India, March 25 -- If I remember rightly, it was Thursday, March 25, 1971, and my MA (History) final exam was round the corner. We in India then had the audible, omnipresent, omniscient and ubiquitous All India Radio but no electronic visuals. Hence, hearing the evening radio news and reading the morning newspaper were my childhood addictions, exam or no exam. My father - an extraordinary scholar of income tax law, English, Bengali and Sanskrit languages, Astrology (including charting a horoscope) and Economics, and a celebrity senior civil servant of the federal Government of India, who was originally born in and hailed from 2 Toynbee Circular Road, Tikatuli, Dhaka, (then East Pakistan) - was not the type to disturb his son for radio new...