College Street: The Disillusionment......

As a Calcuttan I witness with deep sadness the decline of a great city. Calcutta these days looks like a rich Zamindar (landed gentry) falling into hard times. Yet in this city there exists an institution which I consider to be one of the best in the academically inclined world. I am talking of College Street ‘boi para’ (The ‘book shops/stores’ of College Street). Noted Bengali writer Shankar once lamented on closure of Thacker Spink, a Barnes and Nobles of India. Adults are biased towards stories that have a beginning, middle and an end. In that order, Children don’t really care; they just want to know “what happens next”. From this perspective, there should be more children on College Street. Although the maps will tell you College Street runs from Bowbazar to Mahatma Gandhi Road (Harrison Road as was), this is a part of Calcutta that has no discernible beginning nor an end. Every time you think you’ve reached one end of it, three more book-stalls appear under yet another tarpaulin-rigged awning. Side lanes, porticos, lobbies of peeling old houses, in this part of town they breed books like buildings elsewhere grow mold. On a late Saturday morning when the colleges give over early and the book-loving Bengali babu is starting his weekend, this para buzzes with activity like an ant’s nest that’s just sighted an aardvark. College Street, as we sincerely believe, is the biggest hub of publishing and bookselling activities in the eastern part of the country.

Earlier, Chitpur and Garanhata was the sanctum sanctorum of vernacular publishing. The place was popularly known as Battala. The rich oral tradition of the folktales of Bengal, typically juxtaposed with traditional yellow-cover-pornography and religious texts, used to be a major attraction for readers in those days. Later, the market was shifted to College Street in keeping with the literary and reformist spirit prevailing in and around Hindu College. The tidal wave of Bengal Renaissance caused some significant reforms in publishing, and bookselling activities as well, under the astute leadership of William Carey and Pundit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. In course of time, such futuristic ideas of book business culminated into what we call today ‘Boi para’ (the book district) of Bengal. Boi para of College Street is not only the centre for bookmaking and bookselling; it is synonymous with intellectual literary crosscurrents of contemporary thinkers. Boi para is a place where one can find the Coffee House, ceaselessly vibrating with political arguments, while in the wayside stalls, the incorruptible book lovers are always on the lookout for some hidden treasure in the pile of books. It is a confluence of old books and new ideas. Calcutta University, Sanskrit College, Hindu School and a few other academic institutions impart unparalleled intellectual distinction to the place.

Our story had its beginning in a conversation a week before our visit. A school of mine had dismissed the College Street boi para (roughly, “neighbourhood of books”) as a flea-market for crammers’ texts and second-hand potboilers. “Can you find anything in any language that is RARE, let alone interesting?” Out of nowhere, we fixed on Dwijendranath Tagore’s Gitapatha (The Translation of the Gita), as the touchstone. Could we find anything by him on College Street? So it came to pass that 11 o’clock on a cloudy humid Saturday saw us stepping gingerly through puddles, wiping our faces repeatedly under the combined onslaught of humidity and a faint drizzle, glancing with unconcealed disgust at stall after stall that advertised “CBSE-ICSE-ISC text” or “Medical – JEE – CAT”. Was this what College Street had been reduced to? Where were the bonanzas that our parents’ generation gloated over, the pamphlet autographed by Toru Dutt or the 1898 edition of the Materia Medica?  The Coffee House lane (Bankim Chatterjee Street) is entirely devoted to textbooks. (What a waste - even during our student days some decades ago, textbooks never figured on our list of priorities.) Yet it makes historical sense. Hindu College in 1817, Sanskrit College, the Calcutta Medical College in 1835, Calcutta University and later Presidency College – these were all started on College Street or just off it in the Potoldanga area. Small wonder that the College Street boi para took root, almost 200 years ago, from the textbook trade. For more esoteric books and for the latest rage, the gentry ordered in from the booksellers in the Chowringhee area. It was only at the turn of the (previous) century that College Street’s booksellers increased the ambit of their trade. And the stories of lost treasures glimpsed in dusty piles on the pavement took root, grew, gave rise to myths and tall tales.

