The Laws of Twenty-one

This Bengali nonsense poem by the great Sukumar Ray talks about the strange laws in the imagined country of Lord Shiva. Such laws may or may not resemble real laws in real countries. The laws relate to the number 21 various ways.

Today being the 21st of February, the International Mother Language Day, AND Maha Shivaratri, the annual worship day of Lord Shiva, I couldn't resist the temptation to translate this poem to English from my mother language today.

In the land where Lord Shiva stays,
Terrible laws one must obey!
If someone happens to slip and fall,
A policeman will arrest and haul
To the court, and the judge opines,
He pays twenty-one rupees in fines.

There, before it's evening six
For sneezing you need permits.
Without permit, if a sneeze will come,
Bang! Boom! On your back they drum,
A dose of snuff the Chief applies,
Until you sneeze twenty-one times.

A loose tooth, if someone has,
They must pay four rupees as tax.
If whiskers grow on someone's face,
A hundred annas is their cess.
Poking his back, bending his neck,
Twenty-one salutes they have him make.

While walking, if someone chance
To cast left or right, a sideways glance,
At once to the king this news will rush,
The soldiers all jump and make a fuss,
They make him drink, in the sun at noon,
Water in twenty-one serving spoons.

With poetry, those who fill the pages,
They are caught, and put in cages,
And made to listen, in tunes variable,
Recitations of the multiplication table.
They have to read grocery-store ledgers,
And do additions for twenty-one pages.

If suddenly when the night is deep,
Someone snores while they're in sleep.
On their head they rub with glee,
Cow-dung mixed with apple puree,
Twenty-one times they are spun
And hung for hours twenty-one.

(Translated by Sugata Banerji)

Fourteen Years

How long is fourteen years?

When I was a child and my mother used to tell me stories from the Ramayana, fourteen years always seemed an interminably long period for an exile. Later, when I read the Mahabharata, I realized that the Pandavas spent about fourteen years in exile as well - twelve years in the forest, one more year anonymously, and then about another year preparing for the battle (which lasted eighteen days). Again, a huge chunk out of the lives of our heroes.

And yet, when I look back at that night fourteen years ago when I started writing my blog, it seems just like yesterday. It will be an exaggeration to call this my "exile", but it does mark my time away from home. First in Hyderabad, then in Kolkata and finally in the suburbs of three cities across the USA - New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

While it doesn't feel like a lot of time has passed, a lot has changed in these fourteen years. I left my IT job, started and finished a PhD, did a post-doc and then became a professor at a college. I got married. I became a father. And fatter. In the world of social networks, Orkut died off, Facebook came to rule the world. Blogging went out of fashion, microblogging caught the fancy of the world with the introduction of Twitter. Cellphones became smart. Tablets and e-book readers came into existence.

I bought a DSLR. Two DSLRs actually, and started calling myself a photographer.

And in between all this, I started a second blog. In Bengali. While I hardly write in either one anymore, I definitely enjoy writing when I do. Nobody reads my blogs anymore, of course. Nobody reads blogs as much as they used to do fourteen years ago.

Still, it seemed like a nice occasion to commemorate by writing a post here on my first blog. I missed the actual date by a day, but what difference does a day make in fourteen years?

A Walk in Lake Forest

One of the good things about the life of a professor is that one gets to enjoy a summer break and a winter break. Of course, the vacation also brings with it the realization that one has been indulging a little too much  during the semester and has accumulated a considerable amount of bulk around one's midsection. Owing to the fact that the excuse of having too much work and too little time is also unavailable during the break, one tries to make amends, at least partially, so that the midsection is fit to accommodate more bulk again the next semester. That, in short, is the state that I find myself in these days. Also, since the break is of the latter kind, the outside world is somewhat lacking in the temperature department, and any kind of exercise desired must be attempted either in overcoats or in the cozy centrally heated interiors.

