BEFOREBEING EVEN five percent confident in uttering bare Bengali words, I thought they would come out too crude, funny, even gauche from my unpracticed mouth. In my head, I kept comparing myself to the wizard of words, Jhumpa Lahiri, and how she had legitimized her love affair with Italian, writing an entire book in it, giving interviews, going out in the world with so much gravitas about her love for the new tongue. I, on the other hand, had barely started picking up the language after I moved in with my partner in mid-2018.
As much as we were a part of the same religion, we did not celebrate it at such lengths. Whenever around them, I would try to listen in on their conversations. I wanted to know the real reason behind the celebrations, and somehow it seemed to me that their language was a portal to that. At my house, we only ever celebrated weddings this way, for days on end, stretching to a couple of weeks, at times.
I would hear M speak with parents, argue with friends, politely chat with a colleague, or bargain with a vendor. Subconsciously the language started making home in the crevices of my being. Without even the slightest of prodding I would be able to recall words before colleagues, displaying an unending eagerness to learn more and more.
It was jittery, an exercise in extreme patience and anxiety, but I felt charged. I moved through it electrically, responding to this urge that emanated out of nowhere. I had to fight the natural instinct to give in, back off, be my lazy self, but I continued learning.
In my extended friend circle, I was probably the only one who did not know more than three languages. The Indian equivalent to the dumb, vulgar, uncouth, uncultured American. I hated it and wanted to get rid of the tag. I wanted to show off too, like a guy from the Hindi film industry I was once friends with who knew a sum total of seven Indian languages, and then English. Ashen-faced, I had not been able to look him in the eye then. In this way, learning Bangla for me was an attempt to belong to a bigger populace, to outdo myself and to keep my language-oriented brain engaged.
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Echor Chingri Kalia or Jackfruit Shrimp Curry is one of the most traditional bengali dish.In Bengal we call Jackfruit as echor or "Gaach Patha" since vegetarians often compares it with Goat/Lamb Meat. We know Bengali People are great food lover. ...
Today I am going to share how to make authenticate Chanar Dalna / Cottage Cheese Curry recipe (vegetarian dish) at home with all of you. The taste of the Chanar Dalna Curry is really very good without any onion and garlic.The softness of the Chana / ...
Today I wanted to show how to make Daab Chingri - Prawns Cooked in a Tender Coconut Shell at home very easily. This is a special recipe for upcoming Bengali New Year (Pohela Boishakh). Daab Chingri is a very delicious & yummy dish mostly ...
Nothing brings more colors in our life than Holi and this Channa Chaat in Potato Nest is not only very colorful but a composition of many wonderful taste. In every bite, you will feel the crispy outer layer of the nest / basket and the tasty, tangy, ...
Green Banana Kofta Curry is a Bengali delicacy, which goes with chapatti / rice. This is a classic everyone's favorite vegetarian recipe. Myself and my husband Abhisek love this recipe very much. Though the banana is very nutritious fruit, it has ...
Potoler Dolma or Stuffed Pointed Gourd/Parval Curry is a traditional bengali dish. It's a perfect dish for festive season. You can easily make this with left over meat. I have used Chicken & Shrimp both here, however you can use any meat of your ...
Cauliflower in Coconut Gravy is a perfect complete vegetarian (No Onion, Garlic) recipe you can make on Ganesh Chaturthi. You may think the Cauliflower in Coconut Gravy is probably a common dish that we seldom make at home.However, trust me, it is a ...
Sabudana Vada is a very yummy,crispy and quick recipe you can make in 30 mins, if you have the Sabudana soaked previously. This can be served as a perfect vegetarian appetizer.Make sure to serve this hot. ...
It was my first brush with a city named Kolkatta and its people. And on that morning began my life-long love affair for the culture, people and food of West Bengal. My stay in and around Kolkatta was a short one, but I was enriched with music, art and culture.
The humble and much loved daler bora is a very interesting concept. They are small lentil fritters that we Bengalis often enjoy with rice and dal sometimes as a part of a pure vegetarian meal. Essentially, a typical part of the Bengali meal is to pair something fried with the dal. I am retrieving the recipe for Mushoor daler bora, or red lentil fritters for this post.
In some ways, this is too humble a recipe to work a blog post around and yet here it is. The reason is because, someone just wanted the recipe. I find it easier to work up a post when I am asked for a recipe. This way I have it for posterity. The distinction of lentils fritters at least in my house is that they are made with yellow or red lentils. This is different from the Southern Indian Lentil fritters which are typically made with white lentils or Urad dal. All things considered however these fritters are quintessential comfort food.
The weekend draws to a close, I am feeling incredibly well rested and just a little reluctant to head back to the general craziness of things. It is for moods like this some crunchy daler bora calls your name.
This site is a personal effort at chronicling the recipes that I created. It also showcases our small commitment towards reducing our family carbon food print. There is more about me and how the family fits into the equation on this page and all about our little curry garden, here. Like most of the good cooks in my life, most notably my grandmother and mother, my cooking is very practical and approachable.
