On top of the world at Eden

The series was billed the world championship of cricket as it pitted against each other the world’s top two teams fighting it out for the coveted ICC Test Championship. In one of the greatest test matches played recently at the Eden Gardens’ hallowed turf, India chalked up a victory that cemented its position as the world’s best team in the game’s most respected format. And history has come full circle for the Indian cricket team. It was at this very ground nine years ago that the Indian team dug itself out of a quagmire and scripted perhaps the most dramatic comeback in the history of test cricket, ending Australian dominance over world cricket. Ironically for the Aussies, the same Eden Gardens has again proved to be the amphitheatre where their status as the world’s best test team officially ended after seven long years. Read more »

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Nothing’s hit

Sandip Ray’s Hit-List is an interesting case of a good story dealt with rustiness. True, it’s a break from the ungainly fare that paints characters in pure black-n-white, and the film doesn’t for once repose on the handed-down wisdoms of mainstream Bengali films. But all its efforts to entertain with a relaxed treatment of a crime story collapse for a shaky script and shakier performances.

But Hit-List shows Sandip wanted to spare himself the mechanics of Feluda-franchise. His camera makes his characters look more human, say, than that of his last non-Feluda film, Nishijapon. The story would have offered enough temptation for the camera to go edgy. But it rather moves as if on a vigil to register the psychological developments of characters, often putting to test the acting skills unflinchingly. Some come through, some don’t. Read more »

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Rahman in Kolkata: Melody amid anarchy

Saturday’s A. R. Rahman Jai Ho Live in Concert at the Salt Lake Stadium was a veritable feast both for the eyes and for the ears. The young maestro’s live rendition of unforgettable Bollywood tunes with a punch of hip-hop, funk and jazz left Kolkata wanting for more. The stage pyrotechnics were brilliant as were Rahman’s entourage of dancers who mesmerised the assembled multitudes with inimitable moves.

The immovable traffic on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass even hours before the show was proof enough of Kolkata’s love for music. Ticket prices – which ranged from a mere Rs. 100 for a gallery seat to a whopping 5,000 for a VIP pass – didn’t deter die-hard Rahmaniacs from spending the evening in musical proximity to the Oscar winner. However, the event management was a dismal failure that left many members of the audience, particularly those who paid Rs. 1,000 for a ground seat, pissed to the bone as they had to hunt the venue for unoccupied chairs. Many chose to watch the entire show standing as sitting on the grass was not an inviting option. Read more »

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In the eve-teasers’ den

Announcing my annual return to India early this May, the usual grievances got voice—disproportionate worries featuring water borne disease, being mauled by elephants, or perhaps even being sold into prostitution (thanks, Danny Boyle). When I pinpointed destination Delhi, however, the situation changed in two ways. My English family was rapturous, deceived by the obviously modern and safe practices of the capital city—what could possibly go wrong? My Indian friends on the other hand, displayed concern. In fact, their cautionary advice was overwhelming: ‘Wear a burkha at all times, never look any man, woman or beast in the eye, use a pseudonym in every situation’. Well, not exactly, but you get the idea. That’s the way it goes in Delhi, they said.

As a decent young girl of canny sensibility, their advice seemed mildly insulting. I am actually a staunch follower of cultural etiquette and pride myself on advocating the safety of ‘Britishers’/ foreign women in general, the most important points being, of course: don’t flaunt your womanly assets (this is not the Costa Del Sol, ladies, this is Hindustan), don’t hand out personal details like dolly mixtures (in fact, why not fake every aspect of your identity?) and don’t, for pity’s sake, drink with strangers—wherever, whenever or whoever. Experienced traveler as I am, I tend to place myself in an elevated category for the wise, defined by such trivialities as my broken Hindi and Bengali and the fact that I can drive a jolly hard bargain on most curios.

There was remorse all round then, when on my first night in Delhi (note the neck breaking speed of events), my arrogance was unhinged. Lured by the propaganda of one popular travel book, I had headed for the old city, where I looked forward to enjoying a most authentic experience—pungent aromas, wildlife, teeming bazaars, and as luck would have it, a bevy of peeping Toms, peering from every Moghul style crevice. The same over enthusiastic publication which so extolled the virtues of this area, had earlier given a few tips on safety for the single woman in India. ‘If you receive any unwanted attention (termed ‘eve-teasing’), why not whip off your left shoe and brandish it in someone’s face’, it merrily said, as if harassment was some hilarious game. It didn’t state what to do when attacked by six people on a motorbike. You get the picture.

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Food and the City –– A Singapore Diary

How do I explain the shock of sitting down to a very homely lunch of bhaat, daal and maach bhaja (our very own fried fish) one morning and sitting down to lunch the following day only to find the whole sea aquarium “cooked and curried [and the uncooked!!]” on my plate –– cuttlefish, squids, scallops, octopus, stingrays and more. For an average bangali like me it did take some flexing of my culinary imagination, stunted as it is with its limited experience of the Indian type Chinese food. My Singapore experience helped me come to terms with the wide world of edibles we prefer restricted to the glossy pages of Children’s Guide to Sea Creatures.

Just a four hour flight away from Kolkata, this city state boasts of attracting tourists for its chic shopping malls, wildlife parks and oh yes, its food. You can guess its popularity on a very virtual scale— a Google search for ‘Singapore food’ is going to yield no less than 45,300,000 hits! And when you come to this neat first world country close to your home you will be spoilt for choice on what to eat and where to eat. I had begun my first morning at my aunt’s place in Singapore with cereals and milk, getting educated on where to go while she was out on work. I came to know that Singapore had four official languages … a total area of 655 square kilometers and four national languages, that’s like saying four languages for an area of a fifth of Darjeeling!!! I should have been cautioned right then and asked for some clue on what to eat outside … only later did I discover that I could have anything ranging from Chinese to Thai to Indian to French to Italian to Malay food…and all in very hygienic conditions and at reasonable prices in the open air or neon lit food courts that dot the city. For a country with such a diverse culture and liberal ways about food it is only natural that they take their food seriously.

Only the other day I was reading in one of these career advice columns that one’s probability of success depends upon your knowledge, attitude and skill. Nothing can be truer about your food experience here. It’s best to know and choose yourself rather than depend on others for choice of the menu when you come here. Of course, your attitude towards food will be tested as I already told you earlier. My understanding of a 10 day jaunt to this place says that food here can be divided into 2 basic groups. Ones that you see every other person in a food court ordering – in here, the wisdom is to note the person’s ethnicity, I am not trying to be racial in any way, but I don’t think you would enjoy dried fish paste in your curry as much as a South Asian would do. The next group consists of those must–eat authentic preparations that are part of the local or should I say South Asian cuisine?

The first category would list preparations like Mee Goreng– it’s supposed to be the regular fried hakka noodles that we eat here, it looked so delectable and innocuous but I cannot explain the strange pungent smell owing to I think sea food mixed with it; next in line would be Bee Hoon– a mix of cuttlefish, bean sprouts, pork prawns and cockles on steamed vermicelli rice. Don’t go by what you read in the menu about its being a cultural fusion in Chinese and Malay food and something that you shouldn’t miss. I think most people have heard about something called the Durian – it maybe the king of fruits in Singapore but don’t trust it unless you have a strong capacity to stop an automatic retch that will a happen quite involuntarily once you swallow it. Your search for the exotic will end with a very disgraceful run to toilet where you will be more than glad to throw up all you’ve eaten.

Let me now go to the other category of food which will fall under the must–eats category. Start with Satay or Sate, a juicier variety of our kebab , the Singapore chicken rice and move on to, last but not the least, the Sushi – the venerated caviar of the East but again know your sushi dipping sauce according to your palate, not everything can be managed with only the Wasabi sauce. To know more of such gastronomic delights arm yourself with a street food guide by Makan Sutra, Singapore’s biggest publisher of food guides.

If you are not the adventurous sort, the occasional McDonald’s or a restaurant serving continental food beside local delicacies isn’t hard to come by. In fact Singapore was one of the first countries in Asia to bring in McDonalds and KFC. For all those god fearing shudh shakahari Indians, there is no need to worry as you will find plenty of Tamil joints serving Dosa and Idli – remember, Tamils form the largest group of expatriate Indians here.

My ruminations on this topic will come to an end but not without a piece of advice: A big heart and in some cases a weak olfactory sense would get you past most of the vicissitudes that the plate can offer in Singapore.

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The favourite jinx

As the T-20 World Cup reaches its penultimate stage – the semi-finals – the hype and euphoria will also be reaching its peak. India will be represented in the semi-finals – not by their illustrious men but by the lesser hyped women’s team. The men’s team, the defending champions of the T-20 World Cup, have been unceremoniously knocked out of the contest in the Super Eight stages. Adding insult to injury is that they won not even a single match in the Super Eight.

As the cricket mad nation conducts a post-mortem of its favoured sporting team, there’s no respite for M.S. Dhoni’s boys as they embark on a difficult Caribbean tour. For the first time in his short and illustrious stint as India captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni is on the receiving end. But before holding any one individual responsible, a thoroughbred analysis of the reasons of India’s dismal performance in this World Cup needs to be done. Read more »

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World T-20: A preview

As the intensity of T-20 cricket grips the world cricketing audience, the focus shifts from South Africa to cricket’s spiritual home, England. After a tremendous IPL, players from different nations will fight it out for the biggest prize in T-20 cricket – the World Cup.

Ever since the inaugural World Cup two years back in South Africa, the cricketing world has seen dramatic changes both on and off the field. The IPL has made millionaires of unknown cricketers and has made T-20 cricket the game’s hottest reincarnation. The first World Cup was played at a time when T-20 cricket was beginning to take shape. But in these two years, especially after two IPL seasons, T-20 cricket is suddenly everywhere. Teams are now playing T-20 matches more methodically – it’s no longer simply hit and miss cricket. So this World Cup promises to be a cracker. Read more »

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Who wants to be a ‘Minister’

Just when the people of the country and the markets were breathing a sigh of relief having voted a stable government there are first sign of trouble. The friction has started even before Manmohan Singh assumes office as the 18th Prime Minister of India. The reason well the most expected one ‘ministerial berths’. After fighting the election as a part of Congress led collation all the UPA partners want a share of the pie.

The DMK is at loggerheads with the Congress over the number of ministries it wants to hold in the Union Cabinet. DMK had demanded as many as 8 Cabinet berths for itself which is unacceptable to the Congress. The Congress is riding on the confidence that it can form a government at the centre without the help of the DMK which need to bow down to save its government in Tamil Nadu which survives on Congress’ support. In a scenario where DMK and Congress part ways Jayalalitha will not waste a minute in holding Congress’ HAND.

Who says Congress alone promotes dynasty politics DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi wanted to have his
son M K Azhagiri, daughter Kanimozhi and grand nephew Dayanadhi Maran in the Union Cabinet which was agreed upon by the Congress. The bone of contention has been the name of TR Baalu former Cabinet minister for Shipping, Road Transport & Highways. The Congress wants to keep him away for his corrupted background.

Sharad Pawar’s dream of becoming the Prime Minister will remain unfulfilled. This time with Rahul making ‘ekla chalo’ as the buzz word in state elections means that the Maratha leader is at the mercy of the Congress. He is likely to hold Food and Agriculture Ministry while his party colleague Praful Patel will get Civil Aviation.

Mamata Banerjee who holds the second largest number of seats in the pre-poll UPA alliance will surely drive the Indian Railways. Lalu Prasad Yadav’s political blunder meant that he isn’t getting anything in ‘Taatkal’ and most likely he isn’t even a part of the ‘Waiting List’. For the first time Congress and TMC believe Left can be defeated in West Bengal so it won’t be surprising if more if goodies are showered upon the MPs from the state with Pranab Mukherjee already getting Finance.

Other partners like the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference, Kerala Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League will have to take whatever elder brother Congress gives them. With the kind of numbers Congress has this time its allies unless united together won’t be able to blackmail it anymore. Gone are the Karats, Lalus and Paswans of Manmohan’s previous government. The Singh is King finally!

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Has Bengal had enough of Left?

The results of the 15th Lok Sabha polls hasn’t been too surprising but in the context of West Bengal ’shocking’ is the word. The Left was expected to perform badly but nobody thought they would crumble in the manner they did. Not even the worst of the political critics of the Left Front could have predicted this just about two years ago. Mamata’s ‘Maa Maati Manush’ appealed to the people and they did the unimaginable.

The Left parties are finding it tough to understand what went wrong for them. How could a fortified structure they had created in three decades fall like a pack of cards in three years since the violence in Nandigram? From the urban middle class to the Muslims everybody voted against them. They even lost credibility among the rural masses once their stronghold thanks to the mishandling of the Singur and Nandigram crisis.

What was surprising was to see the Trinamool Congress win in most of the urban constituencies and doing a clean sweep of Kolkata. Many would have believed this to be impossible after the dissent that the urban Kolkata had with Mamata Banerjee after she chased away the prestigious Tata Nano project from the state. Many people believed West Bengal did not even have a choice to throw the Left out after the Nano mess.

The thing that went against Left was the consolidation of votes. The urban voter especially the youth always felt let down by the Left rule voted against it. Combined with the Muslim and the rural electorates it formed a lethal combination against the Left. As for the Red Front it was left with votes from their supporters who believed in their ideology and its a known fact that this group is shrinking.

Although the Left leaders may be pointing fingers at Prakash Karat for this humiliation the actual reason for their defeat was within Bengal. The truth is a person in rural Bengal doesn’t even know who Prakash Karat is and doesn’t care what is his stand on the nuclear deal or about his ego issue with Manmohan Singh. The fact is this person only cares about his basics which was being threatened by the Left as was evident in Singur and Nandigram.

The violence in Nandigram exposed the ugly face of Left. People in the rural belt who always considered the Left Front as a saviour suddenly felt threatened with there sentinels. The cadre based strong local units that the Left had created over decades and which won them election after election lost the trust of the common man and led to its debacle.

Ironically with 35 seats in 2004 Left had delivered its best performance in the state. In a matter of just five years tide seems to have blown in the opposite direction in West Bengal. The 2011 Assembly elections will give a better picture whether a obituary for the Left can be written or this election was an one off incident. But one thing has surely changed, the myth that ‘Left cannot be defeated in West Bengal’

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Has the Left Fort been shaken in West Bengal?

West Bengal was one state in India which was always painted red. Many people would have learnt to live with the idea that Left Front couple not be defeated in the Bengali heartland. But for the first time since the polls post Indira Gandhi’s death in 1984 Left seems to be on shaky ground in its own bastion. Analyst believe the Trinamool Congress and Congress alliance might cause a dent in the Left stronghold.

The politics in West Bengal has mostly been isolated from the rest of the country. The Babri Masjid demolition or the politics or ‘Mandal and Kamandal’ hardly made any impact of the poll results here. West Bengal seemed to have been insulated from liberalization, saffron wave of the 90s, the castist politics or recent India Shining campaign. It was all about a political ideology preached by the Left which worked in what was once India’s most prosperous state.

The question in West Bengal was never who but it was by how much? People knew who was on road to Delhi, the unknown factor was number of votes. Most political parties over the years actually fought for the second place in West Bengal. But for the first time political pundits seem to be interested in the outcome of the polls here as it is unpredictable. For the first time a non-Left coalition seems to be sniffing victory in a substantial number of seats.

