soothing view of the countryside which in India would have been dotted with slums, huts and roadside shops.

Americans produce an unbelievable amount of trash. Nobody ever recycles anything that can be thrown away. Whether they are plastic and glass jars, or fully useable furniture and appliances, everything gets thrown away. Tennis players don’t fetch balls that they hit outside the court. Golfers don’t look for balls that don’t land where they intended them to. People don’t climb the stairs if there’s an elevator. Some people have forgotten how to walk. The amount of damage they are doing to the environment is incalculable. But this will not be evident if you see the cities here. New York, one of the largest cities in the world, has an amazingly clear air. The sky is pristine blue and the visibility is about ten miles in clear weather (in Kolkata it is never more than two). Also, in spite of being one of the most light-polluted cities in the world, more stars are visible from New York than from Kolkata (a city that is mostly dark). While this difference probably has a complex explanation involving types of car engines and the quality of fuel used, one thing that is immediately evident is the presence of large parks inside the cities. When I say parks, I don’t mean dusty patches of ground with a swing and a slide, but several hundred acres of wooded area with lakes and wildlife. Once you enter Central Park in New York, only the distant skyline serves as a reminder that you are still in Manhattan. When the people of Kolkata protest against the court’s protection of the Maidan, they fail to realize that they are trying to destroy the city’s only chance of survival. Company Garden in Allahabad is almost exactly like an American park – large and wooded with small areas for gardens, monuments and playgrounds. I’m sure some other Indian cities have such parks too, but we need more of these in our country.

Another thing that I have come to realize about this country in these two years is the fact that the whole country is very much homogenized. You may go to Boston or to Las Vegas and the roads and buildings will look exactly the same despite the fact that the weather is very different in these two places. Having similar houses everywhere may look “neat” but it actually results in tremendous amounts of energy wastage for artificial heating and cooling. But then, energy is cheap here. Petrol is cheaper than water and Coke.

Americans are a strange people. Men have no problem showering naked together in a common bathroom at the gym, yet they will hesitate to sit next to strangers on a train. While a three-seater bench on a Kolkata local train always has four people on it, a three-seater on a New York train will usually have two. People will actually prefer standing to occupying that empty seat, and I have earned quite a few stares by squeezing into empty spots between strangers.

In fact, almost all the differences between the US and India can be traced back to a single factor, and that is population. I realized that soon after coming here, and I will say the same thing now after analyzing this country for two years. What are India’s problems? Pollution? Dirt? Corruption? Rudeness? Dishonesty? Indiscipline? Poverty? Illiteracy? Everything would have gone away (or at least reduced to the level of the US) automatically if the population were to reduce to 10% of the current value. It is not feasible to smile at strangers and say “Hi, how are you doing?” when you meet five hundred of them between your home and the bus stop. It is not rudeness, it is just common sense.

I did not tell these things to the new students. I will let them figure out these things by themselves. I am happy to see that many people of my generation seem to be able to look beyond the outward glitter and see this country for what it is – both good and bad. Many of these people are planning to return to India and make a difference there – something that people who came a few decades earlier did not do. But all that comes later. For the first few months, it is a time for unfeigned wonder: the wonder of seeing skyscrapers, visiting world famous places, looking at things that one has only read about. That does not mean the seeing stops after the first few months, but the enjoyment of seeing things for the first time gradually fades away.

I enjoyed it immensely. Now it is their turn. I will, in the meantime, watch their reactions and relive my memories.

Inception - The Review

2010-07-25T11:57:00.002-04:00

[Before you start reading, please be aware that this post discusses a few plot elements from the recent movie “Inception” and the book “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows” although I don’t think I have given away any major spoilers from either the movie or the book. Also, I think if you are interested in Harry Potter and haven’t read Deathly Hallows by now, probably you deserve spoilers being thrust into your face anyway!]

Mundungus Fletcher had an idea. It was a brilliant escape plan to take Harry away from the Dursleys. Only, it wasn’t he who generated the idea. It was Severus Snape who had gone into his subconscious mind and planted the seed of that idea. When Harry saw Snape doing it, he wasn’t seeing it in the real world of course; he had dived into Snape’s mind and he was looking at the projection of Snape and the projection of Mundungus talking among themselves. And as you know, Harry Potter exists just in the mind of author J. K. Rowling and her millions of fans, and we have no way of knowing whether Christopher Nolan is one of them. So when Nolan had this idea of inception, it was probably triggered by this projection of Mundungus in the mind of Snape’s projection in the mind of Harry who was in turn just a projection in Rowling’s mind – a Rowling who wasn’t real but just a projection of Nolan’s own subconscious.

Confused yet? Welcome to the world of Inception.

Christoper Nolan’s latest movie explores the world of dreams and the subconscious mind, and questions reality in a way that probably only “The Matrix” did in recent times. It is built on the premise that several people can share a dream and interact in the dreamer’s subconscious. There can also be a dream within a dream, a concept that we computer programmers call “recursion.” And just as in computer programming, if the exit condition is not specified properly, one runs into all kinds of problems.

The movie plays with its timeline in a very interesting way – without giving away any key plot points, let me say that when we dream for a few seconds, the incidents that occur in the dream span a much larger time. This “expansion of time” has been cleverly used throughout the movie which is as full of action and special effects as all action movies these days seem to be.

That’s about all I am going to say regarding this movie. Too much discussion is likely to harm your viewing experience. Leonardo DiCaprio is good as usual, as is the rest of the cast. Nothing new needs to be said about Nolan’s direction after “The Dark Knight” and Hans Zimmer’s music is lovely as usual. There is only one thing more that I want to say about this movie.

That is about the concept. The idea.

The protagonist in the movie says, “What's the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. Which is why I have to steal it.” While nobody is accusing Christopher Nolan of stealing someone’s idea, the concept is not entirely original either. In stories all over the world, people interacting through dreams with other people both living and dead is a well-known plot device. As far as questioning reality and bending the rules of physics is concerned, The Matrix got there first, and the science of The Matrix (only the first one) was much more believable. Not that The Matrix was original either – we Indians have always known that the world is just Maya, but that is not relevant to this discussion here. What is relevant is the fact that the comparisons with The Matrix are inevitable for Inception, and according to me, Inception loses on that front.

And that is why, my final verdict is that while Inception is a very well-made movie, it left me a little disappointed. I don’t know whether the trailers were too explicit, or I had set my expectations a bit too high reading the “OMG Inception is the best movie made in like, ever!” Facebook status updates from some of my friends. But when I saw The Matrix, I felt it was full of surprises. Inception, on the other hand, felt predictable to the very end – not in the details of course, but in the overall plot. To be fair, I saw The Matrix when I was a lot younger, I had not seen trailers, and Facebook did not exist back then (I know I sound like somebody’s grandfather saying that line).

Inception is definitely an excellent movie. A “must-watch,” to use the oft-used phrase. But a life-changing experience as some people around me seem to claim? No way! Four stars out of five if you ask me. The Matrix would probably get five. Not Inception.

But then, it was The Matrix that planted the seed of the idea in our minds. Inception pays the price of coming second, and it does a very good job of being the second.

Tolerance

2010-07-19T14:45:00.002-04:00

The other day someone asked me how I am surviving the summer without an air-conditioner in my attic room. The question may come as a surprise to people who don't know that New York City touched forty degrees Celsius last week. For me, however, the surprise was of a different kind. The very idea that I would be unable to survive without an air-conditioner in forty degree heat was laughable. After all, I have grown up in Allahabad where forty-five was the norm during summer and I had to bicycle back from school when candles turned liquid within minutes in the sun. Also, much of the day was spent without power supply and hence the absence of even a fan was a mere inconvenience that we learned to live with. And while explaining all this to my questioner, I thought about all the different ways in which growing up in India has hardened me against difficult situations. Some of the day-to-day situations that are very commonplace for me are extremely disturbing for my American companions, and this forms the basis for this post.

The first incident that comes to mind involves a mosquito. I was sitting at the subway station near my home one day while immersed in an interesting book. Suddenly, I heard something like “Ewwwww!!!” in a feminine voice from my left side and looked up. There was a teenage girl sitting next to me, and she was pointing at my knee with an expression of extreme horror and disgust on her face. Sitting close to people, pointing at them and saying “Ew” are all extremely rare in this country and so I decided to follow her finger and look at my knee. There, on my trouser-covered joint, sat a particularly large and juicy striped mosquito, which on brief inspection didn’t seem much different from the ones back home. Therefore I decided against treating it any different from the ones back home: I swatted it with my palm, dusted the carcass away and got back to my book. But as long as I sat there, I was keenly aware of a pair of eyes that pierced me with a gaze that was a mix of awe and disgust. After all, how could a common man kill such a big mosquito with his bare hands?

The second incident that I can remember didn’t strictly happen to me. It happened to my Turkish roommate. Someone at school explained to him that houses built prior to 1930 have lead pipes and people living there were in risk of lead poisoning. My roommate said our house was built in 1928, and so it must be having lead pipes. The other person apologized for scaring him, but my roommate just laughed in his face and said “I’m coming from Turkey; I don’t care about that stuff.”

I remember feeling really amused when I saw weather.com’s air quality alert for the first time. They advised people to stay indoors because the concentration of ozone near the ground was likely to be high during the day. I had to look up ozone in Wikipedia to find out what happens in ozone poisoning and what causes the ozone level to increase, and came to the conclusion that back home in India every day must have been a high-ozone day but nobody knew about it.

Be it something related to food or drink, or the weather, or phone, electricity or train services – whenever something falls out of the ordinary, the American way of living is thrown into disarray. People lose their way while driving as soon as the GPS gets confused. Take away cell phones and even basic tasks seem impossible. And the less one says about the Internet, the better. I have seen people sitting with the setting sun on their face, and breaking their heads over Google Maps trying to ascertain which direction they are facing. I, on the other hand, try to keep my dependence on machines to a minimum (a battle that I seem to be gradually losing) just because I want to make things easier for me when I go back to India.

Coming back to hilarious situations, the most memorable one occurred during one of the classes that I was teaching. I normally write a problem on the board at the beginning of the class. That day while writing on the board I was aware of a growing murmur in the class behind my back. I turned to find the students talking among themselves excitedly. “What’s the matter?” I snapped. “The place is crawling with bugs,” came the reply. Now I noticed there were winged termite-like insects all over the floor of the lab. Back home these insects come out during the rains and are considered quite harmless. So I asked the nearest student, with genuine impassivity, “So what’s the matter? Are they biting you?” He stared at me with a look of incredulity and replied in a hurt voice, “I do not want to sit in a classroom full of bugs even if they don’t bite me.” I realized my mistake and quickly moved to an adjoining room. Our tolerance of such extraordinary situations as normal can be very unnerving to Americans. Like the time when someone threw a dead kitten in our garbage bin, greatly upsetting my landlord. I remained calm and mildly amused throughout the whole incident, but that’s another story.

Of course, I maybe better adapted to commuting on an overcrowded train, but that does not mean I am always the one with the higher tolerance for something bad. I realized this when I was going to Ithaca a few days after arriving in the USA. As I bought the bus ticket, the gentleman at the counter gave me a badly torn $20 bill. “Can you change this please?” I asked. He gave me a surprised look and asked what was wrong with it. I showed him the tear which ran halfway down the bill. He replied “So?” and dismissed me with a wave of his hand. I later came to know that we Indians may have a better tolerance to heat or mosquitoes, but when it comes to torn currency notes, almost anything can be used in this country.

The Wrong Heaven

2010-07-06T13:07:00.000-04:00

Came across this short story by Rabindranath Tagore while browsing through his works online, and couldn't resist the temptation to translate it. Is it just me, or do the people of heaven really look vaguely familiar?

The Wrong Heaven

~Rabindranath Tagore

-1-

The man was simply jobless.

He had no work, only a multitude of hobbies.

He used to pour earth into small wooden squares and then arranged small shells on it. From afar they looked like untidy paintings, with flocks of birds or uneven fields with cattle grazing; or undulating mountains with a stream flowing down, or perhaps a small walking-trail.

His family never ceased nagging him. Sometimes he vowed to let go of this madness, but the madness never let go of him.

-2-

There are some students who shirk studies all year round, but pass the exams by fluke. A similar predicament befell this man.

His life was spent in useless work, but after death he came to know that he had been granted entry in heaven.

But a man’s fate doesn’t leave him even when he is going to heaven. The messengers mixed up their records and put him in the hardworking people’s heaven.

In this heaven they have everything, only no leisure.

Here the men constantly say, “We don’t have time to breathe.” The women say, “Must go now, we have a lot of work pending.” Everyone says, “Time is expensive.” No one says, “Time is priceless.” Everyone grumbles, “Can’t work so hard” and they feel very happy saying it. The complaint “This hard work is killing us” is music to their ears.

Our poor man does not find a place here, he does not fit in. If he walks absent-mindedly on the road, he gets in the way of busy people. Wherever he spreads out his sheet to rest, he finds it is agricultural land and crops have been sown there. Constantly, he has to get up, he has to move away.

-3-

A very busy girl comes to fetch water from the heavenly water-source everyday.

She walks on the road like quick-rhythm music played on the sitar.

She has hurriedly tied up her loose hair into an untidy bun. Still, a few naughty locks are peeking down over her forehead to see her black eyes.

Our heavenly jobless man was standing at the side of the road, motionless like a tree by the restless spring.

The girl felt pity for this man, just as a princess feels pity seeing a beggar from her window.

“Don’t you have any work on your hands?”

The man sighed and said, “I don’t have the time to do work.”

The girl did not understand anything at all. “Do you want to take some work from my hands?” she asked.

The man said, “I am standing here just to take some work from your hands.”

“What work can I give you?”

“It would be nice if you could give me one of the pots of water that you carry at your waist.”

“What will you do with a pot? Fill water?”

“No, I will paint on its surface.”

The girl replied heatedly, “I don’t have time for this. I’ll go now.”

But how can a busy person be a match for an idle person? Everyday they met at the spring, and each day he said the same thing, “Give me a pot from your waist. I will paint on it.”

Finally she relented. She gave him a pot.

Around that pot the jobless man started painting multi-coloured loops, multi-lined patterns.

When he was done, the girl picked up the pot, turned it around and looked at it from all sides. She arched her eyebrows and asked, “What does this mean?”

The idle man said, “This has no meaning.”

The girl went home with her pot.

She secretly observed it in different lights, from different angles. At night, she left her bed to light a lamp and sit silently to look at that picture. In all her life, this was the first time she had seen something that had no meaning.

When she came to the spring the next day, the busy rhythm of her feet had a slight disturbance. It seemed as if while walking, her feet were absent mindedly thinking about – about something that had no meaning.

The man was again standing by the side of the road.

The girl said, “What do you want?”

He said, “I want more work from your hands.”

“What work can I give you?”

“If you agree, I will weave a ribbon for your hair from colourful threads.”

“What good will it do?”

“Nothing.”

Many different coloured ribbons were made, of many different designs. Now the girl spent a lot of time braiding her hair in front of a mirror. Her work remained unfinished, hours passed by.

-4-

Soon, the work in the hardworking people’s heaven started filling up with large gaps. Those gaps were filled up with songs and sobs.

The heavenly elders became worried. They called a meeting. They said, “This is the first time such a thing has happened in the history of heaven.”

The messenger came and confessed his mistake. “I delivered the wrong man to the wrong heaven,” he said.

The wrong man was summoned to the meeting. One look at his colourful turban and flashy belt was enough to convince everybody that it was indeed a big mistake.

The chairman said, “You will have to go back to earth.”

He tied his bag of paints and brushes to his belt and breathed a sigh of relief. “All right, I’m leaving then.”

The girl came and said, “I’ll go with him too.”

The elderly chairman became absent-minded. For the first time in his life he had seen something that had no meaning.

(Translation by Sugata Banerji.)

Whale of a Time

2010-06-20T14:04:00.001-04:00

From a very young age, I have always been interested in whales. It could be because of the numerous animal picture books in our house or because of an audio cassette of the humpback whales’ famous songs that my father sometimes played, I always wanted to see these magnificent creatures. So it was inevitable that when I decided to visit some friends in Boston for a week, the activity that I was looking forward to most eagerly was not visiting MIT or Harvard but going on a whale-watching cruise.

Our catamaran started from Long Wharf in Boston on a fine Monday morning at ten. I was on the topmost deck as the boat gathered speed and moved out into open sea. The wind was more forceful than I had ever faced in my life, and although the weather was uncomfortably hot when we started, soon everyone was shivering and putting on jackets.

The beginning was very exciting. The deep blue water, the Boston skyline, the planes landing at the Logan International Airport and the windmills and lighthouses nearby provided ample material to keep the photographers busy. I walked around from bow to stern taking photos and watching people and photographing small islands as we passed by them.

Then we left all that behind, and it got boring. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear except the wind. The wind and the engine collaborated to make any attempt to converse with fellow-passengers futile.

This being my first sea voyage (if a three-hour trip can be called that), I was probably a bit more enthusiastic than the majority of the crowd, who had by now either settled down in the comfort of the air-conditioned cabin or were sitting down on the floor of the deck to escape the howling wind. I was, of course, considering myself a mix of Captain Ahab, Captain Nemo, Christopher Columbus and Jack from the Titanic movie and stood at my post at the very nose of the vessel. Except for a brief moment when I had ducked down under the parapet and put on my jacket, I refused to look away from the horizon. I wanted to be the first person to spot the whales.

About one and a half hour after we had started, the public address systems on the vessel crackled to life. Nobody could hear anything, of course, unless they ducked down under the wind, but the whole crowd flocked out on the decks sensing something interesting was about to happen. I crouched down momentarily and realized they were talking about the whales in general, and I chose to scan the horizon deaf, rather than listen to whale experts blind.

“Whale there!” shouted the gentleman next to me suddenly. He was pointing towards a vessel similar to ours in the distance. “I just saw a spout on the left side of that boat,” he said. The boat in question was very far away, and I pointed my telephoto lens towards it. Sure enough, soon there was a fountain of water next to the boat, followed by an unmistakable black tail being thrust skywards. It was gone before I had time to focus (see photo). It was incredibly far – it was a miracle that the man had seen it in the first place. Evidently, the crew had seen it too, for we headed in the direction of the sighting. And as we approached the place, we saw white spouts and black bodies of the humpbacks coming closer and closer until they were just next to our ship.

The engines were cut off and the wind stopped howling immediately. The whale expert’s voice was clear now, but I was not listening to her. There were three glistening backs in the water. They took turns releasing their breath in sprays, and then doing somersaults in the water, never exposing too much of their bodies until they came to the tail. Then they would thrust the tail heavenwards and clear of the water before diving down while the water where they just dove acquired a strange oily flat look. If imagining a creature as big as a bus seems difficult, try imagining one that is as big as a bus and as graceful as a mermaid in water. All the cameras in the crowd went crazy. Then they surfaced on the other side of the boat and the whole crowd rushed from the starboard side to the port side, setting up a slight rocking movement in the process.

It was precisely at this moment when the first wave of nausea hit me.

In the excitement of the trip, I had forgotten all about my motion sickness problem and had failed to take any preventive medicines that I usually carry. Now as the boat bobbed on the waves and everyone struggled to maintain a foothold while holding cameras, I had a new worry – where to go if I wanted to throw up. Fortunately, I never needed to find out the answer.

The intense seasickness curbed my enjoyment to a great extent, but that does not mean I took my eyes – or my camera – off from the whales for one single moment. The three whales that were swimming around us included two females called Tornado and Nile (named after marks on their tails) and a third individual who was not recognized.

After spending some time with the whales, the catamaran started its engines and moved away looking for more pods. As we accelerated, I noted with relief that my seasickness was limited to the times when we were free-floating near the whales and subsided when the boat was moving and hence more stable. We soon found another pair of whales where we repeated the same maneuver as before. Then we saw another three, and finally another two some distance away, bringing the total count up to ten before turning back towards Boston. Everywhere, we saw flippers, tails, backs and spouts, and once even got a clear shot of the blow-holes, but we were never lucky enough to see a whale breaching. Breaching is the process by which a whale clears the surface of the water and throws its body partly or fully out into the air before landing back with a tremendous splash. We did not see it. And frankly, after the four stops that caused four separate bouts of seasickness, I wasn’t too sad about heading back.

I spent the return journey in the cabin – dozing half the time and talking to my parents the other half. Even when apparently in open sea, cell phone signals never deserted us. When I felt firm ground after my feet again about three-and-a-half hours after we had started, I wondered how people spend months on board ships at once. That little time was too much for me to endure.

That does not mean I am not going back, of course. After looking at those gigantic creatures so close, I consider my life incomplete unless I see and photograph a breaching whale. Until then, I’ll have to live with the memories of those white fountains and shiny black-and-white tails.

New-grandpa

2010-05-18T09:20:00.001-04:00

"I bet you are not as strong as I am!" said the old man.

"Oh really? Dare to test that?" said the child beside him.

"Sure. I am balling my hand in a fist, let's see if you can open it."

And so it started, the child's struggle to open the fist. It seemed completely impenetrable at first, and the man kept casting doubts over the diet the child was growing up on if he was so weak. But after some time, the fist seemed to loosen up a little, and then suddenly, a little too suddenly perhaps, the child won. "Well, I am growing old," the man said, "and you are growing up. Can't win all the time!" The child was too happy to realize that even if he was growing up, he was not really strong enough to have opened that fist by himself if the old man had not faked his defeat.

The child grew up into a man and the old man grew older. Now nobody could have cast a doubt as to who was the stronger of the two. And yet, whenever they met, this tradition of opening the fist continued.

"You seem to have grown big. Are you strong enough?"

"Yeah. Want to test it?"

"Yes, let's see if you can open my fist."

Now the pretension was on the other side, but the outcome was the same. The young man seemed to struggle with the hand initially, and then opened it flat with ease. And then both of them laughed out loud at this silly game.

I don't know when this game started as I was too young at that time, but I know it ended yesterday when the old man passed away. I know I will not be opening his tight fist again and rejoicing over my victory.

He was my father's uncle - my grandmother's sister's husband, if that makes it clearer. My American friends will be surprised that such a relation even exists. It is pointless trying to explain what such a relationship could mean. There is no use trying to explain that you can really have more than one grandfather. No wonder we Indians are considered weird - we keep track of such people and consider them relatives. And yet, weird as it may sound, I called him "natun-dadu" which means "new-grandpa."

He was always an equal-aged playmate for me and my cousin, and with him, we knew we could get away with jokes and pranks that our "own" grandpas were too serious for. For instance, once when he was sitting at our house during a puja, I and my cousin competed with each other trying to see who could take out the most things by picking his pocket. We put them all back, of course - we did not have any use for his house keys, his pouch of tobacco and his strips of cigarette paper.

We, the children (I still prefer to put myself in that group), always thought natun-dadu was one of "us" but the truth is, he was equally mischievous with the adults - with my grandparents and my parents. He was notorious for his April fool pranks on unsuspecting relatives every year, and sometimes friends and even mere acquaintances became the victims. Like the time when he sent my grandma and the whole crowd of regular morning-walking ladies of Hooghly to a particular ghat on the Ganga to see the yachts with colourful sails that had assembled there. Who remembers the date when they go on a morning walk?

All that is past now. We don't have to stay alert on April 1 from now on, because most grown-ups are usually too busy to indulge in silly stuff like pranks.

Only, it makes me feel insecure. In the last few months, two of the close relatives whom I met during my last visit to India passed away (the other being my grandma's brother's wife). It makes me realize that when I go home after finishing my Ph.D., home will be a very different place, and many of the people who made growing up such a joyful experience for me will not be there any more.

I may have grown strong enough to open an old man's fist, but I am still not strong enough to not miss him when he is gone.

Africa

2010-05-08T16:35:00.010-04:00

Which is the language that the largest number of people sing their national anthem in?

Is it English? Is it Chinese (Mandarin)? It couldn't be English as only 940 million people in the world sing English anthems while 1.25 billion people sing the Chinese anthem. But Mandarin isn't the correct answer either. Bangla is the winner here with 1.3 billion people singing their national anthem in Bangla. This figure is the total population of India and Bangladesh combined. This seems more surprising because we are used to looking at Bangla as a regional language and never think that our national anthem is written in it. I won't be surprised if the rumours floating around the Internet saying UNESCO has selected Bangla as the sweetest language in the world turn out to be true.

Coming back to the national anthem thing, it is a mighty impressive achievement for a language that the largest number of people sing their national anthem in that language, but even that achievement pales in comparison when we realize that all those 1.3 billion people sing national anthems that were written by just one man.

Today is that man's 149th birth anniversary.

Here is my attempt at translating one of his better-known poems. Unlike my earlier translations, this poem does not have rhyming lines. That is because the original Bangla version is also non-rhyming. However, I have tried to maintain the relative lengths of the lines and preserve the alliterations wherever possible.

Africa

~Rabindranath Tagore

In that chaotic early age

When The Creator, dissatisfied with Himself

Was repeatedly destroying His new creation,

In those days of His impatient head-shaking

The angry ocean’s arms

From the eastern earth’s breast

Snatched you away, Africa,

Locked you up under the dense guard of trees

In the inner chambers of meager light.

There, in solitary leisure you collected

The mysteries of the impenetrable,

Learnt the complex language of earth and sky,

Nature’s unfathomable wonders

Were enchanting your superconscious mind.

You were mocking the terrible

Under the guise of dissatisfaction,

Attempting to defeat fear

By turning fierce in the aura of the terrifying

Dancing to the drumbeats of destruction.

Alas, Shaded Lady,

Under your black hood

Your human face lay unrecognized

To the clouded vision of neglect.

They came with iron handcuffs

With claws sharper than your wolves’,

They came, the human-catchers

With arrogance more blinding than your sunless forests.

The barbaric greed of the civilized

Bared its shameless inhumanity.

In your jungle paths steamy with wordless sobs

The dust turned to muck with your blood and tears;

Under the nail-studded boots of the plunderers

That horrifying mass of mud

Put an indelible mark on your insulted history.

At that very moment in their hometowns across the ocean

Worship-bells rang in temples

At daybreak and dusk, in the name of gracious God;

Children were playing in their mother’s laps

Poets were singing to music

Their odes to beauty.

Today, when on the western horizon

Evening holds its breath before a storm,

When the animals have come out of their concealed caves,

And announced the end of the day in their ominous voice,

Come, O new-age poet,

In the last rays before the impending night

Stand at that disgraced damsel’s door,

Say “Forgive us” –

Amidst the violent delirium

Let these be the last sacred words of your civilization.

(Translated by Sugata Banerji)

Justice

2010-05-06T17:30:00.006-04:00

The day ended with a happy note for me today as a bit of good news found its way onto my Facebook homepage this evening. It was the news that Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist captured alive in the 26/11 Mumbai attack, had been sentenced to death. It was a much awaited decision, and one that I expected to be widely welcomed despite being too little and too late. A little later, I was proved wrong by two friends (and several unknown people on Facebook) who protested vehemently against the decision. So this post is to clarify my stand on this issue.

If, as a reader, you are disgusted at the tone of glee I express at someone’s death sentence, please read on. This post is particularly for you.

I am usually bad at remembering names, but one name got indelibly etched in my memory the day I heard it almost eleven years ago. The name is Ripen Katyal. It belonged to a 25 year old man who was returning from his honeymoon trip to Nepal on Indian Airlines flight IC-814. His crime was the same as mine – being a citizen of India. The plane was hijacked and taken to Kandahar via Lahore. Ripen’s throat was slashed for not following the hijackers’ instructions while a government that prided itself on testing a nuclear bomb in a desert tried to think of a plan. After several days, three of the most dangerous terrorists ever caught in India had to be returned to Pakistan in exchange for the planeful of people. Only Ripen Katyal didn’t return.

I asked a lot of questions then which remained mostly unanswered. One of them was, why couldn’t they have put a slow acting poison in the three released terrorists’ last meal with the Indian authorities? I was told that wasn’t playing fair – as if hijacking a plane was playing fair. But the question that most Indians asked was, why hadn’t these terrorist masterminds been killed already? Although the answer provided by the government was vague and unconvincing, today’s incident proved that Indians seem to have learnt a lesson since then as the judge handling Kasab's case said today.

Describing the 22-year-old Lashkar-trained terrorist as "a menace to society", Tahaliyani specifically alluded to the 1999 Kandahar case in 1999, when an Indian plane was hijacked to free dangerous terrorists who were imprisoned at the time. "Keeping him alive would be a constant danger to government and the state," he said.

Now a number of people, some of them my friends, are arguing about the relevance of capital punishment in civilized society. They say the state should be compassionate. The state does not have the right to kill anyone just because it does not believe in their ideology. Only people like Kasab have the right to kill. Well, ok, my friend didn’t really say that last one, but you get the gist of what he meant.

The funny thing is, I would have loved to agree with them. I would love that because then that would have meant we live in an ideal society where every criminal commits a crime for his “ideology” and reforms himself when given a chance. However, we do not live in such a world, and so, punishment for crime becomes necessary. But is any crime bad enough to award the death penalty? Let’s see what the condemned man did: he is charged with the murder of 166 men, women and children. Of course, some friends had told me after 26/11 that “a few hundred civilian casualties per year is a small price that we are willing to pay in exchange for not having a full-blown war,” but the judge seemed to disagree with that point of view. When the security cameras recorded Kasab shooting indiscriminately into the crowd at the Mumbai CST station, he seemed to enjoy it. Can such a man be trusted to repent what he did and reform himself? And even if he does, what will we achieve? After spending a few crores of the taxpayers’ money on his trial, security and jail facilities, we will have a good citizen. We have about a billion of them already, and we don’t want another one. However, execute him with enough media focus and you have created an example. Like USA did with Saddam Hussain. Personally I would enjoy seeing a YouTube video of Kasab’s hanging, though unfortunately it may be some time before we can see that.

So far I have discussed two arguments in favour of the hanging. Firstly, Ajmal Kasab is like radioactive waste in human form – the sooner we dispose of him, the better. Secondly, his crimes are too grave and chance of repentance too small to make mercy worthwhile. I will end with the biggest reason why he should be hanged: justice.

Kasab came from Pakistan and attacked India, killing innocent civilians without remorse. We cannot really do anything to do justice here – nothing we do will bring back those 166 people. But the families of those people will live a little happier knowing that the person who killed their loved ones isn’t roaming free himself, enjoying life. That, according to me, is the single most important reason why Kasab needs to be killed. Of course, people are arguing that he should be treated with compassion, which we are doing. Ideally, he should have been shot 166 times in non-lethal places in his body and left to die from gangrene. Publicly if possible. But we are a compassionate society – we do not employ such brutal means of punishment which people from Kasab’s own faith prefer in the Arab countries. We are also a spineless society – we do not have the guts to go and do to Pakistan what US did to Japan after Pearl Harbour or to Afghanistan after 9/11. So the only way we can serve justice is by killing this man. We will (hopefully) hang him away from the public eye, in a dignified manner. It is almost like giving the guy an easy way out, but that’s the most we can do. Let’s not hesitate in this little punishment. Some people may point out that he is just a scapegoat, but then, the meat of a scapegoat is just as tasty. I’m sure most people of our country would love to see Kasab hanged.

So friends, I am not convinced by your arguments that Ajmal Kasab doesn’t deserve the death penalty. One killing does not justify another, you say? We can have a nice little argument about that, but after Kasab is hanged. I have to travel on a lot of Indian flights, and I’m sorry if I sound selfish here, but I value my life more than his. I don't want to end up like Ripen Katyal. There is only one way by which you can make me see your point of view, and it is like this: come to me and repeat these same ideas about compassion and the government’s right to kill after one of your parents or siblings or children or a life partner has been killed in a terrorist attack. Nothing personal, of course! I would express my gravest condolences, and wholeheartedly agree with you that although your beloved had to be carried away in four different pieces, killing the captured terrorist wouldn’t serve any purpose.

Oh, and in case you are outraged at my suggestion that such a thing might happen, I think I have made my point.

Update: Check out this video in case you aren't convinced. Beware, it is not for the weak of heart.

The Little Zoo

2010-05-01T12:40:00.000-04:00

Last Weekend I went to see a zoo.

I knew it was a very small zoo – not a large affair with fancy expensive animals. It was just a few enclosures within a children’s park. But even I wasn’t prepared for the star attraction of the zoo – the animal enclosure that had drawn a huge crowd of children and their parents around it.

An enclosure for billy-goats. Yes – simple, bearded goats that roam the streets in India.

The kids were hysterical with enthusiasm – they were trying to feed the goats through the fence. Back home, the goats ate up our garden through the fence and we had to struggle to keep them away.

They seemed undeterred by the typical billy-goat smell emanating from the animals. Back home in India, when we have to describe someone with the strongest of body odours, we compare him to a billy-goat. I agree that animals will have a bit of body odour and zoo goers have no option but to stand it, but we are looking at goats, for heaven’s sake, not tigers that we have to hold our breath and ogle!

Some children were teasing the goats by tempting them with food, and then running along the fence while the goats ran after them greedily. Alas, these children have never had the experience of being chased down the road by a billy-goat as large as a calf that really meant business. Oh, the joys of growing up in Allahabad! On one hand, it prepares you for all kinds of situations you may find yourself in later in your life. On the other hand, your mind forms certain rather unfavourable and inflexible generalizations about the behaviours of certain species which you may find difficult to change later in life. I, for example, have learnt to adore goats, but only when they are on my plate.

The next enclosure held roosters and hens. The only difference that I noticed between these birds and the ones that are found around our house in Hooghly is their increased self-confidence. These chickens were trying to fly. Every now and then they flapped their wings frantically and made a glorified jump of a couple of feet or so. Or it may have been due to their heightened stupidity. I could not tell which, so I moved on.

The next in line was a fox. The raised ears, the bushy tail and the clever eyes reminded me of the little fox that I had nearly tamed back in Hooghly five years ago. He was a wild creature who lived in an overgrown plot of land close to our house. I had not read Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” back then, but my interactions with that doglike yet vastly different creature went just as described in that book.

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me – like that – in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."

I had observed the proper rites. I fed him bread every evening at six, until I had to leave for Chennai to join my first job. Now all these incidents seem as if they are from a previous birth. My fox was a free creature. This one was in a small cage. It made me sad, so I moved on.

There were raccoons, coyotes, a sleeping boa constrictor and some birds (geese, doves, pheasants) in the next few pens. There was one marked “pot bellied pig” and I was almost thankful that it was empty. I have seen enough free pigs since my childhood, pot-bellied or otherwise, to want to see one in a zoo. Why, there was this gigantic pig that lived right next to our gate in Allahabad, and whom we jokingly called our guard. The glum faces of the children around me told a different story though – they wanted to see what a real pig looked like, I mean outside the cartoons, and they were disappointed.

I was also thankful that the donkey enclosure was empty. I think a donkey is one of the most thoughtful and serious of God’s creatures. We used to see the free donkeys (probably not really free – they were just out grazing while their masters washed clothes) near the Allahabad University while returning home from school. They were always so deeply engrossed in thought that it seemed the busy street had ceased to exist around them. Running and jumping are for frivolous creatures like horses – a donkey enjoys a life of procrastination. In fact the only creature that I have seen enjoying procrastination more than a donkey is a Ph.D. student, but I’d rather not get into that right now. The donkeys in this zoo were absent and I preferred absent donkeys to absent-minded ones behind bars.

As we approached the next plot of land, we saw something that can be described as a dwarf horse. Horses are, of course, quite abundant even here in the US. I have seen police horses all over Newark and New York City. Horses were even more abundant in Allahabad where I grew up. In fact there was an old one that was kept tied to a park railing in front of our house. The black horse in the zoo was, however, very different from the horses that I had seen before. This one was about as big as the billy-goat that had chased me in Allahabad and had really long hair on its neck and tail. It seemed too bored to even walk around inside its enclosure. Or it may have learnt a lesson or two in philosophy from the donkeys next door.