I am Tanmoy Sarkar
[Github link] [HuggingFace ID] [Twitter]
I am final year undergrad computer science and engineering student. My area of research is Deep learning, accelerated computing. Currently learning NLP, Quantum computing.
Why BengaliNLP
NLP in Bengali comes with different set of challenges. Bengali has large number of letters, vowels. Unlike English or other majority languages it can form conjugate letters combining two or more letters. In spite of being member of Indo-European linguistics Bengali has different set of characteristics, way of expressions, structure of sentences. And the most important thing may be if we can solve NLP in Bengali we can even solve other languages like Hindi, Sanskrit etc. as these are all similar and solving this would be a huge achievement as there are approximately 1 billion native speaker in Bengali and Hindi combined in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc.
Projects I am currently working on
In spite of being a rich language there are very few good open source dataset available on Bengali. So I have decided to create my own dataset. We have formed a small community where there are some developers working on gathering quality datasets from classic novels, articles etc. along with the dataset annotation. It might take some time to finish that task but we are pretty much excited thinking about the possibility of NLP in Bengali Language and this dataset. Also I am planning some other community projects which I will be talking about later.
A little more about me
I am from India and I speak in Bengali(Native), English and Hindi. I am still new to NLP and I am very much focused towards it. Other than that I like doing literally everything like from blockchain to deep learning, from accelerated computing to Quantum ML also I love music
@khalidsaifullaah @partham Thank you guys for your interest. Here is a discord group link for our little community - , we have already started little bit of work although we are still figuring out the annotation process. It would be awesome if you guys join us and we will then figure something out. . Ping me there after joining, then I will add you guys to Bengali-Dataset private channel.
Hey I am Zaid, I mostly work with Arabic and I am also interested in MRLs (morphologically rich languages). I created this thread to discuss such interesting and difficult languages. I am interested in learning how such languages are similar and distant in terms of linguistics.
I am Sagor Sarker
Github Profile: sagorbrur (Sagor Sarker) GitHub
Huggingface Profile: sagorsarker (Sagor Sarker)
Twitter Profile: _sarker
I have completed my Bsc Engineering in CSE and currently working as an Artificial Intelligence Engineer.
My area of expertise is NLP, deep learning, machine learning.
At present I am not working in any ongoing project, but have interest in building different transformer based nlp model in Bengali.
I am always open to collaborate.
Thanks and regards to all Bengali NLP practitioners.
I am interested in working with multilingual projects and also new to hugging face. I would love to connect with other working on bengali NLP project.
I speak in Bengali, Hindi, and English, and a little bit of German and Marathi.
Hi I am Soham Datta currently working in TCS Research in the area of Data and Decision sciences. I am working on NLP applications but being a Bengali, I want to transfer my learning (pun intended) to bengali.
Rahul (Dev) is a rich, city boy, born to billionaire parents and brought up in Kolkata. On the other hand, Puja (Payel Sarkar)is a traditional, simple desi girl, from a village of West Bengal who is brought up by her only brother, Indra (Tapas Paul). He is heartbroken when their father marries another woman and throws them out of the house, humiliating them on the way. Their mother dies and her tomb is built on the small land which they own until the zamindar tells them that it is his land, since their mother had taken a loan from the man. Indra volunteers to work day and night, to pay off the loan as long as they don't tear down his mother's tomb. The Zamindar agrees and the local station master helps them. Slowly Indra and Puja grow up. One day, Barsha, Puja's best friend, comes to their house to invite Puja to their house as she is getting married. Barsha's elder brother Rahul also arrives on the same day from UK, finishing his studies.Slowly Rahul and Puja fall in love but Rahul's father does not bear it as Puja is not as rich as them, and is thus not to their standards; Rahul is also to be married to Rahul's father Shantonu Chowdhury's business partner's daughter, Mona. Shantonu Chowdhury humiliates Puja as well as Indra, who arrives a minute before, and both are thrown of the house after Shantonu Chowdhury accuses them of trying to entice and trap Rahul. When Rahul learns of this, he goes to Puja's house and pleads to her brother to accept him. Indra gives him a chance, just like he was given a chance by the Zamindar when he was little. Rahul is tasked to take care of the cows, clean up after them and grow more crops than Indra by the end of the season; if he does not, Rahul will be thrown out of the village and can never see Puja again. A village boy who was beaten up by Indra earlier, he doesn't bear it. With his goons, Mona's father trying to get Rahul to lose the competition, Rahul has to work hard for his love, eating red chillies and rice everyday, even though he can't bear it. Through many antics from the Village goons side and Mona's side, Rahul eventually proves his love for Puja to Indra, and succeeds in growing more grains. However, the village goon kidnaps Puja and then later tries to rape her. A fight takes place in which Rahul kills the goon, Indra, after realizing that Rahul and Puja should be together, takes the blame for this and spends 5 years in prison. The movie ends with Indra's release from prison which is also when Puja and Rahul get married, in everyone's presence. Shantonu Chowdhury also becomes happy to get Puja as daughter-in-law.
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