Wednesday Blues -Part III

Classes were off that week for the Pujas. She had gone to Thailand for a holiday with her family. They met a week later again on a Wednesday. She had brought the snaps along and also her slam book. Everyone was getting their slam books to school these days, after all it was their last year.
She nudged him to see the snaps, but he seemed hardly interested. “Now, why on earth is he acting so cold ?” she thought.
“Okkay !!” she chimed in. “If you don’t wanna see the snaps, atleast sign my slam book !!”
He observed the autograph album obscurely with a look of reluctance.
“Who do you have here on the cover? If it’s Ganguly, I won’t sign. I don’t like him.”
She didn’t force him. She could have blurted out “Don’t sign! Who cares anyway?” But she didn’t and merely glanced at him sideways. A few minutes later he took the album and started going through the pages in the beginning.
“Oh so Siddhi’s signed here” he said. Having scrutinized every word Siddhi had written, with a smile plastered on his face, and also checking out that he was the first 'boy' who was signing this particular slam book , which massaged his ego, beyond imagination (I mean to Anoushka’s imagination, since she never suspected guys could be such jerks sometimes ) he scribbled something in a hurry and threw it carelessly on her lap.
“Oh I’ve written something, can’t write more…I find all this stuff really silly !” he said out aloud with an air that said he had done her a huge favour. There was silence, the entire class was looking at the two of them and she was speechless. How dare he insult her this way , when a few moments ago he was savoring all that Siddhi had written? She swore never to speak to him again.
“Go and tell the world that I’m crazy about Roshni! I don’t care whether she has a boyfriend!” This was, next class .The boys just whistled, oohed and aahed but there was no stopping him and the female in question was so exhilarated that she could hardly bear down her animated hilarity. A Punjabi girl had joined in that day. He left no stones unturned in enthralling her in the next few weeks. Anoushka had called him over twice or thrice at his place, during better times. She had learnt that he did not have a father. There was always a part in her that wanted to take care of him. She never could read into his behaviour, after that day’s incident. Was that slam book, the biggest mistake she ever made? They had only a few weeks of class left, before the boards and Anoushka wanted them over, as soon as possible.
Later that year when the boards were over she went for the BITS Mesra exam where she caught a glimpse of him, at her center. He was looking at her from a distance. But they scarcely recognized each other now. They both went their own ways, then and forever. (END)

Wednesday Blues - PART II

Mrs. Sen, with her thorough professionalism was well known for her tendency to divide her students as they were promoted to class XII on the basis of their intelligence as to the ones who would make it to the IITs, the others who would make their way into the less prestigious institutes and still others who would switch over to the humanities streams after the boards were over. Anoushka was an above average student in school and Mrs. Sen’s having categorized her into the so called ‘middle’ category did not please her much. She convinced Mrs. Sen into changing her timings allowing her to come for the Wednesday evening classes, which comprised the so-called ‘intelligent’ batch. It was a fact though that Abhishek too came on Wednesdays but this, she did not know.
The first few days of-course they behaved as if they hardly knew each other. They had met just once earlier and that too hadn’t been an acquaintance of sorts. Then one of those days turned out to be her birthday, and he wished her ever so smilingly and shook hands. One day when he was sitting beside her and saying something to the girls who were sitting to her left she soon learned that he studied in the school that was pretty adjacent to her own. When she told him that, he smiled and said, “I know so many people from your school ! How come I don’t know you?”
“How do I know?” said Anoushka.
“Yeah!” he said. “I know Nita, Ronny, Asha, Disha, Priya, Siddhi”, he declared almost sardonically. “They happen to be my fan-club, you know that?” “And you are the latest to join in”, he smirked.
Anoushka wasn’t entertained. “Fan club?”, she repeated annoyingly. She at once knew that he was one of those guys who thought no end of themselves. She immediately withdrew and stopped speaking to him for a while.
Then one day when they were having a debate competition in school she spotted him with some of his friends . They had come over as spectators for the event and she saw him taking one of the seats in the back row. He hadn’t noticed her she thought.
They had a class that evening. She arrived in a pair of beige cargos and a melon tinted cropped top. They were running short of stools that day. It was eventually decided that they would have to share. The girls would have to share their seats with the guys in front and as Anoushka adjusted into a rather uncomfortable position that lay midway between two stools she felt a whiff of warm wind behind her ear that caused her closely cropped hair to fly in a direction antagonistic to gravity. She shuddered for a moment. It was Abhishek on her right, smelling heavily of Axe Voodoo who had just whispered something into her right ear. There he sat sharing half his seat with hers and giving what she felt, was a wry smile. Well she could not help noticing that their thighs touched, even so for a microsecond, or was it more than that ? There were goose bumps on her inner arms, after all she was straight from a girls convent, and one of those demure females, who had never had any close male friends.

“What did you just say?” she asked.
“Me?” “Well I was just asking, if you were comfortable !" . She could still feel the warmth of his breath behind her right ear and a shiver crept down her spine.
“Oh I sure am!” she immediately answered, checking herself.
“You people had this debate in school today……not much of a success huh?” he asked.
“Oh no! No one participated this year actually because of the boards; the juniors just managed it somehow.”
He turned when one of the boys called him from behind. They were talking about the latest Mumbai flick in town. He turned again to face her. “You saw Taal”, he asked.
“Nope”.
“You must be hating her, I mean Aishwarya. All girls hate her”, he concluded with an air that seemed to proclaim that he had preconceived and resolute notions about the opposite sex. He stressed on the word her as he said those words. She didn’t know what he meant. “I don’t hate her”, she replied musingly.
“ You don’t?” he asked. “Then you are not a girl” he blazoned out, grinning at the same time.
“Very funny!” She smiled as she shooed him off with her huge exercise book.
One of those days she asked him for his school question papers and he brought it next day as dutifully as would a boy in primary school. “But I want it this week itself ; we’ll be getting our answer scripts next week so….”. She assured him of sending them to him through Siddhi who went in his school bus. Siddhi was one of those anorexic class twelves who had the boys in the neighbouring schools go ga-ga as would one say to her ‘charisma’.
The next day when Anoushka came to class she found the boys teasing him about Siddhi. Not that it made much of a difference to her she smiled at him. He turned his face and almost made a grimace. She felt a pang of pain and wondered why. Was it jealousy ? Did she feel threatened by Siddhi ?
He was unusually seated or that she felt for he had taken one of the seats at the back. “I prefer being a backbencher”, he stated stridently. Then Roshni came in and sat beside him. She was one of those giggly females who were his ‘fans’ as he proclaimed, rather short and stocky and by no means attractive.
“Did you get your papers?” Anoushka asked him.
“Which ones?”
“The ones that you gave me”, she said with not even the slightest hint of impatience.
“If someone suddenly asks you in the blue what papers, what are you supposed to understand?” he snapped. He asserted himself so very majestically causing the female beside him (Roshni ofcourse) to break into peals of assorted giggles and laughs and heaven only knew what else. It irked Anoushka just as it would have irked anybody else. She was no doubt egoistic but never had any boy slighted her in this manner.
“ I’ll slap you!”, she snapped back at him. “Did I overreact?” she thought to herself. But it was too late, she could no longer take back her words.

“Ha Ha !!!You will ??”, he peeved her further. Mrs. Sen just stepped in, to start the day’s lessons and the argument stopped then and there. They avoided looking at each other throughout those two hours. She hated him.
Next week they had their usual classes. Anoushka had arrived in a navy blue vest with a sequined -V- neck and white parallels. He came in a good five minutes later and sat by her side. He wore a grey full-sleeved jersey and smelt of what he generally did, Axe.