Next there was a llama, a couple of emus and a deer. They were pretty interesting creatures on paper, but were quite boring in reality. The emus chose the corner farthest from us to engage in their domestic conversation, the deer behaved like the goats next door (yes, there were more goats next door – they could have supplied a banquet) and the llama was the most shabby looking creature I have ever seen. It may have been unfair of me to expect it to come close to me and spit on my face like the ones in “Prisoners of the Sun” did, but at least it could have given some indication that it acknowledged my existence. Nothing. Quite insulting, really!

But the question that comes to the mind after this zoo visit is: which is a better environment to grow up? One where you have to dodge buffaloes while stepping over cow dung every time you step out on the street, or the one where you have to visit the zoo to see goats and pigs? I don’t know the correct answer to that question, but I definitely know which one I prefer.

Judgment

2010-04-19T15:13:00.003-04:00

Judgment

~Rabindranath Tagore

(Original Bengali version here)

My little child has a lot of faults

I know them every bit,

Though to others that I may not admit.

Sometimes I can’t check his

Mischief maybe,

But that’s the deal of good and bad

Between him and me.

You strangers can judge him

Or blame him with ease

As much as you please,

That verdict why should I heed?

I love him because he’s my child

And not for his good deeds.

How much my child means to me

Will never dawn on you.

His flaws are all that you can view.

I punish him if I need to

But I hold him near,

If I have to make him cry

I must shed a tear.

I judge him, or punish him,

Or blame him with ease

As much as I please.

Your censures we don’t value.

The right to censure only rests

With the one who loves too.

(Translated by Sugata Banerji)

One of the best things to have happened in the past year is the availability of Tagore's works on the Web at the two sites here and here. Now I can translate poems more often, and also get more poems to choose from. And can someone please tell me how to insert tabs in poems on blogger? I go crazy maintaining the format each time I post a translation!

Haircuts

2010-04-10T03:00:00.003-04:00

In my childhood, I was afraid of three things: gorillas, spiders and haircuts.

Gorillas were pretty hard to come by where I lived, and although I was scared to death lest one managed to slip under my bed at night, I never came face to face with a gorilla until I came to the city of King Kong.

In comparison, spiders were much more common. From the black hairy wild ones of near-tarantula size that haunted our bathroom in Hooghly to the thin wispy ones with stick-like legs that rained around me when my mom cleaned the cobwebs from our ceiling in Allahabad, they were too omnipresent to avoid completely. But the chances of my actually coming in physical contact with a spider were pretty slim as I was always careful to put the maximum distance possible between me and the nearest specimen.

Haircuts, on the other hand, were not so easy to avoid.

It may not be easy to fathom the reason for my dread of a haircut which is probably the most regular and inevitable ritual in a man's life. Let me elaborate a little. My earliest memory of a haircut isn't bad actually. In fact, it isn't much of a memory at all - just a vague recollection that a gentleman called Ananda came to cut my grandfather's hair at our house in Hooghly and he cut mine as well. At the time he seemed to me as old as my grandfather, but the accuracy of that estimate is highly dubious because I still see him around in Hooghly sometimes and he still looks as old as my grandfather. The fear of haircuts, as far as I can remember, started on the occasions when I had to have my hair cut while in my maternal grandparents' house in Salt Lake.

The BD market had two hair-cutting salons (or saloons, as we called them) run by Bihari hair-dressers and I would be taken to one of them to have my hair cut. Usually there was a queue and the wait there was infinitely boring as I didn't understand a word of what they were saying (I didn't know Hindi at the time). And when my spirit was thus broken by the long and boring wait came the scary part. I was made to sit on a wooden plank placed across the armrests of the chair so that my head would not be too low, and they would put a sheet around me covering my body completely, hands and all. The sheet would be full of bits of hair sticking out like thorns which pricked my neck. The sheet also prevented me from scratching any part of my face.

Not being able to scratch one's face does not seem too big a restriction when you think of it, but wrap a sheet around your hands, and a thousand itches develop simultaneously all over your face, nose and eyes. And then the problem compounded when the cut hair started falling on my face. In those days, for some strange reason, they used to switch off the fan when they cut my hair. The explanation was that the cut off hair blows about and messes up the room. Later, in Allahabad, I found that the salons kept their fans on and now the salons in West Bengal do that as well. So this turning-off the fan in my childhood could have been one of two things: either "may the customer go to hell" attitude of all businessmen in West Bengal, or taking advantage of my innocent little mind so that the hairdresser could have a little less hair to clean. I never bothered to check whether they kept the fan off when they cut other people's hair too. But in summer, sitting in a fan-less room with the temperature close to 40 and the humidity over 90%, and a prickly sheet wrapped around your body seemed to me the last word in torture. And all this happened even before he started to cut the hair.

After this preparation, an indeterminate amount of time was spent in a whirlwind of scissors and combs as my head was reduced to a ball of fuzz and the white sheet turned black with my beloved hair. It sure seemed like a couple of hours at the time but now I don't see any reason why it should have taken any more than the 20 minutes it takes to cut my hair now, even if you compensate for the abnormally large size of my head. The adult accompanying me apparently left instructions to cut my hair as short as possible and so this physical torture invariably ended with the mental agony of looking at myself in the mirror while my torturer applied liberal amounts of talcum powder on my neck using a prickly powder puff. Also, I usually got nicked by the razor somewhere in the region of my ear and the torture continued after coming home when I had to put Dettol on the cut. By then my whole body would be itching due to the tiny bits of hair in my clothes (the white sheet was hardly worth the trouble) and those clothes would continue to prick me until they had been washed a couple of times.

I hope that would explain why I was scared of having haircuts even long after I left Kolkata.

After I went to Allahabad and grew up a little, things turned slightly better. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, the salons had fans that turned. Secondly, my tolerance to the discomforts associated with this procedure increased. For instance, I could now pass away the time in a long queue by reading the Hindi newspaper inside out or even carry my own book sometimes. Gradually I outgrew the wooden plank and was finally allowed to sit on the chair like adult men did. Another significant change was that I was now allowed to determine the length of my residual hair as long as it wasn’t left too long. Old style razors had been replaced by shaving blades fitted with a razor-like handle by this time, and the ugly fear of HIV had appeared, so one of the standard instructions was to use a new blade on me. But in spite of these changes, having a haircut remained one of the most uncomfortable experiences for me. I was (and still am) very fond of my hair and the way it curves down over my forehead (like my father’s and Superman’s) when it is long, and to see that hair lying in a heap around me pained my heart. The fact that I sometimes had to miss my favourite TV shows on a Sunday morning to get my hair cut didn’t help matters. My school, however, was very strict about the proper length of hair and so I had to endure this ordeal at least once a month.

Gradually months changed to years, and many, many haircuts passed. I passed out of school and into college and came to stay in Salt Lake. The same salons in BD market didn’t seem so scary anymore. I sometimes cut my hair in Hooghly and sometimes in Allahabad when I was visiting my family during the holidays. The experiences were more or less similar now. One marked difference was that I needed a shave these days along with my haircut. After the shave I would be asked to choose one out of two options: either be assaulted by a jagged block of alum as big as a brick or be anointed with a nameless after shave lotion that announced my imminent arrival to people a mile away. No matter whichever I chose the miniscule cuts on my cheek and neck didn’t like it. When I moved to Chennai and then to Hyderabad in 2005, one of the many problems that I faced was explaining my desired hairstyle to the South Indian hairdressers. I usually carried a small photo in my wallet when I went for a haircut so that I could show them my desired cut instead of trying to explain in Hindi and broken Tamil/Telugu. I always got decent haircuts but some of my friends often failed at their explanations and it showed in their hair. Of course, by this time I was doing a job, so there was nobody to tell me how long my hair should be. I had it cut only if I felt too hot or uncomfortable with my hair.

These memories came flocking to me as I sat waiting for my turn at a barbershop in Jersey City yesterday. Here they take less than ten minutes to cut my hair. Here they put tissues inside my collar to prevent my neck from itching when they wrap the sheet around me. They don’t use a razor – they use electric shavers and they have minimal use for scissors and combs as they use a clipper to cut the hair. A haircut is a rather enjoyable experience here, except for the cost. They charge 50 times more for a haircut here than they do in India, and then expect tips at the end. But somehow I feel that these men and women lack the skill and the care that the men used while cutting my hair back home. It is true that I am the one benefitting from it – I don’t have to endure scissors snipping around my head for 15 minutes, hair getting pulled from all directions, my scalp getting ploughed by sharp combs and then neck getting nicked by a shaving blade. But I also miss the way all parts of my head were tended to separately, with different combings before every snip, and then the way each hair was carefully brought to the same size. I don’t want to split hairs here, but I still think an Indian haircut looks much better.

So I am no longer afraid of haircuts, especially since I have reduced the frequency to 3-4 times a year. The nearest gorillas are in their enclosure in the Bronx zoo, and my bed doesn’t have enough room underneath anyway. Spiders, however, are still as ugly and creepy as before, and I think that is one fear I’ll have to live with.

Rich Nation Poor Nation

2010-04-02T13:55:00.003-04:00

Look at the picture here. Believe it or not, it is a real gem. This 172-faceted topaz weighs 4.5 kg and was cut from a single crystal weighing nearly 12 kg. I saw it at the Smithsonian Institution (this photo wasn't taken by me though - they don't let anyone touch it) in DC last month. But that is not the fact that I want to emphasize about this stone. The fact that I want to talk about here is that it is called "The American Golden Topaz" although it was found in Brazil.

But then this was, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg.

As I walked past the rows of bullet-proof cases holding gems from the National Gem Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, I came face to face with some of the most valuable stones in the world - some shining alone and some set in ornaments equally famous. Marie Antoinette's earrings. Napoleon's crown and necklace. Somebody's ring, somebody else's bracelet - the list is simply too long to remember or write here. All priceless. All thickly encrusted with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

All coming from "poor" nations.

Take the 45.52 carat Hope Diamond for instance. This deep blue diamond with a turbulent past and owners like King Louis XVI and King George IV was gifted to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958 by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston. But if you manage to push past the crowd permanently assembled in front of its case, you will see a board that says this diamond is originally from India. Not only the Hope, but almost every diamond on display at the museum comes from India. Most of the rubies, emeralds and sapphires come from Burma and Sri Lanka. Some stones are from Brazil, some from Colombia and some from African nations. All had "belonged" to European monarchs or American millionaires who donated them to the Smithsonian. Now they are part of the National Gem Collection. Just like the Koh-i-noor is part of the British Crown Jewels.

Many of these jewels looked ugly to me, of course, as the Nizam's jewels had looked earlier. I would not care to wear a brooch that had a sapphire a little smaller than a golf ball, but then, I would never have one. The fact that these necklaces, brooches, earrings and pendants are too gaudy for modern tastes does not change the fact that they were all mined in the third world countries and and then brought to the "richer" nations who got richer.

While the poor nations got poorer.

Now don't get me wrong here. I do not have a goblin-like sense of ownership (reference: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) which means a diamond mined in India has to remain in India for eternity. Of course diamonds and other gems can be sold to other countries - in fact they should be sold because otherwise how will countries that don't have diamond mines get them? But the question here is, did all of these gems leave their respective countries by by legal means? Koh-i-noor was forcefully taken away by the British from India, and the Hope Diamond is rumoured to have been stolen. Even when a gem was bought from the producing country, did the buyer pay a fair price for it? I don't think the present owners of these gems could answer these questions easily, and more importantly, they would not want to answer them.

India is often described as a rich country inhabited by poor people. I realized the accuracy of this description anew after visiting the Smithsonian. The only consolation is, we are not the only country fitting this description. Also, it was easy to see how the rest of the world came to be inhabited by rich people.

