Category Archives: Amazing Feats

Story of a young mountaineer

Amazing Feats, Inspiration / Positive News and Features, Records, All, Sports, Travel

Piyali Basak, a 26-year-old mountaineer may have limited means but she more than makes up with her drive

Piyali Basak, the 26-year-old mountaineer from Chandernagore, a municipal town 50 kilometres from Calcutta / Source: Piyali Basak

BREAKING: Heartbreak. This Wednesday, Piyali Basak was 500 metres away from the summit of Mt Everest when she had to abort her attempt and return to base camp. She had run out of oxygen. She had run out of funds to purchase refills. She had run into a terrible jam on the final slope.

Now, rewind: The call record shows a missed call from an unknown number. When I call back, a woman’s frantic voice answers at first ring. “Sir, Piyali has made it to the top. She tried to call you several times. You didn’t respond…” The person at the other end is Ratna, mother of Piyali, the 26-year-old mountaineer from Chandernagore, a municipal town 50 kilometres from Calcutta. Piyali has successfully scaled Mount Manaslu (8,163m), the world’s eighth highest peak, in western Nepal.

The last time I met Piyali, she was running from pillar to post trying to raise money to fund her attempt. “For nearly two months, I visited corporate offices, met ministers, political leaders and heads of charitable organisations. But I couldn’t gather even half the money,” she had said.

Piyali belongs to a lower middle-class family; means are limited, responsibilities are Himalayan. But then, there is the siren call of the mountains. Basak Bari, Piyali’s ancestral home, is in Chandernagore’s Kantapukur locality. It is not very difficult for me to find the two-storey house. Piyali has given clear directions up to a certain point. “Then you have to ask for the girl who climbs mountains,” she had said.

The living-cum-dining room is spacious but stuffed with trophies, medals and mountaineering gear. There are about a dozen water colour paintings on the walls; these show snowy peaks, yaks. There are red and yellow prayer flags strung on a long string. We are exchanging pleasantries with Piyali and her mother, Ratna, when we hear someone groan in pain. “My husband,” says Ratna apologetically and rushes inside.

Piyali’s father is a cerebral stroke patient. Once he had his own little business, but it went bust when Piyali was still in primary school. The stroke came close on the heels of the shock, rendering him partially paralysed. Some years later he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As Piyali is the eldest of three siblings, the responsibility of running the household fell on her.

Ratna tells me that her daughter’s attraction for mountaineering was born of a textbook account of the expedition of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. “She was in Class VI then,” says Ratna. It seems, those days, the family would undertake a pilgrimage a year — Kedarnath, Gomukh, Amarnath. That was around the time when Piyali joined a local rock-climbing club.

Like many mountaineers in Bengal, Piyali started with Susunia, a 450m hill in southern Bengal. To keep herself in shape, she started taking Taekwondo and swimming lessons. After graduating in mathematics, she took basic and advanced courses at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling.

Her first major expedition was to Mt Mulkila — a 6,517m peak in Himachal Pradesh — in 2010. Says the five-foot-nothing mountaineer with the physique of a twig, “I climbed efficiently and effortlessly; it seemed as if my body was built for this.” The following year, she tried to summit Mt Kamet, a peak in the Garhwal region, which stands even taller at 7,756m. “We had to cancel the trip after we ran out of food,” she says. Some other niggling issues, according to her, were poor quality gear, worn-out tents and recycled oxygen cylinders. That failure left its mark.

Soon after, a team led by Debashis Biswas and Basanta Singha Roy from Krishnangar made the first successful civilian expedition to Mt Everest from the state. An enthused Piyali joined an advanced mountaineering training course at the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF) in New Delhi. Some months later, equipped with her new skills, she set off for Mt Bhagirathi 2 (6,512m). But the all-women team faced an unforeseen challenge in the infamous cloudburst of Uttarakhand. Says Piyali, “We nearly got blown away at the summit camp, just a few hundred metres from the peak. We remained stranded for four days. Our equipment, food, everything got buried in snow.” When she returned home, her relations and friends advised her to give up climbing.

Piyali was not entirely persuaded but she was now more focused on preparing for competitive exams for government jobs. In 2014, she passed the School Service Commission exam and joined as a teacher in Kanailal Vidyamandir near her home. But the mountaineering bug returned to bite her. She met Biswas and then Chhanda Gayen, the first civilian woman from Bengal to climb Mt Everest, during a felicitation programme. “Chhanda shared with the audience her experience of climbing Mt Everest and Lhotse. I got to know that she practises martial arts and swimming,” says Piyali. Soon after, Chhanda went for an expedition to Mt Kanchenjungha and lost her life in an avalanche.

Piyali returned to the IMF and took an advanced leadership training and, thereafter, undertook an expedition to an unnamed peak (over 6,500m) near the Bara Shigri glacier in Himachal, with an injured leg. She says, “That is when I realised that climbing works like a drug for me. I forget all pain, every hardship.” The newfound confidence pushed her to join another expedition, to Mt Tinchenkang (6,010m) this time. “I made it to the summit despite a terrible stomach cramp,” she says. When she consulted a doctor upon returning home, it turned out to be a huge uterine tumour. Ratna says, “While she was being wheeled to the operation theatre, she asked if she would still be able to climb Mt Everest.” Adds her sister, Tamali, “After the surgery the doctor called and showed me the huge tumour she had been harbouring inside her body for perhaps a year. He said he had no idea how she climbed a 6,000m peak with it in her body.” That year her father suffered a second cerebral stroke.

The next two years there was little time for summits, there were personal obstacles to overcome. In 2017, she missed an expedition as her father was still in hospital. Her finances were a shambles. She was also unhappy with the selection procedures of expedition organisers. And that is why she decided to go solo, plan and organise her own expeditions. With a new resolve she set out to explore the Nepal Himalayas.

Thame is a small Sherpa village in Nepal, close to the base camp of Mt Everest. Piyali had been told that it was the birthplace of Norgay. “During the trip (in 2017) I met quite a few Sherpas on their way back home from expeditions to Mt Everest. I even stayed in a Sherpa’s hut. They were quite impressed by my performance; someone even asked me whether I am actually a Sherpa,” she says with a wide grin.

