Deepanjan Nag's Magnum Opus

Expect a hiatus till early-Feb.

I needed to collate all my LIC premium receipts today. I dug into my mail account and gathered as many as I could, although some seemed to be missing. Fear not, I thought – all the receipts could be downloaded from the LICIndia website. I was wrong. To my horror, I discovered that the site purges receipts more than 2 years old. These guys can’t even spare enough space to archive tiny PDFs! I remembered that not all premiums were paid online, some were paid the conventional ‘over-the-counter’ way (which wouldn’t have corresponding online receipts)…but I just couldn’t recall which ones. Then came the brainwave – consult my good-for-nothing blog. I did, and all the missing receipts were accounted for. My first online premium happened only in April-2006 while the disabling of my net banking account compelled me to go offline for the Oct-2006 and Jan-2007 premiums. I never thought my blog would serve a pragmatic purpose so soon.

I was playing with the features of my iPod yesterday before hitting the sack by midnight. I was awoken at 0130 hrs when Santosh got up to go to the bathroom. That’s when I heard it – a feeble but unmistakable orchestral sound emanating from somewhere. There was no known source of such music in my house at this hour except…my iPod! I was right. I must have mistakenly set the alarm on my iPod for midnight. Beethoven was playing one of his symphonies, oblivious to the lack of audience. I stopped the great man and went back to sleep. Thanks to Santosh.

Everyone tweets…well, almost everyone. Even NASA tweets. I’ve finally taken to micro blogging via Twitter @ www.twitter.com/deepanjan_nag . Instead of visiting the URL, you could visit my Facebook profile or, better still, scroll to MyBlogLog on the right-side column of this page to get the tweets. It’s really a blog within a blog!

I can’t believe it!

I’ve listened to Danny Boy and In  the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning countless times since last night. Dad was right, Ben Webster is a genius. There can never be an instrument greater than the saxophone.

Abhishek Kumar visited me yesterday after recently moving back to Bangalore following tying the nuptial knot in Patna. A familiar politico visited the wedding ceremony.

Ritam Banerjee has been a friend of mine since our days in Fergusson College, Pune. Potent enough to usher the hippie culture in India single-handedly (his living conditions could stun anyone!), he never ceased to stand out from the crowd. A maverick photographer (aren’t they all!), he has many accomplishments to his credit by now. He was already a freelancer for TOI Pune (contributing photographs and essays) during our college days and having him read one of his contributions to the paper, I can safely vouch for him. Not only was Ritam good with prose, verse could also be considered one of his fortes – as was proven by an impromptu poem he penned for a couple who got too cozy during a journey by rail. It was the twisty brother-sister remark in the last line that was the real riot. I can’t get it off my mind even today! Ritam has been very promising, and has delivered on them in full measure. I wish him all the best in the years ahead.

Remember this telescope I wished to buy costing a mere $55? I finally found an Indian dealer who quotes it at Rs.9015 (inclusive of air freight from the US to India, insurance, landing charges, ground handling in US & India, Customs Duty etc). I can’t blame the dealer for the sharp hike. I would have bought the C65 Mini Mak at this price had I been crazy enough to take up astronomy in India!

If you want a taste of Indian hospitality and our expertise of IT, visit IRCTC . When you’ve chosen to book a ticket only if ‘at least one lower berth is allotted’ and your choice of berth allocation cannot be met, the site conveniently first debits your card and then apologizes for not being able to book you ticket. However, Indian Railways is kind enough to promise crediting your card within 3-4 days. And we are a so-called IT superpower!

Time flies by like a hurricane and I don’t have the heart to dwell upon the events of the year gone by. So instead of looking back in retrospect, I’ll look ahead. The new year promises to herald great changes into my personal life. Life, as I’ve known it, will undergo a transformation beyond measure and I’m already beginning to develop cold feet. I guess the best way to deal with it is to live each day as it happens without looking too far ahead. My blog will gather steam, hopefully before mid-2009.

It’s indeed very sad. I never paid much attention to Hubbard as a solo artist. Indeed, most of my recollection of his playing is owed to his role as an accompanist in the Blue Note compilations I managed to buy from Kolkata. I hope to make up for sidelining him. Anyway, the trumpet is so dominated by Davis and Armstrong, a distraction is urgently needed.

It was such a dreadful experience, I don’t even have the heart to write about it. Yet, it provides me with all the substance my blog has been conspicuously lacking of late. It’s undeniably true that I’m lazy. The price I paid this time around is all too much for me to forget. I wish I had invested a little effort in chalking out the details. I didn’t bother to get my luggage ready on Sunday . I hurried through the chore only on Monday morning, losing precious time in the process. I hadn’t even withdrawn enough cash from the ATM the night before. So after the packing, I dashed for the ICICI ATM, but it wouldn’t accept my HDFC Bank card. Great! Just what I needed. The lessons were flowing in already. I hurried to Canara Bank and its ATM, luckily, didn’t disappoint. I returned home, picked my luggage and hurried my way out, took an auto to the KSRTC stand at Majestic and enquired – only to be told (it was 11AM by then) that the next available bus to Chennai was at 1PM. The trip wou...

A sight in Kolkata

The sight was stunning - almost made the city look like a hill station.

Bangalore is poorly connected via rail and air to the metropolitan cities. While it’s easy to get a Delhi-Howrah rail ticket, Bangalore-Howrah tickets are scarce. The same goes for air tickets as well. Consequently, instead of buying a Bangalore-Howrah air ticket for tomorrow, I settled for Chennai as the source city, thereby saving Rs.2k. The only headache now is to travel from Bangalore to Chennai. I might take the bus…just for some adventure.

It’s time to listen to this man. I have fond memories of his ghazals.