These tales were most often told in the Coffee House, the adopted home of generations of self-proclaimed Bengali intelligentsia. Housed in the Albert Hall (yes, of course there had to be one in the “second city of the Raj”! This one was built in 1876), this was the place to enjoy the best adda, the slowest service and the most tolerant waiters in the world. 

Poets, economists, politicians, charlatans, they all spent hours and days over carefully nursed cups of coffee and shared cigarettes under the slow revolving fans strung on beams between the upper floor balconies. Every Bengali of note, from Rabindranath Tagore to Amartya Sen, has been a patron. One of the most enduringly popular Bangla songs is Manna Dey’s anthem to nostalgia, "Coffee House-er shei adda." Yet like most things Bengalis hold dear, it has been on the brink of oblivion for years. It took a petition from the faculty of Calcutta University and the Presidency College to keep it from being shut down in 1958. Eventually, in 1995, Mudar Patherya led an initiative for essential renovation and again in 2007, Bengal Shelter cleaned and renovated it. Today it is almost chic in its ambience. Of course there are old-timers who miss the smoke-blackened walls and the chipped Coffee Board saucers. But they still serve the most soul-satisfying greasy “mutton Afghani”. I can vouch for this because, of course, we ended our College Street expedition there. But again the time-line jinks. The book search, yes!
We pushed through the crowds on the sidewalk in our search for old books, yet all we found within that tunnel of blue polythene rain-sheets was text-books, children’s books and self-help books. We crossed to the other side of the road and found a different world. Piles upon piles of pulp fiction, literary criticism, photography, yearbooks. Obviously this side, along the wall of Presidency College, is more fun. Subol Moitra from Medinipur peeped shyly from his book-walled alcove and edified us about the complicated system of rental and sub-rental that governed the economy of these six by four “locations”. But where oh where, among this rubble of Harold Robbins and Fashion Photography, were we to find anything by the great Dwijendranath Tagore? Back to the other side we went, picking our way between reddish-chocolate mini-buses, bright yellow taxis and rickshaws with schoolchildren peeking out from behind the inevitable blue polythene sheet We had a set of questions and plenty of curiosity in our minds. The most distinguished bookseller in this part of the world is Dasgupta & Company with a rich heritage of a little more than 150 years. Deys Publishing, Ananda Publishers, M. C. Sircar—these three are, unmistakably, icons of Bengali publishing in Bengal. They have backlist of bestsellers at their disposal. Sarat Book House is a meticulously managed literary supplier with specialization in Mathematics and Physics as their area of publishing. At Indiana Bookstore we found a neat pretty bookshop with the latest arrivals from the International market. Chuckerverthy Chatterjee is as spacious as any huge departmental store with well-managed stocks of books on various topics in various languages. Rupa, of course, deserves  special mention for its formidable publishing programme in English. Anushtup and Saptarshi are quality-sensitive publishers with sharp eyes on the intellectual heritage of Bengal. Pratikshan has hawk-eyed editorial and production staff to look after the well-produced art books. Punascha, like Dey’s Publishing, has its own binding infrastucture besides the collossal publishing programme aiming at a huge cross-section of readership. Shishu Sahitya Samsad is a name to reckon with in the field of children’s and young adult literature in Bengali and English. Sahitya Samsad is the publisher of the finest dictionaries in the country.But where oh where can we find the book that we sought out for!!!! After searching for about 3-4 hours in and around college we finally had to give up on our quest...essentially My Quest!!!  We boarded the bus (Route No. 219) and made our journey homewards with drooping faces and words lingering in my mind.......
"Narayan Gongopadhyay, in his Desh column "Sunondor Journal" once admitted that his idea of heaven-on-earth was bringing the golden days of yore back to College Street for just one day, when textbooks, 'notebooks' and suggestions would disappear, and brand new inexpensive books of poetry, plays, essays and novels from all over India and beyond would take their place."

Online Open Education:With Google....

