Reflections

Today’s generation has never even seen records. I know that my daughter will probably wonder what these black discs are if she saw one. However we were bought up in the time when records gave way to cassette players and then we saw the advent of CDs as well. However I believe that connoisseurs of music still swear by the discs of yore. During my childhood, the record player was quite a luxury, at least in the circles that we lived. There were just a few families which possessed one of these and we all used to go to their houses to listen. I remember that one of our neighbours, the Roys, had a magnificent instrument. It was not just a player, but a record changer. It was a fine piece of engineering which could play several records one after the other. Rather than listening to the music I used to watch I n fascination as the stylus raised itself after one record stopped playing and it moved out of the way while the next record fell into place from the stack which we had piled up earlier

I lived in Pokhara for three and a half years in the beginning of the millennium. I came in the middle of 2000 to work at the Manipal college of Medical Sciences and left on the last day of 2003 to come to Sikkim. Pokhara lies beside the Phewa Tal, the city rising from the banks of the lake to the Kaundanda where the Manipal Hospital lies, at Phulbari, rising above a hill at the bottom of which the Seti River thunders down the valley. The Phewa Tal and its environs is the home of the Tourism industry. Choc abloc with hotels of all varieties and a vast selection of restaurants, it is a paradise for tourists who flock there from all over the world and well they might; to my mind, it is the most beautiful valley in the world. We lived at Phulbari at the bottom of the Kaundada in apartments provided to us by the Medical College. We overlooked the Seti gorge and whenever we lifted out eyes we could receive the benediction of the Machapuchare which overlooks the Pokhara Valley like a benign

Last week I got a mail from June Christie. She said that she worked for the BBC and had read my blog entry on the Moon Landings in 1969 and would like to interview me for the Outlook Programme of the BBC. I was taken aback. I know that some of my friends and students do read my blog, (they sometimes email me about it) but the BBC? Somebody had to be pulling my leg. I was wondering whether it was Rakesh or maybe Yachna ? However I did reply and yes, after a couple of mails going to and fro I realized it was indeed the BBC , really ,and I was interviewed by Matthew Bannister who asked the questions over the phone from London while my responses were recorded by their Kuala Lumpur correspondent. I can only tell you that I felt very very important. So if you people out there tune in to the outlook on the BBC world service radio on the 20th (I think,) you will be able to hear me!!! Unless of course somebody edits me out!!!!

I was in Dhaka last week. It was a business trip, but it was an occasion to renew some friendships and to also renew acquaintance with the second great city of Bengal, now unfortunately in two parts, thanks to our own stupidity. The Partition of Bengal was a traversty of history, but the conditions were such that there was an inevitability about it in 1947. I don’t hold with those who happily blame the politicians, the Britishers and everybody else for the division of Bengal, but the people of Bengal must take the final blame. If they had not turned into animals, the partition could have been averted. But the mistrust that ordinary people of each religion bore to each other overcame 1000 years of cooperation and in the event the Partition was inevitable. However, that it need not be permanent has been proved by the events in Germany. I firmly believe that in the next 15-20 years the partition will be reversed, not perhaps in the sense of a political reunion of the two Bengals, but in

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