In Kathmandu, she stopped at the office of Seven Summit Treks, a trekking and expedition company led by Mingma Sherpa, the youngest person to climb all mountains over 8,000 metres. When she made enquiries about an expedition to Mt Everest, it turned out that the season had ended. Besides, the estimated cost was around Rs 26 lakh. It was beyond her means. Mingma suggested she consider an expedition to Mt Manaslu, that would cost less than half the amount.

Piyali had initially jumped at the idea, but in time she realised that even arranging half the fund was no easy task. She decided to take a personal loan from a government bank. When she reached the Seven Summit Treks office on September 2 that year, she had collected barely half of required amount. “Initially, they were reluctant to take me but I put up at a dharamshala and kept badgering them. Finally, they decided to allow me to join the expedition on a loan,” she says. She shopped for cheap equipment. Eventually she hired some, and bought some used gear discarded by other mountaineers. She hitchhiked to the base camp on a truck amid pouring rain and a hailstorm. And when she reached, she discovered that most of the 200 climbers had already acclimatised themselves. “Not only did I not get any chance to acclimatise; on the contrary a respiratory infection I had contracted in Calcutta was worse,” she says.

But once she started climbing, she says, these things became a blur. She forgot everything and reached Camp Number 3 ahead of most climbers. Two Polish climbers were impressed by her spirit and skills. They told her about the legendary Polish mountaineer, Wanda Rutkiewicz, who had climbed eight 8,000-metre peaks.

On September 27, at 2.30pm, Piyali made it to the summit along with Sherpa Pemba Thendup. On her way back she slipped into a crack in the thin ice. “The Sherpa refused to help me. He said: ‘You will have to get out on your own if you want to go solo for tougher expeditions’,” recalls Piyali. Eventually, Piyali heaved herself out of the crevasse and trekked to the base camp. When she returned to Kathmandu, she was handed the summit certificate. But by then she had spent all her money.

As she boarded the train from Raxaul to Howrah, she was exhausted but happy.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> People / by Prasun Chaudhuri / May 25th, 2019

Two decades of Sabyasachi

Amazing Feats, Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Business & Economy, Leaders, Records, All, World Opinion

The designer rewinds with The Telegraph to pick 20 landmarks that made Sabyasachi the brand that it is today!


Sabyasachi Mukherji / Telegraph file picture
  • Sabyasachi considers his graduation show at National Institute of Fashion Technology, Calcutta, as the first landmark of his career. The show had won him three awards — the Best Design Collection from NIFT Calcutta, the Ritu Kumar Award for Excellence in Textile, and the critic’s award in Confluence, which was the best among students from all the NIFTs. “That gave me my first foray into the fact that I could start becoming a designer, it gave me the confidence and the boost that I will not take up a job but start my own label. If those awards did not come my way I would probably be working in an export house now. It made me believe in myself,” says Sabya.
  • The second was being adjudged best designer at a contest called Khadi Goes International, which won him a scholarship to go to London and an internship with the Victoria and Albert Museum. “It was my first trip outside India… I had never really been anywhere except for Delhi and Bombay. So it was my first international flight. I got a lot of independence, because you know, Bengali kids are very protected, in the middle class you don’t really go out that much, so I didn’t have much exposure. So it opened my eyes about possibilities that there exists a market outside India as well.”
  • Sabya feels that his debut at Lakme India Fashion Week with his collection Kashgar Baazar in 2002 was the third and possibly the biggest landmark. “I became a star overnight. It put a lot of pressure on me. Because I did not even make it to Page 3, I made it to Page 1. I remember, The Telegraph coming up with the headline, ‘Fashion star rises from the east’. It came on the main newspaper, not in a supplement. It became a national news everywhere… I became a big star. It catapulted me into the brand that it is today.”
  • His first Bollywood film, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, which won him his first ever national award for costumes, is very special to him. “When he (Bhansali) had first called me for the movie I did not even know who he was and what kind of films he made. I was a big fan of Mr Bachchan and the fact that I got to work with Rani Mukerji and Mr Bachchan in my first film was enormous.”

A scene from the film, Black
  • Retailing from Espee, one of the first multi-designer fashion stores of Calcutta by Sangita Kejriwal and Purnima Chawla, holds a very special spot in Sabya’s heart. “I remember I used to cycle to Espee to see my clothes hanging; I could not believe that a store would actually put my clothes in their window.”
  • Winning the Mercedes-Benz Asia Fashion Award in Singapore got him a ticket to Paris and the chance to intern with global fashion stalwarts Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaia. “I came back feeling much more confident about my body of work.”

Sabya’s Spring/Summer 2005 collection Frog Princess / A Telegraph picture
  • His Spring/Summer 2005 collection Frog Princess got him his first ever international store display — Browns in London. “Ms Burstein, who owns Browns, is considered to be a fashion legend. She was the first person to retail John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and all of these people, and legend has it that if Browns puts somebody in the window of the store during London Fashion Week, that person is supposed to be a huge star in the future. She put me on the same platform. I was in the window of Browns during London Fashion Week. Of course, I became a big star in India, I did not become a big star internationally, but she must have seen some potential.” Frog Princess opened many doors and he got a chance to showcase at his first ever international fashion week — Milan Fashion Week. His next collection after that was Snail in Autumn/Winter 2006, with which he had the opportunity of showing at New York Fashion Week.
  • It was Chand Bibi in Autumn/Winter 2007 that saw Sabya flirt with a full Indian show. “Chand Bibi and much later Bridal Sutra were my first taste of how beautiful Indian clothes could be. Full Indian shows I did and I think they paved the way for the future of the brand. And if I were to give a collection for commercial success… Chand Bibi actually paved the way for the brand that Sabyasachi is today. It consolidated my position as an emerging bridal-wear designer.”

The Calcutta store was about 40 per cent retail and 60 per cent experience /
A Telegraph picture
  • The next big landmark was Opium, which he had shown at the India Couture Week in Delhi and which got rave reviews everywhere. Till today, it is one of Sabya’s biggest commercial successes.
  • A big feather in the cap of the brand was his collaborations — Christian Louboutin, Pottery Barn, Asian Paints, Forevermark — each of these have been very big landmarks for the brand. His collaboration Sabyasachi X L’Oreal Paris in 2018 was his foray into beauty.

