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AlokeKumar

Last seen: 15 hours ago

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 biography of Sara Teasdale - life story

    Rated Mar 12 2009 • 1 review • biographies, poems, sara teasdale • poemhunter.com

    SARA_TEASDALE

    (1884 - 1933)

    Sara Teasdale was an American lyrical poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri.

    Sara's major themes were love, nature's beauty, and death, and her poems were much loved during the early 20th century. In 1918 she won the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for her volume, Love Songs. Her style and lyricism are well illustrated in her poem, Spring Night (1915), from that collection.

    She was the youngest child of Mary Elizabeth Willard and John Warren Teasdale. Throughout her life, Sara suffered poor health and it was not until she was nine that she was judged healthy enough to begin school - a private school for children just one block away from her home. In 1898 she attended Mary Institute, and the following year she enrolled in Hosmer Hall, from which she graduated in 1903.

    In 1913, Sara was courted by two admirers. The poet Vachel Lindsay fell in love with her and at one point was sending her long, fantastic love letters on a daily basis. He asked her to marry him, but though she had deep feelings for Vachel, she instead married Ernst Filsinger, a businessman, in 1914. The following year they moved to New York City, which became her home for the rest of her life. Sara and Vachel remained fond but platonic friends throughout their lives, and Lindsay said that she was his life's "most inspiring, most satisfying friend." She was the inspiration for what Lindsay believed to be his greatest poem, The Chinese Nightingale.

    Sara was very much a product of her Victorian upbringing, and she was never able to experience in life the passion that she expressed in her poetry. She was not happy in her marriage, and she divorced Ernst in 1929. Sara's health further declined. On the morning of January 29, 1933, in her New York City apartment, Sara took an overdose of sleeping pills, lay down in a warm bath, fell asleep, and never woke up again.

    This spot is for my friend Iza who likes the poems of Sara.
    74 views
    The biography of Sara Teasdale - life story

  • Piri Reis Map

    Rated Mar 09 2009 • 1 review • biographies, map, turkish, piri reis, cartographer • pirireismap.net

    PIRI REIS

    (1470-1554)

    A "cartographic renaissance" is taking place with the common everyday use of tools such as Google Earth. However, even before satellite mapping, there are maps dating back to 1513, which could not have been possible if someone did not see the earth from space.

    In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin. Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis. The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed.

    The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC. Who is this man to have accurately cartographed our world so many years ago?

    He is a Turkish geography and cartography scientist. and a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople. The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to the fourth century BC or earlier.

    Piri Reis whose original name is Muhiddin was born on 1470 in Karaman. Commencing from his childhood Piri Reis has traveled the Mediterranean Sea with his uncle Kemal . He joined to the Spain voyage and went until Gibraltar. After the death of his uncle, in 1511 he went to Egypt as one of the masters of Oruc and in 1513 together with Barbaros brothers he arrived at North Africa. After the occupation of Algeria he has been sent by Oruc Reis to Yavuz Sultan Selim. Piri Reis took from Yavuz the degree of Man of Seas (Captain) and he joined to the Egypt voyage. Later he arrived at Gelibolu and Istanbul where he joined to the sea voyage of Barbaros.

    By 1547, Piri had risen to the rank of Reis (Admiral) in command of the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean and Admiral of the fleet in Egypt, headquartered at Suez.
    30 views
    Piri Reis Map

  • Jack Kerouac Biography

    Rated Mar 04 2009 • 1 review • biographies, writer, jack kerouac, beat generation, on the road • angelfire.com

    JACK-KEROUAC-

    (1922-1969)

    American writer, experimented with spontaneous autobiographical fiction chronicling his travels into the American West. He is the darling of the Beat Generation . Xineann to Moonrays -everybody loves him. He popularized the Hindu word 'Dharma', meaning religion and gave it a new dimension.

    Rambling. Wandering. Overflowing. Like his fiction, Jack Kerouac covered a great deal of territory in a short period of time. Known as the father of the Beat Generation, but did not look the part, Kerouac's freewheeling life on the road and his chronicles of that life paved the way for the youth counter-culture of the 1960s.

    Born in 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was the son of a French-Canadian printer. Kerouac, who wanted to be a writer from his earliest childhood, did not speak a word of English until he was five years old. He had an older brother, Gerard, who died at age nine, and an older sister Caroline. At age 11 Kerouac began writing adolescent novels and fictionalized newspaper accounts of horse racing, football, and baseball.

    A gifted athlete, Kerouac was recruited by Columbia University for the football team. In his second game as a freshman Kerouac returned a kick 90 yards, but on his next return he broke his leg. The injury freed him to pursue his true passion - literature.

