He’ aaoa Iswar Jagat tangam noung Jagat rajya hasanichang Toa nangmoun jaonyanlaoa Uyon pelem ninga Pap kamang soun Taliyan agyenni soun Ta sayan jambo boko soun These words will undoubtedly be unfamiliar to most of us. But they are relevant to the International Day of Forests, observed every year on this day since
OIt was a sweaty, sultry morning in Kolkata, a little over a decade ago. Really early morning, almost the crack of dawn. I was sitting in a car in a small bylane in Dhakuria, waiting for Purnadas Baul. Some friends of mine were working on
TThe photograph has grown fuzzy with age, but the smiles of the confident young women are hard to ignore. Published in Bengali daily Jugantar on November 6, 1968, the photograph shows a group of 11 Bengali women who had returned to Kolkata from mountaineering training
Recovering Key Species for Ecosystem Restoration. This slightly ponderous phrase sums up the theme for the 2022 edition of World Wildlife Day, which has been observed on March 3 every year since 2013, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on International Trade
The deadly parade continues. Just about a month after the passing of former Kolkata Maidan star Subhas Bhowmick, his comrade and fellow Maidan legend Surajit Sengupta has played his final shot, at the age of 71. Admitted to hospital owing to Covid-related complications, he was
On its website, Transcendent Knowledge Society (TKS) describes itself as “an organisation for education, empowerment and equality for people with disabilities”. This staid description, however, does little justice to the critical nature of the work that TKS does every day when it comes to integrating
A small Saraswati Puja pandal in a south Kolkata neighbourhood. Sunday morning has begun with the nth rendition of Chikni Chameli blaring from loudspeakers. Suddenly, silence descends. Everything is switched off. In a hushed voice, one young man tells another, “Bhai, Lata mara gechhe ektu aage
Amarendra Roy Chowdhury. Name ring a bell? What about Badal Roy? Still no? Well, the New York Times calls him “an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz”, and he died of
First day of the Constituent Assembly. In the first row (from left), Dr B.R. Ambedkar, B.G. Kher, Vallabhai Patel and K.M. Munshi Mono Mohan Das, Arun Chandra Guha, Lakshmi Kanta Maitra, Mihir Lal Chattopadhyay, Satish Chandra Samanta, Suresh Chandra Majumdar, Upendranath Barman, Prabhudayal Himatsingka, Basanta Kumar
Fourteen heads of state and government and five Nobel laureates. That’s the record so far. We are, of course, talking about the venerable University of Calcutta, which completed its 165th year yesterday. True to its turbulent history, the birthday was marked by demonstrations by a