"What's in a name?" This famous Shakespearean quote suggests that a name means very little in the grand scheme of all things. It is the soul of an individual, object or place that matters the most but events both in the past and present tell otherwise. Before 2001, Kolkata was officially called Calcutta , the erstwhile capital of India and the second city in the British Empire during colonial times. Its birth is a fascinating account of how unremarkable villages can be turned into jewels of urban living. This wider trend of renaming Indian cities has been an attempt to emphasize our independence from the British. There are a multitude of theories on why Calcutta came to be known as Kolkata, the most amusing one being when an Englishman asked a Bengali villager for the name of his village, he answered 'kal-kata'('I cut it yesterday') thinking that the question referred to his grass. In Calcutta, as the population grew, there ...
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."- Logan Pearsall Smith Truth be told, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. My mother introduced me to the fascinating world of books when I was about 5 years old and since then there's been no turning back. Time travelling to the future may be a distant dream, but books are the perpetual little time machines we all have access to. I believe books hold the power of transporting you to a world, to a different place and time where you actually want to stay and see the magic unfold. There has been no better way to escape reality than to lose myself in a book. Whenever it feels like I am drowning in my own thoughts overcome by unavoidable rushes of confusion, reading is the activity that has more often than not kept my head held high enough for me to find solace and happiness. With every page, I turn and seconds that pass by the problems of this world do not feel so intimidating and momentous, i...