    Kerouac pumped gas for a while in Connecticut, where his family had moved; worked briefly as a sports reporter for the Lowell Sun when his family returned there; and found himself a scullion on the S. S. DORCHESTER bound for Greenland. Two days after that trip Kerouac was back at Columbia for a second, short stay. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but was honorably discharged as a discipline problem after six months. Kerouac spent the war years working as a merchant seaman and hanging around Columbia with free-thinking Bohemians, including William Burroughs, Lucian Carr, Edie Parker, and Allen Ginsburg. He wrote two novels during the war, The Sea Is My Brother and And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, with Burroughs.

    Kerouac married Parker in 1944, but the marriage broke up after two months. His father died in 1946, and in 1947 Kerouac found his guiding light - Neal Cassady.
    28 views
    Jack Kerouac Biography

  • Biography

    Rated Feb 27 2009 • 1 review • biographies, painter, alphonse maria mucha • muchafoundation.org

    ALPHONSE MARIA MUCHA

    ( 1860 -1939)

    A Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist.

    Alfons Maria Mucha was born in the town of Ivančice, Moravia today's Czech Republic. His singing abilities allowed him to continue his education through high school in the Moravian capital of Brno, even though drawing had been his first love since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery, then in 1879 moved to Vienna to work for a leading Viennese theatrical design company, while informally furthering his artistic education.

    When a fire destroyed his employer's business in 1881 he returned to Moravia, doing freelance decorative and portrait painting. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hrušovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

    Mucha moved to Paris in 1887, and continued his studies at Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi while also producing magazine and advertising illustrations. Around Christmas 1894, Mucha happened to drop into a print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected demand for a new poster to advertise a play starring Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in Paris, at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. Mucha volunteered to produce a lithographed poster within two weeks, and on 1 January 1895, the advertisement for Gismonda appeared on the streets of the city. It was an overnight sensation and announced the new artistic style and its creator to the citizens of Paris. Bernhardt was so satisfied with the success of that first poster that she entered into a 6 years contract with Mucha.

    Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewellery, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what was initially called the Mucha Style but became know as Art Nouveau. His Art Nouveau style was often imitated. However, this was a style that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life; he insisted always that, rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within and Czech art. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art.
    13 views
    Biography

  • Home Page

    Rated Feb 25 2009 • 1 review • activism, sd millionaire, ngo, children • offerindia.org

    Postscript to SD Millionaire -the Feel-Good film of the decade

    For those of my friends who wanted to know about the organization, with which I am connected, to look after the children of the lesser god.

    Also to all other queries related to press reviews, that the film is a let down on India. This is hard reality. No hiding behind the curtain. SD Millionaire has brought attention to the plight of these children and the Hon'ble speaker of the Indian Parliament mentioned it in the opening statement to the house yesterday.

    The organization is OFFER :

    OFFER (Organisation For Friends Energies and Resources) works for children who are in need of assistance in and around urban and rural areas of North and South 24 Parganas and Kolkata districts.

    Set up in 1986, OFFER reaches out to 5,000 children. The organisation's main objective is to protect children's rights to health, education, security and development and their economic rehabilitation in the future. Community issues are also taken up through direct intervention and campaigns.


    OFFER's major programmes include:

    * Community-based education sponsorship programme
    * Rehabilitation programme for children living on railway
    platforms
    * Residential care units for children without parental care
    * Residential care unit and community schools for children with learning difficulties.

    OFFER also maps the ground realities of children from families of convicted persons in partnership with the National Legal Services Authority New Delhi & Directorate of correctional services, Government of West Bengal.

    This spot is for, Rebekah who likes the film SD Millionaire and says .... "I saw on your page the review for Slumdog Millionaire, and i LOVED that movie!!!!"
    133 views
    Home Page

  • The Feelgood Movie of the Year - Slumdog Millionaire

    Rated Feb 25 2009 • 1 review • biographies • articlesbase.com

    INDIA-Jai Ho

    (1947-present)

    Postscript to the golden statuettes won by A.R. Rahman at the Oscar.

    As the country rejoices over the golden statuettes won by A.R. Rahman,some among India's millions of slum children celebrated, too.They hope that SD Millionaire can help not just make Indian cine artistes popular in the West but also shake India into action against the myriad crimes that demolish the childhood of the poor in this country.

    I am hoping the film's success acts as a catalyst to transform the rights of poor children from a neglected subject to an issue that concerns the government more than ever before.As parliamentary election is round the corner the government might do something. I for my self, working for an NGO having 5000 street children,am extremely happy for the attention SD Millionaire has brought to the plight of these children, many among them being affected by HIV AIDS.

    A mammoth government plan to ensure protection of the country's children - identified repeatedly in surveys as the most vulnerable segment of our society- has repeatedly faced obstacles in taking off.The scheme, called the `Integrated Child Protection Scheme', aims to help save children from forced beggary and other forms of exploitation shown in the film.

