For All Our Blogs at One place

As we announced, from today on, we combine all our views, rantings, reviews into this blog only.

Combining Several Individual blogs into One

Open Space is going to be combined with the Debasis & Associates Collective Musings blog. I'll be closing it down after the currently scheduled posts have been published.

Doctors Should Be Required To Disclose Sleep Deprived Status

Of course, they should be! Studies show that sleep deprivation impairs psychomotor performance as severely as alcohol intoxication. Another study showed a significant increase in the risk of complications in patients when the surgeon had less than 6 hours of sleep the previous night! Given such a situation, the article referred by the news below argues that patients should know this status before consenting to elective surgeries. Absolutely fair! Either the care giver takes care of the situation or the patients takes a gamble knowing the repercussions! Details in the following article.
Doctors Should Be Required To Disclose Sleep Deprived Status

Suchitra Mitra No More

She was 86 and was not well for sometime. So the death should have been welcome to her. But it makes all of us Bengalees sad. She was a living legend, a legendary singer of Rabindra Sangeet. One of its major icons. Rabindra Sangeet is one of my favorite genre of music and Suchitra Mitra is one of the major reasons why it is! I still remember the pleasure in discovering a bootlegged cassette of her songs in the New Delhi' gol market area! Being away from Bengal, it used to be difficult to come by cassettes of Bengali songs. Also, a whole cottage industry had been established who thrived on bootlegging legit music for commercial labels.It must have been one such cottage industry business man who created it! Gol market used to be one area haunted by Bengalee clientele.  

I will forever cherish the day a long time back she came down to our hostel and sang for 2 hours. It was one of the dol (holi) festival days. A hostel mate, I just remember as Kunal, brought her down to the hostel. I cannot, for the life of me, remember his full name. Reading the life story of Suchitra Mitra over the last one day, it may actually have been Kunal Mitra, her son.!


But those two hours were simply golden!

Another Side of Durga Puja in Kolkata

While we enjoyed the puja in our housing complex immensely this year, there was another side of pujas in

Kolkata that became quite apparent to me. The durga puja in Kolkata has always been about going out, visiting well know pujas and others, eating out, wearing new clothes etc. That's what I remember from the days I was a student in Kolkata. There used to be some places where the puja celebrations were well known. People informally would talk about one being the best of all of the well known ones. Opinions differed of course!

Then came the time I went away to my working life that was away from Kolkata for something like 38 years. We found a different kind of charm in pujas at those places, outside Bengal. There was a kind of informality, intimacy, compared to the anonymity of Kolkata. Those occasions of sitting around, eating together, cultural programs in the evening and eating out was so nice! We never felt the need to come attend the pujas at Kolkata all that time.

We are back at Kolkata for sometime now. Last year we did not go out and walk with the crowd from pandal to pandal (in true Kolkattan fashion). Actually, we were a little scared of the jostling in the crowd and all that effort to get a look at a particular image for a few minutes. This year too we stayed away. The local community puja however seemed to confirm a trend we have been noticing. External things seem to have become the focus of these celebrations.

The elaborate pandal, which must cost quite a bit of the overall budget, seemed to have become the focus. During our days it used to be informal competition amongst a few big community pujas. The image used to be the focus. Now, driven by competitions run by practically every Bengali TV channel, there are these formal competitions. They too seem to focus on these externalia anyway! Looks like it has come to stay!

First Photograph of Man - Ever!!!!

I got this on a chain forward from an acquaintance. It amazes me! This photo is claimed to be one of the oldest ever taken by a man made camera. The photograph was created with that Daugerro type processes with a very ling exposure, It was a shot of the boulevard and never intended to capture the man at the shoe shine stand, but it did and created history! Anybody with the faintest interest in photography ought to see this!

Seeing is Believing, or Is It!

At least that's what we all have been told. We also know, having grown up, is that it is not true always. But it is almost an axiomatic belief that we all see the same thing the same way; that at least that part of the faith on our sight was true! Looks like even that may not hold true. According to the finding referenced below it may entirely depend on the size of the primary visual cortex we carry in our brain. It appears that, this area of the brain could vary in size1 is to 3 times.

For example, practically everybody will perceive the internal small dot appears smaller than the one in the center on the right. But, here is the twist. How much of a difference in size between the two dots we see, depends entirely on the size of the visual cortex. People with smaller cortex perceive the difference as larger. So, there goes!

Seeing The World All Depends On Differen Visual Minds