Two families that enlightened Bengal

I have probably said this a million times, but I'll say it once more - I feel very proud to be a Bengali. However, recently, I was hearing about many weird behaviors which are not the stuff that Bengalis used to like. A class of people whose motto in life could be defined in a one liner as - plain living and high thinking doesn't really match the heavy drinking, party going and slang speaking people I now see back home. It is sad how a region famous for being the cultural hub of the nation has fallen into such a deplorable condition. I was thinking about this change and wondered if things are really getting bad or if I am getting old. Maybe it's both...then to free my mind I started listening to Debabrata Biswas on Spotify. When Bengalis run into issues, they turn to Rabindranath. Then I thought about these two families - the Tagores and the Rays (or Ray Chowdhurys) who enlightened Bengal and brought our culture up by quite a few notches.

Every Indian has heard about Rabindranath. He is but one jewel of the crown. Almost all of his siblings were endowed with various degrees of creativity. Starting from Prince Dwarakanath, this family has been the home of various philosophers, mathematicians, composers, playwrights and in many cases polymaths. The Tagore household can easily be called the hub of modernism in early Bengal. Other than Rabindranath himself, there were many people worth mentioning. Satyendranath, who was Rabindranath's elder brother was the first Indian ICS. I think the fact that he urged his wife Gyanadanandini to accompany him to his workplace in Bombay is a more creditable thing than him being an ICS. This lady was the one who taught Bengali women how to wear a saree in a modern style. Whoever wears a saree these days, even the ones who look up Youtube videos on how to drape a saree are actually indirectly following her directions! Jyotirindranath was another elder brother of Rabindranath. He was a playwright and composer. There are quite a few songs where he composed the tune while playing the piano and Rabindranath would put words on the fly. Swarnakumari was Rabindranath's elder sister who was the first woman in India to edit a magazine. Other than these people, there were various nephews, nieces and other relatives who have all shone in various facets of life. One of them whom I like a lot is the painter and story teller Abanindranath.

Almost overlapping the age of Rabindranath was the family of Rays. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a stalwart of that family, but here also there were many other people who were famous for being professors of Math and Sanskrit and also being great cricket players at the same time. More or less everyone wrote books. One brother worked at the Geological Survey of India so he wrote stories about wild animals while traveling to various parts of the undivided country. Sukumar Ray is a personal favorite of mine. Someone I would like to meet in heaven if possible. I can see myself talking to him, reading his works, laughing and enjoying every moment by being the crazy self that I am. The magazine that Upendrakishore started which Sukumar and later his son Satyajit also were editors of is so far the best children's magazine in Bengali. Now that I am growing older, I can understand how they tried to imbibe the best things in the whole society by teaching children the right things in a fun way. Those editions have riddles, puzzles, contests for children, story writing competitions which I like even now. Arnab bought a compiled copy of all the editions of the first year. Even though it is more than a century old we both love reading it. Satyajit Ray was probably the last lamp of the Bengal Renaissance. People might call him a movie director, a writer or composer or even artist, I would call him a teacher. In every book he wrote for young children and in almost all the movies he directed, he taught us something. Be it the right pronunciation of Job Charnock's name (it is pronounced "Jobe" and not job as in work) or how camels store water, he taught us all those. Satyajit Ray's aunt, Leela Majumdar is another personal favorite of mine. She taught me to cook, if not anything else, and reading her recipes give me the same enjoyment as reading a fun story book.

If these two families didn't exist, not that we would lose some of the best minds of our society, we would possibly still be in the dark ages. In everything I do, I say, even my tastes in literature and music, my views about the society and the world are in some means the result of what these two families endowed us with and indirectly how I was molded.

Living the American Dream

In the developing world, there are generally two sorts of people - one are the "liberals" who don't like the West. Who assumes that the West (including USA) is the embodiment of capitalism and all sorts of vices that come with material pleasures, a loose society and consumerism. The second bucket thinks that the West is a dream world. As if everyone is rich, houses are elaborate, streets impeccable and life more or less quite heavenly. Well, I am generalizing for sure, but these are the two ends of the scale. While none of the above facts are true, both are somewhat true. I don't agree with all societal norms here, there are places which are extremely dirty, not everyone follows the law, but also the general work culture is great, generally people are law abiding, an ambulance will arrive on time, etc.

Immigrants have flocked to USA over hundreds of years. Even Wikipedia says that the first sight of the Statue of Liberty signified a new life to many immigrants who came here over the years in search of a better life. They can be software professionals like me wanting a better quality of education and a healthy workplace or they can be a person from Africa wanting to just live like a human being. The common thing is the American Dream, about which Wikipedia says - "In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth." 

I sometimes look back at my life and think. A few weeks back I was sitting at our break room during lunch waiting for my buddy as he was heating up his food. I looked across over Lake Washington towards Seattle and down below at the lunch time crowd walking busily down in Bellevue. I sat and thought how did I land up here? I was out in a totally different city half way round the globe, leading a totally different life. Where was Lake Washington and Bellevue and Concur and my buddy ten years back? How did my life change? What changed? What did it enrich me with?

I am a big proponent of leaving home and residing in other countries, with people of other cultures. So it is really rewarding how my (and people like me) slowly learn new things. Arnab was saying how they are learning basic greetings in Turkish and Chinese and teaching their team the same in Hindi and Bengali. Was this part of his job description? No. But is that enriching him? Yes, for sure! My American dream is not about buying expensive cars or designer wear. I think I have evolved out of those because I don't see any value in them. Neither do I want to live in a huge impersonal mansion.

My dream is to be myself.

To be what I am without any inhibition. To live in a society that does not judge, to work where someone who speaks up is cherished and not snubbed down. To have opportunities to help others without people mocking me. To have a career that helps me grow and have hobbies I love. To learn, to travel, to talk, to experience....even to have healthy pets.

After a year of coming to US I wrote an article on the changes in my life. Those were apparent from the surface, after six more years I realize the deeper things. The stuff that has opened my eyes, the things that have taught me to be less judgmental and to be more compassionate. And also the little things which are actually not so little. Like a sky full of stars beside the Pacific, snow storm at Mt. Rainier, the multitude shades of blue at Hapuna Beach, talking with friends from the world over about their homelands, being invited to eat a turkey at Thanksgiving, giggling over a cup of Starbucks coffee with crazy coworkers, setting up my own home, cuddling with my babies, finding the right guy to get married to...and in all these things really finding who I am.

