Relief materials being distributed at Kharimutha village, around 7km from Kakdwip, on Wednesday Telegraph picture
Five hundred families in the interiors of South 24-Parganas, reeling under the double blows of Covid-19 curbs and Cyclone Amphan, on Wednesday got food and other relief material that would keep them going for the next few days.
The distribution camp was organised at Kharimutha village, around 7km from Kakdwip town, by St Xavier’s College (Calcutta) Alumni Association. A group of Jesuit priests, led by Father Dominic Savio, the principal of the college, went to the village to distribute the materials along with volunteers of the former students’ association.
The recipients were residents of Kharimutha and two nearby villages, Mollar Chowk and Pukurberia. Five hundred people had turned up, each representing a family. The camp was organised with the help of local police.
“We, the Jesuits, believe in sharing,” Father Savio said.
Each family got a kit that included rice, potato, dal, soyabean, edible oil, puffed rice and biscuit. Each kit also included sanitary napkins, hand sanitisers and tarpaulin sheets.
The residents of these villages were already robbed of their livelihood by the lockdown and the storm could not have hit them at a worse time.
“Most of them depend on fishing and farming of betel leaves. The storm not only damaged their homes but also ravaged the farm lands,” said Sudip Singh, the officer-in-charge of Kakdwip police station who coordinated with the association to organise to camp.
The former students of the Park Street college have come up with a series of campaigns in the aftermath of the lockdown and the storm to help the people. “It is our duty to stand by them at this trying time,” Father Savio said on Wednesday.
“We will do our best to help people in need,” said Sanjib Koner, secretary of the former students’ association.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Calcutta / by Special Correspondent in Calcutta / June 26th, 2020
Mayura Misra, who had books delivered even during lockdown, says booksellers are the ones with a heart and soul
Back in the early 1990s, when the term ‘online’ still belonged to the future, renowned Kolkata cardiologist Professor Sital Ghosh was sitting with a patient at the Kothari Heart Research Centre. The doctor was pretty much sure that the patient needed a surgery, but he wanted to reconfirm his diagnosis and for that he needed the latest issue of the British Medical Journal.
So while the patient waited, the doctor too impatiently waited, for his copy, which had just arrived from London and was now on its way, being carried to him by the subscription agent. The agent — a young woman barely into her twenties — was still catching her breath when the doctor grabbed the copy from her, went through the relevant portion, and ordered the patient to be wheeled into the operation theatre.
“Now when I recall the incident, it feels straight out of a movie,” says Mayura Misra, now 50, who is today better known as the owner of a standalone bookstore called Storyteller, located on the city’s EM Bypass. It’s possibly the only old-fashioned standalone bookstore in Kolkata, certainly one that doesn’t also sell toys and games, and certainly one that’s run by a proprietor who’s passionate about the printed word.
Another age
Ms. Mishra grew up in the tea gardens of north Bengal; her father was employed there and she went to school in Kurseong. Her mother, she says, was one of the few to be hand-picked by Jawaharlal Nehru himself as air-hostesses for Air India. After school, Ms. Mishra joined college in what was then Calcutta, where she settled once she got married.
“My father-in-law didn’t want me to sit at home. My uncle, at the time, ran the Oxford Subscription Agency on Park Street. So I joined his firm on a salary of ₹3,000 and took over his Calcutta operations,” she says.
About a year later, having learnt the ropes, she became an independent subscription agent, renting a godown on Theatre Road to stock new arrivals. Back then, when the concepts of online subscription and online edition were still in the realm of imagination, one had to rely solely on subscription agents to import and hand-deliver journals published abroad. Ms. Mishra would personally carry copies — of The British Medical Journal, The Journal of American Medical Association, Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Golf Digest, Architectural Digest, National Geographic, among others — to institutions and individuals.
Soon she was reaching out to libraries of schools, importing books for children. “No one was specialising in children’s books at the time. Kids had to wait for an aunt to come from the U.K. or the U.S. to bring them books,” she says. By now she had purchased a dupleix apartment on Theatre Road, and a portion of the house served as the godown.
Working in lockdown
Today, she lives on EM Bypass, and the ground floor of her house serves as Storyteller, the bookshop she opened in 2012. “During the lockdown, we did a lot of online sessions with authors, especially children’s authors. We also started delivering across Kolkata in April — we were probably the first to resume delivery of books in India. Our staff stayed in the store — we provided them boarding and lodging — and the books were sanitised before they were dispatched through Swiggy. Now we are open for browsing,” says Ms. Mishra.