From time to time, however, one gets a warm day even in a place like Lake Forest. When one says 'warm' here, one says so keeping in mind the fact that Lake Forest is 30 miles north of Chicago and the average temperature for December is -2 degrees Celsius with a historic low of -21. With those reduced expectations of warmth, a December day when the temperature rises 5 degrees above freezing is considered warm, and when the mercury climbs over 10, people are positively sweating in their aforementioned overcoats and centrally heated interiors. The local people are usually not heard complaining about the lack of cold, because living in these latitudes gives them a dread of lower temperatures and snow-covered driveways that is difficult to shake off. However, when one has grown up in India, and has suffered wearing a monkey-cap on a 10-degree day, one tends to look at these 'warm' days as some sort of cheating by Mother Nature and can't stop complaining about how global warming is robbing mankind from some of the simple pleasures of life such as cold winters, and how they are not getting their time and money's worth by spending the winter in the US.

But complain as one may about the lack of cold, one can't deny that a warm day has its advantages. One of the primary benefits that it offers is the chance to reduce the bulk around one's midsection by actually walking outside in the open air instead of the treadmill at the college gym. The gym may be shielded from elements, it is not shielded from the eyes of my students, and when I put on form-fitting exercising clothes that were bought when I was two sizes thinner and go to work out there, I present a spectacle for the occasional unlucky student that, to put it mildly, we both want to avoid. Walking outside, on the other hand, needs the presence of a winter jacket or overcoat even on the warmest of winter days that can conceal the finer details of my over-indulged anatomy from the world. So when we got a string of these warm days this week, I decided to grab the opportunity and walk downtown to post some letters. Downtown Lake Forest is about a mile from my home and the round trip could be considered a fair amount of exercise for someone out of touch with the thing. So I plugged in my earphones into my smartphone, casting the necessary spells to prevent them from falling off, and muffled, jacketed and capped myself with a muffler, a jacket and a cap, respectively. Finally I put the letters in my backpack and started on my walk through the campus. The campus grounds look mostly deserted now, as the usual occupants of the grounds have gone home for their break and the unusual occupants prefer to stay indoors. I crossed the campus, exited it through the large gate on Sheridan Road and entered College Road.

Lake Forest, as the name suggests, is full of large trees. Most of these trees are part of estates surrounding large mansions. Many years ago, I have forgotten exactly how many, the rich professionals working in Chicago decided they liked this little town on lake Michigan for some reason, which I have also forgotten. So all the affluent lawyers, doctors and industrialists built their mansions in Lake Forest. In time, media barons, actors and other kinds of rich people whose professions I can't even begin to imagine moved here and bought all the properties available. Today, Lake Forest has mostly mansions and hardly any regular-sized houses. The best and the costliest mansions, one imagines, are the ones by lake Michigan, with their private beaches and boathouses where they keep their yachts. That's only a guess, of course, since someone like me wouldn't know anything about the prices of mansions. My guess is based on a news report from a few months ago that reported one of the beachfront mansions was supposedly haunted and so its owners were trying to sell it off at a greatly reduced price of ten million dollars.

College Road is one of the roads that have these wooded mansions on both sides. The sidewalk here has deep deer tracks imprinted into the concrete at one point, which always makes me wonder how old those must be. The town itself is pretty ancient--- the college was established in 1857 and the downtown area in 1916. But the concrete sidewalks are probably much newer than that. I entered Washington Road at the next crossing and continued walking. Some areas of Lake Forest have a somewhat English-village-like feel and walking here often takes one back to the land of Miss Marple and Blandings Castle. People who live in real English villages will probably fail to see this resemblance, but when one's familiarity with the English villages is based on murder mysteries, even the small similarities seem significant. Thinking about murder mysteries, I reached the next crossing,  and walked across the triangular grassy area on Deerpath Road. There is a beautiful life-size bronze deer statue in this park which I had used for my holiday greetings last year. As usual for this time of the year, a bright red ribbon was tied around the statue's neck in a large bow. Most of the houses around me were also decorated in some form or another for Christmas. It was only half past three, but the low rays of a dying sun had turned the green grass at the deer's feet golden. Although Jim Reeves' soothing voice dreamed of a white Christmas in my ear, this year we have had only one light snowfall and very few frosty nights, so the grass is still mostly green everywhere. I passed the Lake Forest Library guiltily looking at the crowd of cars parked there. I haven't found time to visit the library even once this year. With an advanced new year resolution to visit the library in the coming year, I crossed the railway tracks and stepped into the downtown area.