Another huge collection was Big Love in 2015 / A Telegraph picture
  • Another huge collection was Big Love in 2015, when the brand started flirting with modern Indian clothing. It was still lehngas and everything, but it was a modern concept, which is still continuing today. A big landmark for the brand was introducing the Royal Bengal Tiger logo and it started with Big Love. “I thought the brand was getting bigger and bigger and it was important to anchor the brand with a signage which could replace my name Sabyasachi. And the Royal Bengal Tiger was a beautiful logo and it has become a bestseller because we have started putting it into the waistbands of lehngas, on belts and bags. I think the logo would find many iterations in many things to come.”
  • The brand’s first Cannes red-carpet appearance was with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan wearing a Sabyasachi sari. “That was my first red-carpet moment. She wore a sari of mine at Cannes and the kind of traffic it generated it has never generated that kind of traffic again.” His first public criticism was dressing up Vidya Balan for Cannes and Sabya considers that a landmark, too. “I learnt a very important lesson that when you are a very big brand the onus lies with the public too. So the people who praise you today are the ones who are going to criticise you tomorrow. You need to understand that people are going to criticise and you have got to respect that but you still got to move on and do what you want to do and not get shaken by public criticism. It made me stronger.”
  • The first interior designing project that Sabya did was for Taj 51 Buckingham Gate in London. Sabya designed the hotel’s iconic Cinema Suites.
  • A game-changer for the brand from the communication point of view was opening Sabyasachi Instagram and the first Instagram show that was Firdaus (2016). “I think I changed the format and a lot of big designers ever since have shifted away from doing fashion shows and switched to doing shows on Instagram. So we changed the way fashion communication was done in India.”

Sabya started his jewellery line in 2017 / The Telegraph picture
  • Sabya started his jewellery line in 2017. “I have ambitions to make it India’s number one jewellery brand. I started it two-and-a-half years ago and it is already over-performing. There are conversations with big stores overseas to stock Sabyasachi jewellery.”
  • The year of the big weddings in India saw Sabyasachi become the go-to name for weddings. In a span of a year he did the wardrobes for all the big weddings in India —Anushka Sharma, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra and then Isha Ambani and Shloka Mehta. 
  • One important personal landmark for Sabya was speaking at House of Commons and going to Buckingham Palace for dinner. “(The experience was) surreal! I had always seen Buckingham Palace from outside, to go inside… I remember I went with Manav (from his team), and Manav pressed his nose against the glass window and said ‘Oh so this is how it feels to look at people outside’. We could see all the people outside staring at the palace and we thought we could have been one of them.”
  • His show Band Baajaa Bride has been one of the most popular programmes on Indian television. It ran for eight seasons and won numerous awards.
  • His foray into the Far East with Lane Crawford and his White Wedding line with them was very important because “I want to own the wedding space not only in India but internationally as well”.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Culture / by Smita Roy Chowdhury / April 27th, 2019

The invisible women in science

Amazing Feats, Inspiration / Positive News and Features, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Bibha Chowdhuri and Jocelyn Bell Burnell were denied the Nobel, and Donna Strickland was denied a Wikipedia page


Bibha Chowdhuri developed the basic principles of identifying new particles by studying their tracks in cloud chambers and on photographic emulsion plates. Illustration by Suman Choudhury

One evening during my MSc nuclear physics practicals, a frail, slightly stooped lady with round gold-rimmed glasses and dressed in a spotlessly white attire enquired of me as to what I was doing. She was Bibha Chowdhuri, the lady who had been denied the Nobel Prize even though she had been the first to discover the pi-meson (pion).

Chowdhuri developed the basic principles of identifying new particles by studying their tracks in cloud chambers and on photographic emulsion plates. Accelerators were unknown in those days. The only source of high energy particles were the cosmic rays. As a student of D.M. Bose, she studied cosmic ray showers during 1938-1942 in Darjeeling. After meticulously exposing and observing half-tone photographic plates, she found new tracks created by a new subatomic particle with 200 times the electronic mass. This was the pion!

The results were published in Nature. Chowdhuri and Bose could not access full-tone photographic plates because World War II was raging at the time. Using the same technique, but with high quality full-tone photographic plates, the British physicist, Cecil Frank Powell, identified the pion at least four years later and won the Nobel in 1950. Powell, however, acknowledged the work of Chowdhuri and Bose.

Subsequently, Chowdhuri went to Manchester and obtained her doctorate degree in 1952. She was a researcher right till her death in 1991. She was never made a member of any national academy of sciences; she was not mentioned in a compendium of 98 women scientists edited by a Padma Shri winner. A handful of people have come to know about her only recently — thanks to Bose Institute authorities and a recent biography by R. Singh and S.C. Roy. But Chowdhuri never complained about anything.

In November 1988, I met Antony Hewish while visiting Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad. Hewish’s winning of the Nobel in 1974 (along with Martin Ryle) was mired in controversy because his Irish student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, had not been a co-recipient. Her discovery of the first pulsar changed the picture of the universe and served as a pointer to later discoveries of black holes and gravitational radiation. Pulsars are born when a massive star exhausts its fuel, its outer layers explode in a supernova and the core collapses. For core masses greater than three solar masses we get a black hole. For lesser masses, the huge pressure and density fuse electrons and protons into neutrons. Some neutron stars, spinning at huge speed and with powerful magnetic fields, accelerate local electrons and produce radiation, which is observed as periodic flashes (‘pulses’) by distant observers. There are millions of these exotic objects in our galaxy alone. Bell Burnell discovered the signals in 1967 by analysing voluminous data from the Cambridge dipole array telescope. Strangely, Hewish always maintained that Bell Burnell discovered the pulsar first. Her cryptic reaction was that the Nobel Committee does not consider graduate students for the prize. Last year, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. To counter the existing ‘unconscious bias’, she donated the prize money of three million dollars to the Institute of Physics in Britain to fund scholarships for women and marginalized groups.

Donna Strickland developed a major portion of the physics associated with laser surgery. She was awarded the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize along with two others. She is the third woman to win the Physics Nobel in 118 years. The medical and industrial applications of her technique are infinite and will influence future technology. Yet, she was denied a Wikipedia page before she won her Nobel although she has been an authority on lasers since the mid-1990s. Strickland sees herself as a scientist — not as a woman in science. Dignity of an unusual kind is at work here again.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Opinion / by Debashis Gangopadhyay / April 01st, 2019

Tallest tower gets four more floors

Amazing Feats, Business & Economy, Records, All, Travel

The 42, the 61-storeyed residential building on Jawaharlal Nehru Road will now have 65 storeys


The 42 / The Telegraph picture

The 42, the tallest building coming up in Calcutta, is getting taller with the civic body sanctioning the construction of four more floors following a change in a rule related to buildings within a kilometre of the Metro Railway corridor.

