Today you turn a year older
Wishes for you to take steps even bolder
A year to start even more questions
I hope God gives you the right directions

Time to move away from “myao” and “teddy
“But always keep your friendliness and smile steady
I wish you get even more friend
Being gentle and nice is all I recommend.

I wish you fine and simple pleasures
Hope that you enjoy life’s best treasures
I wish you years full of only laughter
With no tears and a “happily ever after”

Important of all is to have fun
May you always be surrounded by happiness sun
I hope you enjoy this day
Wish you a very Happy Birthday.

Thanks again for the help here

Rahul Mukerjee

The Survey is Over. Thanks for the help for everyone who helped me here.

Jago tumi Jago

Jago Durga Jago Dasha Praharana Dharini

Abhaya Shakti Bhalo Pradayini Tumi Jago

Thats a verse which for all the bengalis around the world has become  synonymous with Mahalaya or start of debipaksha .

In 1932 All India Radio ( AIR) broadcasted for the first time at 4:00 AM on the Mahalaya a  beautiful two-hour program consisiting of Devotional Songs,classical music and  recitation from the scriptual verses of Sri Sri Chandi (Chandipath ) by Birendra Krishna Bhadra. It was called Mahisura mardani – মহিষাসুরমর্দিনী,The Annihilation of the Demon .From that day till today for the past 8 decades Bengalis get up during the chilly pre dawn hours to listen to Mahisasur mardani.

The flow of emotions and nostalgia that this brings along on one hnad gives me the happiness that Debipaksha has started and Durga Pujo is not far away, on the other reminds of all the excellent days of childhood of getting up at 4:00 am in the morning, listening to Mahalaya along with parents and going out to eat “gorom jilipi”

Gorom Jilipi

For everyone  you can visit http://www.mukerjees.com/pujo.html for more info on Durga Pujo.

Unfortunately I would not be ab le to attend the Pujo either in India or even in Germany this year as I would be attending my first module classes for my MBA in Paris. Nevertheless the nostalgia remains and from the whole Mukerjee Family I would like to wish everyone a Sharod Subeccha.

Namastasyai Namastasyai Namastasyai Namo Namaha

To give a gift a little different
Letting you know you are special
Adding a bit of our love pigment
Helping you with lifes Pedal

From a small cutie pie
Trying hard for the first move
Running around in a blink of an eye
With your cute smile asking to approve

Be that playing with your teddy
Or choosing your  Ben-10 Carpet
Your smile has always been steady
Always having something for everyone in your pocket.

On this day all that we want
May every day be as good as it could
Never may you come across the word can’t
MAy health and happiness be jumping in your wood.

Bengali music has such a history of excellent lyrics and music that even today every Bengali is seen all over India to have atleast some control of music . We come from a tradition which has given composers of the likes of  Hemanta Mukhopadhayay, Salil ChowdhuryGauriprasanna MajumdarPulak Bandopadhyay to name just a few and singers of the likes of Hemanta Mukhopadhayay, Sandhya Mukhopadhyay, Manna Dey, Kishore Kumar, Rahul Dev Burman, Sachin Dev Burman, Geeta Dutta, Dhananjay Bhattacharya, Shyamal Mitra, Tarun Bandopadhyay, Satinath Mukhopadhyay, Dwijen Mukhopadhyay as tip of the iceberg.

Most of the bangla songs that I get to hear these days are either plagarism (which the music composers donot even try to properly cover) or distortion of classics ( popularly known as fusion music). From very little of what I understand of music every song has a certain dimension or essence and to twist that dimension is a very tricky job and honestly most of them donot even come close to “sound good”.

I am hoping on hope that our present day Bengali composers take some newer initiatives for good Bangla music that is “supposed” to be in our blood but somehow missing from todays reality. As aptly said in the song which is the title of this blog post.

E jane Ojana Ek Poth … Ke jane kobe hobe sesh

a song whose lyricis was given by Gauriprasanna Mazumder and sung by  Shyamal Mitra.which lieterally translates to ” O its an unknown path …who knows when we will reach the destination —” .

To finish the blog if you do get time you should definitely listen to the song here you understand the language or not.

While most of the people do not like this because it gives a feeling of being  unsettled and unorganized, this past few weeks have actually made me see the positive side of it.

In the 32 years of life I have been pretty lucky to move bases to many places many times and though I hate moving , I love unpacking because it signifies the opportunity for a fresh start. It allows me to evaluate my organizational processes and make changes, experiment and have a little fun. In a day to day life when settled it is really hard to take an objective look at your processes.  It makes it even harder to make real changes. Some one once told me that the biggest secret to a happy life is to “change” and it cannot be closer to truth than anything else. When changing it helps to get rid of things which you always wanted to throw but never got a chance or the desire to go out to throw.

When you move, however, especially when it includes a job change as well which has been in my case, it provides the perfect opportunity for this type of self-evaluation. It is the only time when you actually take a step out of the comfort zone and believe me from personal experience it is really a very hard job. At the end though you can evaluate your self which is greater than any other evaluation that you go through.

That being said we are finally moving “out of the box” as we finally got our kitchen yesterday and part of our furniture . Though it is still not over the cleaning and evaluation continues for a few more days till we are back to “settled” and out from “living out of box”.

All our friends and family members are ofcourse welcome to our “new” home

As is always said a picture says a million words , here are 2 pictures taken from my iPhone as view from our new appartment (day & night)

But technically speaking the prospect of multitouch which is just he best in the industry at the moment is purely unbeatable ( added with the patents that Apple hasd already on these). Based on these facts my expectation from the Tablet PC which was supposed to be the “bridge between smartphone and computer”  was really high on my part.

Finally Apple came out with the IPad ( though I still wonder whats the secret behing the “I” for every device). If I look at the technical specs

Size and weight

Sounds great sleek and light  isn’t it . Such a small and light weight device

Display

• 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
• Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
• Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously

Well almost in line with the rest of “netbook” market though without a keyboard and IPhone OS definitely not bad.

Processor

• 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip

Well 1GHz …. don’t know  the specs for this particular chip but almost all other netbooks in the market come with Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor.

Capacity

• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive

Now thats a joke isn’t it ? For a smartphone /mp3 player 16/32/64 GB is okay but for a tablet PC 64 GB max. As far as I see the specs there is definitely no support for external drives ( Atleast mentioned) so the only way we would be able to watch 10hr movie on an airplane as claimed in the keynote speech would be buying from Itunes? Sounds creepy to me.

Finally comes the best of the lot

For 829$ I can get a full fledged PC why on earth should I pay that much for a tablet which is donot even have rights to do anything with …

1. Dr. R.N. Mukerjee (Baba) has moved his base from Malaysia to Denmark ( Aalborg University) moving his focus to renewable energy ( wind) .

2. Rahul Mukerjee ( myself) has moved on to take responsibility heading Supply Chain and Production for Kobil Systems GmbH.

Its in a way a new beginning in both our personal and professional lifes with new place and new job. Wish us all the lucks that we need to move ahead successfully from here.

Fire crackers 1st Jan 2010

All the photographs are available in the private gallery ( you require login and password) here.