One of the problems with old age for me: I keep remebering songs I heard long ago and it is difficult to find them, particularly when I do not know the language. At one time, I thought that I would never find the. Now with google and various sites I have been able to find many. The above is a Baul song which I thought was sung by Abbasuddin since that was only LP of that type I had in the 70's. The record was duly lost but whenever I met him (mostly in Mumbai but also in Zurich and Princeton), Amit Roy would sing it for me. Even that was years ago and after some trial and error with google, I found the first line. But all the versions I found on the internet, including a Chinese site, are by Purnachandra Das Baul and are not what I remember. And today I found this site with over 4000 Bengali songs but Abbasuddin's version, if there is one, is not there. But the site owner seems to have been in Melbourne until last year and may be I can find the version that I remember.
Rereading books that I enjoyed when I was kid is also interesting. Recently I read Sarat's "Sesh Prasna" and "Pather dabi" and I still like them. But it was surprising to find an anti-Islam piece by the same Sarat who wrote "Mahesh". Tagore's short stories are still good. It is still painful to read Gopichand. Russell, Orwell and Haldane are still good to read. New areas like economics are difficult. Popular books like "The White Man's burden","The Truth About Markets", "The Bottom Billion", "Economics: A Very Short Introduction" and blogs give some glimpses. May be I should sit down and go through a book like Williams' "Weighing the Odds " carefully.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment