sexypablo’s blog

I have seen my father playing chess for quite a long
time.  I have seen him playing with his
friends and college colleagues.  He is
presently working as a Professor in Narasinha
Dutt College  in English. 
I have neglected his advice of starting to play chess as I thought it
would be quite a 'difficult game.' I am now 28 years old.   For a month, I have started playing Sudoku
after learning from a memory improvement book that it stimulates brain and help
you to think in a better way.  After
solving many puzzles, one win each day, I decided to start learning chess from
my best teacher, father. From him I have heard and now I read in the newspapers
many young children are playing even at international level.  But my stimulus came rather late.  My father motivated me and told me that
nothing is late and today he told me a recent motivational line of the reputed
Indian Chess player Vishwanathan Anand that you can succeed only in the field
where you love the most. 

I am going to tell you the lesson I learnt from my father
today.  He told me about  the following things as an introduction:

1.  He told me the
position of the players.

2.  It is 64-square
game.

3.  The basic movement
of the white and black pieces.

4.  How one check
mates and castling and other things.

5.  The way it is
written in newpapers like the staff notation of music.  Here it is different with alphabets a, b, c,
d, e, f, g, h and the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Chess has similarity with Sudoku in the fact that you use
your imagination to see what is going to happen.  It really enriches the brain and stimulates
it to the maximum extent.  This is a
thrilling experience I found while playing Sudoku.  I can never forget January 16, 2009 when
father taught me the beautiful mind game. 
I can never forget this winter evening!!

I got the opportunity of traveling to Ghoradaha, in Howrah district on a fine
Sunday morning of January 11, 2009.  My
father  is a professor at Narasinha Dutt
College, Howrah. 
The professors, young and old, s have arranged a picnic at Ghoradaha.  I had accompanied around 50 teachers and
their children    For me it's a great break after a week's work
and the weekend trip was the perfect way to chill out. 

The total number of people is 50.  It includes the professors and few teacher
came with their son or daughter.  From
the Bengali department, the teachers are Barnali Ghosh Dastidar, Siddharta,
Chandana Banerjee, etc.  From the English
department, my father (Swapan Kumar Banerjee), Mita Mukherjee.  From Physics department, a teacher came who
sang a lot in our picnic.  From the
Zoology department, Subrata Basu, Shibani Manna, etc.  From the Bontany department, Sanjib Saha
came.  From the History department,
Goutam Ray, Krishna Mukherjee.  From the
Chemistry department, Indranil Mukherjee, Satyabrata Mukherjee, Jolly Mahapatra
came.  From the Mathematics department,
Prasanta Mahato, Chandan Chatterjee came. 
From the Computer Science department, Anshuman Lahiri came.

I woke up at 5 in the morning on January 11.  I accompanied my father to Howrah station catching a bus of route 219 to
Howrah Maidan.  We boarded the bus
waiting in front of Sarat Sadan.  We
departed with other professors around 9 a.m.    
The bus was filled with teachers and their family members.  So we chatted a lot and had a lot of
fun!  Mr. Subrata Basu, a teacher of
Zoology department.  I have attended his
classes on my higher secondary days in the college.  He amused us a lot with his cheerful
personality and the teachers of Bengali department are quite friendly.

 We reached the spot
on 11:30 a.m. The bus stand was filled with trees and there was a pond opposite
to it.  There is a market where vegetable
and fish were available.  We reached the
house called 'Madhu Kuthir' and on English it is written on top: 'Honey Villa'
as if honey is available in the house! J

We took a breakfast around 11:30 in another old building.  We also took the lunch there around 1:30
p.m.  After the breakfast,  6 to 7 people including me went out for a
stroll in the nearby locality.  We walked
amid the morais (container for grains), huts, narrow lanes, cow sheds.  We proceeded further among the lush green
fields.  The sky was blue and it is
wonderful to walk in this beautiful atmosphere. 
The sun heat is not strong as it is winter time.  We could see white birds in the horizon,
probably they are cranes who are flocking in the field for some food in the
lush green fields where water has accumulated and filled with tiny food.  We walked past the fields and were lead by
our college principal Mr. Prasanta Mahato. 
Being the maths professor, he always chose the hypotenuse for crossing
the fields as it is the shortest distance in the triangle.  There was a grave of somebody and some of the
teachers who went before sat over the grave to take some rest.  We went to a spot called 'Sasha Bari' where
plenty of cucumber saplings are growing. 
It is wonderful to see the fields of cauliflowers and the green leaves
are wonderfully soothing to the eye.  We
saw the field of mustard and the yellow flowers are a real beauty as we were
returning back to our starting point. 

