Monthly Archives: April 2012

A cryptic message

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On his way to office, Neil’s phone peeped, indicating that he had a message. Since he was driving, he did not look at it, but wondered if it might be from Mabel. He was planning to go on a four day trip into the southern Rockies, and had invited Mabel to join him. But she was not sure if she could get away on Friday.
Neil would not read messages while driving. He decided to wait till he was stopped at a traffic light.
He looked out at the white speckles in the sky to his left that he had noticed through his peripheral vision. They were snow geese – lots of them. As he looked, they flew in to land on the agricultural field at the side of the highway. Snow geese had been a part of Neil’s life ever since he came to the pacific coast of British Columbia. At certain times, their numbers grew as more of the migratory birds arrive from Siberia. Some would then stay back, while the bulk would move on south across the border and fan out into the United States. IN the summer, they would fly back to Siberia. But some of them came in the winter to settle around the Fraser valley and go no further.
Neil guessed it would soon be time for them to return home to their summer grounds to raise chicks. Soon, he would not be seeing any more of them.

Snow geese landing on a field in Delta, BC

He took an exit at Knight’s street and eventually came to a traffic light inside the city of Vancouver.
He remembered to check the message on his phone. It was from Mabel. The message was : HI 6TH OK CALL ME
The text vaguely reminded Neil of the old days when telegrams had to be abbreviated into cryptic sentences to pass important news to far off relatives. He had seen a lot of old telegrams that his parents received, all kept in a box. Most where typed on a thin strip of paper, which then were glued on a telegram form that was printed on pinkish paper. It contained such cryptic messages – announcing births, deaths, marriages, safe arrivals and other events of relatives and friends.
Neil had no trouble deciphering this message though. Since he had Mabel on his telephone’s list of contacts, the message already identified itself to have originated from her. His phone clubbed such messages going back and forth between him and Mabel on a single thread, which made reading through both practical, and interesting.
They were heading into a long Easter Weekend. IT comprised for for continuous holidays from Friday, the 6th of April through to Monday, the 9th.
Neil had been planning to use that period to visit the lower Rockies of British Columbia and Alberta. He was keen to see if Mabel too might join him.
This was a major change in his lifestyle of late.
A sort of a bachelor till this point, he was apt to either plan this trip all by himself, or perhaps with another like minded male friend.
Neil’s interests were not very commonplace among the Indian diaspora. And while he knew some of the local Canadians, he did not know too many that shared his interest exactly, either.
The thing is like this – a lot of Canadians liked to visit the mountains for recreation. Some where for skiing and going along powdery slopes on snow mobile. Neil was not keen on that. In fact he did now know how to ski and had not made a serious effort to learn.
Its not that he disliked the idea of skiing. But he found out, early on – that the industry was geared to generate a lot of money through these activities. So, going to ski was not easy, even in Canada, without spending a lot of money that eventually end up in the hands of corporations. Somehow, the notion of pristine spots on mountains being the property of businesses, and all the gear that one needs to own also costing far higher that they should, put him off this hobby.
He liked nature but liked the right to walk around in marshes and swamps and dry country and mountain slopes that were unspoiled and unmodified by man, as far as possible. Also, he could understand a nominal fee to visit some parks, where the money was used to maintain the area and prevent its degradation. But the spot of skiing, in Neil’s eyes – was a whole different thing that he did not wish to enter.
Hereabouts, near his own home, he liked to put on his hiking shoes and go walk along the Fraser riverbed or the dykes along the shoreline of the Pacific ocean, watching the lowland vegetation. He loved to look at the tireless rounds taken by the northern Harriers as it glided in slow circles above the reed bed in search of food.

A female Northern Harrier in search of food

It cost him virtually nothing to do that, and he felt closer to nature than in man made institutions to allow him to enjoy a sport that appeared to him to be also a fashion statement that required access to a measure of wealth in order to engage in it. Civilization was geared so one would constantly strive to earn more money, so one could spend it all away in order to make someone else rich.
Neil perhaps still had too much of his upbringing from rural landscapes of Bengal still in him. He had not yet fully merged with Canada. And so, skiing was out.
Snow shoeing was a different issue. It allowed one to walk on stretches of soft snow and usually in back country to see beautiful nature. Going in winter had an added protection in the sense that bears are likely to be hibernating or less active. This, to Neil was an academic and hypothetical issue. He knew Canada had bears and had seen enough black bears up close and Grizzly not so close, to appreciate that. However, he still could not mentally grasp the issue that he might encounter a bear suddenly at some remote spot, where the bear would be startled by him and might make a threatening charge.
Anyhow, snow shoe was something he might have gotten used to, especially since he liked nature.
But somehow, in his few years in Canada, he had not picked up this hobby, while still spending most of his time outdoors, just soaking in the new country. Perhaps he would try that out, along with snow hiking and outdoor living in tents this coming winter, perhaps with Mabel.
Meanwhile, there were still lots of things to see and places to visit, for him. One of them was the Yoho National park and the surroundings. And he was planning a trip there during the Easter holidays.

