Acknowledgement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who showed the path 

Preface

Where did the word Bengali come from? That question irritates every Bengali in one or the other chapter of life. However, no good answer to that question becomes available either from the parents or from the teachers.

 

Having found the answer to that age-old question by combining some arguments with his own life experience, Naru has tried to share it with other Bengalis. The Tibetan merchants did the coining of the term Bangla.

 

 

 

Chapter One Introduction

 

Rollercoaster     

 

A dream was paying regular visits in Naru’s sleep after the termination of the Bangalore phase of his life. He was trying his best to kick-start the next phase of his earnings. In his dreams, a chariot-like vehicle was appearing which was so short in length that it could hardly accommodate its four wheels on which it was moving. Naru used to find himself on the howdah-like seat of the vehicle, which was exceptionally tall. It would be as tall as a three-storied building in Naru's imagination. The moment he discovered himself on top of that running vehicle, Naru could easily feel the position of the last bone of the spinal cord with which presently extinct tail of the human species was said to be connected. That bone used to let its position be felt. No question was there to get woke up with a jolt as his life tempered his soul in its furnace for a considerably long time. The vehicle generally started to move in a jolty and unbalanced manner, making it difficult to remain in the seat. Neither the vehicle had ever reached its destination nor got Naru grounded ever.

 

Finding himself in a similar precarious situation was beyond question while he used to dream in an awakened state. 

 

It was a long time that Naru mastered the art of dreaming awake. Actually, he enjoyed that art very much. Riches were never a topic of his dream in that state. His dreams revolved around unknotting some unanswered questions that he was carrying in his mind for a considerably long period. He gathered these questions along the course of his formal education. Every now and then, he found answers to a lot of these unsolved questions only to reject them at a later date in the light of newly accumulated information. Even the rejections brought him satisfaction and a sense of joy, which was very precious to him. Nullifying his own derivation with sharper logic was a source of gratification for him.

 

During that period a number of times, he experienced another dream involving a sky-high swing. He would swing around it and at times used to feel that he would fall off it. At those times, that very bone used to register its existence. His dreams never brought him to a point where he was ultimately thrashed to the ground. Many times his dreams left him in the mid-air when broken. It is not a case that he never tried to show audacity to decipher dreams; he does it even today. His achievement in that field was of no difference than that of the others.

 

His fate catapulted him to the Himalayas from his birthplace in the Gangetic plains at the end of that short stint of his life. In the beginning, he was at the lap of the hills and, ultimately, within a short period of time he was placed at the hilltop. The nature of the jobs he could ever manage to grab was such that travel always remained an integral part of his life. Travel inside the entanglement of the Himalayas always called for going up and down continuously.

 

Chapter Two Query Build-up

 

Similarities in Names

 

 

The end of the dreamy-childhood called for his admission to the secondary school. He went to the biggest school in his district. That school has the distinction of being one of the few modern era schools in the whole country, which started its journey about a century ago. As the biggest school around, it drew students from far and wide. From those students Naru came to know about the names of places, which were quite difficult to make any sense of. Generally, the names of places that he was aware of until that time bore some meaning when analysed grammatically. The bus service was spreading rapidly during that period. The school building was at the nerve centre of that small town on the side of the legendary Grand Trunk Road, which he learnt was running from Howrah to Peshawar, a great distance. Absence of infrastructure and planning converted that nerve centre into a bus stand. Here the bus stand indicated to a kerb area where buses flocked together by displaying the greatest ever skills of adjustments of big bodies in an illogical small place without following any rule. That stand did not offer any other service to anyone, neither for the buses nor for the passenger. Simply, it was a place of congregation. Literally, the situation used to be very complicated. Pulling out the greatest of his power of observation, Naru found many names written on the windshields of those buses, many of which were impossible to make any meaning of in his mother tongue, Bengali.

         

There was a chapter about the history of Grand Trunk Road in his textbook where he found a name called Sialkot. He came to know about a place called Mangalkot, not very far from his hometown, through his classmates. The nearness of these two names drew his attention, and he was excited to find partial commonness between those two names. He was amazed by the fact that the two places were geographically apart for thousands of kilometres, but then also they had strikingly similar sounding names. ‘Sial’ and ‘Mangal’ were Indian words having dictionary meanings. The common portion of these two words was ‘Kot’, the meaning of which was unknown to Naru and also to all the people around. Naru deciphered in his mind that ‘Kot’ had to be a geographical feature, which was present, equally in the two places concerned.

 

Later Naru came to know about many places whose names ended with ‘Kot’. He never could make out the meaning of that word, but he was sure that word indicated a geographical feature. Either that indicated a water body of particular nature or a stretch of land having a certain gradient or the presence of forest around or any geographical feature similar to these. Naru felt respectful towards his own wisdom.

 

Later in life, for a very long time, Naru would remain immersed in the joy of such discoveries. Actually, that would become his very personal secret passion. He would engage in deciphering the unexplained knots of the world around him.

 

His advancement in formal education exposed him to the realisation that the quest started from any of the peripheral leaves of the tree of knowledge would certainly bring the seeker to a road that indicated a common base of all knowledge, which was like the trunk of that tree. That idea became solidified when he became able to peep inside his specialisation subject of study, Marketing Management, after peeling off the outer cover in his own manner.

 

 

 

 

Unsolved Question

 

 

In his nascent days, nothing was incomprehensible in the teachings of grandma. Everything was stringed together by logical explanations. The problem started after the completion of the primary education. His education in the Bengali medium exposed him to the geographical details regarding Bengal a bit more in the early classes. Whatever was served on the platter of school curriculum, he tried to grasp those, but he remained unable to understand the root of the word Bengal.

 

The renowned expert who forwarded the explanations of different names related to Bengal was a student of his school a long time ago. The

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Bildmaterialien: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Cover: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Lektorat: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Korrektorat: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Satz: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 07.05.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-3984-5

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ॐ श्री विष्णवे नम: (OM SHRI VISHNAVE NAMAH) Late Bishnu Pada Chakraborty, My Father