Death of a Teacher

I started learning Computer Science when I was in the fifth grade. We called it Computer Studies.

Throughout the first year, we learnt mostly theory: the characteristics of a computer, the parts of a computer, the history of computers, etc. Then in the sixth grade, we started to learn programming in BASIC. Little did I know at the time that this would become my favourite subject in school, and then I would go on to get an engineering degree and a Ph.D. in this field. Today, I am a professor of Computer Science, and if I try to trace the roots of my love for this subject, I will inevitably end up in those fifth and sixth grade classrooms where we learnt the basics of computer science and programming.

And I will inevitably end up remembering our teacher, Mr. Sandeep Chintamani. If I have to choose one teacher from my school who had the most influence on my life, it would be him.

I can still clearly remember his voice, his smile, his mannerisms and even his accent, as he taught computer science to us. Most of us had never even seen a computer when we started to learn about them, but he told us a secret: we did not need to actually sit at computers to learn programming. And then, the latter half of sixth grade onwards, we would form a queue and walk to the computer lab at the back of the biology lab once every few weeks and spend some time at a computer. There were only eight or ten computers for the fifty-odd students in our class, and they were old even by the standards of the day, but I still eagerly looked forward to these practical sessions and even theory classes with Mr. Chintamani. Of course, I may be biased, since I eventually fell in love with Computer Science, but I don't know whether that would have happened if the subject had been taught by another teacher.

I later had other Computer Science teachers, of course, and I remember all of them fondly. But Mr. Chintamani held a special place in my childhood memories, and even now, when I teach my students about if-else blocks, or loops, I hear certain words and phrases in my head in his voice. "How would Mr. Chintamani teach this?" has been a question that I have asked myself often, and used the answer to improve my teaching.

I bring this up today, because Mr. Chintamani passed away last week. He was on my Facebook friendlist, and when the obituary from my school appeared on my timeline, it was shocking and sad in equal parts. Just a couple of days ago, he had shared some COVID-related information on his wall. Little did I know that his life would be cut short by the disease within the week. Of the millions of lives this pandemic is claiming in India right now, this one is a little too close to my heart. He was only fifty-five. Rest in peace Sir, you left us too soon!

I don't feel like writing anything more. I don't feel like doing anything anymore. I want to be able to go home and see my parents again.

Remembering Dadu

Very old readers of this blog may remember my post on my grandfather's birthday, fourteen years ago. This blog was only a few days old at that time, and I wrote more regularly.

Today is my grandfather's birthday once again. What's more, today is his 100th birth anniversary.

My grandfather, or Dadu, as I called him, was a man of many interests. When he got interested in something, he worked at it until he became an expert. The fact that these interests often had no practical value did not deter him at all. Some of the activities that he tried during his life (other than mathematics) are contract bridge, carrom, aquarium-keeping, candle-making, ink-making, spirograph, carpentry, book-binding, sandpaper-making, homoeopathic and biochemic medicine, and astrology. Most of these were before my time, of course, and so I only know these from stories I have heard since my childhood. I have also seen him making innumerable small tools and gadgets around the house. 

A spirograph design by Dadu

Dadu was a man of discipline. He woke up by 4:00 every morning and walked to the banks of the river Ganga, which is about a kilometre from our house. When heart troubles appeared later in his life, and the doctor advised against brisk walks, he went there by rickshaw. If I was visiting Hooghly at the time, I would accompany him there. The two of us would sit there on a bench and he would tell me stories from the Mythologies, incidents from History, facts from Geography, theories from Physics. He pointed out the Milky Way and talked about astronomy. He talked about old Hollywood movies. He explained to me the difference between the different kinds of boats passing in the still dark river. He recited verses from the Gita and explained their meaning to me. There was hardly a subject on which he couldn't talk. He told me about all these things throughout the day, of course, but during that early morning hour I had his undivided attention. Dadu also had a great collection of books. Most of those books are crumbling and somewhat obsolete now, but I spent hours with those books, looking at pictures and reading up about the world. He also bought many such books for me. I wonder if my daughter will ever develop an interest in those books, or if that interest will even be relevant in the age of the Internet.

A sample of Dadu's english handwriting

Dadu had a great sense of humour. He loved to joke and play pranks on everyone around him. When we lived in Allahabad, I sent a letter to him in Hooghly every week, and he did likewise. These letters were often very odd - I sometimes substituted words with little pictures. Both of us sometimes wrote little riddles that had to be solved to get the full message. He once even wrote a whole letter in heavily sanskritized bengali, describing mundane everyday things in a hilarious manner. Also, his handwriting was amazingly beautiful. Waiting for letters, writing of letters and reading letters is another set of pleasures that our next generation will never know. 

