Higher education in West Bengal.

Higher Education in West Bengal.

There is some misinformation around regarding the quality and relevance of higher education in West Bengal (WB) which needs to be removed. I am going to address various issues individually.


1. Lack of engineering colleges.

As recently as a decade ago, there were merely a handful of engineering colleges in WB, mostly run by the government such as Jadavpur and Shibpur. These colleges were, and still remain highly regarded centres of excellence competing effectively nationwide. The paucity of private engineering colleges lead to a migration of students to other states, principally Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu. The departure of perhaps 50,000 students each year lead to an expenditure of 50000 X (40,000+40000) = 4 Billion rupees per year. This money was pumped into the burgeoning economies of these states and it came from the not very deep pockets of middle class Bengalis.

In recent years, there have been many private tech schools established. At last count, there are 91 registered under the umbrella of the West Bengal University of Technology.http://www.wbut.net/ The outflow of students has reduced somewhat, but still remains.

What matters is the economic cost. Most of our departing students do not join centres of excellence like the IITs or BITS, where many students receive scholarships. These students pay hefty fees to study at perfectly average institutions. Money which could have been profitably rerouted to WB.

2. Engineering vs Science vs Commerce vs Humanities.

Most students in high school try to take the tried and tested route of an engineering degree followed by an IT job. Few have the courage to try other things, and who can blame them. Most employers seem to take the blinkered viewpoint that an engineer is the only employable person around. There are precious few engineers who do engineering anyway. By and large, most of our bright girls and boys are busy writing code. Thus, the intellectual, monetary and temporal investment in a BTech degree, in perhaps Mechanical Engineering is largely unutilized. Do note that I say ‘unutilized’ and not ‘wasted’.

The other side to the thousands of IT jobs springing up all over is that all other fields are suffering. Very few students take up the humanities by choice; in most cases, it is an inability to perform in the mathematically intensive fields of engineering which pushes someone to, perhaps, comparative literature. This will undoubtedly have a profoundly deleterious long-term effect on the balance of values we ascribe to things. A society, which lives by the technology of iPods and does not care much for the music which is saved in them is in for trouble. Remember that although Sparta won the war, it is the greatness of Athens, which we speak of.

3. Tuitions.

The practice of high school and college teachers offering private tuitions is a cancer, which infects all of Indian education. This is not endemic to WB at all. All the states of India suffer from this, some more, some less. However, blanket bans on private tuitions have not achieved anything worthwhile. As long as there remain colleges with faculty positions, which have not been filled, tuition classes will continue to thrive. Another factor is the intensity to which competition has been taken. The average student is at war with the system and the system does not take prisoners. People who flunk any major exam like the Class X, the Class XII slip between the cracks in the floor. They are the casualties no one talks about. Sad, but true. One might suggest raising the wages of teachers, especially in Government institutions. There is then the question, ‘where will the money come from?’ Well, raise the fees at the colleges to more realistic levels. Apparently student unions raise hell at this. The members of those same student unions do however, pay, quite substantial sums to their private tutors. Rather fallacious, is it not?

4. The role of elite institutions.

Calcutta is home to some of the better known colleges in India: Jadavpur, the Indian Statistical Institute, St. Xavier’s College, Ram Krishna Mission College, Scottish Church College, Bethune College, Lady Brabourne College and finally, Presidency College. Most of these places operate under the University of Calcutta. The current myth is that these institutions have lost their relevance and that the best in liberal arts education has shifted to other places. The India Times college ranking currently places Calcutta colleges somewhat low on the pole.

The first point to be made is that opinion polls such as the one mentioned above are based on opinions. If one looks at results, the picture will be rather different. So what are the results we look at? From my own perspective, students of the pure sciences and the humanities usually do not enter the job market right after graduation. They typically stay at school for higher degrees. In that context, we might ask what happens at various nationwide entrance exams for graduate degrees in the liberal arts.


Again, from a personal perspective, the important exams in Physics are: the Joint Entrance to Master’s programmes conducted by the IITs, the IISc entrance test, the Joint Entrance Screening Test (conducted by 12 research institutes), the National Graduate Physics Exam (conducted by the IAPT). Speaking from personal experience, at most of these exams, students from Calcutta tend to wipe out the competition. As a case in point, at the 2002 NGPE, 18 of the top 25 students were from West Bengal. All of the final 5 gold medalists were from West Bengal.

This is due to the rigorous syllabus at the undergraduate level followed by Calcutta University. (Most other universities in WB tend to follow CU’s lead.)

Another perspective is here.

To be concluded.

Drizzle-Downpour-Depression-DVD

D-day.