Photography

I seriously did not need another hobby. But there is something so fascinating about "learning something just because I want to" that I brought my five year old DSLR out of its bag and played around with the settings. I am not new to photography. When I first learned the how-to's of it, I was not even ten. At fourteen, I took pictures of an entire fortnight's trip to the Himalayas with an old Kodak camera (the ones that came in leather cases). At that time those were film cameras that did not show you on a scale how your exposure is, nor would it let you "see how the shot came" before you send the whole film to be developed. There were people who found out that their pictures came out horrible, but I am truly proud of the fact that I always had 38 shots (you could take a couple more than the standard 36 if you were really good) and none of them were badly under or over exposed. The camera was also fantastic. It was really difficult to mess the settings up. I remember once at Agra Fort (in 2001) I took a picture of some intricate wall carvings with the "distance" set to 1 m. Then I was taking the picture of the rampart of the fort and forgot to change the "distance" to infinity. The picture came out quite ok. Not as sharp as I wanted it to be, but not blurry either.

With National Geographic having this "Your Shot" thing, it has been quite a nice vent of my photography rather than littering my Facebook wall. The good thing about Nat Geo is I can see other people's fantastic pictures and even though mine are nothing in comparison to the photographers there, it feels good to contribute my bit. Photography opens your eyes to see beauty in simple things already around you. One leaf drenched in water, my kitty's whiskers, black and white shot of fallen snow on branches... you don't have to look far. Also, there's a community of photographers from all over the world. It's because of them that I know how pretty the country of Turkey is, I can practically see villages of Bangladesh, beaches from Florida, wild life of Africa... and I realize once more, how beautiful is our Earth with its people...

The Rising of the Moon

There has been only a couple songs in my life with whom I can say there was a "love at first hearing" sort of relationship. One of them is the Indian marching tune "Kadam kadam badhaye ja" and the next was Enya's "Only time". Yesterday another one was added to the list. That is the Irish song - "The Rising of the Moon". I had read the play by the same name when I was in eleventh grade as it was part of our English text book and even at that time I realized the similarity between the Irish nationalists and our own Indian Freedom Fighters. That is why as Indians we always sympathize with the Irish, as we were oppressed by the same country.

This is a song of rebellion where the rebels get crushed. I see the same thing as what happened to our Indian National Army. They put up a fight against a massively strong unmatched enemy and they lost. But that didn't stop the future generation follow in their footsteps. These are actual battles, but in our society now we are fighting battles against unmatched adversaries. There are so many things that we need to fight against and there are a handful people who have gathered so far "with the pikes upon their shoulders at the rising of the moon". Oppression is everywhere, in every society. With all the blabber about Marxism and socialism there are still millions and millions of people having a horrible quality of life. Not just poverty, but facing all sorts of crimes that we can't even think of. I should include animals too. There are tons of animals being abused too, which is one thing I fight against.

Fighting is difficult, going against the tide is difficult. I do just a couple things and even in that I always see apathy, selfishness, a callous couldn't-care-less attitude. A fear to come out of the comfort zone. A general idea of "why bother when it's not affecting me"...

I am trying to change that in all fields that I can. Go for the better alternative. Choose the better solution. I said it is tough but who said being a rebel is easy?

বিশ্ব ছাড়ায়ে উঠিয়াছি আমি
চির উন্নত মম শির 

Photo source - Wikipedia

"Mirror, mirror on the wall..."

What do you do when you see a mirror? Isn't it the most common behavior to quickly check how we are looking? Is the one hair sticking out? Is the nose too shiny? Has the lipstick smudged? From time immemorial human beings try to look better. "Better" is an extremely relative word, because in different cultures and in different times this "better look" sometimes border the crazy. We wonder, "what kind of taste do those people have?" Like when we see those iron shoes from China, don't we think, "what made them think that THAT looks nice?" But if we look around, I am sure we would find a lot of crazy things that we do in the name of "looking good".

Take for example, the high heeled shoes. What makes us think that those look good? And for people who wear those (included me, though very rarely) can vouch for how uncomfortable they are. I don't think anyone can say that they feel good wearing them. Adds to the height? Haha! For a really short person, that won't really add much and for an already tall person, that is not something she's worry about. Makes the gait graceful? Bwahaha...until she sprains her ankle! Also, it adds quite a strain to the leg muscles because humans were not meant to be walking in that unnatural manner.

Then is the thing about nail colors. Why? Painting nails... who told us that it looks pretty? I don't know. (I paint my nails too, more often than I wear high heels). Ranging from simple things like wearing makeup, taking pains to make the hair look more voluminous, coloring hair and going to the last degrees as laser hair removal, Botox and the like, we do spend a lot of money, time and energy in trying to "look good". When I see teenaged girls wearing makeup I wonder what they are thinking. How are they trying to present themselves, how important is "looking good" and why?

I don't know.

We grew up in a society where putting on makeup was considered a bad thing. It was like if you think too much about how you look, you would not be trying to grow yourself properly. I personally like that idea. Especially while growing up, it does good. Probably that is why me and girls of my generation are pretty comfortable in our own skins and I had never heard of the word "negative body image" until I was in my late twenties. The only image we knew of is the one the mirror showed us and we were happy with it.

I am not saying people don't have to look good. We all need to look presentable. That is why we need to wear nice clothes while going to a wedding, professional things when we go to work. Going to a wedding in PJs with a bed head look may be very "natural" but that is also borderline eccentric. We need to take care of ourselves, look proper and wear normal clothes. But how much is too much?

There should be much more emphasis on being healthy. A healthy person will anyway have healthy skin and nails and hair. And when you have naturally healthy hair, why bother to increase it's volume by applying an array of chemicals? A healthy girl will not want to become skinny and result in an anorexic or bulimic or both. A healthy skin does not need any makeup.

It is in our genes, that we girls like to dress up but why? Next time you take up that makeup applicator, ask yourself why you are doing it? If you spend an hour in the morning dressing up before going to work, or worse still, before going to school, ask yourself why. Why do you think you need to hide under a layer of makeup before you go out to meet the world. And those women who apply eye makeup while driving on the highway, let me assure you, no one will admire the eye makeup of your corpse.

Take a look here: http://www.stopthebeautymadness.com/ and see for yourself where the world is heading. #StopTheBeautyMadness

#StopTheBeautyMadness

A season of introspection

I went on my first fall hike this afternoon and realized that like everything, trails show a special beauty in this season. With the early dusk, overcast skies and trees shedding the extra, I feel this is a season of melancholy, of turning inwards. As I looked up on Wikipedia about fall, I read these specific lines - "Autumn in poetry has often been associated with melancholy. The possibilities of summer are gone, and the chill of winter is on the horizon. Skies turn grey, and many people turn inward, both physically and mentally." Just to mention, I read it after I had my thoughts. That means this is a common realization of all people. 

