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I always wanted to see ghosts...who doesn't? But I haven't succeeded...yet.
Prof R K Mukherjee, our amne-samne neighbor at KGP, was full of stories of real ghosts he saw in their ancestral home in Chandannagore:
http://fatakgorasarbojonin.com/chandannagar.html
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I always wanted to see ghosts...who doesn't? But I haven't succeeded...yet.
Prof R K Mukherjee, our amne-samne neighbor at KGP, was full of stories of real ghosts he saw in their ancestral home in Chandannagore:
http://fatakgorasarbojonin.com/chandannagar.html
Maybe it is because of its long-lost French connection. RKM had a way of telling his stories...a good ghost story needs a master-raconteur.
A wacky novel I read when I was young was 'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier...ladies seem to excel in this art form. Wiki tells me something I didn't know about its opening and closing lines:
'The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is an iambic hexameter.
The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt
wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.'
Don't ask me about prosody in English...my Shakespeare Uncle used to talk about iambic pentameter. He should know. Wiki again:
"A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM"
As Bertie would say: "yes, yes, yes..not in the mood now"
Our Bollywood chaps tried a poor clone of Rebecca in my youth. The 1964 film was so-so though some haunting songs were hits...like this one by Hemanta-da:
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That was a big digression.
When I was in school I never had any dreams...I was playing so much during the day that I hit the bed and never woke up till cold water from the surai was sprinkled on my face.
Nightmares started when I was appearing for my final exams in my University. The recurrent one was that I arrived late at the Exam Hall and was driven away. It never happened in reality though.
The next set of nightmares were to do with my unending train journeys between Gudur and KGP. As luck would have it, my train was scheduled to arrive at Gudur at 2.30 AM in the dead of the night...and at 3.30 AM at KGP. So my sleep, if any, was fitful and was always punctuated by nightmares that the train left Gudur (or KGP) while I was slumbering. So, no sleep was really possible.
This did come true once when I was traveling alone by the Janata Express to KGP in 1973. I was on the upper berth and was feverish. I woke up at Balasore and asked the lower chaps if KGP had arrived...they said no...next big halt. I then turned the other side and slept off. And when I woke up again and asked if KGP arrived yet, they said...yes, and gone too. I turned the other side and slept off and when I woke up next it was Uluberia. I got down and returned to KGP by daybreak by the First Local.
My niece, Madhuri, was even more troubled. She completed her B Tech (CSE) at IIT KGP and packed up her huge luggage, took a rickshaw, and went to the KGP station at 9 AM sharp to catch the good-bye Falaknuma Express to Vizagh. They told her that it hadn't arrived at Howrah yet on its onward journey and would eventually be at KGP by 5 PM hopefully on its return trip. So, she dumped her luggage in the Cloak Room and went back to her IG Hall for a quiet lunch and siesta. The lunch was over by noon and she was into her siesta by 12.30 PM. And then she started having recurrent nightmares in broad daylight that her Falaknuma was leaving the platform while she was chasing it unsuccessfully. Every ten minutes. After an hour, she couldn't sleep anymore and went back to the KGP station and waited there on the bench till 10 PM.
After I joined as a Teacher at KGP I had a different set of regular nightmares.
One was that I forgot that I had a Lecture Class and went there unprepared and had to face a class of 60 rowdy ChE students. And that I was booed and shooed.
This never happened in reality though. But I get this nightmare even now and wake up with a heartbeat of 100 or more. And realize that I retired 8 years ago and had no need to teach any longer. The relief is so immense that I get up and hum a tune.
The other one was that I went to my M Sc Lecture Class fully prepared and raring to teach all the physics I knew...sort of. And found that the kids performed what was then known as Mass-Cut. The class room was empty and remained so for the rest of the hour. I ought to have celebrated this as paid-leave but I was not ripe enough in the beginning.
Much later, when I was ripe enough for it, it did happen towards the end of my duties there. That batch was known affectionately as Muarali's batch. This kid, as everyone of his classmates, was very talented, but lost all interest in Physics from his second year when he discovered that his talent lay elsewhere...in making computers dance to his tune. By his 4th year he became such an expert in computers that he had a couple of great offers from Banglaore...he was literally Bangalored...
The 19 or so others were all in a hurry to quit KGP at the end of their fourth year itself without completing their final year. And they were all preparing for GRE, TOEFL, 'apping' to US Univs and composing (remixing) what are piquantly called Suck Letters in the Computer Lab:
Because, IIT KGP was banning this exodus from the next year onwards.
I came to sense this indifference soon after their midsems and was myself looking for an excuse to bunk my own classes. This came one fine morning in October (with a good month to go for the endsems). As I entered the classroom I found only two students (both of them left for the best univs in the US a year later). My joy knew no bounds. And I told them that the syllabus has been 'covered' (instead of being uncovered). And said Ta-Ta Bye-Bye to the batch.
The relief was like the extraction of a painful tooth...on both sides.
From next year onwards, I quit Departmental Teaching and reverted to Jumbo First Year Physics...a different story altogether.
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