The Genius of Ritwik Ghatak

Today was the 86th birthday of Ritwik Ghatak, the powerful Bengali director, scriptwriter and documentary filmmaker, whose extraordinary genius was most enthusiastically received only after his death.

The man who could have been the father of alternative Indian cinema had his film Nagarik been released before Pather Panchali, Ritwik Ghatak spent his lifetime in the shadow of another Bengali stalwart, Oscar winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who never failed to take away the limelight, while the former struggled to finance his projects and battled relentlessly with a 'variety of personal and political demons.'

9/11, Gopal Mitra & His Dream Towers

Laments of a WTC Architect

After the historic collapse of the World Trade Center, a 65-year-old Bengali architect Gopal Mitra suddenly made headlines across television channels and newspapers in India. Mitra, who worked with Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, one of the construction companies that designed the WTC structure — the other being Emery Roth and Sons — was involved in the WTC project from its conception to commissioning.

Sitting beside a miniature replica of the WTC at his office in Tollygunge, Calcutta, Mitra was aghast at the sight of his dream towers crumbling down, as news reports of the September 11 attacks unfolded on his television screen. He couldn't believe that the twin towers could
ever collapse like this.

It was Indestructible!

Mitra recalled why the construction of WTC was a major landmark in architectural engineering. Unlike any contemporary skyscraper, its walls were skin-stressed, i.e., "the walls were self-supported and did not depend on the roofs and floor to stand erect."

While designing the building, Mitra and his colleagues took into account every possible threat — earthquake, storm, wind and fire. None could imagine that someday, thousands of gallons of aviation fluid would be set aflame inside its belly. He is particularly regretful of the fact that the building was equipped with one of the most advanced fire-fighting mechanisms in the world, yet it was finally destroyed by fire. He told the Calcutta daily Telegraph: "When we had designed it, we had never dreamt that one day it would be the target of a terrorist attack and that it would be destroyed in this manner; life was not that complicated in those days." However, he maintained that the WTC did not collapse, rather "it was punctured, and fell apart floor by floor."

The Dream Towers!

Gopal Mitra told the Delhi Times how his tryst with the twin towers began: In 1964, after completing his masters degree in Architecture from the University of Michigan, Mitra was working with Erro Sarrinen & Associates in New York. One day, Minoru Yamasaki, the chief architect of the towers, happened to see his drawings and offered him to work for the WTC project. Soon Mitra was in Yamasaki's design team working almost 18 hours a day to lay down the plans of the building. "Then the only aim of our lives was to put together this dream project," he reminisces.

Remembering his team-members E. L. Tungsten, William Ku and Dr Killing, Mitra said that the thrill of designing the tallest building in the world made the architects overcome a whole lot of constraints. "I remember how I drew sketches of the structure over and over again till my seniors approved of it," he added. Finally, Prof. Mitra said that if he were to redesign the WTC all over again, he wouldn't change much of design, except for adding a "special protective skin" around the structure so that no flying object can damage the building.

Later Gopal Mitra joined IIT Kharagpur, his alma mater, as professor of civil engineering, and established an architectural firm by the name of Buildcon in the early 1970s that has ever since designed, developed and promoted a number of buildings and apartments in Calcutta and New Delhi. Today, he is the Rector of Modern Academy, Calcutta and five other 'gurukuls'. The Modern Academy International, a co-educational, residential school coming up at Kosi-Kalan near New Delhi, is also the brainchild of Prof. Mitra, and has come into being because of his immense faith in the Upanishads and a great respect for the American system of education.

 

This article by me appeared on About.com soon after the 2001 September 11 attacks on America by the Jihadees. Reproducing it here on the 10th anniversary of the event that changed our world.

A Tribute to Kishore Kumar: Six Superb Songs at Muziboo

A Tribute to Kishore Kumar: Six Superb Songs at Muziboo | Upload Music

Dr Sid Mukherjee Wins Pulitzer for Non-Fiction

Another Bengali writer of English prose has made it to the prestigious Pulitzer Winner's list. After Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies: Tales from Bengal, Boston & Beyond (2000), it's Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), which has won the Pultizer Prize - this time in the general non-fiction category. The jury described Dr. Mukherjee's book as "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science." He will receive $10,000 as prize money for "a distinguished and appropriately documented book of nonfiction by an American author."

About the Author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.

About the Book

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. (From Scribner)

Such a Nostalgic Song!

Why this Sad Song was Salil Da's Favorite... Some very Curious Facts! 

মনে পড়ে সেই সব দিন ('Mone Pore Shei Shob Din') from the film Swarnatrishaa (1992) is the last and arguably the best song sung by Kishore Kumar for Salil Chowdhury. It has been one my favorite songs of nostalgia, and of moments of past joy since the time I first heard it in the late 1980s.  I just loved the Hindi version of the song, which I discovered only a few years back. I thought this was perhaps his only song with a single 'antara' – as you’ll see in the video – until I found the full version, which I can’t but share with all of you. Listen to the song first and then we’ll talk about it in some detail (please ignore the intro-ad).