“Looking good!”, he complimented her, as if nothing had happened. “And sign this.”
“Thanks!”, she put in. “But what’s this?”
“It’s a teacher’s day card. It’s for Ma’am.”
“Oh sure!”, she chimed in. She put in her signature and he signed below her. They were talking again normally that day.
“Was he genuinely apologetic?” she thought as the class ended that day and he escorted her to her car. But now it hardly mattered. She did not even remember that she hated him a week back. (to be continued...)

Wednesday Blues - PART I...TO BE CONTINUED.

That evening she was clad in black trousers and a velvet top with a tiger print pattern. That was when she saw him first. She entered the tiny room with its odd sized tables and rotatable stools with their bottoms broken at the most and an occasional tear in the rexine that had a typical chocolate hue, the tear courtesy to the guys sitting around and having a good time ‘apparently’ with their compasses. I say apparently because guys of this age are neither adolescents nor complete adults and assumed for the most to be having a good time ‘all the while’. Her entry was marked with one of the guys passing a remark that was inaudible to her or indeed it did seem or perhaps she didn’t care. She had come for a ‘make-up’ class or that was what Mrs. Sen called them, their Physics teacher. It’s a class you make up for, when you’ve missed it; Mrs.Sen a thorough professional, a pioneer in her business ‘giving tutions’, an aluminous of those ‘oh so famous’ schools in Calcutta which have but nothing to their credit.
Anoushka came and sat down in the stool in front, the one that was located at an immediate corner to the vast expanse of a blue colored sun-mica table that lay before her. Surprisingly that day there were fewer girls than usual, the Wednesday batch was an all boys group and more to her surprise was a boy who sat immediately on her right. The guys do not usually come up in front she thought but changed her mind as she glanced through pages of homework that had been set the previous day. He was square jawed, tall, tanned and fairly handsome in a checked green sweatshirt and white jeans. For her they were all unfamiliar faces for she had not arrived as per schedule last Friday and sat burying her head in her notebook although she did not as much need to, with the guys behind blabbering something about the latest disc in town. Then there was this sudden familiar voice calling “Anoushka have you done your homework? I bet you haven’t tried them, you had exams last week, didn’t you?”
“Oh!” she said “I tried them but couldn’t get very far”.
She had to look past the boy to glance in her direction. It was Shaonli who was sitting on one corner of the room with an extended and rather long look. She too had come for the class. Shaonli gave a soft sigh “Sen won’t excuse me then, she finally concluded, I did not even try them!”
Under normal circumstances Anoushka would have spoken to anybody beside her but this boy had this distinct aura about him, which in a rather ambiguous manner repelled her or perhaps endeared him to her, she did not know. It was five by then and Mrs. Sen stepped in accompanied by an aroma of Liril soap and talcum powder. “I hope you people have pepped up your math this weekend cuz’ I’ll test you on your numericals”, she announced. “ So how were your exams Abhishek?”, she asked the boy who was sitting beside her. “Cakewalk”, he announced with some of the boys breaking into a series of wolfish howls and an occasional ooh or wow.
The test duly commenced with the class elevens arming themselves playfully with their pens and calculators. On this occasion Anoushka could not help borrowing a calculator from the boy beside her for she had forgotten to bring her own .He helped her with some of the sums and smiled charmingly as
she tried her best with the others. To her till then he was just this normal guy who had been sitting in the first row and the incident attached no further meaning to her entity.

Who We Are When We Work Together and Evolutionary Origins of the "Wait and See" Approach

Another one that I have endorsed with
***********************************************
Whether it is barn-raising or crafting a business plan, humans are among the few creatures that are able to work well cooperatively. According to an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, our success at cooperation results from three distinct personality types.

"In any given group of people, youl find three kinds of people: Cooperators, Free Riders, and what we call Reciprocators. Cooperators do the most work and Free Riders do as little as possible, but most of us are Reciprocators. We hold back a bit to determine the chances of success before devoting our full energy to a project," said Robert Kurzban, an assistant professor in Penn's Department of Psychology. "We found that these traits remained fairly stable among people, and you could reliably predict how a group might perform if you know the percentage of each type of person in that group."

Kurzban and Daniel Houser of George Mason University present their findings this week in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used a computer-based experiment to assess the range of cooperative behaviors among people. While they cannot offer a complete explanation of how these traits might have evolved, they point to reciprocity as an important motive in human societal behavior. According to Kurzban, it could also provide a simple lesson on the power of internal communications to managers and group leaders.

"Our findings show that the vast majority of people, about 63 percent, are Reciprocators, and in any group you are likely to have a substantial number of Reciprocators," Kurzban said. "The simplest way to make use of a Reciprocator potential is to keep everyone apprised with information about the successful contributions of others within the group. This way you show them that there is something to gain from their efforts."

More than 80 subjects participated in the experiment in which they were given 50 tokens that they could choose to keep or place in a group pool. Tokens placed in the group pool doubled in value and, at the end of the time period, were distributed equally among members. About 17 percent of the participants could be classified as Cooperators, taking the most risk almost immediately. Free Riders, who prefer not to cooperate, made up 20 percent.

"Overall, these personality traits remained strong through different games no matter which combinations of people were used.

Granted, if people are stuck working with a bunch of Free Riders, even the most highly cooperative among them will tend to take the 'wait-and-see' approach," Kurzban said.

Kurzban and Houser are now replicating their experiments to determine if distributions of cooperative types are similar across cultures. If those similarities are found, it might help clarify the origins of these distinct personality types.

The Russell Sage Foundation and the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics provided support for this research.

Author:
Greg Lester - glester@pobox.upenn.edu
University of Pennsylvania

Why do employees leave Organizations?

Just an article that sounded very convincing... Could not stop sharing it with you all and get your opinions on it.
*******************************************************************************************************

Every company normally faces one common problem of high employee turnout ratio. People are leaving the company for better pay, better profile or simply for just one reason 'Pak gaya'. This article might just throw some light on the matter...... After reading it' I realised how true the subjectline is.

Early this year, Arun, an old friend who is a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer. He had heard a lot about the CEO of this company, charismatic man often quoted in the business press for his visionary attitude.

The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food. Twice Arun was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined. "It's a real high working with such cutting edge technology." Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Arun walked out of the job.

He has no other offer in hand but he said he couldn't take it anymore. Nor,apparently, could several other people in his department who have also quit recently. The CEO is distressed about the high employee turnover. He's distressed about the money he's spent in training them. He's distressed because he can't figure out what happened.

Why did this talented employee leave despite a top salary? Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away. The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called First Break All The Rules.

It came up with this surprising finding: If you're losing good people, look to their immediate supervisor. More than any other single reason, he is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why they quit, taking their knowledge, experience and contacts with them.Often,straight to the competition.

"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. "So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people - in the form of better pay, better perks and better training - when, in the end, turnover is mostly manager issue." If you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers. Are they driving people
away?

Beyond a point, an employee's primary need has less to do with money, and more to do with how he's treated and how valued he feels. Much of this depends directly on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen to good people everywhere. A Fortune magazine survey some years ago found that nearly 75 per cent of employees have suffered at the hands of difficult superiors. You can leave one job to find - you guessed it, another wolf in a pin-stripe suit in the next one.

Of all the workplace stressors, a bad boss is possibly the worst, directly impacting the emotional health and productivity of employees.

HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find public humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he starts looking for another job. When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information.

Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don't have your heart and soul in the job." Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious, too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over seemingly trivial issue.