The woes of the lone tourist

2010-03-21T07:24:00.002-04:00

My Washington D.C. trip that started last weekend in the manner described in my previous post came to an end today with me getting caught up in severe metro disruptions and missing my bus. Or should I say I hope it did? I am still in the bus (the next one) and it’s a long way to Newark. However, this post is about woes of a different kind.

Travelling alone, like everything else, has its pros and cons. While the pro side is a clear winner because I never have to worry about convincing others to go where I want to go or worry about others’ reactions before suddenly changing the day’s plans, the con side has one major point that deserves mention. It is something that I call the curse of the photographer - the curse to remain un-photographed.

And as I realized first-hand on this trip, having a more sophisticated camera does not make your chances better. On the contrary, the bigger your camera, the harder this curse hits you.

If you look closely at the photo here that was taken during my Niagara trip in 2008, you will see two people behind me who are grinning at their own cameras trying to capture themselves and the falls in a single frame. Now I usually find such antics extremely funny and I am yet to see an SLR-wielding person doing that, so this time when I desired to have my photo taken in front of something memorable, I approached others and requested them to do the job for me. With everyone owning a digital camera and photographing each moment of their life one would think that photography had become a skill that everyone has. Not so at all. Let’s take a look at some of the results that I obtained by handing over my camera to others.

Case 1: This one was taken in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. I requested a gentleman with an SLR to take my photo in front of the largest elephant that was ever mounted. He took a perfect shot of me – just there is no elephant to be seen in the frame. My bad, of course – I should have explained to him that I am not interested in knowing what I look like.

Case 2: I was at the base of the Washington Monument looking longingly at the Lincoln Memorial. Will somebody take my picture with that building in the background? I handed one gentleman the camera and explained very carefully what composition I wanted. “The Lincoln Memorial in the background and me at one side. Do you understand?” He nodded and took the photo. Isn’t the composition perfect? It is just a minor problem that I am completely out of focus.

Case 3: This time I was cautious. I wanted a photo with the US Capitol in the background and I wanted to make sure I was in focus too. So I put the lens at 18mm and stepped down the aperture to f/16.0 to ensure everything was in focus. If you are not familiar with this jargon, just understand that I put the camera at a setting where nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought until I asked this gentleman with a large DSLR and a National Geographic cap to take my picture. As I took my position, he started moving backwards with my camera and before I could realize whether he had taken a photo or not, he handed it back to me saying “Eight photos.” When I looked, there were indeed eight photos – some were blurry and some were sharp. Here’s one of the sharp ones. Can you see me?

Case 4: This one was taken on the first day itself in front of the Smithsonian castle. This is not too bad actually and can be salvaged if I work at it for some time, but I wonder if the person with the large Nikon DSLR who took this photo shoots all photos tilted like this.

Case 5: I would not let go of the elephant at the Smithsonian. I had first seen that elephant in the 1977 Guinness Book of World Records in our house in my childhood, and have wanted to see it ever since. So I went and posed in front of it again. This is the only shot in this post that was not ruined due to the photographer’s fault – the Asian lady took great pains to kneel down in front of me and click the photo. It was I who had left the flash popped up – I blame the curse for it. Whoever was at fault, the result was that I lost my face.

At times like this, I seem to grasp the full meaning of what Ansel Adams meant when he said, “The most important part of a camera is the 12 inches behind the viewfinder.”

Disrupting D.C.

2010-03-14T10:30:00.001-04:00

When I first planned my Washington D.C. trip in December, the first thing that I did was informing my cousin Ananda about it since he lives in the suburbs of D.C. On emailing him, I found that D.C. and surrounding areas are buried under unprecedented amount of snow. Over the winter, as my plans took shape, the the intensity of snowstorms increased as well.

These two things are unrelated, you say? Then listen to this.

I booked my bus tickets to D.C. last weekend and then checked the weather for this week. The weekend showed heavy rain. Lately Weather.com has been exceptionally consistent in the inaccuracy of their forecasts and I planned my trip based on the assumption that they would be wrong this time too. Not this weekend. I arrived in Washington D.C. on Friday evening in the midst of a torrential downpour.

Undaunted by the rain, I dragged my suitcase underground and boarded the first Red Line train leaving for the suburbs where my cousin would be waiting. The train stopped two stations short of my destination.

"This train is now out of service. All passengers must exit." said a female voice.

I exited and waited for the next train which arrived in ten minutes or so. I had hardly settled down in the train when I noticed that its doors had not closed yet. And then the same announcement came. In the same female voice. All passengers got off again and the empty train thundered away. There was a power failure in one of the stations and metro services were disrupted.

Eventually a train managed to take me to my destination without going "out of service" midway. My cousin boarded the same train and we both alighted at a station near his house. When entering his house we saw a notice on the door: "Water supply will be cut off in the housing complex on Tuesday 16th March from 8:00 am until repair is completed." It seemed wherever I went, things were falling out of place. But the final blow was yet to come.

Early next morning, we woke up to discover that we did not have any Internet connection or cable TV. A call to the customer service confirmed that their technicians were working on that issue, but we did not get the TV or Internet services till late in the evening. The rain continued throughout the day.

And once restored, the Internet confirmed my worst suspicions. Weather.com was indeed wrong in its prediction when it said the week would be sunny. Now the new prediction was a rainy Monday and cloudy Tuesday as well.

I wonder how long I'll have to wait before the CIA rounds me up for disrupting life in the capital.

Squaring the Circle

2010-03-10T21:43:00.001-05:00

More than a century ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote the lines:

E kebol diney raatre jol dhele futa paatre
Britha cheshta trishna mitabaare.

(It is like pouring water all day into a leaky pitcher,
Trying in vain to quench your thirst.)

He was writing about complex things like human desire for wealth, but the things that reminded me of those lines after all these years are quite simple: a square and a circle.

I have a photograph that would have made things clear in an instant, but since I am a little doubtful about the legality of publishing that photograph here, I have to take the long drawn route of using a thousand words instead.

To make a long story short, I had to grade a bunch of Java exam papers on Friday. My students are all science or engineering undergraduates and so, when we set a question asking them to write a function to calculate the area of a square given its side and the area of a circle given its radius, we did not think it was necessary to supply the formulae for them.

Big mistake. It turns out that at least 30% of the class did not know those formulae and got them wrong.

I must give them credit where it's due though; everyone knew that finding the area of a circle involves some sort of calculation involving a pi. Some even knew the value of pi. But that was about the extent of their knowledge. In the few hours of grading, I discovered that the area of a circle could be any one of the following, apart from the usual pi*radius*radius:

2*pi*radius
pi*pi*radius
2*pi*radius*radius
4*pi*radius*radius
pi*pi*radius*radius
2*pi*pi*radius*radius

I may have forgotten a few, but that should give you the general idea.

People seemed much more knowledgeable on the subject of squares. Most of them wrote it correctly as side*side. However, some of the more interesting answers were:

2*side
4*side
2*side*side
length*height (these two parameters were not defined in the problem)
side*side*side*side

By the evening I had all but forgotten the real things. I deducted one mark per formula error. My colleague who is also a TA felt I was being too harsh on the students. After the papers were returned in class, I did have to answer a few questions. Some of them were from the girl with the side*side*side*side. She tried to support her answer by this line of argument:

She was just a freshman (a college first year) and didn't know all those complex formulae yet.
This was a computer science exam and the mathematical formulae should have been provided.
Nobody remembers all that stuff nowadays anyway.
Rest of her program was correct.
A square has four sides.

Finally I had to tell her that it would be unfair to the students who got it right if I gave her full marks, and that made her leave. She seemed far from convinced though. After all a square does have four sides. Thankfully, she did not try to prove side*side = side*side*side*side using a square with side 1 as example. I have faced that sort of thing before and it is NOT funny.

I hope you see now what made me remember Tagore's lines and what that initial rant about pouring water into leaky pitchers was all about.

A Touch of Colour

2010-02-28T02:20:00.000-05:00

When the world outside is mostly covered in a white blanket and there are no loudspeakers spewing Hindi film songs, Holi is hardly discernible from any other day. So when every joint in my body was sore from shoveling snow on the drive and this bright red cardinal flew onto a snow-covered bush in my backyard, the touch of colour actually seemed comforting to the eyes. He gave me the excuse to take a much-needed break and seemed to indicate that although the world seemed bleak and white at the moment, elsewhere spring had arrived with the festival of colours and it couldn't be far behind in these parts. Mother Nature had started dressing up under the white sheets.

I wish all my readers a very happy and colourful Holi!

The Master and I

2010-02-24T16:17:00.004-05:00

On a winter day about 21 years ago, I was passing a lazy afternoon with a book in my maternal uncle's house while my uncle was watching a cricket match on TV. I was a child who didn't follow cricket, so I wasn't even aware who was playing. Suddenly, as I looked up from my book for an instant, something caught my eye. One of the fielders wore a thick wad of bandage on his nose. "Who is he and what's wrong with him?" I asked my uncle. "He is a new kid in the Indian team - he is called Sachin Tendulkar. He got hit on the nose by a delivery," he replied.

In the subsequent years I started following cricket, and that kid became the most valuable player in the Indian team. He was always the subject of hot debate among my elders of course - regarding whether he was better than Sunil Gavaskar or not, and usually Gavaskar won hands down. He was compared to many of his contemporaries - Inzamam-ul Haq, Brian Lara, Graeme Hick, and Sanjay Manjrekar and in later years, Mark Waugh, Michael Bevan, Ricky Ponting, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. At times he was judged inferior to some of them. He himself never got involved in any of these silly contests, of course. He always did his job and let his bat do the talking.

Year after year Tendulkar single-handedly bore the burden of a billion dreams. I watched India lose match after match as soon as a frustrated and impatient Sachin threw away his wicket. The critics never stopped talking - Tendulkar was no good. He wasn't a match winner. He never did well in second innings of test matches. He never performed well in county cricket. He didn't have the temperament of Lara, the killer instinct of Jayasurya, the leadership qualities of Steve Waugh. Sachin was never perturbed by these comparisons. The best bowlers in the world thought they had discovered his weaknesses, and were suitably punished for the audacity of thinking so. Nobody knows this better than the Australian bowlers of the Sharjah Series of 1998: some of their careers were prematurely ended by this little man. Then Shane Warne confessed having nightmares of Sachin and Don Bradman told his wife that this guy reminds him of his younger years, and suddenly the world started taking note.

Still, that was 12 years ago. Tendulkar was 24 then. If someone had said Tendulkar would still be the best batsman in the world some 12 years later, even his greatest fans would probably have laughed in his face.

In the past decade as the "new kid" became one of the oldest members of the team, he attained many milestones. Highest run scorer in ODIs, highest run scorer in tests, maximum number of centuries in both forms of the game. He dragged the Indian team to the World Cup finals in 2003 - a feat which won him the man of the series award, but could not remove the stamp of non-match-winner. What good was he, if he could not win the world cup for India? Why didn't he have a triple century in tests? Why no double centuries in ODIs? The expectations seemed to be rising. Many people wanted him to retire. He had back problems, hand problems, he was out of form, and if Ganguly and Dravid could be forced to quit, why not him?

I, in the meantime, had stopped following cricket. The primary reason was, of course, that I had joined my job and moved to Hyderabad and I had not bought a TV because I did not have the time to watch it. But the dirty politics of Greg Chappel, the humiliating expulsion Saurav Ganguly and India's dismal performance in subsequent matches, including the 2007 World Cup did not help. The explosion in the number of matches and the coming of T-20 was the last nail - I lost all interest in cricket after that.

During the last one and a half years in the US, I have only followed cricket through online news reports. Although I wasn't very regular in updating myself on the latest developments, one thing was becoming clear: there was nobody else like Sachin. Neither in India, and nor in any other team. There had been nobody like Sachin in many, many years and there would probably be nobody like him afterwards. He was in a league of his own - all those contemporary players who had been compared with him and occasionally been deemed superior had long retired. Tendulkar, on the other hand, was not only playing better than anyone else in the world, but he was playing better than he himself ever did before. His fitness level was better than many of the younger players, and opposition bowlers still spent hours watching his batting videos to find his weaknesses, only to discover their own on the field. Modifying a statement that Rahul Dravid used for Saurav Ganguly, it could be said, "First there is God, and then there is Sachin Tendulkar." The word “God” here obviously refers to a certain Australian with a batting average of 99.94.