I wouldn't say that this season makes me depressed, but it is true that I tend to introspect more than I would do in summer. Spring and summer are all about being active. There are so many things to do, new life springs up with the tulips, daffodils and Easter lilies. If seasons could have characters, I think fall would be the introvert one.

Just like everyone don't like introverts, there are many people who do not like fall. Yes, at first it does look very depressing (to add to it is the time change by falling back one hour), the sudden chill brings a lot of colds and coughs, but if we take a deeper look we will see how beautiful and romantic this season is. If spring is about new lovers, Valentine's Day and dreams of "living happily ever after", then fall is about thinking of lost loves or of those people who could never become ours. 

This is also the time to be grateful. With Thanksgiving coming up, it doesn't do bad to count one's blessings. Especially if you are prone to feeling depressed in fall, this is a good antidote. Write down one thing you are thankful for, every day and you would see that the fact that we are alive should be reason enough for us to be thankful for. 

Bring out your fleece blankets, warm socks, find out some nice crockpot recipes, get a cup of coffee and curl up with a book. While sitting on my chaise and reading a book, I pause and look out to the back yard...and think...it is fun to enjoy every day as it comes and try to be the greatest extrovert, but at times it is nice to question and find answers within my own self too...

Dear Netaji...

On the seventy first anniversary of India's first liberation army, Azad Hind Fauj, I greet you. It is so sad that barring a few none of our one and quarter billion people even know this or worse still care about it. Do people even care for our country for which you sacrificed everything? I wonder.

I don't know where you are, if you are alive or dead. With all due respect, I would still say that I would rather see you dead. To be alive to see what India is going through now is a torture that I never want you to endure. At some points of time I think it is better that you went missing. I could never bear to tar your image by imaging you as a politician vying for votes or trying to please the "minority" that comprises of a vote bank. It is much better to see you as my beloved and most honored Head of the Provisional Government of India in exile. That is how I will picture you for as long as I live - the hero, the fighter and the leader, that's what you are.

When I said what India is going through, I didn't really mean the political scene. We at least have an able Prime Minister now. I'd say the best we had in the last 68 years. You would have liked his ways of thought and actions. What concerns me more is the actual people and an apathy is every sense. There is no passion in trying to do something, the only passion I see are in negative things. Students fighting against teachers, random people on the streets killing if anyone protests against bursting fire crackers, religious fights, poverty, utmost poverty, lack of education and unimaginable violence against women. I am not just worried about criminals. Criminals have existed on Earth for as long as there were humans and they will always be there. What worries me is the criminal mind set in regular people. The high school students who killed their classmates, the terrible thing in engineering colleges called ragging... that is far more dangerous than a stray criminal. These crimes are intertwined in the society.

I also see a backdated notion of going with the flow where families keep on obliging to dowries just because it has always been the norm. Why do we still have the idea of arranged marriages? Why do we expect a child to be an engineer just because his father is one? Why does a woman still feel that she should give up her career when she has a baby otherwise people will think that she is neglecting the newborn? Why would a man feel ashamed to do simple household chores? Worse still, why would a woman, an educated working woman still believe that a woman's place is in the kitchen? These make no sense to me.

People have taunted me with "why did you leave the country" when I bring up these things or talk about helping the underprivileged. I don't feel like explaining that at times you can (and I am) doing much more from outside than from living there. Patriotism runs much deeper than being merely present within a political boundary. Maybe some day people will have the passion to do something good, however small, but still an act of kindness.

You tried to liberate us from foreign rule, but there are so many things that we need to liberate us from now. I don't know who will be able to do it... we need to change the mentality of a 1.26 billion people...who will do it? Who can do it?

Yours sincerely
Sayari

I love being an ENFJ

I meant to write this for a long time but then forgot about it. Yesterday I took a fun test on Facebook, never really hoping to get correct results, but there also I found I am an ENFJ. I was reading the personality traits of an ENFJ and anyone who knows me for even two weeks should be able to confirm that.

There is nothing more fascinating than knowing my own self. Just imagine what the layers of abstraction are that stop us from knowing how our own mechanisms work. Then you take them off, one by one, and your own self emerges. I am glad that I remember my childhood very well, not just the memories of events but also the memories of my feelings are very clearly etched. That is why I can easily track back to match the causes with the effects.

I was reading a book on dog behavior and after explaining why dogs behave in certain ways, they have a topic called "now that you know..." This personality test was "now that you know" for myself. I know that ENFJs are called life's teachers. We are naturals in leading, teaching and working with others. We love working in teams, we get energy by being with other people, it gets really irritable when we are ignored... I should be a text book example of what an ENFJ should be. That is why I was always the one speaking for my class and thereby getting into trouble, I am the one who invites different groups of friends and introduces them because "the more, the merrier". I am the teacher who thinks of her class of students as young fresh minds ready to be molded with moral values, strong characters and showing them clearly what is good. I can stand and speak up when I think something needs to be said. I am the one who loves when my team mates do well because after all it is the team, the organization, the human race that needs to progress. Life is fun for an ENFJ. She feels happy, she is upbeat and her environment becomes positive. I am not making these up, I really feel it. There have been many cases when just seeing people at work around me made me feel good. They were not all talking to me, everyone was doing their own thing, talking, working, walking to meetings... I had my headphone on and was listening to a nice song while working. But I felt very happy. Then as I always do, I tried to find the root cause of my happiness (I do it for happiness and sadness both and I always find the cause) when I realized I was just being an extrovert who was gaining energy from the people around her. It is fascinating to be an ENFJ. Given an option I would choose to be an ENFJ again and again and again. Life is amazing when you are an extrovert!

Goddess Durga and the Bengali girl

There is a very famous Bengali poem called "আমরা" (We the Bengalis) by Satyendranath Dutta, which is also one of my very favorite poems where there's a line - দেবতারে মোরা আত্মীয় জানি, আকাশে প্রদীপ জ্বালি - we consider the gods as our relatives and light lamps for them. The most beloved of them should be our dear Goddess Durga. In a land of 330 million gods and goddesses, every part of India, or rather every household seem to have a favorite god. We worship them, pray to them, celebrate them, but for Durga the difference is that, we love her dearly and treat her like a daughter of the family.

If you know the mythology, it is pretty apparent that Durga was created out of energy to slay the buffalo-demon. This entire span of the puja is nothing but a battle, one of good over evil. Goddess Durga is a tough lady who defeated the demon whom all the other gods could not. She is not a daughter, wife or mother of anyone, she is just a collection of energy. Then how did she become the Bengali daughter?