It isn't the 100th blow that knocks a good man down. It's the 99 that went before. And while it's true that people leave jobs for all kinds of reasons- for better opportunities or for circumstantial reasons, many who leave would have stayed - had it not been for one man constantly telling them, as Arun's boss did: "You are dispensable. I can find dozens like you." While it seems like there are plenty of other fish especially in today's waters, consider for a moment the cost of losing a talented employee.

There's the cost of finding a replacement. The cost of training the replacement. The cost of not having someone to do the job in the meantime. The loss of clients and contacts the person had with the industry. The loss of morale in co-workers. The loss of trade secrets this person may now share with others.

Plus, of course, the loss of the company's reputation. Every person who leaves a corporation then becomes its ambassador, for better or for worse.

We all know of large IT companies that people would love to join and large television companies few want to go near. In both cases, former employees have left to tell their tales. "Any company trying to compete must figure out a way to engage the mind of every employee," Jack Welch of GE once said. Much of a company's value lies "between the ears of its employees". If it's bleeding talent, it's bleeding value.

Unfortunately, many senior executives busy traveling the world, signing new deals and developing a vision for the company, have little idea of what may be going on at home.

That deep within an organization that otherwise does all the right things, one man could be driving its best people away

The lost 80's - Those were the days

Came across this nostalgic poem & thought of sharing it with you all.

The lost 80's - Those were the days
When gulli-danda and kanche (marbles) were more popular than cricket...
When we always had friends to play aais-paais (I Spy), chhepan-chhepai and pitthoo anytime...
When we desperately waited for 'yeh jo hai zindagi'...
When chitrahaar, vikram-baitaal, dada daadi ki kahaniyaan were so fulfilling...
When there was just one TV in every five houses and when bisleris were not sold in the trains ....
When we were going to bed by 9.00pm sharp except for the 'yeh jo hai zindagi' day...
When Holis & Diwalis meant mostly hand-made pakwaans and sweets and moms seeking our help while preparing them ...
When Maths teachers were not worried of our mummys and papas while slapping/beating us...
When we were exchanging comics and stamps and chacha-chaudaris and billus were our heroes...
When we were in nanihaals every summer and loved flying kites and plucking and eating unripe mangoes and leechis...
When one movie every Sunday evening on television was more than asked for and 'ek do teen chaar' and 'Rajni' inspired us ...
When 50 paisa meant at least 10 toffees...
When left over pages of the last year's notebooks were used for rough work or even fair work...
When 'chelpark' and 'natraaj' were encouraged against 'Reynolds and family'...
When the first rain meant getting drenched and playing in water and mud and making 'kaagaz ki kishtis'...
When there were no cell phones to tell friends that we will be at their homes at six in the evening...
When our parents always had 15 paise blue colored 'antardesis' and 5 paise machli wale stamps at home ...
When we were not seeing patakhes on Diwalis and gulaals on Holis as air and noise polluting or allergic agents...
when we disobeyed our parents and bought ice candy for 25 paise on hot summer days outside the school
when there were rain holidays and strike holidays which we discovered after reaching school
when we ever only studied the day before the test or exam
when we fashioned our own toys out of sticks and cardboard boxes during long summer vacations with nothing to do at all
when we literally had goose pimples if even 5 feet close to a real girl .....
when you knew things called limca and binaca and optonica
when you tried to laugh like that bunny on lijjat pappad
when you used the word "cadbury" instead of chocolate
when you looked forward the entire week for something called "the world this week" (and much later were saddened to hear that somebody called appan menon had died)

Book review: The Devil's Alternative

The storytelling of Frederick Forsyth needs no introductions to those who have already had a taste of his writings through the legendary thriller "The Day of the Jackal" which have been turned into a movie (like most of his works). The movie had different versions of it including the latest of "The Jackal" enacted by Bruce Wills (although the storyline has been altered to make up for the technological advancements that were shown). Nevertheless, this book indeed is the Devil's Alternative and the intricate details of the events will blow your mind away.
Frederick Forsyth, born in Ashford in the year 1938, has been an RAF fighter pilot, a newspaperman, a foreign correspondent and BBC radio and televsion reporter, has the uncanny ability to weave the facts and fiction into a fabulous fabric of storytelling. Having travelled to over forty countries all over the world and speaking French, German and Russian, he has the ability to plot a complex and strategic thriller involving the most unusual array of characters (both fictional and real) into a nailbiting story. One thing about the stories he writes: they are so real-like, almost tangiable and always well researched.
I have had the fortune of reading most of his well known thrillers and I have to tell you, this is one of his most enjoyable books. Involving a crisis that wil rock over ten European nations, the USA and the USSR this book will keep the reader guessing till the end. The chain of events described in the book, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, will miraculously fall in place ... but for that you will have to read it ...

A small snip from the book to get the interest going:
-----------------------------------------------------
...Back in the seventies, photographic survellience, though good, had been slow, mainly because each cartridge of exposed film had to be ejected from the satellite at specific positions, free-fall to earth in protective coverings, be retrieved with the aid of bleepers and tracing devices, be air-freigted to NRO's central laboratories, be developed and screened. Only when the satellite was within the arc of flight which permitted a direct line between it and the United States or one of American-controlled tracking stations could simultaneous TV transmissions take place. But when the satellite passed close over the Soviet Union, the curve of the earth's surface baffled reception, so the watchers had to wait until it came around again.
Then, in 1978, the scientists cracked the problem with the Parabola Game. Their computers devised a cat's cradle of infinite complexity for the high tracks of half a dozen space cameras round the globe's surface, to this end; whichever spy-in-the-sky the White House wanted to tap into could be ordered by signal to begin transmitting what it was seeing and throw the images in a low-parabola arc to another satellite that was not out of vision. The second bird would throw the image on again, to a third satellite, and so on, like basketball players tossing the ball from fingertip to fingertip while they run. When needed images were caught by the satellite over the United States, they could be beamed back down to NRO headquarters, and from there be patched through to the Oval Office.
The satellites were traveling at over forty thousand miles per hour; the globe was spinning with the hours, tilting with the seasons. The number of computations and permutations was astronomical, but the computers solved them. By 1980, at the touch of a button, the President had twenty-four-hour access by simultaneous transmission to every square inch of the world's surface...

PS: Sorry Bibliophiles, I had not gone through the comment of Karu and forgot to mention the price and the number of pages/approximate reading time for this one... for the price may be around Rs.100 (the one I read from Indranil), and the book is set in small print and about 400 pages, give or take a few... 8 hours approx. at my speed.