In the last assembly election out of the 294 seats the Left Front won 227 while the Congress and TMC managed 51 seats. In the last Lok Sabha elections LF bagged 35 out of the 42 seats. But a lot of water has flown down the Hoogly since then and a lot has changed. The urban rural divide became more evident during the Tata Nano crisis. The Left Front which had championed the cause of the poor farmers suddenly turned Land Grabbers from Land Reformers.

The high percentage of voter turn out and violence may signal a change wave going on around in West Bengal. The rural voters who were once the die hard supporters of the Left Front suddenly seems to have lost trust in the party which had done a lot for them in the grassroot level. The negligible suicide rate among farmers in West Bengal is a result of such reforms in the state. But the farmers now see the LF turning a back on them after Singur and Nandigram.

It will be amateurish for anybody to write off the Left Front in West Bengal but the Left leaders surely are having sleepless nights this time around. The May 16 results will show if truly the ‘Didi Factor’ worked in the Red State. For the Left Front it remains to be seen if Singur and Nandigram becomes their Waterloo.

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Mind games on the field

Shahrukh Khan in one of his memorable dialogues in the movie Chak De! India had said “Hamla samne wale team ke goal pe nahi, dimaag pe karo, Field pe goal apne aap ho jaayegi”. The very statement holds a fundamental aspect of every sportsperson’s performance throughout his career. The importance of the “process” of work often takes a backseat with respect to the end result. And to successfully implement the process, a calm and strong mind is required. The history of sports is replete with performances where sheer grit and will power have enabled teams or individuals to overcome their more talented opposition. After all, every match is played more in the mind than on the field.

In this year’s IPL, there have been numerous instances where so many results could have been different only if the teams had been a little more composed when it mattered. Although the photo finishes have excited audiences, some of the results have demoralised the teams. The primary reason for some of these losses is that many individual players tend not to remain in the present moment. Instead, their minds go aflutter in anticipation of a victory which might be a stroke away. But in this excitement, they lose the concentration which immediately shifts the momentum of the match. Thus, victory turns into defeat in the blink of an eye. Read more »

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Stories from the League

The cash rich Indian Premier league has been so thoroughly covered by the news savvy media, that there has hardly been any aspect of it that has gone unnoticed. Yet there have been many inside stories which have not gained the attention of the common man. A recent book called IPL Cricket and Commerce: An inside story by journalists T.R. Vivek and Alam Srinivas has unravelled such unexplored stories with the dexterity of an Aesop. The book marries cricket with commerce and highlights how strong business minds have culminated in making cricket a billion dollar industry.

One such fascinating story reveals that an IPL-like concept was hatched way back in the early 90’s. People in close proximity to the late Congress leader Mr. Madhavrao Scindia contend that he had thought up a cricket league similar to the English Football League. But his plans could not be implemented due to his own turbulent political career and the inherent politics of the BCCI. But there are some sections who believe that the idea indeed belonged to Lalit Modi, who got influenced by the NBA’S franchise system during his tenure in the USA as a student of sports management. Such debates will linger but it’s Mr. Modi, who will be credited with translating his idea into reality. Read more »

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Time to come back, guys

In T-20 cricket, strategies have an ephemeral lifespan. Hence, those who hatch them shouldn’t be held as important as their ODI or Test counterparts are. But, as players go hell-for-leather from the first ball, a team without a strong leader in T20 is akin to a ship minus a rudder. In times of crisis, the body language of a team echoes that of its captain; hence the importance of the role of a captain grows manifold.

A fascinating story unfolds as we look into the roles of the captains of various IPL franchises. The series has made it apparent that a balanced team with a stout captain bears fruit most of the time. On one hand we have Rajasthan Royals whose captain Shane Warne’s on-ground performance reinforces the popular byword about him ‘The best captain Australia never had’. And on the other hand, we have a team like the Kolkata Knight Riders whose captain looks like a busted flush, miserably weighed down by the responsibility thrust upon him. Some sportsmen thrive on pressure while others crumble— Shane Warne and Brendon McCullum respectively being the glaring exemplars. Read more »

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SRK is a brand treating KKR as its subsidiary

Kolkata Knight Riders being at the bottom of the table in the ongoing Indian Premier League may hurt the KKR fans but to a cricket enthusiast it is not surprising. The on field performance of the team has truly been disappointing but Knight Riders seems to have lost the plot with the team selection. They are left with limited resources in their present squad and are not expected to go too far ahead in the tournament.

John Buchanan and his team of experts messed up with the selection of players right in the first season. They got overboard with getting big international names such as Ricky Ponting, Shoaib Akhtar, Brendon McCullum and Chris Gayle overlooking the fact that only four international players can be accommodated in the playing eleven. This made sure that although squad looked formidable on paper the playing eleven was a vulnerable one.

Surprisingly IPL must have sounded like International Premier League to the KKR. Otherwise what logic can go behind having only one Indian star Ishant Sharma with all the other Indian players not even having a place in the Indian squad. Why could not manage to get any other players from among the 20-22 India regulars? They even lost Bengal’s most promising batsman Manoj Tiwari to the Delhi Daredevils.

Another mess up that the Kolkata Knight Riders did was select a top heavy squad. The batting stars that the Knight Riders have in their squad (Brendon McCullum, Sourav Ganguly, Ricky Ponting and Chris Gayle) bat at 1,2 and 3 conventionally. This leaves the middle order and the lower middle order in the hands of players like Aksah Chopra, Sanjay Bangar where as other teams had the likes of Yusuf Pathan, MS Dhoni and Abhishek Nayar.

One foolishness could be termed as mistake but twice it becomes stupidity. What made them buy Bangladeshi pacer Moshrafe Mortaza for a whopping Rs 3 Crores when he chilling in the dug out. Couldn’t they have got some better player from the India U-19 squad for may be one-tenth the price. Of course Shahrukh had more of Bollywood and Television plans in Bangladesh behind grabbing Mortaza. SRK is himself a brand and treating KKR as its subsidiary.

If all this was not enough the John Buchanan came with the four captain theory and sowed the last seeds of defeat. Brendon McCullum who has turned out to be a one innings wonder as far as IPL is concerned was given the captaincy ahead of Ganguly and Gayle both of whom have experience. The inexperience has showed in his decisions in the two close encounters the team had. The results are here for all to see.

IPL Season 2 is most likely over for the Kolkata Knight Riders unless a miracle happens which is least expected with the present team combination. Hopefully cricketing logic will drive the team in the next season and not just marketing and brand building exercise. ‘Go Desi’ and grab some good Indian talent that’s the logic behind doing well in the IPL. More importantly Shahrukh should not treat this team as a brand extension of his own name.

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Legends’ day out

It was a national holiday on Monday in South Africa and the Double header matches at the IPL provided the crowds with amazing entertainment. In the first match of the day, Team Chennai led by India skipper MS Dhoni took on the revamped Deccan Chargers. The Super Kings were given a super start by the Orange cap holder Matthew Hayden only to lose impetus at the strategy break. This strategy break, which was initially intended for commercial reasons, has proved to be the undoing for many of the teams, especially the team that bats. This is because it is difficult to regain concentration after the break, and bowlers take advantage of this big time. But some lusty hitting by Jacob Oram at the death provided the Chennai team with a respectable total of 165. But when as a captain you have to tackle Adam Gilchrist and Herschelle Gibbs batting at the top of the powers, even 265 would seem a low total to defend. Gilchrist literally finished the match in the first 6 overs with a 19 ball 44 and Gibbs carried forward the team with a beautifully paced innings. It is so heartening to see Herschelle Gibbs overcome his personal problems and play the type of cricket he is used to playing. One of South Africa’s greatest ever cricketers hitting a purple patch has come in as a boon for the Deccan Chargers who are in to prove a point this time. The only worrying factor in the Charge of their brigade has been the form of the very very special Laxman, who seems at the moment to be playing artificially and forcing the pace a little too early. As the Chargers are on a winning spree, the importance of his failure has been negated. He just needs to spend some time in the middle to regain his silken touch and once he starts firing, the Charger would be the team to beat.

The beauty of the IPL is that it has transformed what was a hypothetical situation some years ago into reality. As a cricket fan, I used to make an all time eleven which composed of players from different nations. The IPL has given all of us cricket fans a chance to see our dreams get translated into reality. Now you have Gilchrist and Gibbs, Sachin and Sanath opening the batting for their teams. If it was Gilchrist and Gibbs in the afternoon, it was the turn of the old masters from the subcontinent, Sachin Tendulkar and Sanath Jayasuriya to show what could have happened if they had been part of the same team at the International level. The only unfortunate part of this fairy tale is that at the receiving end of their brutal torture were the Knight Riders from Kolkata who seem to have found the abysmal depths of ordinariness in their approach. Read more »

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Lankan crisis to impact Tamil Nadu polls

The war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in northern Sri Lanka is likely to have a huge impact on the Lok Sabha polls in in Tamil Nadu. Political parties from Tamil Nadu like the DMK, AIADMK and PMK are trying to draw maximum mileage out of the Lankan issue. The BJP and the Congress are watching their steps on the issue and refraining themselves from making any controversial remarks on the issue.

Now the Sri Lankan has finally declared a ceasefire and promised not to use heavy weapons and air strikes as close to one lakh Tamil civilians are still believed to be trapped in the battle zone. This after New Delhi requested Colombo to halt the aggressive move by its army which was talking a toll not only on the Tigers but the civilians too. Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said the ceasefire was a result of the Indian intervention in the island nation.

The ceasefire by the Lankan government will bring a huge sigh of relief to the Congress and the DMK as both these parties are on sticky wicket in the state. DMK is not likely to sweep through the polls like it did last time when it got all the seats along with its allies denying Jayalalitha’s AIADMK a single seat in the Parliament. LTTE’s defeat would have further made the situation for the Congress- DMK combine.

The PMK has made LTTE the most important issue in Tamil Nadu and its leader Vaiko is openly campaigning for the Tamil Tigers. Often termed as the political face of the LTTE in India Vaiko would surely emerge as the greatest benefactor if any thing happens to the LTTE chief and his organisation. He had even threatened to have a bloodbath in Tamil Nadu in case anything happens to Prabhakaran or the LTTE.

The coming few days will be very important as the Lankan Army will not give up its positions after making strategic gains. What seems logical is the army is giving some time so that the civilians can go out after which it can launch its final offensive against the government.

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Perfect finish again eludes Dada

If critics still doubted the talent the ‘Bengal Tiger’ Sourav Ganguly had, yesterday’s innings against the Rajasthan Royals was an answer for all of them. Nobody expected the match to go down to the wire once Brendon McCullum and Chris Gayle had shown their back. It was the man of steel the former Indian captain Sourav who came good and almost did it for the Knight Riders silencing the Ganguly bashers.

The only sad thing in the story was a perfect finish has once again eluded our beloved Dada. Be it the 2003 World Cup final or the first ball duck in his last Test innings Sourav seems to have been unlucky when it comes to finishing in style. After playing a breathtaking innings and almost scripting an impossible win, Sourav was out in the penultimate ball of the innings giving Royals a chance to win the encounter in a Super Over decider.

A lot of questions are being raised on McCullum’s choice to hand over the ball to Sri Lankan Ajantha Mendis. This showed his inexperience in captaincy and the New Zealander’s personal understanding of the game. McCullum a good player of pace handed the ball to a spinner. What he forgot was Yusuf Pathan being an Indian can murder spinners. Yusuf hit through the line and finished the game single handedly in the Super Over.

Coming back to Sourav it is sad to see that time and again this man has been targeted by his critics. In spite of scoring more than 18500 runs at the international level his attitude, temperament and skills have been regularly questioned. But the character that he is Sourav has always come out of poor form and silenced them. There has been no cricketer in the Indian history who has come back from the docks time and again and proved his critics wrong.

Who said Sourav Ganguly has forgotten how to hit sixes? Things have changed and Dada is doing it against the pacers now. Did we hear somewhere that he was susceptible to fast bowling? Well true he was not a great puller of the short ball like many in the international stage are but again he was murderous when it came to the spinners especially the left arm ones. Even the great Sachin is never comfortable against left arm spinner, so did we brand him as a player who can’t play left arm spin.

The buck has to stop somewhere. If we can’t respect our heroes lets not humiliate them.

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Rain rain go away, IPL players wanna play

This is probably the nursery rhyme that all the players and the fans of Indian Premiere League are rhyming at the moment. Almost half a week after the tournament began the weather god hasn’t showered his blessings on the tournament and rain has played a spoilt sport in most of the matches. It seems to be raining everywhere in South Africa be it in Durban or Cape Town.

Out of the eight matched played so far two have been reduced encounters with the result being decided by the ever debated Duckworth Lewis method. Ironically both the times Kings XI Punjab have turned out to be the victims once at the hands of Delhi Daredevils and than Kolkata Knight Riders. Another match between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians had to be abandoned due to rain.

Many cricket experts are raising doubts over the shifting of the venue to South Africa after the IPL Governing body and the Indian Government could not come to an agreement on the security for the tournament in wake of the General elctions. Many are asking the question whether England would have been a better venue but the weather man would say the situation is the same even in UK.

The rainfall has become a major headache for Lalit Modi and his team as it doesn’t only mean no play it also mean loss of ad revenue. The fact that the ad revenue is already low as compared to the first season of the league made Modi and his men come up with the idea of Strategy Breaks which has already met with sharp criticism from the teams and former players.

IPL Season 2 has already been hit by low TRP ratings which may be a result to the low scoring matches compared to last year. The batsmen are unable to play the slam bang cricket as the green top in South Africa is no comparison to the dusty flat beds in the sub continent. Also the fact that the matches are being played at the end of the season in SA the pitches have become a lot slower and not conducive to stroke play.

All this has become a huge worry for Lalit Modi and his team. They will be praying to the rain gods to shower some blessings on them or else IPL Season 2 might just prove to be a disaster.

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IPL picks up pace

With the cash rich Indian Premier League taking off from the Rainbow Nation of South Africa, the word ‘recession’ will take a back seat for at least a month. It will be a honeymoon period for the Franchise owners from India who hope to make the IPL the next big thing in world sport. Mr. Lalit Modi has even compared the IPL with the UEFA Champions League and has asked the governing body of world Football FIFA to take a lesson from it. As the focus shifts to cricket, viewers all across the world should be in for a cracker of a tournament with most of the international players being available, making each team perform better.

The initial stages of the tournament bring to mind an old maxim ‘the older the wine, the better it tastes’. Senior statesmen of the cricketing world have stolen the show from their junior counterparts, who were expected to hog the limelight. The first three days of the IPL proved the old adage that cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties with the defending champions and the runners up of last year being outplayed in the opening two matches of the tournament. The Mumbai Indians led by Mumbai’s favourite son and Madame Tussauds’ latest entrant, Sachin Tendulkar, rode an all round show to stop last year’s runners up Chennai Super Kings in their tracks. The greatness of Little Master’s batting lies in the manner in which he adapts himself to different situations. Although he played an uncharacteristically sedate innings according to T20 standards, it was his innings around which the team could build a respectable total. However, some experts felt that Abhishek Nayar should have been the man of the match. Can’t disagree altogether…but as a Sachin fan could not have asked for more….. Read more »

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Maya wants to spread her ‘Mayajal’

Mayawati’s decision to fight the election on her own has left many amazed. More so with her claim to form a Non-NDA and Non-UPA government on her own. This definitely has to be the boldest statement for the election season. She might have the largest state in India under her control with 80 seats to the Lok Sabha but to challenge the two national parties is quite amazing.

