jabdakhata

Girish Ghosh was a Bohemian, in every sense. In his young days he destroyed a Durga idol that was mischievously put in his house by some people to embarrass the family. He chased an astrologer and a pretentious sannyasin away when he discovered their falsehoods. He flaunted his atheism to anybody and everybody. Nobody could argue with him as they were sure to get defeated by his tremendous intellectual acumen. But Girish also had a large heart. He collected a group of young boys and helped anybody who was in need - like takings the unwanted corpse for cremation, providing health care to the sick, providing financial help to the poor and needy and many such selfless activities. He first set up his theater, the National Theater, as an amateur actor and  produced Sadhabar Ekadashi, a satire written by Michael Madhusudan Datta, the famous poet, and Neeldarpan, based on the novel of the same name written by Dinabandhu Mitra against the brutal tyranny and oppression of the indigo plant...

An article appeared in Times of India by a certain Mr. Verma on the distinction between Nationalism and Patriotism. Thankfully, unlike other "liberals", the author has not used the term jingoism to denote the Nationalistic fervours. One of course cannot accuse ToI to be either a Nationalistic or a Patriotic Newspaper. It just wants to position itself as a "secular", "liberal" paper and therefore happy to give opportunity to like minded secular and liberals to express their view points, however fallacious they may be. First, on the point of Nationalism. There is a misguided perception prevalent that supporting the country's rights to defend itself from the inimical interests and protecting its interests by raising a pitch against the arch enemies is "Nationalism". Earlier they used to call it jingoism, now mercifully they have toned down the rhetoric as it finds no takers. The author carefully pins the blame on the present Government to ...

From 1880 onward Girish was a sensation on the stage. Yet his life was empty. His personal tragedies clouded his judgement and he became a rebel in the truest sense. He was always a rebel. Now he worked against all social conventions and norms. He was addicted to drinking. It is not evident if he had sinned as he always claimed to have done. He had a propensity of overstating his sinners, by comparing himself to Jagai Madhai, the two ruffians who were converted by Sri Chaitanya. However Girish received the grace soon. In 1879 he had met Ramakrishna in a devotee's house, but he thought that Ramakrishna was full of pretension. He was not impressed. He had seen too much of hypocrisy in the name of religion to be confounded by it. He had some spiritual experiences but nevertheless he continued with his exploits on the stage. 1884 was a phenomenal year. In this year he composed his masterpiece that drew him closer to his guru - Chaitanya Leela - after the great saint Sri Chaitanya Mah...

Naval Revolt was one of the greatest revolts in Indian history, inspired directly by the INA saga. Our history books are silent about the great sacrifices borne by the revolutionaries and the price that they had to pay. The books are also silent about another fact - the great betrayal of the politicians, esp. of Indian National Congress leaders which included Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Jinnah's communal betrayal is anyway legendary but of Gandhi, Nehru? Of Sardar Patel - the iron man who has now the tallest statue? Well, history was written by favour seekers, not by truth seekers. That is the reason why naval revolt has been relegated to the darkest corner and we do not even remember one of the greatest events of our nation. Does Indian Navy celebrate it? Don't think so - to Navy the mutineers are traitors, just as for a long time INA was just an army of traitors to the Indian Army leadership who had to seek favour from their own political bosses. Let us now recollect what ...

Very few people in India outside Bengal know of Girish Chandra Ghosh, the prolific play writer, the father of theatre in Bengal and in India who was once widely regarded as Shakespeare of Bengal and Garrick of Bengali stage. Girish Ghosh was a playwright, a director, an actor, a poet, all moulded into one. He was a versatile genius. He was a lion among men and like a lion he dominated everything that he did. He never cared for conventions. He did not tolerate hypocrisy. He ensured decent living for many women who were otherwise considered "fallen" by the society. He led an intemperate life in a rebellious spirit for sometime, till he met the ultimate man whom he was searching for throughout his life. Girish was appreciated by many eminent personalities, actor and intellectual Utpal Datta being one one of them. In his book Girish Mahima (Greatness of Girish), Utpal Datta was full of praise for him. Recently veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee enacted as a solo actor in one of ...