The downtown in Lake Forest, like the other parts of the town, reflects the prosperity of the residents. For the most part, the businesses are either standalone stores, or chains like Williams-Sonoma, Talbots or J. Crew that stock items on the pricier side. When the first McDonald's was being opened in a different part of Lake Forest many years ago, the local residents were up in arms against it, claiming it would attract the wrong kind of people who would destroy the town. Later, they were allowed to open the store on condition of not displaying their iconic golden double-arch 'M' sign. Even the Starbucks Cafe on North Western Avenue, the main street through the downtown area, is a vast and fancy affair with rustic brick walls, fireside sofas and special reserve coffee blends that one can order and be served in porcelain mugs. I like this cafe a lot because the presence of students with notebooks and laptops inside gives the place a college-town feel seen in places like Cambridge, MA or Madison, WI which is otherwise missing from Lake Forest. The streetlights are now decorated with wreaths of red and green and the big pine in Market Square is decorated as a Christmas tree. Other trees around the place are also covered in lights, although they won't be lit until an hour or so later. I know because I have been to this place after dark. The town bookstore has a very nice window display of a model town, and I paused to take photos of it with my cellphone.

The Market Square in Lake Forest claims to be the oldest shopping center in the US which was built with parking space for shoppers. Built in 1916, the place has a clock tower, another tower with a sundial, and rows of shops around a central green. The central green has a bronze statue of a mother and her child which is also a fountain in the warmer months but has the water turned off now. The Union Pacific North Metra railway line which connects Chicago to Milwaukee has a station right opposite Market Square. As I turned into Market Square, I heard the bells from the railway crossing and seconds later, a bi-level train came to a halt at the station. I walked through the Mercedes, Porsche, Audi and Tesla cars parked around the parking lot of Market Square and headed for the post office at the opposite corner.

The Lake Forest post office is housed in a quite large building and the interior is reminiscent of the General Post Office in New York City. Much, much smaller, of course, but just reminiscent of that place. There was a line at the post office, mainly because only one window was manned and there were several people with dozens of holiday cards to mail. I myself had five envelopes which I dispatched, and then left. Work done, I was feeling elated. Also, Google Fit was informing me I had already walked for about half an hour. I decided to check out Sweet Pete's, the candy store at Market Square. Poulami and I have been yearning to eat some of their handmade chocolates since we arrived in Lake Forest two years ago, but something or the other always came up and prevented us from eating those chocolates. We even bought them as gifts for other people, but never ate them ourselves. I thought, I'll buy a box of those chocolates and surprise Poulami with them. Besides, the fact that one has started exercising to reduce weight is cause enough for celebration with chocolates. When I reached the shop, I found all the windows covered with black fabric. There were some legal notices stuck on the door. I tried reading them but they couldn't be understood because they were in legalese nonsense. I could only guess that the candy shop had been kicked out because they couldn't pay their rent. A mom with two kids was excitedly discussing the shop's closure with another man standing right there. Presumably, she had brought her children for a treat and had been disappointed like me.

I felt a little sad, not only because I wanted to eat those chocolates and now I couldn't, but also because I feel sad whenever I see stores closing down in this country. Since the time I arrived in the US in 2008, I have seen large and apparently busy stores abruptly go bankrupt and close. There was Steve & Barry's soon after I came here, then Virgin Records at Times Square, and then Borders which really hurt, and Circuit City, and then Pearl Paint which hurt some more, because I loved the place, and then the much-visited Times Square ToysRUs store. More recently, ToysRUs has filed for bankruptcy, and if news reports are to be believed, Sears won't last another year. Sears, whose office space requirement created the tallest building in the world, which was the original mail-order company in the days before the Internet, is bending its knees to Amazon.com and the like. Retail giants like Macy's and Bon-Ton are also closing down stores every year. I had no idea whether this candy store was one of a chain or just a stand-alone store, but its closure surely felt like a small but significant change in the town that I have come to love in the last two years.

But my sadness didn't last long. Pandora was playing "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" into my ears and if Holiday music has one good quality, that's its ability to lift one's spirits. I started on my brisk walk back towards home. Chocolates would have to wait for another day, and I'm sure we'll be able to find other stores nearby. About fifteen minutes later, when I entered the college grounds through the gate on Sheridan Road, the sun had already dipped behind the trees and the lower part of my office building was submerged in shadows, but a narrow band at the very top still glittered golden. I stopped to take photos of that spectacle with my phone, and then walked home. That's when I thought, "I haven't formally described Lake Forest on my blog in the last two years, why not do it now?"

