Time is money but some particular currency is timeless. On the eve of Independence Day, Kolkatans will get see some of the most ancient coins of Bengal at an exhibition by the Numismatic Society of Calcutta. On display will be 2nd Century BC coins from Chandraketugarh, along with those from Sasanka and Samudragupta era, among others.
“This is the first time we will hold an exhibition at any college in Kolkata. Elsewhere we had held shows at IITs, NITs,” said Samarjit Ghosal, the society’s secretary. The exhibition will be held at Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College on Friday.
“The Chandraketugarh coin is identified by some specific symbols like the sun and boat. A telltale symbol is that of a conch on the reverse side,” said Anup Mitra, the society’s president.
Explaining how collectors get hold of such ancient coins, he said: “In old times, the practice of storing valuables underground was quite common. In case they are abandoned, they are discovered long after, mostly by accident. Those who find them take them to jewellers. In England, museums buy back such coins. But here there is no such system here. Across the country, small teams of traders keep a track on movement of coins at jewellery shops. Once they acquired, they are sold to museums or collectors.”
“Till recently, it was believed ‘kouri’ was the medium of exchange in early Bengal. But after discoveries of the last few decades, it is now proved that ‘kouri’ was a parallel currency till early 19th century,” said Shankar Bose, an authority on coins who has penned 10 numismatic books.
Bose will present a powerpoint presentation on ancient Bengali coins at the exhibition.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Shounak Ghosal, TNN / August 10th, 2015
Painter Sunil Das died of a massive heart attack on Monday morning. He was 76.
Rabin Mondale, whose exhibition Das was scheduled to inaugurate on Wednesday, recalled how his friend had earned the moniker of ‘Ghora Das’ because of his passion for horses. “Though he was more than 10 years younger to me, we addressed each other by our first names. When I was a clerk with the railways, I would often go over to Sunil’s office adda. I can’t believe he won’t be there to inaugurate my show,” said Mondal, recalling the days when Das was the youngest recipient of the National Award from Lalit Kala Akademi. He was still a student of Government College of Arts then.
Artist Manu Parekh said: “I first heard about his horses when he was only in his third year. But his sketches had qualities of great masters.”
Painter Sanat Kar, who was founder secretary of Society of Contemporary Artists, remembers the day when he got a young Das to join the society. “While on a French Government Scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Sunil went to Spain and watched bullfights. That inspired him to sketch bulls too,” Kar said.
According to art historian Pranabranjan Ray, what set Das’ horses apart from those drawn by MF Husain and Nikhil Biswas was their dynamic energy. In a yet-unreleased documentary titled ‘Sunil: The Lyrical Artist’, director Arun Kumar Chakraborty has interviewed Das about how he developed his fascination for horses. The documentary has footage of Das saying: “I would spend days and nights at the stable of Mounted Police to understand the details and body contours of horses.”
At Keoratala crematorium, an emotional Chakraborty said, “During his discussions in front of poet Alokranjan Dasgupta and painter Tapan Mitra, Sunil-da had told us that he had wanted his body to kept sitting in a chair before his cremation. He was so full of energy that he never wanted to lie down even during his last journey,” Chakraborty said.
Mitra said, “He had even told us that he had kept Rs 5 lakh aside so that he is cremated with sandalwood. Unfortunately, his wishes were left unfulfilled.”
On Sunday evening, Das had called up Mitra to say he also wanted to build a Sunil Das Artist Guest House. From being someone whose father had warned him that he would go hungry to bed if he took up painting as a career, Das used a large part of his savings to support financially weak artists. “His last call to me at 6.39pm on Sunday was to inquire about the progress of the guest house,” Mitra said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / TNN / August 11th, 2015
Journalist Uday Banerjee received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 6th edition of the Journalism Awards on Sunday. Banerjee, who covered government and administration for four decades, is known for his honesty and is revered in the fraternity. Tripura governor Tathagata Roy presented him with the trophy and citation.
Consumer affairs minister Sadhan Pande presented the ‘Hall of Fame Award’ to sports journalist Debashish Dutta at the same ceremony.
Of the 18 other categories of awards, the Times of India group bagged five. Out of the total 10 journalists from TOI and 12 from Ei Samay shortlisted as finalists, three each from TOI and Ei Samay won the honours. Two TOI scribes shared the Best Journalist News (English) award while another won the Best Journalist Lifestyle & Cinema (English) award. Ei Samay picked up Best Journalist Lifestyle & Cinema (Bengali), Best Journalist Sports (Bengali) and Best Journalist Features (Bengali).
