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...

Dear Iqra, I have seen you in classes and in the Arts Faculty corridors. Yesterday I read your helpless and yet immensely brave note after being attacked on the North Campus of Delhi University in...

  Life is short and there are many books to encounter. How does one underline the ones that are worthwhile? More importantly, how do whole societies and traditions take up certain readings as...