Hookah-faced Crave-all

As I have written before on this blog, Sukumar Ray was a multi-faceted genius who is primarily remembered for his Bengali nonsense poems for children. I cannot emphasize this multi-faceted aspect enough - much of what I know today about science, technology, engineering, mythology, geography, and the natural world, had its roots in Sukumar Ray's writings. All these years later, when I see a beaver building a dam in a documentary, or I see compressed air being used to transport messages through tubes, or I read an article about some underground fire burning for decades, or I see Thor and Loki fighting on the silver screen, my mind travels back to that large red book of my childhood, with the smirking green cat on the cover.

When it comes to translating something out of that book, however, I always choose one of the nonsense poems. I find translating nonsense particularly interesting, especially since I try to preserve the rhyme of the original poem. I try to do the same with Tagore's verse, but in case of Ray, since the tone is decidedly more frivolous and common Bengali words and their sounds play a very important role in conveying the mood, translating is somewhat more challenging. I'm not the first person to translate Ray's nonsense though. Acclaimed scholar Sukanta Chaudhuri translated many of these poems about twenty years ago and he did a fantastic job. But I still go ahead and translate some of these poems from time to time, just for the fun of it, and I make sure I don't look at Sukanta Chaudhuri's translation before I do. So here's one of my favorite poems, with the illustration by Sukumar Ray himself. [Coming to think of it, this is how I would expect one of my image classification algorithms to behave when a query image is equidistant from two reference images.]

Hookah-faced Crave-all

~Sukumar Ray

Hookah-faced Crave-all,                              lives in Bengal

His face holds no smile, have you seen?

No smile, why so?                            Anyone in the know?

To stay with him, have you ever been?

Shyamadas, uncle of his                     is the opium police,

He has no other relation---

Is that why alone,                          his face devoid of tone,

He sits with a sad expression?

Thumping his feet,                      he danced to every beat

His voice always full of glee,

All day he would sing                   Do-re-mi-Fa-Ting-ting,

An image of happiness was he.

Today during lunch,                      sitting on that branch,

He was eating smashed plantain.

Then what transpired?                   Did his uncle expire?

Or did his leg suffer a sprain?

Hookah-face yells back      "You're on the wrong track!"

"Don't you see the fix I'm in?"

"The way to swat flies                         the more I theorize,

My whole day passes worrying.

If it sits on the right,                    in my rule-book I write

This tail I use for the kill.

If the left it would choose,                  I'm not one to lose,

This other tail then fits the bill.

But if some naughty fly                 the centre-line does try

I can't imagine what I would do ---

How hard it is to choose              which tail should I use,

I don't have tails but these two."

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

Feeling Thankful

Today was Thanksgiving Day here in the US.

While the news reports and Facebook feeds would like to tell me that 2016 was somewhat short of the ideal year for many people, I have a lot to be thankful for this year.

My wonderfully satisfying job.

My new camera, and a wife that permitted me to spend an insane amount of money on it.

My parents' trip to the US, and our trip to New Jersey and California together.

My Colorado trip with my wife earlier in the summer.

Old book sales that filled my bookshelves with the Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, Tintin, Asterix and Sci-Fi books I always wanted but could never afford.

A new book and a new movie in the Harry Potter universe.

Friends and family and the best neighbours one could wish for.

A wonderfully satisfying Thanksgiving lunch by the college today.

An equally fulfilling Thanksgiving dinner by the neighbours.

Now, as the semester nears its close, and the Midwest winter bares its claws and finally strips the last leaves off the trees, I am left with a lot of time in my hand - something that I have been missing all year. Poulami is in India attending a cousin's wedding and what could be a better way to pass this lonely time than catching up on my missed blogging?

So expect to see a lot of blog posts in the coming days. Expect tales of warmer days and travels to far away lands. And prepare to be amazed, if not by my meagre writing skills then by the photos that will accompany some of these accounts, as I attempt to bring the same sense of wonder that I felt at these places.

So, as I say about all of my resolutions, "Let's start tomorrow."

