Reflections

I suddenly realized that this is the hundredth post in Reflections. When I first started this blog, back in July 2008, I never thought that I would reach this magic number. As blogs go it is not very old, but I am reasonably proud of the fact that I have written almost weekly for the past three years. The idea of a blog arose when I came up with Niponwave when trawling the net. I was very interested to find that the blogger was a second year medical student at the North Bengal Medical College. Nipon was the inspiration for this blog and ever since he has helped me with the nitty gritties, taught me how to negotiate the difficulties that I face. In one of his own posts Nipon has drawn a distinction between those who came into this technology from “birth” as it were against those who came into it later, like me. For those of us who started seriously using computers only about ten years ago and that too at the ripe old age of 40+ some things are very difficult. However with help from Ni...

One part of our childhood to which he had clung so tenaciously finally came to an end when the surviving member of the Goopy Bagha duo, Tapan Chatterji passed away yesterday. He was a professional actor and had acted in many movies, but to our generation he was Goopy Gyne, the failed vocalist who with the help of a boon from the King of the Ghosts, became singer par excellence. Based on a short story written by Satyajit Ray’s grandfather, Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury, The Goopy Bagha series was part of our childhood, our young adult rebelliousness and our middle aged nostalgia for our lost youth. The first film was made in 1968. We were then 10 years of age, and just the right age to suspend disbelief and breathlessly enjoy the tale of Goopy and Bagha as they rose from exiled young men with no talent to the favoured sons in law of the King of Shundi. The songs were magnificent. We realized for the first time that Satyajit Ray was a genius in composition and lyric writing as well. And...

The other day somebody sent me a link to what is one of my favourite songs. “Where do you go to my lovely’ was all the rage when we were in school. I remember how we waited breathlessly for it to play in the Calcutta B Western music programmes and were lost in a world of racehorses and Swiss holiday resorts and what not. At that time they were as distant from our experience as the moon. But I get ahead of my story. Peter Sarstedt was another of the Indian born singers who made it big in the sixties. Not that he was wildly popular the way Cliff Richard was, but he made a fairly large niche for himself, particularly with this song which reached the top of the pops in 1969. It was released in India by HMV a 45 RPM single later, probably in the early seventies and it was one of those songs that remain etched in your memory as one of your favourites for evermore. He came from a family of brothers who were in the show business. None of them were really very successful at the highest ...

Returning from Chicago proved to be more exciting than going there. The United Airlines airplane was late: about one hour and a half. This was worrying, but not unduly so as we did have about 3 hours in Paris to catch our Malaysian airlines flight to KL. Then I saw something in the display that scared me. Arrival time in Paris: 11.55 a m . Our connecting flight was at 12 Noon! But why? On enquiry we discovered that the Iceland Volcano had struck again. Instead of flying in a convex curve over Canada, and then over the Atlantic and Ireland and England, we would have to make a dip to the south over the Atlantic, and then fly north again to Paris. This would add a couple of hours to the flying time and unless Malaysian Airlines was flying late, it looked like we would have to stay overnight at the Charles de Gaulle Airport; unless we could manage to get a visa of course. The transit area at Paris had not really looked too exciting on the way out. We have been spoiled by KLIA and Cha...