Cultural Press

Call me Warne, Shane Warne Shane Warne dared — and won. Not many gave him or his team much of a chance in the Indian Premier League. But then, he won despite his reputation. And it would be fair to say that many weren’t even talking strictly about his professional rep. After all, Warnie isn’t the sort you’d describe as a gent in flannels. He’s a sort of buccaneer with his romps, his drinking, his smoking, his devil-may-care attitude, always…

Switched off. Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar/Unsplash The word ‘power’ has evolved into two disparate but related meanings. The more banal of the two refers to the production and distribution of energy for industrial and domestic use. The other meaning, the favourite object of inquiry of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, refers to a complex mechanism by which authority is applied to help sustain predominance and strategies of exploitation. But the application of the second…

It was the summer of 1956. No one outside the Eastern bloc had much of an idea of what exactly was going on inside the Soviet Union. The superpower was hidden from the Western gaze by the Iron Curtain. And it had to be checked out. With the help of lots of luck and some totalitarian whimsy, two Parisian journalists — Dominique Lapierre and his colleague and photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini — got permission to travel to the heart of Soviet…

There must be many instances when the telephone, the photocopier or the computer refuses to comply with your basic requests. There may be nothing wrong with them, but they either ignore you completely or take the wrong order. Those hassled by such hostile behaviour from machines would be glad to have a word for it, and there is. Resistentialism. One might also like to know that there is a word called millihelen, a unit of beauty needed (at…

Nemai Ghosh has been capturing well-known Indian artists at work for years now. But his favourite time was spent with Satyajit Ray, he tells Sayandeb Chowdhury It was in late 1967 or early 1968. Nemai Ghosh was deeply involved in theatre. He was also an observer of endless card playing sessions at his south Kolkata apartment. Ghosh was not a photographer by any stretch of imagination. Then one day, purely by chance, he acquired a fixed-lens QL 17 Canonette. And…

All lines are drawn. Photo by Adrien Bruneau on Unsplash There has not been a time in Bengal’s history, at least in recent memory, like the past two months. The death of young Rizwanur, the violence in Nandigram, the sudden riots against granting residency to Taslima Nasreen — all have created a vortex of socio-political reactions that seem to have shaken up the arrogance of the ruling CPM and mobilised the crowds. One significant fallout of Bengal’s autumn…

Saskia Sassen, Helen and Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University is considered one of today’s most respected urban sociologists and is known globally for her landmark research on transnationalism, denationalization and the impact of globalization on the movement of labour, capital, and urban life. A prolific author, Sassen’s recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages and A Sociology of Globalization. In Mumbai to present the Urban Age Award, she speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about Mumbai being a…

Indian political leader Mohandas Gandhi circa 1935. In 1938, 23-year-old Phillips Talbot was sent to India on a fellowship to learn about British-governed India. An American Witness To India’s Partition is a collection that springs out of his experiences in India and the subcontinent between 1938 and 1950, chronicling the build-up to the independence of India and Pakistan, and the early experiences of the new states. The book was released in India in an event organised by Asia Society in…

Buddha’s way. Photo by Leonard Laub on Unsplash The future of the Left in India will depend on the success of the ‘Bengal line’. There was a sigh of relief all round when the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) announced, after its central committee meeting in Kolkata, that it would give the UPA more opportunities to find a way out of the current imbroglio over the nuclear deal and not precipitate a political crisis. The general interpretation is…

MG Vassanji is best known for his novels The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. His last work, The In-between World Of Vikram Lall, gave academia a catchphrase — ‘in-between’ — to underline shifting identities in an increasingly global world. Born and brought up in East Africa, Vassanji went to the US to study and then moved to Canada. He has won the Giller Prize twice. In India to promote his new novel, Vassanji talks about The Assassin’s Song, set in Gujarat and culminating in…