Leslie's Laughs

Published in The Telegraph My Kolkata on 28 April 2024. You can read the online version here Or you can read the original below. [The author, a musician by accident and music lover by choice, unravels the threads of the argument that “vinyls are better” as they make yet another endless loop comeback despite on demand streaming and other media.] Disclaimer: This is NOT another Audiophile’s Decisive Comparison between vinyl, CD, cassettes and streaming mp3. But it has been triggered by yet another post about some music icon who still visits music stores to buy vinyls! And of course, the string of comments, on the whole listening experience, both for and against. Vinyl. Pronounced “vie nil”. Yes, I checked it with Google and a few other erudite scholars. The 12 inch polystyrene repository of musical memories, usually black but other shades these days, are vinyls. The pedestrian buyer in Calcutta called them “LPs” for Long Playing Records. Well, in my day folks around me said “vee n...

 [The piece was published in My Kolkata on April 12, 2024.  You can read it online here . ] This is the original as written by me. A teacher by vocation, this Kolkata Goan shares some of his back to school experiences as a student and some insider information as a teacher, very tongue-in-cheek. On the day of the solar eclipse a reader of My Kolkata shared a picture of a circular rainbow seen in Kolkata. It was beautiful and brought to mind all the different imagery of rainbows and their meanings. The one that sticks is the legendary rainbow after the flood in the Bible. This was interpreted as the promise of things to come. The season of Spring is poetically the promise of the future, the darling buds of May. In the world of education, too, it is the excitement of a new school year, new classrooms, new teachers (hopefully) and new textbooks. Or old, depending on which millennium you were born. In the one in which I was born, there was something called “Book Mart Day” - this wa...

 [The original piece was published in My Kolkata on April 7, 2024.  You can read it here . The piece as written is reproduced below.   [The writer has survived the storms of life in Kolkata for six decades, from the pre-electricity era to the post-Covid era. He writes about the storms, virtual and real.] There was a song that Bing Crosby used to belt out from the old gramophone my dad owned. It went like this: Those April showers, they come your way They bring the flowers that bloom in May So if it’s raining have no regrets ‘Cause it isn’t raining rain, you know, it’s raining violets! Bing Crosby warbles on through the song about clouds, hills, bluebirds and daffodils, and all the benefits of those showers, but I get back to thinking about Kalbaisakhi  and how it affects my life.  A couple of weeks ago, after ages, my internet connection started ‘flapping’ - that’s the official term, I kid you not. It came, it went, it came again and as I logged into my onl...