Category: Personal

The Kolkata Book Fair (Boi Mela) is the greatest yearly attraction I look forward to. The Book Fair is not only about buying books. We get to touch and feel the books and even smell the freshly printed books with crisp pages. Delicious! It’s really worth checking out Greatbong’s blog – a brilliant post where he recreates the atmosphere of the boi mela with his superb style of writing.

This time I visited the Book Fair twice. I made it a point not to buy any books this time (because once I get a book I can’t rest till I finish it and my academics require me not to lose focus till April this year), instead I convinced my parents to get me a membership to the British Council Library which was available at a discount on the Fair ground. Participated in the crossword contest at the Indian Express stall and won a prize! Whoa! 🙂 Would have liked to participate in the quiz too but I had to move on with the so many other stalls still to explore. While I had my parents with me on yesterday, today I accompanied my friends to the fair.

This year is supposed to be the last one for the glorious ‘boi mela’ to be at the Maidan. I am afraid that the fair will lose much of its glory if it is shifted. How can we get the same ambience elsewhere?

A glimpse of the Book Fair captured on my friend’s camera-phone.

[Update] An anecdote :- On Sunday i.e. the closing day of the fair, at the Penguin book stall a person was caught red-handed stealing a book. He was punished with the task of memorising the first two pages of that book. Only after he could read out those pages from his memory was he let off —- along with the book too! 😮 Now this can happen in the Book Fair only. The true spirit of the Kolkata Book Fair.

This January I got 1137 unique visitors (even though my site was down for almost 4 days) — this, though not a big figure, means a lot to me. I launched my site in September last year. In the first month I got 147 visitors. It increased slowly but steadily… I am especially thankful to Google which accounts for most of my traffic.

Below are daily traffic stats of January:

The top 25 countries my visitors came from:

Monthly stats of 2006:

Monthly stats of 2005:

Justine Henin-Hardenne is in the Australian Open women’s singles final having knocked down Maria Sharapova in the semifinal. Losing the first set, she came back into match to win 4-6 6-1 6-4. I am a great fan of Henin-Hardenne and the least that of Sharapova. So nothing could have been better news for me. Up against her in the final is Amelie Mauresmo, the muscular Frenchwoman, who got an easy walking into finals as Kim Clijsters withdrew in the 3rd set following an ankle injury.
Waiting to see a good final. Hope Justine wins. All the best to her!

The Madhyamik (secondary examination of my state) syllabus has been thoroughly revised. In our time — I gave Madhyamik in 2003 — we had telegram-writing. It carried 10 marks in the English paper. Now that the syllabus has been restructured, I wonder if it is still there. I, for one thing, think that telegram-writing should be phased out from the syllabus. After all, who bothers to send a telegram these days? Instead SMS-writing should be incorporated in the syllabus. This is one way we can keep up with the changing times. Be it an SMS or a telegram, the challenge before the pupil is the same — that is, summing up a given situation in a concise form.

Wish you all a Happy New Year! Let 2006 be your annus mirabilis!

Here are my New Year resolutions — taken from my diary, things that I have been kept telling myself throughout 2005.  Realisations of yesteryear become resolutions of new year. (more…)

Thanks to Unicode, we can write in Bengali. I use a very nice software Avro Keyword which is fully unicode-compliant. 🙂 It sits pretty on your screen as a sleek toolbar. Supports Windows 2000, XP and 2003 – as the previous versions of Windows don’t have adequate support for unicode. It also includes the UniBijoy layout for users habituated with Bijoy. Best of all, it is a freeware.

[Update]: A newer version of Avro has been released. I have written about it here.

With viruses, trojans, malwares, spywares… abound and hackers on the prowl, the internet is not a safe place. I use the following softwares to fortify my rig.

Antivirus
Avast Home 4.6 (Freeware)

This lightweight yet very effective antivirus — free for home users — is serving me for about a year and I am impressed. It does not hog a lot of system resource, unlike Norton Antivirus the 2006 version of which requires at least 256 MB of RAM. What I like most is its update mechanism. Updates are very frequent and the update files are very small in size… just connect to the net and the update is just a matter of seconds. Ever since I started using Avast I have never had any virus-problem — it simply rocks! Avast also blocks trojans trying to intrude into my system. I am considering to buy the professional version of Avast which has extra features like script blocker, command line scanner etc.

Firewall
Zone Alarm Pro (Shareware, US$ 49.95)

Since I remain hooked to the net for a greater part of the day, a firewall is a must. Apart from keeping hackers at bay, Zone Alarm also monitors which programs are accessing the net. Using this for more than 3 years and I am all praise about it. Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus (a combo pack of including Zone Alarm firewall and Zone Alarm antivirus) has bagged the 11th rank in the PCWorld The 100 Best Products of 2005.

Anti-Spyware
Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy. (Freewares)

Both of them feature among the top 10 most popular downloads at Download.com. According to Digit, India’s premier technology magazine, these two programs complement each other very well, that is to say, if Ad-Aware fails to detect a particularly spyware, Spybot catches it and vice versa. Apart from these two, I also use the anti-spyware included in Zone Alarm Pro.

Winter is here. One can already feel the chill in air. It’s only early November and already I am finding it quite difficult to get up from bed in the morning.

Many a times we hear a cry that politicians should retire, at a certain fixed age like other professions. This is a well justified demand. We can expect the people who govern the country to be efficient. But then a pertinent question arises – what should be the ideal age when a politician should retire. Some say it should be 65 while some others argue that it should be 75. I, however, don’t believe in any such age-barriers. A 70-year old person may be more energetic than a 30-year old. It all depends on how one lives his life.

I have a different idea. I think that the politicians should be made to sit in an annual examination. The exam should be a simple one focussing on reasoning and analytical skills as well as memory test, also touching upon elementary arithmetic and a bit of G.K. on current affairs. A pass marks will be set. One has to pass to be eligible to contest in elections. The consequences will be great and far-reaching. Half-literate politicians will no longer enable to occupy important chairs anymore. Many a times we have to suffer for illogical decisions taken by imbecile ministers. This will put an end to that.

It is a nearly impossible proposition. All politicians will vehemently protest against such an exam-system and even if this ever executed in practice our corrupted netas will soon reduce it to a mockery by cheating, leaking the question paper, bribing the invigilators, forcing the invigilators to cooperate at gun-point, and what not? Such is their nature!

In the middle of my month-long Puja vacation. Not much to do right now.

I intend to study hard the rest of the hols. Apart from that, on my list is a plan to visit my school St. Lawrence to have a dekko at the table tennis board there. I also have plans to have some group discussion sessions with friends, always a very good way to learn, in fact.

For the time being, I am following a rather boring routine – study, eat & sleep. I can’t go out as it is raining incessantly for the past two days, enough for the roads to get water-logged. The meteorology office has held a low-pressure development over Bay of Bengal responsible for it.

These days I am reading Bankimchandra in my leisure. I am not a great fan of his but I like those novels based on historical events of Bengal and India as I get to know a lot from them. I read ‘Rajsingha’ 4 years ago, found it really absorbing.