D day corresponds to the unnamed day on which a military operation is started. Probably dreamed up by some theorist at Sandhurst. The world knows D day as the 6th of June, 1944 when a few hundred thousand Allied soldiers stormed Normandy and established a bridgehead on occupied Europe. D could also stand for Desolation. It could also stand for Drizzle. Which we could upgrade to Downpour.

So it was raining yesterday. Big deal. What is a little rain? But then, there is rain, and there is rain. Rain follows me around. On my more paranoid moments (usually on Thursdays) I imagine that I am turning into that truck driver in the Hitchhiker’s Guide who was followed by rain all over. I like a lot of rain as long as it comes down at one go and then clears up. I dislike the sky being overcast. It makes me feel mildly miserable.

So I started seeing “Ab Tak Chappan”, a hard hitting movie with Nana Patekar playing Sadhu Agashe, an ‘encounter specialist’ with the Special Unit of the Mumbai Police. And the DVD was so badly scratched that it refused to play for more than ten seconds at a go. What do these people do with the DVD, clean it with sandpaper?

So miserable again. So read ‘The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents’. And slept. Today is workday, midweek, Wednesday. Wednesdays are funny. I always go through at least one existential crisis each Wednesday. Finally figured out how to get the pretty software to talk to me. Ya!!

I never knew that Manoj Bajpai acted in Drohkaal. Got to go back and see that movie again. Also never actually made the connection between Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series and Hans Gruber in Diehard. Remember that famous line, ‘Now I have a machine gun. Ho Ho Ho’? Well, both by Alan Rickman. One great actor.

Vijaynagar

This happened en route to Vijaynagar. The time: sometime during my last semester at the institute. Didi was in town. So was her entire lab. In fact, it seemed like all the theoretical physics people I knew from Calcutta were all over the department. So al those random and not so random people from my batch onwards and maybe upto three years my senior were around. There was this school on Statmech, you see, at the department. Now what do we ‘umble spectroscopists have to do with things like renormalization group theory? Answer: nothing. However, all those theorists do, and having an elder sister amongst them makes things interesting.


So someone in the Calcutta gang decided to organize a trip to Vijaynagar. The last trip that I had been on with this gang, or its equivalent about a year ago was during StatPhys 22 when I ditched a lab meeting to go to Nandi Hills and was duly punished by the rain gods for doing so (somewhere in my blog…). So, Vijaynagar. I may have talked about this place earlier in my blog. But just in case I haven’t please bear with me for a couple of sentences.

1336. The small states of the South like Warangal unified under the banner of the principality of Anegundi. The relentless Muslim onslaught was arrested and brought to a complete halt by the newly founded city-state of Vijaynagar (literally, ‘city of victory’). At its peak, Vijaynagar ruled the vast majority of South India, collected levies from perhaps two hundred ports. It started as the rallying point and banner of Hindu resistance and became an empire so powerful and rich as had never been seen.

In 1556, the five Muslim kingdoms of the south formed a grand alliance and marched against Vijaynagar. These kingdoms were Ahmednagar, Berar, Bijapur, Bidar and Golconda. They faced the armies of Vijaynagar near the banks of the Krishna, in what is modern Karnataka. Descriptions of the battle that remain are inevitably from the perspective of the victors. The king of Vijaynagar, Rama Raya was captured and beheaded. His army was routed. The nobles of Vijaynagar fled. For three days, the citizens of Vijaynagar waited, sure that the invaders could be bought off with gifts from the treasury. Then the Muslim armies arrived. The sacking that ensued was again one, the likes of which had scarcely been seen before. The armies carried out their task of utter destruction with such hideous precision that when they were ‘finished’, all that remained of the greatest civilization of South India were pathetic ruins.

The city was never resettled, never repopulated. Ironically, the Dakhan Sultanates, which had defeated Vijaynagar fell to the Mughal Empire in a few short generations.

Oops, that was more than a couple of sentences.. I will probably have to finish this one later.

Ok, later is now. Now is a week or so after I started writing this blog. The reason that I started writing this blog was not quite Vijaynagar, more like a song. To be specific, ‘Aadorer Nouko’ by ‘Chandrabindoo’. This was part of the album that someone on the trip played ad-nauseum on the trip. So much so, that the song wrote itself in my head. I was listening to the song some afternoon, and suddenly it all came back in a rush.

