Calcutta

Ethereal sense lasts longer only because it is an image of experience. It is an Upanishadic thought. Such a thought flows from living with an objective reality in mind as the great Kanchi Sankaracharya had once explained in a discourse.

The Republic Day in 1950, to me is an image of this. It was a transformation from ‘His Majesty’ to a Republican majesty.

Calcutta, the city of palaces, was my habitat at that time. I was a stringer of Hindustan Standard which closed down three decades ago. A short critique in this paper dwelling on a flash back of the memorable Lahore resolution affirming Republic Day on 26th of January reminds me now after over 50 years of the reality of the growth of the Indian Defence Services. I became nonetheless emotional. The All India Radio gave the commentary and the commentator was none other than Melville de' Mello, the celebrated broadcaster of the bygone era.

M. Azizul Jalil was the Convener of the Dhaka University Sanskriti Samsad in February 1951 and became its first student-President in 1952. He is a former civil servant and a retired member of the World Bank staff.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared at

http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2004/04/01/reflections.htm

It is reproduced from there without any changes.

On August 9, 1947, amidst gunfire, burning houses and shops, we left our house on Lower Range in Park Circus in a government Weapons' Carrier with two armed guards for the Sealdah Railway station in Calcutta.

 

Amit is a digital entrepreneur and owner of Green Comma, a print and digital educational materials development company. He lives in Somerville, MA, with his wife, Pam, youngest son, Simon, and three cats. His oldest son, Arnav, lives in Washington, DC, and has visited the Calcutta Blind School and the Shah Braille Library.

Editor's note: The article below first appeared in "The Oriental Watchman and Herald of Health: A Magazine for Home and Happiness" February 1956, which is available at http://www.adventistarchives.org/docs/OWAHOH/OWAHOH19560201-V33-02__C.pdf.

The following commentary is provided by Amit Shah.

The article below says that India's Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, wrote to Dr. Merle E. Frampton, the head of the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind, the oldest institution for the blind in the western world, and this led to the gift of a Braille press for the Calcutta (now Kolkata) Blind School in 1956. This is the behind-the-scenes story of how the Braille press came to this school.

Sadhona Debi Chatterji, seen here with Aadhira, one of her great-grandchildren, was born in October 1931 in Calcutta, to Hari Prasad and Subarna Bannerjee. She did her matriculation, and got married to Birendra Kumar Chatterji in June 1948. She has a son and a daughter. Her husband, like her father, was in the Imperial Bank of India, which later became the State Bank of India. Her husband retired as Chairman UCO Bank in 1984, and passed away in 1989.

She has had a tremendous interest in national and world affairs, with her own opinions on many issues. She is an avid reader. She has been a popular and well-loved person among the family and a very large circle of friends. Even at the age of 85 and ailing, she gets phone calls from all over the world.

Calcutta (now Kolkata), February 1942.

Amit is a semi-retired publishing executive and owner of Green Comma, a service company for education and social-impact nonprofits. He lives in Somerville, MA, with his wife, Pam, and three cats. His two sons, Arnav, 27, and Simon, 21, did not ever get to meet their gentle grandmother, Aruna (Dutt) Shah.

Ma, as I called my mother, was 95 on April 14th, 2016. I cannot imagine what she’d be like physically. She died when she was 68.

Though my father dominated my life with his outsize emotions and contradictions, drive and aspirations, my mother gave me the tools for living . . . love of reading, of trying to understand the strength of humility, of much laughter and fortitude, and appreciation of beauty where I can find it.

She married my father, then 25, when she was 21, in the middle of the Second Word War, in 1942. A college graduate Bethune College, Calcutta, English honors , she was the oldest in a family of four children and a widowed mother. Those who know India will understand that a widow with four children, the youngest was ten, faced a very difficult situation at that time. Her father had died suddenly after a brief bout with meningitis, long before there were vaccines, when she was eleven, and her brother, the youngest, was still in my grandmother's womb.

 

Amit Shah is a semi-retired publishing executive and owner of Green Comma, a service company for education and social-impact nonprofits. He lives in Somerville, MA, with his wife, Pam, and three cats.

Editor's note: His story about his mother is available here.

What he achieved

My father, Amal Shah, born on September 23, 1917, was an educationist, specializing in the education of the visually handicapped. He was the principal of the Calcutta Blind School, which had been founded by his grandfather, Lal Behari Shah, as one of the first three educational institutions for the blind in India in the late 19^th century.