My first glimpse into the lives of women in Bengali Group Theatre was through the Seagull Theatre Quarterly Volumes 27/28 (2000). Focusing on directors and female actors in Group Theatre scenario of Kolkata, the discussions brought out a reflective recollection of many intertwined lives. The most moving aspect of women’s love for theatre, craving for self-expression and the economic need to earn were brought out in a complex narrative.
Soumitra Chatterjee was an extraordinary man. His cinematic acting career straddled the worlds of arthouse films, commercial potboilers, and middlebrow entertainers with equal grace. He is known as much for rom-coms like Basanta Bilāp and the superb Bāksa Badal, as the swashbuckling villain in Jhinder Bandi; as the much-loved sleuth Feluda in Satyajit Ray’s Sonār Kellā and Jai Bābā Felunāth; as for his long-standing association with Ray’s more serious ventures.
Christmas, considered primarily a Christian celebration, has now become a global affair celebrated in all forms, ways and colours by people across the world. In India however, Christmas is often seen either as the product of a certain colonial hangover or increasingly as catering to global capitalist interests. Ironically, as Jerry Pinto reminds us, at the heart of Christmas is the humble birth of Jesus Christ who represents love, hope and peace to all humanity.
The book provides a rich historical account of the evolution of cricket from the fourteenth century till recent times. In the course of its discussion, Richard H Thomas has depicted how the game has reflected the dynamics of English society. Moreover, the book has manifested the transformations of cricket at several historical epochs.
On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was due to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Shortly after the speakers ascended on the stage, a 24-year-old man called Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie with a knife. Rushdie fell to the floor after sustaining a dozen stab wounds. Those who had doggedly or intermittently followed Rushdie’s career began wondering if Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa from 1989 had finally caught up to him.
Dark Star by Ranbir Sidhu is a powerful rendition of the act of remembering. It is a three-part internal monologue by an elderly woman who has returned from California to her husband’s ancestral village in Punjab, and is now trying to learn how to die since ‘Death is a mystery, no one teaches you how to die’ (p. 69). As the novel unfolds, the woman is suspended in a dream-like state, at the mercy of her memories. These memories wade through different traumas, both personal and collective, locating the narrative within the frame of her troubled past, the Partition, the Khalistan movement and the recent farmers’ protest.