Reflections

Picture from www.bbc.co.uk Two of the greatest icons of pre independence India who still wield immense influence over the minds of Indians of today were born within a couple of years of each other barely a kilometer or so as the crow flies in the city of Calcutta, then the capital of the British empire which seemed destined to last a thousand years. I refer, of course to Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda, one the poet philosopher who was, as Amit Ghosh once put it, the first global literary superstar and who was the conscience keeper of the Indian independence struggle. The other was the person who interpreted Hinduism in a way that many had not for a thousand years away and set up a Mission in the name of his master which is till today one of the biggest and most important educational and service organization in the country. It is surprising therefore to find that these two savants barely acknowledged each other’s existence and there is only one unequivocal record of a meeti...

Lorna Monteith is an old friend. She has written in this blog about the Bow Barracks ( see here ). She, too , is a heroine in her own right. I will post her story sometime later, but for now lets read a eye witness account of the Great Calcutta Killing. Incidentally, the Great Calcutta killing was one of the most horrendous riots that occurred on the eve of Independence. The Muslim League gave a call for Direct Action to obtain Pakistan which led to large scale disturbances with Muslim mobs, with the tacit support of the British Government attacking Hindu localities. The reprisals were even worse than the actions and there was great orgy of killing which ended only after a week when the British masters realized that things were getting out of hand.It was one of the biggest failures of the British and combined with the Bengal Famine and the Partition, made the forties probably the worst decade of the twentieth century for Bengal. All pictures from the website " The Old Indian...

We often talk about heroes, the pages of Facebook are rife with many imaginary stories of heroism. However, in life you do sometimes come across people who are heroes and heroines; ordinary people, just like you and me who have overcome trials and tribulations bravely, silently and have emerged triumphant. I would like to tell you the story of one such heroine. She is the sister of one of my closest friends and her story can be really inspirational. Sumita Bannerjee was born in Nagpur, the daughter of a schoolmaster. She was brought up in an ordinary middle class Bengali home where education was more important than luxuries and she received a good formal education. She began her working life as a teacher in her hometown and as is very usual in such families in those days, had an arranged marriage to a bureaucrat in the West Bengal government in 1983. So far, her life was ordinary, even humdrum you might say. The first real setback to her existence came when she had an ectopic pregn...

Frederick II, Holy Roman Empperor Evidence based medicine is all the rage now and randomized controlled trials are a dime a dozen. All self-respecting clinical researchers are jumping into the RCT pit with gusto. However, I wonder how many of us know when the first recorded attempt was made to elicit evidence for clinical practice? Frederick II (1192-1250) was the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Sicily. This was the thirteenth century when medicine was still more magic than therapy. While he was the most powerful medieval emperor of Europe, he had scientific interests in addition to his military abilities. He wrote a treatise on falconry and set up a menagerie which collected all manner of exotic animals. Emperor Frederick was interested in knowing the effect of exercise on digestion. There were two schools of thought extant at that time in his court. One set of physicians felt that exercise was good for digestion while a second lot swore that resting was better. Frederick was ...

As a tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez who died last month, this is the speech he gave while accepting the Nobel Prize in 1982. Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image. This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is...