Forthcoming Attraction – 4

(Continued from Forthcoming Attraction – 3)
I became wide-awake with the sound of my alarm clock ringing in my ears. It was a costly one that I have bought last year from Singapore. Along with this Casio electronic timepiece I also got a free gift of a small heart shaped picture album that I have given away to Neepa. Ooops!! Neepa again. I was up on my feet in a flash. It was 9 AM in the morning and I have to visit some of the distribution centers of my distributors as well as look in to the preparation for my luncheon meet with the retailers at 11. I called up the reception and confirmed the rented car that they were supposed to provide me for my trip as well as ordered my breakfast at room. After lighting a cigarette I went around doing my usual morning chores – 15 minutes of free hand exercise, a healthy shower and then checking of my mails on my Laptop.
It was while checking my mails I got this funny notion about what Neepa will be doing with the photo album. Will she keep it? Women are noted to be very frugal and kind of gatherers or collectors in their own right. Always trust a women to keep every piece of wanted or unwanted matter just in case they may be needing at some distant future. The biggest example can be my Mom. She actually has our attic filled with such things. And given my nature of losing and wasting things, she did act as a savior lots a times by keeping back something, which I might have thrown out at some time and repented later. Hey!! What I am thinking? I am equating Neepa with my Mom. What does that mean? Am I becoming dependent on Neepa’s existence as much I am on my Mom’s? Oh My God!!
With a hazy mind I went over my scheduled itinerary with precision. While I was visiting the last of the distributors in Binaguri I found him a bit down. Praveen Seth!! What’s up? I asked jocularly. Dear Abhi, I am right now in a mess!! Your bhabi have again delayed her home coming from her father’s house by a week. Now that I know how to cook I think she is taking undue advantage!! I guess.. Praveen was fuming!! I laughed and asked him to keep a cooking help till his wife come back. Abhi!! Do you think I am worried about cooking? Will any one want his newly wedded wife to be away for a long time? I actually know her problem behind her staying late. But when I go back home and find no one waiting to hear my exploits, message my ego, quarrel and share my bed, it is then I become restless. So Abhi!! When are you getting married? I was too stunned to reply and started feeling a hollowness growing within me very fast.
After the luncheon meeting was over, I was sitting alone in my room. The smoke from the lit cigarette was twirling its way towards the AC duct. I was feeling week and a bit feverish. I know not why my mind was getting a bit numb. Numb to all feelings. My flight was next day in the morning as I planned to visit a big potential at night. I just did not feel like I can do it. I summoned all my courage but the only thing I was doing was to look at Neepa’s home phone number on my cell and have countless sighs. Somehow I know that I have lost the touch of being a successful flirt.
How I got hold of a train ticket in Darjeeling Mail that day and came back home with high fever, it’s a long story. Our home physician pronounced total rest for me as he rightly conjectured that I am stressed out although the reason of meeting my numbers was downright wrong. Why did not I ask for a self-picture from Neepa? Although I am served rightly by losing actually the girl that I never understood that I loved so dearly, I wanted to at least see Neepa once even if it was her picture.
This was almost a week went by. I have joined work. My body has already recovered but I knew that my mind will be scared for life. I was getting ready for office when suddenly I found my cell ringing. Without even looking at the CLI, I picked and greeted hello. The voice on the other side took my breath away. It was Neepa. Abhi I need to meet you one last time to give you back something. My heart was almost in my mouth and still jumping. WHERE and WHEN? I stammered. Please come near Auto Hitek Maruti Showroom in Southern Avenue at around 11 AM. And she clicked off.
It was around 11 when I saw her coming gorgeously dressed in a blue chiffon sari. Something in her that just took my breath away. I am going to my maternal uncle’s house (that I can make out from her hand luggage, that she was going some where). Abhi please take this back. It was the same heart shaped picture album with my and Neepa’s picture already in. Both of us looked just like a newly and happily married couple. With no more words Neepa turned back and was going away. This was when I got my voice and myself back after a long time. Neepa hold on!! She stopped and turned. Do you know what is a forthcoming attraction? She was just looking at me. This is an attraction that no one has ever seen before but knows for sure that it’s forthcoming in one’s life. Till now I always thought that each and every girl in my life was just a phase and I waited for a forthcoming attractive girl all through. But you know I continued I have found the ultimate attraction in my life in the last few days and that is you. Neepa will you make this photo album a permanent fixture in my life?? She was looking at me. I think it was after ages she came near me. I can smell her Dolce again. I was actually yearning for it. How can I be sure that there are no more such forthcoming attractions left in your life. With a sparkle in my eyes I said. Neepa, there is another forthcoming attraction in my life if you give your consent to marry me. With this I got a bit down and whispered in her ears the type of attraction that I am looking forward to.
You Moron!! She was red with anticipation and gave me a hug. In the meanwhile I saw the same two police officers looking at us from a distance. With a approving nod they started looking the other way. (END)

hello

hello,
our blog spot absolutely rocks. today is the first time i got to get a look at it...!!
I would like to share something funny which happened just now. You see right now there's a very pretty looking 7 year old girl sitting with me and watching me type. and just when i typed my first sentence , she complained about my lack of knowledge of punctuations. She asked me "why have'nt you typed the 't' of 'today' in capital letters ...since it is after a full stop..".well!! i must say the generation z is quite smart!! :-)).
As it is ,I am going bonkers , answering her questions...In the last one hour I have told her everything from internet chatting to blogging.....Infact she was quite thrilled about me and my friend having a conversation through 2 computers.(Though I am sure she is not really convinced,specially after being told that my friend is in delhi!!).

Indranilda(proper nouns in capital letters(before i get a second scolding)),am looking forward to the next episode of your blog..when will Mr. Abhi wake up??

byee everyone and keep smiling ,while I struggle to satisfy the inquisitiveness of a seven year old!

The lure of the bull - by Debraj

For persons keen on indulging in the multifarious aspects of the ever-enthralling world of the stock markets, the last month or so has never let any torpid moment. The markets have as if single-mindedly zoomed northwards taking every bear in its stride. In this unprecedented display of bull-wrath, investors get all the more prone to be taken off their feet and take a downright plunge into whichever scrip seems to be reaching dizzy heights. But watch out! Amidst the flurry of a zooming stock market lurks the risk of untracked depravity in certain stocks.
The greatest risk comes from a certain coterie of penny stocks. If things aren’t quite apprehensible yet, figure this. A bearing manufacturing company in Mumbai named XYZ Ltd. (name changed to conceal its identity – ref. from Business Today) no longer makes bearings but only trades in those catering mainly to Northern India. Net profits for the past 3 years have steadily headed downwards from Rs. 18 lakhs to 1 lakh in 2005! Now hold your breath. In keeping pace with this downward spiral in earnings, its P/E ratio breached the 1000 mark recently! Well, to make matters easier for eyes yet unused to sift through the myriad financial ratios in the business pages of the daily morning newspaper, let me put it this way. P/E implies in its physical connotation the amount of price an investor is willing to pay up to see through one rupee increase in earnings of the company. It is in effect a barometer to gauge investor confidence in the scrip. Having said this, we are but left with gawking looks to explain how XYZ Ltd. Can command such extravagant P/E!!
Infact, this is just one among many such penny stocks that flaunt such 4-figure valuations with such mightless ease that will put any frontline stock to shame! To make matters worse, some FIIs are also found to take interest in these scrips for whatsoever reasons. The quarry in this entire episode seems to be the ordinary investor who having reposed faith in such scrips take the brunt of the pitfalls directly on their chin!
A checklist for investors dealing with such high-risk stocks will be apt at this juncture.
1. Watch out for the history of its earnings. A steady decline in earnings coupled with a concomitant rise in valuation might spell warning.
2. Beware of any erratic trading pattern in the scrip. A sudden flurry of activities followed by an extended lull is not a healthy sign.
3. Excessive promoter holdings will naturally tend to give more leeway to promoters to manipulate the prices.
4. Watch out for the activities performed by the company. No wonder, you may find it transformed by the sweet whim of fate from a manufacturer to a petty trader of its own stocks!!
In a bull run as the one witnessed recently, caution is definitely the watchword to swear by. The slightest error in judgement might unleash the fierceful juggernaut of the stock markets to an investor. After all, it might have been some such hard luck that would have prompted the investment mavens to promulgate the pithy saying:
"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Book Review: Atonement - Ian McEwan

'Atonement' is set in the England of the '30s and the War years. There is talk of a war in the Continent but it is peripheral to the scheme of things for a country girl.