The Sumo was crowded and were packed like tinned fish. And we had this bloke singing. There are people who cannot sing, those who really should be prevented from making a nuisance of themselves and then there are those for whom singing should be made a capital punishment. And I was nodding off, each time, being woken up by this completely unsonorous bastard howling in my ear. And he was Didi’s batchmate, so by virtue of sheer seniority, I could not tell him to shut up. The others seemed content to just roll their eyes and not do anything else. I decided to take matters into my own hands. When we stopped for a midnight snack at a Dhaba a couple of hundred kilometers from Bangalore, I took this guy aside. I made sure that Didi was not in earshot. And then I told him, in all absolute seriousness that any further singing would have me shoving my unwashed socks down his throat. I don’t know what got to him, the threat or the fact that a junior was doing the threatening. Well, he stopped singing.


We got to Vijaynagar in the wee hours, had enuf time for a brief nap and then went prowling the ruins. The first day, we stayed near the living temples in and around the Hampi bazaar. The last time I had been here was with Toton and her folks. That trip, I had made a rather interesting observation: while lining up for ‘Charanamrito’ from one of the temples, I noted that the ‘ghee’ for lighting the lamps was kept in a pint sized bottle of Old Monk rum! This time, unfortunately, I saw no such thing. In one of the temples, Dipanjan making good use of the optical zoom on his digicam found something interesting. Tucked away amongst the sculptures on the huge walls, some twenty feet up, almost hidden between two figures of chariots and elephants, was s sculpture depicting a man and a VERY well endowed woman, well, doing the good job. This was a distinctly Khajuraho thing. Vijaynagar is not at all known for such sculptures/paintings.

The next day was spent prowling all over the ruins, getting lost amidst the rocks about fifty times. Each. And of course, doing the leetil boat trip. These were the same kind of round bottomed boats which I had encountered at Hogenakkal. Apparently these are quite the rage in South India. So, boats, a few wild scares… put five theoretical physicists in a boat and they actually calculate the centre of mass for optimal balance!!! I have seen it done, people!!

The trip home was somewhat anticlimactic. Music, thankfully from the car stereo and not the passionately unmusical idiot of dubious parentage. Fun.

maqbool

Most of us remember that Vishal Bharadwaj made his name as the music director of ‘Maachis’, a remarkably sensitive portrayal(directed by Gulzar) of a family torn asunder during the counter-terrorist purges of Operation Night Dominance in the late 1980s Punjab. Vishal has come a long way since. His latest film, ‘Omkara’ has been hailed as a work of rare talent. I feel tempted to ask though, why didn’t ‘Maqbool’ receive the same attention three years ago when it was released. Star power, my friend, star power is the answer.

Maqbool was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth brought into the context of the Mumbai underworld. There have been quite a few movies about the Mumbai gangs, one of the most famous being ‘Company’. This was Ajay Devgan’s vehicle to superstardom; the movie in which he played the character of a laconic, intense don to perfection. However, Maqbool was a completely different animal. Everyone knows that Shakespeare was the original ‘masala’ playwright. Sure, sure, the great bard and all that, but he wrote and thought for the ‘janata’ better than everyone before him, and better than most of his successors. Macbeth was written in the context of the accession to the throne of James I (of Scotland) in let me see.. 1603? The entire play contains within itself the continuous application of ‘predestiny’. There is a feeling of hurtling towards an end that is utterly ruinous, towards absolute damnation, and that there is nothing we can do about it. The way the supernatural is woven into the plot (Banquo’s ghost, the witches) adds to this feeling. All of this was captured to perfection by Vishal. Maqbool had our protagonist, played by Irfan Khan assassinating his mentor (Pankaj Kapoor). The events which follow lead to the inexorable unraveling of everything around Maqbool and his eventual downfall. The role of the witches is magnificently captured by two of our legendary thespians, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah as a couple of corrupt cops. The role of Lady Macbeth is played by Tabbu, who, quite coincidentally, came of age as an accomplished actress in Maachis. All told, Maqbool is the best possible adaptation of Macbeth I could have imagined, exceeding by far ‘The Throne of Blood’ by the great Kurosawa himself. When I have time, I will finish this article with something about Omkara.


Meanwhile, read this review: http://telegraphindia.com/1060831/asp/opinion/story_6678659.asp