If we go by the last Lok Sabha polls Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has won a mere 19 seats while rival Samajwadi Party got 35 out of the 80 seats. But a lot of water has flown down the Ganges since then and Mayawati registered a historic win in the last Assembly election winning an absolute majority in the house and being the first leader to do so in almost two decades.

By challenging the BJP and the Congress and playing pressure politics with the Third Front, Maya is keeping everyone guessing. The question arises is what is behind her confidence or overconfidence? In the best case scenario she can win a maximum 80 seats in UP which seems highly unlikely. Other than UP her party has hardly has not raised its head in any other state.

Mayawati is trying to woo the voters with what became popularly known as ‘Social Engineering’ during the last UP Polls. She has shed her image of an anti-upper cast leader and has included the upper cast people among her ranks. This worked wonders for her in the last elections. She has however not forgotten to champion the cause of dalits making sure they see her as their sole leader.

Mayawati also plans to cash in on Samajwadi Party’s Muslim votes after siding with the Congress in the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. Muslims who have always been loyal to the SP suddenly have a feeling they have been bertrayed by the SP. Since they can’t side with the BJP under any circumstance, Maywati seems to have emerged as their only saviour. They vote share might turn the table in UP this time.

Mayawati will be the biggest challenge to the Third Front. She is one leader they cannot ignore, neither can they work with. Even before the polls have started she has expressed her interest in the Prime Minister’s chair. Her rise or fall might be the most interesting story in the upcoming General Elections. It remains to be seen if Mayawati can weave her Mayajal around 7th Race Course Road.

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India doesn’t know how to honour its sporting heroes

Indian cricket has been blessed with Princes and Maharajahs ever since its inception. We have had Royals like Ranjitsinghji, the Maharajah of Vizianagram and Duleepsinghji don the sport and make it richer. But indisputably Indian cricket’s Greatest Maharajah has been the man who is so aptly nicknamed ‘Maharaj’- Sourav Chandidas Ganguly. He started like a prince, ruled like a king and left the game like an emperor. The story of cricketers from Bengal being given a rude awakening by the controllers of cricket in the country has been a historically continuous process. It started with Shute Banerjee and Putu Chowdhury while Sourav Ganguly’s case shows that things haven’t changed. But defying all odds, the Tiger of Behala has stood like a Prince among the ruins of his predecessors to become arguably his country’s finest captain. Read more »

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Of recession, home delivery and wives

Life in Kolkata post the economic meltdown has few good things to offer.

The plump of the wallet is gone and even if it’s not, then you must be spending much less than before. There are fewer trips to shopping malls and arcades and multiplexes, and fewer still expensive weekends at those sea-side resorts. The sheen of love life may also be missing as your wife or girlfriend is angry— fuming over the sheer small number of demands being met of all that she usually makes.

But we, the Kolkatans, have the mystical ability to take pleasure in things that other castes or creeds or populations don’t have, not at least to the extent benchmarked by us. And it’s a habit that not even the deadliest and nimblest chain of economic events set in by the brainiest and greediest wizards of the Wall Street can alter.

No points for guessing. It’s our uncanny talent to guzzle down anything we consider edible— for the sake of experiment or just to fill that eternally strong void below our chest— caring least about the nature of the place of eating or if proper hygienic measures were taken. The city streets showcase the flair with a great flourish, and also show why the eateries in and around the city— big, small and the ones that we call hole-in-the-wall— have been able to cock a snook at all business magazine editors! As if this were not enough, there are the new-age food home-delivery services bringing all the lip-smacking restaurant delicacies right to your door—hot, crisp and at card rates! Read more »

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Five reasons why Slumdog Millionaire shouldn’t get a Best Picture Oscar

As of 20 February 2009, Danny Boyle’s tale of a slumdog is enjoying a 94% certified freshness on Rotten Tomatoes and has created a lot of speculation on its biggest critical win as the Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards to be held on 22 February 2009. But the question is: Does it really deserve the Best Picture title? What are the characteristics of the Best Picture according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

Well, as it appears, there are no set standards for determining the best. As a rule, AMPAS’s active members from each of the branches cast their votes to determine the nominees in their respective categories, but the Best Picture nominees are selected by all voting members. After selecting the nominees, the entire active membership selects Oscar winners in all categories. Thus, while Best Actor, Best Cinematographer, etc. Oscar winners are selected in part by practising actors and cinematographers, the Best Picture Oscar depends wholly on general consensus of the AMPAS members. This is really revealing because it sheds some light on a certain quality of the Best Picture: it appeals to all viewers. In this regard, it’s interesting to note that so far only eight foreign language films have been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Read more »

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The school of love

Despite having strict norms in place, the co-ed schools see many love stories flourish on Valentine’s Day— under, perhaps, the indulging watchfulness of the teaching staff. That’s what schoolteacher Madhurima Mukhopadhyay guesses, as she walks down the school corridors and smells a change of mood with the approach of Valentine’s Day.

In a large assembly hall, hundreds of young boys and girls stand to attention. The school principal is listing out the “appropriate” code of conduct to be followed on Valentine’s Day. While she speaks, students try to stifle their mood with serious faces; they wonder if the fifty-something principal was just as prissy in her younger years.

Students take the assembly hall phenomenon, common to schools across the city, with a pinch of salt. After all, Valentine’s Day comes once a year and hardly anyone wants to miss out on all the “fun”. Read more »

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The Sordid Satyam Affair

Mr Ramalinga Raju has finally resigned. And he has admitted that over Rs 7,000 crore of cash and cash equivalents that are showing in the Satyam balance sheet do not exist. Shocking as the whole affair is, I wonder how many people were really surprised by the turn of events. In the past few days, it was apparent that Mr Raju was getting increasingly desperate. His brand name independent directors were deserting him. Banks were selling off the shares he had pledged, and he was about to lose control over his company. The fact that the cash was missing would have come to fore sooner rather than later simply because several big companies – both in the information technology sector as well as from outside the industry – were looking at Satyam as a prospective acquisition. The moment any of these potential bidders started their due diligence process, the fact that money had been siphoned off would have come to light. Read more »

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Why you need to speak up.

They grossly violate traffic rules. They run on adulterated fuel baptised as Katatel. Their vehicles spew venomous exhaust that causes Lung Cancer. They misbehave with passengers because they are organised. They cock a snook at the administration for their unions are affiliated to ruling and opponent parties. And they get a cover from police as they have the blessings of the WB Transport Minister.

The minister interprets court order to his convenience, seeks an extension of the two-stroke auto-ban deadline that his department had set before the Calcutta High Court approved it. He doesn’t seem to fear a Contempt of Court, nor do his blessed ones. There are thousands of them who don’t have permissions to scour the city roads—their affiliation to CITU fends off the peril.

Are they the agents of doom? Are they the dark harbingers of anarchy? The Government is going slow, despite knowing that their notion of triumph among the anti-ban elements may soon propagate to the segment of other vehicles—old and perilously polluting—whose owners are now waiting to see the outcome of the protest with crossed fingers. There is a deadline set by the Calcutta High Court for them as well— 31 March, 2009.

There are two possibilities. One: Many more rounds of violence on city streets, fatal rise of vehicular pollution, piercing gazes of innocent, terminally ill children who trusted us for their wellbeing. Two: Clean air, streets free of old, crumbling vehicles, happy and healthy faces of children. The State Government may forget its responsibilities, but can we?

Have your say in the blog. Take part in the online survey. And check out for news related to auto-ban issues everyday here.

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Christmas- A different view

Christmas is invariably portrayed in the backdrop of snow, even though Christmas and snow are not always concomitant. While it snows only in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere, it is summer in most of the areas of the other half.

Snow nevertheless shows up as a dorsal item in the Christmas scene and Santa Claus turns up in his trademark red wintry attire even in the summer of Australia. This incongruence is retained out of deference to the mores of the north rather than as a defect in the Christmas depiction. Read more »

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Why not make her pay for dinner

I thought of writing this while estimating how much money I’ve spent on taking out my women friends to dinners, lunches and other assorted meals. Ladies, don’t knit your eyebrows and proclaim me a cheapo. Believe it or not, most men do reflect on the expenses they have incurred on the fairer sex once the first flush of romance has passed!

Men spend a lot to impress women. When they are spending the money, they rarely think that the women they are trying so hard to woo will end up as a fierce wife or an angry girlfriend or just a jaded live-in partner. You never understand this basic truth when you are young, or you don’t pay enough attention to what the wiser and older lot say.

No, I am not repenting the fact that I married or even that I had numerous girlfriends before tying the knot. I am reflecting on something far more specific. I want to flashback to all the penultimate moments at dinners with women when the waiter would cordially ask, would you like me to bring the check, now, Sir?

Why not ask the lady sitting opposite me!!

Read more »

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Campus rockers

‘Yeah we rock, we rock, we rock on’.

This seemed to be the theme of the much-hyped ‘Disney Camp Rock, My School Rocks’, the inter-school musical talent hunt organised by Disney Channel at Vidyamandir auditorium, on Monday.

The national dance and music talent hunt aims to bring out the best campus team, which would get a chance to choreograph a Disney Channel music video.

In the Kolkata auditions, the city witnessed stunning performances by city school students. With the participation of students from nearly 60 schools, the auditorium was under the control of these young guns.

Schools like Don Bosco (Park Circus), Our Lady Queen of the Missions, The Assembly of God Church School, Frank Anthony Public School and Carmel School participated in the event.

The participating school teams proved their mettle by mesmerising the audiences with their unique dance steps and moves. ‘This event is really exciting. It’s given us a chance to showcase our talents; we are really thrilled to take part in it’, stated an excited participant.

Auditions for ‘Disney Camp Rock, My School Rocks’ will be held in other cities as well, based on which the national champions will be selected by celebrity judge Shiamak Davar.

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Echoes from Switzerland

My friend and I arrived in Geneva quite late at night on the 20th of June last year, and headed straight (the route literally was a long straight road) to the youth hostel where we’d booked a room for two. For me, it was the first time in a youth hostel, and surprised I was. No, it wasn’t because it was a reflection of my image of hostels being disgusting, deteriorating and with cramped rooms and corridors, but quite the contrary. We had a nice room to ourselves, with an en-suite bathroom for less than £20 (woo!) – my friend, who had more experience with them, confirmed that it really was quite fancy for a youth hostel.

Thankfully, the next day was not spent woo-ing over the youth hostel, but instead, we found ourselves mesmerised by the locales of Geneva – we made our way to the Bain des Paquis (a nice riverside place to hang out, with good views), after which we strolled through the town until we found the highly recommended Chocolaterie du Rhone. It was sublime – a little tray with hot chocolate, chocolate cake, and a tiny piece of pure, simple chocolate. We visited the Palais des Nations (the UN, of course), took a rather dull tour around the not-so-dull place, and then made our way to the ‘Old Town’ of Geneva. It was photogenic, with tiny alleys leading to architectural marvels. We dined alfresco at a Tex-Mex restaurant called Manana, before we headed back to the hostel and slept like logs. The morning presented us with a filling complimentary breakfast at the hostel, which gave us enough energy to cope with the lengthy process of buying youth travel passes at the station, from where we eventually caught a train towards the little village of Chandolin, in Valais. This journey by train (the first of the many to follow) was beautiful. The Swiss railways really are commendable. Read more »

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BSNL woes

I’m not sure if this post has anything to do with ‘cleaner Kolkata’, but it might just fall into the ‘better Kolkata’ bracket.

Returning to Kolkata after a decade in Delhi didn’t just mean hunting for a new flat, new places to hang out at, and new friends, it also meant more mundane details like, say, a new mobile phone connection. I refused to get myself a new connection for the first six months, relying on my parents’ landline and my husband’s mobile instead, gleefully informing my various ‘offices’ in Delhi that I could only be contacted on one particular landline, and enjoying the freedom that comes with knowing there’s no cell phone in your pocket – ergo, no more cold calls, or calls from people demanding to know if I would be meeting impossible deadlines. Till my friends back in Delhi began objecting a tad too vehemently at my ‘unreachable’ status, and I began pondering the thought of a new connection.

I knew I didn’t want Vodafone or Airtel – I’m tired of corporates who claim persuasively that their rationale for living is just to serve us and make life easy – and once we’ve fallen for their spiel, what we’re left with are jammed phone lines, faulty connections, and huge bills that you just knew you never could have notched up. So the only thing left was good old Government of India, and BSNL. My husband used to have an MTNL connection back in Delhi, which he was very happy with, so off I went to the Salt Lake BSNL office and got connected, with the help of some very friendly staff.

However, a few months down the line, I’ve been hit with an unwelcome fact of life where BSNL is concerned – somehow, none of my monthly bills ever reach me; or if they do, it’s after the last date of payment has come and gone. Complaints have been met with furrowed brows and polite assurances that all will be well from the next month onwards – which it never is. So now my husband and I have a monthly ritual – we troop over to BSNL once every month, take a deep breath, and plunge into the crowds thronging the many queues; he goes over to the duplicate bill counter (which boasts of a long line before it – clearly I’m not the only one whom bills don’t reach) while I take up position at the end of the even longer queue before the payments counter. With a bit of luck, by the time my duplicate bill has been collected, I will have moved much further ahead, and paying the bill won’t take much longer.

In a perverse way, though, it’s kinda fun, being part of that chaos. The queues might be bewilderingly long and convoluted – “jilapir moto pyachano”, as one puzzled woman trying to find the correct counter famously commented – I still haven’t stopped giggling at that singularly apt description. Also, the atmosphere is cordial, infested with that peculiar Bengali camaraderie and ability to adapt to any situation with cheerful resignation – people are friendly, polite; lend each other their pens; help each other make out cheques (no one ever seems to know who to make it out to – yet another BSNL mystery that we’re all hoping will be solved sometime this century); offer each other water; help out the elderly and infirm in the queues; and have clearly made friends who fall into the ‘BSNL queue’ category. I saw two men greet each other rapturously at the duplicate bill line – “Arre, ei to! Abar ekhane?” “Hya, tumio? Amar to ebaaro bill aashe ni” “Arre amar to bill kono barei pouchoina!” Grinning at this exchange, I happened to spot a big display board hung on one wall – a BSNL advertisement, it proudly proclaimed – “We are Number I because to us, our customers are Number 1”. Yeah right.

I do hope BSNL sorts out its bill problem – but I’m not switching loyalties, though, because so far, the connectivity’s great, I’ve never been over-charged, the staff are extremely helpful and cordial (hang around for even 15 minutes at the MTNL office filled with surly, rude, non-cooperative north Indians, and you’ll understand the value of a polite voice and willingness to help), and a hour hanging around the ‘jilapi’ queues gives one ample opportunity to observe various facets of human behaviour, exchange a few smiles, and come away laughing at some absurdity that you’re bound to witness.

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No child’s play, this!

Diwali, the festival celebrated with lights, sound and mirth, is a time when the changing face of culture can be clearly noticed. It almost seems like the dawn of new India has extinguished the flames of Diwali to a great extent. With new, innovative firecrackers replacing the traditional tubris and charkis, dandiya making way for rain dances and pastries standing in for the conventional meethais, one can only but see how things have changed. However, for a child, Diwali still remains a mystic mystery that unfolds little by little with every passing year.