Recently I haven’t had much time to give myself to writing(as you can see from the chronology of my blog posts if you’d been following this blog!!! :-P) but as of now since my semester end vacations had started I could again get back to what I like to do best :WRITING. For the past maybe 2-3 months I had engaged myself in a lot of other activities apart from my bachelor degree studies. I don’t know how much these are going to serve me in the long run but I would like to quote one phrase from one of my favorite movies i.e. 3 Idiots which is “ Beta!! Jindegi mein woh hi karo jo tumhe dil se acchi lagti hoon”.Okay, let’s get back to our discussion .Actually I have a lot to write and talk about, here I would only talk about my experience with one thing which I tried quite recently i.e. online education…..

Knowledge is Power

                                                ---Francis Bacon

Yup…..We enjoy being trendy and following the newest tendencies in the web-world. In June 2012 Google announced they would be introducing a new course called Power Searching With Google to their repertoire of online learning tools. This is under the umbrella of their Search Education initiative.The Power Searching With Google course is a series of videos split up between 6 classes, intermediate Google+ Hangouts, and a Mid-Class Assessment along with a Final Assessment. All initially available between July 10th and July 23rd. This community-based course showcases the techniques of successful web-search and the ways you can use them to solve some everyday issues.

Those who pass the post-course assessment will get Certificate of Completion. The first class was released on July 10, 2012, and what is really cool about the course organization is that one can take classes according to his own schedule during a two-week window, alongside a worldwide community! Wherever you are, Google makes education easy for you. Google is pretty good at providing education on it’s products. Basic search doctrine is not one I thought they’d need, nor accommodate. I must say that I really had fun taking Google's online power searching course. Some of it is very familiar for anyone who does a lot of searching, but there is some mind-widening stuff in here, too. For instance, I hadn't thought about using the color filter on images to narrow down specific types of things (the black and white option, for instance, will pull out charts and graphs that tend to be in B&W).There's also the ability to find KML data using the "filetype" filter and feed that link back into Google maps to quickly create a useful map. But personally, I took this as a welcome surprise and so far, I think they’ve done an excellent job of explaining the many benefits of using Google compared to the other search engines. And even as a tech savvy person already, I am learning new things I didn’t know Google Search was capable of.

But the question begs to be answered…….

Why did Google initiate this course?

 Google prides itself on doing no evil. And as an extension of that you can (probably) say they want to do good. They understand that they have built this amazing resource that has capabilities in-line with and far beyond what they originally anticipated. But perhaps they feel they have unleashed this search engine on the world without providing the right instruction book for it. And for those who are willing to take the time to learn, the Power Searching With Google course is their way of saying, there is SO MUCH MORE you can do with Google. After taking the initial pre-assessment and course I can tell you that the Power Searching With Google course is not for the average user. Sorry Google!!

It is a series of 2-10 minute videos explaining the finer aspects of Google’s search capabilities. There are even mid-course assessments to test that you have retained what you just learned. For those who simply use Google for basic search, like the average user, this is not for you. I don’t see most Google users taking the time, (1-2 hours) per course to learn how to use Google more productively. They are fine with the results they get when searching and have no need to better hone those skills. And that brings me to my point of why I think Google came out with this course. For niche site builders, a prominent topic of conversation has been the recent or should I say constant, Google algorithm changes and updates. In various ways these changes have affected SERPs and how sites are ranked. Perhaps, Google is trying, inconspicuously, to tell niche site builders, affiliate marketers, and those trying to build a website empire, how to do it right. But would Google do that? Absolutely! Our niche sites, that rank well for certain keywords and keyword terms, are as intelligently designed as possible to draw a very targeted crowd to a site. And for advertisers that means a very targeted list of leads. This increases the chances that PPC clicks with Google AdWords will produce targeted, highly valuable customers that are relevant to the audience that the AdWords buyers are looking for.

What I Hoped To Learn From The Power Searching With Google Course??