He had a specific attraction for the Yoho national park. It contained the Burgess mount and the famous fossil beds of Burgess Shale.
Some half a billion years ago – that is over five hundred million years in the past, North America was far from its current location. Neither were all the pieces of the present North America in one pice. But most of the parts lay on its side, at right angle to its current orientation. Further, the central portions of Canada was a shallow sea instead of the current high Rocky mountains. And the time frame was the Cambrian.
This was a period when life had evolved in the ocean, but had not yet invaded land. There was an explosion of diversity among the sea creatures, some of which left no descendant. Most were soft shell creatures. Backbone, or spinal column, had not yet evolved properly. The only hard bodied creature of high population were the trilobites.
And, the soil of the shallow sea bed was a very fine silt. Underwater land slides to deeper depths would occasionally bury some of these soft shelled creatures and the fine silt would preserve their shape. The depth would prevent their bodies rotting fast or being consumed by bacteria. Time and geologic forces would then convert the soft clay into shale and the remnants of the soft shell creatures into very rare fossils. So rare that the Burgess Shale deposit is recognized as one of the best sites for the Cambrian era fossils in the entire planet.


And Neil was interested to go there and check the area, out of curiosity. He knew the fossil beds were not open to public. Also, at this time, snow still covered the slopes. But he still wanted to look around the area.
Mabel had thought she might need to be in town on Friday for something relating to her work in her uncle’s construction business. Therefore, she could not confirm if she was able to go with him.
And now, the cryptic text message on his phone confirmed she was good to go with him on the 6th.

The light turned green. Neil concentrated on the road, and let the iPod read out a book while he navigated the roads from Knight Street on to the downtown area of Vancouver.
He was onto the eighth chapter of Bernard Wood’s book on evolution and came to the issue of multi-regional against our of Africa theories about the evolution of modern humans. The issue of how to define a modern human was being talked about, along with the issue of possible Euro-centrism in the view that not only modern civilization evolved in Europe, but also modern man.
The fact that ancient cave paintings, a sign of advancement in human evolution, was there in Europe and not in Africa, was being used as evidence that Africa did not evolve modern humans.
But, as the book was careful to mention – there were other scientists, some of them from Europe itself, that pointed out two major faults in this theory. The first was – there were cave paintings in Africa. It is just that people were not searching for them in context of human evolution, and these cave paintings were not exactly where human evolution was thought to have originated, in Africa. The second problem was – in order to have cave paintings, a region should have caves in the first place. The region were the species evolved into a more modern form, did not have much caves.
Neil was absorbed in the book and thought back on the issue of the first humans in North America. People were still debating on this. Originally, the notion was that the folks came across the Bering strait at a time when the ice age locked up so much of the water on land glaciers that the corresponding low sea levels exposed vast tracts of land thus providing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Humans might have inadvertently crossed over to North America while following the Wooly Mammoth.
Alternately, they could have island hopped over the Aleutian island range. Or, if Asia was not the best candidate, the could have come from Europe.
Some believe that the ancient stone tools in Spain resemble the early stone tools of humans in North America. Therefore, they say the origin of the first humans in North America could have been Iberian rather than Siberian.
Clovis point stone tools, supposed to be of Asian origin and carried by the early humans – is also under scrutiny. One recent view is that the Clovis point technology might be wholly home grown in North America. This means, humans might have come even earlier, to the continent, and then lived long enough to evolve a new kind of stone technology.
Some recent archaeological finds seem to point signs of the first arrivals to around 50,000 years in the past. This can essentially turn conventional wisdom about the origin and propagation of modern humans on its head.
Neil pulled his car into the underground parking lot.
Modern humans of thirty, forty or fifty thousand years in the past will have to wait. For now, he was heading into the Rockies to have a look at the places that gave rise to the grand parents of modern humans, the first of the multi-cellular ocean creatures of the Cambrian period – over five hundred million years old.
And, Mabel was likely to be with him.

