The Song of the Little Road (An Adaptation)

Recently, as I watched Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy once again (this was the digitally remastered version and so watching it was quite some experience), I had a strange realization. While Satyajit Ray received international fame for these movies, and much deservedly so since they were brilliantly made, I think the world of Apu is not the world of Satyajit but rather the world of the Bengali novelist whose novels (Pather Panchali and Aparajito) these movies are based on, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Bibhutibhushan indeed grew up in a small village in south Bengal and completed his education in Calcutta amidst abject poverty. So the resemblance between Apu and Bibhutibhushan is much more than that between Apu and Satyajit; Satyajit belonged to a reputed and fairly well-off Bengali family and grew up in an urban setting through and through.

And more importantly, at least for Pather Panchali (I haven’t read Aparajito yet), what was shown in the movie was already there in the book: the characters, the dialogue, and even the visual imagery. Satyajit only meticulously reproduced the magic of the book on-screen. Of course that deserves immense credit which he did receive. But to me, the unfortunate part is that somehow, probably because the international audience had a much easier access to the Apu movies than the Apu books, people tend to associate the Apu trilogy much more with Satyajit than with Bibhutibhushan, outside Bengal and even inside Bengal.

I feel the original novels deserve as much attention as the movies (though it’s unfortunate that people read less and watch more these days). So I decided to translate selected parts of the novel Pather Panchali for a global audience here. Again, translating the entire novel is a massive task and I am not ready to embark on that endeavour right now; in my adaptation, I will only use chapters from the novel which focus on Apu’s relationship with the natural world and his mental growth, since I feel that’s the main focus of the novel, and since I also feel that the movie, as great as it is, doesn’t capture this aspect of the novel very well (it’s probably because of a fundamental limitation of the cinematic medium).

I hope the beauty of the novel doesn’t get lost in my translation. Any kind of feedback is welcome.

A glossary of colloquial terms can be found at the end of the text.

Chapter 1: The Kuthi and the Field

Photo courtesy: Chhotoder Pather Panchali, A. Mukherjee and Co. Pvt. Ltd.

At the northern limit of the village of Nischindipur lived Harihar Ray in a small kothabari. Harihar was an ordinary householder, with his family of four, which included him, surviving on a meagre income from a few acres of land that he had inherited from his father and annual donations from a few disciples.

Since it neared the end of the month of Magh, it was quite cold. On an afternoon of that month, which coincided with the Saraswati Puja, several inhabitants of Nischindipur walked along a narrow earthen path, lined by shrubs and bushes on both sides. They were headed towards the field next to the Sahib’s Kuthi, where they expected to spot the blue jay, or neelkantha, as they called it locally. Spotting the bird was often considered auspicious.

One of them said, ‘Hari, have you again put your garden under the hold of Bhushno gowalah?’

The person on the receiving end of this question was Harihar Ray himself. His six-year-old son Apu had accompanied him on this trip. As Hari was about to respond to the question in the affirmative, he took notice of Apu’s sudden absence and screamed, ‘Khoka! O Khoka!’

A lean, pretty boy emerged from the shrubs and rejoined the group.

‘Why did you fall behind again?’ said Harihar. ‘Keep walking.’

‘What just ran through the forest, dad?’ said Apu, wonder in his eyes. ‘Large ears!’

Harihar ignored his son’s question and embarked on a discussion about fishing with Nabeen Palit, a fellow villager. That did not discourage Apu from asking the same question again: ‘What paced through the trees, dad? Giant ears!’

‘Who knows, son! I’m at my wit’s end to answer your never-ending questions: what’s this, what’s that. Come on, keep walking!’

As Apu walked ahead, in front of the rest of the group, Nabeen Palit said, ‘I think, Hari, if you really want to catch fish, you should try out Bainsha’s lake. Nepal Parui from the east neighbourhood is catching several-kilos-heavy fish on a daily basis there.’

All the adults in the group stared at his face in wonder. ‘It’s an ancient lake,’ he continued. ‘The water being deep, at the centre it’s pitch black, with lotuses surrounding you all around. Anyone who goes out there on a boat trembles in fear until he reaches the shore.’

Just when he had his audience at the peak of their attention and interest, Apu pointed at the ulukhor shrub and screamed enthusiastically, ‘Look, dad, it ran past us once again. Large ears!’

This time Harihar caught Apu by his hand and said, ‘You are disturbing me too much. This is why I was reluctant to bring you along.’

‘What’s it, dad?’

‘I don’t know; I didn’t notice it. Maybe it’s a pig.’

‘Not a pig, dad, it was quite small.’ Apu bent down to suggest the beast’s height from the ground.

‘Ohh! You don’t have to explain further. Now I know what it is.’

‘It’s a rabbit, Khoka!’ intervened Naveen Palit. ‘It’s a rabbit!’

The kid had seen the picture of the rabbit on his alphabet book, but that the rabbit jumped about shrubs in the real world and could be spotted like he just did was beyond his comprehension.

The village folks walked off the narrow path into the field. There were shrubs and bushes all over the field. Giant kalmi leaves covered the tops of all the shrubs providing gentle shade to all the vegetation underneath. Blue aparajita flowers bloomed unvanquished, true to their name, facing the afternoon sun — the softness of the verdure, the chirping of the birds, nature’s bounties abounded here.

Apu asked his father about the whereabouts of the blue jay, and his father assured him that the bird would soon be spotted on the top of a babul tree. Apu turned his head upwards, his eyes wandering from one tree top to another. Meanwhile, Nabeen Palit carried on with his discussion, with the topics ranging from the profit he made from his farming activity on the northern part of this field, the bricks of the Sahib’s Kuthi near the field going on sale, and the potential buyer of those bricks, Maati Daan from Nababganj, rapidly increasing his wealth over time.

For some reason, the neelkantha stayed elusive to all anticipating eyes that day. The Kuthi lay deserted on one end of the field, near the river, like the skeleton of a mammoth, ferocious beast from a pre-historic era, with this cold solitary afternoon slowly encapsulating it in a grey sheath. Harihar lovingly said to Apu, ‘Khoka, look, this is Sahib’s Kuthi.‘

Near the Kuthi lay the grave of the child of Mr. John Lermor, the sahib who lived and worked at this Kuthi once upon a time, when it was the headquarter of the Bengal Indigo Concern. On the tombstone, now quite dilapidated, one could still decipher the following writing:

‘Here lies Edwin Lermor,

The only son of John and Mrs. Lermor,

Born May 13, 1853.

Died April 27, 1860.’

As the breeze blew gently across the branches of the trees that formed a canopy over the tombstone, yellow flowers softly descended upon it. While for others the child had passed into oblivion, the trees of this forest had not forgotten him; they were still playing homage to this child who once played in this sylvan world.

Apu looked around in wonder. In his life span of six years, this was the farthest he had travelled from home. His own house’s front yard, his friend Nera’s house, and Ranu-di‘s house formed his world thus far. Beyond this Kuthi’s field, perhaps there was the land of the fairies, thought the boy: the land his mother alluded to in the tales she told him every night, where a prince on exile slept alone under a tree, his sword beside him. Beyond this field, probably no man from this world lived: it was a world of the impossible, of the unknown.

***

On their way back home, Apu paused and bent down, stretching his hand towards the shrub, in the direction of a bunch of fruits which had a very bright appearance. Harihar screamed, ‘Don’t touch them, that’s alkushi. Your hands will itch; I am not taking you out again; I have been asking you all this while to stick to the middle of the road, but you won’t listen.’

‘Why will my hands itch, dad?’

‘There’s poison in them. Once your hands itch, you will start screaming!’

Harihar and Apu strode across their village and reached their home. Apu’s mother Sarbajaya came out and said to her husband, ‘What kept you out this long? You took Apu along; the night is so cold; and he’s not even wearing anything warm.’

‘Ohh, taking him along led to so much trouble; he strayed away from the group so often and pestered me with so many questions; he even tried to pull fruits from the alkushi tree,’ said Harihar. Then he turned towards Apu, touched him tenderly, and said, ‘You were so eager to see the Kuthi and the field since this morning. Are you happy now?’

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Exploring the Connections Between Rusty Fiction and Doordarshan’s TV-series ‘Ek Tha Rusty’: My guide to the Rusty universe

Much like the Harry Potter universe and the Lord of the Rings universe, there is a Rusty-universe, in the world of literature. But, the phrase ‘Rusty-universe’ is rarely used, even though its creator, Ruskin Bond, is quite famous—at least in India. It’s probably because unlike the novels about Harry Potter or the novels about Middle Earth, the semi-autobiographical stories about the young Anglo-Indian boy Rusty, who grows up in the Garhwal Himalayas to become a writer, are quite scattered and sometimes lack self-consistency.

The first works about Rusty are the two novels The Room on the Roof and The Vagrants in the Valley; they chronicle Rusty’s experiences as a seventeen-year-old boy in the town of Dehradun, at the foothill of the Himalayas. The works, about Rusty, that come after that are broadly of two different periods: Rusty’s childhood days—losing his father, living with his grandmother and Uncle Ken, living with his step-father—and Rusty’s adulthood—coming back from England, settling down in Mussoorie, and establishing himself as a writer. Most of these works are in the form of stories and novelettes. The stories, particularly, were published, first, in different magazines. They were later arranged in a chronological fashion—to make them look less scattered—and published as books: Rusty The Boy from The Hills, Rusty Runs Away, Rusty and the Leopard, Rusty Goes to London, and Rusty Comes Home. 

But they still lack self-consistency to a degree; it’s probably because they weren’t thought of as parts of one self-consistent universe when they were conceived. And consistency is always the key in universe-building. In some stories—for example, The Woman on Platform 8—the young protagonist has a similar background as Rusty. But his name is not Rusty—at least in the originally published version of the story. Sometimes, the same events have been narrated in different stories, but they have been ascribed to different people. For example, things, which happen to Rusty’s father in My Father’s Trees in Dehra , happen to Rusty’s grandfather, instead, in The Tree Lover. 

Nonetheless, all these tales are semi-autobiograophical in nature; the protagonist is, most often, an extended version of Ruskin Bond himself—sometimes as a young boy and sometimes as an adult. The settings are, most often, the Garhwal Himalayas. So I prefer to call it the Rusty universe, or Rusty fiction; the name Rusty is, still, used most often to refer to the protagonist in these stories.

In that context, of late, I discovered an old Doordarshan TV-series on the internet; it’s called Ek Tha Rusty. As I watched the series, I went through the Rusty fiction, more carefully, all over again. I couldn’t find good resources on the internet talking about which exact Rusty stories—some stories, written by Ruskin Bond, but without Rusty or someone like Rusty were also used in the series—were used to come up with the screenplay of the series. Particularly, I couldn’t find any useful resource, in that regard, for the first season that shows Rusty’s childhood days.

So I have thought of writing an article myself, on my blog, where I shall explore the connections between Rusty fiction and Ek Tha Rusty. The purpose of the article is just to help the reader identify the story, which each episode in the series is based upon. The plot in some stories has been described here, in short, for that purpose. I also mention how the TV-series deviates from the original stories, in some cases.

But none of the stories has been critically analysed, barring the novella The Sensualist (it’s a philosophical story, so I permitted myself to analyse it). Each story is a gem, in my opinion, and to quote Stephen Fry—who said this about P. G. Wodehouse (Ruskin Bond often talks about him) and not about Ruskin Bond though—’You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’

So, here’s the list of the episodes in each of the three seasons of the show and the corresponding short stories and novelettes:

 

Ek Tha Rusty: Season I

Episode 1, 2: Rusty’s early childhood days are narrated here—when he used to live with his father.

Related stories: The Roof of Many Colours and The Funeral . There’s a reference to My Father’s Trees in Dehra/ The Tree Lover, mentioned above,as well; Rusty’s dad mentions that Rusty’s granddad used to plant trees in remote areas where there was no one to see them.

Episode 3: The time that Rusty spends with his grandmother, after his father’s death, has been depicted here.

Related stories: The Photograph and Life with Uncle Ken; Uncle Ken appears as a different uncle, Uncle Victor, though in this episode. Other events in the same story Life with Uncle Ken are shown in the later episodes; there, the name Uncle Ken is retained.

Episode 4,5,6: Rusty runs away from his boarding school, in these episodes, along with his friend Daljit.