Scenes from the Backyard

This is how I spent the morning today. For the time being, the squirrels are defeated due to a liberal application of petroleum jelly, but I'm sure they'll be back with some other devilish idea. In the meantime, we amuse ourselves by the hilarity that ensues when they try to raid the bird feeders.

A few words on racism

Dr. Annette Beck-Sickinger, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, Germany, recently refused an internship to a male student from my country, India, citing the ‘rape problem’ in India as a reason and implied she would be endangering herself and other female members of her lab if she allowed him in. Although I am aware that the German Ambassador already wrote to her and expressed his views in unambiguous terms, I still write this blog post to say a few things that I wanted to say.

In her now-public e-mail to the Indian student above (a mail written in English so appalling that I was almost convinced for a moment that it was fake), Dr. Beck-Sickinger says that India has a rape problem. I wonder how she arrived at that conclusion. If she meant it in terms of numbers, then I have to admit that she does not understand numbers very well. Sheldon Cooper, a fictitious character in the popular American TV series The Big Bang Theory said recently, “The only math biologists know is, if you have three frogs and one hops away, you have two frogs.” While I have a lot of respect for biologists in general, it seems Dr. Beck-Sickinger is one of the biologists that Sheldon was basing his observation on. I do not know how she does her research, but the way I do it is by starting with Googling some information. Googling rape rates per 100,000 people in countries across the world, one finds that the number in India is just 2 in 100,000. Wikipedia says, 

“Adjusted for population growth over time, the annual rape rate in India has increased from 1.9 to 2.0 per 100,000 people over 2008-2012 period. This compares to a reported rape rate of 1.2 per 100,000 in Japan, 3.6 per 100,000 in Morocco, 4.6 rapes per 100,000 in Bahrain, 12.3 per 100,000 in Mexico, 24.1 per 100,000 in United Kingdom, 28.6 per 100,000 in United States, 66.5 per 100,000 in Sweden, and world's highest rate of 114.9 rapes per 100,000 in South Africa.”

So if these 2 rapes out of 100,000 make India a country with a rape problem, what do the 28.6 rapes per 100,000 make the USA? What about UK with 24.1 rapes per 100,000? Does she deny internships to students from these countries too? How about Sweden with 66.5 rapes per 100,000? When she says female professors across Europe are planning to deny entry to Indian students (something she mentions in her email), does she consider Sweden and UK part of Europe? Or are rules different for dark-skinned people from third-world countries?

(It may be worth mentioning here that another biologist who confirms Sheldon's observation is none other than the famous Richard Dawkins. He tweeted about India having a culture of rape without bothering to check the numbers, and then hastily deleted it when the numbers were pointed out to him.)

Does this mean I am trivializing those two cases out of 100,000? Not at all. In a country of over 1.2 billion people, 2 out of 100,000 means a lot of rapes – about 25,000 rapes per year. But that number, while still about 25,000 more than what it ideally should be, is a mere 0.4% of the six million Jewish people Dr. Beck-Sickinger's countrymen killed during the Holocaust. Does that then make Germany a country with a genocide problem? I would like to know if Dr. Beck-Sickinger was ever denied entry into any country saying there are a lot of Jewish people in that country, and it would be dangerous for them if she was allowed into the country.

Actually I already know the answer - she wasn't. Because while she is a racist, most educated and civilized people aren't so. In the modern world, an act of judging a person based on his or her country, religion, gender or race is punishable by law, or at least severely frowned upon. This basic point somehow seems to have been totally lost on Annette while she was receiving big degrees and diplomas from reputed universities.

India has a diverse population of people from all countries, races and religions, and we do not have a culture of judging people based on their race and country of origin. Today, as the whole world is trying to progress towards attaining equality for all human beings, Annette sits like a frog in her well and denies entry to a prospective scientist on the basis of his race. Not because he is bad at science, or because that he himself is a rapist, but because he comes from a country which she feels has a rape problem. As a result, she has brought shame to all Germans, and to researchers and professors all over the world. She claims to speak for other professors across Germany and Europe, but I doubt that they would like to have her as their spokesperson. For instance, Jakob de Roover, a professor from Belgium, opposed Annette's views publicly.