An Eagle in the heronry

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He was fast asleep when the phone rang. It was not normal for Neil to be in bed till past 8 AM, even on a holiday. Besides, this was to be a bright and sunny day, according to the weather forecast online. It had been overcast and raining up to Saturday, and it would be raining against Monday onwards.
So, his plan was to make the most of it, by rising early, and heading out first to the heronry at the base of the route 17 as it headed out into the ocean for the ferry terminal at Tsawwassen. He often wondered who decided to name it, and spell it, that way. It was one of the more difficult names he had come across. It could easily have been spelled Tuasen or something.
Anyhow, the natural heronry at that location had come into prominence only recently. It was reported that a mass nesting site across the border at Point Roberts, USA, was the chosen site for many of the herons. But then an increasing number of bald eagles started nesting there too, with the aim of grabbing the large heron eggs as food for their own growing eagle chicks. Matters went so far as to prompt a group of herons to abandon that site and go look for another suitable one for mass nesting. And they found this spot at the edge of land merely twenty or so miles to the north, and just across the border in Canada.
And this season, the numbers had swelled to over 250 nests – about the largest nesting colony of great blue herons Neil had ever seen in his life.
It was there, that Neil had planned to visit early in the morning. But, his creator, meaning the writer of the story, Tonu, got up late. He went to sleep late the previous night. And so, as the writer got up late, by default Neil too, got up late. But in the case of Neil, he was woken up by a phone. The writer, Tonu, had to get up by himself without any external stimulant other than the light coming in through the large bedroom window.

Neil had fished for the telephone at the bed side table, while still have asleep.
“Hello”
“Hi, this is Mabel, morning.”
“Umm” Neil rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Morning”. He squinted at his watch.
“Did I wake you up?” Mabel sounded surprised.
“Umm, yes, but thanks. What time is it ?” He was still squinting at the watch.
“Its ten past eight. You were to pick me up a half hour ago” Mabel laughed. “No harm done. Just wondered if the trip is still on.”
“Fuck .. Yes its still on, of course. Jesus, how did I sleep so late !” Neil was now fully awake. He got off the bed, found his slippers, and shuffled off to the toilet, still holding the chord-less phone to his ear.
“Give me another twenty minutes Mabel. My apology. I shall pick you up. Fuck” The last expletive was an uncharacteristic curse Neil had directed at himself. Normally, he would not be late, and even if he was, he would be relaxed about it since the change in schedule only involved him and no one else. But here, he had involved Mabel, and then failed to keep the time.
“Fuck” he cursed himself again.
“Relax, Neil. Its cool. Take your time, I shall have two mugs of coffee ready.”
“Great”, Neil was ready to gargle with the mouth wash, and brush his teeth. “What coffee?”
“Your favorite – Expresso instant”
“Okay, shall buzz you as I approach.. Mwaa, see ya”
That was then.

Meanwhile, the writer, Tonu, had done his own thing, including making his coffee. He had loaded two of his favorite cameras with two of his favorite lenses, and headed out by route 17 towards the Tsawwassen Ferry, the place with the impossible name, some twenty odd kilometer from his home in the south-west, and within a thousand feet from the US border.
On the southern end of Delta, to the west, the city had built two deep water terminals, to help the sparesely populated town to also benefit from economic activities of trade and transport without having to rely on nearby townships. But the ocean front on the pacific side as well as the bay on the south east were gently sloping and shallow soft mud deposited table of the continental shelf, not the best suited for development of ports.
To overcome this barrier, the city had built, on the pacific coast and just north of the US border, two long fingers of of road leading out into the ocean. Instead of building a bridge which may not survive major earth quakes in this quake prone area, the passage was built up with gravel and rock piled up from the sea bed. One of these two terminals were for cargo, and was called Delta Port. The other, further south and almost touching the border, was the passenger ferry terminal.
It was at the base of this road leading to the passenger terminal that the herons had selected for their mass resting. And it was there, that Tonu was headed.

