2012

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

Manhattan after Sandy (Source)

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

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

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

Moth art created by Alex Hatjoullis

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

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

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

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.

Sleuths on Screen

Uttamkumar as Byomkesh in Chiriyakhana

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

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

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

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

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

The name's Bakshi. Byomkesh Bakshi. 

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

Look at the hair, not the moustache

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Shoulders of Giants

Two men died in the past ten days.

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

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

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

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

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

A friend's status update on Facebook on the 12th of October told me about the death of Dennis Ritchie. I searched for a news report on Google and did not find a single proper English news site reporting it. The few (less than five) search results that did show up were forum discussions. Wikipedia, however, seemed to confirm that Dennis Ritchie had died on... the 8th of October 2011^[1].

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

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

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

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

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

[1] It now seems he died on the 12th of October 2011. But the fact that Wikipedia reported the wrong date initially only enforces my point.

Slice of Life?

That's how you enjoy life

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

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

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

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

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

A railway platform in Mumbai

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

Singham: How real people fight

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

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

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.

Its Magic!

Some feelings never change.

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity and Boredom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I need to say more?

Completely Dead

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

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

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

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

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

[Commotion outside]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream Come True

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.

Mixed Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.