Tag: Opinion

So another Indian gets the Booker Prize. What shall we feel, smug or smart? Being Indian is tough enough. Being an Indian writer in English is tougher. And being an Indian writer in English who has won the Booker is the toughest business of them all. So hail the Thane of London’s Guildhall, who shall be the Queen hereafter!  If we look at the beginnings of our efforts at writing in English, it would be amusing to note how Indians…

This year the Oscars look more like a line-up for Cannes’ The Palme d’Or or Berlin’s Golden Bear, which in keeping with Europe’s matured celluloid culture and modernist (or post-modernist) appeal, have a fetish for films with a political or psychological edge. Hollywood is exactly the opposite and as its most discernible collaborator, so is The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. Assembly line production, simple, triumphant storylines that are uplifting and widely appealing, and profits have more or less…

File picture of Nano The only inspiration for the opposition in Bengal is CPI(M)’s flawed past The game of realpolitik involves a hidden streak of the unsaid and the unuttered, which does not show up on camera in two-second bites. But certain historical junctures bring to the surface those fault lines and ironies. The Singur and Nandigram issues have all the makings of a conflict that can force open those fault lines in Bengal. There is no certainty that anytime…