RESEARCH

[ Caution: The use of Bengali expletives could not be avoided in some parts of this article for the sake of an authentic feel of Bangla, in which street language, I observed in course of my life in Kolkata and visits to some suburbs, is indispensable. Readers are advised discretion. ] Relevant portions of my e-mails to friends will be added towards the end of the blog (after Anjan Dutta's lyrics) from time to time naqsh faryAdI hai kiskI shokhi-E-tahrIr kA? kAghazI hai pairahan har paikar-E-taswIr kA. [naqsh = a drawn impression faryAdi = appealing shOkhI = style, coyness tahrIr = writing kAgh'azI = made of paper, fake, useless pairahan/pairAhan = outfit, clothing {kAgh'azI pairahan/pairAhan = plaintiff's dress pairahan/pairAhan kAgh'azI hOnA = be a plaintiff (in an old Iranian tradition, one who came to the Shah to appeal against some injustice done to him would hang from his neck a sheet of paper, sometimes containing the written complaint, before presenting hims...

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...

Google's new platform, Android, takes on the might of Nokia's Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry, promising to turn handsets into fully functional PCs. Google must now take the quantum leap It has been reported that Google, through a collaboration with 33 other companies, is going to launch in two years a Rs 4,000 mobile phone that will replace personal computers completely. Google's spokespersons say that the alliance is targeting Internet-enabled smart phones where the asking price worldwide is closer to $ 200 rather than $ 20. The Open Handset Alliance will include handset makers, technology developers and carriers, the prominent among them being Qualcomm, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, LG, and Samsung. Google will offer up something called the "Android Mobile Software Stack", an integrated family of software including an operating system and new mobile applications. If you access the World Wide Web on a machine of Dell, H...

The James Bond film, Die Another Day, had a fictitious North Korean terrorist scheming to set the Earth ablaze with harnessed solar energy. Now, some scientists want to use the idea to burn out asteroids rushing headlong towards us. Surajit Dasgupta differentiates science from fiction Last week, a large section of the popular Indian media was abuzz with the possibility of an asteroid, Apophis, hitting the Earth after William Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Re-entry Studies, Aerospace Corporation, predicted that the collision could occur in 2036 if not in 2029. Elsewhere, Boris Shustov, director of the Institute of Astronomy, Russia, said on October 1 that the impact of the asteroid, of size equal to three football fields, would cause far more devastation than what the asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 did. The Tunguska astral event affected 2150 sq km and blasted eight crore odd trees. The force of the impact was about 1,000 times more powerful than that by the atomic bo...