Reflections

Uma Mallick looks like an ordinary Bengali Housewife. She wears a standard cotton sari, vermillion on her forehead and travels clinging to her husband’s motorcycle as he whizzes past in Siliguri’s notorious lanes. However she is anything but that. Uma is the founder and the livewire of the Uttar Banga Anath Ashram (North Bengal Orphanage). Lest that makes you conjure up an image of a gleaming building full of well dressed children being looked after by an army of attendants, let me disillusion you. Her orphanage looks after girl children (she only takes in girls), and they are housed in a tiny postage stamp sized piece of land that was donated to her by a kind soul. Or perhaps not so kind soul, because the land was already occupied by a group of Mastaans, ( local goons) who could only be induced to vacate by a long and desperate struggle, involving a hunger strike by the children, and the help of local well-wishers. The house is basically a brick structure covered by a tin roof. There ...

Of the prominent Indian writers who write in English, my favourites are Vikram Seth, Amitava Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri. Of them Seth was the first whom I noticed and though to be very frank, I was not so enamoured of his “The Golden Gate” which marked the making of his reputation. However at one time I was very moved by his collection of poems “All You Who Sleep Tonight”. Unfortunately now I find it maudlin’. However his travel book “From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet” is a marvelous work. But my favourite books are his two conventional novels. “A Suitable Boy” is a book that recalls the time when novels were not novels unless they spilled over three volumes. Many of my friends were bored by its garrulousness, but to me it evoked a world that I was fairly familiar with, a Calcutta of the sixties, Batanagar, where I used to go often and most of all it was a story, one that I could never put down until I found out how it ended. His “An Equal Music” is also one of the best...

1 My Daughter Ninni on the canopy 2 Birdwatching from a hide 3 One of the thousands of spiders in Teman Nagara. 4 Common grass snake in the plants in the compound Occupying a huge swath of territory in the centre of Malaysia is one of the world’s largest areas of protected rain forest. This is the Taman Negara (Malaysian for “ National Park”). It occupies 4343 sq km of land spread over three states, Kelantan, Pahang and Terengannu. It is claimed that the landscape here has remained unchanged for the past 130 million years, even the recurrent Ice Ages made no impression on it. Originally named after King George V, it received its new name after independence. We approached Taman Negara from Kuala Lumpur driving east past the Genting Highlands. Later we left the tolled Highway system to enter the “Normal Highway”, not fenced off, with crossings regulated by traffic lights and still at least four lanes. No highway in this country has even a passing resemblance to ours in West Bengal. We s...

We had trekked to the Everest Base Camp and the Kalapathar in the autumn of 1997. We, meaning my inseparable companions of many a Himalayan trek, Swapan Chakrabarty, a schoolteacher from Budge Budge, another schoolmaster Subrata Chowdhury, Asit Bose, who celebrated his 76th birthday at the Base Camp and Mastermoshai, Rabindranath babu the Mathematics teacher in the Achipur High school. Of them Asitda is no more, he spent his last few years confined to his house in Tollygunge with Alzheimer’s disease. The most important thing when you are going for a long trek is to have a good comfort level among the participants, because you are thrown together at very close quarters and have to share your personal space in a way that even Indians, who do not set much store by privacy, may find irksome. However this group was one that had together walked many of the trails of the Himalayas and also most recently, the along the Damodar river in Bihar. (There was no Jharkhand then) At the end of a ha...

I always take my time before commenting on public events. So I have not yet added my two paise bit to the analyses of the election. I have no analysis to offer. I could never understand why the people of West Bengal voted in the communists year after year with unfailing regularity. In my book any sensible electorate would have shown them the door a long time back. However this time they have, but somehow I am unable to feel too pleased about it. The reason is that they have done it for all the wrong reasons. They have voted for the TMC , not because that they expect them to do anything about the failures of the Communist regime, but because they expect them to continue all the policies that they had followed for the past thirty years with disastrous results. Imagine this woman’s first act as a Railway Minister was to announce a Rs 20 monthly ticket for people who have never bought a ticket in their lives. Is it practical to expect them to buy tickets where there is no method of polic...

My maternal grandfather was a school master. Known by generations of students and everybody else as well as “ MasterMoshai”, he spent his life teaching English to thousands of students in many parts of the old undivided Bengal and later in Calcutta and Krishnanagar. I have spoken of him in an earlier post, but I feel there is more to be said about this man who influenced me so much when I was a boy and a young man. He was one of the sort of Bengali who were not uncommon in those days. They had been influenced by the Non Cooperation Movement when they were young men and never wavered in their ideals of honesty, hard work and a firm belief in the aphorism of “plain living and high thinking. He was a marvelous teacher. I still remember him reading Keats’ Ode to Autumn with me. He showed me how wonderfully relevant it was to our experience and how the magical words spoke to us in tropical India as much as it did to Englishmen in cooler climes. He also spoke of the Bengal of his younger day...

The elephant is associated in our minds with the vast empty spaces of Africa or the Indian forests. However elephants have been an integral part of the fauna in many other parts of the world as well. There are large numbers in Sri Lanka, and they have been an integral part of Thai culture too from time immemorial. There are elephants in the Malay Peninsula as well, though the numbers have been dwindling and may soon become too few for a viable population. Elephants also exist in the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A small population also exists in Borneo in the extreme north eastern part of the island. All the fossil and historical evidence suggests that this has been the historical range of the elephant in Borneo; they have never ranged over the rest of the island. Scientists have always debated about the origin of these elephants. Were they indigenous to Borneo or were they feral elephants that had escaped from groups brought to these islands during the heyday of elephant trading in th...