Hrishikesh Mukherjee

Hrishikesh Mukherjee passed away this week. He was the filmmaker who made us laugh and cry. Long before the current crop of ShahRukh vehicles that ooze emotion out of every pore and coat the floor three inches thick, there was something called good taste. Hrishikesh epitomized just that. Anyone who has ever heard the lines ‘zindagi aur maut to ek khel hai Babumoshai’ knows what I am talking about. The amazing combination of Rajesh Khanna’s acting, Salil Choudhury’s music and Hrishikesh’s direction gave us that absolute gem, Anand. I remember that Anand was one of those movies which became so popular that cassettes were released which had the songs as well as dialogues from the film. Imagine some lazy Sunday afternoon with the umpteenth cup of tea making its way down, and from the neighbouring house, ‘Main huun Isabhai Suratwala’, and ‘Babumoshai, yeh wahi hain, na, jiske saath tumhari continuity hai?’ Imagine also, half a decade later the action hero of the decade, Dharmindra turned into a ‘pure’ Hindi speaking driver who sometimes turned crosseyed. And last of all, imagine a decade after Anand, Amol Palekar and the absolutely incomparable Utpal Dutta in Golmaal. ‘Vaise to Kabir padhne padhane ke liye ek jeevan kam hai, parantu main saath baje tak samapt karne ka prayatna karunga’. I always get confused whether the Sachin Bhowmick screenplay was derived from the Bengali play ‘Tulkalam’ by Deboki Bandopadhyay or vice versa. But I don’t think it matters. What matters is that Hrishikesh Mukherjee is gone, and movies will never be the same again.

Aandhi

Aandhi was a movie of some greatness. It deals with a lady politician (played by the incomparable Suchitra Sen, really incomparable, look at her granddaughters and shudder!) in conversation with her former lover (again, played to perfection by Sanjeer Kumar). The music was by Rahul Dev Barman, again a genius who needs no introduction.

So here I am, sometime in the afty in lab, working on a peaklist. If I knew how to code in python, I would probably write a few lines of snazzy code which would simply edit the file just the way I want it. Well, I do not code. If I had any sense, I would start working in Vi, the king of editors and be done quickly. No! methinks I should work in Nedit, this simplified Notepad clone which runs across quite a few platforms. Well, to be honest, Nedit has its strengths, though I seriously doubt if it can be compared, to Kate. Then I figured that I can work on Vi as well, I mean this is a UNIX machine, right, so Vi should be good. Delight! Ya! It works!!!

I am also listening to Aandhi on streaming music. Kishoreda and Lata sing sooooo beautifully. And yes, for the better part of decade, this used to be my sister’s favourite movie album. Which meant that I hated it from the bottom of my heart. Looks like I have recovered.

Chettinad things.

Vodka chettinad.

Yes, the esteemed roomie had a couple of juniors over. One of them is this bloke with a zinc lined stomach. I mean, I generally assume that I can eat reasonably spicy food (that Bangal blood running through my veins, no connection to my Ghoti ancestry at all), but this guy takes the cake. Ok, its not really a cake at all, more like the pickle/achar. The achar in question was a really lethal green very chilli creation I found at the Indian store. Now I am reasonable when it comes to achar, especially such deadly varieties. About as much as one can put on the tip of a fork is enough. Well, this bloke likes two forkfuls with each meal!! And then complains that the food was rather bland!!! Ye Gods!

Which reminds me of a completely peripheral, but still related incident. This happened to my father years ago when he was a field geologist. His driver was pretty awful at cooking. Well, this driver once offered to cook dinner. His brilliant idea of a delicious curry was green chillis fried in a sauce made of mostly dried red chilli powder.

Chettinad food, the other part of the story comes from the hinterland of Tamail Nadu. There is standard lousy Tamil fare, which is idlis and dosas (stuff of my nightmares, comes from having suffered long and hard at the hands, or rather utensils of the Tamil cooks of the Institute Mess), and then there is Chettinad food. Chettinad people really know how to mix spices right. They grind spices fresh and have no truck with the packed stuff that we lesser people use.

Yes, so coming to the point here. This junior, goes by the name of Sethu suggested that we try vodka with green chillis. So, the concoction that we ended up with was one part vodka, three parts coke and one green chilli sliced longitudinally and squeezed into the drink. Lethal combination. If the booze doesn’t get you, the chilli will. This drink, I have decided to call “Vodka Chettinad”. Meanwhile, this other friend suggested that we drink vodka with Pudina Hara. Got to try that.

buri's blog

i would like to call the attention of the casual and not so casual visitor to my blogroll. blogs written by my friends are featured here. the newest addition is buri's blog. it is worth reading. enjoy!

planning: bear mountain

the esteemed roomie was busy planning a trip to NY. he had been told that his pal there would take him to bear mountain. so he spends some twenty minutes looking up bear mountain on my computer. after making his plans and everything, he figures out that the bear mountain site he was browsing was for some bear mountain in california. so much for that.

and then again.....

Orkut has lost it completely, again! This time it tells me that “Your winsome smile will be your sure protection”. I mean, who is kidding whom? Sure, winsome smile.. big fat hairy deal!!! A then, a couple of days ago, its told me that my spouse and I will live happily forever or some shite like that. Is there some brain dead git employed by Orkut, or rather Google who just sits around all day inventing these one liners which will drive me up the wall. Or is it just me?

