RESEARCH

______________________ Indraneil Roy Choudhuri ______________________ Today with a lot of gratitude, I share with all of you my experience in dealing with the passing away of my father. It all started the beginning of last month when during his regular check ups, the doctors found that my dad’s blood count was unusually high. My father had been diagnosed with the cancer of the lymph nodes in 2005, and through timely treatment of chemotherapy, he was totally cured. However, as a part of his routine, in the gap of every two to three months, he had to go for regular blood tests to check if there were any further occurrences of growth. This increase in blood levels suggested the onset of leukaemia and since it was detected somewhat early, the doctors suggested that it would be best to "nip it in the bud". They suggested a cycle of chemotherapy, which would be augmented with an experimental drug, to expedite the recovery. I felt that this was a time for me, to prove to everyone th...

{ Excerpted from my autobiography } An immense hunger for knowledge that about a dozen of us had ensured that we kept ourselves abreast with the latest that was happening around the world not in the fields that comprise matters of general knowledge interest, but ones that the students learn reluctantly. We found mistakes in the suggested academic curricula. We suggested improvement in teaching techniques. In the third quarterly issue of the school magazine, Panorama HCS , for which I was entrusted the task of editing, I brought in features – like interviews and debates – that were hitherto inconceivable for school-goers. As teachers from Kerala were slowly replacing the European ones, we feared our perfect Surrey accent would go for a toss. When the brown mem-sahib s came to know of our consulting the ex-English teachers at their homes, a sense of inferiority got the better of them. The school library was a favourite spot for unwinding. Curiously, our relaxation too was fuelled by expl...

The train was moving as if inebriated. After hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle shaped irrigated fields, thousands of trees and lampposts, millions of rhythmic taps of the train-wheels' on the conjoint tracks and a billion stars in a moonless night, it stopped at a semblance of a station. A ramshackle structure was there, in which an excuse of a government servant, whose designation is a euphemism: "Station Master", was seen serving in odd hours, lest one should say the administration of the country does not work. In Baba's rectangular arms' lock, about five feet above ground level, I descended on what was supposed to be the railway stoppage of a paean-like name of a town—Bokaro Steel City. It seemed Baba knew the Bada Babu. A child all of three, I used to wonder those days how almost every person the elders came across appeared an acquaintance. After the mandatory niceties, we left along a serpentine way that looked like the parting of hair of an old lady with thinning ha...