Related story: Running Away 

Episode 7, 8: Rusty has moved to his stepfather’s—and his mother’s—house in Mussoorie. There, he befriends old Miss Mackenzie.

Related stories: The Prospect of Flowers and Adventures of a Book Lover (Rusty’s stepfather’s hunting expedition has been referred to, here)

Episode 9, 10, 11: These are the most humorous episodes in this season, and in the entire series, in my opinion. And why won’t they be? They are about Uncle Ken, after all!

Related stories: Life with Uncle Ken and The Boy Who Broke the Bank 

Episode 12: This is one of the most touching episodes in the series. Rusty doesn’t appear in this episode, and in the related story. This episode has been connected with the other episodes by showing, in the previous episode, that Mani, the protagonist here, is Rusty’s friend.

Related story: Getting Granny’s Glasses

Episode 13: Rusty’s relationship with his stepfather is dwelt upon in this episode; he grows from hating his stepfather to liking him.

Related story: A Job Well Done; this is the first time what’s presented in the show deviates significantly from what’s in the book. In the story, Rusty and the gardener throw Rusty’s stepfather into a well. And his stepfather mysteriously disappears after that in Rusty fiction. Instead, Mr. Harrison, Rusty’s father’s friend, becomes his guardian. Harrison is presented as a ruthless caretaker in Rusty fiction—for example, in the novel The Room on The Roof.  Some researchers have compared Rusty fiction with Ruskin Bond’s autobiographies and inferred that the character of Mr. Harrison is inspired by Rusty’s step-father.

But, in Ek Tha Rusty, Rusty’s stepfather hasn’t been shown in a bad light, beyond the beginning of this episode. Tormented by his cold behaviour, Rusty does throw him into the well, here, as well; but then it’s just shown to be Rusty’s dream. Waking up from his dream, Rusty warms up to his stepfather; they started getting along, after that. The episodes in Rusty’s adolescent years, as narrated in The Room on The Roof, have not been shown in the series; Mr. Harrison doesn’t appear, in the series, at all.

Episode 14: Rusty’s friends Somi and Biju are introduced here. Rusty’s friendship with Ms. Bean has also been explored, in this episode. Ms. Bean tells Rusty a story about two sisters who lived and fought once upon a time, on the hills.

Related story: The Fight; the name of the protagonist in the original story is not Rusty, but the protagonist, who takes part in the fight in the pool, is also a boy living in the mountains. In this series, Rusty takes part in that fight, instead.

The Good Old Days; Ms. Mackenzie narrates the incident about the two sisters to Rusty in the original story. But in the show, since Ms. Mackenzie has already been dead (presumably), it’s Ms. Bean who tells Rusty the story. Ms. Bean again appears in Season II of Ek Tha Rusty; by the time, Rusty has grown into an adult.

Episode 15,16:  Rusty doesn’t appear in these episodes. Rusty’s friend, Biju, is shown to lead a battle against a man-eating panther, here.

Related story: Panther’s Moon; much like Getting Granny’s Glasses, this isn’t a Rusty story. But this, too, has been connected with the Rusty-centric episodes by making Biju, the protagonist here, Rusty’s friend. This story is beautiful, but I guess it was hard to adapt it on-screen because a panther plays a key role in it. Season I of the show was made in the 90-s, when the technology and the budget—it’s a Doordarshan series—weren’t probably suitable to show wildlife-based stories on-screen.

Episode 17,18: Rusty’s family moves to Miss Mackenzie’s cottage. They soon encounter a ghost, who lives over there.

Related story: I am not sure what the original story is, in this case. Most probably, it isn’t a Rusty story. It’s probably one of the many ghost stories that Ruskin Bond has written. While this story is good as an isolated story, I am not a big fan of it being presented as a Rusty story in this episode. Rusty stories are semi-autobiographical in nature; they are about Ruskin Bond’s life experiences. Showing an encounter between Rusty and a ghost implies that Ruskin Bond encountered a ghost in his real life; that’s probably absurd.

Episode 19,20: Rusty doesn’t appear here as well. Biju’s sister Binya is the main character here. She acquires a beautiful blue umbrella, but the shopkeeper in the village desires to possess it.

Related story: The Blue Umbrella; this is one of the most critically acclaimed stories, written by Ruskin Bond. So, needless to say, these two episodes are extremely touching.

Episode 21–26: I couldn’t find these episodes online, but Season II of the show, often, shows Rusty reminiscing his past. Thus, I got to know some of the stories that are presented in these six episodes:

Related stories: The Last Tonga Ride (Rusty’s relationship with his ayah is explored here, along with other things like the decision of their family to move out of Mussoorie) and He Said It With Arsenic  (a story about one of Rusty’s uncles, who is a serial-killer)

 

Ek Tha Rusty: Season II

The presentation style is different here, compared to Season I. Two long stories/ novelettes are presented concurrently over the length of the season:

Love is a Sad Song: 

This is a dreamy, romantic story. Rusty is as a thirty-year-old man, here; he has settled down in Mussoorie and has started to acquire some fame as a writer. He visits the family of a friend, and falls in love with his friend’s cousin Sushila—she is a teenager.

In the TV-series, this story has been connected with the episodes where Rusty runs aways from his boarding school; Rusty’s love interest Sushila is the cousin of the friend with whom he fled school—Daljit.

Who Killed the Rani?:

This is a slow-paced detective story/ murder-mystery with Inspector Keemat Lal, Rusty’s friend, as the protagonist. The mystery unfolds over several episodes of Season II. True to the spirit of any Ruskin Bond story, this story is not just about a murder-mystery—and the subtleties associated with it—but also about the character of Inspector Lal and the conflict that he faces, internally, as he tried to unravel the mystery.

 

Ek Tha Rusty: Season III

The presentation style, here, is somewhere in-between that in Season I and Season II. Some episodes are dedicated to a singular story; in some other episodes, multiple stories are presented concurrently.

Episode 1-9: Rusty, in his thirties, runs into a recluse, living in a cave in the mountains. The recluse narrates his life experiences to Rusty over the course of a night, sitting inside the cave.

Related story: The Sensualist; this isn’t a typical Ruskin Bond story, in my opinion. In fact it had been a controversial novella when it was first published; Bond was charged with obscenity for writing this novella, but was later acquitted.

This novella belongs to the theme: ‘a journey of self-discovery’. The recluse in the cave,  narrates his journey of self-discovery to Rusty. But this novella doesn’t seem to be as popular as other novels like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which have a similar theme—journey of self-discovery, set in the Indian context, guided by India’s rich spiritual traditions. This is probably because Ruskin Bond, in all his honesty, doesn’t glorify this whole process of indulging in the senses—mostly of the amorous kind— and then renouncing the world unlike many other writers, who glorify these two extremes at any cost.

Instead, in the novella, Rusty—and thus Bond himself—takes pity on the recluse, who goes through that exact process only to take refuge in a cave in the mountains, in the end. Bond tells the recluse that he lost to the world because he went to an extreme, riding on his senses and his ego. `But the world isn’t exclusively a place for the pursuit of sensual pleasure,’ says Rusty—who is the real saint here, I think, despite living amongst people—to this supposed saint, living in a cave.

The ending—in both the novella and in the TV-series—is particularly fascinating. The secret behind the recluse’s lack of hunger turns out to be his smoking of cannabis, found in the mountains. The recluse glorifies it as the victory of mind over matter. But Bond tells him, candidly, that the plant is working on his mind—so, clearly, it is the victory of matter over mind. I have rarely found this level of honesty, on the part of the writer, in other novels belonging to this ‘journey of self-discovery’ theme—for example, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road; most of those novels just seem to glorify psychedelics, at any cost.

The sensual content in this novella—it’s named The Sensualist, after all—was hard to reproduce in a Doordarshan TV-series, for obvious reasons. Some of the subtleties in the book were, hence, lost in the series. For example, what the woman, living in a remote house on the top of a hill, does to the protagonist in the show—that’s what precisely makes him a recluse—is quite different from what she does to him in the book. That ends up changing the message in the story, to a degree. But, I think, since the moment the director decided to adapt this particular novella for a Doordarshan series, this has been inevitable. Nonetheless, these episodes are still worth watching, and the novella is definitely worth a read.

Episode 10: This is a laid-back episode, mostly spent reminiscing episodes from Season II.

Episode 11-19: Multiple short stories are used to come up with the screenplay in these episodes. Hence, events from all these stories happen at the same time in these episodes, the commonality being they all happen in Mussoorie, and Rusty or his friends—particularly Inspector Keemat Lal—are involved in them.

Binya Passes By:

This is, essentially, a prose-poem where Rusty, often, hears a song that comes from the woods near his house; he ventures into the woods in pursuit of the singer. The singer turns out to be a rural girl, who lives in a village, far away, on the other side of the hill.

In the TV-series, this story has been connected with Season II; the girl who is involved in the murder of the Rani walks around the woods, here, singing the song that mesmerises Rusty.

From Small Beginnings:

This story is particularly significant among all the stories Bond wrote, if the reader is interested in knowing about his personal life—after he turned thirty—and who all does he currently live with. This is where Rusty meets Prem, a villager from a nearby hill; Rusty—and thus Ruskin Bond—ends up adopting Prem’s family; he currently lives with them in Landour, a small town very close to Mussoorie.

At Green’s Hotel:

This is yet another murder-mystery; it’s set at a hotel, called Green’s Hotel, in Mussoorie. In the TV-series, the hotel is managed by Rusty’s cousin, and thus Rusty gets to know about the mystery.

Hanging at the Mango-Tope:

This is a macabre tale about how the dacoit Mangal Singh takes revenge on police-inspector Hukum Singh. This story has been connected to Season 2 by showing Keemat  Lal as Hukum Singh’s subordinate. As it turns out, Hukum Singh’s life ends up hanging in a balance. And his fate is in the hands of Keemat Lal.

Episode 20: Rusty travels to Delhi to meet his bed-ridden mother; she is waiting for a major surgery. Together, they reminisce the old days: Rusty’s father, his separation from his mother, and a particular photograph from the yesteryears.

Related story: The Last Time I Saw Delhi

Episode 21-25: In these episodes, Rusty visits a small town near Delhi, known as the Hope Town. There, he meets Sushila—his love interest from Season II. She is, now, married to the owner of the hotel in Hope Town where he is staying, but Rusty’s love for her is rekindled.

Related story: Time Stops at Shamli; this story can be treated as a sequel to Love is a Sad Song, though the writing style is different. Love is a Sad Song reads like a prose-poem; this story reads like a typical Ruskin Bond story.

 

To conclude, though all the three seasons are quite good—they all have been directed by the same person, Shubhadarshini Singh—I, personally, have enjoyed Season I more than Season II and Season III. It’s partly because. each episode is dedicated to a particular story in Season I unlike in Season II and Season III, where multiple stories unfold concurrently in the same episode. The former approach makes the screenplay less confusing, I feel.

Also, it’s partly because I find the stories about Rusty’s childhood a little more enjoyable than that about his adulthood—at least when I see them on-screen. Of all the works about Ruskin Bond’s adult-life that I have read, the ones I find the most interesting are his essays. Bereft of characters and plots, these essays simply contain descriptions of the mountains, the trees, the birds, and the animals; he simply watches them from his window and writes about them. But it’s hard to translate those essays into a screenplay for a TV-series. Comparatively, depicting the events from Rusty’s childhood on-screen is much easier.

 

 

 

 

Estimating the orbits of planets and comets from Newton’s laws alone: My accompaniment to Episode 3 of “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” and Episode 3 of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”

Any high school physics textbook talks about Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion after it introduces Newton’s laws of motion and Newton’s law of gravity. It is mentioned that planets go around the sun following elliptical orbits, with the sun at one of the two focal points. This is Kepler’s first law. Two other laws, which are formulated by Kepler, are mentioned after that. It is also mentioned that Newton’s laws of motion, coupled with Newton’s law of gravity, can be used to derive the Kepler’s laws.  However, if my memory serves me well, the derivation of Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws is only done for a circular orbit as opposed to an elliptical orbit in the high school textbooks. The books probably mention that a circle is a special case of an ellipse and the mathematics is much simpler for circular motion than elliptical motion.