I think it is just me. But there is perfect evidence that the world has gone perfectly crazy. People have been making communities dedicated to film stars, rock stars, and all that for a while. Sometime ago, I ranted against this git who had made a community dedicated to a MacD at Hyderabad. Now there are people who have made communities dedicated to Garaiahat, Tollygunge, and then gone on to make communities dedicated to the four and a half buildings which lie on Gariahat Road, between Golpark and the first thirty feet of Gariahat Road, and listen to this, we are talking about the UTI bank side of the flyover, or maybe it was the other side. Dude, get off the computer and go meet your neigbours!!


And finally there are those gits who have to air their sad pathetic excuses for falling in, and out of love on communities… ‘come share your experiences’… this is just sad.

4.20 in the afternoon

and i have had two bottles of beer. at this farewell party. this is too much beer and too much of some very interesting cheese and tortilla somethingortherother warps, sorry warps. wel, you get the drift. nice farewell party. and two small bottles of beer is really quite insignificant by any standards. but at 4.20 in the afty, well, it does affect one's ability to do useful science.

Voices, Feeling Disconnected and Mr. Lapata

Voices, Feeling Disconnected and Mr. Lapata.

A long time ago, well, to be honest not so long ago, I used to write for a campus magazine called Voices. This was run by, at first, Akanksha and Abhijeet, then later, Anindita (Buri) and Pragyan. It was during Buri’s tenure that I started writing somewhat regularly for Voices. My column was called ‘Feeling Disconnected’, and that happens to be a rather good description of the contents. One of the stars of the Voices team was Sujit, the cartoonist. The character he created was called Mr. Lapata. ‘Lapata’ literally means ‘lost’. And that, again pretty much sums up the experiences of Lapata. Anyone who has ever stepped into a graduate programme will either admit to feeling lost or just happens to be a compulsive liar.

Voices gave me a lot. Starting from learning how to get a tiny magazine printed cheaply in Bangalore (getting to know DTP blokes on a first name basis) to learning how to interview somewhat unwilling administrators and not get kicked out of the institute, yes, I picked up quite a few skills there. Avik and me became the editor’s firemen. I got clubbed with our resident crossword expert, one Rohini to work on, yes, you guessed it right, a crossword. Well, we started disagreeing back then, and its been almost three years and we have rarely agreed on anything yet.

At the annual Voices function, Ayan (Buro) scripted a short skit that revolved around the life (or lack of) and times (way too much of) of Mr. Lapata. It turned out to have hit a chord. Someone had made a huge thermocol cutout of Mr. Lapata which I pinched after the show. While cycling back to my room, there was small accident which resulted in Lapata being very neatly decapitated, but after I put him up on the wall, nobody ever noticed anything strange!

Asimov, Clarke and 2001.

Classic science fiction has as its playground the whole universe, and as its armoury, the whole gamut of human imagination. Having said that, it is equally true that the two giants of SF have been a biochemist and an astronomer. Quite decidedly scientists. Why? It appears that true SF can be written only by people who ave a firm grounding in the sciences. So let’s look at the masterworks by these people. My favourite remains Asimov, although, I sometimes feel that I should show the other master some loyalty due to having the same antecedents in terms of science as Clarke.

Rendezvous with Rama was possibly the greatest work by Clarke, followed very shortly (or perhaps exceeded, depends on your own tastes) by 2001, A Space Odyssey. Rama deals with the reaction of humanity a few centuries from now when confronted with what is obviously an alien artifact speeding through space.


2001 talks about an expedition to the Moon uncovering a monolith of unimaginable antiquity. Then, the Odyssey, a journey of almost impossible ambition, to Japetus, one of the moons of Saturn, which might conceivable hold secrets as old as humanity itself. 2001 became the study of humanity as personified by David Bowman and Frank Poole, crewmen of the most advanced vessel ever designed, the Discovery as she sped to her destination. The third member of the crew was HAL, a computer who would have passed the Turing test with ease. HAL never slept, never fatigued. HAL was the ever present, ever vigilant centurion against anything, which might conceivably go wrong. And ironically, it was HAL who went wrong. Even now, it appears impossibly to write ‘HAL which went wrong’, even though the book addresses the dilemma, which will undoubtedly confront scientists of the future: do machines have morality? Clarke has always held as a central point in his writings that there may be intelligences greater and older than humanity. Intelligences, which may have passed through the playgrounds where civilizations struggle through their infancy. And in their infinitely inscrutable way, they may have lent a helping hand to some. Enter Tycho Magnetic Anomaly I, and the perfect ratio of the squares of the first three natural numbers: 1:4:9. And how, how simplistic of us to believe that the ratio ends in just three dimensions!


