Beginning Digging

Three of us had bonded at university over shared love of the past. Now that we work at different places, canteen tables cannot serve as the best place to generate ideas. Something more virtual, yet something more lasting must take shape. Hence, this blog for ourselves.

But what for you? How do you make things last? Through living in places and deeply imprinting the soil, perhaps. Through home, through language and song, perhaps. A patchwork on a quilt or a soiled boot, perhaps? Stories, or photographs? Through the eyes of your grandfather or the hands of your grandmother? All of life is a remembrance of a life already lived. Our blog would talk about memories and places that pin the past to the earth. Places that cannot be subdued, just like the people who died while refusing to die out forever. We shall post about faded yet persisting stories. Ruins, objects, texts- 'vintage' if you must call them so, but far more than collectibles.

Our blog is not a personal blog. You can expect articles that interest a casual traveler; or if you are interested in folk culture of India, history or architecture, literature of a bygone century, handicrafts, ancient traditions, objects and rituals, or plain philosophical musings of old-souls like us. None of us are professional photographers or travelers- our vocation is humanities, and that is what we have designed our blog to incorporate and express best.

So, fellow nostalgists, return and remember.

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A Visit to The Pen Hospital in Esplanade (Dharmatala)

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...

Upanishad in stories

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...

The Excavation of a Forgotten Painter

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 t...

Faded Earth

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