Reflections

Mahalaya always brings with it the promise of the Durga Puja to follow less than a week away. There are many religious connotations to this day. It is the day given over for prayers for ancestors and there are many who crowd the Hooghly in Calcutta to bathe and offer the necessary prayers. However for us, in our younger days, Mahalaya meant the onset of the Pujas. And this was always heralded by the early morning Mahisasurmardini programme in All India Radio. There are many programmes that have the signature of AIR Calcutta, but this particular one is one that is perhaps the most popular and has lasted the longest. I am told that the programme originated in 1932. In the first few decades it was a live programme that was anchored by the legendary Birendra Krishna Bhadra. When we were kids it was rumoured that Birendra Krishna used to bathe in the Hooghly at 3 AM and then walk to the AIR studios to start the programme at 4.00 AM. Ever since I can remember, my father used to switch on

One question that is exercising many minds in India today is that of Narendra Modi. Will he be the BJP candidate for Prime Minister or will he not? If so will he become the next Prime Minister or will he not? In connexion to this is also the question: Should he become Prime Minister or did his shenanigans during the Gujarat Riots make him unsuitable for the post? To my mind these questions should be in the forefront of all thinking people’s minds and should generate a sober debate. Instead we see the newspapers and the social media sites filled with a shrill abusive noise which only confuses the issue and leads to more abuse which is counterproductive because this is a debate which is necessary and vital and may be a game changer for India in the near future. To my mind the questions are three. 1) Is Modi all he is cracked out to be? Is he really the man who changed the face of Gujarat and if given a chance can change the face of India? 2) If so what about his record during the Gu

When we were at school and which was when we last studied history formally, we were not taught too much about the history of southern India. India was for our history books the history of Northern India, divided neatly into the Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods. Political correctness was less prominent in those days; consequently these periods were also called the Hindu, Muslim and British periods of our history. The fact is however that the history of India was never so neatly divided. Muslim sultanates in the Northern parts coexisted quite comfortably with major Hindu kingdoms in the South. The North East was absent in such histories and the influence that India had on South East Asia was never mentioned. It was unfashionable to proclaim that India had exported its influence all over the Malay peninsula, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia the and the Indonesian archipelago. It was only when I came to live here in Malaysia that I began to l get a real glimpse of the scale of