A few weeks ago, we had told you about the ghosts of Garden Reach, one among Kolkata’s many historically haunted locations. When it comes to heritage and hauntings, however, few locations could be more appropriate than the unimaginatively named Writers’ Building, for centuries the symbol
In November 2019, the Chennai-based Geographical Indications Registry (GIR) announced that Bengal was to retain the Geographical Indications (GI) status accorded to ‘Banglar Rasogolla’. The tag, originally awarded in 2017, had been disputed by Odisha, which had claimed that the origins of ‘Rasogolla’ lay in
By common consensus, the world entered the nuclear era with the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Every year, August 6 is observed as Hiroshima Day, and everyone who hasn’t lived in a cave for the past seven decades knows that the atom bomb dropped on
For the men and women of the British Raj, India was often a land of exile, which offered them very little of the routine comforts they had been used to at home. However, they did their best to address the situation by substituting Western comfort
'The merchant's yardstick, which, at dawn break/ Appeared as the royal sceptre
BOSE. In all caps. As opposed to Bose, a common Bengali last name. But BOSE is both a Bengali last name, and a global synonym for advanced, high-end excellence when it comes to audio systems. All of it courtesy the late Dr Amar Gopal Bose,
Considering the tremendous hurry that the British were in to get out of India, and the impossibly short deadline that departing viceroy Louis Mountbatten set for partition and eventual independence, it is perhaps a wonder that the Indians could get a national flag ready in
In the autumn of 1872, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay launched a magazine which was to create a new epoch in the history of Bengali literature and nationalism. He called the magazine ‘Bangadarshan’, and in the autumn of 1875, it featured his new novel titled ‘Radharani’, apparently based
Namak Haram Deorhi On July 2, a little over a week after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, at the age of 66, Syed Mir Jafar Ali Khan Bahadur became the first ‘dependent’ Nawab of Bengal. Officially dependent on the British East India Company, that is.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 second wave in India from mid-February this year, about 800 doctors have died of the virus. This terrible piece of data was announced by the Indian Medical Association (IMA) in the build-up to National Doctors’ Day, which is observed