Category: Memoirs
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A Sigh to Remember
A sigh of relief is not exactly a sigh in relief, but the difference is more than grammatical. One has to travel all the way to Otaru to appreciate the point. Otaru is a smallish port located somewhere near the foot of Mount Tengu in the western coast of Hokkaido, one of the coldest regions…
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Is Life Worth Living? It Depends Upon the Liver
Professor Lionel W. McKenzie, who supervised my PhD thesis (jointly with Professor James W. Friedman) at the University of Rochester, NY, walked in on a spring morning to the departmental lounge for his cup of coffee, which he used to consume jointly with the New York Times. There were a few others present in the…
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To Sir With Love
Words, however beautifully strung together, are ultimately a weak device for capturing as complicated an object as a human being. Sizes of vocabularies notwithstanding, words are arithmomorphic or discrete by nature, while life is a continuum. A piano recital, irrespective of the quality of the performance, …
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The Man who could not be a General
Masquerading as an officer above one’s rank, it seems, is one of the gravest offences one can commit in military service. A court martial is the inevitable consequence of being caught in the act and the most lenient penalty one can hope for is a retrenchment order accompanied by a certificate of condemnation. The strict…
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Debu-da: Large Man in a Larger World
Come to think of it, you can’t really blame God for failing to make all men equal, or all women for that matter. Not to speak of the rest of the living world, starting from cats, dogs and grasshoppers, all the way back to dinosaurs. Inequality notwithstanding, God has ensured that what one loses on…
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The Harmonium
I doubt that I would be far from the truth if I assumed that few in this community have had the good fortune of listening to S.D. Burman singing some of his immortal creations from a distance of five meters or so. I happen to belong, however, to the rare breed of human beings who…
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Obituary – Tapas Majumdar (1929 — 2010)
It is hard to recount memories surrounding Tapas Majumdar, who died on October 15, without recalling the reasonably large, but not bedizened, first-floor living room of his Dover Lane residence in Calcutta. This room will remain etched in the minds of his students and colleagues from the days when he taught in the Economics Department…
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A No-one Called Someone
Speaking figuratively rather than biologically, the link between Netaji, the name by which he was commonly known, and the man after whom he was named, though reminiscent of the Darwinian puzzle, did not constitute a missing category altogether. Far from it indeed, for he was known to have served in the INA and even participated…
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Buddhu vs. Aristotle: Kaun Hara Kaun Jita
I wish they would start a school that teaches you the art of wooing. I have been exercised over the idea ever since I watched Basu Chatterji’s movie ‘Chhoti si Baat’, starring the ever innocent Amol Palekar and the ravishing Vidya Sinha. I admit I fell head over heals in love with the latter the…
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Anti-clockwise Bhagat
The eternal triangle appears to suggest that human destiny could well be governed by geometric patterns. The hypothesis enjoys the support of eminent philosophers, beginning from no less a person than Plato, who asserted that God was a geometer. Indeed, if historians are to be trusted, he had even posted a signboard at the entrance…
A KALEIDOSCOPE WORLD 