Reflections

If you have the press on your side, you can do anything in India. And there are some personalities who are experts in manipulating the press as well as the online media. One such person is Baichung Bhutia and not too far behind is his mentor Bob Houghton. India was the worst team in the Asia Cup. Ok, it was a feat to have got there, but they qualified three years ago. Subsequent to this, the coach threw tantrums, made racial comments at referees, criticized the Federation, got an increase in salary which was totally uncalled for, and managed to spend most of the time abroad with his team or without. Baichung Bhutia was injured most of this time. When his club (then Mohun Bagan) began to ask why he could not play football while fully able to execute intricate dance maneuvers for a TV show, he managed to project it as a “poor player being targeted by heartless clubs”, broke his contract and landed with East Bengal, for whom he has not played a match for quite some time now. Jus...

I was in Penang for a business meeting last week relating to a study we are doing there in collaboration with one of the hospitals. Meetings over, I had some time to spare, which I decided to spend in taking a walk around the area where my hotel was. The biggest problem in Malaysia is the humidity which makes walking a bit of a tedious activity, but today there was a balmy breeze from the Malacca Straits which made life a lot more enjoyable. As I strolled down Northam Road, now named Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah (re namers also exist in Malaysia, though not so virulent in their work as in Calcutta), I suddenly came across the Protestant Cemetery. It is a leafy walled enclosure full of tombs of Britishers, some Chinese, and Armenians who ended their life on this island. The first burial took place in 1789 just three years after the settlement was founded by Sir Francis Light in 1786. Francis Light was an interesting person. Probably the illegitimate son of a minor nobleman, Francis foun...

I have blogged about it before, but I want to say it again, the BBC Radio 3 programmes are perhaps the best in the world. And one of my favourites among them is the In our Time series in which the host, Mervyn Bragg,speaks to various experts on subjects that vary from Daoism to Byron’s Childe Harold to take two recent examples. It is obviously impossible to keep up with the actual broadcasts, but now we have the podcasts which allow me to hear his programmes over the weekend, at my leisure and in comfort. He recently hosted a show based on the Industrial revolution which changed the face of the world forever. As one of the experts pointed out during the course of the programme, before the industrial revolution, life could be unchanging for centuries, but after this, we are all aware, that life may improve or conditions may worsen, but things are definitely going to change. When I think about the communications revolution that has taken place over the past decade or two, with the rise ...

It has started once again, Calcutta’s idiotic Saurav mania. It was obvious to all, except perhaps to Saurav and his admirers that he was not going to command a high price at the IPL auction. However he stuck to his ego and demanded the highest reserve price. Fine, he felt that he was worth that much and frankly, if I had the money, I would have paid it to get him. Now that the teams have not shown any interest in him, he should simply walk away into the sunset. Perhaps, for all I know, that is exactly what he wants to do, but the Bengali press and the Calcutta agitation brigade cannot let things go so easily can they? So the papers are fulminating about “conspiracies”. We have been conspired against right from 1911 when the British shifted their capital, by the centre after independence and of course by everybody else ever since. Why anybody should find any need to conspire against a race that is so busy conspiring against itself is not clear to me. However there is perhaps some merit...

Floating down a river is the best way to see some types of country. It is perhaps the only way to enter some types of forest. For instance, there is no way to see the Sunderbans except by boating down the creeks and rivers that maze through it. It is a similar state of affairs in the Borneo rain forest. It is practically impossible to walk in the rain forest. There are many descriptions of intrepid explorers who did, and it involves hacking a way through dense undergrowth and grappling with insects, reptiles and all manner of animals big and small. The safer way to do it for lesser mortals is to float down a river with the rainforest on both sides. The Kinabatangan River is wide, muddy coloured , and appeared o have fast current. However the boatman took us in to the Menanggul River, a tributary which had dark black water, a completely different type. The reason escaped me; unfortunately our boatman could speak only very basic English, so that it was difficult to conduct a complete co...

Sandakan really hides herself in the forests. The forests of Borneo have always been a botanist’s and zoologist’s delight and there are many famous names associated with Borneo and its forests. These include Wallace who anticipated many of Darwin’s theories as well as Marianne North, the famous nature illustrator. Incidentally Marianne is a very interesting woman whose collection we were privileged to see at the Kew Gardens in London. In fact she has recorded that during her visit to the hills of Sikkim, she passed through Siliguri in 1878. ( She did not have much to say about it!) Be that as it may, the present day reality is that palm oil plantations are destroying the Borneo forests at a crazy rate. This was evident as we drove out of Sandakan towards the Gomantong caves. There are patches of rain forest left forlornly in between long stretches of palm oil plantations, looking for all the world like a child at a new school, sticking out of its surroundings . However as we came cl...

2011 has started badly for all Bengalis and lovers of Bengali culture. Yesterday, Suchitra Mitra, one of the greatest exponents of Rabindrasangeet passed away. It was not entirely unexpected as she was 86 years old. Apparently she suffered a cardiac arrest while having her lunch and died at home before any medical help could be summoned. The present status of Rabindrasangeet as the undisputed top of the pops in Bengal often conceals the fact that this was not always so. One of the group of singers who brought Tagore’s songs to every Bengali household and made them a part of Bengali existence was Suchitra Mitra. She was educated in Santiniketan, but she made Calcutta her karmabhoomi and her school Rabitirtha was one of the important centres for the propagation and popularization of Rabindrasangeet. She was beautiful, extraordinarily so, and had an imperious bearing; in later years the shock of silver hair which crowned her added to the distinguished look for which she was famous. We wer...