An insider, Tim Davie, is to take over as the new director general of the BBC — culturally, socially and politically one of the most important organisations in the UK.He will succeed the peer, Tony ...

From family members I hear of neighbourhood trees that fell during Cyclone Amphan. Quite apart from the human toll, it was also very sad to read about the countless birds that lost their homes or even...

The BBC pulled a live broadcast from the centre of Leicester after one of its Indian women reporters was allegedly subjected to a torrent of racist abuse.The journalist, Sima Kotecha, was about to int...

It may seem unlikely that a country known for being buttoned-up would turn to a man dancing in a multicoloured unitard for reassurance and inspiration. Yet each morning recently, about 1.6 million peo...

Shine with hard workI really wanted to know about the personal side of Bhramar Mukherjee’s life. In Calcutta, she had been an academic high-flier at Presidency College and the Indian StatisticalInst...

Mira Nair is very busy these days. Now that filming of A Suitable Boy with a cast of 113 is complete after five months of shooting in Lucknow, Maheshwar and Kanpur — more shortly about how she manag...

Few Bengali women get the chance to make Western art ‘accessible’ to a British television audience, but Sona Datta has been presenting an hour-long BBC documentary, Michelangelo: The Good, the Bad...

Coolest ManStephen Ward was a society osteopath in 1960s Britain; his patients included the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret and John Profumo, the minister for war in Harold Macmillan’s cabinet....

This Magh Bihu turned a birdwatchers’ paradise as they spotted nearly half of Assam’s bird species.Around 382 bird species were recorded out of 691 present in Assam in the first Bihu Bird Count, a...

Remember Charles Sobhraj? He was the Indian origin serial killer who was locked up in Tihar Jail from 1976 to 1997 and who has been described variously as a thief, fraudster, psychopath, and as someon...