She sums up: “The temptation has always been there to stock toys and games, but if I do that I won’t be able to concentrate on good books. Mine is not a profession you can take lightly. A lot of hard work goes in selling printed matter in this digital world. Booksellers are the ones with a heart and soul.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kolkata / by Bishwanath Ghosh / Kolkata – June 24th, 2020
In addition to our regular programmes, she is introducing a forum for the members and about the members to keep this laughter alive.
Diya Jaiswal Telegraph picture
You are taking over at a difficult time… what are some of your immediate plans?
These are very difficult and unprecedented times and there is no roadmap for a clear path. As a practising life coach, my core mantra remains to not look at any situation as a problem. I look at it as a challenge to find my inner resilience. I had many great plans for this year but this pandemic will not allow many of those to translate into reality. I have regrouped my thoughts and refocused myself, and I am now ready with a number of plans for how we can interact and re-energise ourselves at this difficult time to help our membership and the larger community we are a part of. With the guidance of my elders and seniors and my more-than-capable committee, I will do my best to make the hardest times into the greatest ones.
How did your association with the Ladies Study Group (LSG) begin?
Being based in Calcutta, I have grown up hearing glorious tales about LSG. I have memories of being inspired by dining-table conversations in my childhood, which often veered around names of various luminaries who were gracing the LSG stage for years. It was, therefore, a natural choice for me to become a member as soon as I became a young adult and attend such events to learn, unlearn and relearn life. The attendance in the first decade of my membership was peppered with occasional events as I had my hands full, juggling motherhood, work and home. An old school friend’s mother who was the LSG president a few years ago, asked me to join the committee to help her out. Little did I realise at that point how special that one phone call was going to be, and how it would enrich my life and bring me to this role today. Having close encounters, deep conversations and constant learnings with the very same luminaries I had grown up admiring, have truly been a beautiful gift.
What are the kind of events you’re planning to host?
In many ways we are all writing history together. The theme for my term is ‘Embracing the New Normal’ as it is only once that we accept this period of crisis and transition that we can look ahead at the emerging opportunities it provides to reshape our thinking and embrace what lies ahead.
The committee members and I are committed to our goal of doing our best to fill the calendar with events, interactive workshops and social initiatives. We will begin our sessions with the webinar format as safety is our topmost priority. While this format will not have the physical element of interaction we had earlier, it will now allow for a different type of interaction — one that could perhaps allow for greater engagement and higher levels of attendance. I truly believe that adopting a webinar route is a genuine advantage to reach so many more members, who perhaps have missed some of our events due to travel or time constraints. Another added bonus of this new normal is that this format will also accommodate family members wanting to enjoy our sessions. These opportunities are, therefore, like sunrises and I would like to celebrate the feeling of togetherness that this digital platform will provide us all with.
Tell us a little about yourself…
Like so many women I know, I have worn different hats through my journey so far. I started out as a corporate investment banker with a foreign bank for eight years and had two children during this time. Motherhood comes with its own challenges with respect to time-management, and so I reinvented myself and became an entrepreneur. I set up my own art gallery, championing local artists and had a much better work-life balance. I ran my gallery for nine years and during this phase, I also had my third child.
Life was very full and busy, and yet, I had this yearning to do more, especially for women. The women in my life have always influenced and inspired me, and yet when I look around me even today, the empowerment of women is the most important and unfinished part of our human history. So I decided to educate myself further and went back to studying and learning. It was not easy to go back to studying at my age and stage of life, but I was determined. And so, as my children were doing their various school exams, I did mine, and I successfully completed three different degrees in mental health over a three-year period. Armed with insight and knowledge, I then set up ‘Empowerful’, practising as a life coach and counsellor, with my main objective of being a rainbow in someone’s cloud.
I cannot over-emphasise the importance of my family in my life. Instead of the often-used phrase of “behind every successful individual”, I would instead rephrase it and say “beside every committed individual” is the family, and I would be incomplete without mine, who are my anchors, my biggest cheerleaders and my strongest critics.
What are some of the challenges that you’re anticipating for this year?
The biggest challenge we are all facing today is the absence of personal interaction, which is something we had all taken for granted. At LSG, our members have always been our VIPs and we have made a lot of effort to involve our members in our annual interactive “members’ event”, a day that all of us look forward to every year. In this new normal, however, most of us are going to lead restricted lives over the next few months and being together to have this experience sounds distant. Therefore, we need to innovate to keep our connections thriving and our spirits growing stronger together.
In addition to our regular programmes, I am introducing LSG Plus, a forum for our members and about our members to keep this laughter alive. We will have two separate initiatives as part of this forum, both of which will have continuous events through the year and will carefully be structured to include all our members. As I mentioned, my focus in my term is to make each one feel “special”.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> People / by Ananya Sarkar / June 09th, 2020
