CALCUTTA -THE CITY THAT REFUSES TO DIE
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin…
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CALCUTTA’S INDIANS TAKE ELECTIONS IN STRIDE
21 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited Calcutta, Nov 21, Reuters – The six Bengalis splashing around a fire hydrant inches from…
The Dauphin and the Figurehead
Timing is everything, and with a number of state elections soon, leading to the general election next year, cynicism and opportunism are manifest. The Congress-led…
CALCUTTA IS FOEVER
Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!”…
Going for Gold
Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a…
Hello, Tomorrow
I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes…
Caste Abuse
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special…
VULTURE CULTURE
PSYCHOPATHY. VOYEURISM. SADISM. Schadenfreude. Vicarious pleasure. Blood lust. You will find several terms to describe the human tendency to find a strange satisfaction, indeed fulfilment,…
Off the Blocks
For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one…