There may such a thing as destiny. For now, all we can do is see the stars and dream.


I am going to finish, or rather abandon this essay with a quote from Emerson, a quote, by the way which may have been the inspiration for Nightfall, undoubtedly the best of the writings of Asimov!!

If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

taming the tiger again

everone tells me that tiger is the only OS to use. what do they know? is there anything which offers the power, flexibility and stability of Linux? well, apparently there is. os X. Tiger.

first, a crib. i listen to online music. i also like to read the newspaper in Bangla. unfortunately, most of the plugins which have been developed for online music or for reading regional fonts have been done so for Internet Explorer. sure, makes sense. after all, IE pretty much owns the market. but then, what about the sane minority which uses other browsers? there are some plugins for firefox, but not font readers. and the plugins make firefox unstable, because with the new generation of intel macs, firefox runs via an emulator which pretends that firefox is actually talking to a powerPC chip instead of an intel dual core chip. and no one has developed those plugins for Safari, which is the browser native to macs.

The girl child in India

The girl child in India.

Am going to start this by talking about a personal experience while traveling from Howrah to Guwahati by train sometime in the early 1990s. Our neighbours in the train bogey included a man traveling to TeenSukhia in Meghalaya with his wife, son and daughter. The son was perhaps 11 or 12 at that time,, his sister maybe two years older. The boy quickly made a complete nuisance of himself. As the train passed through New Jalpaiguri and Siliguri, vendors came aboard selling every kind of trinket, portable electronic goody imaginable. And this kid wanted everything. His dad tried hard enough to satisfy him. The girl, on the other hand spent all the time staring out of the window. Later, in conversation with them, we found out that the boy was just two classes junior to me. And that his elder sister did not attend school. I remember being shocked almost witless by that piece of information. Her parents did not see the point in educating a girl.

A couple of days, I read newsreports of some 35 female fetuses being found near a quack’s clinic somewhere in Punjab. That, in gentle reader is the curse of the Indian girl. The oldest continuous civilization in the world, one that prides itself on its humanity does not care about its girls. Do not get me wrong here, the government does its level best. I have studied in Kendriya Vidyalayas where girls do not have to pay any tuition fees. In fact, in remote places, the state administration tries to send social workers to convince village people to send their daughters to school and gives them all kinds of incentives like mid-day meals and so on. But what do you expect when its is ingrained into the minds of people that girls are only destined to be wives and mothers, so why bother to teach them anything?

Dowry. The curse that has been plaguing us for we do not know how long. Along with dowry, we had another beautiful practice called ‘Sati’. This meant that a young widow would be burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Sati was abolished due to the efforts of Raja RamMohan Ray, who founded the Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta. Dowry remain a problem to this day. According to our laws, demanding and giving dowry is a criminal offence. But who is listening? One might imagine that with education, such practices would die a natural death. It so happens that dowry is much more prevalent amongst the urban educated rich than in lower classes. And although young women today are free to pursue any career that they want to, at the time of marriage, it is still expected that they pay a dowry.


This and other reasons are why girl children are viewed as a burden by parents. Hence, prenatal sex determination (which is, by the way, illegal in India). Hence, termination of female fetuses. Hence, a declining gender ratio. Hence interesting social practices come to the forefront again. Such as a woman marrying into a family of four brothers, and being a wife to all of them. This is seen in some of our ‘Bimaru’ states. (Bimaru stands for Bihar, Madhyay Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the most heavily populated, most undereducated states).

It is simply not enough to say that the government is not doing its bit. As long as we Indians sit around condoning such practices, they will continue.

orkut messed up again

this time by telling me that i am 'sociable and entertaining'. those unfortunates who have crossed my path on thursdays know just how entertaining i can be. as for the sociable bit, well, i do not actively growl and scratch, but i am as sociable as a graduate student who works alone in a tiny office and likes it that way can be.

amongst new communities on orkut i noticed one which is for people with 'attitude'. i find myself slightly confused. as always, when i see an advert or something for people with 'attitude', i start wondering what they really mean by attitude. i mean, one can try to be slightly social by smiling (this section is independant of the first, so i am not talking about myself) and helpful. that would make one more popular for sure. one might also try polishing one's shoes, wearing clean, ironed shirts and try shaving. all of which will make one more presentable and hence nicer to work with. but what is attitude? all those big hoardings which show people with 'attitude' who wear some specific perfume, watch or whatever seem to have people who look remarkably snobbish for no particular reason or simply constipated. hence, i am mystified.

is it possible that by virtue of following the trend gurus and by paying too much attention to those who seek to mould us into better people, we are, in fact turning into factory engineered robots with little, or no individuality? let me talk about a particular case in point. this friend of mine was applying for various software jobs after graduating. he told me that one of the things he had learnt as part of interview tactics was to look the interviewer in the eye and not break contact and to shake his hand firmly. this shows character. now, if the interviewer had read the same book, then what happens is that they both end up with watering eyes after a 'stare him down' contest and crush each other's fingers.

bottom line. we might try looking beyond the superficial and find qualities of a more lasting nature. that will naturally demand a larger investment in time, but the reruns will certainly be greater.