Briony, just out of childhood, still a child, is writing a play for her elder brother who is coming back home from the city. The big country house is populated by her mother who absents herself from the daily chores to nurse a recurring headache, an elder sister just back from Cambridge, luxuriating in her borrowed ideals of liberation but thrust with the care of the house, stifled by the country life but unsure of her life ahead.

Briony chances upon something which to her child's mind she imagines to be sinister. Her playwright's mind provides her with an ironclad story as she banishes any lingering doubts that she might be in the wrong. With her unwavering words she indicts a man, a childhood friend with whom her sister had just started exploring the first timid steps of a love.

It is only later when England is in the middle of the War and Briony is past her childhood years that doubts creep in. She starts to see the incident as what it was - a fabrication of her own mind. A wrong which she has to atone for.

The author captures the feel of the times. The description of the early years is a series of sepia tinted pictures, languid sunshine filtering through the leaves, reflecting off the ripples of a lake, lazy days spent smoking secretly on the tumble of freshly washed linen.

The silence in the house was complete - no voices or footfalls downstairs, no murmurs from the plumbing; in the space between one of the open sash windows a trapped fly had abandoned its struggle, and outside, the liquid birdsong had evaporated in the heat.

The author also portrays the grim realities of a war ravaged continent. The turmoil and sense of desolation of an army on the retreat with yearnings for home and loved ones left behind. Of a people defeated and with little signs of salvation.

And in the midst of it all the sense of wrongdoing, the attempts at making amends, of atonement. And the love which withstands all this, the indictment and the all-prevading war.

They stared at each other in confusion, unable to speak, sensing that something delicately established might slip from them. That they were old friends who had shared a childhood was now a barrier - they were embarrassed before their former selves. Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them. For the moment, there seemed no way out with words.

Book Review - The Alchemist

This is a very feel-good kind of book with very powerful messages.

My preconceived notion of destiny changed after going through this fabulous albeit abstract fable about a shepherd who followed his destiny and was able to realise his dream. I had always assumed that we let ourselves drift through life towards destiny. That our destiny is "destined", and nothing can be done to change it.

But in Alchemist, Coelho lets us believe that destiny is actually a "destination", i.e., God endows each person with a unique set of dreams and capabilities to achieve those dreams, and when we exercise our capabilities best & achieve our dreams, then we fulfill our destiny. Sometimes these dreams seem so impractical with respect to our current situation, they seem impossible even to ourselves, or others make us believe they are impossible, so are content just to muse about them. As a result, we just drift through life, not really "living" it.

"Follow your heart" - the Alchemist says. Very few of us have the courage to follow our heart. We are afraid that our heart will betray us, or that we would lose whatever we possess if we listen to our hearts. We are urged to think with "brain" & not with "heart". But the brain can only perform functions which our heart wills it to do. So the brain and heart must function in harmony, and we should not be afraid to listen to our hearts. In our religious texts also, we are urged to listen to our "Antaratma" - the heart, and then only we would realise who we really are. This book illustrates these ideas beautifully.

But above all, what I loved about this book is the feeling it conveys that "If there is a will, there is a way". " The whole Universe will conspire to make you win!!!

Foot in mouth

We all have our share of having a foot in our mouth… nothing like what I had a few days back and cannot stop feeling the way that I am till I share it with you all…

“Suvo Bijoya to you and your family”—this was what precisely started the whole thing. Being down with some horrible sickness in Dengue, I was left most of this pujo to contemplate the various possibilities that could have presented themselves this year. The new and expensive clothes, meant to be this year’s pujo-wear, which I had purchased for myself, lies in the cupboard. The plans for the Maddox Square adda all turned out to be mere illusion at the wake of this disaster that made my bed a stable companion throughout this pujo. Imagine my dismay when even a colleague commented “Sekire… ato maal tenechish je ogyan hoye chilish ….”, at the statement “Ebar pujote behunsh hoye chilaam…”. Actually I was referring my sorry state which he had totally failed to contemplate. So, when I started messaging everyone from my cell wishing them a “Suvo Bijoya”, little did I know what was in store for me.

I had been unfortunately associated with the most strangest and the most opportunist of all people I had known of. She was just a leech who happened to have landed as an acquaintance on me (why me of all people). It was some experience I wanted badly to forget. I even had to change my phone numbers to rid myself of the problem she seemed to have carried around with her as herself. I had met her on a Durga Pujo two years back and the first message I did to her was a “Suvo Bijoya”. So when I got the message “Suvo Bijoya to you and your family”— and that too from a number that seemed alien (I have no recollection of her number now … I had purposefully forgotten all about her … or have I?), I swung into action. Some deep down pride boiled up and I suddenly remembered her (lets call her ACKC). I was certain that, that message had surely come from Ackc.

I was almost jubilant… having spent most of my pujo confined within a mosquito net thinking of all such useless things like the futility of the pujo (don’t get me wrong…I was justifying why the grapes were sour), this was action time. I geared up for the most forceful of all the telephonic conversations that I would make and dialed at the number. The voice to my expectations proved to be very familiar and the person at the other end seemed to be very unsure about what to say at my fierce line of questioning “Ke bolchen?... ektu agey ekhan thekey akta SMS esechey .. ke pathiyechey boltey parben?... apni ke bolchen? Kottheke bolchen? …”. The person on the other end, a girl, repeatedly insisted that she was the sister of the person who sent me the message “Ami or bon bolchi… o ele oke phone kortey bolbo” …. But I knew better. Almost when the person at the other end started to become non-responsive that my more humane qualities stirred and I thankfully let go of the conversation, disconnecting with mock rage. I was sure of the identification of the so called fictitious sister; it was Ackc at her deceptive best. I called up one of my very close friends who happened to know Ackc personally. I asked him point blank “Tui amar number diyechish?..”. His repeated denials made me even surer that the person in question was Ackc.

I was not convinced. Having let her go that easily was a mistake… I should have made her sorry for finding out my number all over again… I shuddered at the prospect of having to attain her phone calls at the most odd hours all over again and decided to move in for the kill. I would make her so sorry that she would not call up anymore so I set about to write a clear and damning SMS which read like “I had d fortune of getting u out of my life gracefully and u seemed 2 have acknowledged it. Why then this SMS? I hate opportunists like u”. When the delivery report confirmed that the fat boy has been delivered… I set about in a mental muse and had a good feeling about the affair. I was confirmed that the SMS would seal everything and when reply was not coming I assumed the effect was perfect.

All my euphoria had been enjoyed when the call came. I had this habit of clearing up the phonebook every now and then and I had cleared up Sanjay’s number. He was my PL from the previous organization. The voice at once commanded my respect and I was quick to offer it. But something seemed to have put steel into Sanjay (we were on first name terms) and I realized what! I literally felt like hiding somewhere. It was really tough to explain the Phone call or even the SMS. My god! I have spoken the truth but it was not meant to be heard by Sanjay anyway… but what to do now? The pun of the situation has also made the SMS more worthy of belief. I remembered Sanjay had a sister. But what I could not understand was how come his mobile phone is picked up by his sister and where was he? I managed my best… better than what I did in front of Prof. Curie (or Koory) at the BITM (All’s well that ends well). Finally when I could explain to him what happened we had a good laugh… I could have given an arm to make him believe the truth… Luckily he had settled only for my word.