When I read about Kepler’s laws in those books during high school, I was probably too immature to ask the deeper questions. The stress of JEE preparation didn’t help much either in that regard. Every moment was valuable and should be utilized solving  complicated problems, each with 10 pulleys and 15 inclined planes, since these problems   appeared often in the JEE question paper. Speculating about the correct derivation of Kepler’s laws was considered just a waste of time back then.

However, I revisited Kepler’s Laws sometime during the early days of my doctoral research when I had more time and more maturity to ask the deeper questions. I realized that I mainly had two doubts:

1. Assuming that the planet is going in a circle around the sun with an uniform velocity, it can be easily shown that such a motion is indeed supported by an attractive gravitational force applied by the sun on the earth. That was shown in the high school physics textbooks too. However, why does the planet start rotating around the sun in a circle in the first place? If the sun is static and say the planet is at a distance from the sun, an attractive gravitational force will just pull the planet into the sun. Only if we assume that the planet has started rotating around the sun, we can show that such a motion is supported, using Netwon’s laws of motion and Netwon’s law of gravity.
2. How can we show that an elliptical orbit is also supported by the same Netwon’s laws? I tried to show it analytically, but the differential equation wasn’t easy to solve unlike the case of the circular orbit. Also, what determines whether the planet will follow an elliptical orbit or a circular orbit?

A friend in graduate school probably mentioned to me at that point that the initial condition determines the orbit taken by the planet. Whenever the planets broke apart from the sun or came from elsewhere into the solar system- whatever be the case- the speed at which it got introduced into the sun’s gravity field and its initial direction determine whether it will go around the sun in a circle or in an ellipse. Based on the initial condition, it may also fly off and never come back. While the idea seemed interesting and plausible, I didn’t get a chance to verify it for myself by reading a college textbook on classical mechanics. While I took several courses on quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, electromagnetism and solid state physics during my PhD, I didn’t take a good course in classical mechanics. I probably should have taken one.

Recently, the prolonged home isolation during lockdown gave me the chance to watch the celebrated series on cosmology- “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”, hosted by Carl Sagan in 1980, in its entirety. I also watched a few episodes of the next season of the series, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2014. In Episode 3 of either series, the host emphasizes on the importance of Kepler’s Laws in the advent of not just cosmology but science in general. In the collaboration with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler observed the motion of various planets in the solar system meticulously with the telescope. Kepler concluded that the planets move in elliptical orbits and not in circular orbits (Kepler’s 1st law). He also came up with mathematical laws to describe such motion (Kepler’s 2nd and 3rd laws). While Kepler’s laws were purely empirical, several years later, Isaac Newton came up with his own laws on motion of all particles in general and the gravitational force they apply on each other. Using these universal laws, Newton, along with Edmond Halley (after whom the comet which reappears on earth every 76 years is named), showed that the motion of all planets and even the comets can be shown to follow Kepler’s empirical laws. Both Sagan and Neil Tyson seem to agree that this derivation of Kepler’s laws from Netwon’s laws (Sagan doesn’t talk much about this derivation in the show but talks about it in the accompanying book) is the first giant step in the field of physics and cosmology. The derivation shows that simple laws that govern the motion of just about any two commonplace bodies on earth can be used to explain and predict the motion of celestial objects. Such is the universality of these Newton’s laws.

These episodes of the “Cosmos” series motivated me to look back at Kepler’s laws again during these lockdown days. I found that a college level classical mechanics textbook indeed derives Kepler’s elliptical orbits from Newton’s laws, but lots of other new concepts are used to get there. And several pages are exhausted in the process. But, I told myself that physics wise only Newton’s laws should be needed to get to Kepler’s laws. I realized that once the differential equations are written down for Newton’s laws, solving them analytically for elliptical orbits isn’t trivial. This is what I had observed during my PhD days as well. I assumed that all the other new concepts are introduced in the college level classical mechanics textbook to carry out the derivation completely analytically. But, I wanted to avoid this analytical method, knowing from experience that this kind of analytical techniques is indeed not generalizable. Unless one is a mathematical genius, it’s extremely hard to solve every new problem, which is non-trivial, analytically.

Hence, I decided to write the differential equations corresponding to the Netwon’s laws applied on the sun and the planet, and solve them numerically on a computer. Polar coordinates and all are not needed as a result and Cartesian coordinates (x,y) can be used as shown in the Figure 1 below:

 

 

Figure 1- Schematic showing the position of the sun and the planet

 

The method followed:

The sun is at the origin (0,0) in Figure 1. The assumption is that though the planet pulls the sun due to gravity, the sun remains fixed. This holds true because the sun is much heavier than the planet. At any given time “t”, the planet is at position: (x,y). From Newton’s law of gravity, the force is experienced by the planet is given by:

 

 

 (as shown in Figure 1).

Using Newton’s 2nd law of motion (F=ma)- Newton’s 1st and 3rd laws of motion are special cases of this law- we can write:

 

Now all I did was solving these two differential equations numerically. Initial conditions for position and velocity (x,y,dx/dt,dy/dt) are needed though. As can be seen next, these initial conditions determine the nature of the planet’s orbit and all other things, connected to the planet’s motion. For my initial condition, I always consider  y=0, dx/dt=0, x>0 and dy/dt > 0. With respect to Figure 1, this means that at t=0, the planet is somewhere on the x axis, to the right of the sun, and the planet is moving orthogonal to the vector that connects the sun with the planet. By splitting the future time (t) into very small time steps and using the finite difference method, after every time step, the velocity (dx/dt, dy/dt) and the position (x,y) of the planet are calculated from equation (1) and (2). Thus, Kepler’s laws can also be obtained as I discuss below:

Kepler’s 1st law: The planet moves around the sun, following an elliptical orbit. The sun is at any one of the two focal points of the ellipse.

The following figures that I obtain (Figure 2,3 and 4) show that given that the initial position of the planet is the same (the sun is always at the origin), based on the initial velocity of the planet, it either takes a fairly circular trajectory (very low eccentricity value of the ellipse- we later show that for the case of the earth, the orbit is almost a circle) or a much more elliptical trajectory. For the nearly circular orbit (ellipticity =0.09) in Figure 2 (initial condition: x =1.5 A.U.,y=0,dx/dt=0, dy/dt= 25 km/s), the sun is at the center (two focal points of the ellipse overlap in this case). For the more elliptical trajectory (ellipticity= 0.55) in Figure 3, which is obtained when the initial velocity is higher (initial condition:x=1.5 A.U., y=0, dx/dt=0, dy/dt=30 km/s), the sun is at one of the two focal points. This is verified by calculating the eccentricity (e) from the length of semi-major axis (a) and the length of semi-minor axis (b) and then verifying that the distance between the sun and the planet initially (perihelion distance) is indeed a(1-e) as expected for an ellipse. When the initial velocity is even higher (35 km/s), the planet simply goes far away from the sun and never returns, as intuitively expected (Figure 4).

Figure 2- Orbit of the planet when initial distance from the sun is 1.5 A.U and the initial velocity is 25 km/s

Figure 3- Orbit of the planet when initial distance from the sun is 1.5 A.U and the initial velocity is 30 km/s

 

Figure 4- Trajectory of the planet when initial distance from the sun is 1.5 A.U and the initial velocity is 35 km/s

Thus Figure 2,3 and 4 not only show evidence for the Kepler’s first Law but also verify my friend’s claim that the initial condition of the planet determines its trajectory. Intuitively, when a planet has a very high velocity, it can simply avoid the gravitational pull of the sun and fly off. When the initial velocity is lower, the planet gets trapped by the gravitational field and keeps orbiting around the sun. However a certain magnitude of initial velocity, orthogonal to the vector connecting the sun and the planet (velocity in y direction in Figure 2,3 and 4), is needed for that to happen. In absence of that velocity, the planet will simply be drawn into the sun. Thus, both the doubts I had initially on this topic during my PhD days, as I had mentioned earlier, got resolved after doing these computations. Nevertheless, I carried out some more computations and generated some more plots to verify the other two laws, formulated by Kepler.

 

Kepler’s 2nd law: The planet sweeps out equal areas at equal times during its motion.

I calculated the area swept out by the planet per unit time (dA/dt) using the expression:

for all time instants (t) during the motion. Figure 5 shows the plot of dA/dt versus time (t) for the initial condition corresponding to Figure 2 (x =1.5 A.U.,y=0,dx/dt=0, dy/dt= 25 km/s). Figure 6 shows the plot of dA/dt versus time (t) for the initial condition corresponding to Figure 3 (x =1.5 A.U.,y=0,dx/dt=0, dy/dt= 30 km/s). In both cases, we see that the areal velocity is constant with respect to time, thus showing evidence for Kepler’s 2nd law.

Figure 5- Areal velocity of the planet vs time, when initial distance from the sun is 1.5 A.U and the initial velocity is 25 km/s

Figure 6- Aerial velocity of the planet when initial distance from the sun is 1.5 A.U and the initial velocity is 30 km/s

 

 

Kepler’s 3rd law: Square of the time period of the planet’s motion about the sun is proportional to the cube of the average distance of the planet from the sun.

For the cases corresponding to Figure 2 and Figure 3, the square of the time period is plotted against the cube of the average distance between sun and the planet in Figure 7 below. For several other initial conditions with different initial values of x and dy/dt (y=0, dx/dt=0 always), corresponding orbits are obtained and the square of time period is again plotted against the cube of the average distance between sun and the planet in Figure 7 below. As we can see from Figure 7, a straight line can indeed be passed through all the points. This shows evidence that Kepler’s third law is valid for planetary motion about the stars.

Figure 7- The square of the time period of the orbit of the planet vs the cube of the average distance between the planet and the sun.

 

It is to be noted that in the case of all the laws, I have said that my computations show evidence for the Kepler’s laws, as opposed to saying that my computations prove the laws. This is because I think that in order to prove the laws, analytical expressions are needed to be obtained. As I mentioned before, a college level classical mechanics textbook follows such an analytical method, but I do not follow the analytical method over here.

Comparison of the planetary trajectories computed here with actual astronomical observations:

I was particularly interested in matching the result of my computation with the actual motion observed for planetary/ celestial bodies. Two planets caught my interest. One was of course our earth. The second was Mars. This was because I learned from Episode 3 of  “Cosmos- A Personal Voyage” that observation of the Mars’s orbit through the telescope made Kepler strongly doubt the prevalent idea that planetary orbits are circular. As he found out, Mars’s orbit is elliptical and not circular.

I gathered the following information: distance between earth and sun when they are closest/ perihelion distance (1 A.U.), velocity of earth at that point (30 km/s), distance between Mars and sun when they are closest/ perihelion distance (1.38 A.U.) and velocity of Mars at that point (26.5 km/s). I used the Wikipedia articles, related to the same, and associated research article- “Numerical expressions for precession formulae and mean elements for the Moon and planets”, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 282 (2): 663–683- for this purpose. I used these numbers as initial conditions in the equations (1) and (2) mentioned above, solved the equations numerically (as mentioned above) and obtained the trajectories of both the earth (Figure 8) and Mars (Figure 9). The eccentricity and time period (earth: 1 year, Mars: 1.9 years), obtained from my calculations, matched with that mentioned in the Wikipedia articles and the associated research article. While earth follows a circular orbit (eccentricity= 0), Mars follows a slightly elliptical orbit (eccentricity= 0.1).

Figure 8- Orbit of the earth around the sun, as obtained from the computation carried out here

Figure 9- Orbit of Mars around the sun, as obtained from the computation carried out here

 

The third body that fascinated me was the Halley’s comet. Neil deGrasse Tyson spent a large proportion of Episode 3 of “Cosmos- A Spacetime Odyssey” discussing how Halley worked with Newton to predict the elliptical orbit of the Hailey’s comet. The geometry of the comet’s trajectory fascinated me as much as the tale, connected to its discovery.  The sun is at one of the two focal points of the highly eccentric ellipse, which Halley’s comet follows. Hence, when the comet comes very close to the sun (perihelion), it moves very fast. And when it is far away from the sun (aphelion), it moves very slow (Kepler’s second law: aerial velocity remains constant). The period of the orbit is 76 years. Thus, Halley’s comet shows up near the sun and the earth every 76 years, moves very fast and disappears.

