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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

2 Nov

One of the most amazing stories in entrepreneurship originated from the revolutionary fervour of a man in Bengal. Nani Gopal had to flee Calcutta to avoid the British police and came to the US, where he took a job as a salesman & married an American schoolteacher

His son, young Amar supplemented his family income by repairing radios. “We put up signs in all the little hardware stores where my father used to sell his imported goods,” “The signs said, ‘We repair radios...

...So people would drop off their radios at the store and I’d take them home and repair them, and we’d give the store 10% of the invoice. I had a little pact with my father that if my grades remained good, I could go to school only four days a week..

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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

27 Oct

October 1947. The instrument of accession had not yet been signed, and thousands of tribal troops had started advancing towards Srinagar. Sardar Patel knew there was little time and turned to the one pilot he knew, Biju Patnaik, to help.

Patel announced the requisition of all civilian passenger planes on All India Radio, and Biju took charge of the operations.
The aircraft came from the No 12 squadron of the Royal Indian Air Force & the likes of Himalayan Aviation, Indian National Airways & many others.

The unit that was to take the first brunt of the attack was the 1st battalion of the Sikh Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Dewan Ranjit Rai. Stationed at Gurgaon at the time, they immediately assembled at Willingdon airport.

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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

27 Oct

@KumarSanga2

Something I wrote in 2013. Happy birthday @KumarSanga2.
"IPL opening ceremonies are a bit like college reunions. After the mandatory functions, the captains, players and staff invariably drift to the bar to catch up on old times."

Ponting and Lee chatting about Ashes battles over their steak, Kohli catching with his India fielding coach, Trevor Penney, and Adam Gilchrist and Trevor Bayliss exchanging notes on good golf courses. And, of course, Kumar Sangakkara in vintage form.

A couple of hours just flew by while he regaled us with his cricket anecdotes and the the misadventures of his cricket board, guys who made even Suresh Kalmadi look saintly in comparison.

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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

19 Oct

Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyam Chandrashekhar's 110th birth anniversary today, and a story that tells you exactly what kind of a man he was...

In January 1935, twenty five year old Chandrashekhar first presented his revolutionary theory at the Royal Society outlining a size limit after which stars would collapse into black holes.

The most famous English astrophysicist of the time, Sir Arthur Eddington, some one whom Chandrashekhar actually regarded as a mentor, ripped into and completely ridiculed his theory.

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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

18 Oct

One of India's finest character actors found out his real birth date after he turned 25. Om Puri was raised in difficult circumstances and the only thing his parents remembered about his birthday was that it was two days after Dusshera in 1950. Years later in Mumbai..

...he managed to find the calendar of festivals for that year and establish that he was born on October 18th. Much later, he would return to Ambala and try and find the house he grew up in, but never managed to locate it.
He gave us Tamas, Sadgati, Ardh Satya & a cameo in Gandhi

...but he also gave us Ahuja from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, the wily Kakaji in Basu Chatterje's teleserial Kakaji Kaheen and so many more films. An amazingly versatile actor who left us way too soon.

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Joy Bhattacharjya

@joybhattacharj

3 Oct

One of the most amazing stories in Indian science, which makes me both despair and hope. On this day, 42 years ago, Subhash Mukhopadhyay delivered the second in-vitro fertilized baby in the world, Durga, just sixty seven days after the first child was born in Britain.

What happened after was unbelievable. The state government rejected his claim and treated him as a charlatan and most of the Indian medical community turned their backs on him. He committed suicide, a broken man three years later.

5 years after his death. TC Anand Kumar, one of India's finest medical minds, was the architect what was regarded as India's first 'official' test tube baby came to know of Dr Mukhopadhyay's previous work and decided to make a detailed study of his notes and research findings

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