Reflections

The month of Baisakh is always associated in my mind with our visits to my mamar bari (maternal uncle’s house). Back in my schooldays we used to have long Easter holidays and this almost always coincided with the Bengali New Year holidays giving us a week off from school and that was when we went to the village where my grandfather had built his home after he fled East Bengal during Partition. The house was built on a typical Bengali rural house plan; the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard. There was a tube well which was an innovation for those days inside the house and sanitary arrangements included a cesspit which too was unusual for those times. The house was surrounded by a large garden which extended to the banks of the Jalangi River which flowed past the village. When I say garden, please don’t visualize the formal garden of the English or even the Mughals. It was a typical Bengali bagan, which means a collection of fruit trees, a bamboo grove and many other types of...

It is sometimes incredible to reflect on how friendships develop. Charles was an ex Calcutta man who after many adventures and vicissitudes ended up in Pokhara and was working as a travel agent. I was there at the same time ( 2003) working for the Manipal College of Medical Sciences. I met him in the famous Pokhara Lakeside one day when I was shopping around for somebody to take us to the Bardia National Park. It had been almost out of bounds for a long time because of the Maoist rebellion but recently there had been a cease fire which made it possible to visit it now that the guns were silent. Anyway he organized a marvelous trip for a group of us faculty members and students who had a really wonderful time, rafting down the river while watching birds and gharials, not to mention a Gangetic dolphin. However more of that story another time. As it happens,soon after this, Charles was brought to our hospital as a critically ill patient and he unfortunately passed away of a massive hear...

Buru or Nandita Das is my kid sister. Not as in she is my sibling, but we grew up together long long ago in Calcutta.She and her twin sister were our neighbours, and her father was a colleague and close friend of my father's. She is now in New Jersey, USA where she is a happy housewife and a very busy person as she works from home and teaches Bengali to children there in her spare time.She has two lovely children and her husband who is originally from Silchar, is another devoted father and husband. She has been in the USA for a long long time and i don't suppose she will return to India permanently ever. Her mother is a close friend of my mum's and she is also one of my favourite aunts; again of course , not related by ties of blood but by those of love. Anyway, she has written to comment on my post on the Chinese Community in Malaysia. And I think what she said is interesting , so that I am putting it up here, without taking her permission. I am sure she wont mind, and ev...

Before the advent of anaesthesia, surgery was a mad scramble to perform the procedure in the shortest possible time. One of the methods that were tried to save the patient from pain was mesmerism. Mersmerism was developed by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer( 1734-1815).He postulated in his doctoral thesis that the planets affected human health and all humans had a universal fluid which could be manipulated to cure the sick and cure the blind. Not surprisingly, he spectacularly failed to do so in Vienna and had to leave the city where he had his practice in 1777. A Jesuit healer, Father Hell, was active at the same time in Vienna. His preferred method of treatment was a magnetic steel plate which he waved about his patients . Mesmer proposed that the magnetic field unblocked his earlier hypothesized subtle magnetic fluid and cured the sick. Later he claimed that simply waving a magnetized pole over a person could do the trick. He managed to use this technique to hypnotise his s...

I read the most marvelous review of R K Narayan's Malgudi stories. written by Jhumpa Lahiri. One of my favourite writers, it is one of the best expositions of his work i have ever read. Please read it at http://bostonreview.net/BR31.4/lahiri.php It was written some years ago in the Boston Review, but I came across it very recently and I would like to share it with all of you out there.

This 20th of July will mark the 40th anniversary of one of the most important events in the history of mankind. That was the day that man first landed on the moon. I can still remember as if it were yesterday the running commentary carried by the All India Radio, probably from a Voice Of America feed, that told us that Neil Armstrong had indeed put foot on the moon and his now famous sentence (probably written for him by publicists back on earth). However whatever may be said it was indeed a giant leap for mankind. I was just at the right age to be wonderstruck with this feat. Not for me the political questions of the space race, the triumph of the “free “world over the Communist Empire, or the parochial jubilation of the Americans over this stunning success. To me the whole of the second half of the sixties ( when I became old enough to understand the excitement of space travel, was a time when the boundaries of science and technology was pushed to its limit and there seemed to be no...