Forthcoming Attraction - 3

(Continued from Forthcoming Attraction - 2 post)

The IC-771 Boeing took off on time around 11 am. A forty five minutes flight gets over even before one can understand that he is flying. As I already had a heavy breakfast, I declined the shitty lunch that was served and asked for a cola instead. As usual that was not on menu. So I have to get my self satisfied with two fruit juices. Taking a look around I did not find any interesting character with whom I can strike up a chat and hence concentrated on the in flight magazine. The day was great with the sub accentuating the azure of the sky, when suddenly I saw Neepa. Her face was contoured with the most ephemeral smile I have ever seen. In fact, I thought that smile even surpassed that of Mona Lisa by the Master. She was telling something to me and I just cannot hear it above the sound of the jet engine. Speak a bit louder!! I shouted, and suddenly she seemed to be disintegrating in a fog and the edge of the known red and white sari of an airhostess came in my view. Are you ok Sir? She was asking in a troubled voice. I was feeling a bit groggy. What a dream!! I thought and nodded to her to show that I am ok. I looked at my watch and saw that it’s almost touch down time. The no-smoking sign came over my head as if to support my predicament. But even when I was fastening my seat belt my mind was in a total turmoil. Now why did I see Neepa? Was it the acidity caused by the fruit juices? Was I getting a bit jerky from the reaction that I get from Neepa the last night? I am not at all a superstitious person and not that I have not flirted with girls in the league of Neepa. While coming out of the Bagdogra Terminal and catching a cab to Hotel Mountain View on the Sevoke Road, I literally tried and usurped all thoughts of Neepa from my mind. Reaching the hotel I was given a very warm welcome as I was one of their vaunted customers. After getting refreshed I started calling up the distributors of my products in the vicinity. All of them answered my calls in a cheerful manner. When asked about what is the cause of diminishing sales I came to know that one of my competitor products is offering a BOGOF policy for the time being. And that is why our product is getting almost pushed of the display shelf space. I listed down almost all their tale of woes and invited them to have lunch with me next day in the Hotel Banquet hall. Thinking about discussing the undercutting policy with my superior in Kolkata, I absent mindedly dialed a number. Hello! The voice of the lady answering from the other end actually sent a chill down my spine. It was Neepa at the other end. I have myself dialed her number. I was holding the receiver in my thunder struck hands when suddenly after getting no reply from my end Neepa said, Listen!! Whoever you are please know that I have a CLI installed on my telephone. So please be at peace and let me be at it as well. I found my vision suddenly blur, thinking that these were the very lines that I have passed on to her as a tip, coming to know about her complain about crank calls at the most un-earthly hours. My mind was in a tizzy. Neepa is still using my tactics and does it mean that she still remembers me? The flirt within me started sending me warnings. I sat on the bed mulling on the recent incidents that has turned my world upside down. Am I in Love? The flirt inside my mind shouted an emphatic YES and cursed me for bringing his downfall. I asked my heart and could not find an answer. I have lost it. Abhi, the darling of all girls has lost his heart. I looked at my watch and it was showing 5 PM. I have to call my boss and discuss the day’s proceedings. I mustered all the strength both mental and physical as much as I can and picked up my organizer. After taking out boss’s number I pushed the speaker button .After listening to the dial tone I started punching the numbers, this time with more care than I have ever done. After talking with the boss and framing a strategy for the next day’s retailer/distributor meet, when I disconnected I found that I have almost drained all my energy. Feeling a bit week I summoned dinner in the room. After dining I pushed off to bed after popping a half tablet of slipping pill. (To be Continued..)

Forthcoming Attraction - 2

(Continued from Forthcoming Attraction - 1 post)

There are different ways to express ones thoughts. Some one will write them in a personal diary, some will try out the motley of forums that they are part of. But some one like me, who is a self professed extrovert, will not need any medium at all. Many a times I have seen that if you can express your feelings with sufficient clarity, you are going to be accepted on face value more often than not. So, after the love letter incident at such a tender age, I started learning the ropes in the art of flirting. The learning curve was froth with danger without any iota of doubt. Girls are like switches with an auto on and off button. That’s what I understood. The same sentence "You are looking great in this outfit" can bring around two diametrically opposite reactions. So while expressing one’s thought to the female species one needs to be not only aware about his position, but also the get up and the nature of the girl as well. Other wise the reception for ones overtures can lead to one mental and sometimes physical disintegration. Moreover there should not be any role for heart as well. It is not for nothing that Flirting is called a connoisseurs’ art.
So moving ahead when I expressed to Neepa my inability to commit nuptial ties with her after around a year of affair, I almost hoped that she will understand and will settle the matter amicably. I guess I was totally wrong on this count. And now here I am looking helplessly at a crying woman. And I have almost nothing to do.
The only hitch I am facing in consenting to Neepa’s Marriage proposal is that I am NOT READY at all to leave my life and image of a Casanova. People might think that I am a very bad man like Gulshan Grover. But then, how can take upon a commitment on me for which I am not ready at all? Neepa, Shall I drop you home? I asked. No reply. Neepa, Please try and understand, I like you but then I am not in a mental position to become your partner. In fact I am not even thinking in those lines. Go Away!! She blurts out. Go Away?? Leaving you here crying and its coming to 8 PM and this area is anything but safe for you, I advised. Again it is no reply. From the corner of my eyes I can see two constables were looking at us with scrutiny in their eyes. I was becoming a bit apprehensive now. Then I dropped my guard and ultimately put my hands on her head. She smelled great with her Dolce perfume. I lowered my head a bit and whispered in her ears. Neepa, I will try and see that you and I be together. Give me some time and then we will surely come out of this. Right now, if we together continue looking so distraught, we may as well invite some un-wanted attention as well. Like an artist who knows when to call it a day, I also knew that this gesture of mine will surely calm her and make her a little receptive to my ideas. I have slowly started guiding her towards my standing vehicle and once there ushered her in. We never had any more talks till I reached her house. Once out of the vehicle, I have seen her enter thru the front gates of her apartment building. Satisfied, just as I was going to turn the ignition key, I saw her face on my wind screen. The only thing she was able to shout was Good Bye and GET LOST!!! I gave a sorry look as I knew well not to react under circumstances and exited.
While taking a turn near Deshapriya Park, suddenly my cell started ringing. I saw the caller id. Hi Sarmila!! What’s up? Abhi, you have no right to make someone so sad. You are a sick man. It sounded like a shriek from the other end. It was Sarmila my colleague who actually got me and Neepa together. Neepa is some sort of sister of her. Cool down, lady!! I said. What happened? Now Abhi, don’t act smart. I would have never ever let you go near Neepa, if I have known your ways. She said. Sarmila is a colleague and quite an important one at that. I really cannot afford to make her go mad. I parked my car near the Priya Cinema. See Sarmila, I said, I have never told Neepa that I am going to ditch her. I like her very much. I have also asked for some time from her to put more thought on this issue. I think we can talk about this in the office tomorrow or any other place that you might find convenient. Fine! We will talk about this the first thing in the Morning. She said and disconnected. Life is becoming a bit interesting and they say correctly that there are some things that you cannot just keep your attention away from.
I reached office next day at 9 am sharp. My office is the one just near Florence Nursing Home in Shakespeare Sarani. Sitting in my cubicle, I was browsing thru my mails, when I suddenly came across this memo from my superior. It was speaking about diminishing sales in North Bengal. And something needs to be done about it asap. It was November end and my boss wants me to visit personally the Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling Districts to make sure that we meet our sales figures for the third quarter ending on December. I was contemplating the matter in the mail, when my extension phone started its shrill buzz. Looking at the incoming message displayed on its LCD I can understand that the call is from Sarmila, who have come to office earlier to catch me by my neck for my mis-deeds. Keeping the phone ringing I used my cell to connect my boss on his mobile and got his permission for my North Bengal Tour. Then after letting the phone for almost three minutes I picked it up. Sorry Sarmila!! I said. I was on a call with Mr. Das. He had told me to get packing just now and start on a tour to North Bengal. I did not even give her the time to even solicit a meeting. Amidst her exasperated buts and ifs I disconnected and went strait to the Travel Dept to arrange an e-ticket for a flight to Bagdogra Airport. After making all necessary arrangements I left office by 10 am and started towards home. With a crooked smile on my lips and my e-ticket in my breast pocket, I was reveling in the way that I have been able to dodge the prickly issue of my latest exploits. ( To be Continued..)

Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg seeks to make available totally free classic books in electronic format for free download. These books are all currently out of copyright and include works such as Shakespeare , Sherlock Holmes,Lewis carroll, Mahatma Gandhi etc etc.
Be sure to check this out.

Forthcoming Attraction - 1

Neepa was looking at me with disbelief. What have I done to deserve this? She must be thinking. But then I have nothing to do. She was crying and I cannot resist the urge to put my hand on her head. I was feeling bad but then I know that I cannot even console her, as I am the one responsible for her sorry state of affairs.
Anyone who chances upon a look at Neepa, will surely go for a second helping. No doubt was there about that. In fact, some of my friends were in fact becoming foes incorporated once they see me with such a dish. Our love story would have gone on to become a hit unless I suffered about this restless bout of flirting that I have honed my skills on from the very childhood.
Ladies and Gentlemen!! I am Abhi, the only son of my parents. Its not that I belong to a royal family but then my parents were dual earners who have made sure I was always provided, although the basic needs. But then I have no problems from childhood. I did well in studies as well currently I am working for one of the well known names in the world of the FMCG. All well happened with me from childhood till now and there was not even a single glitch. But then as they say things are never as they are seen, until they are put in the light of sanity of the observer. All was well with me, till I received my first love letter at the age of 12 in standard VI from a student of my class. She was not pretty in that sense, but she was indeed more advanced than of the likes of her. Till then I was actually totally unaware about the girlish stuff, as being in a co-ed school I was blissfully unaware of the difference between the two most important species on earth – a human boy and a girl. I could not remember the name of my first admirer but I do remember the love letter. It went something like this…
My Prince Charming,
Am I so bad looking that you never even look at me twice? I want you to be my friend first and then EVERYTHING later. I LOVE YOU… 143…ILU. I saw you with that most idiot of a girl, TINA yesterday during the recess. Both of you were talking about something and were laughing a lot. (Here I must mention that I was actually laughing on the strange stammering ways of Mrs. D’Souza, our English teacher, which was always a famous way of entertainment in the break). So, Abhi, do you love me as well or you are already picked up by that useless TINA?????? Just let her know that I will kill her etc.
I still think that love mail was more of a kind of TINA is bad than I love you Abhi. Anyways that’s my thought now. But then I was actually had mixed feelings finding this piece of paper in my Geography note book. At the same time I was feeling ecstatic as well feeling a bit doubtful about the fact that someone can love me other than my parents and relatives. I remember to have seen me all over more than once that day. In fact I remember asking my mother about my looks. She was surprised and commented tongue-in-cheek, any son is always handsome to his mother like a Mother owl will always like to appreciate the looks of her owlets. Now I understand, that was my mother giving me a very diplomatic and two-faced answer.
I do not about my 12 year physique but now that I am 27 I can see my self as a real tall (above 6 feet), dark and handsome creature. Keeping a date with my swimming activities has kept my body toned as well. Add to that my ready wit irrespective of the situation I am – A deadly cause of worry for all the girl’s fathers, brothers, boy friend’s et al. Al though I never spoke to my first admirer much, and never replied to her letters as well, I can rarely hide the feeling of elation that I received from that girl’s loving looks. (To be Continued..)

ADDA - The Global Phenomenon

( An article from New York Times - courtesy TCS Kool-Katha Team)

Some facts you had better get used to: you will never get to eavesdrop on Sartre and Genet at the Cafe de Flore, or watch Irving Howe and Philip Rahv getting worked up about Roth and Mailer at the Tip Toe Inn on the Upper West Side. And if you wander into Le Figaro Cafe you won't find Kerouac and Ginsberg hollering at each other in holy ecstasy -- just some N.Y.U. kids talking about relationships.
But the tradition of freestyle intellectual conversation lives on in Calcutta. The city (officially renamed Kolkata in 2001) has an oral culture as lively and cerebral as that of 1950's New York or Paris. Bengalis love to talk, especially about exalted topics (the notion that some topics are exalted still holds currency there, even among postmodernists).
And they have enshrined that love in adda, a kind of eclectic and often fiercely erudite conversation that originated among the upper classes but became democratized, thanks to universities, bookstores and coffeehouses. ''If you ask a Bengali what he is fond of,'' Suman Chattopadhyay, a producer at Star Anand TV News, told me, ''he will say rasgulla, which is a sweetmeat, Tagore's songs and adda.''
The word adda (pronounced AHD-da) is ''a place'' for ''careless talk with boon companions,'' as the scholar Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay
puts it, and sometimes as ''the chat of intimate friends.'' Another scholar, Vipesh Chakrabarty, writes, ''Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations.''
Of course, all these terms are subject to debate. Take ''long.'' The journalist Subir Bhaumik reports that some older members of his swimming club start their adda at 6 in the morning and are still at it when the place closes for lunch. An adda at the last Calcutta Book Fair is said to have gone on for five days.
As far as informality goes, the addas at the tony Center of International Modern Art (CIMA) are invitation-only and dedicated to specific topics. And can a conversation whose participants score points by reciting poetry really be called unrigorous? Bengalis assure me that addas may also include talk about job and family, but I suspect this is like a serious eater taking a little sherbet to clear his palate between the braised sea bass and the truffled sweetbreads.
(An adda, incidentally, nearly always involves the eating of fried savories like samosas and bhaji, or the rococo sweets that Bengalis call mishti.)
Tell a Calcuttan you went to his or her city looking for good talk, and there is a moment of incomprehension, followed by relief. The fear is that you will bring up Mother Teresa, who did a lot for the poor, according to the consensus, but dealt a body blow to the city's reputation, engendering an entire industry of squalor -- and uplift-tourism. Of course, there is squalor here, and poverty to gnash your teeth over. But the city also has legions of purposeful, well-dressed office workers; street chefs frying bhaji on propane stoves; vendors of saris, tube socks, counterfeit Nike bags and fresh papayas; and august old men in shalwar kameez that give them the sleek silhouette of an automobile hood ornament. Calcuttans might not want to talk about their presumptive saint, but when I asked them about adda, they wouldn't shut up.
''Adda is something typically Bengali,'' said the tiny, patrician Dr. Krishna Bose, a retired English literature professor at the University of Calcutta and a former member of Parliament. She is related by marriage to the Bengali independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose, which gives her pronouncements on the national character a definitive quality. ''It is something very spontaneous. The club life that the British have, that is not adda. It cannot be 50 people together. That becomes a meeting. So it should be three persons minimum, because if you have two that also is not an adda.''
Amithabha Bhattasali, a BBC reporter, believes that two people can have a perfectly decent adda, while the sisters Rakhi Sarkar and Pratiti Basu Sarkar, who run the events at CIMA, say that their addas typically draw 20 or 30 people. Most cognoscenti would say that the CIMA events don't qualify as true adda, since there is a program of topics. ''The thing about an adda is that it moves fluidly,'' Bhaumik insisted. ''You could be discussing Charles and Camilla's marriage this moment, and the next moment you're swinging over to the latest cricket series between India and Pakistan, and then swing back to the recent controversy over Tagore.''
During my stay in Calcutta, I began to feel that I was taking part in a never-ending adda about adda. The participants were scattered throughout the city, and I scurried back and forth among them, relaying an opinion and having it accepted or elaborated upon or shot down. Of course, everyone had an idea of what constituted a real adda. Was it peasants chatting at sundown by the Kali temple; the pensioners gabbing at Bhaumik's club; the tailors and goldsmiths opining by the tea stalls on Ganguly Road; the literary heavyweights who meet every Wednesday to discuss the arts?
The one thing everyone agreed on was that the best addas were the ones held at coffeehouses, near Presidency College, at the University of Calcutta, the city's (and maybe India's) most revered academic institution. Bose had partaken of them as a student in the 50's (she recalled a professor whose seminars on Milton had lasted so long as to necessitate two addas). The other thing people agreed on was that those addas were a thing of the past. College students today were too obsessed with their grades.
So when I went to the student coffeehouse, it was with low expectations. Nearby College Street is an uninterrupted corridor of used-book stalls; on this Friday evening all of them were thronged. The crowds and the lurid glow of the bookshops' lamps gave the street the feel of a carnival midway. The coffeehouse was on a side street. As I climbed a dank stone staircase, I heard a hum that might have been a generator, but when I rounded the corner it became apparent it was the sound of people talking. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn't be sure because the room was so dark. In the tobacco-colored gloom, people sat at tiny tables built for one or two, but some had six people squeezed around them, gesticulating through a haze of cigarette smoke. (Seeing so many smokers at large was itself exhilarating.)
I zeroed in on a rangy, bespectacled man in his 30's who seemed to be discussing something heavy with two older companions and introduced myself. ''So let me ask you, are you having an adda?''
''Adda? Yes, this is an adda.''
''And what are you talking about?''
''We are writers,'' the ringleader announced grandly. His name was Sarosij Basu. ''I am a very simple and very marginal writer. I publish a magazine, a little magazine. We only publish local writers, in Bengali.''
He showed me a copy that was bound with staples. Another writer, Dilip Ghosh, translated Dostoyevsky from English into Bengali. Basu had published an issue of his translations and critical articles. All 400 copies had sold out. Everybody at the table loved Dostoyevsky. Also Joyce Carol Oates and the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso, whom they saluted as their guru.
Our conversation went on for two hours and moved from Dostoyevsky to the blockade of Leningrad to Cioran to Calasso to Indian mythology to the demographics of Calcutta to the vagaries of the United States publishing industry. I suppose that made it a true adda. When I finally tugged myself away, I was tired and hoarse, but my brain seemed to be crisscrossed by new neural pathways, all of them roaring with conceptual traffic. On the basis of this experience, I would say that the coffeehouse adda is still thriving and that this is a good thing. But I should add the caveat of another man who joined our group and bemoaned the undisciplined spirits who spend their entire lives engrossed in adda: they ruin their kidneys with endless cups of coffee and their lungs with cigarettes, and their lives recede from them like mirages while they go on ceaselessly adda-fying.
''So you think adda is an addiction?'' I asked him.
''Adda,'' he answered, ''is a profession.''