Judges included Abhijit Dasgupta, retired station director of Doordarshan and secretary of Kolkata Sukriti Foundation, Dilip Banerjee, former photo editor of Mail Today, Tapas Ganguly, former chief of bureau of The Week, Manik Banerjee, former chief of bureau of UNI, Pradipta Sankar Sen, vice-president of Calcutta Film Society and ex-resident editor of Hindustan Times, Shyam Afif Siddiqui, visiting faculty at Management Development Institute, Murshidabad.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / TNN / August 11th, 2015
Here’s a first from the world of Bengali sweets. Our very indigenous Joynagarer Moya, sweet roundels made of a special kind of puffed rice and bound with jaggery, has won the coveted G I (geographical indication) tag.
While the decision was firming up since April, the state government, which has been championing the cause of the moya, has just been intimated about the crown. Naturally, the moya makers of South 24 Parganas Joynagar, are rejoicing. This authentication tag attaches great prestige to the special sweet with a very short life that makes its annual appearance only in winter.
Joynagarer Moya had to go through a stringent test and documentation process for two and a half years before finally wresting the crown from the G I scientists in Chennai, who work as a wing of the ministry of commerce and industries. The state department of science and technology, which had applied for the G I tag is now enthused about winning the tag for its other two applications – Mihidana and Sitabhog of Burdwan, which are presently being evaluated for a final declaration towards the later part of the month. A GI tag is a name or sign used on certain products which corresponds to a specific geographical location or origin.
India as a member of the WTO enacted the GI Act in 1999, which came into effect in September 2003. The GI tag ensures that none other than those registered as authorised users (or at least those residing inside the geographic territory) are allowed to use the popular product name. Darjeeling tea became the first GI tagged product in India. The Joynagarer moya was invented in 1929 by two confectioners of Bahura and Charan near Joynagar – Purna Chandra Ghosh and Nitya Gopal Sarkar who sold their creation at their Sri Krishna Mistanna Bhandar. The secret lay in the use of kanakchur rice, which is a special variety of winter rice grown locally.
This rice has a distinct aroma that is heightened when this rice is puffed up. Special gawa ghee and nolen gur, also collected fresh locally, are then used to bind the khoi (puffed rice) into a moya. Kanakchur rice cannot withstand chemical fertilizers. “Initially the Joynagar moya makers, threatened by the plethora of fake and cheaper varieties that flood the market in winter, tried to apply for the G I status on their own but faced several hurdles. So they approached the state government for help.We documented the regional history, lore, ingredients, authentic recipe, the formulae used by the inventors and the list of makers at Joynagar who still follow the original process. The G I scientists inquired and tested random samples for consecutive years before agreeing to give the Joynagar er moya the coveted GI tag,””said Mahua Hom Chowdhury, scientist of the Patent Information Centre of the WB State Council of Science and Technology, which is a wing of the state’s department of science and technology.
A total of 150 moya shops have been included in the G I tag as the only authentic makers. It implies that the rest of the shops across the state who will still sell the moya are selling fake stuff. It was after submitting the application for Joynagarer Moya that the state government received appeals from the makers of sitabhog and mihidana of Burdwan too. “Our scientists actually camped in Burdwan for months and along with officials of the district administration, prepared separate dossiers for both mihidana and sitabhog. We were stunned by the details,” said an excited state minister for science and technology, Rabiranjan Chatterjee. He was found basking in the glory of the Joynagarer Moya. “This is our first sweet GI. We have also received GI for three Bengal varieties of mangoes – fazli, himsagar and lakshman bhog,” he said.
The document prepared for mihidana and Sitabhog and submitted to the GI office says that On February 10, 1904, Viceroy Lord Curzon visited Burdwan to confer the title of maharaja on then king of Burdwan Vijaychanda. Bhairav Chandra Nag, a local sweet-maker, had made the sitabhog and mihidana to mark the occasion. Mihidana is made from Kaminibhog, Gobindabhog or Basmati rice.
The rice is mixed with besan and saffron and blended. The mix is poured into hot ghee through a brass ladle with holes. The deep-fried saffron grains are then dunked in sugar syrup. Sitabhog on the other hand is, cottage cheese or chhana and powdered rice rolled into a dough. It is broken into tiny bits and fried in ghee, then soaked in sugar syrup.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey, TNN / August 11th, 2015
Sundar Pichai, the toast of the technology world, learnt his engineering 110km from Calcutta two decades ago.
