Information On Literature: Fill & Download for Free

A Tamil girl here.In my perspective Bengal stands apart from the rest ,thanks to the beautiful amalgamation of modern thoughts and traditional beliefs.This renaissance period breathed in a new life that changed the face of this state .The sons and daughters of this state openly challenged the oppressive orthodoxic beliefs.Several other domains where Bengal differs from the other states :LiteratureBengal was blessed with the likes of Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore ,Bankim Chandra Chatterjee ,Bibutibhusan Bandopadhyay and Sarat Chandra Chattoppadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam .What makes Bangla literature different from the rest?It is because the works of these geniuses potrayed women in a new light , not as a subordinate to their male counterparts but as their equals.In Nastanirh ,Charu is potrayed as an intelligent woman ,whose spouse loves her deeply yet finds it difficult to spend time with her. He asks his brother Amal to hone her literary skills and to encourage her to exhibit her flair.But unbeknownst to him, Charu and Amal end up developing feelings for each other.This idea in itself seems scandalous, even today ,but Kabiguru somberly puts forth the fact that women are not inate objects ,they do have their own desires and aspirations.Kabiguru's works include several literary gems like Gora ,Ghore Baire ,Kabuliwala, Teen Kanya ,Choker Bali and Gitanjali ultimately for which he was bestowed upon with the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913 ),and him being the 1st non European recipient.Apart from his literary works,he developed his own school of music called Rabindra Sangeet and was the founding father of the Vishwa Bharati university.Bankim Chandra Chatterjee spearheaded the Bengal Renaissance . His first major publication was Kapalkundala. The line from Kapalkundala “Pothik Tumi Ki Poth Haraya Acho” has been immortalised in the minds and the hearts of Bengalis. Debi Chaudhrani talked about the valor of the bandit queen who fought the British oppressors and yet stayed truthful to her religion and customs. Vande Mataram ,our national song was adapted from Bankim's work Anandmath.Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is well known for his works - Debdas ,Choritrohin ,Parinineeta and Bibutibhusan is well known as the creator of Apu Triology and Taranath Tantrik.Kazi Nazrul Islam ,along with Rabi Thakur , Bankim Chandra Chattoppadhyay and several authors voiced their displeasure and anger against the colonial rule through their writings. Kazi Nazrul Islam ,who was known as a rebel poet later went on to become the National Poet of Bangladesh.Daroga Priyonath deserves a special mention here.He was the pioneer of crime thriller in Bengal .Saradindu followed his footsteps and he created the most popular Byomkesh Bakshi -The seeker of truth(Satyaneshi).CinemaBengal spearheaded the revolution in Indian cinema. The parallel cinema genre was popularised by Satyajit Ray ,Mrinal Sen ,Ritwik Ghatak .Satyajit Ray came from a family of polymaths.His father Sukumar Ray was also a pioneer of Bengali Literature. His most notable works include Abak Jalpan and Abol Tabol. Manik da's grandfather too was a polymath and he set up a printing press U.Ray and sons which was considered to be one of the finest printing presses in South Asia back in those days . His work Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was later adapted by Satyajit Ray and he directed the movie of the same name . Upendrakishore's grandmother Kadimbini Ganguly was the first South Asian woman to be trained in western medicine.Satyajit Ray's movies were way ahead of his times. Jhol phoring scene from Apur Sansar is a classic example of his out of the box creativity.Apart from directing timeless classics like Apu Triology ,Charulata ,Agantuk ,Ashani Sanket and Ghore Baire ,he was the creator of Feluda ,the sleuth ,Tarini Khuro and Professor Shonku.For his contributions towards the film industry he was bestowed with the Oscar for life time achievement .ScienceJ C Bose was a polymath and he proved that plants have life.Satyendranath Bose , worked on the quantum mechanics and is accredited with the discovery of Boson particles ,which obey the Bose -Einstein stastics.Freedom MovementsThe Bengalis have contributed immensely towards the cause of Indian Independence.Be it Netaji Subash Chandra Bose ,Rash Behari Bose ,Chittaranjan Das or Shyama Prasad Mukherjee ,the sons and daughters of Bengal have valiantly fought against the British oppressors.Spirituality and ReformersAkin to the Bhakti movement in the South,Bengal too has produced some of the greatest spirtual leaders and reformers of this country. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda's contributions to the spiritual world will never be forgotten.Raja Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar were the pioneers of change against the societal evils of their times.This is just the tip of the iceberg. The contributions by Bengalis can't be summarised in a single answer. Mother Bengal's sons and daughters have always made her and the nation proud.I will wind up by quoting few of my favourite lines to express my love for Bengal and Bengalis.Tumi Robe NirobeHridoye MomoTumi Robe NirobeNibiro Nibhrito PurnimaEdits : Thanks to everyone for your lovely reviews. I want to express my gratitude to Mr. Shahnawaz ,Mr. Seetaram and Mr.Apurba Roy Chowdhury for their suggestions that have definitely helped me to improve my answer.Cheers

To find meaning. Without which you will live a miserable, bitter life. Suffering, if one suffers well, is the most profound method to “know thyself” and, in turn, find meaning.Meaning trumps happiness, joy, and love in the quality of one's life. Meaning is the task we are all in this earth for. Its a strange thing, indeed, that the human brain is set up specifically to have an inate drive to know itself and therefore know one's meaning.If you don't understand this whole “meaning” thing, dont worry, you will. You are too young. The urge to find meaning hit me around 35. The literature says it happens between 35 and 45.