Of course, some of my own countrymen have endorsed Annette's opinion. Ever since BBC released an illegally made documentary interviewing the convicts of the 2012 Delhi rape case on YouTube, some left-liberal pseudo-secular creatures on my Facebook friendlist have started denouncing all Indian men as rapists. One of them took this opportunity to get some free publicity and Facebook likes for her profile and argued that the racist actions of Dr. Annette Beck-Sickinger were justified. She went so far as to say all Indian men currently abroad should be sent back to India immediately since all of them were responsible for the rape culture of India. When I confronted her on this and started an argument on her Facebook wall, I was obviously called insensitive. Her so-called educated friends even came and tried saying that it was "natural" to think India has a rape problem and the German professor cannot be blamed for thinking that way.

I do not want to go into the details of the documentary here, although I strongly object to the manner in which it depicted Indian men. Whether it should have been made is a debate that can go on, but this post is not about the documentary. When I see a documentary about 9/11, I do not automatically go and judge all Muslim men. When I see a documentary about 26/11, I do not say all Pakistani men are terrorists. I got mugged on the street, not once but thrice, by black men, and yet I don't think all black men are criminals. And this woman has the audacity to question all Indian men (probably based on the interview of a convicted criminal) while she hails from the country that started two world wars and wiped out two out of every three Jewish people in Europe. She did issue a half-hearted apology after her emails became public and she was criticized all over the world. The standard stuff - it was taken out of context... I'm sorry if I hurt someone... blah blah blah. One would have thought she would have been a little better at apologizing, given her education and all, but evidently, education isn't enough.

Annette Beck-Sickinger's actions somehow remind me of Hitler's denouncement of Jewish scientists including Albert Einstein. I could have written pages about it, but what is the point? I could go on to say that Germans haven't learnt their lesson from history and are making the same mistakes again, but then I would be no better than her. As the German ambassador's mail clearly shows, all Germans do not share her views. In fact, I am sure most Germans do not share her views. So I will end this post with the hope that she mends her racist ways and stops judging people by their nationality or race. What good is a biologist who does not believe in the equality of all human beings? 

Six

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

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

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

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

Relaxing at home

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

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

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

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

When I appeared on Zee Bangla

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

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

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

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

My Appearance

"Oh my God! How different I looked back then!" exclaimed a friend while looking at a photo taken in 2008. "You, however, have hardly changed," she added.

I chuckled to myself. I knew it wasn't true. I have changed in appearance over the years as much as anybody else, mostly because my body puts on weight whenever I am looking the other way, but also because of changing hairstyles, spectacle frames and, er... facial hair (which I finally got out of the way in 2002). So this narcissistic blog post is about looking back at some of these old appearances of me, and feeling amused or jealous, as the case may be.

To be reasonable, I will exclude photos of childhood from this list. All of these photos depict me later than my late teens.

So let's get the unpleasant one out of the way first. This is a photo taken by my father sometime during my final years in school. My beard had started growing in the most ridiculous fashion, and I had not started shaving it yet. You can see the result. And those glasses! Oh, how can I forget those glasses? They were my first pair. These large carbon fibre frames were the rage in those days. Now looking at them almost kills me with embarrassment. Seriously, I looked like that?

When I started my engineering at IIIT Calcutta, the first thing to go was the beard. The moustache followed six months later, although both of them made cameo appearances from time to time before the semester exams. The large carbon fibre glasses made way for narrow metal frames. The third significant change in my appearance concerned my weight.

I have been slightly overweight since my high school days. I always loved food, but was never a voracious eater. So my weight could only be attributed to a lack of exercise. After coming to IIIT, I decided to do something about it. That something was a four mile walk every day and a reduction in food intake. The latter one was easier to implement as I was living away from home and my mother was not around to check the amount of food I was eating. As a result, I was soon about 10 kilograms lighter and I loved it.

Those were strange times - photos were still taken on film. I had a small auto-everything camera which my mother sometimes used and which I had taken to college with me. Neither that camera took good photos, nor were the scanners which I used to scan them later any good, which is a relief, actually. The few photos that I found of my first year are so grossly weird that I would rather die before publishing them online. I would have died after publishing them anyway, for my other friends who appear in those photos with me would have had me assassinated. So fast forward to my third year in college when two of my friends brought digital cameras to college (on separate days). It was an amazing thing, nothing short of magic. We fooled around with those cameras all day, clicking photos of everyone from the professors to the tea sellers outside the college. Oh those grainy photos in all their 2 megapixel glory are almost painful to my eyes now, but at the time they were the best photos of my college life.

