#calcutta

Football, literature, poets, singers are already a piece of history in Bengal while Calcutta is now good at producing lumpen elements. The city, like its myriad crumbled edifices, is only left with its history to boast. “Parar dokane boshe aajkal Mohun Bagan ar East Bengal niye adda hoina. (Bengalis don’t discuss Mohun Bagan or East Bengal nowadays). The youths are more interested in politics,” said one of my co-passengers in Rajdhani Express two summers ago. There’s something wrong with the Bengalis, who still take pride in being the cultural conscience of the country, though their domination in literature, films, football is all but a part of folklore. “I was born and brought up at Arambagh in Hooghly district, but I shifted to Siliguri to study engineering from North Bengal Engineering College in the early 90s. I stay in Sodepur as I wanted to stay close to Calcutta. But the transformation of the villages into small battlefields baffles me more than what I see on...

Quiet and solitude, the visitors’ room at his Golf Green residence in south Calcutta was an ideal place to discuss Bengali cinema with Soumitra Chatterjee, one of the living legends of Indian films. On one side of the wall, is a portrait of his idol Shishir Kumar Bhaduri, pioneer of modern Bengali theatre. Soumitra Chatterjee and  Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Din Ratri. “Mr Bhaduri influenced me a lot,” said Chatterjee, whose first play was Mukhosh, a Bengali adaptation of William Wymark Jacobs’s horror story The Monkey’s Paw, which he directed while doing his Masters at the Calcutta University. After watching the ‘Natyacharya’ in the 1950s, Chatterjee got into acting and even acted with the late actor in one of his later productions Prafulla. With his tall frame, refined look, education, and someone who is passionate about poetry, plays and theatre, Chatterjee rivaled Uttam Kumar in mainstream stardom. Satyajit Ray’s Apu talked about his relationship with ...