Murshidabad : Where History Goes to Vote

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In Musrshidabad, the Bhagirathi river moves slowly. It always has. Narrower than the Ganga it once was, silted and quieter now, it slides past the great yellow facade of the Hazarduari Palace with the indifference of a river that has seen too much and for too long.

On its far bank, across a short ferry crossing, lies Khushbagh — the Garden of Happiness — where Siraj-ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, sleeps in a grave surrounded by mango trees. The past and the present press together in Murshidabad with an intimacy you will not find anywhere else in India.

Last week Murshidabad voted in the first round of state polls to elect representatives to the 294-member West Bengal Legislative Assembly, with incumbent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seeking a fourth straight term. The second, and final phase of voting will be on Wednesday. Results, along with those from Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, are due on May 4.

The election campaign in Murshidabad felt heavier than elsewhere, charged with a particular dread, as it is one of the most demographically complex districts in India. Its proximity to the Bangladesh border makes it a frequent target of political rhetoric regarding “infiltrators” and national security, creating a polarised environment where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) argues for “purifying” the voter list, while the ruling Trinamool Congress and Congress party characterise the exercise as a threat to legitimate citizens.

Muslims form the majority in Murshidabad district. It is widely believed that they form up to 67% of its population. Across tea stalls on the highway to Kolkata and narrow village lanes, a same story repeated: names deleted, documents demanded, families split between those who can vote and those who cannot.

The district is known for its historically high civic engagement, but this time – after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls — voters seem to have turned out in even larger numbers. Yet, the mood into the run-up to polling was not of celebration but suspicion. Central security forces were everywhere — boots on roads that once heard only the shuffle of weavers and the clatter of coin-changers.

The electoral battle in Murshidabad is not just about political ideology but also about economic survival and identity. The district’s “beedi belt” features some of the wealthiest candidates in the state competing for the votes of some of the state’s poorest workers. The TMC holds the ground here, as it has for fifteen years, but the BJP senses possibility.

To understand why this place matters so enormously, you must walk away from the polling booth and toward its palatial mansions left behind by history. During the 18th century, Murshidabad was a prosperous and cosmopolitan town, the capital of Bengal Subah for seventy years. It was home to wealthy banking and merchant families from different parts of the Indian subcontinent and wider Eurasia. The Bengal-Bihar-Orissa triangle was a major production centre for cotton muslin cloth, silk, shipbuilding, gunpowder, and saltpetre. Murshidabad itself was a great centre of silk. European companies — British, French, Dutch, Danish — all conducted business and operated factories around the city, which was also a centre of art and culture. The city’s wealth, by some estimates of the era, exceeded that of London. Murshidabad contributed five per cent of world GDP in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Jagat Seths and Sheherwalis

Standing at the heart of this was the Jagat Seth family. Their banking empire was often compared to the Bank of England in importance. They managed government funds, collected revenue, and even minted coins. The title Jagat Seth — Banker of the World — was granted by the Mughal Emperor himself. The Nawabs, backed by bankers such as the Jagat Seth, became the financial backbone of the Mughal court, while also serving as financiers to European companies operating in the region. They were not alone.

A community of Rajasthani businessmen who called themselves the “Sheherwalis” — city dwellers — migrated to Murshidabad and worked tirelessly to build empires in textile and banking, becoming zamindars and adapting to the then-prevalent cultural influences of Mughal, British, and European Bengal to create their own unique culture. The Sheherwalis settled in the twin towns of Azimganj and Jiaganj. It is said the combined wealth of 20 to 30 Sheherwali families surpassed that of the entire British aristocracy of the time.

They built palatial mansions along the river — Corinthian pillars, chequered marble floors, stained glass catching the Bengal light — each one a monument to the triumph of trade and commerce. One of these survives in remarkable form. The Dudhorias built Bari Kothi in 1774 , a haveli whose name — the Palace of the Elder — speaks to its place at the top of the family hierarchy.

For nearly half a century it lay abandoned, its grandeur crumbling behind locked gates. From the 1960s, most of Azimganj’s influential families had started shifting to Calcutta. The Naxalite movement dealt the final blow, making it unsafe and compelling the last few families to bow out. By the 1990s, Azimganj was reduced to a desolate address whose looted palaces stood in despair and ruin.

