5 Bengali words – creative professions

This is the first in a regular series of weekly posts containing bite-sized chunks of Bengali vocabulary I’d like to learn and revise.

The first ’5 Bengali words’ will be on creative jobs.

Actor – আভিনেতা/আভিনত্র ী (ōbhineta – m/ōbhintri – f)

What would you pay for online?

The Times paywall went up on Friday, charging visitors £2 a week or £1 a day for access to the well known UK newspaper’s site and that of its sister publication The Sunday Times.

It’s led to much debate about the wisdom of charging for online content, particularly content that’s generally available elsewhere in one form or another.

How will it end? As the Beehive City blog notes, “nobody really has a clue.”

Window shopping for music (part one)

I rarely buy music on a whim these days. There’s no need to buy an album just to find out what it sounds like, in the same way that Spotify and We7.com have done away with the need to buy a CD you used to own on vinyl or cassette – only to find out it wasn’t as good as you’d remembered).

Instead I find myself doing far more window shopping for music than actual shopping. But I’m planning a virtual trip to Amazon some time soon and have been mulling over what to buy.

So, for a short series of posts, I’m indulging my inner Nick Hornby (reader be warned!) with a bunch of self-indulgent lists.

Being won over by the iPhone

Until I was given one I couldn’t see the point in an iPhone.

My mobiles to date have always been the cheapest pay-as-you-go ones, the kind that last two years  before they literally fall apart.

On one the number nine button stopped working, more recently another had a loose battery that would switch the phone at odd, usually inopportune, moments.

A Fine Balance

It’s some time since I read a book that hit me as hard as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Bought on a whim at a second-hand book fair, I knew nothing about book or author. But the cover said it was shortlisted for the Booker in 1996 and I want to read more books that are, at least a bit, more up to date that some of my usual ones.

It’s such an expansive book, covering generations of multiple families, shifting location from city to mountains to village and back to city, that I was surprised to realise that, on one level at least, you can boil it down to a year in the life of a widow, her student ‘paying guest’ and the two tailors she employees to work in her flat.

A gentle confinement

On the one hand it’s just a bit of snow, and the BBC last night certainly went into apocalyptic overdrive with tales of The Great Freeze, on the other hand there is a sense of being gently confined.

Only a handful of cars managed the hill that is the only exit out of our estate yesterday, and my local train station made the national news as an evacuation point for rail passengers whose journey wasn’t going to continue.

My more distant neighbours, some of whom I talked to today for the first time today, say the shelves of the Tesco Metro have been stripped, and tomorrow is the third day A’s primary school will be closed.

Resolutions

Last night was a pleasant but unassuming way to end a decade. It’s not that celebrating the end of the last millennium ten years ago has spoiled New Year’s Eve forever, but with kids in tow the 31st December tends to be a fairly low-key affair.

One thing I do like about the beginning of a new year is the opportunity to make resolutions, those hopeful reminders of things you want to do over the next 12 months.

This year mine are simple: learn more Bengali, read more of the books that keep piling up and write more fiction.