Reflections

The recent canonization of Mother Teresa was a huge event in the Catholic world. It would be incorrect to single out only the Catholic world;many Indians of all religions felt honoured by association,  The political world in India also scrambled to get onto the gravy train. Two separate delegations visited the Holy City, not to impress the pope, but with an eagle’s eye on the minority vote. Why just the minorities, there are huge numbers of Indians who think of her with respect and recall her contributions to her adopted country gratefully. There has always been a debate about the Albanian born nun. She has been deified and vilified in equal measure and her detractors and admirers have always been legion. The recent excitement over the canonization made me wonder where I stand on this controversy. Do I think she was a saint, or at least a great woman? Or was she a bigoted missionary who looked after the poor in the hope of saving her soul and getting brownie points from the...

I recently read a marvelous little book. The book is a record of conversations between Edward Said, who needs no introduction and Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim is an Argentine born musician and conductor who has conducted many famous orchestras worldwide including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The La Scala in Milan and more importantly, the Berlin Philharmonic. Incidentally, he has also played in Calcutta.  As a Jew, he has come to terms with the massacre of the Jews by the Nazis and has tried to distinguish between the Nazis and the German population in general. The book has many interesting discussions about his bold decision to play Wagner in Tel Aviv which caused a big brouhaha. Wagner, if you remember as the German composer known to be anti-Semitic and was idolized by the Nazis. He has, in his conversations clearly distinguished the music from the political opinions of the famous composer. However, one part of the conversation between the two men related to what cons...

Shiv Kumar Batalvi shone like a meteor in the field of Punjabi poetry. Sadly, like a meteor, he faded away at the early age of 36. Born in undivided Punjab in 1936 (or 1937, as his matriculation certificate testifies) his family moved to the Indian Punjab during the Partition. His father was a minor revenue official and they settled in Batala (thus Batalvi) in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab, the heart of the Punjab as it were. He was a precocious poet, beginning to write songs and poems as an intermediate student. Unlucky in love (twice according to most accounts) he wrote some of his finest romantic poetry in memory of the two women he loved and lost. He was the youngest ever winner of the Sahitya Academy award for his verse play Loona. Shiv Kumar Batalvi  He used to delight in outrageous behavior, often speaking disparagingly about amateur poets who used to abound in literary meetings. Unfortunately he was also an alcoholic and despite his superb literary output, was...

ROBERT BOYLE  The field of blood transfusion can rightly be said to have started in the 1660s.On the 17 th December 1666, Richard Lower an Oxford   physician published a   paper in the Philosophical Transactions which described an experiment in where the procedure was carried out among dogs. The paper can be accessed from JSTOR. To be more precise, he informed the famous Robert Boyle about his work and he communicated this to the journal.  Incidentally, the Philosophical Transactions is the oldest continually published scientific journal in the world.   Incidentally, Aurangzeb still ruled India and the Jantar Mantar was not to be built until more than 50 years later. The description of the experiment would have all the animal activists in the world up in arms. The carotid artery of the first dog was exposed and tied off distally and the proximal part tied with a ligature that could be loosened at will. A (goose?) quill was placed in thi...

We Bengalis may not be No 1 in many fields, but as is universally known, there are 3 things we delight ourselves in- food, education, reading. What can be better when it comes to reading about food? When you talk about food and creativity, I can think of 2 kinds of creations: one where you cook food and create a culinary delight and the other which I am expert at is to read of and about food and in my mind conjure, concoct, experiment and almost taste the visual delight. Thus, in order to be interesting, a cook book must cater to both these types of clientele. Further in today’s world of culinary explosions, both on TV as well as restaurants inclusive of all kinds of world cuisine, the reader of cook books needs cosmopolitan recipes, rather than sticking to regional delicacies only(not that I am against them). Taylors University teaches Hospitality and its library has a wide range of food related books, right from choosing wines to world cuisine. However, I was quite surprised ...

This post has been reblogged from Farnam Street.This site is run by Shane Parrish a young Canadian who says that his goal is to "  help you go to bed each night smarter than when you woke up. I’ll do this by giving you tools, ideas, and frameworks for thinking." I subscribe to the feed from his site. I liked this post and thought it might interest some of you who are not familiar with Shane's writings. I have changed the heading of the post however.  You can read the original post here . What makes a theory scientific?   It’s not immediately clear, to the layman, what the essential difference is between science and something masquerading as science: pseudoscience. The distinction gets at the core of what comprises human knowledge: How do we actually know something to be true? Is it simply because our powers of observation tell us so? Or is there more to it? Sir Karl Popper, the scientific philosopher, was interested in ...

The Famous Poster  The febrile excitement caused by the release of the Netaji files has now died down. The excited yelping that had accompanied the release of some of the files seems to be over; the (distant) relatives of Netaji are no longer in the news and all is quiet until the next episode of Netajiitis. Perhaps today’s celebrations will set off another bout. The centenary of the commencement of First World War spawned a large number of books, some of which I have read with fascinated interest. One historical parallel which had earlier escaped my notice may be of interest. As soon as the War started, by public demand and acclaim, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum was appointed the War Secretary. On hindsight, it seems clear that while he was public relations dream (remember the posters showing him pointing to the public saying “the country needs you!” probably the most famous poster in history); he was a military disaster. He was used to colonial wars of the 19 th century w...

Samuel Hahnemann  Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was in India. Just as we ordinary garden NRIs do, great men also like to spend the winter in India. Anyway while he was here, he was invited to opine on many things, and among many things, he mentioned that homeopathy is bogus. Venkatraman Radhakrishnan This is something that I believe. I have no great passion or am not passionate in my denunciation of homeopathy; if anything, I have a sneaking sympathy for the art as my Dad was a passionate believer. After his retirement, he got himself an online qualification, studied large numbers of texts and had quite a clientele for his Free Homeo clinic that he ran from home. In deference to his views and to avoid volcanic eruptions for which both he and I are well known, I used to lie low and say nothing when he proclaimed its benefits. My wife and some doctor friends, who could not get away had to listen to him declaiming the merits of homeopathy. Be that as it may, this blog ...

Bread and circuses were the raison d'etre of the Roman empire, particularly when it was in its long inexorable decline. The Roman citizens could be diverted from anything if they were fed and were provided the entertainment that wiled away the hours of leisure. Bengal, particularly during the Vishwakarma Puja to Saraswati Puja season increasingly resembles the Roman polity. The industrial landscape remains desolate. This is not to say that other regions of India  are flourishing notwithstanding the accha din rhetoric : a recent visit to Nagpur revealed long stretches of defunct “industrial” zones and empty real estate. However, the industrial scene seems especially desolate when viewed form a North Bengal prism: The tea industry seems to be in terminal decline, there is nothing to take its place.  I am not going into the statistics that were being bandied about in the newspaper advertisements and hoardings in late December and early January: the ones that showed Beng...