Then, in a story that has something of the fairy tale about it, the brother-sister duo Darshan and Lipika Dudhoria engaged a Canadian restoration specialist to bring Bari Kothi back over five years, turning it into the first grand heritage hotel of east India, entirely managed by the local community. Today it stands on the riverbank in Azimganj — amber walls, antique furnishings, the sound of Baul music drifting across the courtyard at dusk — a small, breathing resurrection in a landscape of dignified decay.

Getting to it, however, requires a strenuous road trip or a river crossing that is itself a journey through time. To cross over to neighbouring Azimganj from Jiaganj, one must wait for a local bamboo raft boat. Of the two varieties that ply the Bhagirathi, one is a passenger boat while the other carries both passengers and vehicles.

Some fellow travellers made it to this extraordinary craft — a broad, flat platform of lashed bamboo and timber, a small engine coughing at the stern, motorcycles and a loaded tempo wedged improbably in the middle, passengers gripping the rails as the current caught them sideways. Travelling in the mornings is particularly difficult, as there are long queues.

During the monsoon, when the Bhagirathi rises and the tides turn fierce, the boat service is suspended by the authorities. Residents are left stranded, hoping for the tides to calm down. There is, apparently, a local legend that explains the absence of a bridge: Goddess Lakshmi, angered by the greed of the Jagat Seths, cursed the Bhagirathi, and this curse is the reason a bridge has still not been built. Whether or not one believes the curse, the bamboo barge has been the only link across this stretch of river for generations.

A Swift Downfall

The downfall of Murshidabad came swiftly, and it was, in the end, a betrayal of almost operatic dimensions. The conspirators who brought down Siraj-ud-Daulah included his commander-in-chief Mir Jafar, his general Rai Durlabh, and the influential Jagat Seths. When Siraj-ud-Daulah demanded a huge tribute from the Seths and reportedly struck them in anger, the family sided with Robert Clive and the East India Company, financing his campaign against the Nawab.

Clive and his army of some 3,000 were outnumbered by the Nawab’s 50,000-strong forces but were victorious because of the defection of Mir Jafar and the political brokering of the Jagat Seths. On 23 June 1757, the Battle of Plassey ended Bengal’s independence forever. The city’s decline began that day.

What the British left behind they left in stone. The grandest monument is the Hazarduari Palace. Based on designs by Colonel Duncan McLeod, the palace was built in the nineteenth-century Neoclassical Italianate style with Doric order influences, by Nawab Nazim Humayun Jah between 1824 and 1838. The grand yellow-coloured structure with Greek Doric columns spreads magnificently on the banks of the Bhagirathi. Its name means “a palace with a thousand doors,” of which one hundred are false — built so that any intruder trying to escape would be confused between the real and fake doors long enough to be caught by the Nawab’s guards. It is a magnificent conceit, and also a useful metaphor for a city full of false exits.

Inside, the museum holds the accumulated grandeur of a broken court: paintings, thrones, chandeliers, armour, Victorian carriages, and a giant stuffed crocodile on the landing. The Hazarduari complex also includes the Nizamat Imambara, the Murshidabad Clock Tower, the Madina Mosque, the Chawk Masjid, and the spectacular Bacchawali Tope — a cannon said to have been fired only once, its sound so thunderous that it reportedly induced labour in pregnant women within a ten-mile radius. Beyond the palace, the Jagat Seth house, the Cossimbazar Palace — where the British once ran their silk factory — and the crumbling Katra Masjid built by Murshid Quli Khan complete a landscape dense with memory.

In modern India, Murshidabad is among the most impoverished districts in West Bengal — once the richest city on the subcontinent, now dependent on the beedi industry, silk weaving, and agriculture. Its people are acutely aware of the irony. The weavers produce some of the finest silk in India, yet the looms earn barely enough to live on. The mango orchards along the Bhagirathi produce fruit of extraordinary quality, and the river itself, though diminished, still frames the town in a kind of melancholy beauty — wide skies, flat alluvial plains, and the distant call of the azaan drifting over still water at dusk.

