Frontline & Chai

Why don't the people of Kolkata want to work hard? Why is there a constant complain of deteriorating work culture? Why can't West Bengal progress despite being bestowed with natural goodness? Why is the only state in India that has the sea, mountains and forests, cannot have a thriving tourism industry? Know the basic 5 reasons who Kolkatans are lazy.   

I’ll get straight to the elephant in the room: Do you think -parts of Pakistan will now unite with India?

Most Pakistanis will say No. Most Indians will say No. 

Now that I am so well settled in Canada for 15 years, after my revolutionary journey which I talked about in my blog, “Word rape me at night’, would I want to go back and settle in India now? Let’s weigh the possibilities. 

I was born in a world when blackberries and apples were just fruits. Web was a thing spiders spun, and net was something you caught a fish with. Hardware was hammers and nails and saws you worked with, and software was never heard of. Rams, spiders, blue-rays and bugs were all living creatures. (Some of them creepy and crawly). I do not understand how they made their way into tech-textbooks... I had liked our generation. We believed in ghosts, UFOs, Santa Claus, God, love and miracles. It was a pleasant state of mind to let someone else take the onus of your existence. It was relaxing to let your imaginations construct a guardian angel for yourself. I still do, in fact, I still leave a lot of decisions to God and gods. Please check out my latest book WTF I Found God here

We can no longer toss the concept away as a figment of some crackpot's imagination. We are now seeing them. Perfectly sane US air-force pilots and navy personnel have been speaking about them extensively and now Australia's 60 minutes has an entire episode devoted to them.     

There are something around for us to take it seriously. Now the U.S. military has acknowledged them and has a new word for them UAP --- Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

The the question is not whether they exist or not but how will we react when we meet the being in an UFO: The real-life ETs. 

Read more in my book WTF I Found God here: https://www.amazon.ca/WTF-Found-Kaberi-Dutta-Chatterjee/dp/0992078466/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1633552548&sr=1-4

How, as a Bengali, from Kolkata, have we acclimatized in a foreign land, keeping all our Bengali values intact?

And why should you care about NRI’s like us, as we are referred to? We have left the motherland.

Today’s guest in my podcast is Sushmita Paul, Bengali writer, editor and teacher settled in Austria, Graz, which has a huge historical reference as being a major power seat for the Nazis during WWII. Today we get rui mach in Bengali stores there. That is, of course, a totally different story.

Please welcome Sushmita.

After listening, please feel free to write to Sushmita at [email protected]

And to me at [email protected]

Thanks for listening

This podcast is about a close encounter that I had with the third kind in the year 1994. And this will be a dramatic podcast, where I will be telling you the story of my first such encounter, I dared where angles feared to tread.

It was that era when the world believed God created only Adam and Eve. God did not create them. The were neither. They were derelicts, social outcasts, feared, despised and ridiculed by men and women alike. Their coarse voices, their filthy language and obscene gestures embarrassed the ‘normal’ and the ‘civilized’, who would never know what is it to be neither… or both.

The pain was written in their lewd hostility. If nothing else, their unabashed strip-tease was sure to make people shrink away. Yet, at the core of that body, which is neither male nor female but an ungainly mix of both, lay a soft human heart. Eunuchs (or transgenders) eat, sleep, drink, pray, bleed and shed tears just as anyone else. And they were not considered humans among humans.

At least, until after April 15, 2014, 20 years of my write-up appeared in The Telegraph, when Supreme Court in India granted transgenders the right as a third gender on, issuing the landmark verdict recognizing transgender rights as human rights, saying people can identify themselves as a third gender on official documents.

Before that they did not even have voting rights. Now there are transgender principals in schools, and they are a part of the working class. Even in the Aadhar card in India there is a 3rd gender, called “Others”.

This is a podcast just encompassing the natural-born eunuchs., or third kinds. This is not about the other others. 

(Read and view the picture of Hamid Masi here: https://kaberic.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/a-close-encounter-with-the-third-kind/) Please remember there were no internet news stories those days and as such, there can be no link to the newspaper. But we do have a photo of the original newspaper. Check it out!  

Write to me at [email protected]

When we were celebrating the New Year bash of 2020, we hardly knew what we were celebrating. We barely knew that the year we are celebrating is a monster, who was coming at us with a new kind of cane to beat up humans in the creepiest possible way --- in such a way that we couldn’t even fight back immediately, we couldn’t even see our enemies. We were throttled by a microscopic enemy in such a way that humanity went into hiding for a long time: Literally. The roads were abandoned, we were imprisoned in our homes, stepping outside was a crime, we were literally living a horror movie.

2021 seemed just a sequel. So now, how do we say, have a great 2022? Shall we say, Welcome 2022, we are ready for you!