This was the time when Bengali daughters could visit their home. Coming back to their parents, they would bring their children along. That is why Durga is accompanied by her four children. I used to wonder what are they doing in the battlefield? And if they did end up in the battlefield then why are they not fighting? This is the reason for it - they were added on later as part of a social system, not following the original guideline of the Sanskrit texts.

The only way for us to know the original story is to listen to the radio program of Mahisashuramardini (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahisasuramardini_(radio_programme)). I still don't understand many concepts of it, maybe they were so advanced that it's still very difficult to comprehend. I mean, how could you anyway create a person out of sheer energy? Arnab says they created instances like out of Java classes. Probably they did, who knows? And then what about having 18 arms, 16 arms and 10 arms? I have no clue. I like that story, but that powerful goddess is different from the "girl" that we know of.

Durga, or to be more precise Uma (another name of the goddess) is like I said, the dear Bengali girl who comes to visit her parents for five days every year from her in-laws' house in Kailash. Earlier, rich landlords hosted these festivals and the entire village would come to see it. Those people absolutely treated the goddess as a daughter. Their own daughters would come from their respective in-laws and so would the goddess. In some families they make the deity wear their daughters' golden jewelries. Some others feed the goddess and her kids the same food their own children eat. There have been multitudes of songs written where Durga's mother is heard lamenting how harshly her daughter is being treated at her in-laws and asking Himalaya (yes, the mountain range. He is Durga's father) to go bring her daughter. You might wonder how such a powerful goddess who defeated that demon could be ill treated at her in-laws, but that is where the Bengali society overrides Hindu mythology. Her mother is no one but the regular Bengali woman who eagerly waits for her daughter to come visit and weeps when it is time for her to go back. On the final day of the festival, the deities are given sweets to eat. Well, we actually put sweets in their mouths and also put sindur (the red powder married women put on their foreheads) on Durga and her two daughters, Lakshmi and Saraswati. This is the story of every household and of every married woman. To even the most happily married Bengali woman, coming back to her own house is a heavenly thing.

Of the things that are hard coded in every Indian girl's DNA is the sorrow of leaving home after her marriage. I had left home way before getting married and was totally on my own but have never thought of getting upset. However, on the day after my wedding when I was going to my in-laws I wept. There was practically no reason for that. I knew perfectly well that I was just going there for three days and will be back home and then back to Seattle. But as it was hard coded I could not change it. You can't reason with that either. The same story applies for going home during Durga Puja. I don't live at my in-laws house, I talk to my family almost everyday and I visit them for much longer period than the goddess does. But again the debug point hits the hard coded value... I feel homesick during this time of the year...

"Onward to immortality and eternal youth"

When we went to "Tomorrowland" at Disney Land and saw Microsoft surfaces (not the tablets, these were the coffee table kind of things they had prior to the handheld ones) we laughed and said, "that was made yesterday, why is it in Tomorrowland?" The thing is, being in the software industry there is nothing that really feels science fiction-ish for us. We know how those software are written, how buggy they may be, how they are tested and everything from an end to end perspective. But recently an almost 150 year old science fiction bowled me over, that too, reading the translated version of it. It is nothing other than 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne.

I love the ocean and the marine life. There is something so exciting about a whole world of animals and plants that live down in the water. After coming back from Hawaii, I decided that I should start studying about marine biology (I haven't yet, but this book gives me another reason to). It fascinates me at how little we know and how even less we care. This particular book showed me things about marine life and it also showed me that even though we are submerged in technology now and we are discarding things a little more than two years old, good literature, even after 150 years still stays as good literature. It was not that I haven't been in a submarine myself, it's not that I don't know the fundamentals of using a compass, reading a barometer or something like that, but even if those don't hold any surprise for me, the story did.

And did Captain Nemo!

What a strength of character! Technically speaking, he probably was not a very good person, at least he could have acted in nicer ways at times. He kept these people imprisoned, his existence was very revengeful, he sank ships whenever he felt threatened, he didn't forgive easily. But there is something about him which doesn't let me categorize him as someone bad. He had his share of grief. We don't know what it was which caused the deaths of everyone in his family - his parents, wife and children. It could be a war, it could be anything that the "civilized world" brings up as a necessary evil. But he decided to go against the human race totally. I don't really approve of that, but it can be reason enough for someone to turn away.

Then there was the adventure. The depth of water, innumerable creatures, dangers of sharks, giant squids (I hate the look of them), that was fascinating as well. With the adventure, I was ported back to my teenaged self with whom I thought I had lost touch :P

With more Jules Verne coming into my life soon I intend to move "onward to immortality and eternal youth".

My country

It was just a normal regular afternoon when I was writing test automation. Just now I renamed some packages and all the import statements were showing red squiggly lines under them. We don't like those squiggles so I was getting rid of them. There's no connection with the state of mind I was in to the caption of this article. Is it? Well, I was listening to our Independence Day flag hoisting clip on YouTube at that time. I don't remember watching the Independence Day flag hoisting ever, it's the Republic Day one that has more viewers, but with Narendra Modi as the new PM, I wanted to see what is special this time.

Firstly, the tune of "sangachadwam" got me interested. I have never heard it being played on military drums. But the thing that made me sit up straight was when the National Tricolor unfurled and immediately the Anthem started playing with gun salutes! So brilliant and so bold! Yes, bold. That was the adjective I thought of. Did I swell with pride? Of course I did. I am yet to find an Indian who would not jump up at that moment. It doesn't matter who I am or where I am located at this moment, I could well be in the outer space for all that matters. It's just that moment when you realize you are first an Indian and then everything else. Religion, language, society, financial status, nothing matters. It is at that time when you realize what Swami Vivekananda meant by "I am an Indian, every Indian is my brother." Say, "The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahmin Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother."

I have traveled in India. Not a lot, but enough to get a general idea of my country. But I still wonder have I ever seen the real India? Probably not. The one which is far away from glittery shopping malls, designer wear, Bollywood or million dollar advertisement contracts. I hardly have an idea about that country. I can count three of my "India moments" right now. One was when I traveled in the general compartment in a train back from Darjeeling. Where people sat and lay on old newspaper spread on the compartment floor. 

The second one is quite ongoing. That is when I see my students at the orphanage over Skype. Their handed down clothes, bare feet, very minimal school stationery and in general a very rural lifestyle shows me what most of my countrymen are like. Families where sending their kids to school is a luxury, where having access to internet over modem is a dream come true. Last week those kids sang patriotic songs for me. As I was looking at them, I realized that they are the "future of our country" as people say. Their dreams and aspirations would be the path our country will take. If they learn to lead an honest life, we would have a whole population working by honest means. We will have to make sure that they get enough opportunities to bloom. 

