The best way to organise ebooks, notes, & references for your PhD

Surely, I do not mean "the" best way. The best way is for you to find out, one and/or the combinations that suits you the most.

Here, I share the best way that works for me- a technological noob on the humanities' side, who doesn't know and doesn't have time to work and think over complex codes that make your work really easy. I'm a lazy bug who for some strange reasons has to complete a humanities thesis in the space of a year. (If you're only looking for the best software to manage your ebooks, close your eyes, and download Calibre. Though with it, as with any other, you have to spend hours attaching tags to the books and files you once stored in different folders. And if you really do have the time to systematise your study, I suggest you can use the quotation manager TextCite, and make a good use of its category functions to organise your reading notes.)

My intention here is different. I am disorganised to the extent that the effort and time that goes into my attempted writing of a PhD dissertation makes it impossible for wander beyond my writing, for the time being, or to systematically organise my ebooks for purposes other than that of writing. So what I tell you here might come of help if you're working against a deadline, and your technological capabilities like mine doesn't go beyond a little typing skills in MS Word.

The sublime object of Bibliography

For some time I have been looking for a way to refer to my modest collection of about 10 GB of ebooks in pdf, html, djvu and other formats; about 5GB of journal articles and randomly scribbled notes in MS Word. And I've been trying to access these for the last two weeks to write a chapter of about 20,000 words, and the footnote entries stand as of now at 178, with a book or an article to cite for most. I had to do this following one of the the humanities styles listed by the Chicago Manual of Style, and I found the manual entering of citations is really a pain in the ass, especially when you've to concentrate on the writing, and at the same time, look for the obscure useless book stored somewhere in your hard drive that you've read and which exists for no worthy purposes beyond the cursory citation. This made me look for two things: a organiser of ebooks and articles that is (and importantly) a bibliographic citation manager. Like an idiot, the first thing I turned to was EndNote.

Managing Citations and the complex world of Citation Managers

After playing with EndNote for a week, I realised this was not for me. It's expensive: from where does a third world 'researcher' procure $ 300, and pay additional shipping charges, apart from the why of it? And perhaps with the reasons to do with its price, EndNote's interface is confusing for the uninitiated (read someone whose university doesn't have a commercial tie-up with the company). Another of my objections is that EndNote created more problems in terms of storage, unless you constantly upgraded your stuff. Even without upgrading, EndNote sucks. For example, if you've a desktop running on Windows XP with Word2003 installed, and a laptop with Windows 7 with Word2007 installed, and use a USB stick between the two for small file transfers, there's no simple way to migrate your bibliographic data, insert and cite (their 'Cite While You Write' function) from the same EndNote file in which you've once stored your citations. And after an endless session of scanning their tutorial videos, their forums, and googling solutions as how to get rid of the "invalid class string" message that appears every time I try to insert a citation from EndNote to Word, I decided that I had enough.

I tried Zotero for a few days, the free and open source add-on for the Firefox browser. While it worked good for synchronising notes taken from the web, there was no going beyond the proverbial Firefox way of crashing. I usually take a long smoking break when my favourite Firefox crashes, but this was a bit more. Zotero crashed everytime I tried to append a pdf ebook to it from my hard discs, and a number of times, without any provocation. I almost got lung cancer!

And for a day and two after that, I tried using Mendeley. As an offline and web-based hybrid citation manager, Mendeley too was free and excellent in terms of its management of books, articles, and citations, and the way it effortlessly scanned my library and fetched names, etc. off the files, and also made the insertion of citations in Word very easy. If you're planning a shorter work (let's say a journal article), Mendeley should be the obvious choice. For longer works though, I'm skeptical about Mendeley on two counts. One, synchronization between the offline version and the online Mendeley account of yours takes hours, especially if you live on slow internet connections in the southern hemisphere. Two, its free online storage capability is only 500 MB (you've to pay to "upgrade" your storage), which plays one of the older tricks of proprietary software industry's money-making.

It was at this point, I was on the verge of frustration, and almost decided to go back to the manual entry process in MS Word. I was and am wary of open source: who doesn't know that what the geeks call "really simple", really requires hours and hours of unfruitful scripting for the technologically incompetent such as me? But I thought I would try at least one. And I'm happy that I did, I found one that didn't make me look back.

