In Schrodinger’s Cat, the famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics, it is postulated that if you seal a cat in a box along with poison or something that could kill it, you won’t know whether the cat is dead or alive unless you open the box.
The title story of the volume ‘Alka’draws on human bonds that turn out to be both heart-warming and heart-rending. It is about non-blood ties that become deep and intimate, while the closest mother-son blood relationship turns awry and unnatural without any provocation. The author does not moralize, he just presents the situation with poignant empathy.
Krishnagopal Mallick (1936-2003) was born and brought up in Kolkata, and the limit of his territorial domain is essentially College Square and its surrounding area in the city. In his depictions of the mundane and the ebb and flow of daily life
The genesis of the vernacular turn in Indian historical studies can be attributed to a crucial inquiry: ‘Was there history writing in India before the British colonial intervention?’ As Partha Chatterjee puts it in his Introduction to the volume History in the Vernacular
Dimitrova declares in the Introduction of the book, she understands ‘“Indian cultural identity” in a non-essentializing sense, as a pluralistic, open-ended, and dynamic concept that is inclusive of all religious, cultural, and socio-political traditions and currents in South Asia and beyond’
Social as well as political movements have a long and sustained history in India. In post-Independence India, the decade of the 1980s saw a wave of new social movements focused on identity, culture and lifestyle instead of just political or economic issues.