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| Subir Roy: Romancing the railways | 13-NOV-09 |
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| The romance of train journeys, warts and all, came back to me recently. A hastily planned trip to Mumbai, only sky-high air fares available for the return journey, more time on a retiree’s hands, and by some stroke of luck — maybe because people hadn’t cottoned on to it — reservation to Howrah available in the very new Duronto. And so there I was, lugging my malfunctioning American Tourister contraption which would not stroll, at grand old VT, CST if you want to be politically correct and dodge the ire of MNS, looking forward to 26 hours of alternately reading Paul Krugman on the return of Depression Economics and dozing off. |
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| Subir Roy: The dreaded L word | 30-OCT-09 |
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| My friend who went round the world in pursuit of a successful career with a leading multinational now, after retirement, lives in Dubai largely for tax reasons. But he also has a home in Brussels. This is particularly helpful as it is just right for his two daughters and their husbands who live in England to visit him over a weekend. But as he narrates this he adds, you know how it is, they come when they can make the time. In Dubai he has company mostly when someone he knows is passing through from India. He wouldn’t spell it out but it is written all over his face that something is lacking. |
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| Subir Roy: Market driven drinking | 21-OCT-09 |
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| How a man drinks defines him. For the last few weeks I have been doing the rounds of Kolkata’s clubs — a hallowed bastion of tradition, if there be any left. And I am sorry to say that they don’t take the matter of tradition seriously enough. What I mean is, the emphasis is all wrong. Quantity prevails over quality, not the other way round. |
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| Subir Roy: On the garbage treasure trail | 07-OCT-09 |
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| These last few days Mudar and I have been on a treasure hunt. We have been up at the crack of dawn to get a free run of the roads and driving round hunting for garbage dumps. Yes, that’s right, the filthier and bigger the better. |
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| Subir Roy: Time hangs lightly | 23-SEP-09 |
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| Arun Babu is father-in-law to my niece. I have come to pay him a courtesy call, to utter an unspoken thank you for having visited us after my mother died. These reciprocities have to be maintained, because he is kutumba, that is, in-laws with whom one must be particular about social etiquette. It is not that Arun Babu is the nit-picking type. |
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| Subir Roy: The cobweb of wires is clearing | 09-SEP-09 |
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| You know how well planned or chance-created and chance-directed a city is from how much of its wires hang out. When a large village ‘organically’ grows into a small town, its wiring is all over the place. Usually the first to arrive is the power line, strung out from pole to pole, with lesser lines looping into houses. Close on the heels come telephone lines, similarly strung out over poles. |
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| Subir Roy: Mother to everybody | 26-AUG-09 |
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| The most prized possession in our family is a frayed autograph book, well used by my mother when she was a schoolgirl in the ’30s. It is coming off at the binding, but what it lacks in physical impressiveness, it more than makes up through its contents. A lot of the signatures in it, with somewhat ornate, stylised good wishes, are from her immediate elderly of those times. But in between the humdrum are strewn a few gems. There are autographs and sometimes good wishes from some of the most hallowed names of the pre-independence days — Rabindranath, Subhas Chandra Bose and Chittaranjan Das. My mother belonged to the earliest generation of Indian girls who formally went to school and national leaders made it a point to come to schools like Nari Shiksha Mandir in Dhaka to motivate those from among whom would come the flag bearers of independent India over a decade later. |
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| Subir Roy: A nation in the making | 12-AUG-09 |
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| This is a story at two levels, as all good stories are — at a personal and an anecdotal on one hand and an official and ‘history in the making’ on the other. |
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| Subir Roy: Do as Europe has done | 29-JUL-09 |
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| Back in prehistory, that is, about three decades ago, when Kolkata thoroughly drowned in the monsoon deluge, we looked forward to sarat or autumn. The rains would be gone, the heat would be a bit less though the oppressive humidity would still be around, but that’s not what mattered. The special part was the sky at dusk. The grey of the monsoon clouds, still lingering, would be tinted pink and purple by the setting sun and create a riot of colours. And through this sky would pass large flocks of birds in a V formation. |
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| Subir Roy: Redraw your street | 15-JUL-09 |
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| This could be the story of an important street in any big town in India bursting at the seams. In Bangalore, it is the 100 ft Road (the city has a quaint way of naming streets) in Indiranagar where success, not failure, is crying out for a solution. A road that wide inevitably becomes an important artery and so is this one near where I live. But as its importance has grown so have the travails of crossing it, or going down it on foot or in motorised transport. Things have come to such a pass that the thought of a trip is often rejected if it means crossing the road in peak hours. This has cut the neighbourhood in two, drawing an international border akin to the line of control that divides one Kashmir into two. |
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| Subir Roy: Dogs will be dogs | 01-JUL-09 |
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| I made no attempt to cultivate the thin severe looking old gentleman, with fresh bibhuti marks on his forehead every morning, who lived a few houses away from ours. But I was forced to cross his path and the culprit was our dog who seemed quite oblivious of what he had done. It was fairly early in the morning and I was out walking him, the expression standing for the compulsory stroll round at least a bit of the neighbourhood for him to do you know what. |
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| Subir Roy: Mr Jacob and his times | 17-JUN-09 |
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| There are a few mails in my inbox which I neither delete nor shift to archives, so that I can quickly scroll down and take a relook any time I want. Among them is one from Rahul’s father, Mr Jacob. (I called him Sir, his contemporaries called him Jake.) It is a collection of prominent landmarks of Calcutta (for this piece I will use the old name) beautifully lit up at night. Of course that’s not the way they are but good photo editing by someone who has a feel for those landmarks have made them so. That’s where we really met — in our love for a city that was or may have remained but didn’t. |
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| Subir Roy: A homestead in the heart of town | 03-JUN-09 |
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| The park where I take my walk in Bangalore is not as immaculate as many in the city are. It makes do with a daily sweep of the walkways by a somewhat lackadaisical fellow who must be in the employ of the municipality. He has a family, I realised, when occasionally he would not turn up in the morning and instead the sweeping would be done by someone who seemed to be his wife. She, of course, would do a better job. |
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| Subir Roy: Living together separately | 20-MAY-09 |
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| One of the nicest things that has happened to Kolkata in recent times is the creation of two new parks around the eastern and southern periphery of Victoria Memorial. Earlier, for most of the year the place used to collect rubble, coming alive once a year for the book fair, only to relapse into being an eyesore. |
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| Subir Roy: How I got my vote back | 06-MAY-09 |
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| It was the third election in Bangalore since I had come to live there and this time I was determined to vote, come what may. On the two previous occasions, the vote had passed me by. |
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