As I walk back toward the Bari Kothi from the edge of the Bhagirathi, I meet an elderly woman sitting on the steps of an decrepit building. She will voted, she says. However, she is not sure it will change anything. Behind her, the building’s wooden doors look out to the river that has carried so much of this history away. Murshidabad taught India what betrayal costs. In 2026, it is still learning whether the lesson was ever truly understood.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The World According to Simon Winchester

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A Master Storyteller of Science, History, and Human Curiosity

Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War surgeon and violent paranoid schizophrenic, walked into my home one pleasant but dark night many years ago. His story captivated me and the book — The Professor and the Madman – which so beautifully recounted the good doctor’s contribution to the making of the Oxford Dictionary became my favourite.

So did Simon Winchester, the author.

Over the years I have read several of Winchester’s books, all of which have been not only informative, but also rather enchanting – masterclass in subjects beyond a common day’s reading – geology, earthquakes, oceans, cartography, linguistics and land. While Minor’s story reads like a detective thriller, the history of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans read like a biography of an old friend. And that’s where Winchester scores!

What distinguishes Winchester  — who studied geology at Oxford University but later became a journalist before he sat down to start penning his books — from other popular science and history writers is his voice that is warm, witty, and almost conspiratorial. It is amazing how he makes technical things seem personal. His ability to explain tectonic plate movement or the mechanics of ocean currents in simple words not only make it easy for readers to understand them better but also memorable. His curiosity is contagious; so is his storytelling.

Winchester’s books are usually built around a single object, event or personality — a dictionary, a map, an earthquake, a madman — and then uses that focal point to throw a lot of surprising information to the larger world. Readers who might never pick up a straightforward history of Victorian science find themselves captivated by his approach because the human drama is always front and centre, with history and science woven around it.

He has written on a remarkable range of subjects — from the creation of a dictionary to making of a modern map and strange stories about tools we use every day. His geological interests come through most powerfully in Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, a gripping account of the catastrophic 1883 volcanic eruption in the Sunda Strait off Indonesia that killed tens of thousands and altered the global climate. The historically important disaster is seen through a lens that examines deep depths of earth, colonial history and the birth of modern telecommunications. The news of the explosion that could be heard as far as in Mauritius travelled quickly all the way to New York thanks to newly laid telegraph lines.

Similarly, A Crack in the Edge of the World revisits the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake with the same geological rigor and narrative flair, exploring how that disaster reshaped not just a city but a nation’s understanding of the ground beneath its feet.

His most celebrated books, however, concern the world of ideas and language. The Professor and the Madman — his breakthrough bestseller — tells the astonishing true story of Dr. W.C. Minor who, while confined to Broadmoor asylum in England, became one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a story about obsession, redemption, and the strange ways genius can manifest. The Meaning of Everything followed as a companion volume, chronicling the full history of the OED’s creation with equal fascination.

The Map That Changed the World tells the story of William Smith, the canal digger who created the first geological map of Britain in the early 19th century and, in doing so, helped lay the foundations of modern geology. In The Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories he audaciously wrote a biography of an ocean.

More recently, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World turns to the history of precision manufacturing, tracing how the demand for ever-finer tolerances gave rise to the industrial age, mass production, and ultimately the microchip. It is a subject that sounds dry on paper but, in Winchester’s hands, became a satisfying story of human ingenuity. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World ventures into history, politics, and philosophy to examine humanity’s fraught relationship with land ownership — one of his most ambitious and timely books.

In an age of increasing specialization, Simon Winchester stands proudly as a generalist — a writer who believes that everything is connected, that geology informs history, that a dictionary is a window onto civilization, that the story of a single earthquake can illuminate the forces shaping our entire planet. His books are invitations to see the world more carefully and more wonderingly than before. Here is a list of his books that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading – on flights, in trains, on holidays and on just a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Selected Bestsellers by Simon Winchester

•  The Professor and the Madman (1998)

•  The Map That Changed the World (2001)

•  Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003)

•  The Meaning of Everything (2003)

•  A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005)

•  The Atlantic (2010)

•  The Perfectionists (2018)

•  Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World (2021)

K. Asif, his bath tub and blocks of ice

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We sometimes find strange things about strange people in strange places, like I found Karimuddin Asif (a tailor who became a film director) in Raj Thapar’s memoir — All These Years — that was given to me by her daughter Mala Singh nearly 35 years ago.

“Your first lesson in politics,” Mala wrote on the first blank page of the book, which I got around reading again recently after three decades!

