Here is a list of a few popular Bands working in Kolkata at this moment: (If you could add to this list I would appreciate that) :

CACTUS – the First to call themselves a Rock Band. Would be touring six cities in the US in October this year. Most famous song : Halud Paakhi

Fossils - Rock Band, Rupam is the main lyricist, singer. Always-aired-song on FM : Ei Akla Ghar Amar Desh

Chandrabindoo – Their kind of music is difficult to label. They basically do ‘what they like’. The first group to translate Simon & Gurfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” in Bangla.

Bhoomi – One of the most popular bands of Kolkata, they changed the way people think and talk in Bangla. Their song Barandaey Roddur  is almost synonymous with bangla contemporary music. I mean, when people talk about  ‘aajkalkar gaan’, they automatically think of this song.

Krosswindz – The first to be featured in Calcutta University Journal as a Band in its own right. The most famous song I would like to mention here isn’t composed by them but made popular by them. It was later adopted by James for the movie Gangster , Original composition by Mohiner Ghonraguli : Prithibita Naki Chhoto Hotey Hotey…

Lakkhichara – The younger generation, with Gaurav Chatterjee, the son of  ”Mohiner Ghonra’ Gautam Chatterjee, as the frontman and the drummer of the group. They started singing compositions of Mohiner Ghonraguli while they were still children. The most popular song I last heard was : Jibon Chaichhey Aro Beshi Kichhu.

Mohiner Ghonraguli (Mohin’s Horses) : The Father of Bangla Bands, both this side and that side of Bengal. They all learned from them. Everybody picked up from where they left off. The group never achieved either fame or recognition except for a few stray reviews in Newspapers by friendly journos or personal admirers in their musical lifetime but left a legacy behind for evryone to look upto them as pioneers in the field.

Telephone is a song that a lot of Bangla Bands sing (by Crosswindz), Poth Gachhey Benkey (Crosswindz), Bhalo Lagey ( adaptation by Paroshpathhor)

Abhilasha, Paroshpathhor and numerous other Bands have left a body of hummable and interesting compositions and disappeared…

I only mentioned Bangla Bands from this side of the Ganges. There is a sizeable and very strong representation on the other side – in Bangladesh. They are richer, more widely known, technically advanced perhaps and have a regular underground Band Music movement in their part of the country.

I mean to find out more and would keep posting it here for those who care and love these Bands. If you share what you know, here, for all of us Probashis, who live far away from Kolkata and often do not have any access to this music at all, thanks to the utter indifference of record companies and to an extent due to people’s ignorance too, it would be  great.:-)

For am sure if they were heard, the Bangla Bands would be loved and appreciated anywhere  :-)

After all they say music has no barriers (unless you create them or let it develope through ignorance, right?)

Ian Parker, retd Physicist, seen here with wife Margaret Parker

Have you heard about the Honeywell Buzzword Generator? People are inclined to use a lot of words like “The Theory of Knowledge” to sound clever, without really knowing what they mean. I have a number of grave misgivings with the whole idea as applied to teaching.
 
 Emphatically grammar is needed in Machine Translation systems. Google Translate uses pure statistics and this shows. Google‘s Arabic translation is absolutely appalling. It makes no reference to parsing. To do a machine translation you need first of all to parse. Once you have a parsed version of a language, translating it is relatively easy. You simply look the words up in a dictionary, get the correct inflection. OK you do need to then use context to resolve ambiguities but 90% of the battle is over with a parse.
 
 However to say that machine intelligence prompts us to a particular view of grammar although persuasive is not in itself compelling. The human brain is capable of doing a lot of things far better than a computer. Pattern recognition is one of them. One does not either send the Indian cricket team to NORAD to learn how AI performs missile interception. No, cricketers perform that task instinctively. My difficulty with a “theory of knowledge” is that TOK refers to mathematics and mathematical machines. It assumes implicitly that humans perform tasks in the same way as machines. What are the instincts involved in language? Is there an instinct that enables us to pick it up faster than other pieces of knowledge? There might be, but the literature is ambiguous on the subject to say the least.
 
 The fact of the matter is that people who are bilingual have the grammar of both languages instilled in their subconscious. You certainly do need grammar to be able to understand a language. The question really is do you get that understanding by simply listening/reading another language, or do you get it by explicitly learning grammar. The only real answer would be to to a control experiment…

The question to me is this. If you were going to the British or Indian embassy in Damascus, would you learn phrases or would you learn prefixes, suffixes and their compatibilities with different stem types? I think if you are going as a tourist you learn phrases, if you are a diplomat or a business person you should learn about prefixes, suffixes and grammar in general. As I have said it depends on your level and perhaps how well you remember.
 
 To me there is one other piece of evidence. People can learn the Koran by heart and not be able to put together meaningful sentences in Arabic. If you really could learn a language in this way, one would at least expect someone to know Arabic after learning the Koran by heart and looking at a bilingual text.

No you need to understand a structure. All the empirical evidence is in favour of this point of view.

When I had recently written that we need to teach grammar, Ian had commented that he agrees. So I had requested him to write why HE thinks so.  What you read above is the matter he sent in to be posted here.

Ian says: I am a retired scientist with a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence. My wife is a theologian specializing in Church History. I speak French and German fluently. I have some knowledge of Spanish and have used this for my examples on the resolution of ambiguity.

Von Neumann proposed a theory of formal languages. It should be pointed out that all of Von Neumann’s languages were context independent. Natural language is very much context dependent. I discuss the provision of a context free language.

