Culture & Heritage
5 min read
42

Booker Prize 2024: British Writer Samantha Harvey Wins For Space Novel ‘Orbital’

November 13, 2024
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Samantha Harvey poses with the trophy and her book Orbital after winning the Booker Prize award 2024, in London, on November 12, 2024.  | Photo Credit: AP British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on November 12 with Orbital, a short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International

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Culture & Heritage
5 min read
34

Manoj Mitra (1938-2014), the Doyen of Bengali Stage and Screen, Passes Away

November 13, 2024
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Manoj Mitra was equally at home writing a hundred plays, teaching philosophy at university, performing in folk theatre or acting with his expressive eyes for Satyajit Ray and Tapan Sinha | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement When Banchharamer Bagaan (The Garden of Banchharam), Tapan Sinha’s dark-comic masterpiece, was released in

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Culture & Heritage
4 min read
44

Book Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New Book Reminds America of its Complicity in the Ongoing Massacre in Palestine

November 12, 2024
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Outgoing US President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York, on September 20, 2023. | Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/AP As demonstrated by Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015 and is a must-read for anyone who wants to

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Culture & Heritage
7 min read
49

Epic Cop-Out: The Flawed Heroism of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again

November 11, 2024
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The rot at the heart of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again is not what you think it is. It is not the tired plotting, the exhausted acting, the cameos that stack up like a house of cards that should have toppled tiers ago, the repetitive direction, or even the forceful, joyless retracing of

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Culture & Heritage
11 min read
52

Quincy Jones Dies at 91: The Producer Who Reshaped Music from Jazz to Pop, Sinatra to Michael Jackson

November 11, 2024
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Sometime around 1944, an 11-year-old boy, growing up motherless and wild in Seattle, broke into a military store to steal some food. Prowling about inside he spotted a piano in the supervisor’s room; he was about to move on, when a childish instinct (which he later referred to as “God’s

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Culture & Heritage
10 min read
48

Shibpur Botanical Garden Crisis: Great Banyan Tree, Heritage Under Threat from Climate Change, Urban Sprawl

November 10, 2024
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On October 25, the severe cyclonic storm Dana struck the eastern coast of India, bringing torrential rain and high-velocity winds that uprooted trees and electric poles in Odisha and West Bengal. It brought back memories of Cyclone Amphan, which caused massive damage in 2020. West Bengal’s Shibpur botanical garden, one

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Culture & Heritage
8 min read
53

Exploring Love Across Divides: The Complex Lives of Hindu-Muslim Couples in India

October 29, 2024
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What is it like to be a Hindu married to a Muslim or a Muslim married to a Hindu in a country like India where families are deeply involved not only in wedding ceremonies but also in the everyday life of the newlywed couple? Why do they choose to marry

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Culture & Heritage
19 min read
44

Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and the Golden Age of Indian English Literature

October 29, 2024
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In the summer of 1997, a gathering of 10 leading Indian novelists was “herded” into a small New York studio for a group photograph. The New Yorker was putting together a special issue to celebrate India’s golden jubilee—its 50 years of Independence from British rule—and this photograph was to be the centrepiece

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Culture & Heritage
12 min read
44

‘Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board’: Manoj Bajpayee

October 28, 2024
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The team of The Fable was jumping up and down—for joy and for Instagram—in the mid century modernist foyer of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) building. Manoj Bajpayee, 54, stood graciously for the first few photographs, and then sat down a little to the left of where his

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Culture & Heritage
6 min read
13

It is time we made a truce with that reviled vegetable, cabbage

October 28, 2024
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Cabbage must be the most deeply loathed vegetable on the planet. Condemned as vapid and tasteless, it is the acknowledged saboteur of a home-cooked meal. Bought for bulk and plonked on the kitchen counter with an air of atavistic triumph, it is a leafy cranium, freshly harvested off the enemy.

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