CALCUTTA MEMORIES

Iwas born in Calcutta and spent my school and college days here which qualifies me to write on this blog . My early memories of calcutta are the Bangladesh war when we heard of a new word in my lexicon blackout which was preceded by sirens .This was done to alert the people about possible air strikes. Another word that I picked up was Naxalite . although the naxalite uprising had almost ended . Those two seperate events though not interlinked were to determine the course of events in calcutta . The influx of refugges from calcutta from bangladesh which started then and continues till this day has added to the overcrowding of this great city . And the failed revolution of the naxalites has also led to a great lacunae among the Calcutta intelligentsia .

Calcutta has been always regarded as the cultural capital of india a place where great people like Henry Derozio, Aurobindo Ghosh, Ramakrishna Paramhansa , Swami vivekananda ,Rabindrantah tagore , Subhas chandra bose met and transformed lifes . In later years the city got more brickbats than bouquets .While we had a Dominique Lapierre going ga ga over the city we also had Gunter Grass and a former PMm Rajiv Gandhi talk of it disparagingly. But Calcutta still has its charming old world atmosphere which is not there in other metros . Where else would you find people debating over endless cups of tea whether Brazil is better than Argentina in football or whether Satyajit rays films are better than Bergmans . Unlike other cities what mattered in Calcutta was how well you were educated or how intellectual you were also known as Aatel . Another feature of calcuuta was is adda sessions or basically gossip sessions . here you would find young and old men and women gossioping in a public place sitting on a Rock and espounding some cause like Vietnam or Cuba. Some of the landmarks of old calcutta are the Howrah bridge , Howrah station, Victoria memorial, Birla Planetarium , Marble palace ,the Dhakuria lakes , the Maidan or lung of calcutta ,Kkalighat temple , Dakshineswar temple .,Eden gardens,Botanical gardens , zoo

kerala musings part 1

I was born outside Kerala to Malayali parents but spent my preschohol years in Kerala shuttling between a small sleepy hamlet called Kalladathur which was my maternal grandmothers house and another sleepy town called Guruvayur which happened tobe my paternal grandmothers house. There was no electricity in the house in Kalladathur but the house itself was remarkably cool .it had tiled roofs and a blackstone floor . The village itself was sparesely poulated and my family happened to be one of the better well off families of the area with acres of agricultural land number of servants and cattle . Since we happened to be of the so called upper caste ie nairs most of the servants were from other backward and lower castes . During evenings we could hear the roar of the Arabian sea from Ponnani which was a good 18 km from the house. we could also hearthe sound of the Mangalore mail the only train those days which used to stop at kuttipuram about 23 km away . The only entertainment for us was playing in the courtyard and swimming in the pond or kolum as it was called in Malayalam . We also used to make daily trips to the local temple. The other entertainment we had was a radio which had an aeril which in turn had to put outside the house via awire to get fairly clear reception.The menfolk were mostly bare chested and wore nothing except the mundu or loincloth similiar to the dhoti . Among the women most of our relatives wore saris or mundu veshti or the younger ones davini or half saris but the labour class women mostly wore nothing other than a blouse or choli and mundu .
In Guruvayur things were not much different except that there was electricity there and a big temple there althought it had not reached the present stature then . The temple elephants used to be occasinally tethered to trees in my house .We could also have darshan in the temple at ease for most people knew our family was one of the old families of the area. Once school started visits to kerala became only annual. By then kerala and our village began to change .