Reflections

The Bengali Singara (as opposed to the North Indian Samosa) is my favourite snack. For those not in the know, a singara is made of a vegetarian filling over a flour based covering, deep fried The filling can be simply mashed potatoes, or may contain any vegetable including, famously, fresh cauliflower. During the Bengal winter the smell of cauliflower singaras being fried is one of my enduring memories of my homeland. . I have lived in Calcutta City, then in its Southern suburbs, and spent many school holidays in the heart of Nadia where my grandparents lived near Krishnanagar. I have also spent almost four yeas in North Bengal. To my mind the art of making a good singara is a very Calcuttan one. I have yet to taste a singara better than those that are routinely fried in the lanes of Central Calcutta. I spent about 15 years in the College Street area, first as a student, then as a PG student and finally as a teacher . During this time I must have had thousands of singaras and those are

Three years ago the centenary of a momentous event in the history of India’s independence movement passed almost unnoticed. The reason was of course the disinclination of the ruling dispensation to acknowledge that the partition of Bengal was a seminal moment in the history of British India and the movement that for the first time forced the British to back down and to quote Surendranath Bannerjee “unsettle a settled fact” was a watershed in the history of the independence struggle. I refer of course to the ( first) Partition of Bengal, which set off a movement in Bengal that was unprecedented in its scope and managed to fire the imagination of an entire generation of Indians. Today it is fashionable to say that it was an upper caste Hindu agitation and was directed against the poor Muslims who we are told wanted the partition. To my mind this proves that Marxist historians can go to any extent to distort History for their purposes. The Soviet revolution masterminded by a gang of Bolsh

A bottle of mineral water costs Rs 12 in India today, two bottles cost more than what 77% of the Indian population earns every day. This is a statistic that all educated and well off Indian should remember every morning as they have their breakfast. It might help us to remember that while India has progressed in many many ways, there are countless numbers of us who still live in a way that many middle class Indians would not allow their pets to live. This is true of half the world population, but a large proportion of the world’s poor live in India and it is our responsibility to never let this slip our mind. 10 million children die due to vaccine preventable diseases, again a large proportion of these children are Indian. And 1.7 billion people in the world do not have access to essential drugs. This means that a disease that may be easily treatable ends up in a long illness or death, that too in a population least able to face up to this disaster of long periods without wages or the

Or more properly Melaka. The name itself has a romantic cadence; history has been made here many many times. It has been a port for half a millennium, standing as a staging post between India and China; traders used it as refueling point and rest station when travelling between the two major cultures of Asia. When the colonial powers arrived, chasing the spices that were essential to preserve their food, they quickly grasped the strategic advantage of this port and it changed hands many times, the Portuguese were here, then the Dutch and finally the English. It was here that Tunku Abdul Rehman declared independence in 1957, incidentally the year of my birth. The building from where this event took place stands as a monument to those stirring times. We arrived at the Melaka Sentral bus station at about 11 AM after a comfortable and airconditioned journey from Kuala Lumpur. A short bus ride later we were at the heart of historical Melaka. The heritage area has been declared a Unesco Wor