So, yesterday's double century doesn't prove anything new about the Master Blaster. He didn't need to score the first 200 in an ODI innings to prove that he is the best ODI batsman ever. He did not need it to prove that he had better temperament than Lara, more killer instinct than Saeed Anwar. He did not need the record of 25 fours in an innings to prove that he is a better batsman than Inzamam or Jayasurya. This 200 will not silence the critics either. They will still ask for the 2011 world Cup, a 300 in tests, or perhaps a 400. This celebrated innings hardly changes anything for Sachin.

Only, after almost five long years, I am starting to feel that I am missing something by not watching cricket. Many years from now, if I wish to hold a younger generation audience in awe telling them that I was ancient enough to have actually seen Sachin Tendulkar bat, I would be unable to narrate a lot of stories about how history was rewritten during the best years of his career.

The Alien Feeling

2010-02-13T09:15:00.002-05:00

There are two kinds of bloggers in the world – habitual and inspired. The first kinds can blog about anything, anytime. The second kind blogger, however, needs a real inspiring idea before he can hit the keyboard. As my regular (sigh!) readers will know, I belong to this latter category. I can hardly blog about a subject that does not inspire me to write and much less so when my mind is occupied with something else (which I don’t want to blog about). That is the primary reason why I never put up a post since that endless night in Helsinki. Initially I was homesick, and then got buried up to my neck in work. Also, whatever leisure time I got, I devoted to photography. Finally, after almost a month, a foot-high snowfall and the absence of a girlfriend on Valentine’s Day that is also a weekend has given me the much needed time for to type out a blog post.

And the subject is not, as the title may suggest to some, about spending Valentine’s Day alone in New York. It is about my India visit.

The American government calls us aliens – resident or non-resident as the case may be. I always found the term mildly offensive, because no permanent resident of this planet would like to be reminded that Americans find them strange enough to be from another world. However, the full implication of the term hit me during the winter holidays when I landed in India and found myself a greater alien there than in this country.

The first thing that seemed extraordinary to me at the Indira Gandhi International Airport was of course the most ordinary of things – the crowd. The last six airports that I had visited were Heathrow, Newark, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, JFK and Helsinki, and although these included some of the biggest and busiest airports in the world, New Delhi gave a whole new meaning to the word “busy.” Who cares whether the number of flights operating from there is just a fraction of the traffic handled by Heathrow or JFK? All that I thought as I pushed my cart through the airport was, “Really, are there so many people in the world?” Something else also seemed very, very odd, and somewhat unnerving after sixteen months in the US: the airport was full of security men flaunting AK-47s. It was a grim reminder that India was fighting the real “war against terror” every day, despite what people across the world may be thinking post 9/11.

It was a relief to be able to switch to Hindi while talking to customs officials, security men and domestic airline clerks without having to prick up my ears trying to catch their accent. This was especially good because I realized to my horror that some people were unable to catch my English accent the first time. Soon I landed in Kolkata and came out of the airport, and it was here I saw the next thing that makes India look so alien to Americans.

Dust. Lots of it.

I am not talking of dirt. I am not even talking of dirty places. The dust that I am referring to is the fine powder that covers everything in sight from cars to tree leaves. It is this very coating that gives off the wonderful smell when the first raindrops come down after a dry spell, so I am not really complaining. Only that I had grown so accustomed to a dust-free world that it all seemed very strange. I also realized why photos taken in Europe and America were so brightly coloured; I suspect it is their policy of keeping all patches of earth covered either with grass or with mulch that prevents the creation of dust. On a related note, I was very surprised to see the amount of haze in the Kolkata air on my subsequent visits to the city during the following month. The sky is almost never blue, and visibility is usually less than two miles on a clear day. In New York City the visibility is almost always ten miles and the sky is pristine. Even though New York is one of the most brilliantly lit places on the planet, one can see more stars in the sky than can be seen in Kolkata these days. Does Kolkata have more cars or more people than New York? I don’t think so! Probably the diesel-burning buses overcrowding the city have something to do with it- I can’t tell for sure- but I would surely like to see my favourite city getting a cleaner sky.

Talking of buses, I must say I was most pleasantly surprised by some changes taking place in Kolkata and one of them was introduction of imported buses. For a person who spent his B.E. years commuting on leaky and dented tin boxes on wheels also known as buses of route 215A, it was a jaw-dropping sight to behold a shiny glass-covered 215A with low footboards, switch operated doors (which are always open) and moving LED displays announcing the destination roll by. Now only if the political activists of Kolkata can be persuaded against burning off these buses on bandh days, we shall have a very modern fleet within a few years, and that would probably take care of the pollution problem to a large extent. Also, the metro rail expansion work is progressing quite fast and Salt Lake is almost unrecognizable now with flyovers and overhead railway lines coming up everywhere. When I said I felt like an alien in my own city, it was not only because I had developed an “NRI air” but also because my city had changed so much in the last year and a half.

As for the NRI air, this time I could guess what goes through the average Americans’ minds when they try to navigate Indian roads, and if I have to describe it in one word, I would use the word “terror.” Even for a person like me who has grown up in UP and spent a year and a half in Hyderabad where the lack of any rule is the only steady traffic rule, sixteen months in the US were enough to erase a significant portion of essential-for-survival skills right off my brain. While it would be an exaggeration to say I was terrified of going out on the streets, I was definitely confused. Apart from the left-or-right dilemma, I kept stopping for traffic lights where there were none, waiting for all vehicles to stop before crossing the street (which made crossing even small streets an indefinitely long process) and getting scared whenever I caught a glimpse of an approaching cow. I was never the brave type, but growing up in Allahabad had at least ensured that I could walk calmly by a passing cow or buffalo without feeling the irresistible urge to cross over to the other side of the road. This time, however, I found myself yielding to that urge often. This added to the chaos as crossing the road was a dreaded exercise as mentioned before, and it further confused me regarding which direction the cars were going in. Apparently, my brain did not have a problem adjusting to the different on-off states of light switches, but as far as left and right side of the road are concerned, I am a big mess. I wonder how I’m going to learn driving. If someone saw me walking on the road in this manner and assumed I was showing off some of my NRI air, I don’t really blame them.

And thus I spent a month in India, feeling alien in my own city, enjoying the sights, sounds, smells and tastes that I have grown up with, and yet subconsciously overjoyed that in some aspects, these sights and sounds were giving way to a more Americanized version. I knew that in a few weeks’ time, I would be back in my fixed routine in Newark, where every day was predictable and survival was much easier. But I also knew that I will eventually be going back to live in India once I am done with my studies here, and all that dust and cows and unruly traffic could never make my country seem worse than the sanitized land where I stay. The captain of the Atrium in the movie WALL-E said, “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!” I myself couldn’t have put it better. For me, there is only one country to live, and that is India.

Night Without End

2010-01-16T22:05:00.000-05:00

Time flies fast.

It seems only yesterday that I put up the last post sitting here at the Helsinki Vantaa International Airport while headed for India. And here I am back again, this time headed for the US.

The last one month seems like a dream now. The one month that I spent with my parents and my sister after spending sixteen months away from home. One month without making my own bed, doing my own laundry, washing my own dishes or sweeping my own floor. One month of enjoying the cold weather sitting indoors wrapped under a shawl (and the Indian winter didn’t let me down this time), a month of free incoming calls on my cellphone and a month with several lunch and dinner invitations where you eat licking your fingers and not struggle with a knife and a fork. All that and more seemed to fly by at the speed of light and here I am headed back to the US again.

Indians living in the US often spell out the things they get in that country that they don’t get in India. What they conveniently choose to ignore is how much they miss in the land of the free. During the last month I became aware of how much I love my country despite all her problems (and there are many, no denying that fact). But more of that later. At the moment I am not able to organize my thoughts mainly because this journey is taking too long.

I started on this journey at 12:30pm on Friday. We reached the Kolkata airport around 2:00. My flight to Delhi left at 5:30 and reached Delhi around 8:00. Then there was the bus ride from the domestic terminal to the International one. After having a hearty dinner on the luchi, alubhaja and sandesh packed by my mom, I proceeded to spend the night half awake on a chair guarding two suitcases and a backpack. By next morning I was already stiff, and the real journey had not yet started.

My next plane left Delhi at 10:30am on Saturday and reached Helsinki when it was 6:00pm in India and 2:30pm here. Since then I have been trying to survive in this airport where a small sandwich costs around $10. It’s around 8:30 in the morning now and it’s still dark here – it became dark at 4:30 last evening. I have to wait till 2:00pm to board my next flight to JFK.

Time flies fast. Unless you are on a journey.

Arrived in HEL

2009-12-14T01:56:00.000-05:00

I will not write a full fledged blog post now because (a) I have to conserve battery power on my laptop. The power outlets here are different from ours in the US and (b) I am tired and jet-lagged because instead of sleeping, I was looking outside the plane all night hoping to see the Aurora Borealis. I didn't see the aurora, but I did see the sun rise below ahead of me while there were stars in the blue-black sky above and behind me.

And in case I did not mention before, HEL is the airport code for Helsinki Vantaa international airport where I was supposed to spend 11 hours en route India. Torrential downpours in New York City delayed my flight enough to reduce my waiting time here to 9 hours, but it is still a long time. Tomorrow I reach New Delhi (Or is it later today? I am terribly confused regarding dates already) from where I have to catch another flight to Kolkata.

The outside temperature is -11 degrees Celsius and everything is covered in snow. The inside is nice and warm. I will now try to sleep. My watch tells me it is sleeping time in Newark.

My position on the graph

2009-12-09T00:33:00.001-05:00

See the peak on the left side of the graph below? That's where I am right now.

I will start sliding down the slope on Sunday.

Shopping

2009-12-06T15:35:00.000-05:00

There comes in the life of every person a time when, casting aside all lethargy, he or she must make a dash towards achieving greatness. For Americans this time comes on the last Friday of November every year, a day commonly known as Black Friday.

And to say that they make use of this opportunity would be an understatement like saying Spartans disapproved of Paris abducting Helen. On this day Americans display a zeal that can only be described as reminiscent of the Neanderthals’ enthusiasm in bringing down a well-rounded woolly mammoth in times when food was hard to come by. Only, since woolly mammoths are not so readily available these days, the current specimens of Homo sapiens Americana (who are often well-rounded themselves) display that energy and vigour in shopping.

Now to be fair, even on ordinary days, Americans never shirk shopping. The greatest critics of the American people and the “resident aliens” will have to concede that the Americans are second to none on earth in this field, and shopping is quickly developing into the national pastime. Give a thing a name and a price tag and you will find a half-mile queue of people with shopping carts waiting to buy it. But even the greatest of men need their quiet hour in front of the television and it is only natural that these shopping duties would be performed as mere duties; a thirty minute stop at Wal-Mart on the way back from work will suffice for the whole week. On Black Friday, however, the situation is completely different. All stores worth going to announce discounts on that day and people rush in and grab whatever they can lay their hands on (as opposed to whatever they need). And since the stores open in the wee hours of dawn, many people drive there the previous night and camp out on the parking lot in near freezing temperatures, thus displaying a spirit hitherto only seen among pilgrims going for a holy dip at the Kumbh Mela, so that they can be among the first people entering the store the next morning. In some ways, they are even more no-nonsense about attaining their goal than the average Kumbh Mela pilgrim as demonstrated by the fact that last year a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in New York when he was unfortunate enough to come in front of the stampeding herd of shoppers entering the store – something that hasn’t happened at the Kumbh Mela in the last half a century. And they have every reason to be so, for while the early bathers don’t take the river Ganga away with them, the early shoppers do take things as they forage through the shelves and a few minutes may mean all the difference between showing off an amazing buy to one’s neighbor and staring blankly at a “Sold out” sign.