Ten-year-old Rajvansh Chhabra, who is more than happy to get chased around by the snake cracker (something his thirty-year-old uncle had never even heard of before!), says he loves the way Diwali gives him the opportunity to spend time with his grandparents. ‘My Dadaji and Dadima come over and stay with us for five days during Diwali. It is the best time of the year for me’. At a time when families are turning nuclear, such occasions indeed provide great opportunities for them to come together. Read more »

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All in the name of ‘Jana Sadharon’

Kolkata will not become clean only by trying to keep it clean through agencies like Municipal Corporation. Cleanliness is part of one’s culture. Over the years our political bosses have created a culture in West Bengal where by no clear understanding or respect for cleanliness has grown in our society. We have learned to accept everything that is thrown on us. You look at every action that we take in the name of poor ‘Jana sadharon’(public). We have made it a right for us to create anarchy and get away by saying that it is for the ‘Jana Sadharon’! Consider these -
- Putting posters on walls/Graffiti is our right
- Uncontrolled auto emission/ unlimited auto on the street is our right
- Filling up of water bodies - we have made it a skill on how to by pass law
- Sound pollution during political meetings are allowed because it is for the ‘Jana sadharon’
- You can block roads and have gatherings on the street with high decibels because it is for the right of the poor.
- You can have auto/rickshaw stand any where by putting up a jhanda because it is their livelihood.
In this situation the concept of cleaner Kolkata is difficult. There must be a political will to achieve this important social milestone.
Our political leaders in West Bengal owe an explanation to the citizen. When will we grow up and start asking questions to our political leaders?

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Helping hand for needy

Ninety students from three faculties of Jadavpur University (JU) joined hands to supply clothes and other items of daily use to pavement dwellers. The project that took off on July 5, was the initiative of the varsity’s National Service Scheme unit.

“Every year our students take part in community service programmes, but the response this year has been overwhelming,” said Bappa Mullick, director of youth welfare, JU. “Usually the strength of volunteers for such initiatives is around 50. This year, we have received such good response that we can’t accommodate any more,” he added.

The students have been divided into six groups. They work on Saturdays and Sundays every week. Read more »

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Cyber-forensics does a bummer - again

I went on the Internet a week after it was launched in India on August 15, 1995—probably the among the first 100 in India to have taken to cyberspace in this tight-arsed, and then entirely unregulated, nation. The first week I spent, 10 hours a day, bleary-eyed like a perv, trawling all the ‘blue’ sites that the Net had to offer—and the pornucopia was overly pulchritudinous, in the sense that it eventually deadened all my senses, killed off my synaesthesia (an ‘infirmity’ which makes me see colours where sound is heard, and vice-versa, and makes me touch paintings and ‘feel’ the colours by their heat signatures) and put me completely off properties of flashing white flesh till my attention was Shanghaied, barely two weeks into my cyberspace peregrinations, by the two major denominations of US-designated ‘terrorists’: those true to their ideologies and those true to their impulses.

As the years gambolled by—the Net had a way of making you cavort—I learnt more and more about its Byzantine ways. The authorities cracked down, the initial euphoria about the Net being a free space was shackled by national laws that belligerently sought to become international and indisputable. The first among us found conspiracy theories that roamed the lanes and bylanes of the Net, the least of which was the US-sponsored uber Net-bug called Echelon, designed to track every email packet across the globe—and which many of us have incontrovertible evidence of its existence, including binary hideyholes and sarcophagi where details of its snooping are available.

But Echelon could do precious little against Steganography, the stealthy craft of concealing messages in random pixels of a photograph. This is the fondest methodology of communication of those the US government considers inimical to the welfare of that group of nations that constituted the Coalition that has laid waste to Iraq. The al-Qaida. Steganography is a both a complex and a simple thing, and it can only be cracked by global offline intelligence, of which the US has precious little.

Nonetheless, to come down to my binary peregrinations: I learnt how to write codes, how to crack them, how to upgrade my simple computer into a raging Lamborghini of a trackmeister. This entailed no particular laborious, incompliant work. All it needed was application and a certain degree of passion often leavened by my other—professional—passion, journalism. The two, let me tell you, make a puissant combination.

Now to the crux: this is why I know that the two suckers arrested in Salt Lake a couple of days ago on the charge of having sent out a “terror email” (why doesn’t someone get that right and call it a “terrorist email”? aren’t the culprits, however hard the cops might try to paint them as either chaos-creators without a purpose or jihadi recruits.

No owner of a cybercafé—particularly not one who is an MBA and another who might be, as the media so disparagingly says, a maid who’s passed only her 8th standard—would be caught dead not knowing that an IP address can be traced right back to its owner in three hours flat. I could do it from my own laptop, and I have, bombarding spammers’ IPs with promises of dire ramifications if they didn’t put me on their ‘watch-out-this-one’s-a-cyber-nutter’ list. I could also, if I so wish, shoot off an email to anyone I wish in the great paranoid world without ever being traced. There are thousands of proxy servers around this corrupt planet and IP addresses by the tens of thousands that could hide the origin of my mail till even Echelon would have its head up its own colon, searching for clues.

Why, then, would a savvy—if illegal—cybercafé owner sluice off an email that he knew could be traced back to him? Why would his computer-literate ‘maid’ do the same? On my Orkut profile, I’ve made no bones about the fact that I’m member of dubious groups such as Polyamory (‘For infinite possibilities in relating. For all relationship shapes. For connection, communication and community. For love. Ok, lust too’); Indian Ocean—not the high-security zone, you idiots, but the fusion group, who are all friends of mine (have I let a security gremlin slip here?); Filesharing p2p style (‘Kazaa, Morpheus, Napster, Gnutella, Shareaza, BitTorrent, DirectConnect++, eDonkey2000, Limewire, BearShare, iMesh, CuteMX, AudioGalaxy, Freenet, EarthStation5, Ares, and all other peer-to-peer (p2p) protocols’); SFI (‘WHEN INJUSTICE BECOMES THE LAW …. RESISTANCE BECOMES OUR DUTY’ - CHE ::……[that’s Che Guevara]); IPFC SNOBS (‘India Pakistan Friendship Club Sans N00bs Or Borders’); The Last Poets (‘The group arose out of the prison experiences of Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, a U.S. Army paratrooper who chose jail as an alternative to fighting in Vietnam; while incarcerated, he converted to Islam, learned to “spiel” (an early form of rapping), and befriended fellow inmates Omar Ben Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole’); The X-Files (‘All the issues the serial raised - alternative terran species, how many species, as Fox Mulder once asked, has humanity created instead of eradicated, the possibility of alien visitations, supersoldier constructs…The list goes on’); The Blacksmith’s Song Circle (unprintable lyrics); and so it goes.

So arrest me, too.

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UPA wins trust vote

The political upheavals of the past few days have finally come to an end with the UPA Government winning the trust vote. There were tense moments and, when the final results were declared, there was a sigh of relief and smiling faces. The difference was expected to be miniscule and there were assumptions that the speaker might have to give the casting vote for a positive result. But, that was not necessary – the difference was a healthy 19 votes. Obviously, in spite of assurances given to the party leaders by their members, there was cross voting. That has not made the leaders happy. The situation now is that one cannot trust his own people!

Plenty of research would go into establishing the reasons for the change of heart by some – the attraction of monetary benefits could have played a role in the role reversals. Whatever it be the leftist parties who were determined to pull down the Government have been humiliated – one would like to listen now to their explanations. If horse trading has wooed away as many as 19 of the opposing camps, it is a bit too farfetched and difficult to believe. Anyway, the sudden enthusiasm to put up a third front with Ms Mayawati as the leader has suffered a setback. It would be interesting to see whether the alliance takes shape in days to come ahead of the scheduled General Elections.

The left parties would face the music in West Bengal because the ill timed decision of the CPM to withdraw support from the UPA Government has put a spoke in the proposed development plans of West Bengal. The electorate would not forgive them soon. Therefore, tie ups with other political parties like the BSP might come in handy.

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Mental math, the Vedic way

Have you ever tried to do not-so-simple calculations in your head? Chances are you had to either reach for a piece of paper or worse, a calculator. But there is a method that lets you develop high speed calculation skills — without external aid.

“Vedic mathematics gives you access to high speed calculation skills,” claimed Gaurav Tekriwal, president of The Vedic Maths Forum, India. To familiarise students with the skills, the forum invited Vedic math guru professor Kenneth Williams to hold workshops in city schools earlier this month.

“Vedic mathematics has 16 sutras, which were taken from ancient texts by Swami Bharat Krishna Tirtha in the early 20th century,” said Williams. Read more »

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Exchange of knowledge

Classroom lessons for students of Calcutta International School (CIS) goes beyond the chalk-and-talk method. Working in collaboration with College Marx Dormoy in Paris, the two institutions publish French magazines every year and exchange it between themselves.

“We teach an international curriculum and we do not believe in keeping education restricted to text books. There is a lot of difference between gathering information from the Internet and acquiring knowledge. In order to make our students knowledgeable we try to initiate them into such projects,” says Anuradha Das, principal of CIS. Read more »

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Locked in a war of words

It was a pitched battle as 16 students locked horns over the topic ‘The women’s reservation bill is a threat to male dominance’, at the eastern zonal finals of the ninth inter- institutional L N Birla Memorial debate, held at the Vidya Mandir auditorium.

A preliminary round was held the previous day and seven schools, from the participating 20, reached the finals.

With topics ranging from senile social adaptation to pan-national governance, students blended anecdotes with statistics to prove their stand. Read more »

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A brush with Bangla

My interest in Kolkata had always been strong, so when I fixed a return to the city this year, I decided I would have to learn some of the Mother Tongue. It seemed a natural choice, and an important task, if I was to get the most from my experience. Thus began the long search for a suitable teacher and after 4 months scouring of Northern England, I eventually found my woman. Sharmi Siddique was a Bangladeshi immigrant living in my University City of Newcastle, and over the next few weeks we spent much time together. This lady took me right back to the most basic forms of interaction- she patiently listened to me recite the numbers one to thirty, she gave me a crash course in all the vital questions and statements needed for survival, and she also took it upon herself to provide a thorough education in Bengali sensibility- ‘Kakhona bhulona Amy. Every Bengali thinks London means the same thing as England. When they ask you where your house is, just lie and it’ll save you a lot of explanation’. I’m not sure that this was entirely true, but it was certainly meant with the best intention.

So I can’t imagine what my poor teacher would have thought, when upon touchdown in Kolkata, my first spoken word was ‘dhanyabaste’. This careless mispronunciation invoked embarrassing laughter from a number of people, and thus the struggle to establish my language abilities began. Things hadn’t started well, but I was darned if I was about to fall at the first hurdle. And by Jove, it would be a tall order.

English people have a reputation for being some of the worst linguists in the world and unfortunately, I had immediately served to further this notion. But the problem we face is not poor verbal aptitude, for I quickly learnt the correct way to say ‘thank you’. It is the cold hard fact that everybody in the entire world speaks our lingo, hence why would we endeavor to learn anything else? For the language enthusiasts of the UK, this is a real pain in the neck, as it renders self improvement almost impossible. Go to Holland thinking you can speak Dutch for example, and they will shoot you down in an instant. In Germany, the smallest hesitation whilst ordering a pretzel, will mark the end of your Deutsch experience. Pick destination India, where English binds the common people almost as much as Hindi, and fluency in Bengali becomes mission impossible. ‘Bangla bolo’ I keep pleading of my friend. ‘But it’s so boring’ he complains. ‘You don’t understand anything and we can have such better conversations in English, isn’t it?” Problem number one, how then can the poor international ever hope to learn?

I faced this discerning attitude from the beginning of my adventure and quickly realized that whilst acquaintance with high society was nice, it was unhelpful for progress. And so I decided (rightly or wrongly) to throw social sensibility out of the window and create a healthy circle of down and out associates, who were of much more use, simply because they couldn’t counteract me. Sometimes I wonder if this approach was a little slapdash and often fear I would get the boot, were any colleague to see me in such company. Indeed, my enthusiasm has led to a few misguided encounters; I’ve shared pavement space with some real undesirables, made accidental acquaintance with a well known pimp and generally become a regular on the mafia scene. Overall, however, I have to argue that lowering one’s standards is the best way to do things. The human ability to communicate is quite astounding, as is the capacity for kindness and learning. One young boy, for example, regularly creates lists of vocab for my use. In the past, these have included some real linguistic gems, such as the Bengali translation for ‘entrails’,’ pot-belly’ and ‘bowels’. Just in case. Another youngster likes to entertain me in the back of her cart, where I am fed copious amounts of rasagulla and chastised for not learning my weekly quota of Bangla.

So through various crude methods of interaction, I’ve ensured a stream of terminology and whilst I am no expert, have somehow become an authority on basic phrases. Actually, it’s always the simple things that are the most useful. ‘Atcha’ for example, is a straightforward but wonderful word, which serves to pacify any situation. It can be said in a number of tones, to mean different things or to drive the spike into any point, and I enjoy combining it with a head wiggle. We don’t do head wiggling in the UK, so this gesture is a novelty. ‘Ki hoyeche?’ is another great one and a question which I seem to ask myself far too often. Since things have a tendency to go marvelously wrong in India, it’s a good way to wash over any mishap, and a useful outlet for grief. Finally, ‘aami janina’ is a favorite, for it allows one to protest innocence and feign confusion in any suspect circumstance. Yes, these three turns of phrase are most crucial and I relish using them. In fact, I find them irresistible.

When I was at school I learnt German and French, but I never discovered a real passion for either, and it’s hard to remember a great deal. My abilities can just about stretch to ordering a croissant or a Curry Wurst and grammar wise, I only know that ‘je laverais la vache’ means ‘I have washed the cow.’ So imagine my frustration that Bangla, which I really want to be good, is a million times harder than either and that during these early stages, the only way to remember anything, is to parrot talk it until you simply can’t forget. Many an hour have I forgone in Barista, looking like a mad woman whilst doing this. It’s often the case, however, that once I attain some meager in road (such as managing to distinguish the word ‘bari’ in a sentence), my effort is crushed by the stumbling block of linguistic variation. Anyone who I allow to peruse my book of learning, will inevitably find a hundred corrections to make, and each one they will fervently claim is the ‘real’ Bangla. I understand that the language has gradually changed over the years and that a span of subtle dialect makes such modification somewhat inevitable, so I try to be tolerant. However, I do suspect that the Indian tendency to help with anything, means I’ve also received inputs from the most utterly doubtful sources of Bengali, ie. Urdu. Add to this confusion an entirely new script, and the task ahead seems monumental. Whatever happened to the good old ABC? I’m proud to say I can write numbers (with all the pace and concentration of a three year old), but it’s going to be a while before I can comfortably sit down to a samosa and a nice copy of Anandabazar Patrika.

