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Aloke is a 53 year old guy from Calcutta(kolkata), WB, India

We live in a fantasy world. I know this because I live in that world, and I actually receive my e-mail there.And, sometimes when I don't ,I think I am having a bad dream.......

  • The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 - Bio-bibliography

    Rated Oct 09 • 1 review • biographies • nobelprize.org

    HERTA MULLER

    (1953 - Present)

    Herta Muller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae CeauÃ...Ã...¸escu regime, the history of the Germans in Transylvania, and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Soviet forces in Romania. On October 8th, 2009, it was announced she would be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

    The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. Muller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority, was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.

    Muller was born in NiÃ...Ã,£chidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), a historically German-speaking town in the Banat. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother served five years (1944-1949) in a labour camp in the Soviet Union during and after World War II Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant. While she speaks German as a native language, she is also fluent in Romanian.

    She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the TimiÃ...Ã...¸oara University. She was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a German-speaking literary society.

    In 1976, MÃÃ,¼ller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.

    Muller left for Wualler received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. In July 2008, Muller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the support given by the institute to a Romanian-German Summer School involving two former informants of the Securitate.
    19 views
    The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 - Bio-bibliography

  • Irving Penn - Biography.com Biography - Biography.com

    Rated Oct 08 • 1 review • biographies • biography.com

    IRVING PENN

    (1907 - 2009 )

    Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer Is Dead. Irving Penn, one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

    Penn, the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn, initially intended to become a painter, but at age 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer.

    Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School from which he graduated 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography.

    His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraitist. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.

    He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Posing his subjects within this tight, unorthodox space, Penn brought an unprecedented sense of drama to his portraits, driving the viewer's focus onto the person and their expression. In many photos, the subjects appeared wedged into the corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Marlene Dietrich.

    While a master of the studio flash, most of Penn's portraits are lighted with window light. For travelling to New Guinea and other locations to photograph indigenous people, Penn created a portable studio with a skylight deployed facing north with impressive results.
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    Irving Penn - Biography.com Biography - Biography.com

  • Dirac biography

    Rated Sep 30 • 1 review • biographies • gap-system.org

    PAUL DIRAC

    (1902 -1984)

    The mathematician Mark Kac divided geniuses into two classes. Ordinary ones whose achievements others will emulate, and magicians whose inventions are so astounding that it is hard to see how any human could have imagined them. Paul Dirac was one of these magicians.

    When he went to Cambridge in 1923, at the age of 21, the world of physics was in turmoil. Experiments had shown that classical physicists could not explain the behaviour of atoms. The old principles of Isaac Newton didn't seem to apply to the microscopic world. Dirac soon developed his own widely-acclaimed theory of quantum mechanics. His theory included wave mechanics, the version of uantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrodinger, and matrix mechanics, the theory put forward by Werner Heisenberg.

    At the time, it seemed miraculous. Albert Einstein described Dirac's theory as "the most logically perfect of quantum mechanics". Perfect as it was, the theory was only a reformulation of a newly-discovered branch of physics. In 1928, Dirac made a breakthrough. He combined the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein's special relativity. The resulting Dirac equation, still widely used today, was able to explain the mysterious magnetic and "spin" properties of the electron. Like so many great discoveries, it required an extraordinary leap of imagination.

    But there was a conundrum. The equation had two solutions, one representing the electron, the other representing its opposite, a particle with negative energy and positive charge, that had never been seen or suspected before. Dirac concluded that each electron had an "anti-particle". The two could be created or destroyed in matching pairs. Dirac had predicted the existence of anti-matter, which makes up, at least in principle, half the universe.
    Heisenberg judged this to be the supreme achievement of 20th Century physics.

    Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. His mother was originally from Cornwall and the daughter of a mariner. Paul had an elder brother, Félix, who committed suicide in March 1925, and a younger sister, Béatrice. His early family life appears to have been unhappy due to his father's unusually strict and authoritarian nature.