After reading this far, if the reader gets the impression that I am criticizing the Americans’ enthusiastic Black Friday shopping spree, then the joke is entirely on me as I could be observed entering the nearest shopping mall before sunrise this Black Friday.

When a friend told me in school on Tuesday that she was going to the Jersey Gardens mall, I said without thinking that I would accompany her. For the last couple of months, any mention of shopping perks me up like the word “bone” perks up a dog. There is a reason for this: I am going to India for the first time since coming here and I have been buying American (read “Made in China”) gifts for friends and relatives back home. Prior experience tells me that women have a knack for sniffing out deals where a man would feel lost and so I could not let go of this opportunity of accompanying my friend to the mall on Black Friday. However, no sooner had the words left my lips when I realized my mistake. My friend told me she was delighted to have me as a companion and I should meet her bus at the Newark Penn Station at 6:30 a.m. on Friday. This meant I would have to leave my bed at 4:00 a.m. on a holiday – a blasphemous deed if ever there was one, and then reach the bus stop three miles from my home after walking fifteen minutes and taking a subway ride on a morning when the wind-chill was four and the sun was expected to rise at 7:00. But Banerjis are chivalrous people and they would readily embrace death rather than backing out of a promise made to a lady and so there I was trudging across a soggy field at 5:40 a.m. on Friday in the dark, wishing all muggers of Newark a sweet undisturbed sleep through chattering teeth.

The bus was surprisingly full despite the weather and time of the day, and when we arrived at the mall, shopping was already underway for a few hours. Over the next six hours I, along with fellow humans, rummaged through mountains of clothes, shoes, crockery, cutlery, jewelry, accessories, toys and other things that I don’t know which category to put into and managed to find three bagsful of absolutely essential stuff that I didn’t even know that I needed before I went shopping. I was the small fish in the pond, of course. All around the mall the common roosting areas were occupied by groups of people who were sleeping surrounded by shopping bags while their less fortunate companions kept an eye on them. If there was an award for most prolific shopper, I would personally recommend one man whom I saw sitting on the floor with twelve full size bags around him and an expression on his face that could only be described as ecstatic. All stores had serpentine queues at the check-out counters and it was easy to see that he must have started shopping around 3:00 in the morning to have amassed so much of the loot. Of course, I have no idea if he achieved it alone or he was accompanied by early birds of the same feather, but in any case, he presented an impressive sight.

When I came out of the shopping mall eventually, I was an impressive sight too. I was carrying only three bags, but I had become so lost in the excitement of shopping in the hot mall that I had totally forgotten there was a real world outside where the temperature had fallen further and the wind was virtually a storm now. As a consequence, I had taken off my down jacket and ordered iced coffee at Starbucks. Only when my fingers started turning blue did I notice that I was holding a glass that was virtually full of ice, and holding my jacket in my other hand. People were ogling at me probably thinking I was a dark-skinned Eskimo enjoying the summer breeze. It felt good to know that I can make women turn around and look at me even with “50% OFF” signs all over the place.

My shopping wasn’t over with Black Friday, of course. As a matter of fact, it isn’t over even now. Over the last month or two I have become an authority on the prices of everything from cosmetics to cuddly bears in the New York- New Jersey area, not to mention the best online prices for a variety of things which are arriving at my house everyday now in large parcels. But going to the Jersey Gardens Mall on Black Friday gave me the kind of thrill Bengalis typically feel during the “Choitro Sale” in Kolkata, and it is this very thrill which made me realize how American I have become. Probably Bengalis and Americans are not so different after all, especially when it comes to shopping.

Moving On

2009-11-26T13:13:00.002-05:00

One year has passed since 26/11. Thanks to spineless indifference from the Indian Government, benevolent support from the USA and careful nonchalance from the world in general, the terrorists are thriving as before in Pakistan. Only life for us Indians can never be quite the same again, though the Taj Palace is up and running once more.

So I thank all of them this Thanksgiving. Thanks to them, our life is less valuable everyday. At least something gets cheaper in this world. We now need to display the "Mumbai Spirit" or something like that, and respectfully show the other cheek to our neighbours.

The K-7

2009-11-21T11:35:00.001-05:00

It's over a month since I wrote my last post here, and while I would not go so far as to say I have disappointed my readers since I do not have enough of them, I am sure the few that I have would not have felt exactly appointed either, being forced to look at that dog story again and again. But why didn't I write? Was I busy with my coursework or my research? Although I'm tempted to answer that question in the negative, it would be politically incorrect for a Ph.D. student to say so. Therefore let me put it this way: I wasn't any busier in the last month than I have been in the past year and a half. The reason for not posting here is something different. It is my newly purchased toy that is keeping me occupied for most of my spare time; a toy which goes by the name of Pentax K-7. It is my first digital SLR camera and I have been spending all my leisure hours learning to use it and reading up its 330-page user manual.

When friends see my camera, they react in one of three ways.

"Oh wow! That looks cool! How much zoom does it have?" is the typical reaction of people who are not familiar with SLR cameras. On being informed that it has only 3x zoom, they barely conceal their disappointment and walk away.

The second reaction is from a very small group of people who are aware of SLR camera fundamentals but do not keep track of the current market. They ask me about the camera and listen with interest when I describe its features, and seemingly accept my verdict that this is the best camera for this price. But it is possible that these people have been behaving this way out of politeness, and they actually belong to group three which is by far the largest group among all my friends.

The group three people ask, "Why Pentax? Why not Canon or Nikon?" Sometimes the question is implied even if not spoken aloud. I hope the rest of my post would serve as a satisfactory answer to this question. This is not exactly a review of the K-7 as I have not tested it thoroughly yet, and it is definitely not a comparison of the performance of the K-7 with competing models from Canon and Nikon since I have not used those cameras. However, I think this post could still be useful to a person who wants to know what to look for before purchasing a digital SLR camera.

But before we come to the K-7, we must go back in time. Almost twenty-nine years ago my father wanted to buy an SLR camera. Unlike me, he had the experience of using several borrowed SLR cameras. Yet, when he decided to buy one for himself, he settled on the Pentax MX. Although the camera looks like a giant compared to the tiny point-and-shoots of recent years, it was then the smallest SLR in its class, and one of the smallest manual SLRs ever made. Numerous moments of my childhood (and later my sister's) were captured on film using that camera. For the first eight years, my father had only one lens after which he bought one more. He always maintains that Pentax lenses are as good as Canon and Nikon lenses if not better. I can say they are at least better than Canon as that is the only other brand that I have used. When I came to the US in 2008, my father gave me the camera. I bought another lens after I came here and I have been shooting on film occasionally ever since.

When I decided to buy a DSLR, my first concern was, "Will I be able to use my old lenses with my new camera?" As I browsed the online reviews of various models from different manufacturers, only Pentax advertised of one fact.

"Our cameras are compatible with all Pentax lenses ever made."

This in itself was not sufficient reason to be overjoyed. Modern lenses are auto-focus lenses which allow quick clicking, and they also have image stabilization which means the lens elements can shift a little to offset the effect of small vibrations of the photographer's hand. I have used an older Canon lens with a new Canon DSLR body, but the result was less than satisfactory as the older lens did not have image stabilization. The newer lens gave far better images. So if Pentax says their cameras are compatible with older lenses that was all very good, but would the picture quality suffer if I use those lenses? On closer inspection, two more facts were revealed.

Pentax DSLRs have shake reduction in the body and not in the lens like Canon and Nikon. That meant any lens that I used, old or new, would give exactly the same quality of pictures. This fact has been confirmed now that I have bought the camera and used it with older lenses.
Pentax DSLRs have auto-focus assist for use with manual lenses which means the camera lets me know when the focus is perfect even when I am using a manual focus lens. Not only that, the K-7 can also automatically click the picture as soon as the focus is perfect when I am using a manual focus lens and focusing by rotating the focusing ring.

I emphasize on the above facts so much because the usability and performance of my older lenses was a crucial issue in my choice of camera. And if someone has an arsenal of older Nikon or Canon gear, I would suggest they go for their respective brands, although no other brand makes using older lenses as easy as Pentax does. This moon photo is a handheld shot taken using my Vivitar 100-300mm manual zoom lens fitted with a 2x teleconverter.

My father always tells me, "A camera is only as good as the bit of glass in front of it." While this was completely true for older film cameras, things are a bit more complicated in the digital world. Here cameras have "features", and a sensor which records the images. Although I was already almost certain on buying Pentax because of the lens compatibility, I still checked out the features of this camera and tried to determine whether I was making a compromise on any front. And only then I realized how bad Pentax's marketing strategy was. This camera was offering features that similarly priced Canons and Nikons didn't (weather-sealed body and lens that can operate at -10 degrees Celsius, 5.2 fps shooting, 30 fps HD video, 3" LCD, 100% viewfinder, live view to name a few), and yet not many people knew about them. Not only that, this camera was offering features that were invented by Pentax, features that no other manufacturer provided. That is why when I tell my Canon and Nikon using friends that I have an electronic level-indicator, automatic horizon correction, sensor-shift composition adjustment, in camera HDR capture, a sensitivity priority mode, rear panel remote-control sensor, external microphone jack, a lock on the mode dial and one touch RAW, they usually go "Huh... what was that again?" And despite all this, the K-7 has one of the smallest bodies in its class.

I am not writing this to advertise for Pentax. I am justifying my choice. Does the camera have any shortcomings? It sure has. I am not saying this myself because as I said, I did not compare it directly with Canon and Nikon DSLRs of its own class. I did use a much cheaper Canon Rebel XSi during summer, and although it overexposed my shots, I loved how it sensed my cheek and switched off the LCD when I put the camera to my eye. I would have loved that feature in my Pentax. As far as image quality is concerned, I am very happy with the images so far. However, this website compares images from different brands and they suggest that the Pentax K-7 sensor falls short of the competitors under certain conditions. I do not dispute their claim. I just say I can live with that shortcoming as it is a very specific condition where it fails.

Also, two allegations have been made about Pentax DSLRs all over the Internet. One, their autofocus is slower than Canon and Nikon, especially in low light. Two, the high-ISO images captured in low light are noisier in Pentax. I myself cannot say if they are true, but if the experts say so, they must be. Again, I knew of these problems before I bought the K-7 but they are things that I can live with. The picture on the left was taken at ISO 1600. Click on it to enlarge it. Does it look too bad?

The bottomline is, I am an amateur photographer and intend to remain so (well, except the occasional summer job maybe). I am not among those people who go on expeditions to photograph wildlife or shoot rock concerts and weddings professionally. Low light is usually an indication for me to pack up and go home. So a faster focusing lens or a less noisy sensor does not appeal to me as a weather sealed body or an in-camera shake reduction system does. That is why the Pentax K-7 remains my choice.

And that is why blogging will take a backseat until I get bored of my new toy, something which I don't foresee happening in the near future.

My Tragic Predicament

2009-10-14T15:48:00.000-04:00

I bet whoever invented comedy was never in a comic situation himself. I'm not sure if I have said this on my blog before, but whenever I find myself in some considerable amount of soup, my friends find the situation extremely stimulating to their funny bone. On the other hand, I don’t know if my sense of humour is warped, but my hearty appreciation of a truly comic situation has earned me many a cold stare. Extrapolating along those lines, I expect the following narration to be deemed funny by my readers since the said situation had, when seen from my perspective, all the elements of a tragedy.

Before I approach the incidents of the evening of the 13th of October 2009 AD, let me describe the place where I live. I live in a room that is about three-quarters of a mile in the horizontal direction from the nearest railway station, and three floors heavenwards from the nearest patch of earth. The second dimension, however, has no bearing on the current story. I have to travel the three-quarters of a mile (and the three floors as well) by foot every evening since the train driver doesn’t want to leave his track and drop me closer to my home, and I don’t own a car yet. Now all along this road there are houses and many of them have dogs. Many of those dogs do not like people walking by their houses. Especially people with backpacks and occasionally wearing monkey caps. And I can’t remember if Shakespeare said something on this subject, but he definitely ought to have observed that the smaller a dog, the stronger his objection to people walking by his house. Before I came to the US, I had no idea that so many varieties of toy dogs existed in the world, and definitely no clue that they thought of themselves as guard dogs.