It’s no surprise then, that people question my motive. Why, they inquire suspiciously, would you bother to learn Bangla since a) Everyone speaks English, and b) it’s impossible anyway? Sometimes, they display open mirth. I would like however, to argue against both points. Firstly, many of the people I mix with are highly educated and fluent in English, yet still love to slip between both dialects. E ach time this happens, I get unwittingly left behind and whilst I admire such bilingual talent, it is a little bothersome. Secondly, Bangla may be hard, but learning even the smallest amount has improved my foreign experience tenfold. Conversations, however pitiful, can open up a host of rewards, ranging from dinner at someone’s house to a unique insight into an unusual part of the city, a free cup of chai or a slice of exceptional Bengali warmth. And as far as navigating the city is concerned, a bit of the old lingo couldn’t be more useful. I can now walk relatively unscathed through Sudder Street, for example, since I am able to say, ‘no, I would not like to buy your rickshaw bell, but thankyou very much all the same’, or ‘that is indeed a nice bevy of flutes Dada, but I’m not really musically inclined’. Well actually I can’t converse quite so smoothly, but I can definitely make my point. And so my prospects are on the up.

My Father is a linguist, and at his advice I keep a detailed record of conversations, which has proved a great way to track achievement. The first entry in my journal proudly states: ‘Asked small man in airport where toilet was. He pointed straight, I said ‘shoja?’, and I think he understood me!’ Clearly I have come a long way since those peasant origins, but every time I remember my humble roots, the triumph spurs me on to new heights. In my last blog I stated that I would like to know some ‘cutting edge Bengali’, after which I resolved to pad out my dictionary of abuse. And I’m pleased to report that I now have a nice reserve of slang to match any occasion- Another small victory in the name of fluency.

So it seems a shame that just as I’m getting into the swing of things, I’m about to be swept off the face of Mother India, back to the Small Island. What then will happen? Can I continue my education in the face of distance, globalization and the blatant skepticism of my local Asian community? Will I muster the fight and will I conquer? Well yes, is the answer, for I have learnt the art of resilience and discovered that it more than pays its way. As long as my Indian prospects continue to flourish (and that I don’t doubt), I have oodles of incentive and more than enough confidence. So expect me at the service of all your conversational needs, in Kolkata, this time next year.

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Learning science the mad way

A scientific principle can be taught as scores of black letters and a couple of diagrams. Or it could take the form of a discovery, leaping out of books through exciting experiments.

Instead of reading about a rocket, one could also build one that not only launches at count down but also separates in air like a real rocket. Little surprise that most children prefer the second option.

The West Bengal franchise of Canadian organisation Mad Science has started regular After School Programs (ASP) at their office in Survey Park. “Very few schools have welcomed our projects so far. We pin our hopes on parents who have been very enthusiastic whenever we given demonstrations in shopping malls, bookstores, at British Council and other public spaces,” said Anirban Chanda, the head of Mad Science, Kolkata. Read more »

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A poacher’s approach

It was during those two decades of the Bodo movement, that Manas became inaccessible to visitors, the state machinery, and finally in 1992, earned the sobriquet of a ‘World Heritage Site in Danger’. Sixteen years later, I was sitting deep inside the jungle at a forest camp, face to face with a very shy old man, who, the others at the camp tell me was a poacher. He is a forest guard now—has a small hut and an old wife. That’s about as much as he has. And he barely survives. His lot, like the lots of others, has not changed much. Sixteen years back, they had poverty and police to deal with. Now, they at least have peace of mind. It’s ten at night, the jungle is alive with all sorts of sounds, there’s a crackling fire flickering on the faces of everybody who huddles close to it. Everybody at the camp has gathered for a little fireside story.

Yet there is one face, which is so different, almost inert in the crowd. Deeply lined, almost stony. The face of an old man, who now vouches his life to protect the same animals he had once killed. He speaks nothing but the Bodo language. And haltingly he describes a typical hunting scene. I talk to him through an interpretor.

‘The only guns we had were country made ones. And we didn’t have jeeps or anything. We hunted on foot. We would be a group of four to five. All of us armed. And we would roam the forest searching for elephant herds, or rhinos, or tigers. Read more »

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They, as usual came, after it was dark

(Names of Bodo characters have been changed for obvious reasons)

The answer came to me in front of a camp fire one evening, when my friend and guide Sunny told me his story.

It’s been a few years since Help Tourism and Sabyasachi Chakraborty had put their respective resources together to transform a lot of what was lost. The same som plantation where Chakraborty and his family had stayed in a camp, now has four thatched huts—Bodo style. Built of bamboo and mud, and raised on stilts, they look pretty fragile from outside. Inside, there’s a double bed, clean sheets, a bed side table, a centre table, carpeted wooden floors, solar powered lights, an attached toilet with a decent shower, tiled floors and a WC that actually flushes. You get warm fresh food at the canteen, run by the local youths. You get warm water for your bath, delivered at your doorstep by the numerous other young men who have taken it to be their sacred duty to build every inch of this so-called resort in the heart of the jungle. “I built the room where you are staying. And the furniture too”, Sunny tells me. There’s a twinkle in his eyes. Read more »

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Kolkata goes up in smoke

I returned to Kolkata late last year after a gap of a decade to find the city – smoking. I mean, literally. Strangely enough, I cannot recall if this was the case ten years ago, when I left the city as a young college student, though common sense tells me there’s no reason for it to have been otherwise. I daresay growing up in the city meant taking a lot of things for granted – things that my absence has rendered all too visible.

As a student, I played my part in courting lung caner and polluting my immediate environment – the first couple of years as an undergraduate went by in a happy, smoke-filled haze as I succumbed to the many temptations Promod-da’s marvellous canteen at Presidency College offered; while I worked hard the final year, there was still ample time for yet more cigarettes and luchi-aloo. Delhi, however, was a different ball game altogether – people out there were much more sensitised to the norms of political correctness, and at the university, you didn’t really need cigarettes to appear cool and intellectual, or appropriately jaded (though a joint did come in handy now and then). By the time I quit smoking my much whittled-down quota of two cigarettes a day, an active campaign against smoking was well underway – you were no longer allowed to smoke in offices, on the roads, or any public space. Restaurants had well-demarcated smoking and non-smoking sections, and most these days prefer to do away with smoking altogether within their premises. The fact that there were fewer people lighting up made imposing these rules that bit easier.

By the time I returned last year, I’d metamorphosed into a militant ex-smoker, married to yet another militant – and proselytizing, to boot – ex-smoker who had by then developed a violent allergy to cigarette smoke. Returning to live in Kolkata was, quite literally, akin to a hard kick in the lungs.

Everywhere we went, there were people smoking – on the streets, in the shops, taxi drivers inside taxis, people walking their dogs or picking up their children, inside restaurants, and horror of horrors, inside doctors’ chambers! Within a month of our being here, my poor husband had begun wearing a permanently hunted look, clutching his inhaler for dear life; I probably resemble one of those over-the-top, all too obvious, secret agents thanks to the sharp looks I cast in all directions, the swift, peremptory way I shove my husband to the right or left, and staccato barks to ‘hold your breath’ – all implying there’s someone smoking within inhaling distance. We love eating out, but going to restaurants here has become something of a problem – a couple of our favourite places in Park Street took us to their ‘non-smoking sections’, which comprised of two tables set very thoughtfully right next to the smoking section. Perhaps they’re trying to make up for your being too cheap to buy your own cigarettes by allowing you to inhale others’ leftover smoke. Ask a waiter to seat you somewhere where there is absolutely NO smoke, and he begins casting desperate glances all around; I did so once when my husband was in the throes of an asthma attack – the waiter, after one terrified look at him, hustled us to another table where, with a relieved smile, said, ‘Here, madam. There is no one smoking here.’ I forbore to mention that there was no one smoking because the tables around us were empty.

The only ‘good’ thing about Kolkata is that a lot of people do move away or stub out their cigarettes when told you’re allergic, unlike the Jat bhais and yuppie Punjabis in Delhi, who would probably shoot you for impinging on their freedom of expression. Of course there is the odd nonchalant babu who tells you unconcernedly ‘Daran, ei cigarette-ta ekhuni dhoralam, eta shesh kore ni’. My husband has a genuine medical problem, which entitles him to sympathy and understanding, but what about me? I didn’t quit polluting my body so that others could do it for me, and surely I have the right to a clean, smoke-free environment? We Calcuttans pride ourselves on our sensitivity and innate ‘decency’, so why are we so insensitive to the needs of our immediate surroundings, and the health of our fellow citizens, including our own children (what I’m most horrified by is the sight of fathers blithely puffing out clouds of carcinogenic smoke right into their little children’s faces). Ever since I returned, Kolkata has been witnessing raging debates around the environment, and the nasty, polluting practices of unconcerned city denizens; perhaps a serious consideration to ban smoking in at least public spaces would not go amiss.

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Taxi drivers: movers and shakers at the wheel

Taxi drivers are usually as churlish as the belching rattletraps they steer by the injudicious overuse of biceps and forearms, and lazy feet. But their degree of tetchiness varies from country to country, and within a country, from city to city.

In New York, they curse you with everlasting hellfire if you don’t, or are too hard up to tip them more than the mandated amount of 10 per cent of the fare. They also protest against the installation of GPRS in their cabs, which pinpoint precisely where they are located at any given time, thus stripping them of their generosity in taking their fares on circumlocutory rides. In Frankfurt, the Teutons among the tribe are grim, remote and not a little xenophobic, and the only taxi drivers who pick up the gastarbeiters are the Turkish ones. In Paris, they mutter at you in French, but descend to wittering despondently in English only because the government of France has given English, which it now concedes with bad grace is the language of global commerce, a leg-up. In Turkey, they scold you if you protest that they’re pelting down roads too narrow to take human and automobile traffic, which is almost always the case. In Italy, they stick their heads out of the window and yell at the ubiquitous, beautifully-designed scooters that thread through the traffic with such effrontery that they make your hair stand, like waxed punk poufs, on end. In Delhi, they keep the meter covered with a fetching piece of black felt, informing you that it’s for the meter’s “protection”: if exposed to the heat, the meter—which is actually both electronic and tropicalised—goes loopy and if it’s covered it runs slow. And then, notwithstanding what the meter reads, they proceed to overcharge you.

But nowhere except in India do taxis routinely mow down people and blitz other vehicles with the impunity that comes of driving licences earned through bribery, an absence of road manners, a sense of everyone else’s rotten karma but their own, the tunnel vision that deserves to exist only on Formula 1 tracks, and the ownership of a sheet metal hearse that will go on and on even with its bits and pieces falling off like biscuit crumbs behind it.

This tribe is saved, in my modest opinion, by those countries whose first, and often only, industry is tourism and where rays of sunshine sometimes cut through the rumbling clouds of hacks. The first time I experienced the fact that taxi drivers could be human by nature, and affably human at that, was in Bangkok a few years ago.

If I’m travelling alone, I usually insist on sitting beside the driver: not only might a conversation become haltingly possible by cutting through the sociopathic voice-of-god in their heads, it might even become memorable; on the front seat, one is treated to the drivers’ sotto voce imprecations at other drivers and, in particular, traffic cops, who seem to be universally unendurable. (Even if the drivers’ purple prose is in an alien language, the globally typical fact that these are words their mothers would shoot them for having used, the explosive inflexions and the salivary exclamations have been so designed by the Great Semanticist in the Sky that even tourists get the gist.)

At Bangkok, the driver asked me, mostly through paralingual gestures, where I was from. I said, “India.” He said, “Hindi? Hindi!” and hauled out from his dashboard, first, a copy of the Qu’ran and then, smiling all the while, an entire treasure trove of music cassettes of the lilts of Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, Kishore Kumar, Talat Mehmood, K.L. Saigal, T.S. Atma, Geeta Dutt—a smorgasbord of musicians I hadn’t paid much attention to for a decade of working 26/8 as a journalist. He knew not a word of Hindi or Urdu, but it didn’t matter. Thereafter, we didn’t attempt to communicate with words, which can be misleading: we just listened companionably to music, which can’t.

Some time later, at the Seychelles’ capital of the tiny island of Mahé, which stands out like a lump of broccoli in an ocean which is 12 shades of blue and seven shades of emerald and where the crystal clear water is waist high for a kilometre into the ocean, I met drivers who wouldn’t take on passengers from 1 pm to 5 pm for an oil sheikh’s fortune: it was unassailable siesta time, when it seemed that the entire Creole population—the one that didn’t comprise of Indians, who virtually ran the government, and Pakistanis, who ran the banking system, both working at such impassioned cross-purposes that it’s a wonder Seychelles survives as one of the last paradises on Earth—was busy conking out on the local beer, Sebrew.

One briefly showery day, I took a cab at 10 minutes to 1 pm, hoping to beat the clock to the picture-postcard quay where my office was located. The driver was no slouch. But about 200 yards from the only traffic light in town, a scary thing because it was a Lilliputian, barely noticeable 10 feet tall pole, he turned in at the curb, braked, grunted himself out of his seat and walked off, fare forgotten to the call of the sirens of Sebrew. After stewing for 10 minutes, I got out too and lugged my heavy briefcase to my destination. It didn’t help that all the cabs in the Seychelles were low-slung, heavy-doored Cielos, in those days the automobiles of choice of spiffy corporate moguls in India. A week later in the evening when the sun was going under like a sly mermaid, Francois recognised me slouching beside the road, called out grinning dementedly and took me to his home for dinner. It wasn’t in the nature of an apology: it was the kind of simple sociability that much of the world has forgotten.

Years prior to this experience, which cemented a goofy grin on my face through years of life’s sadisms, I lived in Bombay and my vehicle of choice on reporting assignments was a taxi—if, that is, I could con the editor into reluctantly counting out more than the mingy handful of change that transit rail would cost. I smoked like a coal-powered locomotive in those days, beedis at that; and while beedis are killers, they are also great class levellers. Depending on the length of the journey, taxi drivers would invariably bum a few weeds off me, for which they’d be shamed into recompensing me with conversation, much of it unprintable.

One of them, an old man from a taxi stand near the office who I remember had the most lacerated voicebox in the known world and who smoked incessantly, made me an offer that rendered him a permanent choice of driver for me: “For two rupees more than the meter charge, I’ll take you to the very doorstep of whichever address you want to go to anywhere in Bombay.” It takes taxi drivers in London years of learning every road in that gigantic metropolis to get a licence to hack it: this geezer knew every inch of Bombay, a city whose layout is as capricious, malleable and, in cartographic terms, unknowable as Kolkata.

And now on to my latest metropole of residence. Kolkata’s taxi drivers are of a different breed altogether. The really inspired ones, migrants from that entirely different paradigm of ethics called Bihar, first ask you which route you wish to take to your destination, even if there’s only one. Fumble once and you’re in for a head-spinning city tour. Many of these drivers are underage and don’t know a lane from a divider, which is often cause for grief. Add to their maladroitness the fact that the amber lights in Kolkata’s junctions have been retired. The only sign that the lights are going to go green are the red lights blinking twice. And then it’s a grinding of clutch plates abused to an inch of their life, the shuddering of engines running on a venomous mixture of diesel and kerosene, and pedal to the metal.

I’ve learnt that here taxi drivers do sport by tailgating mere mortals, squatting at crawl-speed on the high-speed right lanes, and hurtling up your nose on the wrong side of the road. They crawl at 10 kmph in the middle of a road hunting for passengers, with traffic scrunched up like an accordion behind them. I much prefer city driving to Formula 1 antisepsis—but tangling with Kolkata’s dementors on wheels nibbles away at my optimism.

In eight months in the city, I’ve travelled with one taxi driver who’s charged me the right amount. Unlike Delhi’s drivers, they aren’t ambitiously criminal, just small fry extortionists. Like the city’s denizens themselves, their materialist visions are small and, to an outsider used to encountering taxi drivers going on to own large fleets through bureaucratic benefaction, quaint in their diminution. There are some saving graces, after all.

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To guru with love

It was Ashmita Mohanty’s big day. The child prodigy was chosen to present Guru Pranam at Gyan Manch on June 17, as part of a tribute to Padmabibhushana Kelucharan Mohapatra organised by Shinjan Nrityalaya.

Wearing a red and blue costume and heavy silver ornaments, Ashmita — a Class II student of MP Birla Foundation Higher Secondary School — regaled the audience with her stellar performance. “I like Odissi as it is easy to learn,” she said. Ashmita has been staging performances all over the city, including Swabhumi. Recently, she also danced at a temple in Khidderpore. Her upcoming shows include one in Bhubaneshwar. Read more »

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Prosenjit and the attitude shift

The other day, I was talking to Prosenjit Chatterjee in a surrounding that has, as of now, been largely unfamiliar to the Tollywood-based scribe brigade.
It may be a purana practice in Bollywood, to have your personal PR, but over here it’s a direct contact between the scribe and the star. The basics are simple. You SMS the star for an interview, he/she SMSes back to give you a time to call, you call and fix up the interview date and time. The bottomline—the journo needs to ensure that his/her cell number is stored in the star’s cell. And that it rings often.
With a PR or a secretary to handle the media, it becomes a tad easier. Interview requests are rooted through this go-between. And unlike stars, this person makes it a point to generally take all calls coming his/her way. So in order to fix an interview with Madhuri Dixit, you call up her secretary Rikkuji, you sms Mr Bachchan for an interview and if he agrees you send the questionnaire to Ms. Rosy, his secretary.
More professional, but mostly devoid of the personal touch.
Prosenjit, by all means has been the first in Tollygunge to appoint a profes-=sional agency to handle his media affairs. And I was interviewing him in the office of that agency.
Why this, after twenty-five years in the industry? I asked.
‘’Something new. It becomes necessary at times. You change with the times,'’ he answers.
But doesn’t this take away a bit of the personal touch that Tolly-journos shared with the man they generally addressed by his pet-name, Bumba– with the younger lot suffixing it with a ‘da’, I wonder.
” But you need to give new experiments a chance. Dekhai jag na byaparta kemon hoy,” he answers.
Give the new a chance. That coming from Prosenjit says a lot. After all, these days he doesn’t mind sharing almost equal screen and poster space with the likes of Jishu Sengupta and Tota Roy Chowdhury. That too in a mainstream venture.
Shift of attitude. And a more professional one at this point of time. Perhaps….

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Sorry Mr Dutt, my fault

It happened simply by chance. Watching two films back-to-back is nothing singular. But when the two are such that they deal with almost the same subject, the occasion requires mention. Something that happened to me a few days back. The first film was ‘Chalo, Let’s Go’ directed by Anjan Dutt. The second ‘Into the Wild’ directed by Sean Penn.

I was at fault. I shouldn’t have watched the two films back to back. Otherwise, I would have waxed eloquent on CLG. I couldn’t. Because Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer’s powerhose idea of an adventure/travelogue movie simply swept me off my feet.That, despite the various limitations of a home video watched on a fourteen inch colour television, which was no comparison for the Gold Lounge comfort of Fame that Anjan ensured for his exclusive wine and kebabs Thursday gathering of elite pressmen and presswomen.

So why did I like ITW more than CLG? Not because the former was technically better than the latter. Neither because Alaska on the small screen looked more breathtaking than Dooars and the hills on the big. And of course not because ITW is a Hollywood product, while CLG was from Tollywood. None of that! In fact, I immensely enjoyed the comfort of urban Bengali pidgin that was impossible with ITW.

It was actually the ‘idea’.

So where does the idea come from? From Jon Krakauer of course, who is capable of turning a narrative on a failed Everest expedition into a breathtaking thriller—so much so that his 1997 book ‘Into Thin Air’ is now accepted as a masterpiece of travel writing. He does the same with the screenplay of ‘Into the Wild’— based on his 1992 bestseller of the same name. And Sean Penn’s camera and visual narrative does the rest. ITW therefore becomes a very honest account of a man’s search for life’s meaning—both by excluding society and including it.

Something that to my limited understanding was also Anjan’s idea. Four friends—ala Ray’s ‘Aran-yer Din Ratri’ trying to break free in Kolkata 2008. The problem is, it’s not a radical idea. So you need to package it in a different way.

The Jon-Sean duo has been able to do it. When Chris MacCandless, the central protagonist, denies to part ways with his weather-worn Dutsun, burns his change, and finally sets off on a hitch-hiking venture to Alaska, there is a slow build-up to the character—a rebel who is totally frustrated with the American living and like a headstrong romantic, decides to give up a promising career for a life of hardship—facing nature bereft of all the trappings of human civilisation except for the basics.

Anjan tries to do it in his own way. The four friends, trying and failing at all possible off-track careers, finally choose to start a travel agency. However, getting roughed up while performing a song that by all standards was pretty good in lyrics and music, did not seem to be enogh reason for the four to radically shift gear and start a travel agency. Then there’s the story. While ITW leaves a scope for society to drift in and out of the narrative, thus allowing for a variety of characters and resulting in a breadth of vision, CLG becomes static with a set of tourists who follow the four friends as their travel agency clients.
That is where CLG starts sagging. It becomes nothing different from a very smartly made big-screen fictional version of Dutt’s very own non-fiction TV show—’Chalo Anjan’ (if I remember correctly).

And I reiterate—I should not have watched ‘Into The Wild’ soon after ‘Chalo, Let’s Go’. My fault!

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Bhoomi goes to Montreal

Bhoomi will be the first jazz band of India to participate in the Jazz festival at Montreal later this month. Bhoomi – the music of the Earth is a Bangla Band began its journey way back in 1999 - 24th of July, to be precise. It brought a new dimension to Bengali songs and music and, within a very short time it caught the fancy of the people. Its debut album was appropriately named was ‘Jatra Shuru’. It was awarded the best Bangla band of 2003 and had composed the music for the Cheer Song of EURO 2004 that was aired on ESPN and Star Sports. One of its famous songs is ‘Tomar Dekha Nai’. Let us wish the band all the best and hope they are successful in their venture to bring back laurels for the country.

‘….. Indian traditionalists Bhoomi (June 28) and the Seckou Keita Quartet (July 3) are among those who will take the stage at 9 p.m….. (read more)

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/arts/story.html? id=ebde7a41-0125-46bd-816f-10dc93902a64

Bhoomi – music of the Earth

http://www.bhoomimusic.com/index.htm

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Hail the bandhs

The Kolkata Police had requested all vehicle drivers to avoid using the horns for at least one hour in the day on 5th June 2008 to show respect to the environmentalists. The idea was to keep pollution under control. If not the air pollution, at least the noise pollution could be reduced and kept in check. However, the Kolkattans went the whole hog and did not resort to blowing the horns for the whole of 12 hours on 5th June. Not only that, they did not even pollute the air for 12 hours – they just did not take out their vehicles. All because of the bandh called by the CPM to condemn the increase in cost of petro products like petrol, diesel and cooking gas. Kolkattans are determined to earn bonus points for being environment friendly because there will be a second bandh tomorrow, this time the credit will go to the Trinamool Congress. These will be followed by the weekend when the number of vehicles on the roads is usually less in number. Hail the bandhs.

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Criminal minds

Six men wannabe ransomers copy-paste the outstandingly sophisticated methodology of the bomber from the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster Speed on a Bangalore milieu, and flub it. A 14-year-old schoolgirl is murdered in Noida by someone who wields a sharp-edged weapon like a surgeon’s scalpel, slices through the carotid artery and the vocal chords in one stroke, and knows enough about due process to get rid of the murder weapon/s, leaving the prosecution without the most important instrument in its armoury. The police in that first electoral redoubt of US conservatives, Florida, gripe that the television hit series, CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) Las Vegas, CSI Miami and CSI New York has served to inform criminals about the technology of cutting edge forensics, and thus the means to subvert it, along with feeding the public’s insatiable hunger for someone else’s pain through computer-generated graphics of the minutiae of severe bodily trauma.

It seems that everyone is busy learning about how crimes are solved except those that mid-20th century American crime writers variously called “flatfoots”, “stumblebums” and, in memoriam to a slapstick black-and-white movie series, “Keystone Kops”—the police.

The six dunderheads in Bangalore who failed to extract from their victims enough money to cover their own expenses were more or less benign: the ‘bomb’ they cobbled together looked authentic enough, with a digital readout timer that you can buy from your corner watch store for less than Rs. 200 providing most of the authenticity. Far be it from me to decry the fact that the bomb was a dud and didn’t blow to bits the one victim who ripped it off his back in a panic—but the thing was a stage prop. If the cops had had to use forensics to solve this one, it would have been like treating a pimple with a full course of cancer chemotherapy.

But where they could have called for forensics, they blew it: by the time serologists and techs were brought into the two signal crimes in recent memory—the recent Noida schoolgirl murder and the Nithari mass ‘cannibalism’ of December 2006—it was too late. The material evidence had been rather handily compromised, due process repeatedly bungled. In both cases, forensics couldn’t even take recourse to the last-stand Polymerase Chain Reaction-Short Tandem Repeat method, which expands a tiny DNA sample by synthesising new DNA, and is used to produce remarkably clear results with degraded specimens.

I watch all the CSIs with a religious fervour: I’m one of the legion of those utterly unhinged telespuds who think blood and gore are the stuff of human history, and because of it I believe in the infallibility of modern forensics with the certitude of zealotry. In the Noida case, the police woke up to the possibility of a rich seam of information hidden in the computer hard drives of the dead girl and her accused father nine days after the murder had taken place. Meanwhile, they had let a professionally nosey—and unconscionable—electronic media stomp all over the crime scene, eradicating the slivers and microscopic shreds of evidence that can actually seal a case. They ‘forgot’ to lift fingerprints and DNA evidence from the room where the girl was killed—and usable DNA from elusive sources such as epithelial, CSI Las Vegas informed me and the Journal of Forensic Sciences of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences confirmed, pretty much degrades in three days.

You can’t fault the CSI scriptwriters on their homework, although you could quibble that every episode, in which a case is cracked in a matter of days and not the weeks of scrupulous slog that it would take in the real world, is an exercise in time-stop photography. Bud goes to flower in three seconds flat, a herd of wildebeest crosses a rain-swollen river in the Kalahari in half a minute, etcetera. But surely creative licence is small price to pay for such knowledge.

And for this knowledge, or at least awareness, a government concerned about klutzes in khaki should make it mandatory for every cop from constable to commissioner to virtually memorise ongoing TV shows such as CSI, Criminal Minds, Bones and NCIS, and dead ones such as Profiler and the brilliant British serial Wire in the Blood and learn about, at the very least, procedure. Simply put: Bring in the cavalry before the enemy scoots.

In the Nithari crime (which is too gory for even hard-bitten CSI scriptwriters to handle), the police dismantled the case from start to what is turning out to be a slow marathon to the finish by letting entire localities, human rights ambulance chasers and the media bustle through the crime scene, day after day, till only circumstantial evidence survived the stampede. This crime will be remembered for having started the national ‘narco-analysis’ riot by the police. Now, every suspect whose forensics has been bummed up by the police is dosed with sodium pentothal, and is interrogated by the police in a state of such utter grogginess that anything the suspect regurgitates is inadmissible in court.

It’s not that India doesn’t have the facilities—on paper. In its report (2003-06), the Directorate of Forensic Science (DFS), Ministry of Home Affairs, claimed: “The three Central Forensic Science Laboratories [CSFL] examined 6600 cases and the three Government Examiner of Questioned Documents under DFS examined 5000 cases during the last three years.” What the DFS didn’t report was that more than 90 per cent of the cases had to do with white-collar crimes, the kind that rarely make the front page and even more rarely end in convictions. These days, much of its time is taken up ‘examining’ cases in the latest buzzword in crime-busting: “cyber-forensics”, which essentially means trying to place a tracking bug on everyone using the Net.

CFSL, Kolkata, and CFSL, Chandigarh, stand out because their DNA fingerprinting facilities are reported to be state-of-the-art. “Both the laboratories have reported more than 400 important cases related to rape, murder and terrorist related activities,” the report said. CFSL, Kolkata, “through collaboration of Ministry of Information & Technology has indigenously developed software which will identify the origin and make of the firearm cartridge and head stamps. The developed software has been found to be immense help in a number of terrorist cases where firearms were involved.” The report didn’t amplify on the terrorist angle because terrorism is such a complex subject that the police often end up confusing routine crime with terrorism and vice-versa.

Or perhaps imprecision is in our societal genes. We do have our own version of CSI, of course: it’s called CID, in which forensics is substituted with wild and often sideways leaps of logic.

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The food zone down the road…

Although, someday it might have housed just a bakery, today, it has many more options to offer. The shops lining the Lord’s Bakery crossing in the Lake Gardens area of Prince Anwar Shah Road have an exclusive common feature—they cater indulgingly to the taste buds of the local population. An exclusive variety of south Indian cuisine, Chinese dishes, Mughlai food, fast food and fruit juices await the foodies of the area.

The popularity of the series of seven to eight shops lining the stretch of Prince Anwar Shah Road, leading to Jadavpur, spreads a good way across its immediate neighbourhood. Pallavi Mishra, a resident of the Tollygunje area, says that good shops such as these are not to be found in her locality, and she always makes it a point to pick up something from here when she is in the area. The entire stretch has gradually, turned into a hang-out zone for the youngsters of the area. Many a time groups of friends are spotted grabbing a bite after a day of fun and frolic. With two schools nearby, the students on their way home after a tiring day, also pause to indulge in the tasty delights that this set of eateries has to offer. A little late in the evening comes the crowd of office-goers, returning from a hard day’s work. Some of the shops have arranged for make-shift sitting arrangements, to enable customers to eat in comfort. Read more »

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Role of the Captain in IPL games

The Rajasthan Royals has taken a resolve not to lose any further games. They are charged up like nobody else – what is the secret of their success? Obviously, it is the captain who has developed an enviable relationship with his boys. They have not failed him and he is sitting on top of the world – yes, including the points chart.

An outsider, he has got all his players local and overseas eating out of his hands. On the field, he is in all places at the same time – whether encouraging his bowlers or setting a field or tapping a fielder for an unnecessary blunder – he enjoys the game. Unlike other captains who are weighed down with burdens that no one can see but can imagine. He has proved to be a true brand ambassador for IPL.

In this context, a report in a section of the press indicates that Rahul Dravid wants to part ways with his owner. Earlier there were rumors of the relationship between SRK and Sourav turning sour. Then the captain of the Deccan Chargers VVS Laxman was a captain for namesake – it was Adam Gilchrist all the way. For the Mumbai Indians, there were as many as three captains – unfortunately, it has not been of much help. The bottom-line is that the captain has to lead the way – if his body language does not impress his players, the team suffers. At the back of his mind are the questions – can I meet the expectations of the crowd? Will I emerge victorious? Will I get into runs? Will I bag the award for the maximum sixes? It is all about the bad word ‘I’ – if the captain thinks in terms of ‘we’, he will be a much relieved captain.

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The further adventures of the fedora and whip

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published in The New York Times of May 22, 2008

CANNES, France — “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is a movie for boomers of all ages, though you can bet the bank that plenty of tots will be tagging along with Mom and Dad, Granny and Gramps. Like the 1981 blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the first in a monster franchise that has spawned two previous movie sequels, a television series, comics, novels, video games and Disney theme-park attractions, this new one was directed by Steven Spielberg, cooked up and executive produced by George Lucas (with Kathleen Kennedy) and stars Harrison Ford as the archaeologist-adventurer-sexpot with the sardonic grin, rakish fedora and suggestive bullwhip.

This latest Indy escapade, which was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival and will probably scoop up more money than the rest of the selections combined, serves as a reunion for the principal creative team. Almost two decades have lapsed since the third installment in the series, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). In the years since, Mr. Lucas — whose logo for Lucasfilm received the loudest applause at the press screening in Cannes — continued to build his special-effects empire and resurrected the “Star Wars” franchise while Mr. Spielberg has oscillated between serious-minded projects and financially instrumental entertainments.

For his part, Mr. Ford rode the ups and downs of high-concept stardom, oscillating between roles that called for him to flash his customary wry grin or his equally familiar grumpy frown. He wears both in “The Crystal Skull,” though the busy story makes enormous effort to keep the mood happy and snappy and decidedly PG-13 friendly — P.C. friendly, too, as in politically correct, with fewer dark-skinned people popping their eyeballs. Not that Indy has gone soft or the natives have gone hard, mind you, only that Mr. Spielberg no longer seems as eager to cut down extras for a laugh.

Thank goodness for the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, which have expedited the return of blond-haired, blue-eyed villainy to the screen. Set in 1957, this new Indy yarn, written by David Koepp from a story by Mr. Lucas and Jeff Nathanson, takes place far from the Middle East even if it opens in a desert. The bad guys this time are cold war Reds first seen poking around an American military base and led by Irina Spalko. A caricature given crude, playful life by Cate Blanchett, Irina owes more than a little to Rosa Klebb, the pint-size Soviet operative played by Lotte Lenya, who took on James Bond in “From Russia With Love.”

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk.

If only the filmmakers seemed as eager to see — and to please — the audience as Ms. Allen. There’s plenty of frantic energy here, lots of noise and money too, but what’s absent is any sense of rediscovery, the kind that’s necessary whenever a filmmaker dusts off an old formula or a genre standard. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” creaks with age now, but to look at it again is to see Mr. Spielberg actively engaging in an organic whole, taking a beloved template and repurposing it for the modern blockbuster age he helped create. By contrast, “The Crystal Skull” comes alive only in isolated segments, in a clever motorcycle chase that ends in a library and, best of all, in an eerie sequence at an atomic test site that wittily puts the nuclear in family.

The original Indiana Jones venture was inspired by Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg’s love for 1930s serials, but you’d be hard pressed to find much inspiration in their latest collaboration. There’s plenty of perspiration, of course, what with the wall-to-wall chases — many tricked out with obvious computer-generated effects — that careen one into another like colliding big rigs. As expected, the high leaps and long jumps look impressive, even if it’s something of a bummer when one of the best directors working today (Mr. Spielberg) doesn’t seem to be working as hard as the stunt crew. Initially, I thought he was bored with the material (he wouldn’t be alone), but now I think he’s just grown out of this kind of sticky kids’ stuff.

Creative ennui certainly might explain why he spends so much time riffing both on his own greatest hits — Indy and company have an encounter of a close, insipid kind — and on other movies. Some of these allusions amuse (a sea of red ants parting à la “The Ten Commandments”) while others are just painful (Mr. LaBeouf done up to resemble Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”). It’s odd to see Mr. Spielberg recycling plot points already chewed through by Roland Emmerich in “Stargate,” though Indy’s brief encounter with some ferociously feathered Indians who look right out of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” was a tantalizingly sweet pip, a sequel in waiting (“Indiana Jones Meets Mad Max”) or maybe just a YouTube mash-up.

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Auto, bliss or curse?

Kolkata, Our very own ‘CITY of JOY’, but let me ask you a question do you really feel proud for you city for its present status or all your ‘FEEL GOOD’ factors are due to the golden era what it has passed. Unfortunately answer is yes. We feel proud because of the tradition it has to its credit and we are heard of (not fortunate enough to experience).
Let’s look into it in a deeper note. If you make a survey amongst Calcuttans what is the reason behind their grudge, the response is going to be same in 99% cases. And the reply is ‘Present days Transport Condition’.
In fact, I support the reason behind this anger whole heartedly. While researching, I found some facts about one of the most well accepted mode of modern day public transport- ‘AUTO’, which has turnout to be the cause of headaches for most of the traffic problems caused in the city.
Unarguably, they are the major cause of unstructured traffic jams in the city. Due to their shape, mobility and no detail route map (most of the cases) they have a tendency to consider themselves as the king of the road, resulting hiccups at every crossing. Forget about other valid papers (like pollution control certificate etc); some of them do not carry their valid driving license as well. Only one thing they never forget to carry is a ‘CITU Member ship card’. Most of them run their vehicles in some fuel popularly known as ‘KANTA TEL’ (a mixture of diesel, kerosene and other liquids), which not only illegal in nature but also more heath-threatening in compare to its other counterpart.
More surprisingly the so called franchisee of this product runs their business openly in the closed proximity of local police – stations.
For example, one of the largest hubs of this fuel in south Calcutta is in front of JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY, 8B bus stand gate, a venue which is almost at a walking distance from JADAVPUR THANA. And believe me, JADAVPUR is not at all an exception in this regard, we can find the same picture in some of the northern suburbs as well like LAKE TOWN, KESTOPUR etc.
After the pollution aspect, let look at the commuting aspect. Most of the auto pullers use to pick 5 or more passengers at a time. If you dare to argue with them, trust me, they are going to show you hundred of reasons including socio-economic imbalance ornamented with typical AUTO-WALA phrases, (popularly known as derogatory word).
Their fare gets changed with the timing of travel and season of travel.
For example, from SALTLAKE, KARUNAMOYEE to TECHNOPOLIS it is 6rs during office time and 5rs during normalcy, similarly from BIDHANNAGAR RAILWAY STATION to SALTLAKE, KARUNAMOYEE it is 10rs during rush hour and 7rs normally. If it is during rainy season or festive season you can’t predict how much you have to pay for the same distance. During last year rain, some AUTO WALA asked for as high as 150rs for a distance that normally being charged as 10rs.Just think?
With our utter astonishment they even restrict the transportability of some public vehicle as well. No buses (public, government, office etc) are allowed to stop at their allotted bus stop near CHINGRIHATA FLYOVER (towards sector-V), rather they are compelled to give a stop far ahead of the stop, only because of our very own AUTO WALA.
At the conclusion I just want to raise some question for our honorable ‘TRANSPORT MINISTER’?
1. Our honorable ‘TRANSPORT MINISTER’, once promised that there would be no AUTO in the city, running in any fuel other than LPG. He has set some deadline for the same but unfortunately that gets extended only. Can we ask him about the final deadline for the same?
2. Can we ask him, unlike other public transports why the fare of the auto is not set by any state authority like ‘RTA’? Why the fare is getting set by LOCAL CITU AUTHORITY and more surprisingly these fares are getting set not on distance but on the area where it runs.
3. Our honorable ‘TRANSPORT MINISTER’, has made another promise as well. Where he told that there would be no AUTO in the city, carrying more than 4 passengers at a time. Like all other cases even this time also he has failed to convince most of the AUTO-PULLERS, incidentally who are supporters and active members of his party.

Along with asking for explanation from our government authority, even we need to take some preventive measures as well. We should not be the 5th member of any auto. We should wait for the next. If it is not permissible considering the time crunch we normally have during office hours, either we should be leaving early for the office or we should opt for any alternative mode like BUSES or CABS.I agree, these two options are fairly extreme in terms of comfort and fare, but my dear co-residents, no gain is ever attainable without some pain. Even if any AUTO WALA asks anything extra than his allotted fare, try to protest. If the active protest is not you cup of tea, you can always follow the GANDHIGIRI MODE. You can always abstain from the service and can wait for some alternative.
But, trust me if we do follow our old mode of compromising attitude and leave everything towards the government to take up. Honestly speaking, then we do not have any moral right to criticize the system even if any fine morning we lose one of our dear ones due to accidents caused by the reckless driving of this utterly irresponsible ‘AUTO WALA’ s !! And the reason is simple; when my time of act came we have failed to act properly.

This city is ours, if we want this to be considered as ‘CITY of JOY’ in true sense of term then we need to act accordingly.

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wrong strategy means loss

This 41st game of the IPL between Kolkata and Chennai should have not been lost by the home team. However, when over confidence strikes, it spells doom. That is what happened. It was a loss due to wring strategy. There were rains the previous evening and at this time of the year, the climate is always unpredictable with heavy showers, gusty winds and terrible atmosphere. Therefore, when Sourav won the toss, he should have asked the visitors to bat – that way, in the event of rains and the D/L system, he would have had the advantage. Unfortunately, he preferred to bat himself because he had tremendous faith in his batsmen and felt that they would have no difficulty in putting up a high score. That was not to be since the team managed just 149 runs. The rest is already history.

There are accusing fingers pointed at the decision of the umpire to call one of the balls as a ‘dead’ one when it should have been called as a wide. The argument is that if it had been given a wide, Kolkata would have had one more ball to play and that might have changed the course of the game. Well – arguments are bound to be there: the misfield by Goni that sent the ball to the boundary when it should not have got more than one or the missed catches that gave lives to a couple of Kolkata batsmen. Then, in the Chennai innings, the life given to Parthiv also went against the Kolkata Knight Riders. Therefore instead of blaming others for the debacle, the team management need to look for the weak links in their strategies.

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Young, drunk and hip

Jojo Roy, a high school student returns home late, drunk and exhausted. He sneaks in through the back gate, fearing he might get caught. The excuse for this late coming, if his parents ask, would be visiting a pal’s b’day party. He was in a city pub, all this while, fagging & drinking.

“Eh dude, what’s life sans fun?”

Be it for fun’s sake or for just a dose of adventure, late coming and giving false excuses have become a common practice among the city-youth, a large section of them are rapidly getting addicted to smoking and drinking. This rate has but increased over the years. Read more »

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Kolkata, ‘amar’ Kolkata

Everything has its firsts and this is my first blog.
Well its about Kolkata and our love for this great city.
But is it true? Do we love Kolkata? I have my doubts. What are we doing to keep it clean? We still see garbage hurled from the balconies of apartments. We still throw things from running bus or car, don’t we? We still don’t make complain when someone in our locality dump all the garbage in a public place when he gets his house repaired. We accept everything with a smiling face.
Its time we really try to understand the depth of our love for Kolkata, it’s time we take responsibility to keep it lovable.
Don’t treat this blog as blame game, think about the ways we can make things better, it will be nice if we can make it a movement, a real start, a platform to those looking for opportunity to give back something to their place they live in.

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No way to walk!

It was supposed to be a footpath, but has now become a mini bazar! The footpath along Garia Main Road, has now become a hotspot for roadside hawkers.

The road that stretches from Raja S.C. Mullick Road, towards Boral Main Road, is now covered with the roadside food stalls, tea stalls, and has turned into a hub for vendors who sell vegetables and other things.

This has led to a serious problem for the locals. As the pavements are now in the hold of hawkers, locals are finding it difficult to walk along the footpaths.

“Everyday they occupy the entire pavement, and we have to take the trouble of walking on the roads. This often leads to accidents. It is really difficult,” says R. Biswas, a local resident. Read more »

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Should not forget Tagore

On the 8th of May, the world would celebrate the 148th birth anniversary of Tagore. It would be once again that time of the year when Bengalis the world over would remember the Nobel laureate. There would be the usual songs and recitation programs held in Jorasanko, his birth place , and in Shantiniketan, the campus that he set up to educate young boys and girls in various subjects with stress on arts. There would also be serious discussions on his life and letters. Debates would rage on some of his long lost letters that have surfaced. In places outside West Bengal, there would be similar methods of paying homage to his memory – but, and this stands out like a sore thumb, the culture is gradually dying out. Present day kids hardly have the time to devote to songs or dances – if at all they do, it is with an eye for getting publicity via one of the many reality shows on TV channels that promise popularity and riches. We are continuously seeing budding singers and dancers – they showcase their talents through Hindi songs. In the Bengali channels that have national coverage, one seldom hears Rabindra Sangeet – the art that was once a must for prospective brides has been shelved, they now learn computers. On the occasion of his birth anniversary, the singers who will be seen rendering his songs on stage will usually be from the older generation.

One exercise that could be contemplated by those interested in preserving the culture is to take recourse to remixes. Yes, the works of Tagore are now out of the purview of the copyright act. Therefore, remakes of his works like Shyama or Chitrangada could be considered using new setups, and modern dress codes. The lyrics of the songs could be retained and choreographed to match with modern day hip-hop music. That way, the works of the master could influence the modern generation to enquire and learn more about him.

Another thought that worthy of consideration is to dedicate important roads, buildings, educational institutions etcetera in his name. At present, this is restricted to only Bengal. His songs could be translated into other languages – this has been done in Hindi, and could be extended to cover Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and other Indian languages as well. Hindi versions of many South Indian movie songs have stayed on the pop charts; there is no reason why Rabindra Sangeet cannot do the same. The Rabindra Bharati University should take the initiative and include these in their agenda. They should take action to spread the information pertaining to Tagore. He was not only for the Bengalis but was for the whole of India.

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Salman Butt itching to make presence felt

Salman Butt is in the Kolkata Knight Riders’ XIV for Thursday’s faceoff against the Bangalore Royal Challengers, but it’s to the XI that he’s itching to return.

“I guess the Indian Premier League (IPL) rule about fielding only four overseas players is working to my disadvantage… It will be great to again play at the Eden, though,” Butt said. Read more »

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Tipple tale

Today it’s the fairer sex that’s making the cash register at bars ring aloud, fast catching up with their male counterparts. It isn’t a new trend, you may argue. The number of women downing a few at bars, nightclubs, or at restaurants has seen a significant increase in the last 10 years. What’s new however is the changing colour of the tipple tale every season.

In 2007, white was clearly the colour of the season and the verdict from behind the bar was the narrowing of the gap between the whites and browns (vodka and whiskey, if you insist).

But this year a new colour has trickled in and ladies are painting the town red. Wine is the new flavour for women. “Women and wine are inseparable! Most women who party prefer a glass of wine or a Breezer. Those who really party hard opt for the first while those who take a drink just for the sake of sipping on something go for the latter,” says Bambi, club manager, Underground.

Apart from red taking over white, what’s also emerging is a bunch of seasoned drinkers who may be spotted across dine dens. “The other day I met a girl who said she drinks single malts. I was amazed. In fact, a lot of women I know go for whiskey and most of them are seasoned drinkers,” adds Bambi.

A lot of men - primarily JD drinkers - would be happy to hear that!

Even the increasing number of bars in the city is proof of the growing demand. At The Park, F&B manager Anirban Simlai admits that “alcohol consumption has gone up by 40-50 per cent” in the past two years at Someplace Else and Tantra. And women, we reckon, can claim that they are as much a part of the success story as men.

Hic, hic hurray!

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Roadmap for budding scribes

Students of Calcutta University (CU) and NSHM Knowledge Campus organised an interaction between students of mass communication from the two institutions and James Richard Dickenson, a veteran correspondent and political editor of The Washington Post, USA, on April 24. The 75-year-old journalist answered the queries of students regarding the present US election campaign and also listed the dos and don’ts to become a successful journalist.