The 61-storeyed residential building on Jawaharlal Nehru Road will now have 65 storeys. The tower will be 249m tall, 12m more than the height in the original plan.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation approved the proposal for the extra floors last year.

“We have started constructing the additional four floors,” said Subir Basu, one of the architects of the project, being developed by a consortium named Chowringhee Residency Pvt Ltd.

Mumbai-based Hafeez Contractor is the other architect.

The civic body could allow the construction of the additional floors because of an amendment to its building rules last year, which allows extra floor-area ratio (FAR) for buildings within 1km of the Metro Railway corridor.

“Fifteen per cent extra FAR is allowed if the road in front of a building is 15m to 24m wide and 20 per cent extra FAR is allowed if the road is more than 24m wide,” a CMC official said.

The 42, the city’s tallest structure, is just a building away from Maidan Metro station and the road in front — Jawaharlal Nehru Road or Chowringhee Road — is nearly 30m wide.

FAR denotes the ratio of a building’s gross floor area to the size of the plot on which it stands. More FAR means opportunity to build more floor space in a building.

“Following the amendment, we have got 20 per cent more FAR,” architect Basu said.

The building plan for The 42 had been approved in 2014. Subsequently, the CMC building rules had been amended twice. The first amendment, in 2017, allowed extra FAR to properties within 500m of the Metro corridor. In 2018, buildings within 1km of the corridor were brought within the ambit of the revised FAR rule.

For the CMC, the additional floor space would result in more revenue.

The work at The 42 site was stalled for some time in 2017 after the Airports Authority of India had imposed a height restriction of 198m on structures within a certain radius of the airport. The order would have resulted in demolition of the top 12 floors of the tower.

The AAI later revised the height limit to 260m and sent a no-objection letter to the developers of The 42 in January 2018.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal / by Subhajoy Roy in Calcutta / March 11th, 2019

The Winners scripts a success story in Kolkata Police

Amazing Feats, Inspiration / Positive News and Features, Leaders, Records, All, Travel

The Winners, an all-women patrolling team by the Kolkata Police, was launched in July 2018, with an aim to check crimes against women and make public places safer for them.

“Oye, akeli hai kya? Chalegi park me? 300 dunga. Arey bol na, jyada chahiye? (Hey, will you come with me to Park, I will pay you 300 bucks. If you want more, tell me,” said a man in his twenties to a woman near Mohor Kunja Park under Hastings police station area around four months ago. The offender had no clue that he was messing with the wrong person. Arpita Mallik, a constable with the Kolkata Police and a member of the team The Winners, made her first arrest that day.

The Winners, an all-women patrolling team by the Kolkata Police, was launched in July 2018, with an aim to check crimes against women and make public places safer for them. The team with personnel trained in self-defence has so far apprehended more than 200 “Road Romeos”.

“I was on duty in civil dress. When the man teased me, I asked him to wait and grabbed him by the collar. He put up stiff resistance but was soon surrounded by a group of policewomen and he started apologising. We arrested him and I felt good,” Arpita said with a wide smile. She stays alone and meets her husband in Malda on holidays.

EXPLAINED

Step towards better gender equation in Kolkata Police

The Kolkata Police has always been keen on increasing the presence of women in their force. The State Home Department has set up eight women-only police stations in Kolkata to investigate crimes against women. A rape or molestation survivor will be comfortable with a woman police officer, they feel. More women in the force means more women reaching out to report incidents that bother them. Several crimes, including eve-teasing, often go unreported. An all-women battalion is a step towards betterment of city police’s gender equation — 800 women in the 26,000-strong police force.

“He wasn’t very keen on me joining police but I managed,” she said. The Winners has 28 women personnel, including three senior officers. All the 25 constables are in their mid-twenties. In white uniform, they conduct patrol on scooty.

“They have been rigorously trained in self-defence and have revolver licence. Our objective is to make the city safe for women,” said Sampa Guha one of the senior officers of the team. “I am happy to see such young, smart women cops in our city. Once a man in lungi started following me on the street and retreated as soon as he spotted a group of policewomen. Cheers to these ladies,” said Anindita Ray Choudhuri, a management student.

However, the team has to fight odds while on duty. Once a constable in the team was bitten on her hand while another was heckled while on patrol inside the Millennium Park. Six persons, including two women were arrested for allegedly harassing personnel on duty.

“We face a lot of challenge and even get teased but when we are in uniform, people respect us also. There have been instances when during midnight patrolling, women came and thanked us for making them feel safe. It gives us immense satisfaction,” said Zinnatara Khatun, another member of the team.

Team Winner is headed by three sub-inspectors, including Sampa Guha, Mita Kansabanik and Zinnatara Khatun. Sampa has various accolades to her credit in power lifting in international, Asian and national events. Zinnatara Khatun is an athlete who has won the Indian Police Medal. Mita is also a power lifting champion.

“We love catching Road Romeos,” laughs Zinnatara. Mita is married and has a 16-year-old daughter, while Zinnatara and Sampa are single.

“Earlier marriage used to give a woman financial security and an identity, but nowadays it has nothing exceptional to offer a woman,” said Zinnatara and Sampa.

Madhumita Mahapatra, another member of the team, says, “My husband is very proud to see me in uniform. I have a tight schedule but he is always there to pick me up when I finish work.” Another member, Debolina Das Rai, feels they stand for themselves to bring the change. “My husband mostly takes care of our son as I have a tight schedule. We manage well and he never complains,” she said.

Their message on Women’s Day

“People talk about women empowerment but hardly practice it. We are educated and present ourselves well but our mentality remains the same. Real change has to come from within. All women should be financially independent and should speak up. Once a woman starts sharing financial responsibility of her family and her parents, people will stop craving for male child. To bring a change, it is important for women to learn self-defence. Girls are mentally much stronger than men and we must celebrate womanhood.”