Neil had put on a Canadian made wool-cotton blend button down insulated full sleeve shirt over a pair of jeans and his time trusted hiking boots. All this he did almost on the run.
Since he got involved with Mabel, he had taken to using mouth wash a lot, conscious that his mouth might smell odd to her, with his particular disorganized eating habits. Neil was effectively changing, and adjusting to accommodate another person inside his circle.
Mabel too had sort of dressed for the occasion, basically having a baseball cap on her head, and a blue-grey hiking jacket on, zipped at front and without a hood. She was wearing thick cotton jeans of brown color and had a pair of hiking shows. She even had a backpack on, and was holding two carry on mugs, presumably with the instant espresso coffee that she had promised to make.
She looked lovely, with the hair on her pony tail that stuck out of the back of her cap.
Neil waved at her and pulled the car over. She tossed the backpack in the back seat and got in, placing the two insulated mugs into the cup holders. Then she leaned over and kissed him briskly on his lips.
“You look lovely” Neil mentioned, meaning it. “And again, I am sorry I was late.”
Mabel placed her finger on his lips, silencing him.
Neil turned towards the highway, getting in the right lane for it, and took a sip of the coffee. “Aaah” .. It felt good as the caffein worked its way down his gullet.
“Want a snack?” Mabel fished out a wrap of paper from her jacket pocket and opened it, handing him a cookie.
Overhead, he could see a number of immature bald eagles chasing each other, and even a few adult ones. This was likely the season of the bald eagles to fight, to court, and to nest and raise chicks. The sky was often full of the shrill cry of bald eagles.
It felt good to be living in British Columbia, Neil thought.
“Its great, you know?” He said as he slowed to take an exit from the highway, on to route 17.
“Yeah… what is ?”
Neil nodded, tilting his head her way. “Everything. This bright blue sky. Me living in British columbia. Those eagles crying in the sun. You sitting next to me, and the radio weather and traffic channel talking about powdery snow falling on the mountains around us, while here down at the valley, the temperature is five, and the day looks so gorgeous.”
He slowed and turned right, into route 17, and looked around the agricultural field and dykes. There were blackbirds and sparrows in the low bushes. A ring necked pheasant browsed the grassland at the edge of the road ahead of them, and ran off as their car came closer.
In the air, a group of five long necked trumpeter swans flew north. He partly lowered the driven and passenger side windows and slowed the car slightly. Sure enough, the call fo the swans came through into the car. Mabel had noted the swans and were watching them, her face opening up in a wide smile.
Neil wished he was not moving, and that he had his camera in hand. But he was not complaining. He had the swans in his camera from other times. There were not many countries or regions in the world, where you could hear swans while driving.
“This is what Canada is, to me.”
Mabel smiled and nodded.
“And you, of course.”
Mabel nodded in mock seriousness. “Of course”.

A great blue heron at the Heronry

He pulled his car into the truck and trailer parking lot at the side of the road leading to the passenger ferry. Right ahead of them was the steep bank where the hill started.
At the base there was a cluster of tall black cottonwood trees, with dogwoods at their base and smaller shrubs leading up to some shallow fresh water ponds.

It was on the tall deciduous trees that the herons made their countless nests.
They stepped out of the car and onto the fresh air and sunlight. Behind them to the northwest, the highway 17 carried a few fast moving vehicles to the terminal. They could see beyond it the waters of the pacific, and Deltaport further away. There were ships alongside the jetty and cargo work was going on. Giant cranes perched over the ships.
In front of them, was the stretch of bushy lowland with a shallow fresh water marsh, where the frogs had started their cacophony – this being the first of the warm days of spring.

