A little over 3 months back NDTV conducted a survey to choose 7 wonders of India. The grand finale took place in a glittering function in New Delhi on April 3 last.
Taj Mahal was also one of the New 7 Wonders of the World that was declared on 07/07/07 (July 7, 2007) in Lisbon, Portugal in a star-studded function which the Indians would remember as one where Christiano Ronaldo allegedly kissed Bipasha Basu.
While there is nothing wrong about Taj Mahal, it’s an irony that in the NDTV contest no natural place made it to the final list. India is blessed by having the highest mountain range as its crown and an ocean at its feet. Yet the voters couldn’t get at least one natural wonder in the final list.
Now the New7Wonders have embarked on finding 7 new natural wonders. The process has commenced last year, and the initial list of 440 places is now pruned to 77 last Thursday.
There are only 2 places from India in the list – the Sunderbans Forest, and the Kaziranga National Park in Nagaon district of Assam. The Sunderbans Forest is jointly under India and Bangladesh, while Cox’s Bazar is also in the list from Bangladesh.
No other natural place qualified in the list from India, though initially the Ganges and Nepal’s Mount Everest did figure in it.
Among the other places selected, and one I’ve been to, is the magnificent Table Mountain of Cape Town, South Africa.
The list 77 selections will be further pruned to 28 finalists in a function on July 21 at the New7Wonders headquarters in Switzerland. The final voting will start after that while the grand finale is expected in 2011.
Amid the quest for discovering newer wonders, not many perhaps remember the great The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo, Egypt, the only wonder of the ancient world that nearly survives intact.
It’s been several months that I visited south of South Africa with family. The pictures we took remained unattended for various reasons until I decided to do something with them some time back.
The video below (the first one) puts together 14 still images of Table Mountain, that fantastic ageless wonder in Cape Town.
Below it is yet another video of the Table Mountain, a fantastic time-lapse video of 560 individual images, done by Keith Pickersgill.
Some things are better ‘now’ than ‘never’. Take change for example. I resisted social networking for months – ages in cyber parlance – hoping better sense would prevail to the gung-ho enthusiasts of modern web generation.
But no, no amount of my ill-wishing could do any harm to the Facebooks and Twitters striding ahead. People laughed at me. Mocked they, “How could a silly, pot-bellied, do-nothing Kolkattan could ever wish such a thing!”
I tried to hold my own even as sand slipped below my feet so rapidly that I almost went off-balanced at times. “To hell with my wish…” I said at long last and joined the bandwagon that rode piggy-back on Facebook and Twitter.
Oh, dear me, look how I’ve deviated from what I was to write! What was I saying? Yes, change is something that is better done now than kept pending for long. Today’s TOI reports that the schools in Kolkata are now favoring US spellings.
That shouldn’t be a big story, because frankly who cares! But some still do like Sunirmal Chakraborty, the principal of La Martiniere for Boys. He says, "We discourage US spellings. Even though marks are not deducted, we do not encourage students to use them."
Aha, there lies the catch. You don’t deduct marks, which is like taking the side route to the main road, admitting that US spellings are not wrong after all.
Devi Kar of Modern High School is more practical. "Students have to be consistent in following the UK or US spellings," she says. That’s it, really.
Wonder what the fuss? Well these are the words spoken in the American society, and yes like it or not, we’re now more ruled by the US societal spellings than the Queen’s English. Ahem.
Interested readers will require Adobe Reader to read the downloaded PDF ebooks. There will however be no grief once the fair gets over. One can enjoy access to over 500,000 ebooks at the World eBook Fair website for just $8.95 a year.
Old memories must have been passing through his mind when he rose to present this year’s budget in the parliament. The man on his left as he spoke was the Governor of the RBI when he last presented the budget. Now he is the Prime Minister.
Pranab Mukherjee was perhaps setting a record of sorts being the only person in the history of India to hold the high-profile finance portfolio for a second time after a gap of quarter of a century. History will remember that but Pranab Mukherjee is a person of different league.