    Seventeen-year-old garbage collector Faiyad Khan claims he can relate to police's refusal to believe Jamal Khan as they thrash and electrocute him in the multi-Oscar SD Millionaire.The brutality shown in the film is "absolutely accurate", claims Faiyad, who says he risks police lathis daily as he rummages through mountains of garbage dumped behind Nizamuddin station in Delhi.

    Vijay Kumar another rag picker says , "I want assistance from the government, I want education. Education would allow me the learn English, which in turn would help me get a job in a call centre, like Jamal."

    'SD Millionaire' has a fan in our Home Minister P Chidambaram,previously Finance Minister, who said that movie portraying the rags to riches story of a boy from Mumbai slum , should inspire banks to provide loans to budding entrepreneurs from slums which are humming with business ideas .He also said that young boys and girls from slums are not laggi
    49 views
    The Feelgood Movie of the Year - Slumdog Millionaire

  • A.R. Rahman - Biography

    Rated Feb 23 2009 • 2 reviews • india, biographies, a r rahman, oscar, music composer • imdb.com



    A.R.RAHAMAN

    (1966 - present )


    A.R.Rahman was announced winner of the Best Score for Slumdog Millionaire and Best Song for Jai Ho from the same film at the 81st Academy Awards night held at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on the 22nd of February, 2009. Rahman is the first Indian to win two Oscars. The movie nominated for 10 Oscars in nine categories had a dream run, winning eight trophies, including best film and best director. In a way, the Oscar ceremony evening belonged to India. Other than the Oscars, Rahman has won the BAFTA and the Golden Globe Award for SD Millionaire recently. Indiaaaaaaaaa Jai Ho !

    Rahman is working in several of India's various state,language film industries, international cinema and theatre. Rahman, in a career spanning over a decade, has sold more than one hundred million records of his film scores and soundtracks world-wide, and sold over two hundred million cassettes making him one of the world's top 25 all-time top selling recording artists.His acclaimed music compositions have led TIME to declare him the Mozart of Madras and several Tamil commentators have given him the title Isai Puyal (Musical Storm).

    Born A.S. Dileep Kumar in 1966 to a Hindu Brahmin family. His father R K Shekhar, of Tamilian descent, was a composer and conductor for Malayalam-language films in Kerala . His father died when Rahman was nine years old, and his family rented out musical equipment as a source of income. His family converted to Islam in the late 1970s. Rahman served as a keyboard player and an arranger in a band "Roots" with childhood friend and percussionist Sivamani. He played the piano, synthesizer, harmonium and guitar. His curiosity in the synthesizer in particular increased because, he says, it was the "ideal combination of music and technology". He began early training in music under Maestro Dhanraj. At the age of eleven, he joined, the troupe of Ilaiyaraaja. Latter Rahman obtained a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London, where he graduated with a degree in Western Music.

    It wasn't until 1992 that Rahman planted the first seeds of his film career. When Sharada Trilok's ad for Leo Coffee won an award, she introduced Rahaman ,the music composer to her cousin, Mani Ratnam. Impressed with his work, the director signed him to compose the music for Balachander's film Roja. Rahman's scored, a colorful, uncluttered combination of pop, rock, and traditional music, reshaping the genre, winning him three awards for Best Music Director. Roja became the equivalent of an Indian cro
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    A.R. Rahman - Biography

  • Salman Rushdie Biography

    Rated Feb 18 2009 • 1 review • biographies, salman rushdie, death sentence, satanic verse • notablebiographies.com

    SALMAN RUSHDIE

    (1947- present,in hiding)

    It's 20 years since Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, then religious sovereign of Iran and spiritual leader to millions of fundamentalist Muslims worldwide, pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for 'insulting' Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses. The repercussions were profound - and are still being felt. The repercussions was notable as it was the first time in modern world a government had publicly called for the killing of a private individual in a foreign country; and the first time that a book, caused an international diplomatic crisis.

    The issue divided "Muslim from Westerners along the fault line of culture", pitting the core Western value of freedom of expression - that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write" - against the core belief of many Muslims - that no one should be free to "insult and malign Muslims".

    Even before the publication of The Satanic Verses, the books of Salman Rushdie stroked contro versy. Rushdie himself saw his role as a writer "including the function of antagonist to the state." His second book Midnight's Children angered Indira Gandhi ,the then Prime Minister of India, because it seemed to suggest "that Mrs. Gandhi was responsible for the death of her husband through neglect." His 1983 novel Shame "took an aim on Pakistan, its political characters, its culture and its religion. Rushdie forcefully denounced the Shah's government and supported the Islamic Revolution of Iran, at least in its early stages. He condemned the U.S. bombing raid on Tripoli in 1986 but found himself threatened by Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi three years later. He wrote a book bitterly critical of U.S. foreign policy in general and its war in Nicaragua in particular, for example calling the United States government, "the bandit posing as sheriff." Who is Salman Rushdie ?