I found JabRef . And my ecstatic advice to you: If you're looking for one that makes your work easy, try JabRef- the best bibliography manager for the present. The best thing for JabRef is that it easy for the first-time user and uncomplicated. It takes at the most 10-15 minutes to learn. Moreover, it is consistent than EndNote, or the word citation manager that comes default in MS Word 2007; it is so because the techies say JabRef is based on BibTeX. And finally it always free to try, and improve on (if you are into coding), because it is open source.

How JabRef works

Once you download and install it, you open JabRef, create a database, and click the green (+) sign for a new entry. (BTW, you have to have Java installed on your computer. If you don't have it, get it from here).

There appear simple fields to insert your bibliographical data and linking facilities to either files in your computer or on the web. It's really that simple! And this YouTube video below explains most of the rest:



I found out that I can easily customise on the input fields for the bibliographic entry. And if you require more variations on the Chicago style using JabRef, they don't come by default with the JabRef software. But you can easily download an excellent plug-in (developed by Juan Jose Baldrich) called "Chicago Manual of Style export filters" (check here for the English version). Download the plug-in and install it in the following steps:

JabRef>Plugins> Plugin Manager> Install Plugin

Once you've installed the plug-in, you can export your entire bibliography (or select entries) in a rich text format (.rtf) file that opens in MS Word with your citations arranged according to your preference following the Chicago manual.

Also if you're lazy like me to desire a set of insert buttons in MS Word that automatically insert a citation, or create a bibliography on the document in which you are working, you can do that with JabRef. For that, you just have to install two other pieces of free software: the basic version of a word-processing package called MikTeX (available here) and the Word-integration software called Bibtex4Word (available here). The developer of Bibtex4Word has put up a very comprehensible step-by-step installation instruction here, and you can refer to it if you have problems installing. (As I've found out, with JabRef running, Bibtex4Word works perfectly with Word 2003 and Word 2007). Again the chicago style doesn't come by default, but you can download it (and numerous other sytles) off the MikTeX site by going through the following steps and choosing:

Your Computer's Start Menu>All Programs> MikTeX>Maintenance>Package Manager> chicago or chicago-annote (you find these by scrolling down the entries on the left side of your screen). Select chicago-annote and click the install (+) button.

Once done, you can integrate JabRef with MS Word to seamlessly insert your citations in your manuscript, and to look up ebooks, articles, and links inside the same window. It really saves time; believe me!

Being Caliban

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he asked disapprovingly, looking at the books on my bookshelf. I was shocked: this was the first time I had come across such reverse Orientalism; albeit a politically-correct one.

We were having a rather irritating debate on 'continuity' and 'rupture' two days after that.

This young French anthropologist was trying to say the more things change, the more things remain the same. Yes, I said, but it depends on the position in time, space, and culture that you belong to, or assume. To an epithelial and alien anthropologist watching earth over an alien telescope for ten thousand years, it's the continuation of a species over numerous insignificant events. To Foucault, the Islamic 'Revolution' of 1978 in Iran was a rupture.

We differed sharply on the question of 'choice'.

He said: The middle classes largely control what is called 'culture'. They are to blame for consciously choosing on every point on shopping malls, consumerism, cars, and everything that goes with the logic of the market: they consciously choose that everyday, every moment, when they share small bits of power against the relatively powerless.

I said: The middle classes, at least here, are now primarily shaped by social conditions that make them devoid of 'history' in the older sense. Apart from those rooted to older ways of tradition (those disappearing ones who still preserve the classical educationist's vision of, say, listening to Mozart and speaking the Queen's English measure meticulously on a Nesfield grammar book), most ape and synthesize according to local customs and cultural moorings (for aping is also an act of synthesis) the products spawned by what Adorno and Horkheimer had simplistically tried to pin as the "culture industry".

The question of blame be better left to those higher-up in the fields of concentrated power —those running, funding and controlling the globalised networked shows of power and domination. An individual belonging to the middle classes can only be criticised when he is aware of the range of possibilities that constitute his 'choice'. I don't blame a person for buying a branded jeans from a supermarket; I criticize him for not knowing that jeans is the fruit of sweatshop slave trade. And I, specifically blame him when, for example, he pretends to ignore that the person sitting next to him has fallen sick and needs taken to a hospital. That is, he can be explicitly blamed only when he's aware of the choice he is to make as an individual, and then choose the ethically wrong one... I was going on to speak of Max Stirner's view on the topic, but then I stopped talking all of a sudden.