It is well known that Google is king of Search Engines. So when building and designing niche sites it is appropriate to take Google’s tastes, preferences, and ideals into mind. My intention with taking this course is to learn not only what Google is capable of as a search engine, but how to better optimize my niche sites to accommodate Google’s many abilities, those well known and not. For lack of a better term, I want to learn how to better exploit Google and it’s search algorithms. And of course, how they rank pages so that I can better understand and get my own niche sites to rank well for the keywords. Finally, I really would like to say that out an out it was a truly fascinating and exciting course with a professional tinge. And guess what!!! I had a perfect score on both of my Mid Class & Post Class Assessment!!!

Here the mail which I received from them:
help@powersearchingwithgoogle.com via search-edu.bounces.google.com

Congratulations! Here is the certificate you earned through your participation in Power Searching with Google. Below are your assessment scores.
Mid-class assessment score:  100%
Post-class assessment score:  100%

You can print out the attached certificate and hang it on your wall.  We hope you enjoyed the class!

Cheers,
Power Searching with Google course staff

Here is my certifate!!!! Cheers…..  :D :D

Foreign Direct Investment:The Story of India

The primary source of information on a boring Sunday evening came when a friend of mine actually called me up to help him with some of his college work. Guess what he had to prepare for his college debate the very next day!!!The topic was “FDI in India”.I quickly glanced through the ever so dependent Wikipedia article on FDI and began my information search quest through the fascinating world of the internet. I chanced upon one video on youtube where the language of the same content coming from a financial broadcast drifts drastically to optimism in hopes to play the bull and the bear game. The  broadcast had roped in some top management gurus to tarot card the future. “India is an idea that will take off this year”. In this thirty minutes program, the gentleman devoted twenty-eight minutes to ideate an optimistic view for the leap year while the ad agencies squeezed out two minutes to sell a million things possible. Two topics that strongly emerged from this discussion were the introduction of FDI in India and the impact of new products on the growth rate in these recessionary times. Following are my views on these issues.

I have been reading many articles on the impact of FDI in India. I am happy for giants like Starbucks and IKEA entering the Indian market. I hope Starbucks does influence the Indian political system in some way but IKEA is going to be a game changer in the interior industry. Apart from this, how does FDI revolutionize everyday buying?

The first thing I recall reading FDI is the famous retail chain- More. More was the first place where my father learnt about the discounts being offered on the MRP. What he thought was a fascinating concept is actually a headache to the local ‘Mudir Dokan’ stores. A few months later when the local More store started winding up, the local ‘Mudir Dokan’ stores saw every Tom, Dick and Harry ask for a bargain. But if More  was such a fascinating place, why did the retail chain shut down? Let me take you on a demographic ride around my residential area

Let’s fix the ‘zero mile’ at the entrance of my residence. Travel some miles and you see an Infosys like campus called ‘Big Bazaar’, take the second right and a sober looking ‘Bazaar Kolkata’ welcomes you. A few blocks down the road you see a place crowded with everyday vegetables and everyday people; that’s Reliance fresh. After all the hustle and bustle when you finally return home, keep an eye to the left; you will probably stop at the wine selling ‘Godrej Natura’. I am not sure what exactly will FDI do in the retail sector. There may be some kind of revolution in everyday buying but I am sure my father will not dump his local ration card for some loyalty cards program.

Another subject interesting about this century is the rise of Africa. Slowly and steadily, the ‘first world’ has realized the direct connection of the population with customers. Now what do I mean by the rise of Africa? Let’s take an Indian example. I was born in 1992 and by mid 2012 I had a simple idea to be a millionaire. Thanks to engineering text books, crazy ideas came to me effortlessly. So what was the idea? To collect one rupee from every Indian that would make me rich by a million dollars. Now what seems like a simple plan is actually a complicated business with competition coming from places as far as America. One billion plus population with nearly 700 million customers ready to buy an affordable, feature rich product, and that’s a market twice as large as U.S.

Bottom of the pyramid is a term long used in business and currently being reinforced with design thinking for the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). We have seen giant companies like GE and Philips come up with affordable products sold with low margins and a strategy relying heavily on the foundations of scalability. These products are designed for the emerging markets and compete with similar products launched by the ‘local entrepreneurs’ that specialize in catching up with the competition. The only way a product can survive and/or maintain its market share is by incorporation the right ‘looks’ and the ‘desired’ features. This is when Design Research powered by Product Design will slowly make way into the boardroom.

Way back in 2009, I was shopping at an Electronic outlet and found myself staring at a brightly lit glass cube with some four-grand, two-inch gizmo inside. This was a Sony USM 2 (GB) SE pen drive that sounded more like an American sergeant on mission. Three years down the line, prices for a pen drive have reduced by a factor of eight and are usually stacked in plastic buckets and sold around the cash counter. Growth can either be achieved by improving your products and services or by introducing new products and services. Now some ‘curve’ in the management theory will stop you from launching new products under such volatile conditions and respecting this theory, the only option remains is refinement. So how much growth do you expect by selling the same old products with new brochure? In years from now, targeting the mass market with refined products will not define growth. Growth will be achieved by platform based innovations that would make a feature rich product affordable in the mass market.

The Entropic Theory!!!

Many of you may think, like I did, that job, money and family bring in a lot of big questions. Well this weekday, I asked myself one of those really big questions: ‘What is the meaning of life’?. The big question seemed to have a profound effect on my thinking process as I soon found myself dusting engineering text books and looking for physical logics in terms of ‘System’, ‘Surrounding’ and ‘Energy’. In this quest to find out the ultimate answer, Newtons third law of motion seemed appropriate: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Let us suppose throwing a ball is action. The reaction to this action is the displacement of the ball from one point to another. Now if throwing the ball is action, from where does this action initiate? Let us say throwing the ball is a reaction caused by the action of various impulses in the nervous system. Experiments have proved that nervous impulses are a form of electric signals generated by the conscious energy that travel from the generative cells to the receptor cells. Well from the first law of thermodynamics, “Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed”. So the conscious energy derives its state from a universal energy that governs the laws of nature. To put all the above statements in a layman’s term, the universal energy governs the will power of an individual.

The Neuron Impulses (Visualization)

This theory sounds funny. I said the universal energy governs the will power of an individual. If this is true, are we just puppets in the hands of ‘God-knows-who’? How is this possible? If you look at the facts, our will power is responsible for the worst calamities in nature; the over hyped global warming, the rise against corruption in India, the recent euro zone crises and even worst: the downfall of Microsoft! Does the nature governed universal energy try to destroy itself. My theory seems to have some major flaws. For a moment, lets us take the universal energy out of this picture and introduce a new term called entropy. Entropy is defined as the state of randomness. In other words, Entropy is the quality of energy in use.As the Entropy increases, the state of randomness increases which in turn increases the electrical impulses in the nervous system. The electrical impulses raise the level of mental activity and then you know the classic answer of why a blacksmith gets a better sleep than a businessman? So am I concluding that Entropy is an equivalent of the universal energy? Well in short: No. In my understanding, the ability of processing random information and converting them in a structured format requires that certain amount of willful energy which is entropy. Thus the external conditions impose a state of randmoness and hence Entropy is a reaction to the action of the environment.

The Entropy - Impulses System (Visualization)

In short, the environment acts and we react accordingly. Now finally I seem to arrive at a logical conclusion that will never be mailed to the Science Journal.

My Existance!!!!

Hi all,

Found this absolute gem somewhere online. Also inserting image below. It’ll take a minute to understand, but its absolutely bang on target!

 Intelligent enough to be socially awkward, but not intelligent enough to make a contribution. Man, does that summarize me.

Who am I????????????

What's the point? What's the point in anything? Nihilism, nothing. Nothing has meaning, everything is perception. Everything is relative. Man is an irrational creature, an impulsive one. There is no pattern, no habit, no inherent nature, no predictability. We are as random as our fingerprints, each unique. There are no groups, no nationalities, no possible way of categorizing us. Man is unquantifiable. I cannot be more than you, cannot be less. Since there is no quantification, there is no comparison. We are an amalgamation of our choices, a product of our thoughts. I owe nothing to anyone and no one owes me anything. I don't have a duty to anyone, not even to myself. Life is an abstract. Death is sleep. We are dust. Our actions, our thoughts, our deeds, our money, our sex, will all be dust. There is no right, no wrong. There is no judge, no morality. We just happen to be. It's all relative. Our senses deceive us, they give us false pictures. Our brain is a cheat, it draws patterns where there are none. It connects dots, forms associations. It qualifies things, quantifies them, gives them labels. It says, this is blue, this is bitter, this smells foul. It draws connotations, forms prejudices, allows us to judge. Black is dark, black is evil. Self is an abstract notion as well. Who am I? Why should I be so special to me? Why should I work for my own betterment? What is pain, what is suffering? What is agony? Nervous responses, again interpreted by that cheat of a brain. The universe is pristine and pure. Human thought has corrupted everything.

How stoichiometry problems exposed the Indian Education System!!!!!

For the  past couple of days I've been at home and have been teaching my brother some of his class XI science and mathematics. So, while I juggle among molarity, molality, dimensional analysis, significant figures (?!) and the likes, he keeps barraging me with random questions - most of which I could answer thanks to my clear & conceptual understanding of my +2 level . Whether he does this out of curiosity OR whether to verify my WBJEE rank credentials - I don't know.

Anyway, at one point, he asked me a seemingly trivial question in chemistry and he was surprised at the ease of the solution. He later told me that her teacher told her that this is "high-level" and she cannot solve it. I am surprised because all that the question demanded was an understanding of the mole concept. A few other anecdotes from her and my own experience of the Indian education system lead me to a disturbing conclusion: The system is decaying, and it is decaying fast, and we are running out of time, and it won't fix itself, and they are not really bothered!

My brother has a good theory about why the senior secondary teachers suck at their job. Let me paraphrase him:

"Most of the class XI/XII syllabus is "irritating" and requires sound fundamentals to grasp the subject. Most teachers prefer to teach class X-and-below because it is "very easy" in comparison to senior classes and students hardly ask (or are encouraged to ask) "difficult" questions.

The few who actually manage to master the syllabus never return to teaching because there are greener pastures for such people. So, there is a void created and this void gets filled with sub-standard (or, as he said, "bekar") teachers."

To think of it, he makes perfect sense.

Going through his NCERT books, I realised that class XI/XII is indeed demanding (and rightly so!). To teach the thousands of these students, we need teachers of the very best caliber and it seems not forthcoming. You know that the system is rotting when your teachers advise the parents to arrange for "coaching", even for basic school syllabi; when the school lets a professional coaching institute "counsel" the students and for all their queries, there seems to only one answer - Jay E Eee. (After the counselling session, the coaching institute offered the students a discount on their JEE-coaching program.)

While Pranab Mukherjee is busy allotting thousands of crores towards education, I hope he realises that there are serious problems with the Indian education system that cannot be solved by pumping-in cash. Perhaps, we need a revamped pedagogy - one which understands the changing needs of the students while still able to deliver quality input.

The Private Engineering Colleges ( built to nurture and churn out good Technocrats!!) face a somewhat similar crunch - 60-70% shortage of faculty. And thankfully, they are appointing bekar professors (or so I'd like to believe). There was/is an attempt, though, to bring in reservations in the faculty, which would undoubtedly lead to a compromise of merit.

So, Pranab dada giving the Education System 2000-odd crores is great news but it will hardly solve any of the fundamental problems that plague this Indian Education System- and there are enough and more. (If you a new joinee to any private engineering colleges(however reputed it may be!!) - too bad I am squashing your dreams so soon :-) some of my other posts might offer solace!)

I leave you with a question that often bewilders me:

Why does India not have a network of world-class government high schools which attract and train the best minds in the country? And how come we have the world-class IITs and IIMs without a sound higher-educational foundation in the system?