The third moment was something very close to my heart. It was in the Himalayas, at the last village before India-Tibet border. I saw our National Flag flying high. All by itself, just a solitary flag. It did not have any language or expression like the human beings I mentioned before, but there was something in that lonely flag that made me wonder about my nation. It felt like a symbol of the motherland that we need to love and protect.

We don't really think of our country much. We probably don't have a "national feeling" because until the British came, there was nothing called "India", just a collection of states which always fought against one another. Our nationalism only shows during cricket matches and at the Wagah border. That is not going to help us. We need to start "doing something" instead of "saying things" and blaming each other or the government. Think of one thing you can practically do for India and stop procrastinating... just do that!

11110

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't. If you fall into the "don't category" then let me just tell you, the title means 30 in decimal. That's because I turned 30 today.

I was asking myself, how does it feel to get into the third decade, but for some reason I couldn't sense anything different. I can still remember my second birthday party with ease. For that matter I remember all of my birthday cakes till date. I can still comfortably fit into a dungaree which I got in seventh grade and a top from eleventh grade and most importantly, my likes and dislikes have stayed the same. Other than learning some new things, I don't see myself changing.

The things that mattered to me, still does matter and the ones that didn't will never do. I am certain of that. I don't have any chances of spending money over designer clothes or a lot of cosmetics. Nor would I care for a sports car. However, the things that got instilled in me will stay there. Hopefully those are the virtuous things :) Another thing will be there, which is about making mistakes while calculating powers of 10. For some reason I can't manage to get rid of it.

I won't say I have a lot of past yet, but I see the past building up in my old journals or in nostalgic Facebook posts by my friends. However, there is a lot to dream about and a lot to make happen. There is one thing I should say that is getting different from my earlier years, that is I used to dream but now I am finding ways how to make those dreams work. They say, it takes as much effort to plan as to wish. I am using that time to plan.

There is so much to do and so little time in the human life. So much to know, so much to experience. Only one thing got checked off my bucket list so far. I will have to work through the rest. Building dreams and planning the way to reach them. And on the way I get to meet people, learn to do new things, gain experiences and cherish the good stuff!

Rain....

There are many good things of having an active imagination. The most important of them is that space and time cannot contain you. You can mentally float away anywhere and during any time. I don't know if this is my genes or a result of gorging books, maybe a combination of both, but I like to dream of different places and imagine how life would be if I stayed there.

When it rains, Bengalis, irrespective of their current geological location, start craving khichuri and ilish machh. As a Seattlelite, I should by now be placidly indifferent to the rains but as we had a really hot and dry spell for the last couple of weeks waking up to dark cloudy skies and heavy rain (not that irritating Seattle drizzle) actually made me feel very good this morning. The good thing was that I was to work from home today so I had enough time to space my work out and to cook khichuri during lunch. The ilish I had to do after logging off from work though, as it is quite a delicate dish and that I had to clean the fish.

Rainy season in Bengal is beautiful. Dark gray clouds cover the sky and they look especially awe inspiring over the rivers. Accompanied by thunderstorms heavy rain lashes down, coconut trees bow down and stand up, the wind howls through bamboo bushes. Farmers anticipate a good crop and fishermen bring us our favorite silver colored ilish, the heavenly fish.

Monsoon in Calcutta reminds me of a bunch of things, some of them may not be nice, like waterlogged streets, pot holes, mosquitos bearing malaria... but looking back I don't think of them as bad things. Well the malaria part is not funny, but with mosquitos, Calcuttans have a love-hate relationship. We also haves jokes about them :) Anyway, we used to get khichuri and ilish and also a very famous kind of mango during this season. That is the monsoon I personally know of. Those waterlogged streets are much closer to me than the rain over rice fields.

However, as I love my roots and I always feel a connection to Bengal through books, poems, songs and of course food, I want to keep on cooking the traditional food as much as I can. Today I made ilish with mustard paste and coconut milk. It turned out very well.... now I am dreaming of the torrential rains while listening to rainy days Rabindrasangeet :)

Public speaking

I would start by ranting against the ill feeling towards extroverts. Look up things about introverts and extroverts online and you'll see how everyone tries to say introverts make better leaders, better speakers...etc. I would NEVER say introverts make better speakers. I have seen them speak, they sweat, they forget words, they become silent and their body language is horrible. I am not saying extroverts are always good at public speaking, they need to learn and prepare, but as they "enjoy" being with people and they "enjoy" the attention, they feel much more comfortable in a large group. If introverts always made good speakers, there would be no need of the tons and tons of articles to "help" them overcome the shyness.

I love public speaking. I think I radiate a glow when I speak to a group. I did not know this happens because I am an extrovert, but I realized that I love the attention of a whole group of people. When I walk to a stage, or behind a podium and look in front of me, I have a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I feel like I have so much to say and so much to impact. It can be the "I" thing in me, which I admit might not be a good thing, but it is there and it motivates me. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't prepare my speeches, I do. I write them quite a few days before my presentation, read them over and over again, get other people to proofread, make notes and check the time. But I never go up to the stage with my notes. NEVER! It spoils the impression. I have slides if needed, but never any notes. I trust my memory and I know the guidelines, that's all I ever need.

I have recently joined ToastMasters' club at work and I just completed my fourth speech today. I was told that the topics I chose show my passion and it also is very much apparent that I love to speak. I love this audience as well. I see them listening with serious attention, they smile, have constant eye-contact, laugh when I say something funny and in general the whole atmosphere is very positive. It is easy to speak in these situations, people are willing to listen to you. Things were not this pleasant all the time. There have been incidents where I was not encouraged to speak, well to ask questions to be specific, but of course those people couldn't stop me! (bwahahahaha - evil laugh)

Once was a seminar we went to from school. The thing was going on very smoothly until a religious debate sort of thing got in. One lady was saying that the minority is treated in a horrific way in India, to which I had to get up and protest. My points were that most of the minority still doesn't consider India to be their homeland and I went back in history of 1906 when the Muslim League was created till the Partition. I also brought up that under an able leader like Netaji, religious issues never cropped up. It comes up only when political leaders fan those flames to separate us instead of unite. Then I ended with an open question - why do we need to have a seminar on this topic after fifty five years of India's independence? Nobody could answer. People applauded, some got real mad at me, one lady started crying... it was a mess. But I loved that thing. That mess and the failure to answer was worth more that all the applause because it told me that I hit the nail on the head.