I found out that I was rather rude when debating with him, and I wondered why was it so. I'm usually not that rude, and I've been a patient debater in other situations, more disconcerting and hostile. What was it that had unsettled me? And then I remembered his question.

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he had asked.

The question was sickening. And I couldn't answer him without being angry; angry at him for being a white man with a not-so-innocuous question. A long time back in the university, a professor had told us: 'There's a Caliban somewhere deep inside you. You'll always find him when time comes."

You can't answer the question without being Caliban. Prospero's spirits hear you and yet you need must curse!

"Remember When"- Sharing is Caring

In this world of webs, deceptions, and sickening credit-carded entertainments, and where strangers walk the nights of the ether in their wakeful solitude, it's rather strange that the act of sharing survives. It's made up of one of the oldest and noble human sentiments that made us humans, and it's still the only act that makes you feel alive, at least on the net.

Sharing. An act of courage and extreme gentleness that survives the hostility of governments, and other rabid censors of free expression.

Imagine a world without the silent uploader, her pirate eyes alight with the warmth of the incandescent cathode ray screen, spending sleepless nights to share a movie, an album, a book she knows you're sure to appreciate.

Imagine a world without the patient seeders on the portals who seed and seed for years, risking their systems to known armadas and unknown hostilities, and planting new trees of hope in every island of a recalcitrant computer connecting to this nether regions.

Or imagine a world without trees.

Yes, trees and photosynthetic life forms and images that survive and blossom inspite of a million leeches who've never bothered to put a decent "thank you" comment on a post. They nod in silence, share light and oxygen, lifting their branches and leaves up into the ultramarine sky and breathe life everywhere, and right now, as you're reading this, they weave life in all its varieties.

Listen carefully. Let me whisper it once more in your ears. "Sharing is caring."
And gentle reader, remember it well.

What follows is a Not-Copyright Comics on the "piracy" issue by Dylan Horrocks, a wonderful artist from New Zealand:
(Click on the image for a better view)

Writing is a con

Any child can see that the map is not the ground. You cannot make a “reliable” map. A map, like a scientific theory, or consciousness itself, is no more than a dream of control. The conscious mind operates at forty or fifty bits a second, and disorder is infinitely deep. Better admit that. Better lie back and enjoy it—especially since, without the processes implied by it, no one could write (or read) books anyway. Writing is a con.

- M. John Harrison (what it might be to live in viriconium, 2001)

Intellectuals and propaganda

"Those who are most susceptible to propaganda (and advertising) are the intellectuals...



"In fact, those who are fascinated by technique are the intellectuals, the technicians, the scientists, the upper classes, the journalists, the various shapers of public opinion, the artists, the priests and pastors (when they want the church to change and to adjust to modern tastes), the responsible economists (bankers, etc.), the professors (who have suffered enough from being told that their teaching is worthless!), and the high-level administrators. These are the ones who are fascinated and who show no critical spirit, or who, when they believe (like many artists) that they are engaging in violent criticism of our society, fail to see that they are simply reproducing in a kind of parody the technical world itself with all its perversity, thus strengthening the perverse effects and in so doing reinforcing the myth."

— Jacques Ellul ['Fascinated People,' The Technological Bluff, 1989]

Fifteen minus four

Never! Never in my lifetime had I been to the first class that started at 10.20 in the morning. I simply hated it. Most of my classmates probably thought it had something to do with my complex communistic principles, a conscious act of defiance against the bourgeois university system, essentially typified in the 10.20 class, which denied students the right to sleep till noon.

But today, post 9.30, I sweated profusely and pedalled furiously as I moved in through drizzling rain and roaring city traffic to reach the university. There were kids supposedly waiting for my—whazzit called? ah, yes!— sermon. Yesterday had been my first class with a bunch of postgraduate kids, fifteen in number, and I had been assigned by R...di (the course coordinator) to take classes on Eric Arthur Blair for the rest of this week.

I reached the verandah and smoked one and a half cigarettes (I had to throw off one for ADG had stepped in from nowhere, speaking absent-mindedly on his phone). Five minutes past, I saved up the stubbed-out one in my pocket for emergency futuristic consumption, and picked up the attendance register from the HoD's office. By then only two kids had appeared and at 10.35, I was still patiently waiting. Damn, I had to explain so many things by 11.10. Another two turned up at 10.40. Two plus two made four, and I started off. It's so strange to be on the other side of the desk—this is a metaphor, for I deliberately chose a small room with a big table and lots of chairs around it— with people fidgeting and gaping at you, and you fumbling for words.

