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Upanishad in stories

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Subscribe Sometimes you find a book close to your heart, you read that book a few times, hoping to return to it again, only to lose it. No matter how hard you search for it, you cannot find it again. I am sure that things like this happen to all of us. Objects and people are similar after all- they disappear leaving empty smoke behind… When in secondary school, at the age of twelve years, I had the occasion of reading a few books with stories from Upanishads in them, and two particular books struck me as especially interesting. Not having enough knowledge of Sanskrit, I could not read the stories in their original form, nor had I the patience back then to rummage through the entire Upanishads just in order to find a few stories. These two particular books, in all their lucidity of prose and yet not-so-dramatized retelling of the stories drew me to them repeatedly. One even had particular references of the stories being retold, and in this case re-written, so that if one wer
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Excavation of a Forgotten Painter: The Moments of his Art

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Subscribe In the earlier post I had tried to dig up the silken glow of Maniklal Banerjee, an eminent painter aligned to the Bengal School of Art, not so well remembered, who also happens to be my great grandfather. Like the familiar yet elusive beauty of his native village Sonaranga, he has remained less than fully tangible. He has remained somewhere amidst the luminous haze of family reminisces and the "ghost paintings"-as I call them- mere photographs retained of his best work on silk. I have received them archived on a CD disk, that came to me as a family heirloom.  Sonaranga of his younger days, drawn from memory and impressions. I have decided to call him, at times, by the name of Manik Babu, even though the man is both, a great painter and my great-grandfather instead of the more endearing “Boro-Dadu”. I have accused him at times in my mind, for remaining like a myth in our household. It was as if everybody knew half-truths about him, yet he did leave
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A Visit to The Pen Hospital in Esplanade (Dharmatala)

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Subscribe …I answered "The smell of old people's houses". The question was "What do you really like the most in life?" – Jep Gamberdella in The Great Beauty (2013) A few days back I had a chance to visit the Dharmatala area with a friend of mine, who was soon leaving for US. We strolled around the footpath amidst the bustling crowd of buyers, sellers and bystanders, and looked round. As we came near the Metro Gate no. 4, behind the stalls selling modern day clothing, we were able to find a shop not so modern- The Pen Hospital. On the wall by the shop Mr. Riyaz in his shop The shopkeeper of The Pen Hospital Pens on display The dusty rack Some of the pens I bought. I had to return the green coloured Parker England though since that one had a crack near the nib. Later I bought a Cross instead. For those who are fountain pen aficionado the existence of this shop is not a breaking news, for this shop with its dusty old di
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Listening to Erosion at Gangani

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Subscribe It is difficult to dig up faded stories of the earth or make up a story that both looks faded and smells earthy. My friends have shown great ingenuity in overcoming this impasse. Myself having none, must rely on the recollection of past before it completely fades away. My memory of Gangani goes as far back as my memory of picnics and hazy wintry mornings. A stretch of laterite with patches of cashew trees dips into a gorge with numerous caves and crevices before sloping into the river shilavati. We would cross the river barefoot and my Chhotka would spread his gamcha to catch a fish or two. There was no stair made yet to assist my trembling legs in descend on the yielding soil that glistened like gold in the sun. It was long before we read about soil erosion. For me every crevice was a haunt of stories etched on the soft yellow walls, a maze of figures, human, animal, demonic. Once down I had to stretch my entire neck to look up the ridge at the red rocks sittin
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The Excavation of a Forgotten Painter

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Subscribe Now that we are talking about things old and (not quite) forgotten, I’d like to tell you a story about an Indian painter, and not an ordinary one at that, for he was aspiring to do something new and difficult. More extraordinary was the fact that he was trying to do something beautiful in troubled times. Maniklal Banerjee was, to begin with, an ordinary village boy at Barisal. He was born in pre-independence India, in 1917, at a swampy but beautifully green place that now falls within Bangladesh. His father, a big man with a sweet humor and knowledge of worldly things almost as large as his moon-shaped belly, allowed his son to go after his heart’s desire: to study art.  Father of Maniklal Banerjee, Jintendranath Bandyopadhyay, as painted by son.  So, our young man quickly acquired his degrees from the Govt. Art College, Calcutta, and went on to win the first Indian Govt. Scholarship of art. This was a big deal for a new nation striving to build i
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