Following the same method that I followed for computing the orbit of earth and Mars, I could compute the much more elliptical orbit that Halley’s comet follows. I even got the eccentricity and the time period of the orbit to match with numbers reported in the Wikipedia article on Halley’s comet and associated research data in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s database(https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=1P). Both the eccentricity (0.967) and the time period (76 years) of Halley’s comet’s orbit turned out to be much higher than that of the earth and Mars, as anticipated (Figure 10, Figure 11). When the comet is the farthest from the sun, its velocity is as low as 0.9 km/s in my computation (Figure 12), which also matches with the actual number reported elsewhere (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982S%26W….21…21R/abstract). Of all the results I obtained in connection to this article, being able to predict this highly elliptical and mostly slow trajectory of Halley’s comet gave me the most delight- I must admit!

Figure 10- Orbit of Halley’s comet around the sun, as obtained from the computation carried out here

Figure 11- Position (x,y) of the Halley’s comet (with respect to Figure 1) vs time, showing time period of 76 years

Figure 12- Velocity of Halley’s comet as a function of time. The velocity is as low as 0.9 km/s when it is farthest from the sun.

 

Further speculation:

Thus, I have been able to resolve most of the doubts I initially had, connected to Kepler’s Laws, through this computation. As it turns out, the initial condition (distance from the sun and the velocity) play a key role in determining the trajectory of the planet or the comet. That makes me speculate what are the odds of such a thing happening. The possibility is quite high that fragments broken from the sun, or objects coming from elsewhere, are introduced in the sun’s gravitational field with such a high velocity that they simply fly off. Or their initial velocities can be so low that they get pulled into the sun. Yet, there are nine distinct planets and other smaller bodies around the sun, like the Halley’s comet, which go around and around the sun in circles and ellipses. Most of the planets also have satellites, which go around the them following similar orbit. I also learned from “Comos: A Personal Voyage” that most stars in the Milky Way galaxy have about ten planets on an average. Thus, the odds that a broken fragment from a star goes around and around the star in an orbit aren’t significant, though they are quite low. Is there a formal method to calculate the odds? I don’t know at the moment. May be I shall look it up and think about it more. It can probably be the topic of another article in this series.

 

 

Durga Puja 2019

It’s time for my annual blog post on Durga Puja. Like the previous years, I will review the literature published before and the movies released during this year’s festival. Then I will showcase some of the best puja pandals in Kolkata for this year.

Literature:

I have read this year’s Pujabarshiki Anandamela almost in its entirety, and Sharodiya Desh and Sharodiya Anandabazar Patrika in bits and pieces. I am looking forward to reading more of the latter two magazines in the upcoming weeks. Here’s a short review of the writings I found noteworthy in these magazines from what I read so far .

Hensehare Hunshiar (Stay alert in Henshehar) by Debashis Bandyopadhyay (teenage mystery fiction novel)- published in Pujabarshiki Anandamela:

Since last year, the writer Debashis Bandyopadhyay has apparently switched from “Bhubandadu” series (adventures of an old history professor named Bhubandadu and his grandsons and grand-daughters, all set in a historical context) to “Kaga- Boga” series — adventures of police officer/ detective Kantik Ganguly (Kaga) and his accomplice Boga (I forgot his full name, it’s rarely mentioned), who is the narrator of the stories. I missed the “Kaga-Boga” novel in last year’s Anandamela, which made it difficult initially for me to comprehend what was going on in the 2nd novel in this series, “Hensehare Hunshiar”. What added to the difficulty was the strange way the story has been narrated: dream sequences, surreal imagery, and bizarre characters.

There is a clear inspiration from Sukumar Ray’s “HoJoBoRoLo” with all the Bengali idioms taking some real shape in the novel. Just like “HoJoBoRoLo” has the characters Udho and Budho inspired from the colloquial Bengali phrase “Udhor pindi budhor ghare”, this novel has the characters Kanamama and Neimama based on the phrase “Neimamar cheye kanamama bhalo”. But this novel is much longer than “HoJoBoRoLo” and has an additional mystery component — hunt for some hidden treasure, references to which have been made through various poems and riddles. It is the job of Kaga and Boga to solve those riddles and get to the treasure. So in that sense, the novel is similar to any novel from the celebrated “Adbhuture” series by veteran writer Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay.  With Sirshendu’s series on a decline over the last decade, most probably due to his advanced age, it will cause utter delight to hardcore Anandamela fans like me if Debashis Bandyopdhyay carries his torch in the modern day and ushers in a new era in the mystery teen fiction writing  genre in Bengal.

Brikhha Anubadok (Tree Translator) by Srijato in Sharodiya Desh:

Ever since reading the famous Bengali poet Srijato’s novel “Tarabhora Akasher Niche” in Sharodiya Anandabazar Patrika two years back, I have been looking forward to the next piece of prose that will come out of his pen. This new novel of his, “Brikhha Anubadok” , doesn’t disappoint in this regard. The central theme of “Tarabhora Akasher Niche” was the artwork of Van Gogh, and how it impacted a schrizophrenia patient Ritwik in modern day Calcutta. The central theme of “Brikhha Anubadok” is the connection between the poetry of English poet Sylvia Plath and that of Bengali poet Jibananda Das. Also, the novel throughly discusses the difficulty associated with translating their works, as faced by an old English scholar William Bright, his daughter Carole, and a young Bengali scholar Samyak, whom Carole meets at a poetry workshop in a small picturesque town in Wales, UK.

Carole and Samyak have been tagged together by the workshop-organizers for a joint session on English and Bengali poetry, where Carole is supposed to read her English translations of Jibanananda’s poems (I have translated some myself in an earlier post in this blog) and Samyak is supposed to read his Bengali translations of Slyvia Plath’s poems. Much expectedly, Carole and Samyak  fall in love as they stroll around the town, which seems to be a paradise for bibliophiles with all its bookstores, stacked with old books, and idyllic coffee shops. The story of Carole’s father, Professor Bright, runs in parallel; he is suffering from alzheimer’s disease and lives in an old-age home, next to the sea. Though he can see the sea from his balcony everyday, he is not allowed to get close to it by the authorities. This separation, coupled with disillusion regarding his lifelong work on translation of poetry, increases his mental anguish.

Behind the frustration connected to translation, I feel there is a larger frustration related to depicting the complex emotions, felt in reality, and the nature of reality itself in a written language; this frustration pervades the novel. It is quite similar to the frustration faced by Van Gogh and Ritwik in their quest for capturing reality in its finest essence on canvas, in “Tarabhora Akasher Niche”. This, what I feel, is the limitation of any artistic medium, be it painting, music, or poetry. Art, by nature, is subjective and cannot depict reality in a deterministic way science can. It is true that modern-day science is still far from capturing all the fine emotions we feel as human beings. But, I feel, that is the limitation of the tools we have at our disposal to do science currently, and not a limitation of the scientific method itself. Hence, I feel the hope really lies in pursuing science and connecting it with different mediums of art rather than discarding science altogether and just indulging in arts which artists, including the writer here, often tend to do.

In any case, Srijato writes this novel beautifully, just as I had expected from this great modern day Bengali poet. It almost reads like a long prose-poem, full of vivid imagery, and is certainly worth a second read.

Movies:

Mitin Mashi (Aunt Mitin), directed by Arindam Sil, based on Bengali teenage detective fiction series by late writer Suchitra Bhattacharya 

This movie is adapted from one of the books in the teenage detective fiction series, called “Mitin Mashi”, centred around a female sleuth Mitin Mashi and her accomplice Tupur. This series is much more contemporary compared to other series in the same genre, like Feluda, Kakababu, or Arjun; it used to come out in Pujabarshiki Anandamela every year when I was finishing my high school. However, the writer Suchitra Bhattacharya had an untimely death, and the series got terminated. Though I was never a fan of the Mitin Mashi novels (the plot was never as complex and as satisfying as a Feluda or an Arjun story), I was curious to check out its first movie rendition. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Koel Mallick plays the character of Mitin Mashi with a lot of maturity in the movie. The sharpness and deductive ability, characteristic of a fictional sleuth, exists in her rendition of Mitin Mashi. The sharpness is also accompanied by a touch of compassion, which I often found missing in the male detectives in the same genre. The plot is also pretty interesting; the other actors are apt in their performance as well. Overall, the first Mitin Mashi movie provides an enjoyable two-hour-long experience in the theater.  Now, I am looking forward to more movies in this new franchise.

Puja Pandals:

The beautiful display of street art in all corners of Calcutta during the Durga Puja week, in the form of puja pandals with various themes, is something very unique about the city. In all these years, I have tried to look for similar celebration of any other festival in any other part of the world, and I have only been disappointed. Here are the pictures of a few pandals from this year’s Puja.

Colorful interior decorations and lighting of Mudiali Club, Tollygunge

Interior decorations of Debdaru Phatak, Behala, themed around middle-class Bengalis’ lifestyle

 

The always gorgeous idol of the divine at Shibmandir Sarbojonin, Tollygunge

TheDurga idol of Naktala Udayan Sangh, a very popular pandal in this year’s puja

 

That’s all for this year’s festival. Aschhe bochhor abar hobe!!!

How Steve Smith got me interested again in cricket, and in extension, life: A personal journey with the modern day Don

Ever since Steve Smith made a glorious comeback to the test cricket scene—this summer  of 2019—after serving the one year long ban, I had been thinking about writing a post on my blog about this modern day batting great. But, given my busy schedule with technical research, I hardly found time to do so until one fine weekend when a cup of strong black coffee got my brain cells racing at the speed of horses; technical research was too logical and too slow to keep pace with them. The usual urge that accompanies such mental stimulation is that of self-destruction, as vastly evident from most of my other blog posts, but I have somewhat convinced myself that it is not an option. Hence it’s a good idea to resort to the second best option—writing. And with the Ashes almost coming to a close, there is no one better, for me, to write about than Steve Smith!

Comparison between Smith and Bradman has been going on for a while, and this blog-post could have been a statistical analysis to throw light on that. But most of my creative energy is spent on numbers every day because of the nature of my work. So I try to keep numbers away from this other outlet I use to pour out whatever’s left of my creative energy—this tiny little blog of mine.

So I choose to narrate, instead, a personal journey of watching Steve Smith bat, which is actually largely connected with the evolution of the blog. My initial posts on these blogs were mostly about all sorts of “trippy” stuff—nature of reality, the bridge between the real and the abstract, death, hallucinations, etc. Gradually, as the circumstances in my life changed, some of which I brought about consciously, more light stuff started surfacing in my blog. One of conscious choices I made was to get cricket back in my life after almost a decade.

Like most 90’s Indian kids, I grew up watching tons of cricket on TV. I was glued to the TV-screen during the 1996, 1999 and 2003 World Cups, and also most of the prominent test series of that era. But then cricket slowly receded from my life as I moved to a hostel and had no TV. Then I moved to the US where pretty much the only thing people knew about cricket was that it was like baseball. So cricket, soon, became history to me.

When I moved back to India—but not to my hometown—two years back, it was my first time living in a big house in a completely new Indian city, all by myself, as an adult. Gripped with reverse culture shock, I didn’t realize that there was nothing much to do outdoors in urban India; people mostly spent their free time inside their houses watching TV.  So I didn’t get a TV in my house and flooded my mind—and later my blog—with all sorts of metaphysical and existential thoughts until it was too much for me to handle.

Then, I got a TV, and a cable-connection, in my house. I wanted to use it as the window to the world—not the Kafka-esque metaphysical world that had taken a toll on me because of reading too many books, but the real world—so that I could get back to being “normal”. And I found no better way to achieve that than getting back to watching cricket—one of the first loves of my childhood.

It was the 2017-18 winter season, at that time; the Ashes was being played down under. I started getting up at 5 AM in the cold Delhi mornings,  make a cup of Darjeeling tea, and lie down on the sofa, under a thick blanket. The TV was in front of me; the English and Australian teams were battling each other.

The first time I saw Steve Smith bat was the second innings of the first test in that series. Smith scored a century and pretty much single handedly recovered the Australian side from a batting debacle. But more importantly, he got me hooked to the TV while he was batting, for the months—and years—to come. When gripped with existential crisis, even spending five minutes without a self-destructive thought was hard. Moving from that to watching test cricket for several days was a great progress for me. And given his amazing consistency, him batting for days wasn’t very unusual.