He is a man of learning, his awesome talent of deep understanding of a wide gamut of issues overshadowing the small stocky built of his.
In the last government, he started off as defense minister, shifting later to external affairs, and when the PM took ill in January this year, held both external affairs and finance portfolios simultaneously and effortlessly…all that in addition to being the head of the largest number of ministerial groups as well as trouble-shooting political crises whenever need arose.
There were and are tall persons in Indian politics of varying caliber, but Pranab Mukherjee’s caliber is the rarest of the rare even as he stands the tallest among his contemporaries.
The reason I think why he cannot hope to become the PM is not the dearth of talent – he has too much of that – but the fact that he has a mind of his own. And who knows better than him that nurturing ‘own mind’ is never a good quality in Indian politics.
Let me turn a little ‘parochial’ at this juncture. I am proud of him because like me Pranab Mukherjee is a Bengali, and I have no hesitation to say that he is yet another addition to the long list of luminaries from Bengal that perhaps no other state in India can (ever) boast of.
His was the world stage. He belonged to that vast humanity that has no geographical barriers.
No surprise then that Michael Jackson’s public memorial service to be held on coming Tuesday is going to have visitors from all over the world.
A total of 17500 tickets to the event to be distributed on the Internet already have half a million applicants. The figure is expected to be more as the registration has ended.
The Los Angeles police warn the fans and the media not to crowd the place without tickets or accreditation because they will not be allowed at the venue, the Staples Center.
Here are the details of the event:
Michael Jackson Public Memorial Service Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 10:00 a.m. STAPLES Center, Los Angeles, California
Below is the Michael Jackson Staples Center Rehearsals 2009 "This is it". Can you believe this is a rehearsal!
Not since the underground Metro did Bengal stand to receive so much from the Indian Railway. It’s stupendous by any standard, and what is a surprise is that not many from outside Bengal are wagging a finger at this shower of ‘gifts’ on Bengal.
Nitpickers may argue where from so much money will come, the railways will suffer loss, and so on! As if they are losing sleep over those concerns!
The reality is however different, and looking at the rush of people moving to and from Kolkata all through the day and deep into the evening, one can be reasonably certain that the new suburban/metro railway links announced will prove to be success.
Kolkata lacks decent infrastructure yet it hopes to attract investment in droves. Look at what other cities in India offer by way of easing commuting – the just opened Bandra-Worli sea link for example – and it’s a shame that Kolkata is still locked in the pride of a Bypass or 2.
Things have to improve…and fast. Bengal is economically too starved to refuse any help that comes in the way. In that respect the railway’s bounty is heartily welcome.
Who knows there may be more changes in the not-so-distant future! For better!
Yesterday, the t2 headline is a quote by Saina Nehwal:
I appeal to parents to allow their children to pursue their dreams. If they have the talent for badminton, please allow them to pursue it.
Saina is 19, which according to many doesn’t qualify her to be called an adult, though technically she is because in India 18 is the age of adulthood.
I bring in the talk of adulthood not to obfuscate Saina’s fervent appeal, rather to make the point that it required her to suffer pain to utter those words. It is not difficult to understand why.
Sports and games are hardly the first choice for most youngsters. Their parents will be happy to see them become doctors and engineers. The greedy parents make their young ones suffer the grind of reality shows in order to become rich overnight.
Cricket is another passion. It’s a funny game that is played in 3 formats, occupies more space in newspapers and time on the TV than any other game, and engages players who are long past their prime. The last happens because – no matter what anyone says – cricket hardly needs supreme fitness of body and mind.
Some time back the union sports minister made an immature remark about India’s football. Not to be outdone, the national football coach gave vent to his frustration at the state of affairs in the country.
I’m amused at times (when people talk about how poor the Indian team is). I remember the Sports Minister saying this Indian team would lose even to an Australian school team. I don’t know what prompted him to say that but I feel, instead of being cynical he should’ve asked himself why the facilities aren’t there.
