Society and Life

Not all movie stars are created equal. If you were to trap all of Hollywood in amber and study it, you would discover a lattice of unspoken hierarchies, thwarted ambitions, and compromises dressed up as career moves. The best time…

Mrinal Sen, the original gadfly of Indian cinema would have turned 100 today. He belongs to that rare breed of parallel Bengali cinema who along with Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak took Bengali cinema out of claustrophobic maudlin,…

Karl Marx sowed the seeds of the labor movement when he wrote: ‘Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor & lives the more, the more labor it sucks’. His theory of surplus value in the magnum…

He was an oddball in the Calcutta of 60s, teeming with anarchists, Trotskyites, Mao devotees and loonies believing in flat earth. The intellectual to population ratio was high even by the usual Bengali standards. Yet he stood out abetted…

On 24th April 1973 the full bench of the Supreme court in the Keshavananda Bharati Case upheld the right of the parliament to amend any provision of the constitution with a proviso that the parliament can’t alter, emasculate or obliterate…

Of the four must-read books written by Indians, Hind Swaraj by Gandhi (1909), Nationalism by Tagore (1917), The Discovery of India by Nehru (1946), and Annihilation of Caste by BR Ambedkar (1936), the last book is most iconoclastic, as it…

Madhusudan Babu is credited with several firsts; the first postgraduate including graduation in law, the first lawyer, and the first minister who played a pivotal role in bolstering Odia’s identity at the turn of the 20th century. But his…

Jean -Luc -Godard was among the world’s most acclaimed directors, known for classics like Breathless (1960) and Contempt (1963), which broke with convention, inspired iconoclasm, and helped kick start a new way of filmmaking, with handheld…

2020, the year of Rat, which made us live like rats in the name of "SELF QUARANTINE,” was enough to weaken our bones and paralyze us from head to toe. But Nah, not in my case. I decided to give my slackened, lazy and passive afternoons a…

Prof. Jan Tinbergen, the first Noble laureate in Economics, had famously said that for each target you need one instrument; like for combating inflation you need to raise the repo rate. Paul Volker, the Federal Reserve Bank governor of…