A block before my house there is a house which has two of these creatures. One is a black and white cocker spaniel and the other one is something which could be anything from a dirty hairy teddy bear to a stick-less feather duster that has seen a bit of dusting, but is none of those things only because it barks like a dog. The owner of these creatures is apparently very proud to show them off to the neighbourhood and so she ties them with really long leashes to her porch railing and leaves them there. The leashes are long enough to allow them to run about freely over the stretch of sidewalk in front of their house, and short enough to prevent them from going on to the street. Now when I return from the school, I have to keep in mind to circumnavigate that particular stretch of sidewalk and walk just below the curb, with the creatures trying their best to tear at their leashes and nip at my ankles and getting strangled in the process. If I’m feeling particularly cheerful and the owner is nowhere in sight, I may even stop and bare a fang or two at them, reprimanding them for being so selfish-giant-like in their attitude and taunting them for being helpless against their leash, both in my mother tongue. Then when I have passed the house I can climb up on the sidewalk once more and continue as if nothing has happened. In fact there’s a large black Labrador in the very next house who barks at me from within his fence (and often makes me jump out of my skin if I am absent minded), but even he has his principles and he will let me go on the days I am barked at by the neighbour’s tiny dogs, for I think it is against his principle to agree with those creatures that pass for dogs at the neighbour's house.

So let us come back to the incidents of this fateful evening of the 13th of October 2009. I was returning home after dark by the usual route. I was in an unusually cheerful mood for some reason and was whistling some tune. I don’t remember the reason or the tune anymore now because what happened next drove them permanently out of my mind.

As I approached the aforementioned house from a distance, I saw the dogs in their long leashes sitting dejectedly at the edge of their property. With hardly a thought, I came whistling and went down on the road at precisely the right point to avoid being nipped at the ankles. And not a moment too soon, for as soon as I descended from the sidewalk, the infernal creatures dashed barking to the point where I was walking a moment before, tugging at their leashes, ready to strangle themselves. I was enjoying myself thoroughly at this moment when it suddenly dawned on me that all of them were not getting strangled that night. The larger of the two dogs, the cocker spaniel, was tied with a long leash that wasn’t tied anywhere at the other end and before I could say “What ho!” he was upon me like a pack of hungry wolves.

Well, looking back at the moment now I think he only jumped down from the curb and came barking up to my feet with bared fangs, but at the moment it surely felt like all the dogs in the world had attacked me. The feather-duster who was still tethered to the porch encouraged him with furious barking as well. Now the principal complaint of the dogs, as far as I could interpret their language, was that I was passing by their house. However, they seemed to be pretty much fuzzy about the solution to this problem as they were very reluctant to let me leave. I tried to ignore the beads of perspiration on my forehead and the chill running up and down my spine and slink away homewards, but the cocker spaniel ran alongside me and held me at bay. As far as he was there, I wasn’t going anywhere.

So being the brave person that I am, I did the only thing left to do. I turned and faced the chap and asked him what the matter was. I had read somewhere that bolting from an aggressive dog encouraged it to chase and I sincerely hoped the dog had read it too. Besides, long ago I had been similarly reprimanded by a far larger and far more aggressive street dog in Kolkata and I had obtained promising results by turning and facing the specimen at that time. I did the same here and as soon as I had done so, the one-foot tall dog considered the prospect of fighting with the five-feet-something human being in front of him, and retreated a couple of steps towards his abode. I took a few more steps towards him and he retreated more, all the while facing me and barking. The hairy teddy bear didn’t believe in retreating in such a dignified manner though, and although he was decidedly more vociferous while protesting against my intrusion, at the sight of me advancing towards the house and his comrade retreating, he turned tail and ran to the porch. When I felt the spaniel had been thoroughly cowed, I tried to go home, but the problem was, as soon as I retreated, he was assuming I was scared and would chase me. So I decided to stay there and terrify the dogs until the owner came out to investigate, which she presently did, with “What’s the matter?” written all over her face.

“Your dog is running loose.” I said, trying to sound hurt.

“He’s LOOSE?” she bellowed. “What rubbish!” was implied afterwards.

“Yeah! Look at him, he’s loose!” I suggested, just as the dog tried to jump at me again now encouraged by the presence of his mistress. She saw the loose end of the leash and quickly stamped on it, stopping the dog mid-jump.

“Oh thank you so much!” she remarked, as if I had knocked her door and told her that her little puppy was loose and would get lost if she didn’t tie him up again.

“He attacked me, you know.” I tried sounding hurt again.

“He ATTACKED you?” she bellowed again with a tone that was part mother-who-thought-her-child-could-do-no-wrong and part trainer-who-knew-her-dog-knew-no-such-trick. “What rubbish!” was re-implied.

I looked around. There was no witness except the two dogs, and they weren’t going to talk. So I decided to press charges. “He jumped upon me as I was going by the road. They bark at me every day but they are tied up. Today he was loose and he jumped on me.”

“I can sue you for that.” I tried implying. She didn’t get it.

“Well, he must’ve come loose…” she said and went inside pulling the dog behind her, signaling the conversation was over. I took the hint and headed home. But the incident has left me wondering if I can ever laugh at that Tom & Jerry episode again, where Tom stood too close to Spike’s kennel and tried provoking him, only to be skinned by the still-leashed bulldog.

Comedy, as I observed before, is enjoyable only when you experience it second-hand.

How to recognize a Bengali?

2009-10-11T11:18:00.000-04:00

How do you recognize a Bengali at a formal dinner?

Recently I had the good fortune to see a Bengali scientist who had received an award for excellence in research. He was coming out of his evening reception and going to the formal dinner on his award ceremony day. His attire was like this:

Black tuxedo jacket
Matching trousers with silk braids
White dress shirt with pleated front and wing collars
Black silk bow tie
Black cummerbund
Red rose in lapel
Black zippered office-goers' bag hanging from one shoulder
Black woolen muffler wrapped Bengali style around the bow tie.

The last two items, of course, announced him as a Bengali from miles away. But whatever he was wearing, he made us Bengalis in New Jersey very proud that day. Especially Bengalis like me who feel naked without their side-bags and monkey caps.

Puja Snippets

2009-09-29T06:18:00.002-04:00

Another Durga Puja came and went by. Last year I did not write a post on the Puja here in New Jersey simply because I felt it was not worth the trouble. The Puja here is just another excuse for people to meet and party. A suitable weekend is chosen around the time of the real Puja and everything religious is completed within that weekend. Or to be precise, the mornings of that weekend. The evenings are for merry-making. The non-resident Bengalis arrive in their cars and run to the dinner queue from the parking lot. After dinner they enter the auditorium from a side door and fight over seats with other fellow "Bongs." Then someone suddenly remembers that they forgot to take a picture with the idol in the background this year, and they run to the goddess who stands neglected at one side of the hall. Sanitized. No dhak. No sandhya arati. No incense fumes for fear of setting off the fire alarms. A bare minimum of flowers lest the idol gets stained and rendered unusable for next year. They buy Bengali books, Puja issues of Bengali magazines, DVDs of Bengali movies, saris and jewelry from the stores put up on the premises. Then there is a lot of song and dance till midnight, and everyone goes home satisfied that they enjoyed another great Puja. So I had decided I didn't want to write about this kind of Puja on my blog. This year, however, I will describe a few things that happened during this weekend here.

House Full

Kallol of New Jersey organizes one of the larger Durga Pujas in the state and they were charging $65 per person ($40 for students) for participating in the celebrations this year. Participation means letting you see the idol (which they had kept stowed away somewhere since last year), feeding you dinner for three nights and letting you watch the cultural functions by famous and not-so-famous celebrities ("The famous Miss Xyz who won Zee TV's Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa in 2005"). This combination of goat meat and music seemed so irresistible to the local culture-deprived Bengalis that the number of registrations permitted by the New Jersey Fire Code was reached within seven days of opening the gates. I tried registering on the eighth day and found the "House Full" sign staring me in the face on their website. Of course, being an Indian and a Bong I knew that house full seldom meant house full and I managed to get a kind of back door registration due to the infinite resourcefulness of my sister-in-law and owing to the fact that my nephew was acting in a play there. Of course, when I walked into the hall and saw last year's idol, much of my enthusiasm ebbed away, but that is a tale of misplaced expectations and it's no use ranting about it here.

Unbroken Song

When Pundit Jas Raj took his seat on the stage at ten on Friday night, there was utter chaos in the auditorium. Men were discussing the economy, women other women and the kids were running around the place chasing each other. The mood was anything but suitable for a classical singer and I did not help remembering Tagore's lines about Baraj Lal, the old singer in the poem "Broken Song":

Old Baraj Lal, white-haired, white turban on his head,
Bows to the assembled courtiers and slowly takes his seat.
He takes the tanpura in his wasted, heavily veined hand
And with lowered head and closed eyes begins raag Yaman-kalyan.
His quavering voice is swallowed by the enormous hall,
Is like a tiny bird in a storm, unable to fly for all it tries.
Pratap Ray, sitting to the left, encourages him again and again:
"Superb, bravo!" he says in his ear, "sing out loud."

The courtiers are inattentive, some whisper amongst themselves,
Some of them yawn, some doze, some go off to their rooms;
Some of them call to servants, "Bring the hookah, bring some pan."
Some fan themselves furiously and complain of the heat.
They cannot keep still for a minute, they shuffle or walk about -
The hall was quiet before, but every sort of noise has grown.
The old man's singing is swamped, like a frail boat in a typhoon:
Only his shaky fingering of the tanpura shows it is there.

I hoped switching off the lights would probably quiet the crowd and help Punditji concentrate and was really surprised at the confidence of the man when he asked for the lights to be switched on. "I want to see my audience," he said in broken Bangla, "I want to see if my song is reaching you." When he started singing, I realized my mistake; I had been remembering the wrong Tagore lines about him. His singing could only be described as

The seven notes dance in his throat like seven tame birds.
His voice is a sharp sword slicing and thrusting everywhere,
It darts like lightening - no knowing where it will go when.
He sets deadly traps for himself, then cuts them away:
The courtiers listen in amazement, give frequent gasps of praise.

I am no connoisseur of Indian classical music, but it wasn't difficult to sense his mastery over his voice. Although there was a trickle of people leaving the hall at all times, it was more because it was late than because they did not like the music. The rest of the people sat spellbound throughout the performance as if stunned by the singing of Goopy Gyne.

A Timeless Masterpiece

A Bengali movie made forty years ago from a story written about a hundred years earlier. A group of non-resident Bengali kids who have grown up on Cartoon Network and can hardly speak Bengali clearly, let alone read. What happens when you bring them together? The result may not be as predictable as you think.

When Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was first chosen as the story for the children's play at Kallol this year, many of the actors did not know what it was all about. When they saw the movie for the first time, they did not understand many of the dialogues due to the dialect of Bengali used and the poorly placed subtitles. Yet, after a few days of practice, they loved it so much that they genuinely enjoyed acting in the play, and didn't have to be forced like they usually have to be. They learnt up all the dialogues, not only their own but everyone else's as well, and they learnt them up well enough to use them as quips in everyday conversation. They learnt up things not required of them for the play, like the songs being sung in the Shundi court, and used them to pass their time when they didn't have their Gameboy handy. And when the king of Shundi broke his arm fighting with the king of Halla after rehearsal five days before the act, he insisted that he will act despite that broken arm. The most comic moment of the whole play was witnessed by me (and probably only by me) - the children playing Goopy and Bagha had come down from the stage during the play. They needed to go back up and re-enter from the other side. As they approached the stairs, they were accosted by a smaller child from the spectators holding a pad and a pen. "May I have your autograph please?" was the sincere query from this little fan with genuine admiration in his eyes.

Such is the appeal of a timeless classic. We don't need learned critics to tell us why a classic is great. We don't need a scene-by-scene analysis of Ray's movies to understand his greatness. The reaction of an audience that was untrained, unbiased and culturally alien demonstrated beautifully what a timeless masterpiece looks like.