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Cities / by Sweety Kumar / Kolkata / March 08th, 2019

When the love of nation and the love of science thrived together

Amazing Feats, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

The scientific genius of Bengal just before Independence deserves better storytelling


Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray Laboratory, University College of Science and Technology, Calcutta / Telegraph file picture

One of the problems with history is not how it is written but how it is perceived. Time adds a certain sense of melodrama and stereotype to events. History then acquires a grandeur, a stark monumentality, but somehow the narrative lacks nuance, the sensitivity and vulnerability of genius. As a sociologist who has worked in Bengal for a decade, I always felt Bengal, nationalist Bengal, was more creative and nuanced than it is presented to be. One sees this particularly in the relation between science and nationalism. The debates that Bengal fought embodied a plurality of visions which the nation desperately needs today.

Our nationalism had a confidence, with powerful insights into oppression and liberation. I remember the first great nationalist institution in science, the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science established by Mahendra Lal Sircar. Few remember its great goal, which was to rescue science from Western civilization. Our nationalism, thus, was not merely an attempt to liberate ourselves from the West but to evaluate it, to reinvent the defeated West. One sees it again and again as we look at science. We wanted to inject into science our own genius. J.C. Bose, for instance, borrowed from Shakta traditions to challenge the dualism of the mechanical and the living. Bose had an acute sense of being an Indian scientist. He realized that one had to take on the mainstream paradigms. He realized the danger was of the West reading you through orientalist eyes and reducing you to an occult or mystical figure. Bose realized that one had to make English science say things it had not said without being marginalized. Bose had that genius which people valued.

I remember a cousin of mine, a physicist, listening to a lecture at Princeton by William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and a Nobel laureate. Shockley began his lecture by invoking Bose and claiming, “[T]here was Bose and the rest is toilet paper.” I wish some local publisher would republish Patrick Geddes’s biography of Bose to recapture his genius.

In fact, history has little to say about the relation between Bose, the poet, Tagore, and the biologist, Patrick Geddes. They shared a mutual reverence and a curiosity about nature which needs more discussion. The narratives of science and nationalism often become a failure of storytelling. Few know that Tagore wrote a textbook on science and even fewer know that Tagore, Bose and Geddes taught a summer school in science at Darjeeling.

The conversation between Geddes and Tagore also led to a vision of Santiniketan few talk about. The current Santiniketan embodies the aesthetic genius of Tagore. But the original Santiniketan embodied a vision of science that Tagore and Geddes discussed. One gets a whiff of this plan as one reads the Geddes-Tagore letters edited by Bashabi Fraser or Philip Boardman’s biography of Geddes. Geddes and Tagore dreamt not only of rural reconstruction but also of a return to an agricultural view of science. Tagore felt that the dialogue of civilizations would be a dialogue of universities. He argued that this exchange would be between the city science of the West, which sought to dominate nature, and the forest universities, which lived in harmony with nature. It is a pity we have not explored these dialogues or even captured the romance or the romanticism of science that this trio evoked. One forgets that Bose was an inventor par excellence also and one of the scientists who refused to patent his work, genuinely believing that ethically and creatively, science belonged to a commons of knowledge. I cannot resist but relate a story about Tagore’s first visit to Bose’s laboratory. The scientist was not there but Tagore left as his signature a bunch of oleander flowers. This relationship between the three makes C.P. Snow’s idea behind The Two Cultures an illiteracy. Nationalist science was interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in a way we cannot imagine today.

Tagore helped create an aesthetic of technology. His debates with Gandhi on khadi are critical. Gandhi saw khadi as transforming the village but Tagore warned that a mechanical use of khadi would create a uniform dullness. Tagore’s sense of the aesthetic went beyond function because he wanted to inject an aesthetic and an erotic into technology.

The debates between Prafulla Chandra Ray and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the geologist and the art critic, are also relevant. Ray warned about the impact of synthetic chemistry, claiming its power stemmed from the tapas of German scientists. Coomaraswamy warned that chemistry had no balancing ethic, that it would create an industrialization of colour: a standardized red for madder, replacing the infinite variety of red that was available in the villages.

Ray himself was a folklore figure. One can invoke a pantheon of stories about the chemist who was a great swadeshi scientist. In fact, Ray’s Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist is a literal embodiment of a life in science. The two volumes have nothing private or personal in them. The book is an attempt to show how science creates public knowledge. The whole narrative is written as a scientific experiment with Ray’s life as a test tube, creating a scientific method. Ray realized the importance of a swadeshi science and was among those most committed to a Gandhian way of life. His was an ascetic life and an ascetic style of science. I remember a leading scientist who had gone to visit the University College of Science and Technology. He landed up one evening, found it deserted except for an old man in a corner. Thinking he was the chowkidar, he asked about Ray, to discover that the old man was Ray himself. Ray brought to life and science a simplicity that was stunning.

A perfect contrast to the vision of Ray was Meghnad Saha. An astrophysicist, a brilliant scientist, Saha was tired of politicians who had no sense of the possibilities of science. It was Saha who was the greatest advocate of a Leninist style of planning and it was Saha who persuaded Subhas Bose to set up national planning committees. He also edited Science and Culture, one of the great science policy journals. Science and Culture comprised a wonderful network of intellectuals which included P.C. Mahalanobis, N.K. Bose and D.M. Bose, all of whom combined in their individualistic ways to create a society based on the scientific method. The prolific Saha worked on everything from dams to calendrical reform. He was quick to express his disappointment with Nehru and got elected to Parliament to challenge him. One can hardly dream of that kind of vision and commitment today.

One can retail story after story about this period, celebrating Satyendra Nath Bose or P.C. Mahalanobis, but what one wants to emphasize is the different styles of science and the varied dreams of it that the Bengal of that time possessed. There was a playfulness, a plurality, a sense of dream and ideals, an availability of eccentricity and creativity one misses today. The stories once popular are quietly fading. One wishes Bengal was better served by its historians of science. At least one would like to propose a museum of photography, stories, technologies as a tribute to this generation. We sadly have a regime that talks of ancient science idiotically but ignores the neighbourhoods of genius just before Independence. Surely this generation deserves the storyteller and his tales of a great and creative science.

The author is an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Opinion / by Shiv Visvanathan / November 28th, 2018

A tribute to Jagadish Bose, who proved plants have life

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Group of scientists recreates Bose’s experiment, which was not received well 100 years ago

Bose’s peers in the West may not have got the same results as him because of the water used /
Image: The Telegraph

More than 100 years after Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted the experiment that established plants have life, a group of scientists in Calcutta came together this year to repeat it.