How true! In his column, Free Kick, in The Telegraph, even the redoubtable PK Banerjee wrote:
A close look would reveal that top Indian sportspersons in almost every discipline train in foreign countries these days. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have made global impact. Even world chess champion, Viswanathan Anand mostly stays in Spain because of better training facilities.
The fact of the matter is that except cricket we the Indians don’t like sports or those who play them. Whenever there is a success the media rushes in to start the game of adulation making the sportsperson a temporary hero before dumping the news and the player altogether.
Getting rubbed off by Sukumar Roy’s talent may be a good sign of better days on the way, so I'd ask for your little indulgence as I combine 'writing silence' to 'wrilence' in the heading.
But what is writing silence (I can see the creases on your forehead…)? Well, it is my way of saying that I haven’t been writing for a long time in this blog. Which I now intend to break…
The occasion to cause the silence has been my project on online video making course, and the occasion for the silence to apparently come to an end is the completion of that project.
I'd much rather like you to see the video below than grudge my essay about the video project. And while there, the interested souls may take a peep at how some 30+ best video software – over half of them being FREE – can shape up a very decent web video.
I've another reason to feel good. Around the same time of my smallish effort coming to fruition, Wordpress, the blog giant, has announced VideoPress, which in their words is an upgrade that makes it easy to upload, embed, and share video on your WordPress.com blog or any site around the world, even in full HD.
Though feed-readers to this blog are steadily increasing, I feel guilty for not writing posts for a long time.
This would perhaps have continued for some more time had it not for the fact that I somehow felt compelled to pen my thoughts on the failure of the left parties in the elections just gone.
Any major social event needs introspection, and the last month’s huge electoral upset for the left parties in Bengal was no exception. Yet I was not finding the right answers to several puzzles in my mind.
To give examples, many pundits argued that at last Bengal joined the mainstream political wind to align with the Congress supported alliance because it felt that the Congress alone could take the country ahead.
I’ve no argument against that, but the question is why now?
Some people said it was the anti-incumbency factor that played the crucial role. If so then why it did not ‘play’ in the last 3 decades?
No, the reason should be something else and I was groping in the dark to find it until I came upon the article by Kalyan Sanyal, a professor of Economics in the Calcutta University, in the editorial column of Anandabazar Patrika of May 29 last (a small image below).
Now, having lived in many parts of India in the past, I can tell you that it is perhaps not possible for anyone leaving outside Bengal to understand what Sanyal meant by social rejection.
What is common to most of India but largely absent in Bengal – at least in electoral politics – is the division of people along caste, creed, and religion. But Bengal is unique in that it has sharp ‘political divide’ which you find nowhere.
In Bengal the left ideology demands unconditional subservience to the Party. If you are ‘in’, you are privileged. If you are ‘out’, you are doomed.
This deep political divide, nurtured and ruthlessly enforced over the last 3 decades, has resulted in talented people leaving or having left the state in droves, and their places being taken over by the self-seeking, mediocre, and inefficient people.
There are many ills that plague Bengal today, and examples are there everywhere that show how grossly inefficient the government has now become.
What will happen in the assembly elections 2 years from now is anybody’s guess. But there is no doubt that many people have voted against the left front out of sheer agony and helplessness that have been accumulating over the preceding years.
This result could have happened earlier if there was a close alliance among the principal opposition parties. That alliance happened this time and hence this result.
The situation now in rural Bengal is very tense what with mindless political violence taking its huge toll.
I often wonder that given such deep animosity among people along political lines, how will the state ever make any progress!
But I’m hopeful that even though dividing people along caste, creed, and religion may not go away in a hurry in other states, Bengal will ultimately eradicate the menace of political divide among its people.
The chance of that happening may appear slim today, but then wasn’t Europe a hell-hole a century and a half back, changing to what it is today!
Let Bengal reconcile to the fact that living in harmony is a far bigger virtue than mindless killing. When that happens we will be beckoned with a glorious future that was once ours.
If I’m looking for a change, I’ll want a ruler who is honest, capable, and who loves its people irrespective of political affiliations.