    He was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at Merchant Venturers' Technical College , where his father was a French teacher.
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    Dirac biography

  • Norman Borlaug - Biography

    Rated Sep 14 • 1 review • biographies • nobelprize.org


    (1914 -2009)

    Borlaug, the icon of war on hunger, is no more

    The death of crop scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, an enduring icon for the war on hunger who had helped steer India away from recurrent famines towards self- sufficiency in food, has compelled me to return to SU after 2 months, to pen a tribute.

    Borlaug, whose research to improve wheat varieties, initiated in Mexico in 1945, led to the Green Revolution and helped save millions of people from starvation worldwide, died from cancer complications in Texas on 12th.of September 2009. He was 95.

    M.S. Swami- nathan, the Indian scientist who had taken the first steps to initiate Borlaug's lasting association with India 48 years ago, was today in a hotel in Blacksburg, Virginia, in transit to visit the ailing scientist for a final meeting on Wednesday.

    He was the greatest hunger fighter of all time," said Swaminathan, who had in 1961 proposed to the government that it invite Borlaug to apply his ideas of developing high-yielding wheat varieties in India.The country faced the threat of recurrent famines during the 1960s and pulled through with food aid brought in by ships. "It was a ship-to-mouth existence," said Swaminathan, who was at the time a scientist in the genetics division at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI).But Borlaug, who arrived at the IARI, New Delhi, in 1963, helped India develop high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties of wheat that quickly doubled wheat productivity.

    In Mexico, Borlaug had developed a dwarf variety with substantially increased grain yields. "This trait was passed on to Indian wheat varieties and our yields began to rise," said Kailash Bansal, a plant biotechnologist at the IARI. Scientists also applied the technology to rice and India's grain production soared, allowing the nation to export grains. Wheat yields increased from 800kg per hectare in the 1960s to 2,800kg per hectare by the early 2000s. Rice yields have shown similar gains.

    Borlaug, who received the Nobel in 1970 for his work to increase crop productivity among other honours including Padma Vibhushan in 2006, was born on a farm in Iowa where he spent his childhood attending a one-room school. Borlaug failed his first attempt to enter the University of Minnesota where he was told his high school education had not prepared him properly in Science and Maths.
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    Norman Borlaug - Biography

  • Amitav Ghosh Biography

    Rated Jul 07 • 1 review • biographies • jrank.org

    AMITAV GHOSH

    (1956-Present)

    Amitav Ghosh, a pioneer of English literature in India, was born in Calcutta (Kolkata) in the year 1956.

    His father was in the Indian army. It was mainly because of this reason that Amitav Ghosh has been raised and educated at the same time, in as different locations as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India and the United Kingdom. Amitav Ghosh did schooling from the Doon School, Dehra Dun. He completed his graduation from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. After leaving St. Stephen's with a B.A. in History in 1976, he obtained an M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi University in 1978. He went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford pursue Postgraduate work and in 1979 obtained a Diploma in social anthropology. He also spent some time at Tunis where he learnt Arabic. Amitav Ghosh was awarded his Oxford D. Phil. in Social Anthropology in 1981.

    Amitav Ghosh is acclaimed in the literary world for his works on fiction, travel writing and journalism. His long list of accomplishment includes books like The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous work, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad.

    Among awards, Ghosh has won France's Prix Medicis Etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986), the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Shadow Lines (1988), the Arthur C. Clarke Prize for science fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), the Pushcart Prize for his essay, "The March of the Novel through History: My Father's Bookcase" and the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards for The Glass Palace.

    The fictions of Amitav Ghosh are marked by extreme themes that go side by side with post-colonialismIt can be added here that his topics are much more unique and personal. The appeal of Amitav' s work lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious, heavier themes. The Government of India conferred Amitav Ghosh with Padma Bhushan. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York. He is planning to shift back to India.
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    Amitav Ghosh Biography

  • All Michael Jackson Biography History Bio

    Rated Jun 27 • 1 review • biographies, michael jackson • allmichaeljackson.com


    MICHAEL JACKSON

    (1958 -2009)

    Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, aged 50. The specific cause of death has yet to be determined.

    Michael Jackson discovered India in 1996 but some Indians used to go the extra mile to not discover him.An unstated but perceptible cultural ceiling made many "discerning" lovers of music in India view him with affected disinterest.