Supriyo Kumar Das, an assistant professor of Geology at Presidency University, led the initiative. The others on the team were also from Presidency — Debashis Datta and Rabindranath Gayen, both assistant professors of Physics, Snigddha Pal Chowdhury, a research associate in the Geology department, Abhijit Dey, an assistant professor of Botany, and Saranya Naskar, an MSc student of Physics.

Bose, who had joined Presidency College in 1885 as a professor in the Physics department, had conducted the experiment in a laboratory on these very precincts. No matter how much he is hailed today for his scientific genius, in his time Bose’s experiment had not been received well.

It all began when Peter V. Minorsky, a botanist and professor at Mercy College in the US, got in touch with Das earlier this year. Minorsky wanted to know about the groundwater composition in the College Street area, where Presidency University stands.

Says Das, “It is from him that I heard about the prejudices against Bose. In the course of our exchanges, I got interested and emotionally involved with Bose’s work.”

He had been savagely criticised by George James Peirce, professor of Plant Physiology at Stanford University. Peirce wrote in the journal, Science, in 1927: “The trouble with Bose… is that while his curiosity is directed to biological phenomena, his mind is inadequately equipped with the information and habits necessary for accurate study, and his reflections are addressed to philosophical problems.”

In 1929, the Indian Review reported that G.A. Perrson, who was from the US, was unable to find pulse in plants. And years later, in the mid-1960s, in the Handbuch der Pflanzenphysiologie (Encyclopaedia of Plant Physiology), it was said, “Unfortunately Bose’s theoretical views and his emotional style of reporting have generated what may be an excessive skepticism concerning the validity of his observations.”

This is what Bose had observed. By devising a wire electrode — an invention three decades ahead of its time — he identified a pulsating layer of cells abutting the vascular tissue in plants. In an email to The Telegraph, Minorsky says, “In the last few years, plant biologists have come to recognise this layer is the site of propagating waves of calcium release that are involved in communicating stress from local points of occurrence to the rest of the plant. The discovery of this calcium wave is one of the more exciting discoveries of the 21st century, and Bose’s ‘plant heart’ predates this discovery by a century.”

Bose has left notes aplenty about every aspect of his historic experiment. One of the lone omissions is the kind of water used. Says Das, “Being a geochemist and scientist, I understand the composition of groundwater and the effect of chemical stress of sodium on plants. I also know that the composition of water varies from place to place.” He adds, “It occurred to us that Bose’s peers in the West might not have got the same results as him because of the water used.”

PULSE TEST: A repeat of the experiment at Presidency University that Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted in the 1900s /
Image: The Telegraph

In Bose’s time, water was supplied to the Presidency campus from Palta in the Barrackpore area. Das points to a spot occupied by an elevator on the ground floor of Baker Building that houses the Physics department and says, “This is where the old pipeline ran.” Currently, the municipality takes care of the water supply. It comes from the Tala tank in north Calcutta.

When Das and and others repeated the experiment, they decided to use water from every possible source Bose might have accessed. “He could have also used water from the Ganges or from the pond in College Square,” says Das.

Datta explains, “We wanted to check the potassium and sodium concentration. Electricity flows through water only when there are some ions present in it. Possibly, the scientists from the West had not used ionised water.”

The “repeaters” used for the experiment the plant Bose had used — the Desmodium motorium, locally known as bon charal. Minorsky explains, “The lateral leaflets of Desmodium are unique in the plant kingdom for their pronounced and unprovoked oscillatory movements. If conditions are optimal, one can watch these lateral leaflets move at a pace slightly slower than the second hand of a watch.”

According to Minorsky, Bose enjoyed certain enormous advantages over his Western peers. First, Desmodium motorium is a native of Bengal, so he had access to an ample supply of healthy, thriving specimens. In contrast, in the West its cultivation was restricted to glasshouses. Those days, glasshouses were often heated by wheelbarrows of burning coal. These released a gas called ethylene, which in turn affected many plant processes, including a decrease in overall excitability. Second, he points out Calcutta’s temperatures and how they lend themselves to plant study. “Temperatures of 30-35° Celsius, which occur commonly, are optimal for studying plant movements and excitability. The temperatures at which scientists in the West studied plants would have been much lower,” he says. Finally, there was the salty water advantage.

Dey arranged for 21 Desmodium plants. Each was kept in a beaker full of a distinct water sample. Thereafter, they were all kept in a controlled atmosphere. Says Gayen, “We placed them in glass beakers and left them in the laboratory, where all the lights would be kept on so that all of them were exposed to the same amount of light. The air conditioner would be set at a particular temperature to control the humidity. We would connect the probes to two different parts of the stem. The source meter was used to read the fluctuating signals.”

The brainstorming went on for months and the experiment lasted a fortnight. Das says, “The apprehension of failure was there. But the moment when we got the first response was exquisite. The horizontal line that appeared on the screen formed a peak and then fell only to rise again. Though our graph did not have peaks and troughs as tall as Bose’s, we definitely had got a graph that roughly replicated the ECG graph of humans.”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Online edition / Home> Culture / by Moumita Chaudhuri / November 25th, 2018

An unrecognised explorer

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It’s time we do justice to Radhanath Sikdar, the man who first measured Mount Everest

All of us are aware from the days of our childhood that the highest mountain peak in the world is Mount Everest and it was discovered by George Everest. It was only much later that one came to know that Sir George Everest was the Surveyor General of India and the peak was so named as he had discovered it to be the highest in the world. As the Surveyor General, he had his offices in Dehradun and used to stay in Mussoorie. He left India in 1843, almost 200 years ago, but his house in Mussoorie is still being preserved and is now a place of tourist interest.

The truth, however, is somewhat different. It is a fact that Sir George Everest was the Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843, but it is also a fact that during his tenure of office, Mount Everest, that we know of today, was only known as ‘Peak XV’. Everest had neither initiated the process of measuring the height of this peak, nor was he instrumental in its naming, which was done much later, long after he had proceeded to England to enjoy his retirement after 1843. Located on the border of Nepal and Tibet, this ‘Peak XV’ has been worshipped as a holy place by the Tibetans, who called it Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess of the World. In Nepal, this peak is known as Sagarmatha, meaning the peak of heavens. Even these days, this peak is addressed by its traditional names, both in Tibet and Nepal, while we have followed what was given to us by the British ie Mount Everest.