Then came fourth year, along with six months of staying at home during my project at ISI and soon I was on my way to fatness once more. Here you can see me during this period. This was taken by my cousin in May 2005, shortly before I joined my first job using a 3 megapixel digital camera that my other cousin sent from the US. Here I am neither extremely thin nor excessively fat. Yes, my Blogger profile photo is cropped from this photo. So this is not really an unknown look for my readers and hence there is really no reason to select this photo in this collection, but you know, kittens can justify anything.

The next photo shows me a year and a half later, in February 2007. I was comfortably settled down in my job and almost halfway back to my old weight by virtue of sitting at one spot all day and hardly having any time to cook healthy food. By this time, I was a photographer, so this was taken with my own Sony point-and-shoot by my friend Bhavana. Also, "A Joyful Experience" was already a year old at the time. Another year and a half later, in August 2008 to be exact, I said goodbye to this job and flew to the United States to do my PhD. I was further fattened up at this time and also, I had my first haircut in USA on New Year's Day which meant I had annoyingly long hair by Thanksgiving break, when the next photo was taken. This photo was the one from which I have supposedly not changed. But as you will see next, I actually changed a lot in between and then returned to the same configuration.

It was only appropriate that I should lose weight during my second innings of college life like the first time. Only, this time it was far more difficult. Firstly, you don't simply walk for miles in the winter anywhere in America, and particularly not in Newark. Secondly, as a student with an embarrassingly low income, most of my eating out options were limited to McDonald's and the like. Thirdly, I was seven years older than last time, which made things difficult. However, I found New York City a very good place to spend the weekends, and I sometimes walked seven or eight miles on each visit. Usually I have seen people put on weight after coming to the US but I was an exception. I dropped another 10 kilograms (or 22 lbs as the Americans would put it) and became very thin indeed.

So here I am in spring of 2009.

And then here I am in summer of 2009.

In summer of 2010 in Boston. Note that the glasses have changed to rectangular half-rimmed ones.

 And in fall of 2010 in Chicago. As you can see, I had gained back most of my weight once more.

This time, I was not able to shed the extra pounds, and I really don't know why. To make matters worse, I had seen most of New York City and the motivation for walking was gone. I had moved to a house next to the station which meant I didn't walk home also. So I started going to the gym. This resulted in my becoming slightly muscular, but without any loss of weight. So here I am in summer of 2011.

And then, in summer of 2012, as seen in the photo below, I was heavier than ever before. Clearly, something needed to be done urgently to reverse the trend, but I did not have time to do it as I was nearing the end of my PhD and was simply too busy with my dissertation and job applications. 

I kept getting fatter until winter, when I half-starved and half-exercised myself back to my fall 2008 proportions. So when I was travelling around the United States with my parents in summer 2013, getting hooded, and getting my photo taken all over the place, I had managed to look somewhat different again. I still look like that, except for the occasional hair cutting disaster. While this is still far heavier than what I would like to see myself, this is what I was like when I came to the US. So I have been worse, and I hope to get slimmer now that my new college/office has an area of 700 acres and I have to walk a mile to just go to the cafeteria and back.

Of course, what I do at the cafeteria once I'm there is important too for my appearance, but I think I have spoken far too long on the subject of myself, so I will make an abrupt stop here.

Polar Vortex

Just this New Year's Eve a little girl was asking me if I knew the way to the North Pole and whether I could take her there. When I said "Yes" to her, wondering what to say next, I had no way of knowing that the North Pole would soon be coming to her.

Now the whole world has been talking about the US polar vortex for the last couple of days, or that's what we in America would like to think. You may even have seen photos of the cold places. So here's a quick update for the readers of this blog about the weather here. It is also a post to remind me of these events next winter, when I feel it is too cold. So, just how cold is cold? A few points.