The second incident was tougher. That was challenging a so-called eminent speaker at his own house on a very sensitive political issue. It can be called a conspiracy theory in India. That is about Netaji and the person I had this fight with is Netaji's descendant. They didn't ask me for my opinion, and I anyway was a second year student in college at that time, but I pushed my way forward and asked them why exactly they are coming to this specific conclusion when all the evidence proves the opposite. They did not have any answer, they were tongue tied. The best part was the audience cheering. I didn't expect that to happen so I was a little shocked, but when an elderly gentleman encouraged me by saying "carry on young lady" I realized that not many people would have the courage to say these things. What I just said was not very common. Later I thought that the whole incident of speaking up for Netaji, a hero I admire standing at his own house is probably a thing I would remember fondly all my life. Netaji sacrificed his entire life for us, maybe I could just do this much for him?

Indian Railways

A constant but very pleasant white noise along with a rocking motion, random people passing by the common corridor most of them being "one of the general mass", vendors, each with their special call selling tea, coffee, unhealthy but very tasty snacks, a strange smell of the bed-roll and me sitting on the top berth and watching everything from there... that is what I remember when I think of "trains" a synonym for the Indian Railways.

Covering thousands of kilometers across the country, railways is probably the only thing that can "mobilize the mass" in its truest sense. How else would the common Indian travel across the country? How else would I ever see villages, rivers, acres and acres of farmlands? Where would I meet the actual India? The India that is far away from the glitter of IT jobs, the one that is never portrayed in Bollywood movies, the one nation you can see if you travel without reservation in a second class compartment. Those people who spread old newspapers and sit on the floor, they bring food from home, they travel with a lot of luggage but they won't mind saving a spot for you if you step out for a moment, they will look after your belongings too and like the old woman on the train to Shimla, a local person from the village would ask over and over again how you are liking the place.

I love the Indian Railways.

Source: Wikipedia

Long back, when the British were laying a foundation of their Empire in India, the railways was one of the reasons people from different parts of the wide country met. As they started learning English (another good thing of the British rule that I have to admit) they could communicate with their fellow countrymen who spoke different languages. They found out that the common problem is the British all over the country. They came out of their own tiny worlds and got a broader perspective of where they belonged in the nation. Now the Indian Railways is the world's ninth largest employer.

Over the years things changed, but I still believe if you want to see India, you have to undertake a long train journey. A person once mentioned that he traveled from Delhi to Bangalore and how he realized the diversity of India. As they went south, he said the tea vendors were slowly replaced by coffee vendors, common people from the villages were not wearing churidars, but wearing dhotis. The terrain changed, the climate changed... that was amazing.

There were two long journeys that I took,  to Delhi and to Kalka (higher up north from Delhi) from Calcutta. The ones to Kalka involved two straight days of journey and it was in summer when the carriages heat up real bad. And no, we were not traveling in AC compartments. Those were for the "rich people", we were supposed to "learn to endure" the heat. It was hot, yes extremely hot but my memories of that journey is very pleasant. Those journeys were the times to play indoor games with other kids, they may be from our own party or maybe not, could be just random kids from the next coupe. We would share food with other families, especially the other kids. For those few days people sharing the coupe or even people from nearby coupes became like family. I remember an older lady could not start eating her dinner because I was still awaiting mine. She said, "how can we start eating when that kid hasn't got her food yet." For the more introvert types, those long journeys were the time to read. I remember my brother climbing up to the top berth and reading a book all day. For the thoughtful ones, they could just sit next to a window and look out. I think that is the best part of traveling by train. Villages, small temples, rivers (yes I remember the junction of Ganga and Yamuna seen from the train), level crossings all zoom by. You can see farmers working, villagers going to rural markets, little kids waving at passengers from a passing train....

And I need to mention the stations. There are big junctions which are crazy crowded and then there are tiny village stations, homely and rural. Sometimes you would get down to quickly get a cup of tea, sometimes you'd fill your bottle with water, or get something to eat. Those are experiences which can't really be explained but need to be felt :)

The thing I don't like in the trains are the bathrooms. I have heard that originally there were no bathrooms at all. Then one man wrote a letter (in hilarious English) which made the authorities to consider his proposal. Anyway, the ones we have now are ones which sometimes make me wonder at times if the no bathroom model would have been more hygienic. Anyway, I am not going to discuss those gross things here.

I don't know if I would have enough time to afford to have a train journey sometime when I visit India, but the one that will remain in my memory consists of watching the sun rise from the train window, feeling a nice breeze, having coffee in minuscule cups, eating food from a strange square shaped plate with in built bowls, chatting with co-passengers and finding the real India!

Note: I am reading in the news that a makeover is coming up for the railways, which includes cleaner bathrooms, hygienic kitchens, cleaner sheets and blankets and better quality food. I do hope they work on it fast because I so want to see the lifeline of our country prosper.

Fictional heroes

I have talked about Aravinda de Silva before, who is my hero from time immemorial, but this article is going to be for some men who are totally fictional. Even with their virtual status they still mean a lot to me and I hope, to humankind as well.

1. Sherlock Holmes

'...when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

I was thinking that when I meet someone, what appeals to me the most. The first thing I like is a person's honesty and the next, invariably is intellect. Sherlock Holmes has everything that appeals to my mind. A strong capacity of observation and clear reasoning. I said once that a software tester needs to be like a detective. That is why I appreciate Holmes even more nowadays.

I was reading his quotations and almost all of those I can apply with software testing. You can't assume, you shouldn't guess, you can't make exceptions. Science has no place for exceptions. It is not logical, they do break the rule and not prove it. And then is his take on data. He always said don't guess the reasons for anyone's action and then get everything to retrofit. You should not come to any conclusion before you have data.

The sharp grey hawk eyes, that tall and thin figure in great coat and deer stalker cap and the famous pipe...I can visualize him in his study, at Paddington, around London...the man who stirred up our reasoning capacities and who made us use our grey cells a little more.

2. Arjunbarma

My beloved romantic hero of all times. I don't have a picture of him to share, but I have a vivid picture of him in my brain. A tall and strong young man of twenty one, who left his home in search of a kingdom where he would not be forcibly converted to another religion. The melodious story teller Saradindu Bandopadhyay walks us down a part of Arjun's life. After he saves the king's bride to be from drowning and she falls in love with him, how the king who was once his patron tells him to leave the kingdom. Arjun and his friend were at the border of the country when they saw enemy soldiers trying to make their way in stealthily. In spite of the king's order, Arjun still went back to alert the king about this enemy intrusion and finally saved the country. The king changed his mind and decided to unite the lovers.

Arjun brings back memories of my teenage, the time when girls start to become fans of movie stars and sportsmen. I did have my fair share of those people as well, but Arjun's virtual presence made him my most loved hero. He is always perfect because he is in my mind and he never changes, he would never grow old. Even when I will be an old woman in grey hair, Arjun will still be able to bring back the romance I first cherished in my teenage days.

