Statuary and public art are proliferating in the city. Most of these are scary. In this column I will try to arrange them in an ascending order of horror, in the classic Aristotelian sense. Horror, Ar...

Today is Friday the 13th and I want to talk about a spine-chilling experience. A chain of circumstances led me to spending a night in the company of a Bengali grammar book, with no one around but a lo...

I want to earn sabka vishwas. I want to give you swabhiman. I want to give you swatantrata. I will give you desh bhakti.I will give you swachhata. I will give you nari shakti. I will give you employme...

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A famous Bengali restaurant in the city serves excellent food. The staff greet you warmly. The portions are generous. The menu is diverse. Only one problem persists: the music is Tagore on guitar. Alw...

This Valentine’s Day, let us celebrate a most unusual symbol of love: dentures. There cannot be a more inglorious object than dentures, less associated with tender feelings. They are a savage body p...

A park that was recently inaugurated has opened up new space in the neighbourhood. But wait. “Open” is hardly the word to be used here; the park invites a verb that is the very opposite in meaning...

The signs have been appearing for a long time, asking me to keep my mouth shut. For three decades, at least, starting from the time I was a student of Jadavpur University.Those days we would go to Jad...

For years I felt quite offended by Valentine’s Day. I think my problem was primarily aesthetic. I hated the iconography of this festival that took root in India about two decades ago, quite suddenly...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently impressed the world with his plogging video, which shows him picking up pieces of plastic from Mamallapuram beach in Tamil Nadu during a morning walk. We learnt a...