In the records of IIT Kharagpur, P. Sundararajan was the topper in metallurgy and material science in the Class of 1993. Outside the classroom, he was known as the ” chhupa rustam” who had wooed and won his life partner from the chemical engineering class without any of his hostel mates getting a whiff of it.
Metro spoke to some of the new Google CEO’s old friends and teachers to get an insight into the man that holds that brilliant mind.
Sourav Mukherji, dean of academic programmes at IIM Bangalore; studied civil engineering at IIT-K and shared the Nehru Hall with Pichai
The world may be hailing Sundar Pichai but to us in Kharagpur, he was Sundi. And he would sing ” Anjali Anjali, pyari Anjali ” all the time.
We would often hear Sundi hum the lines from the title song of a popular film of our time: Anjali (1990). He loved music and we all thought he sang the song because he liked it. It was much later, after we left Kharagpur, that we realised why he loved this particular song.
It was probably meant for Anjali, the girl from chemical engineering who would become his wife. We all knew Anjali and Sundi knew each other but we never came to know of their relationship in our four years on the campus. It was ‘surprise-surprise’ when we came to know that Sundi and Anjali were seeing each other.
He was a brilliant guy. In fact, a lot of people in the IITs are brilliant. But Sundi was absolutely brilliant. He was the topper in most exams when we were students at IIT. But nobody would call him bookish.
I feel that this (Pichai’s elevation at Google) is a moment of great joy and pride for us as Indians because two of the world’s most powerful IT companies now have Indians as their CEOs (Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft). These gentlemen have truly been able to break the so-called glass ceiling. Twenty years ago, who would have thought that Indians would head powerful American companies, especially companies at the forefront of technology?
Sanat Kumar Roy, professor metallurgy and material science, who taught Pichai
At IIT Kharagpur, we all knew him as P. Sundararajan and it was only in 2012 that we came to know his new name: Sundar Pichai.
It was December 2012 when we got a call from the Wall Street Journal, informing us that Sundar Pichai, an alumnus of our institute, had been appointed vice-president of Google. The journalist wanted details about him.
We checked our records but couldn’t trace anyone by that name. Later, the journalist gave us a clue: that he had been a recipient of a silver medal. That helped us track P. Sundararajan. Later, we contacted our alumni office in the US to check whether P. Sundararajan and Sundar Pichai were the same person and finally it was they who confirmed it.
I had taught him in all the four years he studied metallurgy and material science here. I found him exceptionally bright.
The IIT selected him for its Distinguished Alumni award this year and he was supposed to receive the honour at the annual convocation that was held recently. He couldn’t attend the event this time but he has promised to visit the institute when he comes to India next.
Phani Bhushan, co-founder of Anant Computing and Pichai’s batchmate and co-boarder at Nehru Hall, where he had stayed at “CTM” (that’s section C, top floor, middle wing)
Sundararajan was a shy person who was more comfortable in small groups, and now he is making speeches and heading a global conglomerate like Google. It is like he has had a personality U-turn.
We are super excited that our batchmate and hall mate has achieved such a feat, although it isn’t as surprising as the news that he married a fellow KGPian, Anjali!
We hall mates and batch mates tend to spend a lot of time together and we thought he was shy about talking to girls. But he turned out to be a chhupa rustam! We wonder how he managed to have a girlfriend without us knowing about it.
Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, director, IIT-KGP
We are all delighted that a student from Kharagpur has achieved this. Sundar Pichai was always a very quiet and studious person. I never taught him but have interacted with him several times. He recently did a video chat with an auditorium full of students who talked to him about everything from life to technology and leadership.
He hasn’t made any public statement as yet. That’s the kind of person he is. He likes to do his work. Sundar has proved that technological leadership can lead to global leadership and has given aspiration to a new generation of IITKgpians that you can achieve global leadership through technological leadership.
He is a quiet worker, a technical wizard, a great thinker and visionary who is also an extremely humble person, quite in sync with his alma mater IIT Kharagpur. He is an Indian who is a global leader and epitomises future generations of Indians.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Calcutta,India / Front Page> Calcutta> Story / Wednesday – August 12th, 2015
Preparations at Mashaldanga, the Bangladeshi enclave, for Friday’s transfer of territory. Picture by Main Uddin Chisti
Dinhata :
The people of Mashaldanga built the road themselves with mud and covered it with bamboo cane. A big gate draped in blue cloth stands at the start of the road which leads to a colourful canopy.