3. Atticus Finch

I have to mention here is that this character made a greater impression on me because of Gregory Peck. There have been very few incidents where a character in the movie matched the my imagination and in this case I think Gregory Peck is the only person who could fit into this role.

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” 

When I think of Atticus Finch, the first thing that comes to my mind is strength of character. All the characteristics people like in a "man" were brilliantly present in him. A loving father and an unusually modern one who let his kids call him by first name he had the perfect balance of how much to control his kids and where to let go. Then came the lawsuit. I don't intend to narrate the whole story here, but my idea is to convey why he is one of my favorite characters. He was a brave man. It is one thing to fight a war, but another thing, and maybe a more difficult one is to fight against stagnant societal rules from within the society one is living. He stood up for justice, he did the right thing. No he didn't win, but he still did what was right.

Atticus Finch is not just an iconic literary hero, but he is and should be an inspiration. If you do the right thing people will still go against you, call you names and even threaten will all sorts of consequences. But some people still do the right thing. He was one of them.

As you can see, all these three men are way different from one another. They span not only over space but time as well. I admire them for different reasons and they bring out different facets in myself.

Summer time reflections

From my third speech at ToastMasters

Coming from a tropical land, I didn’t really have any reason to celebrate summer. It reminds me of heat, sweat and power cuts and other than the occasional thunderstorms, it is a dreaded season in my memory. Also, I am not a person who can sit quietly or peacefully for a long time. Must be because of my over active brain, I always need to DO something. So my summers were never idyllic as such. In fact they were the only time when I could get a lot of things done. I was busy!

I see a summer holiday is a big thing here, no school for months, outdoor activities and all. We were not so lucky. After our finals were done in late March we had no school for around two months, including summer vacation, but we had loads of homework to do and regular study sessions. Sometimes we’d travel with families but they were never adventurous and very little exciting. However, I found things to amuse myself. My main attraction was my laboratory at home. It was a broken wooden bench on our open terrace where I had my beakers (empty jam bottles) full of muddy water which I filtered. I mixed water color and saw the sun rays gleaming through them with the airs of a professional chemist. I also measured rainfall in a glass jar. You might think that my teachers and elders should be really proud of my scientific attempts, but sadly that wasn’t really the case. Anything outside of school books were considered a waste of time, so even though I learned science, this was technically my play time.

After a few years, my experiments changed in form. I started getting interested in physics, especially the night sky and optics. As my knowledge of science increased, my experiments started succeeding as well. I bought a science encyclopedia with gift money and delved into the projects section of it. Funny enough, the book was printed in the US, so even though the materials they suggested I use are easily available here, getting them in India was next to impossible. Would you believe I couldn’t get a box of tissue papers, aluminum foil or play dough back home? But I found my work around. Many of my experiments failed but like everything else in life, the ones which succeed after so much effort put into them are the ones that stay etched in our memories. The optics light overlapping experiments never came out well, my water wheel splashed water everywhere and the paper wheel got soggy but my pin-hole camera was perfect, I could separate sodium and chlorine by electrolysis table salt. The smell of chlorine is not nice, but it really made me happy that day as I copper coated a paper clip. My most successful experiment was a sun dial. I worked round the unavailability of cardboard but I got stuck at the need of a compass. How would I know the exact north without a compass? I had to align my sun dial on the north-south line to mark the shadow cast every hour. Mind it, this was a time before Internet was widely available, so all I could do was brainstorm. Then like the ancient sailors, I turned to the night sky to guide me. I went up to the terrace at night with a bit of chalk and a ruler and found the big dipper shining brightly. Well, if there’s the dipper, I joined the first two stars in the scoop and traced down. Oh no! There is a huge hospital blocking most of the north sky. Well, ok I still know where Polaris is. I put a mark on the ground and drew a straight line pointing north-south. Next morning before the sun rose, I went to align my sun dial and mark the hours on it. And then the best thing in science happened – if you follow the right steps, you are bound to get the right results!

So you can see even with the discomfort of heat and humidity, summers were really quite nice. In my university days in the south, summers gave me the time to spend time with my friends and I really started cherishing this sunny season after moving to Seattle. I don’t have summer breaks any more, but I still get to do simple things that are very new in my life, like camping in Mt. Rainier or tending to my little kitchen and herb garden. This season has given me the chance to find myself. It’s not really a horrible season after all.

My guy friends

With Fathers' Day coming up tomorrow and the ongoing World Cup, guys seem to be getting some importance after all. So I decided to dedicate this article for my guy friends from the world over - everyone from the mischievous classmates from South Point to the fun co-workers in my professional life. They have been great, they have opened a whole new world which has enriched my life a lot.

Long before I got married and started living day in and day out with a guy, I was appalled at guys' manners. How they can comfortably wear one pair of jeans for a month, not wash their cooking utensils, drive nonchalantly seventeen miles over the speed limit and do many a weird thing that girls can't even think of. My jaw-drop moment was when a friend, on seeing his gym pants torn from the ankle to the knee immediately stapled three pins in there! Another one once told me that he used rubber bands to hold the sleeve of a torn shirt (which he tore during a school fight). Though I still have my "really??!!" moments after five years of marriage, I think my friends did help me in knowing guys well.

Not many people have siblings these days, so they might not get the chance to grow up with a brother. Those classmates were the boys I first interacted with in a regular basis. I saw what sports fanatics they were and how they tirelessly played cricket and football even if they got a ten minute break between classes. They did not spend time gossiping like the girls, they were busy. The college friends were into rock bands too besides sports. They would play the guitar, they introduced me to "the summer of '69" explaining that it has the best guitar played ever by any human. It was clearly apparent that they were budding engineers as well. During my birthday, I remember three friends crowded in front of the TV, trying to find out how to display recently captured pictures of the party on the TV, which cables to connect to which port. This comes effortlessly to boys, technical or not. I remember them as my team mates in the quiz club, my partner as the class monitor, my companions on the tram rides to and from school, my IT guy when I needed software, music or games, my competitor during NFS car races and in general people who would bug me, drive me nuts, call me at 11:30 in the evening to ask me if the grades are out but the ones I still enjoyed spending time with.

University introduced me to guy friends the world over. They differed in looks but not in behavior. I accompanied them to some "adventures" where I probably wouldn't have gone alone or with girls. They explained that scrambling over prickly bushes was fun, climbing walls to see what's inside a deserted home was "cool" and scaring people on narrow hiking trails, pushing them in swimming pools were all totally ok stuff to do to friends. Those are the friends who taught me to ride a bike, they were the ones I played badminton with on Saturdays. They were crazy but when it came to accompany us back to the dorm after evening or give a ride they were the ones who stepped up. There was a whole new responsibility that showed up in them during those times. They knew how to take care.

