St Xavier’s College on Sunday celebrated the birth anniversary of an alumnus who did not complete his formal education but went on to become a literary giant and one of India’s greatest ic...

Mamata Banerjee’s landslide victory has helped her emerge as Bengal’s own Joan of Arc, but one who survived rather than went down fighting. Now is the time for her to seriously introspect ...

Visva-Bharati was founded in 1921 by Rabindranath Tagore on many ideas. One of them was freedom and another was openness. Tagore did not believe in walls. In his play Raktakarabi (Red Oleander), the k...

Realistically speaking, I do not envisage the contentious time we are passing through will end very soon. The elections will be over in one way or another, but be sure, Bengal will see an exacerbation...

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1933: Sankar is born in Bongaon, in North 24-Parganas district, then known as Jessore district The family moves to Howrah soon after. He attends Howrah Zilla School and then Howrah Vivekananda Instit...

“What am I? Asiatic, European, or American? I feel a curious medley of personalities in me.” — Swami Vivekananda In 1873, the social reformer, Jyotirao Phule, published a searing cr...

‘What is happening to Bengal?’ The question is heard often enough now, in these election times. But there is more to it than we might imagine. It does not ask what is happening in&nbs...

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore are Bengal’s two greatest icons. Though there were commonalities in their philosophy and politics, there were also differences. It might be fai...

I have been reading the memoirs of Dora Russell, a pioneering British feminist and educationist. These were published in three volumes, of which I have just finished the first. This covers her upbring...