Is calling for war justified? In the past few weeks the events that unfolded almost resulted in a skirmish between the two bitter enemies. There have been a lot of fights over it in the social media, and in political circles. The peaceniks had started a hashtag #saynotowar. Now is that a good or a bad move? What does dharma say? Of course waging war is abominable. Any person in his or her same mind would be averse to war. However does that apply to the right to defend oneself? One's own territory? When dharma is being brutalized everyday, when one's people are killed everyday by a devious, cunning and ruthless enemy who has anyway waged a third grade proxy war for decades now? What about fights with the evil forces who kills, tortures, and subjugates, spread lies and hatred? Is war an option or should we still aim for peace? Mahabharata is clear, peace is preferable over war only when we are able to achieve a solution to our problem, i.e when we are able to turn the tides...

If we carefully study the history of India in the last millennium, we shall see that its a continuous history of backbiting, treachery and undoing of good work through personal hatred, animosity, jealousy and extreme selfishness that would often overshadow national and community interests. Every stroke of misfortune that India suffered had been on account of one of these reasons. Great men rose into prominence, great, self sacrificing men who were ready to do everything possible to resist evils in the form of conquests, but petty, mean, selfish men became their thorns, did everything to put a stop to their efforts and in the process helped India sink deeper and deeper into darkness. Blind hatred caused many problems - it invited enemies to attack the country, opened up great possibilities for its conquests and plunder and helped hatred mongers to come on a common platform to deliver a crushing blow to the object of the hate. In many cases such hatred was driven by communal passion, i...

An Artificial Neural Network, the primary constituent of Machine learning and Deep Learning, consists of the neurons, i.e. nodes grouped into Input Layer, Hidden Layer and the Output. The input layer provides the problem while the output layer classifies or finds the probability (like detecting the correct image or recognizing faces or texts). It is the hidden layer that is most interesting. The hidden layers are used in feature engineering to detect more and more features progressively as we move towards the output. This is done through  processes called forward propagation and back propagation. Simply put, the layers are connected to each other and provide input to each other and each input being associated with a suitable weight and accompanied by a bias. The weights are first chosen randomly and then the network is trained on a set of data. More the training data the better it is, as it may minimize the problem of overfitting esp. when there are too many features. The input s...

Another problem that atheism fails to resolve is that of the life of the great teachers, sages and saints who have led a completely unselfish life devoted to the welfare of the others. These set of great figures in history, called great teachers or incarnations, appear only once in say about 500 years, Buddha, Christ, Sankara, Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda-Sarada Devi being some of them who made a huge impact. If we study their lives carefully we find that these lives are remarkable. They devote considerable amount of time in preparing themselves for their roles and then once they have entered the stage of teaching they devote themselves wholeheartedly to it, setting new ideas and principles. They often bring huge, earth shattering changes in their wakes, changes which are felt quite a few years after they have left their mortal coils. They lead a life of purity, truthfulness, simplicity and attract hundreds during their lifetime and thousands, may be millions, ...

One of the key points of contention between Theism and Atheism may be around the problem of evil. Suffering exists, that's  a natural phenomena of life. How does suffering come to haunt an otherwise placid life is a big riddle. Theists in various cultures have tried to explain it in various ways, and atheists have no explanation. Atheists have taken the existence of evil and the suffering as a natural phenomena, may be linked to desires, may be to the circumstances, buts always explicable through a pure materialistic view point - of inherent tendencies of men, of accidents, of natural deaths and destruction and so on. Every sorrowful event can be explained as one causing problem and suffering but there is no reason to find a meaning in them. One question that atheists tend to ignore are why are there so much varied conditions in life? Why are some born with silver spoon in their mouth while others are born in thatched huts or probably on streets. Why people are born poor and die ...

