Prasanta Chakravarty On August 4, 1943, a few days before her death and amidst war, Simone Weil began to describe to her parents, Selma (Mime) and Bernard Weil (Biri), from her little room in London...
Prasanta Chakravarty The tightrope of real intimacy means trying to cultivate our common capabilities—for life is unembellished, plane and full of unexpected miracles; even in barbarous times: जीवन...
Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on...
Subha Mukherji in Kolkata, October 2021 Durga Puja is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of India, an annual event most widely and exuberantly celebrated in and around Kolkata. On display at the...
The poet and the essayist Shiv Prasad Joshi has recently written an essay in Pahal about the wellsprings of writing (http://pahalpatrika.com/frontcover/getrecord/321), on the question of holding a...
# 1927: a young Jibanananda Das musters courage to send his first collection of poems—Jhara Palok—by post to Rabindranath Tagore, requesting the great man for his opinion. Tagore reads the...
Prasanta Chakravarty “Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for autobiography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses...
Prasanta Chakravarty An Honest Letter An exceptional testament about the nature of violence in times of civil war appears in the form of a letter: the one sent by Simone Weil to the...
Rana Roy Our world is going through a crisis, caused by power and the will to overpower. Power to overpower nature works in tandem with the wish to overpower humans and creatures alike. People...
Arijeet Mandal The first reaction after receiving a small cut or bruise in humans is to put it inside the mouth. If the bruise is in some other part of the body that we cannot...
It is an unanticipated coincidence that the collected works of Parthapratim Kanjilal, a major poet writing in Bangla for the past half a century, has been published just as George Steiner has breathed...