So, of all the batsmen, who played in that series and in all the other series I have watched after that, what do I find so special about Steve Smith?  Well, the answer is obvious: his completely unorthodox batting technique. Watching Kohli or Williamson or Joe Root bat is pretty much like watching Tendulkar or Dravid bat from the yesteryears. If you take away some special moments when these batsmen hit some extra ordinary shots, or defend some extraordinary ball, and instead just take a thirty-seconds-long clipping where a fast bowler delivers a ball and the batsman defends with the middle of his bat —which a large percentage of test cricket batting is about—you can pretty much replace Williamson with Kohli, and Kohli with Tendulkar, and Tendulkar with Dravid, and Dravid with any other decent batsman, who went to a coaching camp in his childhood and learned to bat following the textbook style.

On the contrary, when Steve Smith plays a straight delivery with the middle of his bat, it still looks so unique and special to me simply because of the shuffle to off-stump that he does. And he does that for every delivery from a fast bowler; this makes every minute of his batting very special to me.

Unorthodox batting techniques aren’t completely alien to cricket, but usually they are reserved for power-hitters, who specialize in limited-overs-cricket. Technically solid test batsmen like Ben Stokes and AB DeVilliers use unorthodox techniques occasionally to switch to an explosive mode and score quick runs. But, here you have this “bloke” with a test average above 63 runs (only below Sir Don Bradman), who doesn’t bat explosive at all; his ordinary batting average in ODI and T20 shows that; yet he shows the middle finger to the textbook every single delivery he faces. He is pretty much the non-textbook version of Rahul Dravid. And the only other unorthodox test batsman of that calibre who comes to my mind is Shivnarayan Chandrapaul.

I have thought quite a bit about the possible reasons behind Steve Smith’s famous shuffle to the off stump—not sure why the commentators don’t brainstorm on this—and here’s what I have come up with:

1. Usually a batsman’s most vulnerable spot is the zone right outside the off stump. Unable to understand whether the ball will come inwards and hit the wicket or go past his off-stump to the keeper, a batsman ends up edging the ball. And the ball gets caught by the keeper, or someone on the slip cordon. But, by putting his right foot in front of the off-stump and shifting his balance to the right side of the body, Smith can defend a ball on—or right outside—the off-stump with the middle of the bat much more easily than a batsman following the textbook technique. Chances of getting Smith out go down significantly because of that.
2. When a batsman following the textbook technique defends a straight ball, the ball goes back to the bowler or somewhere near mid-off and it ends up being a dot ball. But, by shuffling to the off stump, Smith can push the ball to somewhere on the leg side where there is no fielder, and then he takes a single. Just like droplets of water create the sea, singles like that create a Steve Smith century. That’s probably another secret behind why Smith has scored so many runs.

One short coming with Smith’s technique is that he will be trapped lbw if he misses a straight ball, but he has practiced so much in the net that such a thing rarely happens.

Coming back to the story, Smith’s batting prowess in the 2017-18 Ashes didn’t continue in the subsequent test series against South Africa for whatever reason. And then the infamous sandpaper scandal happened in the third test of the series; Smith was banned from cricket for an entire year. Luckily, by then, I had largely pulled myself out of  my existential crisis. Watching cricket with no Smith in it wasn’t very easy, particularly during the India-Australia test series the next winter, but I did fine in the end.

Now, in the summer of 2019, Steve Smith is back into the test cricket scene in all his glory. He has scored more runs in this Ashes than in the last Ashes of 2017-18, down under. In fact, at the time of writing this post, he has scored more runs in an Ashes series than all batsmen in the past barring four—Walter Hammond, Mark Taylor, Alistair Cook, and Don Bradman, himself. This is despite the fact that he missed one entire Test and another innings due to concussion from a blow he received on his head from a fiery Jofra Archer bouncer. In the gentleman’s game called cricket, it is legal to bowl bouncers targeting the head of the batsman, which can and has killed a batsman in the past. But tampering the ball so that it can reverse swing leads to a year long suspension!

Anyway, that’s all in the past! If Smith’s current form stays intact, comparison between  Smith and Bradman will continue—much to the agony of cricket purists who believe, not without reason, that different eras cannot be compared. Some purists will always look down upon Smith because of his unorthodox technique or lack of flamboyant shots. But, to me, he will remain one of the reasons to look forward to test cricket—and in extension life. Much like Steve Smith’s batting in test cricket, life often seems long, monotonous, and uneventful to me these days. But, much like Smith, by deviating from the rule book  and doing something a little unique every moment—and yet staying cautious—I believe something extraordinary can be created over time in life. Or at least that’s the hope!

 

My little guide to the Marvel cinematic universe

The epic finale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Avengers Endgame, just got released. Never have I witnessed a science fiction/ fantasy movie of such an epic proportion other than its immediate prequel Infinity War. The thunderous claps that can be heard in the theaters during the epic fight sequences of Endgame speaks volumes how heavily the Marvel franchise got the audience invested in its characters over the last decade.

To cherish this epic moment in the history of cinema of the fantasy / sci- fi genre, I have been bing-watching all the 21 movies of the MCU these past few weeks. Some I had watched before but had forgotten the plots, some I had never watched earlier! As I watch them, the nerd that I am, I have been taking notes so that I have the full picture of MCU in my head while watching Endgame.

So here is a brief summary of each of their plots, description of the main characters and some interesting observations I made connected to each movie that hold all of them together. Going over this post will quickly provide the readers with all they need to know to follow and enjoy Avengers: End Game. (Empty spaces below the names of some movies will be filled up soon as I watch them)

PHASE 1

1. Captain America : The First Avenger (Timeline: Second World War, 1942-45, location: Brooklyn, NY, US and Europe)

Hero: Steve Rogers aka Captain America

Villain: Johann Schmidt aka Red Skull

Other important characters: Peggie Carter (Officer in Super Soldier project and Cap Am’s love interest), James “Bucky” Barnes (Cap Am’s best friend from Brooklyn), Chester Philips (colonel in US army)

Plot Summary : Steve Rogers is a frail young guy from Brooklyn who shows a lot of heart in every fight with bullies but gets beaten up. Steve’s passion and good nature wins over Dr. Erskine, who injects the Super Soldier Serum, invented by him, into Steve, coupled with “vita-rays” and turns Steve a much taller and muscular Captain America. Cap Am next leads a mission that rescues his friend Bucky Barns, who was captured in the war, and then demolishes the Hydra project, led by Johann Schmidt/ Red Skull, who had utilized the power of the Tesseract and Erskine’s serum to nearly launch weapons of mass destruction at major American cities. In order to prevent the plane that contained those weapons from destroying the American cities, Cap Am was left with no option but crashing it in the Arctic and got buried in the ocean in the process.

Interesting facts:

1. The Tesseract was brought to earth by Odin (king of Asgard and father of Thor) long time ago, as mentioned by Schmidt.
2. Howard Stark, the science and technology entrepreneur, who assists in the Super Soldier project is Tony Stark aka Iron Man’s father.
3. When the container that held the Tesseract broke inside the plane towards the end of the movie and Schmidt held it in his hand, it opened up a wormhole which made Schmidt disappear. Essentially in these fantasy movies, important characters do not die that easily.  Instead they disappear through wormholes so that they can reappear in some other space and time.
4. The tesseract was later found by Howard Stark from the floor of the ocean.
5. Cap Am’s friend Buckey falls from a train in a fight scene in which Cap Am and company try to demolish the hydra project. Buckey is assumed to be dead.
6. Ending/ Mid credit/ Post credit scene: About 70 years after World War II, Captain America wakes up from his sleep. Nick Fury, director of Shield, welcomes him to modern day America and talks about a mission with big implications .

2. Iron Man (Timeline: late 2000s, sometime during the later part of the Afghanisthan war, location : NY, US and the middle east)

Hero- Tony Stark aka Iron Man

Villain- Obadiah Stane, Ten Rings (group that captures Stark)

Other important characters: Pepper Potts (Tony Stark’s PA and love interest), Colonel James Rhodes (Stark’s friend), Yinsen (scientist who implants the electromagnet in Stark’s chest that keeps Stark alive)

Plot Summary: Technologist and entrepreneur Tony Stark gets captured in the Middle East by a group called Ten Rings, where he finds them using weapons made by his own company for killing innocent people. With the help of fellow captive Yinsen, Stark makes the first Iron Man suit wearing which he escapes from captivity. After getting back home, he upgrades his suit. He also finds out that Obadiah Stane, second-in-hand in his business has carried out several under the table deals with organizations like Ten Rings and sold his company’s weapons to them. Soon Stane gets his own suit made and tries to kill Stark. In the climax of the movie, Stark, dressed in his Iron Man suit, beats Stane when Stark’s PA Pepper Potts overloads a reactor that causes a massive electrical surge and burns Stane.

Interesting facts:

1. Tony Stark wears a shining chest piece throughout the Iron Man movies. It is essentially an electromagnet which prevents pieces of shrapnel that entered his chest during the explosion in middle east from piercing into his heart. The original version of it was made by Yinsen in a cave in the middle east, where Stark was captured by the Ten Rings. Stark later upgraded it when he got back to US.
2. The Iron Man suit Stark makes is powered by the chestpiece.
3. SHIELD representative Phils Coulson is shown several times in the movie approaching Stark for a secret project. He later assists Pepper Potts in fighting Stane.
4. Ending/Mid Credit/ Post credit scene: Once Stark reveals himself as Iron Man to the press, Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, approaches Stark to talk about the formation of a superhero group called Avengers.

3. The Incredible Hulk

4. Thor (Timeline: 2011, location: Asgard, New Mexico, US)

Hero: Thor

Villain : Loki, Laufey (king of the Frost giants)

Other important characters- Jane Foster (astrophysicist and Thor’s love interest), Erik Selvig (astrophysicist, works with Jane Foster), Odin (father of Thor), Thor’s childhood friends- Hogan, Fandral, Sif

Plot summary- Thor is about to be coronated as the king of Asgard, but the frost giants, against whom the Asgardians fought wars previously but currently have a peace treaty with, try to steal the “Casket” from the Asgardians. This infuriates Thor and drives him to Jotunheim (land of Frost Giants) for revenge. Odin doesn’t approve of such rash and untactful act on Thor’s part, strips Thor of all his powers and banishes him to earth along with his hammer, which he cannot lift anymore.

On earth, Thor falls in love with an astrophysicist who works on portals between different galaxies, which are roughly equivalent to “realms” in Asgardian terminology. In the process, he loses a lot of his old arrogance and starts caring about her and other fellow denizens on earth. As a result, when Thor’s brother Loki, who has always been jealous of Thor, sends the Destroyer to earth to kill him, Thor offers himself to the Destroyer urging it not to kill anyone else on earth. This act of kindness on Thor’s part moves his father, who lifts away all his curses. Thor recovers his strength and his hammer, bids his lover goodbye, goes back to Asgard and destroy the bridge (Bifrost) that connects Asgard with other realms so that Loki cannot go to Jotunheim and destroy it.  Thor and Loki get in a fight in the process, and Loki apparently commits suicide by refusing Thor and Odin’s help and falling off the bridge at some point.

Interesting facts-

1. Portal between different galaxies/ realms through which people can travel across time and space have been referred to as “wormholes” in most Marvel movies, but in this movie the more technical term- Einstein Rosen Bridge is used a few times.
2. Hawkeye is shown to be working for SHIELD in this movie. When Thor gets very close to the hammer and is about to pick it up, Hawkeye is shown pointing an arrow at him from a distance and talking to Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD.
3. Coulson confuses the Destroyer, sent by Loki to earth, to be Iron Man at first.
4. Thor promises his support to SHIELD in the movie in his short coversation with Agent Coulson before he leaves the earth. Thus this movie follows the lines of the other movies in Phase 1 that it introduces an Avenger, narrates his origin story and roughly ends with a scene on how he got connected with SHIELD and rest of the Avenger team.
5. Ending/ Post credit scene: The post credit scene of “Thor”  shows Nick Fury introducing Dr. Selvig to the Tesseract, with Loki watching them from the shadows and mystically controlling Dr. Selvig. This scene is an immediate precursor to the starting scene of “The Avengers”, where Loki comes to the same location, steals the Tesseract and abducts Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig, controlling their minds in the process.
6. It is not clear how Loki survived the fall from Bifrost and got back to earth. Marvel Wiki says that he passed into an wormhole and reached Other (featured in “The Avengers”) and Thanos. He made a pact with Thanos that he would attack the earth with the help of the Chitauri army and rule it, and in exchange will steal the Tesseract from the earth and hand it over to Thanos since it is one of the infinity stones.