The road did not cost much but the pandal did – Rs 2 lakh. Yet the people of Mashaldanga, the biggest Bangladeshi enclave in India, paid for it out of their pockets because on Friday this is where they will celebrate their coming into being.
On July 31 midnight, as Bangladesh and India exchange territories, the borders of the enclaves will dissolve.
It will mean that Mashaldanga and 50 other Bangladeshi enclaves in India will become Indian territory. Similarly the 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh will become Bangladesh territory.
For the people of Mashaldanga it will mean having a country in the real sense for the first time in their lives.
For 67 years since Independence, the people in the enclaves have been overlooked by both the countries. They have been denied everything that a state can give its citizens, starting with identity.
From Saturday morning, for the first time 14,000 people on the Indian side and 41,000 people in Bangladesh will become citizens of the respective countries.
Enclave residents were given a chance to choose their country. No one from the Indian side – the Bangladeshi enclaves are mostly in Cooch Behar and a few in Jalpaiguri – is crossing over.
In total, 979 people are coming over from the four districts in Bangladesh with enclaves – Kurigram, Lalmanirhat, Nilkhamari and Panchagarh – said the superintendent of police of Kurigram, Mahammad Tabarukullah.
Mashaldanga illustrates perfectly what being denied a country is like.
Through the middle of the green fields of Madhya Mashaldanga, the part of the enclave where the celebrations are being held, run electricity lines.
Yet no house in Madhya Mashaldanga has electricity because it is in Bangladesh.
Through the middle of Mashaldanga runs a road, but not many step on it, because it leads into the outer world – India.
Only one house in Madhya Mashaldanga has electricity, because that house is in an Indian enclave within the Bangladeshi enclave.
This enclave, with its only house, since it is Indian territory, has electric lines reaching it, resting on a row of poles that cut through the green fields.
What applies to electricity also applies to jobs. No Mashaldanga resident has ever had one.
If the children go to school in Mashaldanga, they need to cook up the name of a father as no father here has identity proof.
Jainal Abdedin, a 23-year-old from Madhya Mashaldanga, who was at the forefront of the movement to exchange enclaves, is a third-year political science honours student at Deoanhat College in Dinhata. Even if he became a graduate, he would not be able to get a job, because he would need more identity proof than required so far.
He has been able to go through school and college using the name of another person, an Indian citizen, as his father. Because his father, like all other residents of Mashaldanga, has no papers.
“Mithye bolte bolte obhyesh hoye gechhe (I have got used to telling lies),” he says.
But may be that would change now. With him becoming an Indian citizen, he can think of having a job.
The enclave exchange has been achieved, says Diptiman Sengupta, the man behind the Bharat Bangladesh Enclave Exchange Coordination Committee, because of the will of the people. The organisation has led the movement for the exchange and Jainal is a member of this organisation. Jainal, with his friend Saddam Mian, also look after the social media presence of the movement.
Sengupta points out that the history of enclaves began in the displacement of people. From the 1880s, when land began to be organised in India by the British and be marked, the landowners of the areas in which the enclaves – chhitmahal in Bengali – lie, began to gift each other mauzas as stakes in card or chess games.
But that was undivided India, and the stakes got scattered over what would come up as borders between first, India and Pakistan, and then Bangladesh.
After Independence, depending on the ownership, these plots remained Indian land in Pakistan/Bangladesh or Pakistani/Bangladeshi land in India.
And all the countries forgot them, though there were agreements from time to time.
The first one was between Jawaharlal Nehru and Feroze Khan Noon, the Indian and Pakistani Prime Ministers in 1958. In 1947, the Land Boundary Agreement was signed by Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Many governments and working groups and decades later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ratified the agreement on June 6, 2015, during his visit to Bangladesh.
“The government moved aggressively when it felt the will of the people,” says Sengupta. He thinks the exchange is a triumphant example of a history-making event that political parties could not interrupt.
The Indian authorities are making arrangements to receive the people from Balngladesh, who are expected after November 30.
Tota Mian, a Mashaldanga resident in his seventies, said today: ” Akhon swadhinata pailam (We have got independence, finally).”
