Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

I just finished doing a history project on the life of a girl child in the early 19th century. While the project wasn't an awful lot of fun (writing pages and pages does tend to become tedious), I did learn quite a bit. One of the things that I learned that I thought was pretty neat was the story of a woman named Rassundari Das. She was a Bengali woman who was born in 1809 and died sometime near the end of the 19th century. Her claim to fame is that she was the first Indian person to write an autobiography. Personally, I've always felt that autobiographies show extreme conceit - I mean, just how big-headed would you have to be to go out and write a book chronicling your own life? But I'm not here (much as I may wish I was) to discuss the pros and cons of autobiographies - I'm here to discuss Rassundari Das. She was born in Bengal (probably the great-great-grandmother of the chap who started K.C.Das Sweets, eh?) in a high-caste, low-income, conservative Hindu family. S...

A few weeks ago, my classmates began to use hashtags on WhatsApp. They served no purpose, because WhatsApp has no support for hashtags as of now, but they made me wonder about the origin of the hashtag. Why did it suddenly strike us that we should use a pound sign on social media? When did it originate? Why is there a hashtag symbol on our telephone dial pads? In my never-ending quest for knowledge (wink wink), I began to Google the hashtag and its origins. Surprisingly enough, the pound only took off in a big way in 1960 or so. Bell Labs and AT&T began to put it on their new touch-tone dialing systems to be used in those annoying automated telephone response things that all those customer helplines have (if I wanted a recorded voice repeating a sentence over and over, I'd have used Siri, not called customer service!). Back then, the pound symbol wasn't nearly as well known as it is today. All of a sudden, everyone who wanted the above annoying voice in their ear had to k...

A couple of days ago, I forced myself to read animal farm (a decision I deeply regret, I must say). Now, I don't mean to offend anyone - I'm certain there are those of you out there who think that George Orwell is the best thing since sliced bread - but I, personally, didn't think it was all that great. First of all - and this is the one thing I hated the most - the book doesn't end well. I mean, quite frankly, I was hoping that it would end with the regime of the pigs being ended. Instead, the book ends with the pigs turning into humans. Now call me choosy if you must, but when I read a book, I like to end it feeling happy. My problem with Animal Farm isn't so much that it ends sadly than that it ends without a sense of completion. At the end of nearly every book I've read, I've felt that, if nothing else, I've actually finished a book. With Animal Farm, that never happened. I felt like there was a large blank space at the end of the book that no one ...

First off, I'd like to say that my grasp of Hindi isn't all that great. What you see before you was written by someone who has only a very rough idea of what our Prime Minister was talking about.   In his speech, Modi says that we need more of our students to want to become teachers. Now there's something worth thinking about a bit. If I went to school right now and asked my classmates what they want to be when they grow up, they'll say 'doctor' or 'lawyer' or 'engineer'.  What makes these professions any better than teaching? Better salaries? I don't think so. Your average 9th grader isn't particularly interested in what his yearly earnings will be. I think the problem lies in how we look at the profession. An engineer or doctor is someone you respect because you've been told that they're very smart people. A teacher is someone you gave lip service to for fear of getting bad grades. Who wants to be a person like that? Absolutel...