Amidst the politics spanning five decades I found Asif lying “in his bath tub atop blocks of ice, his method of cooling down for sleep” whenever he felt overwhelmed with the heat and tension of directing the glorious Mughal-e-Azam, starring Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, which took 16 years to make!

So what is Asif — who died young after making what was then biggest blockbuster of its times — doing in Raj’s memoir? He got in there because of her husband Romesh — at one point a close advisor of Indira Gandhi — who was tasked during his days in what was then Bombay to write the English script of the film for a then princely monthly fee of 700 rupees. Asif wanted an English version of the film. It didn’t happen.

Mughal-e-Azam almost ruined the financier Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry (more about him another time), but became a huge success once it hit the screens in 1960. It was the highest grossing film of all times in India and held that record until Raj Sippy’s Sholay took the crown 15 years later.

Asif, I learnt from the book, “answered in looks to all that the priggish associated with men of the cinema: uncouth, unlettered, unshaven, a slight twist in his jaw, dishevelled hair falling all over his forehead, short hands with stubby, stained fingers, a cigarette clutched between the middle and the forefinger, silk shirted and with chest on display, a gambler whose gambling instincts had brought him from tailoring … to the studios of Bombay.”

Asif married twice (one of his wives was the famous dancer Sitara Devi who finds mention in the book too), had six children and died leaving an unfinished film — Love and God — which had to be put on hold when its lead actor Guru Dutt passed on. Sanjeev Kumar was roped in, but then Asif called it a day at age 48.

Shut your eyes and imagine this film-maker lying on top of ice blocks in his bath tub on a balmy pre-monsoon Bombay afternoon and you can probably picture why it took as it long it did to make the film!

According to Raj, “it was a world of the bizarre, where in a sense they were all living in their fantasies, having pushed the other realities into some hidden corner of the mind.”

I wonder if much has changed in Bollywood since.

Prithviraj, Akbar and the metallic armour

Raj had an eye for details, finely carved while describing characters in her book. Read below an excerpt that brings to life the great actor Prithviraj Kapoor’s attempts to don the metallic armour and breathe Akbar into his soul:

“This obsession with exaggerated realism had its satirical moments. When Prithviraj Kapoor, who was playing the great Akbar, had to don the armour which was brought from the Jaipur Museum, Prithviraj sat on a stool for half-an-hour, eyelids shut, meditating, drawing inspiration for the character which he was about to portray. 

“Everyone stood around waiting in silence for Prithvi to announce that he was ready. He did so soon enough, in his deep, reverberating voice, always pregnant with some hidden meaning which no one was ever able to fathom — ‘Bring it now. I am ready.’

“Two hangers-on rushed out at great speed and brought the armour. Slowly they let it fall over his head and into position. Prithvi was still in nortial trance muttering to himself, then with his characteristic gesture of hand, convinced that the great Akbar was within him, he attempted to rise, but nothing happened. He tried once, he tried twice, but his massive frame refused to move, weighed down with the armour.

“How we had deteriorated in a brief five hundred years! Akbar must have donned that armour, leapt on to his horse, wielding at least a sword, and Prithvi, much the same in build and height, could not move from his stool. Everyone was stifling their laughs, it wouldn’t do to annoy Prithvi, but this was certainly more dramatic than anything else in the film, and seeing Prithvi’s defeated, dejected face, Asif took over. He ordered a light aluminium copy of the original armour, and the scene would have to wait until the replacement arrived.”

From All These Years – A Memoir by Raj Thapar. Seminar Publications, 1991

Trump win heralds higher tariffs for Asian businesses

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From China to Japan, the Philippines to India, nations prepare for more volatility. Read more here.

Three Men And A Book

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is a story about three men — all dead but bound together in the pages of a 53-year-old frayed and heavily pencilled book that I chanced upon last month while cleaning up my late father’s collection.

The paths of these men — a newspaper editor and chronicler of history, a patriot army general and my father — crossed at different times in the last century in a strange twist of fate that also found me looking at what I would call a historical treasure filled with facts, gossip and secrets that has made the book a fascinating read.

The journey of this prized copy of “India From Curzon to Nehru and After” also shows how strange coincidences fill our lives and how sometimes we, mere bystanders, become a part of stories that began long before us.