Co-workers can't really be friends, but when you spend more than eight hours everyday with some people, you are bound to get close. As it is common in our field to have very few girls we really have no other option but to be with a bunch of guys in our teams. Here, they are mostly not in the same age group as me, but that did never stop them from being my buddies. Talks of cars, beer, football, the latest smartphone crowd the team lunches. Activities like skate boarding competitions, gun ranges and dirt biking get talked about, Wikipedia articles on guns are read and discussed. If Sounders lose, there might be an ambiance of mourning around, weird jokes and out-of-the-world crazy things like Uni-baby (reference: http://axecop.com/characters/) are discussed with deep interest. That's a world very different from the one I grew up in, that's the world my guy friends have shown me.

These guys have made me laugh, come out of my comfort zone, look at things from a different perspective and have made me feel special. Guy friends are the ones who make us understand our future husbands in a better way and I wish more girls had the chance to grow up with fun boys like I did.

Creative engineer - the non-oxymoron

What comes to your mind when you think of the word "creative"? I invariably think of colors. Splashes and strokes of colors on a canvas. Colors like the ones in "holi", too much of them. You might think of authors or musicians, artists or even chefs.

Now what comes to your mins when you think of the word "engineer"? I visualize two things - either a factory like the Boeing one in Everett - conveyor belts, people wearing hard hats and overalls, or I see code. Plain simple programs running on command prompt. Black and white and dull.

Where is the connection between these two words? Creative and engineer? Is that an oxymoron? People would think so. I mean why not? The left brained analytical nerds don't come close to the right brained colorful people. How can they be related?

Here's how.... what do you exactly mean by being creative? Wikipedia says creativity is the way in which something valuable is created, ok? Now think of the valuable things mankind has produced. While I agree that art and literature has been extremely valuable to humans, but think of the more practical things you know like the house you live in, the street where you drive your car, yes the car itself, your smartphone, computer, the Internet... who created them? Engineers! The boring blueprints, pencil marks on butter paper, T-square, etchings on a screwhead... no they are not as pretty as an oil painting, but they are the base. Scientists show the way on which engineers build a highway, they scale it up, make it possible to bear load and also to maintain it for generations. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose told us what radio waves are, but it took an engineer to create a smartphone out of it. An artist will cherish the view of a waterfall, a poet may write a lyrical poetry describing it and an engineer will conceive a way to harness that power and set up a hydroelectric power plant to supply electricity to an entire city.

A blank canvas and a blank notebook has been talked over a lot for expressing thoughts and inspiring creativity. Blank programming IDEs can do that and much more too. One day you take a fresh clean Eclipse IDE without a single line of code on it and you create a software program that automatically sends requests to servers and gathers the responses. Like a robot, it reads the responses and lets you know if your product is ok or not without you having to do anything. That's a very small scale engineering, but none the less it can empower humans to sit on the same seat as the Creator if there is one :)

Who is a Bengali?

Last year just before Durga Pujo I bought my first saree and my first designer saree. I am not a fan of designer wear. Actually, if I like the shape and color of an apparel and it fits me then I don't care if it is coming from the sidewalk vendors in Calcutta, from Walmart, Macy's or someplace fancier. I bought this saree because it struck me as something very creative - Bengali calendar print in black and white with a solid red border. It has something very Bengali in it with just the right amount of color and an out of the box creativity. So I went for it. Recently I was looking at a few more sarees designed by the same lady Paromita Banerjee. Almost all of them have this right balance of color and a uniqueness which tells me about the refined taste of the designer. With the very limited exposure I have in fashion, I think she concentrates on just one thing in a saree. For the calendar one, her main focus of course was on the Bengali print, so she kept it at two colors. She didn't keep on adding more accents or flashy stuff. In another one, the off white body and golden border has bright red pleats in the center. That's it. No more color, no more decorations...just one thing. I very much appreciate her taste. Before this article becomes one on fashion, let me come to the main point. I so liked Paromita's concepts that I looked her up online to see more of her designer clothes and her professional profile, etc. I found she writes a blog and her topics along with her command of the English language gave me an idea of her - a well educated and cultured Bengali girl. "Cultured" is the thing I am coming to, that is the kind of people I used to know Bengalis as.

Most probably due to the Bengal Renaissance of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Bengalis evolved as a race who could think. They were conscious of the political situation of the country, the reformed the society and they questioned and rebelled rather than accepting something as "tradition". A bright band of stalwarts like Raja Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Swamiji, Rabindranath, Acharjya J. C. Bose, Acharya P. C. Roy, Netaji, Sarat Chandra, Nazrul trailed till Satyajit Ray in all fields from politics to religion, science, arts, literature, music, sports lit up the cultural field of Calcutta, a city which was the jewel in the crown, the city of joy.

I was not as lucky to be born at that time, but I at least was born in the city and had the opportunity to grow up learning about these people and as a book lover, reading stories of these people and their own writings. I always say that for a person who reads (he/she most likely thinks as well) the world becomes a single nest spanning both space AND time. These people imbibed in me and to those people who fit my definition of a Bengali some cultural values which are not easily shaken off.

I see in Facebook - 15 reasons why you should date a Bengali girl, well they are funny when read with a light spirit but that is not all. There are much more stuff in there besides the ability to sing Rabindrasangeet or having a cute nickname. To me Bengali culture is not limited to going to coffee house or sounding intellectual, it is about realizing the things our beloved and revered stalwarts taught us and following their paths. It is about rebelling like Derozio by breaking all chains of dead habit, about loving the most downtrodden countrymen as our our brothers like Swamiji, finding solace in Rabindranath, feeling the deepest sorrow of the poor villagers like Sarat Chandra, on being the firebrand that Nazrul was, making the impossible possible like Netaji, cherishing the children in us like Sukumar Ray, finding our ways in the dark with the help of knowledge like Jagadish Bose...with that comes a race of people who value knowledge and education above everything else. A refined taste in music, arts that also reflects in clothes and dresses. A sharp intellect that gives rise to wit. Creativity that shows up in various places from food to baby names. A questioning spirit that made us liberals who might believe in god, but would not become vegetarians just because some people interpret Hinduism like that.

In Satyajit Ray's famous movie "Agantuk" (the stranger) Utpal Dutta, a character who was interested in anthropology and spent many years among different tribes of the world was saying that before he left home, all the works of the most famous literary people of both English and Bengali were instilled in him. That is what I feel too. In all my steps and my behavior, if the teachings and ideas of these people shine through then I would be able to become a true follower of all these people whom I so dearly love.