    Salman Rushdie,is an Indian born novelist. Born in Mumbai (Bombay) to a Muslim family, he was sent to school in England in 1961. After reading history at Cambridge, he spent some time as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, the allegorical Grimus (1975), already demonstrates two distinctive elements: the use of a fantastical narrative idiom--notably less restrained in Grimus than elsewhere--and the exploration, in both form and content, of the meeting of the cultures of East and West (he has since published a collection of stories entitled East, West, 1994).
    435 views
    Salman Rushdie Biography

  • Louis Malle: Biography from Answers.com

    Rated Feb 16 2009 • 1 review • biographies, calcutta, france, film director, louis malle • answers.com

    LOUIS MALLE

    (1932-1995)

    In 1968 Louis Malle came to Calcutta and was introduced to my father by the film maker Satyajit Ray. I remember Malle then sporting a beard. I was made his guide as he wanted to roam the streets of Calcutta .You know ...just be with him and take him around. He traveled to India without any real specific goal in mind, `just to experience the country and get something of it down on film'. We were standing on the curb of a street as a communist procession moved by. All of a sudden Malle rushed, seized a red flag and started walking. I was bewildered. I stood there for a time not responding. As a young lad I did not know what to do. Suddenly I realized that he may get lost and I was meant to be his guide. I joined the procession, this being my first......That is Louis Malle for you. Ultimately he collected enough footage on Calcutta to make it into a documentary. The documentary was latter banned in India.

    Louis Malle comes from a rare breed of French film director who achieved a reputation as a great director not just in his native France but internationally, and was not afraid to embrace a wide range of subjects, some notoriously controversial. Malle is sometimes incorrectly associated with the nouvelle vague - his work does not fit in or correspond to the auteurist theories that apply to the work of Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, and others, and he had nothing whatsoever to do with Cahiers du cinema. Nonetheless, his film Zazie dans le métro ("Zazie in the Metro," 1960, an adaptation of the Raymond Queneau novel) did inspire Truffaut to write an enthusiastic letter to Malle.

    Malle was born in 1932 in Thumeries, near to Lille in northern France, into a comfortable bourgeois family which had made a fortune in sugar production dating back to the Napoleonic wars. In 1940, at the age of 12, he attended a Catholic boarding school near Paris (with his three brothers), a school which was sheltering Jewish pupils. The tragic events of this time are documented in Malle's poignant 1987 film, Au Revoir les Enfants.

    AAfter the war, Malle began a degree course in political science at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris but, against his parents' wishes, switched to a course on film studies at the Institut des Hautes ètudes Cinématographiques. Almost immediately after that, he was recruited as a camera operator for the famous underwater explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He worked as co-director on Costeau's celebrated documentary film, Le Monde du silence in 1956.
    11 views
    Louis Malle: Biography from Answers.com

  • Ferdinand de Lesseps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Rated Feb 16 2009 • 1 review • biographies, promoter, ferdinand de lesseps, france, suez canal • wikipedia.org

    FERDINAND de LESSEPS

    (1805-1894)

    The French diplomat successfully promoted the Suez Canal .

    Ferdinand de Lesseps was born on Nov. 19, 1805, at Versailles. After a childhood spent at Pisa - where his father was sometime consul - and then in Paris, his education at the Lycée Napoleon fitted him for entry into the French consular service. From 1825 he held posts of rising importance, usually in the Mediterranean area. In 1849 he went as minister plenipotentiary to the Mazzini Republic in Rome. The unknowing tool of duplicity from the first, he was made a political scapegoat, but he weathered this storm, as he was to ride out future crises, through his political innocence and personal integrity. He soon resigned from the foreign service.

    With the accession of Mohammed Said, an old friend, as pasha of Egypt in 1854, Lesseps saw a way to realize an old ambition: the cutting of the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, an idea which was not new. In Egypt, Lesseps became Said's favorite to undertake the project and by the year's end had gained a concession to cut the isthmus. It authorized Lesseps to form the Compagnie Universelle du Canal; the concession was to last 99 years. The international repercussions surprised Lesseps, for he did not appear to realize how the canal could change the balance of power and hazard communications with the British Indian Empire.

    The British government applied pressure to delay the Ottoman sultan's ratification of Said's firman, while Lesseps went on with his preparations. Skillfully meeting opposition, Lesseps floated his company Lesseps commenced work in 1859. Said was succeeded in 1863 by Ismail Pasha, who ordered Lesseps to release the Egyptian laborers and return the land granted by Said in 1856, with the aim of stopping the work. However with mechanized dredging the work got completed faster. Lesseps became a national hero when the canal was opened in 1869.He died in 1894.

    This spot is for Fred , from Nottingham, UK, who is interested in the Suez Canal.
    44 views
    Ferdinand de Lesseps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia