Looking back and ahead

It's 20:25 hours of the last day of 2011. I have just returned after a holiday trip, about which I have written on the other blog. Mother Nature is up to her strange antics again: I left the town much colder than it is now, so that I went away wearing warm woolens, and now I am back and typing in shirtsleeves! In Kolkata people were actually sweating...the weather bureau has been talking about a low pressure belt which has built up over the Bay of Bengal, preventing the usual western cyclonic winds from doing their thing at this time of the year. I do hope that the cold will come back: I was hoping for at least a month more of really chilly weather. 

2011 hasn't been a big deal for me, for good or for bad, but the world has been rocked by all sorts of revolutions and quasi-revolutions and pseudo-revolutions: Osama and Gaddafi killed, Mubarak deposed, Berlusconi removed, Putin and Manmohan Singh tottering, Cameron gibbering and Obama dithering, the likes of Anna Hazare sharing 15-minute-celebrity status with Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs, Dev Anand gone at last but Fidel Castro and Khushwant Singh have cocked a snook at the Great Reaper one more time, and some really far-out freaks almost eagerly looking forward to the end of it all sometime in late 2012. With all that in mind, I shall now go take a walk, then come back home to watch loonies hyperventilating as they gear up to usher in yet another new year. All the best, everybody.

It's December again

Winter began last evening, with a sudden chill in the air. As usual, the weather had become comfortable since the start of November, but the sun was still unpleasantly warm in the afternoons, and I had been going around in shirtsleeves all through the month. Last night the kids began to shiver even in a classroom with all the doors and windows shut, and  the woolens had to come out pretty abruptly. I hope, since the season has begun late, it will last at least until mid-February. It is for this very brief spell that I live every year. It coincides with the lightest workload for me, so I have a lot of time to soak in the delicious charm, God be thanked. Despite the cold water and the shivers if you go riding a two-wheeler at dawn or late in the evening, I will never see eye to eye with those who dislike winter in a country like ours. I only wish there was some rain to wash away all the dust in the air and on the leaves, and I am waiting for the sky to turn azure. I can never have enough of azure skies. And the mountains are calling me again...

Street maze

The municipal authorities in this town are driven by strange fads. Once upon a time, while naming streets in my neighbourhood, they took it into their heads to immortalize the pantheon of Russian and American astronauts. So we got a rash of streets with utterly alien names like Grissom and Chaffe and Merbold and Svetlana and Tereshkova (some of those people might have had a little difficulty in identifying themselves from the spellings!). Then someone said "Let's do something different now - let's name all the next lot of streets according to the classical Indian raagas." At once there came up signs saying Bilawal and Iman Kalyan and Malkosh and Jayjayanti and Meghmallar Path...

Of late, they have gone back to naming new roads after famous people from recent Indian history, freedom fighters and writers prominently among them. Somehow, though, someone in authority wasn't confident that the names by themselves would ring any bells with the public - we being notorious for our indifference to matters historical - so they have put tags before the names: Biplabi (revolutionary-) Rashbehari Basu Sarani (street) and Sahityik Leela Mazumdar Sarani. 

And they have been so prolific with the naming exercise that personnel from other government departments are having difficulty finding their way about. I don't know about postmen, but this morning I saw some policemen asking for directions...