As I was, er, exploring the, er, complexities, er, of the genre formations of 'utopia' and 'dystopia', and the post-Enlightenment, er, reaction, er, to the notion, er, of technocratic, er, progress— a cellphone rang. A kid stood up with an apologetic smile and said: "Dada, please, can I attend to it?" Lost in the corridors of no-place (ui+topos, to be precise), I was blank for a moment. "Switch it off, you're crossing your limits," I said in a cold voice, well remembered from other spaces and times. Limits? Ha, ha, listen who's talking of limits. But voila, it still worked— I had perfect attention for the rest of the class which ended, let's say in considerate terms, rather miserably but slightly better than yesterday.

Kids, big brother (dada) is watching you, but believe me, his vigil is mostly symbolic. There are ghosts, shapes and mental structures that you've inherited from the past, and as long as you seriously believe in them, you cannot dream of alternate worlds, or even have serious negative visions.

After a day of intense neurotic reading

A sound is lost in the continuous deafening noise that they still call language, and you feel like a specialist in repetition. Repetition, as a distinct category of social existence, i.e. the separation of all the capitulative decisions that determine our lives from the execution of different arrived-at decisions. This transformative pattern of repetitiveness is simply a matter of degrees, of one’s position along an ongoing trajectory, pretending to be different, and forgetting to think of the tiresome repetitive pattern. The right amount of adjustment will get us “there” (wherever “there” is). But do I learn? Do I learn?

You realise your being, and ah, also that mutual recognition of responsibility that only happens on a plane of mutuality. Imagined, i.e. deep inside your mind, a simulacrum invented by neurons, a neurotic activity, anyway.

Creation is thought, desired, projected and organized. Your mind silently works on destruction. And destruction is a creative joy.
So sayeth the ancients.

I got proof

Finally. And it's official. The clerks at the district college kept me waiting for 3 hours, but at around two o'clock, I had it in my hand.

The certificate. The atavism of this confused pudding. The material of the muffled metaphor. I had cleared high school ten years back.

The baboo I had talked to on my earlier visit was absent, and it was strange to find, after the time spent on "requests, reminders and re-reminders" (if there is such a word), that the file containing the certificates was in a cupboard just next to his desk, fished out innocently by someone who went about pretending to be busy for the time I waited for a change in their insouciance.

I also found there're around 20 or more guys, my college-level classmates, who've not picked up their certificates. One of them, as far as I know, is in Delhi working in an advert firm, another is writing codes for a software firm of the US. Trouble lies in wait for them, in case they want to register for PhD. Hopefully, they won't.

I felt angry in a way. The absent baboo could have given me the document the earlier day itself. Or it could have been had without the unnecessary wait. It's all about attention-demanding bureaucratic self-importance on part of people toying with whatever little power they have in their hands.

But share my elation! For now I've got solid proof: I had indeed cleared high school ten years back.

Tree-faced sanity

Societal culture had always created a slew of new poseurs with affectations and idiosyncrasies that sane people earlier found easy to ridicule.

True, in the crux of that ridicule lay ignorance, apathy, superstition, political blinkers or cultural incomprehensibility, and the hostility of a people who considered themselves hypothetically sane; sanity was, and is, always a confusing term. The constants that people used to assume, always melts away to incomprehension, or to newer constants.

But here, I am speaking in specific terms, like the sanity that goes into the planting of rice-buds in the rainy seasons, and not in the blight of summer, or something that teaches you to be observant, if not critical, when the world around is changing fast to far-fetidness. The sequence of the conceptions is at the same time a sequence of realisations, as the grand old man put it.

This brings us to what I would like to call tree-faced sanity. It is a category in preconception, self-relation and self-realization in a removed societal fabric, approximating as universal infinitude. It assumes a lot, and is itself subject to varicose interpretations. It's distinct from the above sane 'sanity', for it talks big structures and branches, and does precisely nothing to realize.

Does scorn and ridicule build up inside you, even when you choose to remain silent, hearing people talking tree-faced sanity? Is it discernible from your face? Careful then— the edges are showing.

But tell me: Do you consider yourself sane?

[Pix: Jurgen Habermas and a tree-face]

"The Noble Purpose", or How to Easily File a PhD Application

Regret having to write this. But, better late; than never.