 

5. The Avengers (Timeline: 2012, location : NY, US)

Hero- Tony Stark aka Iron Man, Steve Rogers aka Captain America, Bruce Bannar aka The Hulk, Thor, Natasha Romanoff or black widow ( a spy based around Russia working for SHIELD), Clint Barton or Hawkeye (another spy working for SHIELD)

Villain – Loki (Thor’s brother)

Other characters- Nick Fury ( the mastermind behind SHIELD), Maria Hill (agent of SHIELD who works with Fury), Phil Coulson (agent of SHIELD, appeared in Iron Man as well), Erik Selvig (astrophysicist who is enslaved by Loki and helps Loki with the tesseract), Other (leader of extra terrestrial race known as Chitauri who gives Loki an army under the condition that Loki will give him the tesseract)

Plot summary- Guided by the ambition to rule the human race Loki makes a deal with Other, leader of extra terrestrial race Chitauri, that they will give him an army to help him attack the earth if Loki can give him the Tesseract, possessed by the SHIELD on earth. Loki enters earth from outer space through a portal,  steals the tesseract, enslaves various agents and scientists of SHIELD and takes their help in energizing it. In order to stop Loki from ruling the planet, Fury puts together a team of superheroes called the Avengers. After several banters and quarrels within the group, the Avengers finally unite, Culson’s death in the hands of Loki being the catalyst. The Avengers successfully beat Loki and his army that attacked Manhattan, NY, entering the earth through an open portal. Iron Man sends the nuclear missile, launched by the higher administration to destroy Manhattan in order to kill Loki, to outer space through that portal. The Tesseract is recovered, Thor carries it with Loki back to Asgard and the rest of Avengers disbands for the moment.

Interesting facts-

1. Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) are shown to be very familiar with each other. They refer to a lot of their past adventures together, with a particular emphasis on some incident in Budapest.
2. The Tesseract is shown to be possessed by the SHIELD in the beginning of the movie. There is a reference to its recovery from the bottom of the ocean, which was shown in “Captain America: The First Avenger”.
3. The movie ends with the Tesserract being taken back to Asgard, where it came from originally (again shown in the beginning of “Captain America: The First Avenger”), by Thor and Loki, who is chained.
4. In the beginning of the movie, Banner/ Hulk is shown to be practicing medicine in the outskirts/ slums of Calcutta. What a way for Calcutta to be a part of the Marvel franchise!
5. Mid credit/ end credit scene- Other is seen complaining to Thanos that humans are an unruly species.

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Durga Puja 2018

A year has passed since I wrote my blog post “Durga Puja 2017”. Now, with Puja here in the city once again, it’s time to start writing my new blog post — “Durga Puja 2018”. Last year’s Puja was my first one, in Calcutta, in the last seven years. Since I spent majority of those seven years far away from Calcutta, last year’s Puja felt very surreal. On the other hand, this Puja feels like a regular event in my life largely because I have visited Calcutta about once a month since last puja, and hence, I have been able to re-establish my connection with the city.

In my last year’s Durga Puja post, I mentioned that this festival is not just about the five-day-long rituals, the pandals, and the crowds. This festival is also about the Bengali literature that is published before the festival in the form of puja magazines, the movies that come out in the theaters during the puja week, etc.  But unlike in my last year’s post, where I talked about the pandals first, followed by the magazines and the cinema, this time, I shall follow a chronological order and hence first start with the works of fiction that I liked from this year’s Puja magazines. Then I shall discuss the movies and the pandals.

Literature:

Pujabarshiki Anandamela comes out about two months prior to the Puja. About a month later, Sharodiya Anandabazar Patrika gets published. And right during the inception of the festival, the local newspaper-and-magazine distributor puts a fresh copy of Sharodiya Desh at one’s doorstep. As a result, by the time of writing this post, which is during Mahaashtami and Mahanabami, I have been able to read the Ananadamela almost in its entirety, a large chunk of Ananadabazar Patrika, and almost nothing from Desh. So, here are the novels I liked so far from this year’s Puja literature.

Mahidadur Antidote (The antidote made by Mahidadu) by Dipanwita Ray (teenage science fiction novel)- published in Pujabarshiki Anandamela:

This is first time I actually read a science fiction novel in Bengali which can be called “hard science fiction”, without any qualm. As I had pointed out before, in an earlier blog-post of mine on alchemy, the much adored science fiction stories by Satyajit Ray are way too much on the softer side. There are almost no scientific details in those stories; most of the events defy scientific logic and hence seem highly implausible. On the contrary, this novel is quite a successful attempt at creating an extremely scientifically accurate post-modern world, where humans commute from one place to another in flying cars, visit artificial parks for recreation where rivers, fountains and sea beaches from the natural world have been replicated for human entertainment, human DNA is corrected at birth to bring out the best features in humans, etc.

Though it all seems to be an utopia initially, soon there is a turn of events which makes the protagonist question everything that he has been raised up on. In this world, the DNA of most humans is corrected at birth by some other humans in power such that an average human is rendered bereft of the power of creativity, imagination, skepticism, and dissent. Similar dystopian vision of the world has been dealt with in modern classics like “Brave New World” and “1984” (sadly I haven’t read these books yet) or popular movies like “The Matrix” and “Equilibrium”. Yet the plot of this novel “Mahidadur Antidote” seems quite original with the traditional Bengali emotional touch to all the events in the novel, which are vastly futuristic and global in scope and scale.

For me, the beauty of this novel lies in the details with which all the different aspects of the post-modern world have been depicted though it has been written for teenagers. That’s why, as I said, this novel can be indeed called “hard science fiction”. But I can imagine that this level of technical details will reduce its entertainment value for a lot of general readers.  Nevertheless, since the society we live has become much more globalized and the amount of information an average person has access to has increased exponentially thanks to the internet, I feel it won’t be too inane to presume that soon, such technically rich “hard science fiction” novels will capture the psyche of a Bengali reader, known for their intellectual curiosity and cultural refinement, and childish science fiction stories of Satyajit Ray, with no technical details whatsoever, will pass into oblivion. But sadly, not many will probably read this novel. Rather, they will continue talking about some Professor Shanku stories that came out forty years back and Satyajit Ray’ son Sandip Roy will make more big budget movies  on them. This is yet another glaring example of modern intellectual Bengalis living vicariously through past legends and ignoring gems of the present.

Jipur Jawa Asha (Jipu Goes Back and Forth) by Sourabh Mukhopadhyay (teenage fiction novel) – published in Pujabarshiki Anandamela:

This is another beautiful novel that came out in this year’s Anandamela, but it is very different in flavour, compared to the previous novel. This novel is largely about the changing times, how schooling has become extremely competitive and grueling in the cities, and how refreshing and productive it can be for a kid to take a break from urban schooling and study in a countryside school for a while. The kid here, Jipu, who is the protagonist of the novel, is forced to go to a countryside school because his father loses his job and is unable to pay the heavy tuition fees of his current school, which is meant for kids from upper-middle-class urban families. Though his parents are traumatized by the experience and are deeply concerned about the future of their son, Jipu falls in love with his new school, thoroughly enjoys the idyllic countryside lifestyle, and even shows significant improvement in his academic performance. The novel is a joyful, refreshing, and yet intriguing read; it makes us question the various choices that we, ultra urban people, are making everyday in our lives.

Mantra (Chant) by Binayak Bandopadhyay (novel) published in Sharodiya Anandabazar Patrika: 

Sparsha by Krishnendu Mukhopdhyay and Tarabhora Akasher Niche by Srijato from last year’s puja magazines set my expectation very high regarding contemporary Bengali literature, and this year’s novel Mantra by Binayak Bandopadhyay did not disappoint. Just like Sparsha  and Tarabhora Akasher Niche, Mantra  has a very global feel to it. The events in the novel aren’t restricted within the periphery of Bengal but spreads across the globe, with a majority of the latter events happening in US, mainly on the east coast academic campuses. According to me, contemporary Bengali literature, and in extension, the Bengali people can be broadly classified into two types: the ones who are affected by globalisation, and the ones who aren’t. Quite naturally, the former type seems much more attractive to me than the latter.

In Mantra, the protagonist Uttaran spends his childhood in an ashram  in Calcutta in the company of Hindu saints; thus, he experiences a very spiritual upbringing. An extremely meritorious student, he goes to a top college in Calcutta for undergraduate training in Philosophy and then a top university in US for doctoral training in the same subject. But throughout this entire time, he does not desert his monastic celibate lifestyle, until a girl, Anasuya, who falls in love with him in Calcutta, follows him all the way to US to spend more time with him. The plot is pretty epic in its scope; it takes several twists and turns after that incident, as it follows the spiritual and academic trajectory of Uttaran – his giving up of celibacy and starting a family with Anasuya, raising a mute kid as a single parent, acquiring professional fame through his scholarly works on the Gita, and so on.

Uttaran’s internal struggle regarding the life choices he makes, or the circumstances force him to make, is the central theme of the novel. He is shown to be torn apart internally several times, unable to make a confident choice between a monastic, spiritual, celibate life and a passionate, emotional, lustful family life. What I really liked about the novel that it adopts a very balanced and neutral approach and depicts the bright and dark sides of both these life-choices. At a personal level, I largely agree with the writer on various points. If everybody in this world chooses to be a monk, this civilization will indeed cease to exist in a very short time. Sexuality is the driving force behind continuation of our species, and hence all the passion and emotional vulnerability that come with it need to be embraced rather than be shunned. Also, even if a monk chooses to live a family-life due to a change in the circumstances, he or she can always go back to the original lifestyle and pursue spiritual advancement, again in the future.

I personally think that whether you are a monk or a family man, a celibate or a casanova, a musician or a clerk, you have to survive on this planet, find your own balance, and live your life. So it really doesn’t matter much in the end. And death will strike upon everyone, one time or the other. Even the most spiritually uplifted monks aren’t exempt from that. Yes, they can claim that our consciousness does not cease to exist. Extreme amount of dedication to spiritual practices in this life can lead to a much more peaceful after-life or something like that. The slight amount of subjectivity that always pervades our experience of the world we live in and our lack of understanding of the functioning of the brain certainly leave space for such ideas. But based on my personal experience, I can say that delving too much into such metaphysical ideas has quite a chance of bringing more suffering in life than happiness. Death will eventually come to us all, and whether anything happens after death or not can be found out then. It’s far more enjoyable to enjoy this “real”, physical world, which we live in, in all its diversity and derive pleasure from little things in life than obsessing oneself with abstract stuff like metaphysics and spirituality all the time. The protagonist Uttaran probably also feels the same several times during the course of the novel.

Overall, this novel is a great read. However, one thing that probably makes it fall short of a classic unlike Sparsha and Tarabhora Akasher Niche, from the last year, is its weak narration style. I read Tarabhora Akasher Niche the second time very recently and it felt nearly as good as reading it the first time even though I knew the entire plot this time. This primarily happened because Srijato is one of the best Bengali poets of modern times; even the prose he writes reads like excellent poetry. The words resonated in my consciousness like some soulful melodies played on the sitar by some maestro. The places in which the events of the novel happen got beautifully projected in my mind. It felt like I was sitting in front of a Vincent Van Gogh painting in an art gallery and enjoying it with a cup of black coffee. Though this novel Mantra had plenty of scope of reaching that level of excellence — it dwelt upon spiritual life in India and academic life in the west — it quite failed to do so. Hardly any picture connected to Uttaran’s childhood or adult life gets painted in the eye of the mind while reading the novel. I kept turning the pages of this really long novel strictly because of the content. Hence, now that I have finished reading it once, I don’t think I will read it once again in the near future.