Across the denuded shrubs, stood the tall series of also denuded cottonwood trees, like tall sentinels. They could see behind the trees the land rise sharply to be the base of the hills. And in those denuded cottonwood trees, there were nests for herons. Countless numbers. The trees were chock full of herons that were jostling, crying out and pecking at each other, in a fierce struggle for maintaining their little patch of treetop real estate, while also busy either building nests, or attracting a partner to share the nest with.
Neil opened the trunk, took out the tripod with the swinging gimbal head for his camera, and set it on the ground, extending its legs to the fullest. He took out the long lens and proceeded to attach it to one of his cameras.
He kept one of his cameras, attached to a long black Sigma lens inside a grey canvas backpack designed for toting photographic material. He used it because it allowed him to store the camera body still attached to the long lens. He did not have to attach and detach the lens from the camera each time he used it. Besides, the backpack had many configurable pockets to store more lens, battery, flash and stuff.
Nest to the backpack, were two field guides, a binocular, and two books on sustainability.
Mabel leaned over and picked up one of the two books.
Neil adjusted the camera on the gimbal stand, balancing it  in the stand,  with the lens extended to full focal length. In that position, the heavy camera-lens combination would not tilt forward or back on its own weight in the gimbal cradle, even if he did not tighten the holding screws. That way, it could be freely swung side to side as well as up and down without having to fight against the force of gravity.
“Whats this ?” Mabel asked, flipping through the blue paperback book.
Neil glanced sideways. “Ahh, I have not fully read it yet. Its title says what the book is about.”
Mabel read through the title softly – “Beyond growth”. She turned it to read the back cover.
Neil lifted the Gimbal head so that the viewfinder of the camera was at his eye level, and he did not have to crouch to look through it.
Before he could train the camera at the herons, a soft chirping sound nearby drew his attention.
On a shrub a few yards from Neil, a solitary robin chirped advertising itself. Neil turned the camera on the bird, and pressed the video record button. The camera could take stills and high definition video. On the screen, he could see the birds throat swell, its beak opened and oscillate, every time it chirped. The sound of the chirp came clearly through to him. He was conscious that the built in microphone was prone to pick up wind noises and amplify them. Ideally, he should be able to use an external and directional mike that would pick up the sound without the wind. But, this was primarily a high end still camera that could also take some video.
The bird kept chirping for a minute.
Neil kept filming.
Mabel, seeing the bird, closed the book and watched silently.
To their north and west, one of the ships at Deltaport sounded its air horn – that penetrated the air above the blue ocean waters, and came to the bird and to Neil. The bird stopped in mid call, and flew off.
Neil stopped the recording.
Mabel stepped closer, watching the heronry, but still clutching the book, by Herman E. Daly.
Neil wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her slightly closer in a sign of affection, before releasing her.
He left the tripod mounted camera and returned to the opn trunk of his car, fishing out his second camera.
Mabel watched the herons. “There are so many of them”
Neil nodded. “I think they have not hatched their eggs yet, or if they have, the babies have already grown. I do not see a tiny one anywhere.”
“Why do you think they have not hatched yet ?”
“Well, I am not sure when exactly they hatch. But you can see, many of these birds are coming down to those bushes by the marsh at the base of the trees, picking up twigs and sticks, and flying up to their nests to use the twigs as lining. They appear to be still engaged in nest building.”
“Yes. I can see that” Mabel nodded, turning towards the trunk of the car. “Can I use the binocular ?”
“Of course. You don’t need to ask.”
Back at the mound where Neil had placed his first camera, Mabel watched the nests, and the birds, through the binocular.
Neil attached another long zoom lens from Sony on his second camera and slung it over his neck, closing the trunk of the car.
Mabel lowered the binocular and pointed with her left hand – “There, looks like eagles are around too.”
Neil had noticed them. “Yes, there is a relationship in these areas, between heronry and eagle nests.”
He lifted the handheld camera to his eyes and looked at the tree tops, and then to the single mature bald eagle — and followed its path till he spotted the second eagle.
“There – the eagle nest. There is an eagle on it already. I think it is hatching an egg, the way she is sitting there.”
Mabel looked up, and shifted slightly to get a better look.
The robin came back and perched itself at the top of the brush again. It watched them briefly before starting its advertising calls again.
To the east, the puff of cloud had cleared, and the horizontal rays of the sun struck the heronry from the side, creating a contrast to the hitherto subdued scene.
The second eagle, sitting on a lone branch close to its nest, lifted its head skyward, opened its yellow beak, and let out a series of shrill calls, its white head lighted by the sun and in high contrast against the darker gray and greed shades of the trees in the shadow behind it.
It was going to be a fine day – Neil thought.

A road for Mr. Elgin

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I remember there was an Elgin Road in Calcutta of the old. Perhaps it is still there, in Kolkata of today. But they keep changing names of often. So I don’t know.
But, finding that book on Lord Elgin, the person behind the name of that road from my younger years in Bengal, was curious. And that too, while looking for some old history of Canada.Anglo Indian Attitude - the book.
And then to find out that he had had a lot of influence in three countries that I am reasonably well linked with today – Canada, China and India, was equally interesting. He was from such an era that I have no good grasp of. This was the time frame when India was ruled by a corporation – The East India Company. One of the books from that era claimed that a land of 300 million people were governed by just 1,000 civil servants.