A bengali letter from Dadu (click to enlarge and read)

I could go on writing, but then, this post would never end. So there is no point in going on and on. The only thing that I wish on Dadu's 100th birthday is that I can use at least some of the teaching techniques that I learnt from him to teach my daughter. She wasn't fortunate enough to meet Dadu, but I hope at least she can learn from one of his students.

Magic in the Sky

The rest of this series:
A Road Trip and a Speeding Ticket
Badlands
Devil's Tower and Onwards
A Land of Water and Fire
The Strange Dinner
Bison Jam
Last Day at Yellowstone
Two Days at Grand Tetons
A Desert of Salt
Mountains of Sand

***

A very long time ago - on October 24, 1995, to be exact - I witnessed something magical.

I was in Allahabad at the time, and the moon decided to pass between the sun and the earth on that day, casting its shadow on northern India. What's more, Allahabad was one of those few lucky cities where the eclipse was total. The moon completely covered the face of the sun, enabling us to look at the duo with our naked eyes and see the solar corona. My father even took photos of the event. I remember everything about the day vividly: how the light decreased in jumps, how the panicked sparrows came back to the tree in our garden, how the circles of sunlight in the shadow of that tree turned to crescents. And I remembered the diamond ring. As the moon passed the face of the sun and the sun started to peek out from one of the sides, I saw light that was whiter than I could ever imagine. Naturally, I have wanted to see it again ever since.

So when I found out about the Great American Total Solar Eclipse (as the media keeps calling it) last year, I had decided I had to witness the event. What's more, the path of the total eclipse was passing through St. Louis, Missouri this time, and we have friends there. I ordered a solar filter sheet on Amazon before they went out of stock, and cut it out to create caps for my telephoto lens and Poulami's binoculars. The only thing that remained to be done now was to plan our road trip in such a way that our return journey took us through St. Louis on August 21.

So we decided to drive from Great Sand Dunes in Colorado to St. Louis, Missouri over two days. Most of this drive was through the agricultural lands of Kansas - a terribly straight road through a terribly flat land. Our car's AC started acting up on the first day of this trip and we got a feel of the 40-ish degree Celsius temperature outside. On the second day, the AC gave up completely and turned this into the most uncomfortable leg of our trip.

We spent the first night at a hotel in Hays, a city in Kansas. This place was chosen only because it was on our way and roughly the center point between Great Sand Dunes and St. Louis. We were so exhausted by our seven-hour drive that day that we didn't feel like leaving the hotel at all. We ordered Chinese food for dinner and ate in our room. Next morning, we hit the road again and reached St. Louis after driving for another eight hours. The city where our friends live isn't actually St. Louis but one of the southern suburbs called Fenton, and this was good because the moon's shadow would be passing just south of St. Louis. Staying in Fenton meant we could see the eclipse from the house. And that's what we did in the afternoon. Our friends were at work, but Poulami and I watched the eclipse from their deck. My father had to worry about running out of film in 1995, but I don't have to think of such matters anymore. I set up my digital SLR on my tripod and took photos to my heart's content.

It was strange how similar the experience was to the last time. The light going down by leaps and bounds, the crescent shaped patches of sunlight. The absence of sparrows, or any other birds for that matter, was conspicuous. But then, maybe the tree in their garden doesn't have birds. Once during the whole experience light clouds threatened to cover the face of the sun, but they went away quickly.

Crescent-shaped images of the sun

Here are the photos that I took that day. I think they would do a much better job of describing the celestial magic by which the sun and the moon appear exactly the same size during a total solar eclipse on the only planet that has observers to appreciate it.

Solar corona

Totality selfie

Diamond ring

Our road trip story ends here. Actually, truth be told, it should have ended here. I would have liked to write that we left Fenton that evening and made an uneventful five-hour drive back home, because any further experience wouldn't be able to top the solar eclipse. But I can't write that because that journey took nine hours and we reached home at 3:00 a.m. The highway was congested with traffic moving at a snail's pace. All this traffic was returning to the northern states of Illinois and Wisconsin and Minnesota after watching the total solar eclipse from Missouri. The traffic was so slow at points that people were literally getting out of their cars, grabbing drinks from their trunk and going back to their seat again. To add insult to injury, we were also hit by severe thunderstorms on the way.

After going to bed at 4:00 a.m., I also had to go attend a departmental meeting at 9:00 o'clock the next morning. That meeting kicked off the semester which has caused this inordinate amount of delay in writing about our road trip from August. Now that I'm done, I can go back to writing about other topics of a non-serial nature.

(The End)

Adios, Amigo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Storage

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

Those bookshelves go from the floor right up to the ceiling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hundred years later

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty

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 Future of Books

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.

Load shedding

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.

Toy Story

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.

Dream Come True

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.

Saraswati Puja

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.

The Customary Durga Puja Post

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.

New-grandpa

"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.