In fact, the name Everest was given by Col Sir Andrew Waugh of Bengal Engineers, who succeeded Everest as the Surveyor General of India from 1844 to 1861. Circumstances under which ‘Peak XV’ was named as Mount Everest are rather peculiar and reveal a very biased handling of the matter so that the entire credit goes to the British officers of the East India Company. Going through the historical records of the Survey of India Volume IV: 1830 to 1843, pertaining to the tenure of Sir George Everest, one can observe at a glance that he had shown no interest in ‘Peak XV’ during this period. It was his successor, Andrew Waugh, who made the official announcement of ‘Peak XV’ being the highest known peak of the world in 1856, the measurements had, of course, been initiated much earlier and finalised by our own Radha Nath Sikdar in 1849.

Recognising the work of Sikdar, the Government of India had issued a postage stamp in his honour in 2004. But his work is of such a great importance that issuing a postage stamp and then forgetting about him does not do full justice to his unique and great contribution. It was Sir George Everest who had recruited Sikdar in the great trigonometrical survey and became extremely fond of him. Volume IV of the Historical records of Survey of India, pertaining to his tenure, have the following mention about Sikdar: “Radanauth is high in favour with everybody, and universally beloved in the GT Survey. You will not know him for the same person when you see him again, for he is no longer a puny stripling, but a hardy energetic young man, ready to undergo any fatigue, and acquire a practical knowledge of all parts of his profession. …There are few of my instruments which he cannot manage; and none of my computations of which he is not thoroughly master. …Eventually he will furnish a convincing proof that the aptitude of your countrymen for the practical, as well as the theoretical, parts of mathematics is in no wise inferior to that of Europeans.”

“Of the qualifications of the young man himself I cannot speak too highly. In his mathematical attainments there are few in India, whether European or Native, who can at all compete with him, and…even in Europe those attainments would rank very high.”

Later, on account of a special technique developed by Sikdar for accurate computation of heights and distances through Spherical Trigonometry, he virtually became indispensable to the organisation and rose to become the Chief Computer in the office of SGI. In that position, he moved from Dehradun to Kolkata in 1849. As to why Andrew Waugh gave the name Everest, even though he had left the scene long ago, is an interesting piece of history.

Had SG Burrard, a later Surveyor General of India, not acknowledged the good work of Radhanath Sikdar through a research paper published in 1904 in the scientific journal Nature, these facts would not have come to light. He published in detail various steps taken for the measurement of ‘Peak XV’. This in a way also exposed the machinations of Andrew Waugh who had tried his level best to take credit away from, to where it truly belonged, that is Radhanath Sikdar.

It is human nature that in case something important is achieved, one tries to take credit or gives credit to someone, but in this case, Waugh specifically mentioned that Sikdar had nothing to do with this work, indicating his bias. Later, he could be seen placating him by asking him that he should be happy that the peak had been named after his mentor. Andrew Waugh also gave the additional charge of the Indian Metrological Department to Sikdar, raising his salary to Rs 600 per month. This was unheard for an Indian in those days. Clearly, all these efforts were to keep him happy but away from the core of the survey work.

SG Burrard’s publication in the Nature specifically mentioned that the Chief Computer (who was Radhanath Sikdar) from Calcutta had informed Andrew Waugh in 1852 that the peak designated ‘XV’ had been found to be higher than any other highest measured peak in the world at that time. Raw data from theodolites, taken from seven observation stations at Jirol, Mirzapur, Janjpati, Ladiva, Haripur, Minai and Doom Dongi was collected at the trigonometrical survey at Calcutta. This was then processed by Radhanath Sikdar and conveyed to Andrew Waugh that ‘Peak XV’ had been measured at 29,002 feet, taking the mean value of all observations. Considering that the scientific instrumentation available at that time was only of a rudimentary nature, the level of accuracy reached was almost 100 per cent, and this figure has not undergone any change, despite the current state of technological progress.

Correspondence between Waugh and Sikdar reveals that Waugh did privately acknowledge the achievement of Sikdar but did not recognise his work on record and in public. In his letter dated August 25, 1856, Waugh wrote to Sikdar that he was glad to hear that naming the peak as Everest had given the latter a lot of satisfaction. Thus, it is clear that the name Everest was given to ensure that Sikdar, who could have been the rightful claimant for credit, did not object as he was extremely fond of Everest, who had recruited him in service. The situation would have remained obscure but for the research paper of SG Burrard in 1904. Later, Professor Meghnad Saha acknowledged this feat in 1938 by giving Sikdar full credit. Earlier, Kenneth Mason in 1928, recognised his work as also John Keay in his book, The Great Arc.

In the given situation, changing the name of Mount Everest to Mount Sikdar Everest will perhaps do full justice to Radhanath Sikdar and give him worldwide recognition, which was legitimately his due, long time ago. We do not have to seek anybody’s approval for such a change as the rationale is all well-documented. Even if the world continues to call it Everest, in India, we could still call it Sikdar Everest.

On several earlier occasions, achievements of Indian scientists have not been recognised, as Sir JC Bose could have got the Nobel Prize for Physics or at least shared it with Marconi for his work on wireless and radio; SN Bose could have got the Nobel Prize way back in 1932 for his work with Einstein on Bose Einstein condensate but atleast he was recognised, though belatedly naming the God particle, Higgs-Boson after him. Naming Everest as Sikdar Everest would be a recoginition of a scientist whose work has stood the test of time. Besides it would also justifiably add to our national pride.

(The writer is a retired Delhi Police Commissioner and former Uttarakhand Governor)

source:http://www.thepioneer.com / The Pioneer / Home> Columnists> Opinion / by K K Paul / November 23rd, 2018

Medical care for a low, flat fee of Rs 10

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A Calcutta doctor who spends his Sundays running a clinic in a remote village asks why others don’t do so too.

Manindra Seva Sadan, a health centre in Manihara village /
Samantak Das

On the first Sunday of every month, Dr Santanu Banerjee, MD, gets up at 4:30 in the morning and sets off for a small village some 300 kilometres from Calcutta. I’ve known Santanu for some years now, as a neighbour who is also my physician, and as a keen participant in our para’s various activities, especially during the festive season. A few months ago, after he had completed my check-up, we got to chatting about healthcare issues and he told me how surprised he had been to discover the high prevalence of so-called ‘diseases of affluence’, associated with sedentary urban lifestyles, among the labouring poor in rural Bengal. When I asked, somewhat sceptically, where he got this information from, he invited me to visit the health centre that he runs in his ancestral village and take a look for myself. So, on the first Sunday of this October, I did.