Scum Bag # 1: The moral and intellectual depravity of a certain section that claims over whatsapp messages and through social media that the Government perpetrated the killing of the jawans for electoral gains - We cannot get any lower than this. The politicians and political parties that are doing this are the worst enemies of the nation and need to be dumped. The media that is providing credence to such statements need to be boycotted. Silence of the good is no longer viable. If you are silent you are a party to the crime Known perpetrators - 1) Congress's leader in Gujarat and therefore the Congress party as a whole, since no disciplinary step has been taken against her. This can well become Congress narrative in days to come, esp. it being an election year. Also if the Government takes some decisive action the shrillness of such allegations may increase. 2) An IT cell of a political party in Bengal, perhaps TMC, because the whatspp message is being circulated in Bengali 3) Me...

One of the numerous whatspp post that I received had been something like this: A Friend: I have stopped believing in God, I think, God & Religion are all created to hoodwink people. These are like Narcotics. Now the friend has an absolute right to become an atheist and state his personal beliefs, perhaps with an intention of instigating some of the non atheists for a debate. But the word "narcotics" is a very strong statement and here his hidden intentions are revealed. Quite sometime ago Marx had called religion to be an opium of the masses. It became a catchy phrase with the communists worldwide. This is also popular among the so called atheists and agnostics. However when a believer may turn unto them and speak out her mind saying that, may be, its just a may be, that their obsession with the world and the worldliness, the materialistic and pure sensual pleasures, is some kind of an addiction too as they are not really able to come out of it for a purposeful life, ...

What characterizes Narendra Modi is that he is a master politician, far above his counterparts in shrewdness, in audacity and in boldness, something his opponents and haters would never be able to fathom, nor emulate. Compared to him, Rahul Gandhi who is trying hard to position himself as his main opponent is a child, nay, a baby perhaps. Rahul's job is made harder by the fact that he is lifted up by a gang of sycophants and a herd of leftists, many of whom have little or no connect with grassroots, and of course even less concern for the national interests. Others who are actively positioning themselves as champions of secularism and also supporting him are one whose interests have been most affected by Modi's transparent policies - notably the corrupt politicians many of whom are busy sewing what they call as "Mahagathbandhan". TV channels and other sections of media are busy writing Modi off based on some flimsy pre election surveys or some by election results. B...

Artificial Intelligence is a term that is being widely used nowadays but as a concept it had captured human interest and imagination since last two centuries. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was perhaps one of the early thoughts. Robots captured human imagination with limitless possibilities in the last century but the journey has been slow and tedious. Now Machine Learning and Deep Learning, the key ingredients of AI open up the frontiers to new opportunities. Machine Learning with Neural Networks based on Supervised and Unsupervised learning of data depend on a new paradigm called Data Science for training an algorithm with very large set of data so that the algorithm is able to predict results closer to the actual through minimization of errors. Neural Networks that are modeled after the interaction of neurons on human brains extend the possibility. Even though the AI concepts were theorized back in the 1950s and 1960s, the possibility of them concepts becoming practical could hav...

Silver - The spy who did the unspeakable Silver – this was the name of Bhagatram Talwar who helped Netaji cross Indian and Afghan border. Documents unclassified in the 90’s revealed that Bhagataram, an active member of the communist Kirti Kishan Party, was a quintuple agent during the work, working closely with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. He also worked as a Russian, German, and Italian agent but most likely his allegiance lied with Russia, the communist heaven, even at the cost of his country’s interest. Since Russia was an ally of the British, he and his party therefore actively helped the British by providing confidential information about Netaji Subhas Bose in Germany and other Indian revolutionaries and provided false information to Bose through German agents. Why did Silver help Netaaji cross the border? Reason was simple. At that time when Netaji crossed the border Russia was still an ally of Hitler. In fact Russia had attacked Poland and the Balkan countrie...