Reflections

From the world of blogs I stumbled on the world of podcasts again very serendipitously. It was while surfing the net that I came upon the world of BBC podcasts. I don’t know whether it is generally known but BBC website has a wonderful podcast section where they offer literally hundreds of podcasts of their programmes. My favourite is of course the “In Our Time” podcast. Mervyn Bragg has been examining intellectual issues for years in this programme. The format is very simple. The host invites three experts on the field to discuss with him over about three quarters of an hour, one topic, which could be literally anything. I have heard a discussion of the “The Scream”, the masonry astronomic instruments of Raja Jai Singh and the rise and fall of the Aztecs. It comes on air every Thursday on Radio 4, but I always download the podcast on a Friday and listen to it very attentively over the weekend. It has opened my eyes to many subjects and ideas and I am an unabashed fan. Bragg also write...

The other day, I noticed that a colleague of mine was using a fountain pen. It has been ages since I even saw one, so I took a nice long look at it. It was not the sort of leaking ink pens we used to have in our school days, but a designer pen, pretty expensive. Apparently it is the in thing nowadays to use fountain pens once more, but not the common or garden variety; one must use expensive branded ones. The ink too has to be something other than the royal blue that we were so used to in our student days, purple, or green is the colour of choice. It took me back to a long forgotten part of our school life. One of the things we had to compulsorily do in the morning while packing our books was to fill the fountain pen with ink. Mostly we used to have to unscrew the top of the pen and then use a dropper to fill the reservoir. If one overfilled it, it invariably dripped all over the table and we always had an inky rag handy for these accidents. More expensive pens had a rubber self ...

I am an unabashed fan of the movies of Satyajit Ray. He was, to my mind, one of the greatest minds of the last century and besides his films has left behind a body of other work that marks him out as one of the most talented Indians ever.  I sometimes play a rating game with his films. Which of them is the best? Purists are unanimous: Charulata is the number one. Perhaps it is, the subtle nuances of the changing relationships between the trio of principal characters is one of the great moments of cinema. The characterization of Charulata, her loneliness and inquisitiveness make for marvelous cinema. There is much to be said for Apur Sansar as well. This movie too, ranks among his best. The superb acting, the character of Apu and the heartwarming scenes where he and his wife fall in love with each other are also unparallelled in Indian cinema. But what about Pather Panchali? This movie, justly regarded as a path breaker in Indian cinema is also a favourite. The rural Bengal cou...

The power of rumours to influence society is immense. One of the most powerful rumours in recent times was the one about Lord Ganesha “drinking “ milk that swept all over India in September 1995. The whole of India was agog with rumours of this supernatural event and it all died down after about three days. Some rumours can exhibit some really fantastic feats of imagination on the part of their creators. And as someone once pointed out, there is a sucker born every minute in order to believe it. The times when rumours have a field day are during times of civic stress, like wars, riots and the like. At that time grown and normally sensible can easily swallow seven impossible things before breakfast without even turning a hair. One such group of rumours have been documented during a plague epidemic in Calcutta in 1898. Plague was a terror in those days and still is. Many will remember the panic that was set off by the Surat plague scare in 1994. People fled in panic from the city red...