We reached Manihara village, just beyond the Bankura-Purulia border, a little before noon, and went straight to the Manindra Seva Sadan, named after one of Santanu’s ancestors. The spacious three-room centre is located on a largish plot of land, with a beautiful garden and immaculate lawns — Santanu tells me that it belongs jointly to several members of his extended family, but had been lying unused until he decided to set up the centre. He took a loan from his mother, cleared and cleaned the land, and constructed the neat, single-storey structure that stands there now.

Outside the building, under a large permanent awning, villagers wait, patiently, for the daktarbabu to come. On arrival, Santanu’s team swings into smooth, practiced action. Of the three rooms, the first — which runs the length of the building — is where patients have their names, blood pressure and pulse rates noted, and are given a number (depending on their place in the queue) on a slip of paper; as they pass through the long room, they can get a battery of tests done, if needed, on a device that Santanu calls his “lab in a box”. Once all this is completed, they line up to enter the doctor’s chamber in the next room, where one of Santanu’s assistants notes down their details on a laptop. After Santanu examines them and writes out his prescriptions, they move to the adjoining room, where medicines are distributed. On the day of my visit, Santanu’s wife, Kokila, a doctor with an MD in microbiology, was assisting Santanu’s father, a retired engineer, in the medicine room. Patients leave only after collecting a month’s worth of medicines. Some will come back to the centre in a week’s time, and report their condition to Santanu via video-conferencing — he is available online between 9:00 and 11:00 am every Sunday — and some of them will return on the first Sunday of the following month. The cost for all this is the ten rupees patients pay when they register; there are no other charges.

The day I was there, over 200 people had registered to be examined. There was a low buzz around the centre, interspersed with the occasional shout, as a patient’s name was called out, or someone asked someone else not to shove others in the queue. The noise level went up several-fold as patients jostled in line, assistants shouted to patients to register their names, have their pressure noted, and so on and so forth. In the midst of all this, Santanu sat like the calm eye in the centre of a mild storm, radiating cheerful good humour as he spoke to patients in his soft, measured tones and wrote down their prescriptions. Santanu has a mild, friendly manner, and is unfailingly polite even to the most vociferous of his patients. When his assistants raise their voices, mostly in order to ask patients to maintain quiet (“Have you come to a doctor, or to a fish market?”), he remains composed. He also has a sly sense of humour and a ready smile that puts even the most grim-faced individual instantly at ease. He tells a patient, with a broad grin, that he will kill himself if she can prove she actually did take the medicines he’d prescribed last month. After much hemming and hawing, she admits that she “might have missed” a couple of doses.

Of course, many of his patients have seen him before, and he seems (at least to my untutored self) to recall every detail of their various ailments. Interspersed with talk of symptoms, diagnostic tests, medicines and so on, he exchanges pleasantries with his patients — telling someone she’s fine, reassuring another that he needn’t worry, the usual doctor’s prattle: but, sometimes, he turns to me and says, half in jest and half in despair, “Tell me, how on earth do these people get these diseases, here, of all places?” He seems to be especially puzzled by the high incidence of diabetes among his patients, including in some who are in their early thirties, as well as other diseases of the leisured, particularly hypertension. “Look at her. Not an extra ounce on her and yet she has a blood sugar reading of 210! How do you explain this?” There is speculation in the medical community that undernutrition in infancy could be a likely cause even though official statistics do not seem to bear this out. This is something that needs to be investigated thoroughly because the health of thousands is at stake. Over 33 per cent of his patients have diabetes and 40 per cent suffer from high blood pressure. He has the details of all the patients he has treated since he set up the clinic three years ago but wants to know more about the prevalence of illness in the area. “I would like to make a database of every individual and their ailments in the 30-odd adjoining villages. Once I know this, we can do more to alleviate or, best of all, prevent them.” He would also like to bring every woman, child, and man in the area under a health insurance scheme.

When I leave the centre, it is past 4:00 pm, but Santanu is still inside, talking, smiling, examining, prescribing. He will stay back tonight, along with his wife and two kids, for tomorrow they will distribute saris among the women of Manihara for the festive season. His parents will help him, as will his paternal uncle and aunt, who still live in the village.

As I speed towards the bright lights and loud noise of the city, I glance back at the endless expanse of undulating green, dotted with clumps of kaash flowers, harbingers of the season of festive joy, and I wonder: what makes a man like Santanu Banerjee do this month after month, year after year, almost single-handedly, with scarce resources and at considerable cost to himself in terms of time, effort and energy? By my reckoning, it costs Santanu some thirty to forty thousand rupees every time he visits the health centre, but when I put this to him later he only smiles at me. Does he receive any money from funding agencies? No. Do many other doctors go with him to the centre? Again that smile. Yes, he agrees, he couldn’t have done it without strong family support. But why does he do this, I persist. He looks up, quizzically, “Shouldn’t you be asking me why others don’t do it as well?” I have no answer. Santanu says he can’t really explain why he started doing this work and refuses to accept the usual explanations about giving back to society, extending a helping hand to people, and so on. Instead, he tells me a story. “One night, as I was peeling open sealed boxes of medicines and arranging the strips into smaller bundles, my fingers started to bleed. And instead of feeling upset or angry, I felt this joy radiating through me. That was my epiphany. That’s when I knew this was the right thing to do.”

Samantak Das is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta, India / Home> Opinion / by Samantak Das / October 26th, 2018

Kolkata girl crosses English Channel

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Kolkata, (PTI):

Twenty-two-year-old city girl Amrita Das crossed the English Channel, completing the 34-km challenge in 13 hours and 42 minutes.

An understudy of Masudur Rahman Baidya, the first double amputee below the knee to cross the channel, Amrita began at 6.19 am (GMT) from the Shakespeare beach in Dover, England and swam across the channel, reaching France at 8.01 pm (GMT) on September 4.

She could have bettered the timing if Amrita did not veer off course due to strong currents, Baidya said.

“There were high tidal waves that blew her off-course and she had to remain static for about an hour before resuming swimming,” Baidya, who has conquered the English Channel (1997) and the Strait of Gibraltar (2001), told PTI.

Baidya said Amrita had started started her preparation long ago.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India – Online Edition / September 06th, 2010