A reason to celebrate

There is a common phrase in Bengali, “Baro mashe tero parbon” which roughly translated means thirteen festivals in twelve months referring to the innumerable festivities we Bengalis (or for that matter Indians) celebrate. This phrase accurately describes the festival loving country ours is. We Indians, I believe are a merry lot, we love our festivals, the celebration, gaiety and the fun associated with all of them.

Reality shows: Boon or Bane

Reality shows on television are the most happening things these days. Open your TV and you are sure to find at least one reality show if not many in every channel. I cannot exactly pinpoint the first reality show that happened in India or the west but my earliest memories of a show on TV which wasn’t made according to a fixed written script (although reality shows are scripted to an extent) are the famous Amitabh Bacchan hosted quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati, the dance show Boogie Woogie and the music talent hunt Saregamapa which I watched as a kid. But then, how exactly do you define these? Do we call them reality shows or are they mere competitions? 

Things to know in School

Memories from school are perhaps our best childhood memories. The innocence and naïveté and the silly things we did can never be brought back. It is also the most crucial phase of a person’s life, the time when they are away from family mingling with various kinds of people of different age, gender, class and religious groups. School is where they interact, learn and imbibe a lot of different things that they cannot possibly learn from being at home and things and values that will help them grow into better human beings in the future. 

Importance of Book cover

Let us take a random scene from our lives. You are inside a book store with no particular book in mind that you want to purchase. You see books arranged in sections – romance, mystery, thriller, non-fiction, self-help etc. You get to the romance section and see huge bookshelves with literally tons of romances all stacked up closely (let’s admit it; romance is the most written genre). Now, assuming you don’t have the time to pick every book and read the first couple of pages, what are the factors that will make you pick a particular book from the infinite options available? The answer would be – an attractive book cover.

Public Libraries

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”  ~Mark Twain

I could not have agreed more to it. I cannot imagine a world without public libraries, a world without beautiful books all piled up systematically, waiting to be sniffed, felt and read. My earliest memories of childhood are of a 5 year old me with my nose into an Enid Blyton book I found in my father’s bookshelf. I can still remember how I used to stand outside my school library as a kid, waiting for the lunch hour to strike so that I could get free access to all the books inside. The day I got my membership card for the local public library was perhaps one of the happiest moments of my life.

Emancipation of Hijras

The term “hijra” is very widely used term in Hindi (and a few other languages). But when it comes to finding an equivalent term in English, it is a tad bit more complex. Terms like transgender, transexual and asexual all refer to a set of people with a non-specific sexual identity but are not exactly equivalents of “hijra”. A simpler way of defining them would be to say that they are a set of people who do not fit into either of the two genders that are officially accepted in most countries, male and female.