Three months ago, when I lost my mother, I received the following email from a close friend:
Tonight at the Sahitya O Alochana meeting I heard the very sad news of your mother’s passing away.The email was from Gayatri Gamarsh (who allowed me to call her as Gayatri-di) and it really helped me cope with my pain. Little did I know that three months later, Gayatri-di herself will move on to “her after-life” leaving us behind mourning her loss.
I came to know Gayatri-di mainly through her literary works and her love for anything artistic. She used to love coming to our plays and appreciated them very much. Several times she has written about our plays in Anandasambad and other magazines. Her appreciation and encouragement meant a lot to me and my team mates. It is for people like Gayatri-di that makes all the hard work in writing and staging a play worth it.
In September, she had participated in a workshop on creative Bengali writing conducted by Sunil Gangopadhyay. She had rescheduled her heart surgery just to attend this workshop online. That was the last time I had heard her voice on the phone. Later, after her surgery, she had sent me an email asking for an article or cartoon for the “Sambad Bichitra” English section. But I never had the chance to hand it to her.
As mentioned by Gayatri-di in her email, I’ll believe that she is always with us and will be watching any play we put up or read any article I write or any cartoon I draw.
Goodbye Gayatri-di and thank you for all your encouragement and blessings, for those will be my source of inspiration for whatever I do in the future.
Bengali Associations of NJ are gearing up for the biggest festival of the year – Durga Puja. This year the festival starts quite early, around 25th-26th of September. Kallol, GSCA and Anandamandir will be celebrating their Durga Puja during that weekend. And just like last year we should expect that the registration to start soon. GSCA has already opened their online registration, and Kallol is expected to open theirs in early September.
Recently I listened to an excellent talk by Dr. Jeffrey Cole (Director, Center for the Digital Future, of the USC Annenberg School) about Social Networks, the digital media and our teens. His research and insights into this digital revolution that we are growing through threw some interesting light on our teen generation. The teens today use technology in ways we never thought of. The entire digital industry is geared up to develop new gadgets and gizmos for the new generation. The social networking phenomenon like Facebook, Orkut and others have demonstrated how much influence this new generation has in defining the shape of digital media. Dr. Cole lists few characteristics of a teen in this and our future digital generation.
Anybody who is even the least interested in making money with their blog has done a google search this title phrase and have landed up with thousands of articles, posts, advertorials, videos and other material that provide a hash-up of few different techniques that can bring in the greens. But when you look at them with some curiosity, you’ll see that almost all off them give you a bullet list of techniques that can bring in traffic and can potentially bring in some dough. You’ll learn about SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings, you’ll know how important it is to have in-links to your site, you’ll discover what article marketing is, and how to effectively use the social networking and bookmarking sites (Facebook, Orkut, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc. etc.). You’ll know the benefits of enlisting your blog to multiple blog networks and directories, tricks to improve Alexa rankings and the secrets of setting up RSS feeds for potential subscribers. All these techniques are good and work to some degree to bring in traffic to your blog – but believe me, millions of bloggers are doing just the same. Traffic is king to any blogger, and whatever published technique exists today are being tried over and over again. The problem is that the search engines (google, yahoo etc) and traffic ranking sites (like Alexa) keep on changing their strategy frequently and hence many techniques become stale. 
It is ironic to say the least that just when I was enthusiastically reporting the news of the development of an artificial heart by IIT Kharagpur, a young heart stopped beating in the campus. Rohit Kumar, a third year Electrical Engineering student (LLR Hall) died due to the apparent neglect by the in-campus “B.C.Roy Technology Hospital”. Details about this event can be found in the campus students newspaper “