Every return teaches you something. But learn to be careful about filing applications.
It'll save you time if you are a last year's man, and it will also serve a "noble purpose", as I learned on Monday.

I had been to the university PhD cell, armed to the teeth with my proposal and registration form, photocopies and tattered original documents; apprehensive, for I know some masticating mammalian types at the administrative building are worse than reptilians on the hunt.

The guy sits brooding over my proposal for pukka ten minutes, and tells: "Shouldn't there be a hyphen?"
"Where?" I wonder. He points his finger to the title. "There."
A minor altercation follows.
— Naah, that's fine.
— There should be one. I know how things run at the Faculty Council, kid. I'm doing my job. Add your hyphen.
— No, it's OK. It's not needed.
— I insist, there should be one. You've come here for a noble purpose. You shouldn't be making these mishtakes."
— Yes. No. See, this is an adjective, and that is a noun. No hyphens are needed to link these two (I remember Wren and Martin. Who?)
—But there should be one.

I speak in true guilt: "Listen Mister, I have a post-graduate degree in English and have been working in English newspapers. I know..."
"Ok, ok," he relents, and picks up the next bunch. I am ready for that as well.
— "Why aren't these attested?"
I point to my signature. "There. Since these are copies of my salary sheets, and since my employers won't give me a certificate of some kind for giving them peace, tranquility and what-ye-call-it, these stand attested by me, and by me alone."

He picks up the copy of the appointment letter. "Well, what about this?"
I smile: " That's a letter from the Registrar of this university. And attested by a professor who's on the expert committee of the fellowship programme I'll be pursuing."
He nods: "I understand. Don't shout. I understand it better. Shouldn't you have a "No Objection" letter from the Reich-i-star?"
—" No Objection For WHAT?"
— "That you're getting the fellowship."

Patience, my love! It goes on like this for the next 15 minutes till I am almost convinced I deserve an icecream for seeing my application through the slot on the day itself. But at the next moment, he lands a hard upper-cut: "I see. Hmm, you've got your graduation and post-graduation certificates," he rolls his eyes over the attested sheets, and coughs: "But, ahem, we need proof that you've cleared the higher secondary exams."

Rubbing my chins, I blink: "Er, I have my HS marksh(i)t there, doesn't that suffice? Or since I've been a student here and the university has already checked my 'credentials', my BA or my MA certificates?"
"No," he crosses his hands. "I'm sorry. Next."

It's a knock-out.

As I gather up my wits and papers, I watch the next candidate frantically looking for her marriage-certificate. "This will not do," I overhear. "You have to get two 'No Objection' certificates for the change in your surname: one from the Court, and the other from your husband."

"No Objection for what?"
"For your marriage."

Poor girl, patriarchy spared me that. And in sad flourish, I made the return journey. Went back to my district college day before yesterday, after 1o long years, to fetch my higher secondary "pass (sic) certificate".

Waited for three hours for a durbar with the head clerk there. At 3.30, he yawned and granted me audience for a split second: "Come back after 5th. The admissions are on: and we've got no time."

I am patient, believe me, I'm still very patient...

First hand invigilation

Your purpose is to stay awake. For you function as a verb, dating 1553. Remember kid, your etymology derives from Latin invigilatus, past participle of invigilare, to stay awake; be watchful.

You keep watching from the first-floor balcony.

“Parents and guardians are not to be allowed inside. I REPEAT, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” screams a kid, in a black departmental T-shirt, who’s on the edge of his nerves.

A motley crowd of brutish father-figures are jostling and pushing, heaving and screaming, to accompany their girls to the examination-halls. An insignificant number of student volunteers are trying to be patient; a lone fatigued university security guard, past his retirement age, is trying to be invisible; it’s 11 o’clock at Gate No.4.

This year, more than 3, 500 students are competing for entrance to the English department. Around 60 of them will make to the classes in September. “What about the rest?” I wondered aloud as I remembered the day I had been there downstairs, ten years back. Nervous, anxious, drenched by the rains, and overawed by the crowd, the faces, the city and its people. Now there were two research scholars busily arguing the pros and cons of postcolonial “Englishnesses” next to me. No one heard me sigh as I went on to collect the answerscripts, the question papers, the forms with your identities stuck, pinned and stapled on them.