Happy Birthday India!!

On the 15th of August, independent India will be all of 59 years old. We have built up a population, which will shortly be the world’s largest. We have created a strong economy that anyone who knows anything tells us is moving fast in the right direction. Our Parliament has gone from the days when one principal party (the Congress) was almost always guaranteed victory to a multitude of parties, each more vociferous than the other. Each party promises to safeguard the interests of some specific group, be it characterized by religion, language or geography. Success can only be guaranteed by hitching our star to someone’s wagon. Thus, caste based politics have come to play a much bigger role than before. We have also fought a few wars against our immediate neighbours. The last was a victory, or so we are told. As a result, we should arm ourselves better, for the inevitable onslaught, which a vengeful foreign administration is sure to launch at some point or the other. And to bolster our defenses, we have that trump card, a nuclear arsenal. Please note, not just a bomb or two, a full-fledged arsenal. But, of course, we need it. Deterrence, you see. Meanwhile, as a highly respected former chief of police put it, another neighbouring country to our east is turning into a ‘demographic bomb’. The situation in West Bengal is remarkably like that faced by all-Americans who are increasingly seeing themselves as shortchanged by their high-ups who find it convenient to employ cheaper foreign labour.

Meanwhile things are happening in New Delhi. The central government, or some parts of it have decided to increase the number of positions reserved for ‘backward communities’ at various academic institutions dramatically. The reduction in the number of ‘general seats’ will be made up for by simply increasing the over all intake. This has lead to a backlash by students, teachers and many others who have a stake. At the point when things appeared to be moving towards something more ominous than mere rumblings, several bombs exploded in commuter trains at Bombay. The final death toll stands at more than 200. If our western neighbour is involved, as it is being suggested, then we should do an Israel on them. But oops, they are also a nuclear power, and should anyone forget issues, at the moment of writing, Israel is facing somewhat unexpected opposition in Lebanon. Not so easy after all. And does anyone else see the connection between wars and internal strife. What better way to sweep internal dissent under the carpet than fight a war? After all, the people in power are hardly the people in the trenches. It is easy to be brave at long distance when the blood being spilt belongs to some poor fellow from some small town in Bihar who didn’t have much of a life anyway, right?

We also have a leftist contingent. This section of our polity does little, but is all the more vocal for it. The two states where it has been in power for a while have been remarkable only in the continuous way they have deprived their own people of jobs by irresponsible trade unionism. The industries have moved to states where the climate is less inimical to investors. Now, it appears they are somewhat lacking in infrastructure and are asking preferred foreign groups to hop in. The Salim group of Indonesia is supposed to build industries in Bengal. Whoever heard of the excellence of Indonesian industry? Not to belittle Indonesia, but what can they do that we do not have the technology and the manpower for? Meanwhile, what will probably happen is that these people will build houses (yes, that seems to be the only form of business which is perpetually expanding) with ‘seed money’ taken from small investors in Bengal and then sell those houses to those same small investors. In short, with hardly any capital, and probably employing local contractors, they will walk away with profits of maybe 5 to 10 thousand crores of rupees. That is about a billion US$.

To conclude, yes the country is moving fast. But in which direction? The people who created this nation, fashionable though it is to criticize them unthinkingly today, built something great. There is too much good in the Indian nation to die out so soon. But our ‘leaders’ are certainly trying hard enough

Books, movies and other things

The last few days have been passing peacefully. Barring unavoidable trips to relatives and hobnobbing with some friends, I have been catching up on my reading and movie watching. He last movie I saw was ‘Apharan’, a Nana Patekar directed flick starring Ajay Devgan. Ajay has transformed himself into a raucous college rowdy to a dark hero who acts by just standing around and looking dangerous. Movies like ‘Company’ have showcased his metamorphosis into the thinking man’s anti-hero. Nana has always used his trademark deadpan manner and that absolutely amazing voice to great effect in everything from the pathbreaking ‘Prahar’ to his more recent gangster movies. This movie deals with the kidnapping mafia in Bihar. Truth is usually stranger, and sometimes more horrifying than fiction. Bearing that dictum in mind, what has happened in Bihar, and continues to happen is nothing short of a government of criminals turned politicians.