Durga Das, once a Reuters correspondent, editor of the Hindustan Times, founder of the Press Club of India and author of the book and General Nathu Singh, who could have possibly become the first Indian chief of the Indian army, were contemporaries who witnessed the violent birth of a nation that we now call home.

Born about seven months apart in 1900, the two chose different paths but played important roles in the story of India as it hobbled through an ugly partition and beyond. They both had a front-row view of events that shaped the formation of India and lived long enough post independence to be able to judge history.

Das, with a pen and pad in his hand and deep memory to store big and small stories, reported for what was then the Associated Press of India (which later aligned with the Indian News Agency before they were taken over by Reuters), as he hobnobbed with the Indian and British elite who mattered during the British Raj.

Singh, a dominant personality with a handlebar moustache who was the second Indian to graduate from the military academy at Sandhurst at 21, fought in the Second World War and ended up as ADC to India’s second last British governor general. It was to him that the Japanese troops surrendered in Nicobar in 1945 when the big war ended.

He later managed one of the biggest refugee camps in post-partition India for the hundreds of thousands who streamed in from the newly born Pakistan. Later, he commanded the army’s eastern region, which became the site for the first war between India and China.

My father was a mere bystander who walked into this story in the last years of the general’s life in a small town of Rajasthan.

The Book

How does the book connect them? Well, Das and Singh obviously knew each other and the copy of the book I am writing about was presented by Das to the general who probably lent it to my father when their paths crossed in early 1990s. The general hailed from Dungarpur and had retired there after his exciting military career. My father was then working there and befriended Singh because he simply loved meeting people and had a knack of bumping into many with interesting pasts. (He once found himself in a hospital in Nasik in mid-1950s where a man lying chained in the next bed and surrounded by policemen turned out to be Nathuram Godse’s brother, apparently recovering from a bad bout of dysentery!)

Das’s book, which many have panned as a continuum of historical gossip, was published in 1969. He presented a copy with the following inscription — “With best wishes to a great soldier patriot General Nathu Singh, Durgadas” — to the general a year later and then died in 1974.

Singh lived until 93, ramrod straight, sharp and with a voice that could still shake the cows and crops he tended at his farm just as it shook soldiers of the past. My father — 34 years younger than the other two in this narration — passed on this year.

When paths crossed

I never met Durga Das as I was only a decade old in this world when he called quits. My only connection with him beyond the book is the fact that we both worked at both Reuters and the Hindustan Times — many decades apart — in almost similar roles.

However, I did have the pleasure of spending time with the good general during my visits to Dungarpur to meet my parents. My father had told the general about his journalist son and I was ushered in to meet a man who didn’t quite look like the general I had expected to meet. Nearly four decades after leaving the army he was more of a farmer with fascinating stories from a past I then was only learning to understand.

I did end up writing his story for the newspaper I then worked for, re-introducing the man to the elite of the Indian capital he had left behind. The story struck a chord with many old timers in an age when there was no internet and social media. Unfortunately, I have lost the clipping of that story, though much of what he shared with me came alive in what’s scribbled on almost every page of the book.

The general obviously seems to have spent a lot of time reading and judging the contents of the book. I wonder whether he ever shared his views with Durga Das. Maybe he did. On the pages of the book the general had something to say about everything, much of which I am trying hard to decipher.

The reasons behind him not donning the hat of the army chief remain cloudy. The official version that is generally bandied about is that he was indeed asked, but declined and instead offered General K.M. Cariappa’s name as Cariappa was senior.

Another version that’s available on the Internet is that at some point in time the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wondered if a Briton should be made the army chief for sometime as none of the senior Indian army officer was experienced enough in the new nation to make the grade.

Singh apparently questioned Nehru’s wisdom and wondered whether a Briton should also be made prime minister as no politician then has the experience of running the country. That made him unpopular with those who mattered.

The first chief

The general, however, mentioned to my father that he was against the division of the country and had put a gun to Nehru’s head demanding the decision to create the new nation of Pakistan be withdrawn. That obviously didn’t work in his favour when the new government went looking for a new army chief!