“I disagree with the notion that journalists are born and not made. But one can only be a journalist if one has the temperament for it”, said the scribe who covered every US presidential campaign from 1964 to 1988.

He advised the students to cultivate the qualities of a good political reporter that include scepticism, inquisitiveness, objectivity and the importance of rechecking facts. “Once a senior editor told me that even if my mother said she loved me, I should check it,” joked Dickenson. Read more »

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“Is this Tantra?”

That’s what the sedate-looking gentleman behind me demanded of the twenty-somethings dancing to ‘Om Shanti Om’. He didn’t want directions. Genuine wonder combined with exasperation gave rise to this question.

The venue wasn’t Tantra or Venom or any other nightclub at all. It was good ol’ Eden Gardens. Steeped in sporting history but fallen into disfavour following a flurry of makeshift missiles aimed at visiting cricketers, Eden is in revamp mode. A floodlight malfunction, a non-functioning scoreboard, and lack of basic facilities may have spoilt the initial impression, but the Kolkata stadium is hoping to get back into everybody’s good books. Read more »

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Unlike Grisham

Just tucked the latest John Grisham into the upper rack of my bookshelf. I picked it up at Kolkata airport on my way to Delhi. The Indian capital is about two hours by air from Kolkata, and I was sure to complete the read on my return flight, because I thought four hours should be enough for a pulpy read. But I was wrong.

I came back to Kolkata halfway through the book, convinced that Grisham has but grown mature. He took a sabbatical in ‘The Innocent Man’ and his efforts to transcend himself were visible. But ‘The Appeal’, his latest, clearly shows his growing reluctance to stay inside the typical Grisham fame.

‘The Appeal’ tells a long and astonishingly detailed ordeal of the purchase of a Mississippi Supreme Court verdict by a corporate giant, Krane Chemicals. In the course of producing pesticides in a small town factory at the outskirts of Mississippi (Bowmore town, fictitious), the company illegally dumped truckloads of toxic byproducts in and around the city. These chemicals, in time, trickled down into the water-layer. The ground water became too risky to drink—even unfit for bathing. Soon the water was proved a carcinogen— cancer spread all over the city, and the number of patients soared fourteen times the national average.

At this outset, two humble trial lawyers, Wes Payton and Mary Grace, managed to win a lower court verdict in a lawsuit that held the corporation liable for the deaths of two male members of a black family. Paytons mortgaged all their tangible assets, including a tract of land owned by Mary’s father, to keep the fight on. They moved out of their cozy house in Jackson and settled down in a rental, sold off their fashionable cars and got used to be on the wheels of secondhands—all for the hope of winning the lawsuit some day.

They win the lawsuit, but the astounding $41 million that the lower court ordered Krane to pay the plaintiffs, of which one third was Payton’s, still looked a far cry. Krane appealed to the Supreme Court and tried their bit to buy the judgment. There was a chance that the final verdict could go against them, on a 5-4 division of the jury bench consisting nine members. And the Judge whose vote could uphold the decision of the lower court was Sheila McCarthy, a divorced woman in his late forties, with a record of voting against corporate giants.

But, the impending judicial election for Sheila’s seat provided Krane with an excellent chance to replace her. They made a judicial candidate of a credulous lawyer, Ron Fisk—whose only qualifications were his clean family records and his looks. Looks were important, as Krane agents saturated the judicial election with TV ads, featuring Ron as a caring father, responsible husband, a school baseball coach and a fierce critic of same sex marriages and the gun-control policy of Mississippi—everything except his worth with the black gown put on. The minutely planned campaign kept Krane and its owner, Carl Trudeau, a seasoned Wall Street predator, out of the picture. A friendly right-wing senator used his contacts to ensure a steady shower of campaign-funds until the election was over.

The novel starts quite like a page-turner—the proceedings at the lower court and its upshot ride a gripping narrative. Grisham introduces Carl Trudeau next, displays his social circle making full use of the art-auction backdrop, where you stumble on those who make Forbes rich list and their trophy wives. However, as the political campaign kicks off, Grisham struggles to maintain the proportions of his characters. At some points, it looks like he is in a dilemma—on one side, he fights the pulp writer in him, while on the other he cannot take to the prose properly in the fear of loosing pace.

He loses pace at times. But then, those are areas where his attention to the niggling details of a judicial campaign makes the read more interesting. It clearly shows the risk the American judicial system embraces every time it chooses a Supreme Court judge by election—how exposed campaigns are that need seamless cash inflow to move on, to corpo-political gropes designed to limit social liability. That most US trial lawyers hate Washington politicians these days is a result of such foul plays, which makes an outsider wonder why such a system still exists in USA at all.

As one goes though the writer’s seemingly effortless weaving of climaxes and non-climaxes, expectations on the last page piles on. But Grisham concludes his novel in a surprising but stylish manner, not exactly what a die-hard Grisham would long for. This novel might not have the elements to please readers who loves Grisham for his popular works, but it shows his efforts to induce a change in the way thrillers are written, and the result is a work many cuts above his previous page-turners.

Surely a work, which you wouldn’t do enough justice if you try to finish it in four hours.

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Cool Sreesanth takes things in stride

The body language was different. There were no frayed tempers and no tears shed on Sunday as Sreesanth shook hands with the Delhi DareDevils after Kings XI Punjab won convincingly.

The ceremonial handshakes, this time, were conducted well inside the boundary line. On Friday, against the Mumbai Indians and during the infamous Harbhajan-Sreesanth altercation, the porch hid most of the view. This time the teams were “directed” to carry out formalities in the full glare of the cameras. Read more »

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Ready for action

For students of Mahadevi Birla, school days are a heady cocktail of work and play.

This is one school where sport is not just an extracurricular activity. At Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School, swimming and skating classes are compulsory. And these are just two of the many sports they get to play.

“A child’s physical development is as important as his emotional and intellectual progress. We need to cater to her all-round development,” says Malini Bhagat, principal of the school reputed to have one of the best sports complexes in the city.

The “Krida Kunj”, as it is called, was established in 1988 with facilities for seven sporting activities: badminton, table tennis, skating, swimming, dart, chess and gymnastics. Dart and chess were introduced in 2006. The school bagged the Inter-School Dart Championship organised by West Bengal Dart Association in 2006, defeating three-times champ St Thomas School, Howrah.

Besides, the school won two silver and three bronze medals at the West Bengal School Games Aquatic Championship last year. The school team also won the badminton championship in December 2007. In 2006, the school team won two gold, one silver and a bronze medal in the Inter-School Skating Competition held at MC Kejriwal Vidyapith, Howrah.

The ground floor houses the swimming pool, while the first floor has a sprawling wooden skating rink. The second floor has two badminton courts, table tennis boards and the gymnasium.

The school provides all equipment and classes are held twice a week. There are 10 coaches. Swimming and skating are compulsory. “Those who are afraid at first are made to sit near the pool and encouraged to take a dip. This way their fear subsides,” explains Sushma Bubna, administrator, Krida Kunj.

Besides these two, the students must opt for another sport of their choice. “The younger ones often go for gymnastics, but after Class VII, students prefer to stick to table tennis and badminton,” says Bubna.

“Since there are so many options, there is a tendency to opt for a different sport each year. We try to guide a student toward a sport for which she has an aptitude, she adds. “Initially, students were not regular at the after school practice. But attendance has improved since we made it chargeable since 2007.”

The students are enthusiastic. “I want to be a badminton champ. I practise for three hours three to four days a week,” says Class IX student Kosha Modi. For Raveena Surana of Class VIII, chess is the first love. “Everybody in my family plays chess. I too want to excel in this game.”

Jhinuk Mazumdar
(Powered by Young Metro)

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Search for my Kolkata – Part – I

During my last visit to Kolkata in November 2007, I somehow managed to keep a few days reserved completely to myself. There were no pending social obligations, and no commitments that would have encroached into my very private domain. Therefore, I decided to go on a search for the Kolkata I knew, the city that I felt sounded better in its earlier version of Calcutta.

I had put up with a relative in Salt Lake. The most sought after destination for the nouveau riche, this reclaimed land has crorepatis by the dozens as also the retired professor or the doctor whose son has made England or America his permanent home – the son comes down occasionally while the parents relax with nothing much to do. They have a whole fleet of servants and the elderly couple moves out of the house to go for a stroll in Banabitan early morning, fully protected with mufflers, great coats etcetera. Banabitan is a huge expanse of greenery meant for relaxation – only, throughout the day, it is taken over by young boys and girls on the lookout for seclusion. Elders find it embarrassing to stroll in its grounds for fear of suddenly finding scenes being enacted – scenes that are appropriate in the privacy of the bedrooms, not in the open, behind some shrubs. Anyway, Salt Lake is a piece of Utopia where air-conditioned cars move silently side by side with cycle rickshaws and auto rickshaws. The IT parks are in Sector-5 of this empire and the City Centre has food malls where people spend five thousand rupees just to chill out for an hour or so while there are families who survive on five thousand rupees as monthly budget.

I walked down to Karunamoyee and took a bus to Hatibagan – I wanted to experience the Kolkata of old that, I was told, still existed in the Shambazar-College Street belt with Hatibagan at the centre. The large buildings carried with them the legacies of their ancestors and, in spite of sprawling multiplexes and multi storied buildings mushrooming elsewhere in the city, the sky here in the North is visible to people on the streets. The people, also, carry their distinct identities, the identity of domesticated Bengalis. This is evident in the wares on display on the footpaths on either side of the road. The road is the Cornwallis Street, later renamed as the Bidhan Sarani. I got off the bus at Hatibagan bazaar – the bus fare was five rupees and fifty paise, in Nasik this distance would have costed me at least twelve rupees. Then I stood for a couple of minutes taking in the surrounding sights and wondering which way I should move – yes, I wanted to travel on foot and absorb the magic of a city forgotten. If I took the right turn, I would be going towards Shambazar; if I took the left turn, I would proceed towards College Street. I took the right turn.

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Can IPL succeed?

This is a question not only in the minds of the common man but also in the minds of the millionaires who have taken the plunge. As long as there is a struggle for supremacy between two countries, there are spectators to cheer them on.

Sides are taken and there are signs of ecstasy and disappointment on the faces of spectators once the final is over. The stakes are invariably for the teams and individuals – the ICC rates these two entities based on their performances in games between two nations. There are no laurels for teams which are hotchpotch affairs of one-time enemies and perennial adversaries. In the final analysis, the game is sure to take a severe beating.

The dazzling spectacles will have laser shows, skimpy clad girls, plenty of fireworks and promoting of individual brands of whatever. The cine stars who have invested their finances will watch helplessly as their importance takes a beating. It is the BCCI and others who will relish every bit of this extravaganza.

It can be safely said that this is a platform for retiree cricketers to make the final plunge into extracting the last bit of juice from the game of cricket. Tall talk of encouraging youngsters to play alongside established professionals is an eye wash. Finally, the big names will remain names and will be seen in action only in a few guest appearances. It will eventually turn out to be a clash between the Sharmas of Jullunder, the Ghoshs of Kolkata and the Murthys of Bangalore. Obviously, the on-ground spectators will not approve of that!

Prabir Ghosh

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Shocking pitch: Laxman

V.V.S. Laxman blamed the Eden Gardens wicket and the power failure for Sunday’s loss to Kolkata Knight Riders. The Deccan Chargers captain also said he was happy with the team’s performance.

The following are excerpts…

Are you happy with the way Deccan Chargers played today?

Yeah, I am pleased with the way my boys played. Read more »

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I’m the energy for this team: SRK

The Kolkata Knight Riders’ owner, Shah Rukh Khan, spoke to The Telegraph soon after his team’s five-wicket win over the rather highly rated Deccan Chargers of Hyderabad on Sunday.

The following are excerpts…

Thoughts on the Knight Riders’ second win in succession

Feels fantastic, yaar… It’s a great team made up of players from different parts of the world… Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan… This is their home now and they’ve done every Calcuttan proud… This isn’t only Sourav Ganguly’s home, but Ricky Ponting and Brendon McCullum and Mohammed Hafeez’s as well… Of course, mine too. Read more »

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Star’s song saves the day

Calcutta, April 20: Tonight was solely on the spur of a song four words long. Korbo, lorbo, jeetbo re… korbo, lorbo, jeetbo re….
Sourav Ganguly’s Knight Riders had very little going for them for the better part of their riposte to the Deccan Chargers’ modest 110.

They were floundering, in fact, at five down for 89. Seventeen overs had gone. Dada had perished along with the better part of his batting cast. They seemed to have taken their mascot Hoog-Lee’s catch-line too much to heart — “I play Cinderella cricket, I find it hard to get to the ball.” Read more »

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No time for you man…

Good news or bad, I don’t know, but this one comes from June—who can on any given day boast of shaping a chunk of Calcutta’s P3 culture.
After all, she has often left one baffled. Shall one call her an actress, a so-cialite or an event man-ager? Bottomline is, her days started late and she continued well into the night. She still does, but the morning hours have definitely increased.
And that was what we were discussing the other day. June said she hardly visits the nightclubs these days. “Only private par-ties, you know,” said she. So she gets time to sleep early, and often does so. Why man? That would only mean the nights would be a shade paler. Or aren’t they?
“But that’s the whole point,” said she. “Nights are pale in Kolkata. They never were great, so to speak.” Now, now— that coming from June raises a few eyebrows of course. At least, it raised mine. “Oh, Someplace is still nice. You get to hear good music and all that. The crowd’s decent. But the rest….” she added.
What? And what about the fact that we still have the longest night life? What about the fact that we can drink a Mumbaite, a Bangalorian and a Del-hite all together under the table? ‘’Yeah, but where’s the mood? Look at the crowd at most of the places. Why do you go to a nightclub? To chill, nah? Not to drink anybody un-der the table,'’ was June’s argument.
So nobody chills these days? “Do something. Drop in at any of these places on any weeknight. You will know it.”
I did as ordered. Three places I couldn’t get into. At the fourth, I did. But I hardly have reached the bar, when I was shoved to the side.
Reason: A few young studs thought they needed a bacardi shot very quickly before returning to the floor. No time for old whiskey timers like me. Overheard: ‘These whis-key drinkers even take time to order their drinks yaar. Arre, whiskey hi to pina hain isko…’
From then on, I have settled for my study, good DVDs, and whiskey at home.
Chill pills, after all, are for the young. Or Dravid, if he is out of form with the bat.

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Commerce meets cricket, at fine leg

The girl screwed up her eyes against the sun and asked: “What’s the name of the game again?”

Brijesh Patel, swashbuckler of yore turned mover-shaker of the Karnataka Cricket Association, let out a sardonic little grunt and said: “Cricket, it’s called cricket.”

But the girl was already out of earshot, flouncing away on the park, a ballerina in blue jeans, cellophane fairy wings wrinkling and flowering under her arms. Read more »

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Sachin hopeful of playing in opener

Sachin Tendulkar on Thursday brushed aside reports of his being doubtful for Mumbai Indians’s opening IPL tie against Bangalore Royal Challengers.

The former India captain said there were two more days left for him to get into shape and lead his team at the Wankhede Stadium here.

“I am strictly following the physio’s fitness regime. There are two more days to go (for our opening match). A decision will only be taken before the 20th,” he said. Read more »

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