Sunday, 29 June, 2025

1.47 PM

Morning started off with a disappointment. TOI didn’t carry the Twinkle Kanna column. At least I couldn’t detect it anywhere in the Sunday edition. I ate my breakfast in mournful silence therefore, which doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the food. I merely mourned over the absentee Twinkle column, not the food. As noted earlier, I always look forward to lavish breakfasts. Of course, I don’t have sausages, mashed potatoes and fried eggs anymore these days. Age you know … and unkind doctors. But mainly google which carries all sorts of scary no-no’s for the less adventurous.

The only interesting bit of information I could glean from TOI was the way my fortune is about to unfold in the coming week. “A period of social recognition,” it says, “gaiety and celebration with friends. Expenses are likely to be high.” Nothing to complain about, except for the reference to “friends”. My list of “friends” has been shrinking at an alarming rate for the last few years. Not many left in whose company I might “celebrate”. The soothsaying continues further. It tells me, “The only thing you need to control is temper and impulsiveness.” This surprised me. Does it mean there are weeks when I am permitted to be tempestuously impulsive? Hmmm …

To be additionally sure, I checked up a similar column in another newspaper. This one observes, “You have a natural tendency to overdramatise situations, more so when an emotional planet like Venus is creating tension and raising the temperature.” I am not sure if I understood the lines at all. I juxtaposed the two bulletins and concluded that the period of “social recognition” that I am about to “celebrate” will probably be “tension”-filled, so long as I keep myself under control. The “temperature” bit was somewhat alarming though, since the monsoons have just arrived. I was getting ready to listen to Miyan ki Malhar played perhaps by Vilayet Khan or sung by Kishori Amonkar. And this spoilsport appears to suggest that there will be no monsoon at all!

Right now the temperature is 30°C. I don’t mind this, so long as it doesn’t climb further.

Sunday, 06 July, 2025

10.35 AM

The temperature has hovered around 27°C. Which is cool by Kolkata standards. No complains.

Time flies you see. That’s the worst cliché I could have started off with this morning, which has not been totally unproductive, given especially the fact that an interesting event is about to happen.

The thing started off a day or two ago, when I got an email announcing that Debraj Ray will deliver the annual Bhabatosh Datta Memorial Lecture soon. I could well be a member of the endangered group of humans who were students in Bhabatosh-babu’s classes. His lectures were a treat as everybody knows, including those who were yet to be born when Bhabatosh-babu was no more. In my case, it was Milton who was missed the day I arrived on earth

Debraj will speak on “Upward Mobility and The Great Gatsby Curve”, a curve of some sort that I look forward to be introduced to. I realised though that I had never read the book and ordered it immediately over Kindle. They gave me a “buy free” option, which I happily accepted. Something is free, Bhabatosh-babu taught us, when its supply exceeds demand at all prices. The book was written in the early twentieth century and has characters who were First World War soldiers. Which probably explains the paucity of demand a hundred years later.

The more I read it, the more I like it. Its style is so delightfully English (i.e. English that used to be spoken by Churchill and his admirers on the wrong side of the Atlantic). I hope I can finish reading it before the “alap” part of Debraj’s lecture begins to move upward.

I am picking up words in the book that few use anymore and these are gems if you are into haiku poetry. Editors love haiku which require google searches. Not quite the spirit of Tagore’s ‘সহজ কথা কইতে আমায় কহ যে, সহজ কথা যায় না কহা সহজে।” I love Fitzgerald’s style though, especially so because it reminds me of Aldous Huxley.

1.09 PM

Bhabatosh Datta’s name brought yet another curve up from the hidden depths of memory. It was the “scallop curve”. When we were students in Presidency College, stalwarts like Bhabatosh Datta and Tapas Majumdar in the Economics Department didn’t employ a single Bengali word in their lectures. I had arrived from an English medium school and could deal, unlike many of my peers, with the “foren” language to a limited extent. But even I had no idea what a scallop was. And Bhabatosh-babu wouldn’t tell us what it was in Bengali. All we knew was what a “scallop curve” looked like and how it turned into a U-shaped long run average cost curve. Since we were never asked what a scallop was, nothing prevented us from metamorphosing into graduates.

But, this morning, seventy years later, I asked again what a scallop was? Casual observation suggests a ঝিনুক , but google doesn’t quite agree. Scallops, clams, oysters … New Orleans, Mark Twain, Mississipi, Huck Finn, French Quarters, grits …

Let’s part company for now on the shores of this stream of consciousness.

See you soon …

Click here for Episode 1.