On this day in 1902, the Anushilan Samiti started in Bengal. If you haven't heard of it, it's because it is probably the best kept secret about our freedom movement & an organization feared by the British Many places in Kolkata are actually named in homage to members, from Benoy Badal Dinesh Bag to Rashbehari Avenue to Bipin Behari Ganguly Street to Aurobindo Sarani to Surya Sen Street.

It's fascinating that three of the most important developments in Indian science happened not in a laboratory or lecture hall, but in the most unlikely of places, on board a ship on an ocean voyage. The first was in 1893, on a voyage from Yokohama to Vancouver, when Swami Vivekananda met Jamsetji Tata & inspired him to create an institute that merged the humanism of the east with the science and Technology of the west. That's how the Indian Institute of Science started.

What does a small town in Cyprus have to do with the Indian army? On 16th December 1971, 21 year old Lt Arun Khetrapal commanded a Centurion tank named Famagusta in the Battle of Basantar. The reason the tank was so named was because his regiment, the Poona Horse, had fought valiantly here in 1944.
Arun Khetrapal and his troop blunted two attacks mounted by the 13 Lancers and destroyed 10 Patton tanks before his tank was hit and their radio operator killed.

About our children!
Around 15 years, ago, we went for what we thought was a standard parent teacher interaction at Neel and Vivek's school, Shikshantar. And what the school did instead was get a bunch of us parents into a room and ask us to write down what we wanted for our children.
Most of us trotted out 'happy healthy lives,' 'health and wealth, ''success in everything they do,' 'peace of mind'.... the usual cliches.

It's the birth anniversary of a man who frankly made miracles happen. But before telling you about him, here's the story of Teddy Ryder, a four year old boy in 1920 diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. In those days, the only way to save diabetes patients was to put them on a starvation diet, less than 300 calories a day. It was known as the Allen diet.

It all started in Bengal!
Nani Gopal, a revolutionary in Bengal in the 1902s 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,”

In 1948, the AAA marathon in UK was the qualifying event for the 1948 Olympics. The second place winner, Tom Richards, won silver in the London Olympics. But the man who finished fifth and just missed out qualifying for the Olympics was far better known. His name, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, and the man who led the Bletchley Park crew that cracked Germany's Enigma coding machine and changed the course of the Second World War.

In early 2003, Ma was in her 7th year of Alzheimer's & my father realized that all ma's current memories had been wiped out. Her only memories were of her childhood & the only place still familiar to her was the town of Krishnanagar where she grew up in the 1930s. My father remembered all the stories Ma had told him about her childhood, but the town itself would have changed beyond recognition. so daddy asked ma's third brother, a gifted amateur artist, to sketch the house and high street as he remembered it from that time.

Ike Turner gave Annie Mae Bullock her first big steps to fame and also her stage name, but actually registered it, so that if she ever left, he could easily replace her with another singer and name her Tina Turner. When his continued violence and cocaine habit got too much, Tina Turner fled from her husband carrying just 36 cents and a Mobil card. She was prepared to give up rights all they had written together but knew that her stage name was the thing fighting for.

In February 1983, Brigadier Gyan Singh, a former artillery officer, arrived in Uttarkashi to run an adventure course & was so impressed by the girls who participated that he offered 7 of them scholarships. One of them, the third of 5 children of a local border tradesman, bluntly told him that scholarships were not enough & girls like her whose parents were pressing her to get married needed a proper career option

It's the birth anniversary of Herge, the man who created Tintin. And this story is about one of his most endearing characters.
It was in the early 30s that a certain Father Gosset heard that Georges Remi's next serialized Tintin story would be about China. And he advised him to meet a young Chinese artist, Zhang Chongren, then studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts for some perspective on the country and its people.

On the 16th of May, 6 years ago, we launched ticket sales for the FIFA U17 World Cup. The person handing over that 1st ticket was one of the biggest stars of world football, Barcelona's Carles Puyol. But the person who got that first ticket was what made it really special. We were very determined that this tournament should honour Indian football heroes. And what better place to start than that immortal Mohun Bagan side of 1911, who beat East Yorkshire regiment in the finals of the IFA Shield.

It’s Florence Nightingale’s 203rd birth anniversary. Growing up, we were taught about her selfless service in the nursing profession, particularly during the Crimean War. They dubbed her the Lady with the Lamp, a tireless worker for the injured & sick. And yet that image of her does a colossal disservice to one of our scientific pioneers.
For Florence Nightingale not just a wonderful nurse. She was a formidable medical statistician and economist, using data, charts and graphs to plot exactly how diseases spread.

A thread inspired by an Ishant Sharma delivery and the birth anniversary of one of my heroes!
It was in a Cornell university cafeteria in the late 1940s that a high spirited student threw a plate in the air. As it went up, a young physics professor was watching, and was fascinated by the way it wobbled.
At that point, Richard Feynman just finished a gruelling time at Los Alamos working on the American nuclear bomb, had just lost his wife to tuberculosis

Can a sub-editor in a news agency cost a cricketer six years at the elite level? It actually happened.
Feb 2017, just days before the auction. Harpreet Singh Bhatia was quietly confident of his chances at the IPL auction as the top scorer in the Mushtaq Ali tournament with 211 Instead, an inadvertent mix up by an overworked desk person at ANI changed his life. Harmeet Singh, a talented young spinner who had a brief shot at the IPL with MI was arrested for an incident at Andheri station. But the ANI originally reported it as Harpreet Singh, not Harmeet.

15th April 1912. The band was playing when the RMS Titanic, on its maiden voyage, collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. There were 8 of them, the oldest 33 and the youngest just 20. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, Wallace Hartley & his band kept playing to help calm the passengers. Not one of them stopped even as there was a desperate rush among the rest of the passengers for the life boats.

Bhimrao Ambedkar sat on a gunny sack at school & had to wait for the peon to give him water as being an untouchable he could not touch the tap or surai. When he passed the 4th standard in school his Mahar community wanted to organize a feast as no one had studied that far.

On my father's 98th birth anniversary, one of my favourite stories!
In the early 1980s, my father finally switched from the shipyard that he had nursed back to financial health after eight long years and joined GEC, still then a blue chip company. Within six months he realized that he was there for all the wrong reasons. The board had wanted a tough but fair man to lead the company out of the red, but the thirty something Managing Director wanted to be the hero with the workers.

He could speak 8 languages and they said he could recite all 37 of Shakespeare's plays from memory. An award winning playwright, and one of Satyajit Ray and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's favourite actors. Utpal Dutt was a man of towering intellect and strong convictions. His daughter Bishnupriya once recounted, ‘"When we went to Italy, it meant we would have to spend at least one day on viewing each sculpture. David dekhte gele wine khete khete dekhte hobe... Once during a visit to Rome, we had hired the services of a guide.

It's Shakib Al Hasan's birthday, and he has to be one of the most interesting cricketers around. In 2007, he returned after playing a match winning World Cup knock against India just 17 days before a board exam. He studied 18 hours a day and got a reasonably respectable score. But my favourite defining Shakib story is from 2012 when I saw him returning from a Reebok store visit. Most cricketers came back with 6 -7 packages full of shoes and other stuff. He came back with just one box in his hands.

On this day in 1902, the Anushilan Samiti started in Bengal. If you haven't heard of it, it's because it is probably the best kept secret about our freedom movement. Every second bus destination in Kolkata pays homage to a member. Revolutionaries like Binay Badal Dinesh to Bagha Jatin to Rashbehari to Bipin Behari Ganguly to Aurobindo & Surya Sen were members in one of the two major branches in Dhaka and Calcutta
The Anushilan Samiti was the organization the British feared the most.