A mail and a rush of memories

Got a mail from Partho today. He had sent it to a bunch of us reminding of another Gandhi Jayanti in what seems a long long time away.

It was a Saturday last year and our mid term exams were on the coming Monday. A month had gone by in a wink in Chennai and people were finding out their books. There were some funny subjects which I don't even recollect plus a test on Japanese.

I had got bugged cooped up in the ashram the whole day labouring over some stupid concept on Software Life Cycle. By evening I had managed to convince Nirmal and Lungi to take a break and go out for dinner at the only decent eatery some distance away from our ashram. Nirmal had stubbed his foot playing football the day before and was in considerable pain and so we had to stop at the doctor's on the way.

Jaiwin and co. (Chinmay, Partho, Mukesh) too were going to the same place in Jaiwin's car and since it was some distance to the the main road and to any transport Nirmal went off with them and I and Lungi legged it to the main road and thence onto a passing rick.

I had always wanted to wear a "mundu" - the white lungi thing, and had coaxed Lungi to lend me one. Now this is a tricky piece of garment and very prone to come off. It stays precariously tucked in at two ends, a master of its own fancy. To take no chances I had my shorts underneath.

Walking in a mundu is no mean feat. There is the constant fear of it coming off plus your pace is severely restricted. On counsel from Lungi I folded it midway like any true-to-his rasam South Indian. Much better that.

At the doctor's got quite a few enquiring glances, my unease showing on my face. After a few minutes wait and some medicines and rest advised to Nirmal we headed off to the eatery.

The food was good and the conversation merry but what was lacking was some booze. Being a dry day and the proprietor being conscientious refused to accede even upon our repeated winks and nudges.

There was some talk in jest of going off to Pondycherry where there would be booze aplenty. A bit sadly we left the place and headed back to our sordid rooms and those horrid books.

We were halfway there when we saw Jaiwin's car manoeuver a turn and stop in front of our rick. Said they had decided to go to Pondy and asked us to hop in.

It was 11:30 in the night, his car was low on gas and we had to go some distance into the city to fill it up before heading the other way. The car was a bit crammed for there were seven of us in it. But what the heck. By this time the mundu was serving as a wrap against the cold night breeze. It was drizzling and the cold spray on us was refreshing. The ECR is such a pleasure to drive on and we were hitting good speed.

On the way we stopped at places to stretch our limbs, take a fag and off we would go.

We reached Pondy at around 2AM and found most booze shops closed. A passing autowallah said he knew of a place which might be open, but this was not our day.

Still with spirits high we parked by the main road next to the promenade. Jaiwin was running a fever so he stayed back in the car with Nirmal (who jokingly reminded that the doc had advised him rest so what best but Pondy - though the ride in the cramped car had only made the pain worse).

We walked the promenade, went out to the sea, sat beneath the solitary statue of the Father of the Nation. The sea was glistening silver from the moonlight and from the lights at the pier. Lungi and I went exploring the French quarters, past the Aurobindo Ashram, where a sweeper was already cleaning the road of fallen leaves. Past two Japanese tourists who stopped us and asked us the time (a bit unexpected that. At 3AM in the morning). Past 'The Rendezvous' and the 'Sat Sang' where Shravu and I had been only a week back. Past immaculate houses and empty roads where dogs stood guard.

We came back to see Partho and gang had gone skinny dipping in the sea and were now in a bit of a pickle as a European couple had found it very amusing and stood looking. We sat and watched the fun and chatted up with another group of merry revellers (they from Bangalore, and cleverly had carried their own booze).

Pondycherry rises early. It was not yet light and people were out walking the street, whole families. It was almost 4:30 when we decided we should head back home and to some sleep.

On the way I dozed off and so did all except for Jaiwin at the wheels and Nirmal who was awake from his hurt toe.

Was woken up by the patter of the rain on the window. It was 6:30 in the morning and we were still some distance from Chennai. ECR was near empty and glistening in the rain. We stopped at one of the numerous beaches along the road, trudged to the sea where fishermen were bringing the night's catch in. It was raining a bit harder now so after some time we were off on our way.

By the time we reached the ashram it was almost 7:30. My body demanded sleep. Took a quick bath and fell out flat on my bed to wake up at 1 in the aftrenoon. Was famished by then so dragged myself to lunch and then back to bed .

By the time I was rested it was late in the afternoon and I had loads of subjects to wade through and only so much time. Fate catching up?

But then given a chance I would still not trade those hours of fun for a few more hours with those horrid blue books. For what I will always have are these memories.