• All 50 states in the US registered temperatures below freezing on Tuesday, January 8.
• Chicago was actually colder than University of Chicago's research station in Antarctica
• The polar bear at the Chicago zoo had to be shifted indoors due to plummeting temperatures.
• Falls Church, the city where I live, registered a low of -16°C in the early hours of Tuesday. The windchill was -26°C at the time. Both these figures are officially the lowest temperatures I have seen in the US. Of course, Newark and New York were much colder on Tuesday.
• My own thermometer, which is kind of accurate, measured -10°C on my balcony. I did not try to turn boiling water into instant snow, but I am sure it would have worked. By the way, that thermometer also has a hygrometer and it measured the relative humidity as 16% both inside and outside which means I have to use a humidifier all the time to prevent nosebleed.

The heating of my apartment broke down on Sunday night, proving yet again that Murphy's Law never fails. Thankfully it was fixed on Monday morning. I had to venture out for half an hour on Tuesday without gloves, and my hands felt really painful. Besides, when the temperature remains sub-zero for a long time, one gets to see some weird effects, such as icicles hanging under the car. The worst part of living here in Virginia during this period is that there is no snowfall which means there is no reason for school to close. Who heard of schools closing because temperatures dropped too much on a sunny day? So I am trying to endure the cold weather to and from school, hoping for a snowstorm that would close everything for a day. That would at least be better than this icy-surfaces-in-the-sun thing.

In the meantime, Google automatically enhanced some of the photos that I have uploaded during the last few days by adding animation to them and decided to call it "Auto Awesome." While the effects are nothing short of cliched and tacky, somehow it goes with the holiday spirit, and helps me imagine what it would look like if it snowed. Here are the two that I liked the most.

What I'm up to these days...

Source

I always stayed up late, but being in grad school has made me take it to a whole new level.

Snowstorm and other things

The days are flying by. I have been busy before, but never have I been as busy as I am now. Between last-minute work on my thesis, experiments for a couple of new papers, managing a photography exhibition in Kolkata, my teaching job and driving lessons, I hardly know what I am doing any more. However, even amidst all this stressful work, a few events took place last week that took a little of the stress off. I thought I will post a few photos of these events here, if just to keep this blog alive.

First, there was the Broadway musical Mary Poppins which I went to see on the day before its final performance on Broadway. I do not have time to describe it now, but probably I will write a full post on the show. I am happy I saw it. After that there was Saraswati Puja last Sunday, delayed a couple of weeks by a snowstorm but enjoyable nevertheless. There was pushpanjali, bhog and a lovely cultural programme followed by a delicious dinner.

Then there was the exhibition in Kolkata itself. Being a part of the administrators' team for Kolkata Photographers' World, I had to do my bit for the club's second photography exhibition. Mine was probably the least work among all the admins. The others had to run around printing photos, getting them framed, reserving the gallery, sticking posters on the streets, hanging photos, finding a chief guest- the list is endless- while I was just designing flyers and posters, and helping select and prepare photos to be displayed. Still, this little work was heavily taxing on my tight schedule. When the exhibition finally happened and people from all works of life crowded the gallery to appreciate the work of us amateurs, it was worth all the trouble, of course. Those three days were really rewarding for me.

My sister at the exhibition. Photo courtesy my friend Lopamudra Bag

Finally, as the week was drawing to a close, we had a snowstorm blowing in unexpectedly into Newark. While it prevented me from practising driving as planned, it did offer me the opportunity to photograph my university campus in a heavy snowstorm, something that I never had since I bought my weatherproof DSLR in 2009. Since 2009, all winter storms have either hit Newark at night, or the school has been closed, or I have been in India. Going to take photos the next day is useless as the cleanup is real fast, and old snow looks different anyway. I have written about snow before, several times in fact, and although the summer is the most enjoyable season here, fresh snow has a dreamy quality to it that can instantly turn any landscape into a fairyland. This snowstorm had the added advantage of having a relatively warm air temperature, which made taking photos slightly more comfortable. A more complete set of these photos can be seen here.

And that's all for the time being. Daylight Saving Time begins tonight, which means tonight is going to be shorter by an hour. It's time to turn in and get whatever sleep I can.

Momentary Rhyme

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

"The spark, in his wings, found momentary rhyme

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

~Rabindranath Tagore (translation by me).

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

One longs for home

Things have been busy around here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just for the next ten days.

On a Leash

Yes, that is a dog.

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

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

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

There are more to the right

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

Seen at Central Park

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

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

  

Photo courtesy: Humans of New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy: Humans of New York