The breakfast comprised of Kachuri, alurdam, cutlet,
etc.  It was followed by tea.  We had lunch comprising of chicken, rice,
dal, curry, chatni, and followed by pan masala. 
The arrangement of food was quite good. 
We took some rest.  Some people
chatted and some took a nap in this afternoon picnic at Ghoradaha.  Two boys were playing chess on the bed in one
corner while I was fast asleep.  One of
the professor's daughter was reading a story book written by Sidney
Sheldon.  In this way, the afternoon past
and we got ready and went to the Honey Villa from the original boarding
house.  This house had 2 floors and we
sat there for some moment and chatted on the rooftop.  The staircases were narrow and each room is
small but the overall construction of this 100+-year-old is quite strong!  Now we returned to our room where luggages
were kept.  We packed our bags.  It was around 5:30 and I saw the setting
sun!  I took a photo of that orange shining
in the pale sky.  I felt like jumping in
the sky and grab it and eat it!  It is
looking so delicious!  Anyway, life has
to go on and reality is quite the opposite of our dreams, at least, most of the
times. 

We boarded the bus and as I am going away from Ghoradaha and
I felt as if I am going away from a land filled with natural beauty and that
this moment of joy will never come again in life and that it will be fixed only
in my memoirs.  Many things in life are memorable
and the sights, sounds and smells of a travel journey can only be felt and we
feel a little bad when we go away from a lovely place, which is similar to the
departure of a favorite friend who has recently come to your home from
abroad.  A traveler is like a migratory
bird who comes and enjoys the beauty and returns back to his homeland.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/colorful_world_of_butterflies/

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/gymyoga_fitness/

Flowers have inspired human being for their attractiveness
and fragrance.  Scientists have recently
found that bees can truly appreciate the beauty of a flower.  The researchers at Cambridge University
revealed that the flowers take on different colors depending on the angle they
are viewed.  The plant petals use the
property of iridescence.  This is a way
to attract the pollinators, i.e. bees. 
This is similar to a CD which reflects colors and we see rainbow colors,
isn't it?  So this is different from
visible colors.  So the iridescence and
color pigments are the ways to attract the pollinators.  A young girl in human society attracts male
friends by her beauty, words, body odors, personality, etc.  The flower attracts pollinators in only one
way, i.e. iridescence.  Beverly Glover
being the lead scientist tells us their initial survey on plants suggests
iridescence may be widespread!! 

From the gardening to agriculture, flowers and their
pollinators play a major role in our daily lives and their signaling to each
other with iridescence i.e. flashing multicolors are really wonderful and
fascinating.  If human beings could have
this iridescent property, then we would have better appreciators, but
unfortunately we don't have such a beautiful natural trait like the flowers! J

The bumblebees could separate iridescence and color in
Hibiscus and tulip flowers. 

Making an experiment with bumblebees'''

The bumblebees were taught to recognize that iridescent
discs containing yellow, blue or violet pigments offered a sugary reward.  They learned to fly to these discs and avoid
others with the same pigments that are not iridescent.

Oh supercalm lake
of Rabindra Sarobar!

What a beauty you are!!!

Fascinated by your beauty

Thousands of people come towards you,

Thousands of birds come to you,

In winter and in summer

For a sweet slumber

You provide them the satisfaction!!

The visitors bless you

Day and night!

Your beauty has perplexed birds;

Forgetting everything

They flock to the green island at the center of your lake.

Just to get a supercool touch of yours

Just to get kissed by your magical waters

People come here to sit and relax

People come to you to get the fresh oxygen

Absent in cities

Absent in those concrete jungles

Where there is everything but so mechanical

Your trees are so beautiful

Your trees shade cools down the disturbed mind!

There is no dearth of lake lovers

As long as you stay alive in Kolkata

Visitors will come to sit beside you

Tourists will take photos of your beauty!

You'll finally become an international beauty!

Oh beautiful lake be there for ages to come!

Rabindra
Sarobar Lake
is a wonderful place.  For the first time
in my life, I got the opportunity to stroll around the lake.  It is located near the metro railway station
of Rabindra Sarobar and just a few steps after that is the office of Public
Service Commission, West Bengal. 