Movies:

Manojder Adbhut Bari (Manoj’s strange house), directed by Anindya Chatterjee

This movie is adapted from the  critically acclaimed teenage fiction novel of the same name, written by prominent Bengali writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. The novel came out several decades ago and kicked off Shirshendu’s Adbhuture series – a series of teenage fiction novels full of comic and mystical elements in a village setting. This series, along with Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series and Sunil Ganguly’s Kakababu series, forms the cornerstone of Bengali teenage fiction. I have read almost all the novels in this series barring this one- “Manojder Adhbut Bari”. But all the novels in the series have pretty much the same setting and the same kind of characters – a king who isn’t much aware of his surroundings, an ever vigilent thief, bunch of hilarious dacoits, a saint or a local lunatic who makes mystic statements which sound like rambling initially but later turns out to be extremely insightful, some conservative old lady and a few curious kids. The plos are also fairly similar – there is a treasure hidden somewhere in the village, its existence is never mentioned in the early part of the story but only gets acknowledged towards the middle and then rest of the story is about finding that treasure. As a result, though I didn’t know the plot, I had a fair idea of what’s coming next when I sat at the theater to watch the movie.

Probably for that reason and also because the plot turned out to be quite weak compared to Shirshendu’s other novels in the series like “Pagla Saheber Kobor”, “Jhiler Dhare Bari” and “Harano Kakatuya”, I didn’t enjoy the movie much. I won’t say that in the movie the director failed to bring out the typical Shirshendu brand of humor that pervades all the novels of the series. Rather I felt he was quite able to bring it out, just that it has stopped working on me. I had a similar experience when I read the Shirshendu novel that came out in this year’s Anandamela and the last year’s. Probably because I have read too much of it- the same humor and characters have been repeated every year in the puja edition of Anandamela for the last several decades. Also the world we live in has changed too rapidly since the inception of this Adbhuture  series and Shirshendu’s Adbhuture world could not keep pace with it. As a result, I felt much more sad than irate after spending a huge chunk of money and time watching this movie on the day of its release- particularly when the author Shirshendu himself made a cameo towards the end of the movie and pretty much looked as old and obsolete as the world of his imagination.

Ek Je Chhilo Raja (There lived a king), directed by Srijit Mukherjee

These days Durga Puja has become incomplete without the release of a Srijit Mukherjee movie. So I had to check this one out- though I haven’t ever taken much interest in the famous Bhawal Sanyasi case or seen the Bengali classic movie “Sanyasi Raja”, based around it. In the beginning of “Ek Je Chhilo Raja”, Srijit makes the claim that his entire plot, barring the characters of the prosecution and defence lawyer,  is based on historical facts and events .  So it won’t be apt for me to critically review the movie without knowing all these historical facts. But, since I am quite interested in the history of Bengal and legal philosophy, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie with its historical references, intriguing courtroom drama, clash of ideas like feminism and patriotism, etc. The short conversation between the two lawyers, played by Aparna Sen and Anjan Dutt, was the most brilliant part of the movie for me. Sen’s  dismissal of patriotism as an emotion centered around an abstract concept based  building borders on a map echoes similar ideas that I had nurtured before but do not entertain much these days. Yes, a nation is an abstract concept based on borders drawn on a map, but those borders drawn on the map are quite related to distinct features in the physical world like mountains and seas. People who lived on different sides of a mountain or a sea hardly interacted across the ages and hence formed their own cultures and thereby their own countries. So patriotism is not that abstract a sentiment as some intellectuals portray it to be.

Another thing I really liked about the movie is there is no clear right and wrong in the story, just like in any mature drama. Both the prosecution and defense side think they have the higher moral ground. The conflict among laws of the physical world, laws institutionalized by humans to govern society and  laws of the metaphysical or divine world, if anything like that at all exists, has interested me a lot over the years and this movie brings out that conflict beautifully towards the end. Overall, Srijit Mukherjee has made a brilliant movie once again and it shouldn’t be missed.

Using “Maharajo Eki Saje”, sung by favorite contemporary Rabindrasangeet singer Sahana Bajpayee, in the soundtrack made me even more happy about the movie, though the entire song seems to be lifted from her album “Ja Bolo Tai Bolo” that came out a few years ago as opposed to being reproduced specifically for the film.

Pandals / Street Art:

Here are some pictures from the puja pandals I visited this year. Much like the previous time, I only saw a few pandals in south Calcutta (Jodhpur Park- Tollygunge- Behala area) and some in North Calcutta (Hatibagan- Shovabazar area) this time. Here are the pictures from the very best of them.

 

Barisha Sarbojonin takes the city dwellers on a trip to the Anadamans, right among the Jarawas.

 

Dazzling orange-hued pandal and idol of the goddess in Shibmandir Sarbojonin- brick has been used as the main component of their pandal decorations.

Gorgeous interiors of old zamindar houses in puja pandals of Kasi Bose Lane and Ahiritola Sarbojonin

The old zamindar house atmosphere nicely emulated by Kasi Bose Lane Durga Puja Committee and Ahiritola Sarbojonin is present quite in its original form at Shovabazaar Rajbari.

The divine female, unarmed, rests in all her tranquility along with a repentant Mahisashura in an other worldly pandal made by Hatibagan Sarbojonin

 

That’s all from this year’s puja. Aschhe bochhor abar hobe.

My dream cricket XI (1996-2007)

I watched cricket very seriously in the entire period between the World Cup of 1996 and the World Cup of 2007, and after that stopped watching it altogether. Lack of cable television wherever I lived after 2007 was one of the reasons. People who lived around me in those places weren’t much interested in the game either, which was another reason for my drop in interest in cricket. Also it is probably not a coincidence that India-England test series in 1996 marked the arrival of my hometown hero, Sourav Ganguly, in test cricket and World Cup 2007 was the large major ODI tournament he played.

As I moved back to India in 2017 and got a cable TV in my house cricket got back to my life once again and made me reminiscence those glorious days of test and ODI cricket with the Tendulkar-s and the Lara-s and the Shane Warne-s. So here are my dream test and ODI XI, only picking players who dominated cricket during that period. Again, I never understood the technicalities of the game that well and so my teams may not be optimised with the right combinations for the best performance. It’s rather made from the heart largely to recount the amazing moments those cricketers gave us to cherish. As a result, performance in big matches like World Cup matches and some crucial Test series matches has played more importance in selection of the team than average, technique, etc.

Dream Test XI:

1. Mathew Hayden

2. Virender Sehwag

I have found it harder to choose the openers than the middle order batsmen because  unlike the four middle order batsmen that follow in the list these two batsmen came to prominence towards the later part of the period I picked up here. Still, these two batsmen completely dominated that later period with their explosive batting, consistent performance and most importantly their triple tons. So I can’t leave out either of them.

3. Jack Kallis

4. Sachin Tendulkar

5. Ricky Ponting

6. Brian Lara

Jack Kallis is there at no. 3 to anchor the innings. Rahul Dravid could have been another option, but Jack Kallis could also bowl. That has given him an edge over Rahul Dravid to get into the squad. Making a dream XI like this always makes you sad in the end because of the players you have to exclude. In my case, the fact that Dravid is not included in my dream test XI really makes me sad. Also, V.V.S Laxman for that matter!

The batsmen at no. 4,5 and 6 were the three batsmen of that era, so it is impossible to drop any of them.

7. Adam Glichrist

The man you first think of when you think of a wicketkeeper- batsman in the pre- Dhoni and pre- Sangakara era! He single handedly changed the role of no. 7 batsman in the squad in test cricket.

8. Wasim Akram

9. Glen Mc Grath

10. Allan Donald   (Anil Kumble or Muthaiah Muralidhan on a subcontinent track)

11. Shane Warne

Wasim Akram and Glen McGrath make it to pretty much anybody’s dream XI, so those are obvious choices. For the third fast bowler, I have to go with Allan Donald, thanks to the amazing memories I have of India’s tour of South Africa in 1996-97. That face smeared with white cream, that gentle and yet sinister run up and smooth delivery style which all of us tried to imitate in gali cricket, and that menacing speed at which the ball came towards the batsmen – Allan Donald is my personal favorite and has to be in the squad! For the only spinner, I will go with Shane Warne just like most other people will. He had been the very definition of spin bowling in that era. In case it’s a subcontinent spinning track, I will drop Donald and pick Anil Kumble or Muthaiah Muralidharan in his place.

Captain: Wasim Akram

He is probably the most senior player in the team and  has been really well respected throughout his career. He should lead the team.

Dream ODI XI:

I have found making the dream ODI XI list much harder than the test XI. All the dominant teams of that era- India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and South Africa- could contribute 5-6 players each to this team. As a result I have made some hard choices- some of them quite unorthodox. Here is my list.  I go with the combination of 4 batsmen, 4 bowlers,  2 all rounders and 1 wicketkeeper-batsman.

1. Adam Gilchrist

2. Sachin Tendulkar

Since I am going with 4 batsmen, I couldn’t pick Sanath Jayasurya or Sourav Ganguly in Glicrist’s spot though I would have really wanted to. Choosing the other opener here is a no brainer.

3. Ricky Ponting

4. Jack Kallis (all rounder)

5. Aravinda DeSilva

6. Michael Bevan

7. Lance Klusener (all rounder)

Ricky Ponting at no. 3 is probably a no brainer. Jack Kallis is there at no. 4 to anchor the innings- plus he had been excellent with the ball in limited overs cricket. I choose Aravinda DeSilva at no. 5 instead of Steve Waugh or Mohammad Azharduddin because of the two consecutive ODI centuries he scored in the semi-final and final of the 1996 World Cup. Michael Bevan was the best finisher in ODI cricket before MS Dhoni arrived in the scene, so his position at no. 6 of my squad probably cannot be questioned.

Lance Klusener at no. 7 is probably an unorthodox choice but again I have given a lot of importance to big match performance and personal memories here. 1999 World Cup- need I say more? With respect to cricket, that guy probably gave me the most excitement and also the biggest heartbreak! Those two boundaries smashed through mid-off, followed by a dot ball and that “fatal” attempt to take a single- I don’t think I can ever watch a replay of that over in my life! A couple of decades has passed since then which included almost a decade for me away from cricket and yet it remains as a painful memory which I never want to go back to. So my dream XI will be incomplete without him.

8. Wasim Akram

9. Glen McGrath

10. Shawn Pollock

11. Shane Warne

The bowlers in my ODI XI are pretty much the same as that in my test XI, just that in place of Allan Donald I choose his fellow teammate Shawn Pollock in the shorter format of the game.

Captain: Wasim Akram

12th man: Jonty Rhodes

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recurring imagery in Anjan Dutta’s music

After writing a few really cerebral posts which are so typical of my blog (the last one was particularly dark), I felt like writing something light and fun. So I chose something which is much closer to my heart than my mind- the music of good old Anjan Dutta, somebody who Bengalis both love and hate. His songs like “Mary Ann”, “Bela Bose” and “Mr Hall”  became a mainstay of urban college music scene in Bengal in the early 90-s. In the new millennium, just when people thought his popularity had faded and the themes of his songs- guitar, Darjeeling, cigarette and teenage love- had grown stale, he rekindled the enthusiasm about his music in people by making movies around his songs. Movies like “Madly Bengali”, “Ranjana Ami Ar Ashbo Na”  and “Aami Ashbo Phirey” that released in the 2010s were essentially celebrations of the music he made as a singer- songwriter a couple of decades back.

As I said, along with multitudes of fans, he has plenty of detractors particularly among members of the older generation, who probably cannot relate to his anglophilia, his free flowing hipster lifestyle and his obsession with cigarettes, alcohol and western country and folk music. The fact that his songs are not musically rich and are quite simply glorified poems is another popular allegation against him.  I defended him on numerous occasions in debates with elders, as well as some friends, and went to the length of saying that he is a better songwriter than Rabindranath Tagore. After exploring Tagore’s music much more in the recent years, I don’t think I can make that claim any more but I still see where my argument came from. Tagore’s lyrics is mostly abstract, he seeks some form of divinity in everything that he sees around him – clouds, rivers, flowers, meadows- and finds a sense of tranquility in them. On the other hand, Anjan Dutta’s lyrics is highly grounded in “reality”- he talks about the daily commute in the crowded buses of Calcutta, the lonely saxophone player in a five star hotel, two tiny rooms under the staircase with the plaster fading off the walls- the list goes on. Even when his imagery shifts from the crowded urban landscape to the serenity of the hills, he is still very “real” – the railing overlooking the steep slope, the yellow fingers of the piano teacher moving over the keys of the piano, etc. So in a way the contrast between Anjan Dutta’s lyrics and Tagore’s lyrics perfectly encapsulates the central theme of my blog- the real versus the abstract.

Okay, I again deviated from my promise of not making this post cerebral like my other posts. So let’s get back on track- I am simply gonna describe some of the recurrent imageries in Anjan Dutta’s music over the years and have a lot of fun in the process. I am not describing the most talked about ones here- everyone is well aware of his obsession with Park Street, Darjeeling, Anglo Indians, cigarette, guitar and Bob Dylan.  This post is about the less discussed ones, but strangely these images have repeated in a lot of his songs, starting from the early 90s to the late 2010s.

Buttonless Shirt- Why exactly is he so obsessed with a buttonless shirt? Probably to him it’s symbolic of a free flowing lifestyle, but since he has talked about it in multiple songs, for example. “Ache beporoya botam bihin shirt” from the song “Tobu Jodi Tumi” in the movie “Dutta vs Dutta” or  “Botam bihin shirt ta amar chhoto keno hoy” from the song “Monkharaper Bikele” in “Ami Ashbo Phirey”, one has to wonder what is this fetish with buttonless shirts really about. In fact what exactly is a buttonless shirt? Does a simple round neck T-shirt count as buttonless? For sure it doesn’t have a button. Or does he simply want to the convey the idea of wearing a shirt without buttoning it up? In fact he posed himself like that too often in the movie “Ranjana Ami Ar Ashbona”, so probably that’s what it is.

Poor kids living on the streets of Calcutta, bathing under the roadside municipal taps – “Tobu-o neche uthey abar rashtar kol, Nachte nachte chaan kore jaay, rashtar cheler dool” from the song “Sokal” in his recent movie “Ami Ashbo Phirey” invokes quite similar images in my head as “Tumi dekhechho ki Hatujole 1 Loyd Street-tumi dekhechho ki borshay….sei langta chheletar hashi” from the song “Tumi Dekhechho ki”, composed in the 90s. All jokes apart, this imagery is really touching just like most of his other imagery and speaks volumes about his lyrical genius.

Japan- Anjan Dutta has some weird obsession about Japan. Sure, he considers his music to be international and it indeed is, and he often tries to transcend all political and cultural barriers with his lyrics and music. So he frequently talks about other countries in his songs, but he talks about Japan a bit too often- and the references to Japan are pretty arbitrary and almost have no context whatsoever. For example, he repeats the phrase “Ke Hindu Ke Japani” in the songs – “Que Sara Ra Ra” from the movie “Ganesh Talkies” and “Ami Ashbo Phirey” from the movie with the same name.Then again a couple of decades ago in the song “Aamar Janala” he wrote- “Keu janala khule Alabamay bangla gaan i gay, Keu porchhe Koran boshe tar Japani janalay”. Interestingly, he followed up the imagery of singing Bengali songs in Alabama and reading the Quran in Japan with that of playing guitar in Mexico. Probably back then he didn’t have much access to the internet just like the rest of us and wasn’t aware of the fact that the image of someone playing guitar in Mexico did not really break any cultural stereotype and promote a sense of internationalism unlike the previous two images- in fact playing the guitar was probably a very common thing in Mexico and still is.

 

Getting up early in the morning and watching the sunrise- Along with internationalism, the pain of growing up and missing one’s childhood is a dominant theme of Anjan Dutta’s lyrics. And he depicts it really well through his imagery, thereby making his songs one of the closest things to my heart. And just like he refers to Japan often to promote internationalism, he talks about not getting up early in the morning any more to watch the sun rise whenever he misses his childhood- for example, the lines “Bhorbela ar lukie dekha hoy na, Surjodoy dei je faki”  from the song “Koto ki korar chhilo re” in “Madly Bengali”  or the lines “Bhor bela te bhor bela amar Dekha hoye othey na je aar
Ke jaane ki karone” from the song “Monkharaper Bikele” in “Ami Ashbo Phirey”.

 

There are many other such recurring images in the lyrics of his songs, which together build up the world of Anjan Dutta- a world which I have always relied upon to provide me with support in moments of pain and with excitement in moments of joy. Most importantly in moments when I have got lost in some abstract world and felt detached from this world we live in, only to feel scared subsequently, his music provided me with the perfect “grounding”- something I badly needed. It reminded me of and made me embrace again my roots, my passions and my identity which I had tried to transcend with all the other worldly spiritual stuff, a journey which ended up being scary in the end.

 

Lastly, yes, the themes and images of his songs and also his movies are repetitive, and a lot of people I know have voiced their dislike for him because of that, but this is what I have always said in his defence- he is not a mainstream playback singer who sings songs written by other people like a machine- some being about romance, some about patriotism, some about friendship and so on. Instead, he writes his own lyrics and he writes them from within. As a result, since he is just one individual and has had a limited set of experiences, his songs and movies are bound to be repetitive. And that is probably the case with any original artist of modern times in any domain of art unless the name of the artist is Satyajit Ray.

 

 

 

Why not trip over death or try kill oneself

(written sometime in 2018, in Delhi)

Over last Fall and Spring, I had scribbled down on my notebook several reasons why one should not obsess over the idea of death, or worse, actually try out some self destructive physical act as a result of the obsession. I wrote them down as and when these reasons occurred to me. An important thing I wanted to clarify here is that these reasons are mainly applicable to people who contemplate suicide mainly out of an obsession with the idea of death and what happens to someone after death, and not to people who contemplate suicide to terminate the mental pain or escape from the difficult situation they are in. The latter is considered to be the main reason for suicide- a person is in immense emotional pain all the time and cannot take it any more, so they kill themselves. But as experience has taught me, one can have self destructive thoughts simply out of isolation or too much pondering over philosophical issues. They can get so immersed in their own mental/ abstract world that they keep questioning whether the physical world they live in and share with others is real or whether it is simply an illusion. After that at some point, they start toying with the idea of death too much because to them death, being quite absolute in nature, opens up the possibility of experiencing some kind of absolute reality.

Here I have listed some arguments I have come up with over time which one can use to avoid having such weird “trip”-s about death and thereby getting into a self destructive spiral.

1. Death is inevitable. It will happen to everyone. Obsession about something makes sense if the probability of that thing happening is pretty low, e.g. publishing a research paper in a high Impact Factor journal, writing a best seller novel, winning the Nobel Prize, leading Indian cricket team to a victory at the World Cup, etc. Based on past record death is an absolute certainty, so why obsess over something that will happen anyway?
2. All these philosophies, poetry, music etc. hint at the existence of a beautiful ideal world beyond this physical world, but there is really no guarantee that such a world exists. Also if it exists, with death it will appear anyway and death will happen eventually. So why rush it? Death is irreversible, so don’t toy with it. Let it happen in its due course. 
3. This world with mountains, rivers, cities, friends and family is pretty intricate, intriguing and awesome. Even if the whole thing is a simulation, as it often appears with isolation and too much “deep thinking”, let it be a simulation. We have always been in this simulation but probably never noticed it before because it is a wonderfully intricately designed one anyway. For example, when we were having fun in high school or college, when did we ever think that the world around us could be a self consistent simulation?  It’s only recently as we have experienced the life more and more and patterns have started to repeat that we have started bringing up these questions. It doesn’t really matter if the world around is a simulation or real because as long as everything is consistent, which has always been the case minus some fringe elements, our experience of the world remains the same either way. Also, eve if it’s all a simulation, what is the reason to want to end the simulation abruptly through death? That thought didn’t occur so far even though we had always been inside the simulation.
4. Love holds the world together. This world may be a simulation but our near and dear ones really love us and they will be devastated if something happens to us. So never never contemplate death. Explore all your passions and stay obsessed with them. Stay distracted!
5. The fundamental purpose of existence is to eat and reproduce. That’s how evolution works . The spiritual framework rejects this idea and tries to find a higher purpose for existence. So in that sense a spiritual journey is anti-evolutionary. Probably that’s why it’s extremely demanding to go on the spiritual path. So better not to take it too seriously and get guided by evolution and chill out!
6. Spending too much time insolation and questioning what is the purpose of life doesn’t make much sense because we didn’t start from such an ideal situation in the first place. We spent first twenty years of our lives with family and friends and never asked ourselves what was the purpose of life. But then when we started living by ourselves and experienced more solitude, this question started arising in our minds. Since we got entangled in a non ideal world to begin with why ask idealist questions now!! Just continue with the non idealities, spend life the way you spent your initial years. Stay connected to the “real world” one way or the other.
7. Isolation and loneliness lets the subjective aspect of our consciousness, as described by philosopher David Chalmers while formulating the “hard problem of consciousness”, grow and hence outsude world feels like simulation because of too much mental activity inside and too little physical activity outside. Don’t spend too much time alone!
8. Don’t even try to act like you are doing things close to what can hurt you. Brain is a pattern forming machine. It has somehow related those things that gave you “death trips” with death and your OCD further makes you want do these things or act like doing them. Don’t respond to it at all.
9. There is no absolute reality at least the living cannot experience it. A subjective feeling of consciousness always pervades our perception of reality, which is a calibration  of current signal to some previous signal already existing in the brain as memory. May be at the moment of our death we will perceive absolute reality, but we may not as well. Anyway death is an eventuality, so at that moment of dying the idea can  be tested anyway. No need to rush it.
   Also probably if someone loses all memory whatsoever or feels a sense of detachment from all memory, the latter can happen out of isolation and prolonged lack of interest in worldly things, they can perceive something very close to absolute reality but the experience is much more scary than fun. There is perhaps no need to revisit it again. Instead of trying to detach oneself from memories and try to live “in the moment” without relating the present with your past and future, it is a much better idea according to me to make new memories and experience the world around in the light of those memories. Your memories are what you are, they are your identity. This idea that memory is painful and one should get rid of their ego by transcending these memories and experience life only by living in the present is often preached in the spirituality domain of human knowledge. However from personal experience this idea, though can be an immense source of bliss in the initial days, eventually alienates one from their surroundings, makes them very lonely inside and leads to existential crisis. In the name of losing your ego you may lose your identity, don’t do that!
10. If we study human evolution in this planet, we will observe that forming groups has made man survive and eventually outclass all other animals. Forming group has been our biggest strength. Thus evolution has made man a social animal. We need each others’ support to live. There may be outliers to this but majority want to live in society with company and not feel alone. So many things are missing when alone like love and humor, which are essential to our existence. So we must live together, not alone. Even human consciousness is collective end of the day. The language in which we think, the manner in which we talk, our hand gestures are all products of our upbringing in the society. Living alone suddenly makes you question all those things about yourself which you had taken for granted so long because the collective nature of your consciousness starts disappearing slowly. Is it an experience really worth having?
11. Assuming the realist/ materialist view point of life is correct, this world exists the way it is whether we live or die. But again this world is us in the end. Our job is to live this world and people there in and learn as much and make memories and then impact the world so that we live in this world through our memories after we die. death is gonna happen anyway . Question is what do we do to impact this world before we die.
12.  As long as train of thoughts leads you from one idea to another without raising any question mark / existential crisis / suicidal thought you are fine. Just keep loving this world. Another thing that one needs to be careful about is obsessive thought in general. Even if it’s not about death, even if it’s about something else, always thinking about it means you are indulging in it too much. Indulging in something is fine, if you don’t indulge in the world then you start feeling detached from everything and all the death trip starts as explained previously, but if you indulge in something too much that can lead to a lot of pain later and then again to avoid the pain you will get into the detachment path and the cycle will repeat. Best way to proceed is probably to balance it all out, indulge but don’t indulge too much, be practical and yet be spiritual, be spiritual and yet be practical!
13. According to the concept of arrow of time, time moves only in the forward direction. However an interesting thing I realised in that context is that though in the physical world things can get created or destroyed, in the mental world things only get created. Any thought that has occurred to a man lives on through the memories of the man in the others’ minds, the books he / she writes or the work he/ she does. Sometimes memories go latent but they are always there. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote in the poem “Hothat Dekha” (A sudden meeting) – Raater sob tara thake diner aalor gobhire (All stars of the night stay hidden in the depth of the sunlight during the day). Right circumstances bring back the latent memories. Hence always stay in touch with the world and through that stay in touch with your memories. Love the world and its people, and contribute more to this world through your work. This way you add more to the world. Things only accumulate in mental world, nothing gets destroyed. Keep adding stuff.

Most importantly try to adopt a middle ground whenever there are contradictory ideas, don’t take any idea to the extreme and do chill out!