During 2000-2010 myself and my artist friend Amitabh Bhattacharya used to spend a lot of time ruminating our common memories of childhood in old Brahmin families in the Bengal suburbs. Both of us witnessed declining Brahmin Pundit families in Bhatpara ( a small traditional hub of learning in south Bengal once renowned for scholarship as well as ritualistic orthodoxy of all sorts of Dharmasastric origins . Many Mahamahopadhyayas belong to this place ) . Curiously the family members can be characterized though as brilliant but typically eccentric at the same time which can sometimes even appear as perversion ! In almost all families , you are sure to have someone almost on the verge of madness ... I used to observe them with a scanner developed through my new grown familiarity with Indian Philosophy and Amitabh as an Artist grown from within this very Brahmanical ambience . As a matter of fact , by this time - nearly after 30 years of communist regime in Bengal , almost all traditional knowledge resources were in a state of ruin. Though the Pundit community of Bengal seems to have rejected " modernity" , but at the same time they were terribly insecured as the authentic custodians of traditional knowledge ! So most of them appeared to live in a psychologically marginalized state of mind ! I tried to capture this very Brahmin ambience in a broader perspective of the clash of tradition and modernity in my writings , while Amitabh did this in his paintings. This way , this Book happens to be a joint venture , which can be best described as a self ethnographic account of our personal experience with the-then traditional pundits and their ambience in a few places of traditional interest in Bengal . I tried to portray the fractured left-over or scattered remains of our own scholastic tradition mainly in Bengal ! In fact I have tried to set up a kind of dialogue here with the collective Past I am psychically a part of.The figures and portraits in this book can be best described as reflections of Amitabh's brahmanical memory of Bhattacharya families in Bhatpara