In Durga Das’s book there is no mention of Singh. He writes that the choice “lay mainly between General K. M. Cariappa and General Rajendrasinhji. (Then Home Minister Sardar) Patel favoured the latter, but Cariappa was chosen as the next C.-in-C. in view of the strong views expressed in his favour by (then defence minister) Baldev Singh and the Defence Secretariat. Rajendrasinhji, a kinsman of the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, had his innings when he was chosen as successor to Cariappa.”

There are three question marks in pencil against that paragraph — no other comment — which I believe were put there by General Nathu Singh, the original owner of a book that landed in my hands through a quirk of fate.

I wonder whether General Nathu Singh wanted to say more, but didn’t!

Henry Kissinger at 100: A crooked legacy

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Few people remain influential at 100. They are either dead or about to die, frail in mind and body. Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, is both alive and influential. He might be frail in body, but his mind is sharp. Having outlived almost all his detractors, the man once accused of a dark side that changed much of the world, has evolved over the past decades into a statesman feted by leaders globally. Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs than him, The Economist magazine recently wrote after interviewing him.

Read More Here

View: De-risking China business

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At a closed-door business meeting in Singapore in March attended by representatives of large US firms, much conversation was about China. Is the purported ‘de-coupling’ of the world’s two biggest economies working? Is it the correct direction to take? Will the politics in Washington ahead of next year’s presidential elections, and naming of China as the ‘prime enemy’.

Read More Here

Atlas ‘shrugged’

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There was a time when there were “paper” maps. Some of us who were born in a distant past would remember using them frequently.

Since there was no Google, places and distances could be found and distances measured on large maps, which could be folded nicely and stuck in the book shelves, in the walls, or kept in the car pockets for use during travel.

They had a different charm and they never aged well until such time we started getting some covered in thin, foldable plastic — a clear technology upgrade!

There were also those beautifully hand-crafted globes with wooden bases that sat neatly and importantly on office tables. They came in different sizes and were prized possessions.

And then there were those awesome, detailed world maps, which could be framed and hung in offices and studies. Well-travelled people showed off the places they had been to by tagging colourful pins on those maps.

Maps are always fascinating. They tell stories of places that otherwise don’t get told. Geography decides national boundaries, national interests and therefore — in many ways — our lives.

Why am I writing about maps? I am because I found something during my summer cleaning exercise — the world atlas by National Geographic, acquired with much love during the very early years of global e-commerce. It took me back more than two decades ago when the world was probably much simpler.

I lived in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s at a time when the country was wracked by an ugly civil war. Bombs went off with precise regularity, people died, but life kind of went on despite all the turbulence around.

In between all that one day I registered myself on Amazon.com — the new, very exciting website that could send me books from across the oceans. I had always loved the National Geographic and had always been fascinated by the atlas they produced. The cartography was mind-blowing for someone with deep interest in geography and graphics.

So, after successfully receiving some books from the United States, I put $50 (if I remember correctly) on my credit card for the world atlas and clicked buy. The return mail that I opened excitedly said it will reach me in a few weeks by sea mail! The wait began.

However, at some point I quite forgot I had ordered the atlas as more bombs and more violence in the war zone north of the country distracted me.

Three months later I suddenly remembered that the atlas hadn’t showed up to brighten my otherwise then rather dark and violent world. I wrote to Amazon, expressing my unhappiness over their poor service. 

A day later an apology landed in the inbox, saying they were now sending the atlas by courier and it should be with me in a couple of days. This time the atlas kept its tryst with Sri Lanka. It took a plane instead of a ship and landed at my door three days later.

As I opened the large card box package, I did wonder whatever had happened to the earlier shipment. Had the ship carrying it lost it’s way, or sunk in bad weather. Where could that copy be?

A month later, the phone rang. A voice at the other end asked in broken English whether I had ordered a “big” package from overseas. It took me a while to connect the dots before I said yes and was ordered to show up at the customs warehouse the next morning.

On a rainy morning I walked into this covered compound where consignments were stacked and spread across the floor. I was shown to a corner where sat a large black package — with visible signs of having been opened and peered into.

“There is a war here, sir, and importing maps need security clearance,” I was told. It is a world atlas that I have ordered to donate to a school library, I responded, and gave the name of one of the famous schools in Colombo after handing him my foreign journalist identification card.  

The officer at the counter looked at me suspiciously, but eventually agreed to clear the consignment, and now I had TWO of those beautiful atlases.