    If Jackson's moonwalk and the corkscrew strand of hair over the forehead smashed language barriers and made countless hot-blooded young Indians "do the break dance" at the drop of a hat in classrooms, canteens and dead-end alleys, another class went into a deep denial mode. To be honest , I was a part of that denial group.

    A group of college alumni recalled how they would make it a point to steer clear of the Jackson hype, at its peak then with his album Thriller. "Brought up on a staple of Jethro Tull, ELP and Styx, and of course Floyd and Zeppelin, we would sneer at folks who seemed to have discovered `western music' via the break-dancing of MJ," said a one-time drummer for the college band.

    Gradually, as the Jackson style struck deep roots and "beat-it" posters in teenager's rooms became the symbol of cool in the eighties, without the angst of Vietnam and a million other revolution that vexed the preceding generation, there seemed to be grudging admiration for some of his songs. But it was never meant to be articulated.

    Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he made his début onto the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1969, and later began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop"in subsequent years, his 1982 album Thriller remains the world's best-selling record of all time[3] and four of his other solo studio albums are among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).

    In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and "Thriller"--widely credited with transforming the music video from a promotional tool into an art form--helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s.
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    All Michael Jackson Biography History Bio

  • Farrah Fawcett: Her finest performances - The TV Paige

    Rated Jun 26 • 2 reviews • biographies • suntimes.com

    FARRAH FAWCETT

    (1947--2009)

    Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and, beginning with a celebrated pin-up poster, bewitched a generation of men, died on June 25 2009,in California. She was 62.

    Fawcett had been battling intestinal cancer since late 2006, and to an extraordinary degree that fight was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide.

    Farrah Fawcett was born Ferrah Leni Fawcett in 1947 . Her mother, Pauline Alice (née Evans), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett, was an oil field contractor. She was of French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry.

    A Roman Catholic, Fawcett's early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W.B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi in 1965. From 1966-1969, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. She appeared in a photo of the "Ten Most Beautiful Coeds" from the university, which ran in Cashbox magazine. A Hollywood publicist saw the photo, called Farrah and urged her to move to Los Angeles, which she did in 1969, leaving after her junior year with her parents' permission to "try her luck" in Hollywood.

    Fawcett's career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and on stage as well as missed opportunities. She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined.

    Fawcett won praise for her serious acting later in her career, typically as a victimised woman. But she remained best known for the hit 1970s television show Charlie's Angels, in which she played Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful female private detectives employed by an unseen male boss. Her pin-up fame had led the producers to cast her.

    In 1978 Playboy magazine called Fawcett "the first mass visual symbol of post-neurotic fresh-air sexuality".

    52 views
    Farrah Fawcett: Her finest performances - The TV Paige

  • Gustave Doré biography

    Rated Jun 19 • 2 reviews • biographies • artbible.info


    GUSTAVE DORé

    (1832-1883 )


    French illustrator, painter, and sculptor.

    Doré was born in Strasbourg and his first illustrated story was published at the age of fifteen. He began work as a literary illustrator in Paris and commissions include works by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante.

    In 1853 Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated English Bible. In 1863, he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his illustrations of the knight and his squire Sancho Panza have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters. Doré also illustrated an oversized edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", an endeavor that earned him 30,000 francs from publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883.

    However it is with Dante's Inferno (1861) that his fame grew world wide. Doré was a skilled draughtsman (drawing directly onto woodblocks), theatrical, poetic, versatile, and incredibly prolific. He was often criticized for his fecundity and for the rapidity of his work, having produced more than 8, 000 wood engravings, 1, 000 lithographs, 400 oil paintings, and 30 works of sculpture.

