By Tanushree Ghosh
The Lucknow search hadn’t yielded anything; it seemed the missing person complaint lodged with the local police station continued to be low on the priority list. This was the final hope and the floodgates to tears and grief would fling open if he didn’t show up in his proper yet slightly yellowed kurta and pajama, holding his treasured US traveler roll-on that Sourav had brought home few years back.
By Riti Das Dhankar
Shoojit Sircar’s Piku is sheer magic in the way it captures ordinary life. It’s a sensitive portrayal of a father and daughter relationship. The magic in the movie comes from the brutal honesty and deep love that the duo shares for each other, despite being in an unenviable situation.
By Mosarrap H. Khan
You might howl in abstraction. But the pain of being denied an apartment is concrete. And trying to express that concrete pain in abstract language is a reductive endeavor.
By Amartya Banerjee
There is a lively school of thought in West Bengal that my father describes as “not Marxism, not socialism, not even secularism, but Denial-ism”. Without singling out any person or party, there is present, a pattern of justification which says that “Everybody is to blame, save us.”
By Nandini Ghosh
Korpan, on the other hand, is just the opposite of all that Nirbhaya represented – a mentally ill man, with little education and no stable job, hence with very few aspirations in life. Moreover, the aspersion of theft of a mobile phone made him more culpable for the crime he was accused of. It is almost believable that a mentally ill man with little money would be prone to committing such a crime.
By Mohsin Maqbool Elahi
The first generation of Jewish settlers in Kolkata spoke Judeo-Arabic at home and adhered to their Arabic style of costumes. The next generation of Jews adopted European dress and lifestyle and English as their language of communication. The Jewish population had grown to 5,000 in Kolkata by the 1940s. Now only 27 remain; most of whom are in their 60s or above. With the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews started moving out.
By Rabindranath Tagore
The other boys were overjoyed to see these results almost before the games had started in earnest, but Photik became very anxious. Makhan scrambled up immediately and attacked Photik, hitting him with blind rage.
By Lopa Banerjee
The whistle blows. I find myself in the sweltering heat of a train compartment in suburban Kolkata, my tongue chained to numbness and austerity. I carry with me the rampant memories and succulent folklores of my childhood, my unruly hair running along with the houses, huts, trees, ponds, and creeks, as my life speeds along, swishing back and forth between pale faces and clumsy station platforms.
By Mosarrap H. Khan
However, engagement with the secular world does not imply abandonment of faith. Rather, Seabrook and Siddiqui’s study illustrates that faith is the most important pivot that makes the dream of transformation feasible. Among the poor Muslims in Calcutta, faith thwarts the seductions of extremism and violence.
By Rafikul Islam
The Governor of West Bengal, Shri M.K. Narayanan, inaugutated the festival. This year is Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s 125th Birth Anniversary. The Governor mentioned the important contribution of Maulana to Indian politics. He praised the role played by Maulana in initiating modern education in Independent India.
By Anwesha Rana
My family had many Muslim acquaintances and they often came home. When my mother explained that these people were Muslims, I was taken aback. They were also people like us; they spoke like us; they behaved like us; they expressed their affections like us.
By Rafikul Islam
If you walk from Park Street, past the Birla Planetarium, to Rabindra Sadan, late at night, you will find other women and girls like these two, waiting under the shadows of flickering street-lights. Women in saris, girls in closely-fitting western clothes emerge at every nook and corner of this stretch.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 