I learned Chinese primarily because of the characters, which are exceptionally beautiful. However, that doesn't make them easier to learn, it just gives you the motivation to keep going.Writing and More Writing? Really?I wasted a lot of time trying to learn characters the Asian way, by writing them over and over and over again. Writing them like that commits them to muscle memory - your hands can trace them, like your PIN at the ATM, even if your brain cannot remember their shape. However, muscle memory only works with very regular re-inforcement and I don't hand-write Chinese often enough for that to be viable, at least not beyond the most common 600 or so characters (it explains why this method works for Asians though, or used to work, getting weaker with the advent of computers and cellphones).Photographic Memory?What's left is trying to commit the characters to your real memory, so that your brain can recall how to write them when your hands cannot. That's where it helps to have a photographic memory, or even any kind of memory that's good with pictures - I don't have either, I think in abstract terms only, and yet I really wanted to learn Chinese characters!The Solution for Analytically-minded WesternersFirst, stop seeing the characters as a series of almost-random strokes. Familiarize yourself with the basic elements and their inate meaning. This will also help you distinguish 王 (king), 壬 (ancient burden) and 玉 (jade) or 土 (ground) and 士 (knight). You will notice that the vast majority of Chinese characters are not new, they consist of two or more of the basic elements. If you know the basic elements, you can then construct a mnemonic to link the elements to their meaning, a little story to help you remember or even a downright explanation. For example, the character 明 meaning "bright" consists of sun and moon - not difficult to remember, is it? The character 休 meaning "to rest" consists of a person and a tree - mentally fix the idea of an exhausted hiker resting against a tree and you'll never forget this character again.This works for complex characters as well, and for each character you can choose into how many parts you split it, e. g. if you want to think of 偷 meaning "thief" as (person + making a canoo) or as (person + Chinese roof + moon + knife) - I went for the latter, with a story involving a thief on the roof of a house in moonlight, knife in hand, in order to climb into one of the windows and steal stuff. Stories can be colourful, absurd, racy, nonsensical even, as long as you personally find them memorable.Learning StrategyFor the purpose of learning a large amount of characters this way (I memorized almost 2500 in one non-intensive year), it makes sense to go from basic characters to more complex ones, also so that you don't have to memorize all possible basic elements at once. Unfortunately quite a lot of frequent words involve characters that are complex combinations of 4 or more elements. So character study has to be somewhat separate from regular textbook study at first, until you have a foundation. It is possible to go this path alone; Zhongwen.com gives you an analysis of each character's components. But I don't recommend it, because then you'll encounter the issue of having one peg word corresponding to several characters, or inadvertently learning out-of-use characters, or learning complex characters before learning the parts that they're made of.I recommend getting a book to guide you. Depending on your background, there are three books I can recommend for learning characters:1) Alison and Laurence Matthews' "Learning Chinese Characters" proposes pictures and stories to go along with every character and the stories will even help you remember the pronunciation and the tone if you choose. On the down side, this book only covers about 1000 characters, sorted roughly in order of appearance in textbooks (!); it's really great as a textbook companion for a beginner with little prior knowledge of characters and methods.2) William McNaughton's "Reading and Writing Chinese" (simplified characters or traditional) is a better choice if you have already learned more than 200 characters and taught yourself how to make mnemonics based on the character parts. This book is also guided by frequency and teaches you more than 2200 characters but doesn't feed you the stories.3) T.K. Ann's unabridged "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" is for the pros, sinologists and the like, covering almost 6000 characters, basically all that you'll ever need, even when reading literature. The book doesn't give stories so much as etymology - etymology with a bit of fantasy filling in the gaps - usually making characters very memorable. On the down side, you will find frequent characters mixed with infrequent ones, so getting this book only makes sense if you're planning to learn all characters anyway, and if you have time to wait e. g. till the end of the first volume to learn some characters that will come up in the first few lessons of your Chinese textbook. T.K. Ann also provides lists of words using the characters, but again you have to be careful - some of these words are clearly literary or outdated, without being marked as such.4) I guess I should mention James Heisig's "Remembering the Hanzi" (with traditional or simplified characters) for completeness' sake, but I would not recommend it except possibly if you already used Heisig to study Japanese Kanji. His book has several drawbacks. The biggest is that he doesn't provide Pinyin (pronunciation) with the characters, even though in Chinese it makes sense to learn pronunciation at the same time (characters with the same elements usually have a very similar pronunciation and characters usually only have one possible pronunciation). Also, Heisig made the mistake of largely copying his Japanese Kanji book for this, giving little thought to how frequent/useful these characters are in Chinese, or whether a different order of introduction might make sense for Chinese.+ AnkiI used these guides to initially memorize the characters and then Anki to put the characters in my long-term memoryNote that you probably won't need to graduate e. g. from "Learning the Chinese Characters" to "Reading and Writing Chinese Characters" to "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" when you're ready to learn more - once you've learned 800+ characters this way, the method and the meaning of basic elements should be so ingrained that you can learn all future characters on your own as you encounter them. The main advantage there would be if you're making a push to learn lots of characters BEFORE you encounter them.Good luck with your studies!(I originally posted this advice on my blog www.learnlangs.com. Do check it out for more language-learning advice. Also note I'm working on a new site for learning Chinese using a similar approach as Duolingo or Khan Academy; find it at www.learnyu.com)