Tag: Politics

Bengal is chained to politics. Image by Photo by John Salvino/Unsplash Last week, the world saw visuals of poor villagers, bleeding and being carried away after the police opened fire on villagers in Nandigram in Bengal. They were protesting against the acquisition of farmlands for industries. For anyone, it was revolting that a democratically elected government should shoot down its people because they were engaging in what appeared to be legitimate protest. Not surprisingly, the general reaction was…

Samuel in style Writing about Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright and novelist is an act of supreme dilemma. Because, here is a man who gambled with meaning-making, eschewed verbosity to manufacture silence and played upon language to extract its hidden humour and cruelty. When the war-weary mid-century Europe was looking for a structure of belief, a frame of reference, Beckett gave it none and instead recalled even the last strain of certainty that could hang on to literature’s hoary claims.

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…

The immediate reason for the publication of this book is the suggested amendment to criminal law in Britain, seeking to prevent any work from inciting religious hatred. Under this law, no work of art and imagination will be considered fit for public display or consumption if it makes comments deemed derogatory to any religion or faith. The resonance with similar issues in India is strong, but the comparison is not quite valid. Noises that violate free speech, part…

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…

The bars fill up the day before. Oly Pub, 2009. Photo by author. Last Wednesday I walked into a popular pub in Kolkata. Olypub, as it is commonly called, was packed with customers by the time the twilight gave way to the neons. It was too early for the regular bench grabbers — the usual office crowd. So what was the occasion? A man approached me, guessing my perplexity. He whispered, ‘they are stacking for the bandh tomorrow.’ That was…