In fact I believe that the achieving of Artificial Intelligence will be in the form of a context independent operating a parallel operating system.
His website is here

“In a broad sense, any appointment, that is a deviation from the past practice in that state, is referred to as a para teacher. This broadly refers to large number of teachers recruited by the community (though not always), at less than the regular teacher pay scale, for the formal as well as Alternative schools, to meet the demand for basic education” source: http://www.educationforallinindia.com/page154.html Copy Right: DPEP Calling

“Since all the teach­ers will be appointed on contract in the state and the cadre of regular teacher has been done away with, therefore the contract teacher system has become the regular system. The government of Rajasthan has taken a similar policy decision…as decentralisation of accountabil­ity framework.”.

In Madhya Pradesh, the govern­ment policy is to appoint teachers only on contract basis. School teachers will henceforth, no longer be, a regular government employees.

How It Began: mostly for states like HP, Rajasthan. The Rationale behind the drive:

1) A sizeable number of small size habitations in remote and tribal areas, in different states, which do not qualify for formal primary schools within the state government norms…finan­cially not viable.

2) In regular schools, to ensure a minimum of two teachers in every school.

3) Because It does not require any significant increase in financial allocation to fill up retirement vacancies of regular teachers.

They were meagerly paid (initially it was Rs. 100 per month which was raised to Rs. 200 p.m.) because they had to work for only about two hours daily. That is how the concept of para teachers in education came into existence…Currently…not because they are working part time or the services they provide do not justify payments more than what they are paid currently.T hey are paid less because of state governments’ financial inability.

Qualification required for Para Teachers: Class 5 passed.

So am sure we can ALL tell what to expect. Would any highly qualified, properly eduacted person like to adopt teaching as a serious career? Would they survive?

How many para teachers per state?

Andhra Pradesh (35,000), Gujarat 485),   Rajasthan   (18,269), Arunachal Pradesh (10,961) West Bengal (8,065) Assam (2,332), Kerala (385) and Orissa (380). (Pl see looks like Gujarat no. has been tampered with-ALL aided schools in Gujarat pay INR 4000 to High School teachers).

Interesting to note here: the highest literacy rate is in Kerala out of all these states! Orissa has the highest number of people clearing the civil services exams! In these two states the number of ill-paid teachers is below 500!!!  In Assam it is less than five thousand!!! Despite insurgency there? Amazing or not enough data?

Why is communist West Bengal in this list at all? Isn’t it here that Tagore had laid the foundation of Shantiniketan and had said that for good education it is necessary first and foremost to be able to SUSTAIN our teachers. So he built quarters for them with adequate salary to see that they do NOT starve with their families.

 The government doesn’t have money but why would hundred year old reputed wealthy private schools like Convents in Gujarat do that? Do they lack the resources? Do they depend on the Government for Financial Aid/ Grant? Do they charge subsidised fee from students? Why can’t the non-govt aided schools pay their teachers the full salary they deserve, if they want QUALITY teachers with quality time to devote to their profession?

  Isn’t t there any smart economist/MBA/Financial Wizard to help the government generate money to pay their teachers?!!! What happens to all those students of ours who do pass out and go to these business schools? Somebody please save the teachers!!!

Thank you Ian for taking time to share your views here.

I propose We teach Grammar. Like they used to. Every good web-designer worth their salt know ‘code’. Infact, the wizards would tell you code is poetry ! What code is to a web-designer, grammar is to whoever uses it all the time!!

Introduction to Ian Parker : A Brief Bio in His Own Words

I am a retired scientist. I gained my PhD in theoretical Solid State Physics from the University of Sussex (England) in 1969. I have worked most of my life in Industry. I have a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence and am a regular contributor to the usergroup “Creating Artificial Intelligence” I speak fluent German and French and have some knowledge of Spanish.

He blogs here:  http://ipai.blogspot.com/ and have Guest Written here: http://www.paperoftheweek.com/2007/04/18/guest-contributor-ian-parker/

My specific assignment is to attempt to re-vamp a three year old site. Put in new content, change the look of it, bring out the Newsletter. I give them a blue-print in word, and then the designer would write the code for it.

This made me get back to WP and revive my interest in blogging.

Now throughout the process I noticed that:

1) I make random mistakes* to “see” how something works. Like activating Flickr on my a/c. I got it right only after the fifth try. Sure fire sign that am learning.

2) I try to read code, tramp around geeksites to get a hang of their language, so I can talk to my designer better AND faster. You do undertsand all of us work under a deadline here. Admissions are right round the bend in November and we want to be ready before folks hit the site.

3) I also learned to read code so I could edit the matter on the dummy before he uploads it to a server site.

4) Infact to make sense of what his problems are, what he needs and what I need to do to ensure maximum hits for our site I ended up learning about SEO, dummies, WYSIWYG, Dreamweaver and its interface etc.

So, like instead of saying, “I want, that, when people touch the bold lettered dates in our calendar they should not have to click, but instead as soon as they touch it with their mouse they should see the event planned for that day.”  Phew! Was that long?!

If I could simply say, and I have learned it now {am shwoing off   } ”I need a mouse-over on the dates, and maybe you could use AJAX”. Ten simple words and it’s done! One page taken care of.

Meaning? Well, to make way in this domain of web design, without stumbling too much, I had to get a hang of the grammar of Web Design. I did not become an expert, I don’t even claim to know the rules (how many native English speakers would know what to do when they are asked to use a transitive verb or join a sentence in appositon anyway? or Bangla speakers about the karak-bibhakti of their speech? ), but a very vague, very general idea of how it works and more importantly the ‘terms,’ call them jargon if you like, helps to get work done faster and effectively and to talk about it to the designer.

I saw that code is to web design like grammar is to language. One does much better if one knows both. It reaffirmed my faith that some grammar teaching at school is essential.

*If children are allowed to make those learning mistakes, and not monitored too tightly when they write compositions and stuff, they pick it up faster. More importantly knowing about terms and grammar enables them to talk about language and speeds up the learning process.