Muslims lay out their demands at a recent rally in Calcutta
Jadavpur University students raise a hail of slogans
Calcutta’s Haan ‘D’ Biryani is health-conscious
American troops in Calcutta during WWII. They left a deep impression.
Nilratan Sarkar Hospital, Calcutta
In Icchapore, near Calcutta, residence, tea shop and supporters parade Argentinian stripes
Fans pose before a Neymar grafitti in Calcutta
An old alley, a maestro with his bag of tricks, a group of gaping peers, graffiti declaring the advent of gods...World Cup comes to Calcutta
The FIFA World Cup is wildly popular in Calcutta
As a tram trundles along the Maidan on its goat-nibbled tracks, the eye is caught by the pleasant vista of the bulk of Calcutta on one side, framed by ‘the Victoria’, a...
Telangana CM K. Chandrasekhara Rao meets Mamata Banerjee in Calcutta
Before the India-vs-Pakistan World T20 match at the Eden Gardens, 2016
Protests in Calcutta against the Myanmar government’s violence on the Rohingya
Sari boutique, Calcutta
Beauty parlour, Calcutta
Sari boutique, Calcutta
Beautician, Calcutta
Civic workers spray chemicals along a canal in a Calcutta slum
Muslim women in Calcutta celebrate after the verdict
Nurses after night shift on a flooded Calcutta road
I think Right and Left have always been a very inadequate description even of political activity.There is a lovely story about PC Joshi too. More here
...The right wing and the left wing, as many will know, were descriptions first defined by the way members sat in the French National Assembly of 1789-91: the nobles in the wing to the right, the common people to the left, of the president of the Assembly. In course of time, as parliamentary democracy unfolded, the left wing came to be referred to as “a group or party favouring radical, reforming or socialist views”, as the Oxford Dictionary succinctly tried to put it...
...But from all I can surmise from a distance, for many among the intelligentsia, the bonding with manush (human being), to use the more modern term for Tagore’s janagana (people), has not been lost.
I cannot make out how exactly today’s manush, in turn, relates to Calcutta’s intelligentsia. But one can see how the state’s political apparatchiki can take on the teachers, the doctors, the poets, the artists on the assumption that connections between such people and Manush have simply vanished.
...the Right-Left dichotomy is old and difficult to dislodge — but why not redefine Right and Wrong from the standpoint of social justice and responsibility, and in that light redefine Crime and Punishment in the Indian Penal Code? That may yet set the cat among the pigeons — of all colours.
