On Camus, Jibanananda and Life
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All…
Soumyanetra Munshi
Of floods and threats and other things man-made
In an idyllic three-storey house, nestled amongst a rich garden of all kinds of flowers and fruit trees, playing host to most of the birds, insects and even monkeys, Samarpita,…
Night
The night never was oursIt was by them, for them, of themNot made soft for the rest of a tired bodyNot made fragrant for the ease of sleepLullabies didn’t play…
Was
I don’t want to be nice and decentI want to tear off my skinAnd bludgeon my patienceAnd rip apart my smilesI want to exposeAll that’s inside of meRugged, sharp, tornShorn…
Protesters, Perpetrators, and ‘Tilottamas’
These are very strange days - I have fractured a bone in my foot and am largely confined to a chair at home, with the TV switched on for a…
Manto and Chugtai: Smell, Dog, Quilt and so much more
“Two or three years after Partition, the governments of India and Pakistan decided that just as there had been a cordial exchange of prisoners, there should now be a similar…
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: A Roller-Coaster Through Time
ALBUS takes the Time-Turner from SCORPIUS - he presses down upon it and the Time-Turner begins to vibrate, and then explodes into a storm of movement. And with it the…
Story of Atashi… and many more like her
A lot of the news nowadays covers stories of abominable crimes surfacing in a remote rural pocket of West Bengal. While looking at some of them on television, I often…
On Reading Nabokov’s Lolita
I finished reading Nabokov’s Lolita again after many years, and this time it was strange reading it as the mother of an eleven-year old daughter. There are some books that…
Menarche: Entering the Strange Land of Adulthood
It was April and we were all getting ready for parents-teacher meeting in my daughter’s school, when I noticed her inner wear were smeared with red stains. She would turn…
For the times they are a-changin’: Of fishes, books and online transactions
Gobindo, the fish-seller, sat smoking bidis, amidst piles of silvery, shining fishes of different kinds, every evening, just where the street began as an off-shoot from the Lake Town main…
Homo Deus: From Being Masters to Marionettes
Imagine this. You have to travel from one place to another. You have two options. Human driver driven taxi or an-AI-algorithm-controlled automatic taxi. You know the associated traits of each…
Sapiens: Myth, Foraging and Agriculture
“On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree…
WEIRDest People and Us
When I first went abroad to the US for my PhD, I, like most other Indians, was very surprised by many of the customs and ways of life that I…
Remembering Khudiram: The Smiling Young Martyr
The Statesman, May 2 1908: “The Railway station was crowded to see the boy. A mere boy of 18 or 19 years old, who looked quite determined. He came out…
“Dancing on the heads of snakes”: A Glimpse into Yemen
The other day I came across a copy of an old newspaper - The Statesman (Kolkata edition) of August 4th 1994. As I browsed through the headlines for a glimpse…
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