The borders of the lake are cemented so that the banks do
not give away.  There are thousands of
trees all around the enclosure with plenty of places to sit and relax!  There are benches.  There are big trees and the shades of the
trees will take you into a different world. 
You feel so close to nature as if like a baby in the cradle of her
mother.  Here the mother is not a human
being but the protective shades of thousands of trees protecting you from the
strong UV rays of the sun.  Here you do
not need a sun screen lotion to protect you from the scorching sun.  Here the umbrella is the tree shades with
millions of leaves to cover you from the sun. 
But it is winter now and it is January 3, 2009.  It is a wonderful place to roam. 

Rabindra Sarobar is the place to calm down the disturbed
soul.  It is the place where you sit
beneath the trees and take your mind far away from this polluted world to a
place where you let your soul free!  You
allow yourself to day-dream!  It is
important to dream in life.  It is
important to re-think whatever you have done in your life till now and for that
you need some isolation!  A place where
you sit closing your eyes and think none other than about yourself!  Sometimes big realizations come when you
meditate. 

Lord Buddha got enlightenment under a Bodhi tree.  You will probably get enlightened under a
tree of Rabindra Sarobar lake.  Here
there are beautiful big trees of huge branches and subbranches.  You will have the desire of turning yourself
into a bird.  You will feel like hopping
from branch to branch.  You know
thousands and thousands of years ago, our ancestors before turning into apes
were monkeys!  They hopped from branch to
branch with their long arms and tails balancing together.  They evolved and at some point, the apes
emerged from the apes and from these apes, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Homo
sapiens etc.  This evolution also
happened but not in a garden of Kolkata but thousands of kilometers away in Africa.  The dense
forests of Africa provided ideal playground
for the early primates to evolve!  The
evolution is like the tree.  The
evolution happened branching out from one to another and the entire look is
just like a banyan tree with shoots hanging. 
The shoots hanging from the tree may be a strange analogy here but as a
matter of fact, it is the evolution that happened like branches of a tree from
a common origin making life so wonderfully colorful and varied in this planet
earth!!  The discussion of evolution and
enlightenment has been done to highlight the fact that human evolution happened
in a wonderful garden "like Rabindra Sarobar lake where thousands of trees are
there with plenty of fruits and flowers around the trees" to feed the animals.  After all man is a highly intelligent animal
whose emergence itself is recorded in fossils and the anthropologists have only
speculated its emergence based on the fossil evidence!

Rabindra Sarobar lake is not very well maintained.  If it was under the care of the private
company, the maintenance would have been better.  I should say that bathing and washing clothes
will only pollute the ecosystem of the lake. 
It will cause harm to the aquatic animals.  It will harm the fish and the algae in the
lake.  The lake has an island filled with
big and small trees and it is looking wonderful creating a beautiful green spot
and soothing to the eyes of a nature lover like me!  Nature lovers like me will go more than once
to get a touch of nature far away from the hustle and bustle of city life!  Many people are enjoying the New Year in a
club with wine and foreign dancers but passing some time in the beautiful
natural surroundings of Rabindra Sarobar will take your mood in a different
height!  You will feel that this is the
second Botanical Garden.  We have already
seen one in Shibpur at Howrah.  I used to live in Ichapur, Howrah and went to that spot quite a number
of times!  Now I feel that getting a
garden like this so close is an opportunity! 
I never failed to take some photos of trees and the lake and the island
and not to mention the crows.  These
crows were bathing in the pond. 

The crows are bathing in the lake.  It is a wonderful thing I have never seen!  The crows are bathing near the bank of the
pond under the cool shades of the trees. 
Some trees have bend down giving them a shadow to rest after a tiring
day of flying high above the sky!  I saw
5 to 6 crows bathing.  It is exciting to
see birds cleaning themselves in water. 
Probably they will take a lunch at Someplace Else and enjoy the New
Year!  Someplace Else is a discotheque,
which is quite popular in Kolkata.  But
my some place else is matching with the brand name of the disco.  So party people, please, do not get
offended!  J There are some moments in life when you have no words
to describe and you just look at it with your eyes glued to it.  The trees here seemed to have grown for
hundreds of years giving oxygen to Kolkata. 
So never let this greenery go away! 
It is an asset in Kolkata.  So
preserve it and let it grow for the health of our future generation