About this ebook
About the author
Rajshekhar Basu, better known by the pen name Parashuram (March 16, 1880 – April 27, 1960) was a Bengali writer, chemist and lexicographer. He was chiefly known for his comic and satirical short stories, and is considered the greatest Bengali humorist of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1956.Basu began his writing career in the 1920s. He adopted the pen name of Parashuram while writing humorous pieces for a monthly magazine. The name was not, apparently, an homage to the Parashurama of mythology. In fact, Basu simply borrowed the surname of someone at hand, the family goldsmith, Tarachand Parashuram. His first book of stories, Gaddalika, was published in 1924 and drew praise from such personalities as Rabindranath Tagore.
Utsa Bose is a second-year undergraduate student at the department of English at St. Stephen's College, New Delhi. He completed his schooling in Calcutta, trapped in an ambivalent relationship with the language he was born into. It was only after he’d left Bengali as a subject in school that he returned to it, later, embroiled and involved in English. The irony was poignant: it was only by submerging himself in the river of a foreign language that he turned back, homeward bound, towards that monsoon homeland he'd ferried within, throughout.
