Good stuff

-

 1. Ordered some Bengali food from The Calcutta Club. The mochar cutlet and dhokar curry were good. The chop was also tasty. But personally the shukto was not what I was expecting. They have clearly modified the taste for a Bombay palate that doesn't like bitter. But shukto with plain rice is one of my favourite things 

2. Work was peaceful. Or I ignored the hassle pretty well.

3. Papa told me an interesting story. When he was 15, he was traveling with a friend from somewhere to Calcutta. This was in the midst of the Bongal Kheda movement, an anti-Bengali movement that originated in Assam. (Whether was anti-Bengali or anti-Hindu or Brahmin Bengalis am not sure). A few stations before reaching Howrah, a group of men stormed into the train with swords and knives, attacking Bengalis. My dad had spent his early years in Mednapur, a place on the borders of Calcutta and Orissa. So he spoke both languages properly. When the armed group approached Papa, he spoke to them in Oriya asking them what the problem was. The group made some remarks about how ignorant the youth were and moved on. My father's friend had grown up in Cal and could only speak Bengali. Anyway, I was struck by a couple of things - one, this country has actually seen a time when being multilingual was life-saving, not just a good intellectual trait to keep in your kitty. The other thing was just how my father and his friends seemed to go around everywhere unsupervised or unaccompanied. He didn't grow up in a safer world. There were riots, mutiny, carnage, etc. But he would just go around with some equally footloose friend or classmate or cousin at the age of 6 or 8 and his companion was his age or maybe slightly older. I wonder if that's why my father overall believes that people do come around to help you. And that there is always more kindness among people who have less material possessions. 

 I really want to visit Kolkata with my father. Hopefully soon.

Okay. This is it for today. Will make some coffee, make my to-do list for the weekend, and get back to my book.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more