    Anecdotes told frequently about Doré relate how he began to draw when about the age of four, that he always had a pencil in hand, and that he preferred his pencils sharpened at both ends. With little formal training, Doré began as a young comicstrip artist, a boy genius, at the age of 15 illustrating a parody of Greek mythology, Les Travaux d'Hercule (Labours of Hercules, 1847), and evolved into a literary artist illustrating the works of Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Hugo, Shakespeare, and Tennyson.
    17 views
    Gustave Doré biography

  • Zubin Mehta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Rated Jun 17 • 1 review • opera music • wikipedia.org

    ZUBIN_MEHETA_______

    (1936- present)

    Zubin Mehta is one of the greatest conductors of western classical music of all times.

    "Born to the baton" aptly describes the extraordinary career of Zubin Mehta. A native of India,Zubin currently holds the music directorships of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He was the conductor and director of both the New York the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras.

    Born in 1936 in Bombay, India, Zubin Mehta grew up in a home filled with music. His father was a co-founder of the Bombay Symphony, and the young Mehta heard chamber music and Beethoven quartets before he heard a symphony. He learned to sing what he heard before he could read music.

    At the age of sixteen, Mehta began conducting concerto accompaniments, leading the orchestra when his father was away on concert tours. At eighteen, Mehta abandoned his medical studies to pursue a career in music at the Academy of Music in Vienna. "I always had the intention of becoming a conductor, not just because I wanted to wave a stick, but because orchestral music appeals to me most," he said.

    By the time he was twenty-five, Mehta had conducted both the Vienna and the Berlin Philharmonics and was the music director of the Montreal Symphony. In 1962, at age twenty-six, he became the youngest conductor of a major American orchestra when the Los Angeles Philharmonic appointed him music director. In 1978, he accepted the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic. Mehta's powerful stage presence translates into a strong, provocative management style. "In Los Angeles [as compared to New York] I'm the absolute boss. It's my orchestra," he said.

    An intriguing question is the role that being Indian has played in the success of his career. "Mehta's career in this internationally minded age has possibly profited from the exotic value attached to being the only India-born conductor to attain prominence," speculated Albert Goldberg, music critic of the Los Angeles Times. "But [Mehta] does not trade on such externals....His musical abilities alone have been sufficient," concluded Goldberg. "Zubin has one of the best techniques around," agreed Los Angeles Philharmonic tympanist William Kraft. "Even the way he holds the baton makes it easier for the orchestra to follow him."
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    Zubin Mehta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Metro | Cancer...

    Rated Jun 15 • 1 review • cancer, kindness foundation, real life story • telegraphindia.com


    SANDIP-SHARMA

    (1987-present)


    The Kindness Foundation has extended its hand to a 12-year-old boy, who battles a chronic vision problem to do well in school and has been forced to quit studies, with both his parents being diagnosed with cancer within 10 months of one another.

    Till a year ago, the Sharmas were like any other lower middle class family -- living on a shoestring budget but finding happiness in son Sandip's progress at school and the small things of life that money can't buy. Then things started going horribly wrong. Between May 2008 and March 2009, Ramakant Sharma, 40, was diagnosed with throat cancer and wife Sunita Devi, 35, with cancer of the oesophagus.

    Sandip, a Class VI student,dropped out of school after his father was forced to quit his job."Our son scored 80 per cent in math in his second term but we haven't been able to send him to school since. We can't even afford the monthly tuition fee of Rs 200," said Sunita Devi, bedridden and barely audible.

    Ramakant gave up his job in a sari shop two months ago because he was "too weak to continue". "I feel so helpless at not being able to afford my wife's and my own treatment, or pay for our son's education," he said.

    Kindness Foundation has pledged to foot all the medical bills and take care of Sandip's studies and look after the family with the help of Mr. Manoj Kumar Jain, Chairman of the Jain Group of Industries who has extended all support .

    The Foundation wants to admit Sandip to a boarding school but he wants to attend a Day School so that he can take care of his parents. We had to bow down to his wishes as this is what is kindness all about.

    Sandip has got a new eye-glass. There is attempt to place him in a good school. Both the parents are under treatment-the father just out of a nursing home and the mother admitted for treatment. Efforts are being made to get a bank account opened, as all financial help could be deposited to form a corpus fund.

    Sandip is smiling, but only just, praying for the fast recovery of his parents.
    855 views
    The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Metro | Cancer double blow for boy’s family