The next two hours simply floated away. I had been assigned to a big hall, but there I found a wonderful senior from our department, a passout of the eighties and now a chief somewhere; one of the few I envy for real. And without realizing it, the examinations were over: perfect, except two cases of mistaken identities in our room; two pairs of candidates with the same name, identical signatures and almost identical faces; five candidates confidently in the wrong room; few additional sheets appended to the answer-scripts surprisingly, but unconsciously, finding the initials of someone on them— someone who could have still been attempting a critical appreciation of a confusing romantic poem having something to do with the caressing of an old Greek statue.

I loitered about in the corridors, I refused to go away. A teacher wearing a green T-shirt, with the words “Mad Hatter” written on them, was seen seething with soft-voiced anger. A number of the examinees’ parents had manhandled him, along with a number of students, and girls, too, as they were controlling the ‘parental crowd’ at the gates.

“Why’ve you come to study English here?” someone will be asking the kids who’ve qualified, the same inane question, this year, the next year, and the year after that.

I looked over from the balcony. Again. I still didn’t have the answer to that question. I guess I'll never have. A fine drizzle caught on, the campus wore a deserted look. I kept myself from falling over the edge; it’s so confusing to be on the inside. It brings back big bad memories...

Back to bicycles: melancholia, pleasures, and surprises

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.
—H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance

It doesn’t need reiterating, but I got myself a new bicycle on the first of May.
More than a month has passed and the enthusiasm for biking remains, though Kolkata city is hardly the place where you can think of pleasant biking.

Around eight years back, I rode to the university on a rusty black Hercules MTB, muttering to myself about definitive todays and tomorrows as I dissected the city’s heart (dumb voice-over from JU community radio 90.6 FM: Tomorrow the bicycle races. Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle. ...)

It got stolen after a year.
Along with my definitives, all dialectical and historical todays and tomorrows, the millenarian dreams that only youth can conjure in its mind.

No regrets. Somewhere, at some new moon, someone else, of the same lost age of innocence and the defiance to unknown complicities, someone definitely younger, is pedaling fast towards those dreams, which I might now call confused, but can never disown their experiences for they taught me much. I have emerged sadder and wiser. Young mind, wherever you are, wish you my realizations without the sadness, solitude and pain it brings when you know your dreams have been played and tampered with.

But the returning to the university seems a difficult task, for the paths, too, have literally changed beyond recognition.

Biking is an attitude, I remember reading somewhere. But in Kolkata, dear, you’ve got serious attitudinal problems when you decide to cycle your way through depending on an eight year old memory.

I lost my way thrice into the mesh of lanes and bylanes that once characterized south Kolkata. Here you took a right turn, and there was a big pond to your left. There you swerved to avoid a bamboo grove, and little fenced spots of green, a garden or two where you could see and smell, at least forcibly imagine the presence of almost all the trees you thought you had lost to a distant childhood in the mofussil.

Nothing remains of them.

The concrete and brick have devoured all, given the unprecedented progress of unplanned urbanization that has swept through the city in recent years. When the heat settled in the melting asphalt and in the shadows of the endless stretch of box-like apartment houses on colony lands, I asked my way through the pointed obscenities that bristled below the late afternoon sky.

I learnt another thing. Apart from some wayward kids, it’s only the poor adult folk who use bicycles in Kolkata. The noxious fumes-spewing motorcycles, the autorickshaws and the nouveau rich red little cars, are status symbols and in an old colonial city, symbols are matters of life and death. These symbol riders take it for granted that traffic rules are to be flouted and anyone on a bicycle is to be ignored, rudely brushed aside, shouted at like a dog, or mangled like a worm. The common logic working in their minds is: “Hey, that was a sod without money or status. Or why would he be pedaling if he could have afforded petrol money?” True, sierras, I got neither money nor status. But even if I had, I would have preferred the bicycle.

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” said Christopher Morley. I am none, but I do deserve a better commendation, for I’ve survived some of their works, say Rushdie’s for instance. And no wonder Kolkata city spews a lot of rubbish in the name of literature coz majority of its pot-bellied poets and authors ride cars and autos. Taa-raa-rum-pum-pum-pum!

But inside the campus, things are different. Envious eyes caress your new black bike, friends and canteen boys share your joys, and an unknown undergrad approaches you and shyly asks for a ride. When you see him speeding away, and you happily shout at him, and pretend to give a chase, you realise that life still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of melancholia, pleasures, and surprises it offers.