One of them had to shrug and accept it won’t stay with me. So, I kept my promise to the customs officer and sent it across to a school from where I received an ecstatic letter of thanks and appreciation.

The other still lives with me — in good health despite having added 22 years to its life! 

Two Conversations

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The first was with an old friend who now lives in the United States. We go back 35 years, studied journalism together and shared an apartment for some years.

We have, what my wife says, “venting calls” ever so often. Both he and I belong to a different time and are mostly unable to comprehend why we as people are the way we are when we always have had the option of being otherwise.We make predictions — political and economic — and they mostly come true.

Not so long back we had discussed the possibility of the Covid virus hitting India hard and mutually agreed we could potentially witness a catastrophe. We predicted reasons that would lead India into a dark tunnel where the only light would be those of many pyres. I don’t want to list them, but they all came true.

The other morning we spoke again and tried to not despair even as we talked about what this latest surge was doing to India and Indians — friends, families, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbours and even strangers. He told me he had lost a few relatives to Covid and his elder brother was in the ICU for the past five days. I told him about the challenges we as a people, a nation, were facing. He was sounding brave, but I knew he was rattled.

There is little he can do sitting far except worry. He said he had hardly been able to focus on work in the past 10 days because of the deaths in his family.We spoke about our journey as journalists, worried over the current state of the media and wondered when and where this would end.

He told me to get my sons out of the country, reminding me of a story about one of his relatives who always said he believed in the “Quit India Movement” and had, therefore, first sent his children overseas and then followed them.We also tried to look for funny things in these dire times and laughed nervous laughs.

At one point he got distracted, as his wife called out from another part of his house as he laughed. “No, no I am not crying” he told his wife.

We got to start getting very worried when our laughs begin to sound like sobs. Also when Supreme Court judges and children of politicians die, friends and relatives don’t get oxygen and common people have to be cremated by the roadside because cremation grounds have run out of space.My second conversation was with someone who had a role in saving my life when I was struck by Covid and had to be hospitalised back in December.She’s a nurse at the hospital I was admitted to.

I don’t know what she looks like as everybody was wrapped in PPE suits, but she had dancing eyes and her voice was always calm. She was around for the first seven days of my stay in hospital and then she had a two-day break before she returned to bid me goodbye when I was discharged. “Don’t come back,” she said joyously, wagging a finger.

Large chunk of positivity

She had a steady hand and was happy to chat about her family and dreams and career as nurse. She became my source of information and there was a lot to learn from her about Covid, patient care, situation in the hospital, the tough cases and the deaths in the ward. She would also happily announce the number of patients who were recovering.

There was always a large chunk of positivity around her, which was welcome in an otherwise depressing place.

It struck me that she and her other colleagues who nursed me back to my feet and helped me get through a rather trying period would be in the midst of another battle as patients flowed in the second surge.I messaged her, asking how she was. I received a big smiley back.

“Haan ji, bilkul theek”, she wrote, asking me how I was doing. I asked her what it was like at the hospital, and she responded matter of factly.Patients are very critical. They are unable to hold oxygen (oxygen levels are volatile). Patients were much stable during the last surge.

This virus was definitely a new variant, she said.I asked her whether she was managing well and she said she was, that she was on night duty and asked me to look after myself.I then said I hoped her family was well. “I hope so,” she said, adding that her mother and younger brother had cough.

As always, I marvelled at her equanimity, her dedication to her work and the selflessness with which she cared for patients — stuck in that spacesuit and sweating under double masks and rubber gloves for many hours.I told her that I considered myself lucky that I survived. “Yessss,” she wrote back.

Her display picture on WhatsApp tells more about her. “Shukr hai rabba tune mainu dukh sehna sikhaya, kisi nu dukh dena nahin.” She is just one of the tens of thousands of frontliners in this battle we are all waging. We should be grateful to people like her.

Points Of Contact – A Short History Of Door Handles

Posted on by Standard Reply

Despite their ubiquity and pivotal role in the haptic experience of architecture, door handles remain oddly under-documented. There are no serious histories and only patchy surveys of design, mostly sponsored by manufacturers. Yet in the development of the design of the door handle we have, in microcosm, the history of architecture, a survey of making and a measure of the development of design and how it relates to manufacture, technology and the body.

Read Here – Apollo