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Calcutta,India / Front Page> North Bengal> Story / by Chandrima S. Bhattacharya and Main Uddin Chisti / Friday – July 31st, 2015
A former student of Presidency College has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2015. Writer-publisher Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, was named among 13 novels longlisted for the prestigious £50,000 (around Rs 50 lakh) prize on Wednesday.
“It feels surreal. I had never expected it; didn’t know the longlist was being announced today until my publisher in Britain told me I was on it a couple of hours ago,” Roy, who has been living mostly in Ranikhet for the past 15 years, told Metro from Delhi.
Sleeping on Jupiter is published by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus, in the UK and by Hachette in India.
The 48-year-old writer was born in Calcutta and had attended South Point School till she was about seven. She also spent some years in Sikkim, Ranchi and Hyderabad. She returned to Calcutta to complete her Plus 2 at St. Thomas’ Girls’ School, Kidderpore, and went to Presidency College, graduating in English in 1989.
Thereafter, she went to Cambridge University on a scholarship.
“Presidency meant College Street and lots of Coffee Housing and buying books on loan from the understanding shopkeepers in Boi Para. They were so sympathetic to our perpetually broke condition. I remember Presidency with great affection because I made friends there who are still my closest friends and I had some wonderful teachers,” she said.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Calcutta,India / Front Page> Calcutta> Story / by Samhita Chakraborty / Thursday – July 30th, 2015
The green gate of 3 Peary Charan Sarkar Street has been leading thousands into the enchanting premises of the Eden Hindu Hostel for almost 130 years now. The lush green field, the wooden staircase, the kharkharis, the high-ceiling rooms, everything oozes an old-world charm that’s hard to ignore. And on Wednesday, the hostel closed down for renovations -its first overhaul since its establishment in 1886. CT celebrates the heritage and history of the colonial building and takes a trip down memory lane…
RICH HERITAGE
The hostel was initially built for the Hindu students of Presidency College, but later accommodated students from outside Kolkata. In 1988, the building was extended in order to accommodate postgraduate students and research scholars.Among its many famous boarders were the first President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad, who studied in Presidency between 1902 and 1907, and professor Amartya Sen. Presidency University registrar Debajyoti Konar said, “Dr Rajendra Prasad was a student here and his room in the hostel is still not used.”
Divided into six wards, the hostel houses over 274 boarders, including undergraduate and postgraduate students.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
With its seasonal tournaments, annual athletic meets, Saraswati Puja, reunions, freshers’ welcome, political meetings and farewell ceremonies, this hostel has been a second home for thousands of students.”It feels bad to leave this place. I’ve been here for over three years now and have spent some wonderful times with my friends and seniors,” third-year chemistry student Swarup Maji said. He added that they had been shifting to the new address in Rajarhat for the past three weeks. “We will be staying in Rajarhat for 11 months till the work gets done here. It’s going to be difficult, as we are used to staying in central Kolkata with so many facilities within reach,” Swarup said.
A NEW LOOK
Konar said an architect from the Heritage Commission will oversee the renovation. “As of now, Partha Das will supervise the work. This is a heritage structure and the plan has been made keeping that in mind,” he said. An amount of Rs 3 crore has been sanctioned for the first phase of renovation, while estimation is still under way for the second phase.
HELPING HAND
The University is more than happy to receive help from the government of West Bengal. “The renovation will span over 11 months and the higher education department has arranged for 80 flats in Rajarhat for the 150 students who have been shifted. A canteen, too, has been arranged. That’s not all. A subsidized bus will ferry the students from Rajarhat to Presidency,” Konar told us.
SAYING GOODBYE
For Sajan Dewan, a postgraduate political science student, it’s time to bid adieu to the hostel. “I’ve been here for the last four-and-a-half years. We’ve spent some of the best and worst days of our lives in this building. By the time the work gets done here, I’ll be out of college. But I’m taking back some fond memories with me, so we had a small party last night to say goodbye,” Sajan said.
HOSTEL HIGHLIGHTS
Eden Hindu Hostel was established in 1886 The hostel was built using funds raised by Ashley Eden, WB Gwyther was the architect The first president of India Dr Rajendra Prasad and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen are its alumni The hostel has eight guest rooms where parents of students and other guests are allowed to stay The six wards in the hostel include a kitchen, dining hall and staff-quarters, which occupy a total area of 26,000 sq ft.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata /by Kathakali Banerjee, TNN / August 03rd, 2015
