Skip to main content

Book Review: Apna Utsav by Purnendu Ghosh

Apna Utsav by Purnendu Ghosh is an admirable nostalgic memoir cum semi-autobiography. The book is slightly long and stretches up to 300 pages. The book is about the author, he vividly brings forth his life’s phases and events right from the birth to up till now, at the age of seventy. Right at the beginning, the author says: Apna Utsav begins the day one is born. It continues even when one is gone.


The title Apna Utsav means personal celebrations and ceremonies of life. In this book the author mainly brings good memories of his life from childhood to old age. His take on life is not void, rather it’s full of wisdom and experience.

The author introduces his family tree, parents, upbringing, foreign sojourns, achievements, his finicky mental state, relationship with wife and children and much more. The book gains philosophical pattern when the author tangentially sheds light on arts, cinema, country, freedom, education, and so on. Like a veteran narrator, first he starts with his story, and then shifts to a general tone to reach a wider base of audience.

The author Purnendu Ghosh so far has a fantastic life. He got full support of his parents, siblings, wife, and children. In many chapters, he remembers all of them from time and again. It was quite sentimental when his boss at Mysore was crying when he left for IIT Delhi to pursue his PHD. Though P. Ghosh remained glued to his family but his attachment to his teachers and mentors is commendable. Like a true student, he never ignored and forgot them. Also, one of the reasons is that he himself got into teaching profession after some stints in private companies.

He did his schooling and engineering while staying at Kanpur, which is also his native town, where his parents were firmed. He lived mainly in Kanpur, Jaipur, and Delhi…but his Bengali roots got strengthened after his marriage to a hundred percent Bengali girl. He fondly remembers how he would miss his wife while away in Europe. He wanted her to be with him in a paradisiacal romantic place like Europe but he regrets now in the book. Yet overall he did a great job for his family and later on he took them to Germany and Australia.

The author was growing up when life in India was quite simple and devoid of so-called modern gadgets. Life was simply superb in those days, bunking school for theatre movies, and waiting for songs on radio. Amazing to remember such things today. Certainly down the memory lanes, P. Ghosh is quite a nostalgic personality.

The book has many perspectives; it takes us to the journey called life. His stance on jobs and study and highlighting the importance of education, healthcare, etc. is worth noting.

P. Ghosh chronicles his life events in as much as clarity as he could. Overall, it’s a great book for people who have seen a lot in their tenure. And for sure the author’s generation can look up to this book as a resource full of wisdom, knowledge, sacrifices, history, and what not.

On a high note, it’s commendable that the author relied on a simple technique of narration. He didn’t confuse with verbosity, nor there redundancy. In fact Mr. Ghosh should come up with a collection of short stories as his life is full of anecdotes and he knows how to connect the dots in life.

Buy from Amazon India.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should
67 comments
Read more

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo
63 comments
Read more

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r
23 comments
Read more