Part-8: August 17,2007 My childhood in our remote farmland: We own a farm on a basin of a stream which is about 20 minutes walk from our house so it is a little remote to us. We can grow paddy there twice a year. It is a really nice plot of land, very close to the source of water, a kind of golden plot. But the problem is that during the rainy season, it is difficult to reach the place because of the swollen stream and without any bridge over it. My childhood was in deep touch with this land. I used to go there to tend the plot, to water the plants and to take care of the budding paddy plants from the monkeys. Sometimes a flock of monkeys came and nipped the buds massively, destroying the crop of the whole plot. Thus the hard days would start right from the preparation of the nurseries during the month of Magh or Falgun until the crops were harvested and brought to the house. Mostly I with my dad had to go to watch the cultivated plot so that the crops grew safely with enough water and fertilizer. While returning home, we had to collect firewood or the grass to feed the cattle. The life used to be very hard after transplanting the seedlings which needed to be regularly watered. Particularly in dry seasons, there wouldn’t be sufficient water in the stream and it was very difficult to supply enough water to the plants. It would be further hectic during the harvest time. We had to take help of several people for cutting and threshing the ripe and dried paddy and carry the sacks on our back to our house. We used to thresh the paddy seeds from the plants on a big flat rock on the side of the stream. Sometimes the swollen stream from a heavy rainfall overflowed the rock and claimed the paddy that was ready to be housed. We used the straw for feeding the cattle and for roofing. I remember the moments of carrying the bundles of straw up along a street soaring up rapidly to our house. An exhausted body due to the hard work of the day was now squeezed with the load of paddy sacks or straw packs! What a hard life I lived that time and the situation is still the same with my dad and other members there! Sometimes I cursed my birth-place but that was of no help! The nice thing is that the evening meal after a heavy work of the day was so sweet that there is nothing sweeter than that meal in the world and the sleep of the night after an exhaustive work of the day was so gorgeous and heavenly that there can not be any nicer sleep than that sleep. Those meals and sleeps were much-much-much better than the meals and the sleeps of the Semesters with Home Assignments of Quantum and Statistical Mechanics during my PhD coursework. God! Those were the days of the balance of the physical and mental work but now are the days of more mental pressure than a physical fatigue!