It also claimed that the Indian population was fully one sixth of the world population at the time. That book, about the Indian Civil Service, or ICS in short, claimed that this statistics of a thousand civil servants administering a population of three hundred million made that body, the ICS, the most powerful civil service body in the entire world. But, that was a different book, named the Anglo-Indian Attitudes by Clive Dewey. And I am digressing a bit.

It all actually started with Ms Leena Chatterjee, who is a family friend and a neighbor and who I address as Leena di (Meaning Leena the elder sister, or a person deserving the respect of an elder).
Leena di and  her husband Tan Lee da had been a source of inspiration as well as a link with our collective eastern heritage.
Tan Lee da is an unique amalgam. His father, a famed Chinese scholar was befriended by Tagore and invited to Santiniketan, Bengal, in the 1920s, when India was still ruled by the British Government, And no more the East india Company. As a result of his father coming to stay in Bengal, India, Tan Lee grew up in Santiniketan and became a Tagorian at heart and at the same time a first batch IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) passed out civil engineer and architect by profession. His internationalism was perhaps completed by him working in India at first and then onto north and south America, before setting down in Delta, British Columbia. To cap it all off, he is a better Bengali than me in about all aspects except in appearance.
Leena di was the quintessential scholar that was only part Santiniektani, and part many other things that broke the mold. For one thing, she was a believer of Gandhi, Tagore and Karl Marx at the same time. I found that combination a near impossible mix, but then Leena di could separate what Marx thought and believed, from what people made out of his thoughts, and the same for Gandhi and Tagore. That was quite a feat. I did not study Marx much. To me, the similarity between Mark and Tagore was restricted in their beard. In fact I used to think Tagore’s beard to be more similar to Tolstoy’s for example. The similarity between Gandhi and Marx was harder to discern. Both wanted social change – which could be considered a similarity. The effort to bring that social change also became specific political paths for different nations. Those paths, incidentally, were diametrically opposite for India and Russia. One preached reaching its objective through non-violence or ahimsa, while the other called for armed revolt and a blood bath.
Leena di is also half Rajput and half Christian from her mothers side, and among the most educated person I knew. To me, educated meant something more than a piece of certificate paper.  Those who want proof that women might be better scholars than men, look no further than Leena di.
And to cap it all off, she had read the Vedas in their original sanskrit, and had also studied the Indian constitution, and knew a lot about constitutions in general.
So how is it that I write a blog named after Elgin, while speaking about Leena di?

It all had to do with the Imperial Gazetteer of India. Or rather, some of the volumes that were published by the British with that name, a long time ago.

The British had these great books published during their rule of India. But, before these could be published, material has to be gathered, which essentially helped describe India in as many ways as could be measured. These books were perhaps the bible for the future generations officers of the Indian Civil Service – ICS – that came to serve the Raj. Initially they would all be British, and products of the best schools of Great Britain. They were appointed under section 32 of the Government of India act of 1958 of the parliament of the United Kingdom.

 Initially, all thousand of them were British. Then, Indians started getting into it by passing the test. The first Indian to become an ICS officer was Satyendranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s elder brother. By the time of independence about half of the ICS officers were Indian. The other half, British, mostly left and returned to Great Britain when India became an independent nation.

Satyendranath Tagore - the first Indian born ICS officer.

Being stickler for detail and record keeping, they produced a number of volumes about India that was better than anything contemporary India had up to that point. In some ways, they are still the best work on the subjects covered, till date.
And Leena di had studied them in the past, and was looking for them in the present. And she had asked me to find them for her. She was also looking for census records of southern parts of India from late 1850s onward, in a hope of finding some details about her maternal ancestry, who were Rajputs that traveled south and settled around Kerala, became rich and powerful but retained their ethnic distinction by not intermarrying with the locals. Leena di wished to peer into those details, if possible, through British census and gazetteers.
I had located a few of the later publications under the name of Imperial Gazetteer of India volumes on line for her. There was a lit of altogether 26 of them in a series. The first one, Volume 1, was titled ‘The Indian Empire – Descriptive’ and was published in 1901. The last one, Volume 26, was name ‘Atlas’, published 1931.
These could be read on line. The first volume started with the following text:

“THE INDIAN EMPIRE
VOLUME I
DESCRIPTIVE
CHAPTER I
PHYSICAL ASPECTS

No one who travels through the length and breadth of the continent of India can fail to be struck with the extraordinary variety of its physical aspects.”
The term the British used at the time, was continent, and not subcontinent.

