A thousand salutes to Lieutenant Leo Gradwell!

September 3, 2014

Lt Leo Gradwell

Lt Leo Gradwell

‘Are you happy in the Navy?’, this was the signal passed to a neighbouring vessel by Lt Leo Joseph Gradwell during a German air raid. An Oxbridge barrister, adept in six languages, he was not quite the man one would imagine fighting the best German warships with only a yacht sailing certificate. Captain of one of the British merchant ships of the ‘scattered’ PQ17 convoy, he had a Times Handy Atlas to stay alive after being ordered to disperse at the lurking threat of the the Nazi warship Tirpitz. PQ17: well, it’s obviously an intriguing code name though quite a historic one.  PQ17 was the code named convoy containing British and American ammunition, weapons and aid that were sent to the Russians  to prevent the unstoppable Germans from capturing Moscow; crossing the hell rough Arctic ocean. Dating back to the venerable Second War, PQ17 Arctic Convoy Disaster has been tagged one of the most infamous naval disasters in the history of warfare. This may seem to have no connection to that of an 18-year old prat’s life. Self-confessedly, even I would have been in the dark about PQ17,  like most other people, had I not stumbled upon the documentary broadcast on the BBC, presented by the legendary, albeit controversial, Jeremy Clarkson.

Time to draw the connection.

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Braving a tempest

June 6, 2014

Budhaditya sitting on the steps at his exam centre

Ready for an exam

The time since I last posted my blog, it has been quite a hurricane for me. And I think I have survived. To say simply, the time has not been the rosiest. Managing the increasing burden of the examinations and the mounting backlog of my music lessons simultaneously has been one of the trickiest legs among all the examinations that I have taken. Admittedly, I have not been out of my home for most of the time – this has been the most vexing parts. It is indeed no child’s play to self-motivate and keep the pace ticking to gobble up the endless miles of the syllabus. Much has been said, opined and written about the much anticipated exams. So I won’t further add to the discussion, though I don’t think I would be able to resist.

There goes a saying, ‘Time and tide waits for none’. While I had focussed on my exams and music (relatively limitedly) the world had not been still. A lot has happened. India has undergone one of the most significant changes in its governance, Narendra Modi (our new PM) taking not only the national but the global media by storm. Not only India, democracy has triumphed in nations such Afghanistan, South Africa and Iraq. The case of Afghanistan has been awe-inspiring proving that all humans have hope for something better. To add, South Africa has re-elected their leader – President Zuma. Seen from the bird’s eye view, a silver lining can definitely be seen peeping from the black, sombre clouds. Witnessing the rise of a man from the echelons of a naïve tea-seller to that of the leader of the largest democracy, to the dew-fresh hopes in Afghanistan for sunny days ahead, it has really ignited my zeal.

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A charming changeover!

February 6, 2014

BB

I posted my first blog on the 9th of December.  Almost two months have passed by and have done so in a flash. Not only two months, we have bid adieu to 2013 and welcomed a brand new year. Not that it has been much of a change for me. With a packed up and tight schedule almost throughout, the transition from 2013 to 2014 has quite been linear and unnoticeable. Well, it would be better off to say such schedule a concoction of extracts of calendars  of that of  a student, a musician, a disciple of his mentor and a budding connoisseur all at the same time.

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Music or studies? How about both!

December 2, 2013

Snapshot_20131203_360x225_scaled_cropp

Selfie!

The neurons of my grey matter were almost overloaded with the different formats of the Java programming language five years back. They meant nothing more than permutations and combinations of alpha-numeric characters – ‘system.out.println’, still stuck in my memory. It was time for exam preparation, rather preparation for puking it out during those tense hours. I had already sensed that computer programming (the backbone behind  modern computing) was not my cup of tea.

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