Cogitation aside, what I have been reading (after brushing up on the Half Blood Prince) is ‘English August’ by Upamanyu Chatterjee. I suspect very strongly that Chatterjee belongs to that class of subversive Bengalis who studied at St. Stephen’s instead of Presidency and proceed to write all these vaguely apologetic novels. English August is a good example. It talks about Agastya Sen, a Delhi educated Bengali who has joined the Indian Administrative Service and has been posted to a small district town in North India for a year. The language stumbles at times and somehow carries with it the soporific effect which Agastya himself feels. However, I will recommend it to anyone who has the patience to sit through what seems to be interminable boredom. This is writing about life as it really is. Tame ending though. Still, worth a read.

Really awesome Kati Roll

Kati Roll, Park Street.

Street food in Kolkata has always been something of an adventure: as in this is really tasty, but maybe it will, quite literally be the death of me by cholera, gastro, or some other interesting disease. I bet Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Alexander and other conquerors felt much the same as the looked over lands beyond their realm; so peaceful, so much wealth, it could all be mine; but then again, it could rip my empire apart. Anyway, did that ever deter them? Nope! And the prospect of dying a hideous death never deters the average Bong from pursuing happiness in the form of totally unnecessary plates of kabab and mutton rolls. In my limited experience, Kati Roll at the junction of Chounringhee and Park Street is the best place to go to in Kolkata for mutton rolls, chicken rolls, even, God forbid, vegetable rolls, in fact for rolls of any description. This place is truly awesome.

It is also so popular that we have to stand in a line for getting the roll of our choice. In fact, I should change that; we Bongs line up for pretty much everything and anything, from electing absolutely horrid governments into power for the eighth time, to pick up college admission forms, to submit the same, to catch an autorick home, to receive the ‘charanamrito’ after a pujo Apparently there was a rather famous incident near my house where a gang of petty thieves who used to snatch purses and chains from women had been apprehended. Well, the entire neighbourhood stood in line to slap the thieves before they were escorted away by the cops. But we do not line up at Kati Roll. There we see a free for all, where I got elbowed in the ribs by a perfectly respectable bloke with peppered gray hair, old enough to be my father. He just pushed me aside and grabbed his roll first. Bugger!!

The way they make the rolls is a treat to watch. You pay. You wait. The bloke inside is kneading the dough and making it into nice flat paratha sized circles. He tosses them as they are made to the bloke who is frying them. This bloke fries them ten or more at a time on a bloody huge tawa. Once they are fried, he takes them off and passes them to bloke number three. He now places them lined up so that about 40% of the surface area of each is exposed. He now proceeds to shovel pieces of chicken/mutton, salad, dressing and other stuff of indeterminate provenance on the exposed 40%. Now bloke number four joins him in layering this with garnishing salts and sauces. Then they roll the parathas with paper and hand them over. Then you eat and thank heavens that you are a Bong/an Honourable Bong. That is the magic of Kati Roll.

Lady on the Metro

Lady on the Metro.

This is not meant to be a something like ‘lady of the lake’, or ‘lady on the water’. This is a description of something I saw on the metro. First a few lines on the metro itself. The metro was built over a really long 14 year period in the 1980’s. The streets of Calcutta were dug up and filled again ad nauseum until the city had that most wonderful magical thing; an underground train. I have been a big fan of the metro train because this was my primary mode of transport to college. Me and a few of my friends became metro fanatics; as in had specific compartments where we used to rush to and specific doors near which we stood. The reason, of course being that this door opened right in front of the exit gate at Tollygunge, where I got off. In fact, Calcuttans are divided into two classes; one who do not use the metro as part of their daily transport, and do not see any reason to (unenlightened heathen that they are). The second category of people believe very firmly (and sometimes incorrectly) that the metro is the easiest, and fastest way to get from any point to any other point of the city. Somewhat like Einstein Rosen Bridges, in fact. This is not a conclusion drawn by me, it was drawn by one Prof. Siddhartha Bhowmick, one of the most interesting people to have taught us at Presidency.

The other day, I was on my way back from Park Street to Tollygunge. There was this lady on the platform, who got onto the same train as me. She was solving a crossword in Bangla. The first impression that one would get looking at her was that she was a schoolteacher, or perhaps a principal. And that one would be badly mistaken to cross her. Well, she got off at Tollygunge, all the while balancing herself against the door and concentrating on the crossword. This was something of a feat, given the crowd on that train.