Anyhow, some of these versions were available to be read online only, and not downloadable. Leena di was not the most proficient in browsing the internet. Besides, Leena di was also interested in earlier publications.
And thus, out of interest, I located another source of them, through eBooks. One of them, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, by Sir William Wilson Hunter, 1840 – 1900, volume IV.
This over 500 page book was scanned from the original and put up as iPad readable eBook, costing 5 dollars.

And I bought it for my own iPad and read through it a bit before informing Leena di. And then I located some more books. One of them – The Tribes and Castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, by Herbert Hope Riseley, was known to Leena di and she got quite excited that I found this book too, again for only 5 dollars.
These books were scanned and turned into iPad readable books. The quality of scans were very high, and included hand written notes, rubber stamps, and even signatures.
It was from a short text in that book that I wrote a piece on the ongoing novel, about the Lepcha tribes of northern Bengal and Sikkim.

Anyhow, I had by then downloaded free sample sections of over twenty books from the British Museum Library. If I wanted to buy the full version, each would cost me 5 bucks. All these books had been scanned and put up on line just in the last few months, so they were practically as virtual books on line.

And then, I searched for information of the formative years of British colonization of Canada, and found two. I bought both. One was titled ‘Canada under British Rule 1760 – 1900’ by John G. Burinot. And the other, was on Lord Elgin.

Now, that rung a bell. I did not know too much about the British Colonials of the late 18th century, but I knew Elgin was one of them.
I remembered that old Calcutta had a road in his name – Elgin Road.
And where was this road ? Well it was on the way to the Maidan or the New Market of those days. It was in the region just to the south of Theatre Road, west of the Chowrangee Road, and north of the the Circus Road. But these days, the Governments had been busy confusing the heck out of folks like us, renaming and re-renamign roads after dead people. Now we have Shakespeare Sarani, Picasso Bithi, Mujibur Rahman Sarani, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Lord Sinha Road, Gorky Terrace, Albert Road, Laudon Street, Sarojini Naidu Sarani, U.N. Brahmachari Street, Madam Courie road, which is a dead end and many more. I often thought the American system was best, all roads horizontal are streets and numbered progressively, while all roads vertical could be avenues and also numbered sequentially. Thus, one could easily guess where any street crossing is located.
Reading up on parts of that book, I learned that Lord Elgin was a highly influential administrator for Canada, and had later been sent to China and India at important historical junctures, and was partially responsible for the history as it turned out, in great historical events in those regions.
For example, I learned that Lord Elgin, upon request received from India regarding difficulties the British were facing in relation to the fomenting discontent that would eventually spill over as the Sepoy mutiny, was instrumental in diverting many British military personnel and equipment that were going elsewhere, and sent them to India at a most critical juncture.
Likewise, Elgin, upon landing in China, helped in the final deals made there at the aftermath of the opium wars, that essentially ensured that the days of the Chinese rulers were over, and her days of subservience to Europe started.
In those aspects, his work turned out to be in support of colonization of Asia by his Britain in particular, in the case of India, and Europe in general, in the case of China.
His work in Canada, however, seemed to be of a different kind, ensuring that Canada would be an equal partner in the group of nations that believed in the same king of England, but otherwise ruled themselves. This, of course, only related to European immigrants of Canada, and not the original inhabitants of the land.

I had not read the book through. And there surely would be more books on the topic. I was no historian. But, reading what I did thus far, it appeared that he, being a product of his time – was probably racial in his thinking and could not consider non-Europeans as equal, or deserving of fair Governance.
I decided to read up some more about those tumultuous days, when the British empire, even after losing the war of independence against USA almost a century earlier, was still in its expanding mode, and the loss of the continental USA was to be made up by huge gains elsewhere.

So, if the local Governments of West Bengal, decided to change the names again, and if Elgin Road no more existed, I decided I should not feel too sorry. New happenings pile up on top of old ones, and eventually, take new flavor and shape. To know it all, one would need to pry away layers of it and peer deeper to find out how things used to be. That, in a nutshell, could be the essence of history. The road might have had another name even before Elgin. What was it, and how did it get that name, before it was changed to Elgin road?

I might talk about all this with Leena di some day !