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NEW YORK: Sean O’Casey was the first English-speaking dramatist of international significance to emerge from the proletariat. His proletarian consciousness made his plays a significant part of Irish and international theatre history, securing their enduring relevance. O’Casey was not only a talented playwright but also a committed political activist. This dimension was not just a backdrop to his works but central to his creative output, and is crucial to understanding his work. O’Casey saw his plays not merely as artistic creations but as weapons in the fight to create a new, truly humane society. He died 60 years ago on September 18 in Torquay, UK.

KOLKATA: Time and place cease to exist when one hears any Rabindra Sangeet of Suchitra Mitra, even as her birth centenary is being observed. For she was not only an exponent, but also an interpreter of Rabindra Sangeet, which was manifest in her enchanting voice. The listeners of Mitra's Rabindra Sangeet were held captive till it went on. Its melody and lyrics resonated in their hearts and minds long after the song had been sung.

NEW YORK: It must be quite a daunting challenge to start writing an autobiography when you’re over 90! But that’s exactly what movement singer and organizer Barbara Dane has done, and it is a beaut! What amazes me is the ready access she seems to have enjoyed to a vast archive not only of memory itself but of physical evidence—recordings, films, photographs, press coverage, calendars—and a host of fellow artists with whom she collaborated over what for most other performers would have been two or three-lifetime careers.

No matter how many decades pass since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, and no matter how often it is dismissed as outdated, it time and again returns to the center of debate. At a venerable 157 years of age (it was first published on September 14, 1867), the “critique of political economy” has all the virtues of the great classics: it stimulates new thoughts with each rereading and is capable of illustrating crucial aspects of our present as well as the past.

Visit to Hiroshima to participate in the All Asia Conference of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) in 2009 and again on the occasion of 20th World Congress of IPPNW in 2012 is an unforgettable experience. We had the opportunity to go around the Peace Memorial Museum situated adjacent to the epicentre where the atom bomb was dropped. This left a heart rending imprint in the mind about the destruction caused due to the atomic bombing. Never before in the history of mankind has so much catastrophic damage been heard of in such a short span of time.

Appearing at the triumphant moment of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Fred Halliday’s book Iran: Dictatorship and Development immediately became an iconic text to Middle East readers and the international left. The book’s appeal to a generation of leftists, particularly Iranians, was phenomenal.

Artificial intelligence, a never before new frontier of technology is emerging worldwide in a big way, which will disrupt traditional voice and video communications as well as produce mindboggling data that will change all round human conduct in all walks of life. Be it trade, commerce, industry, businesses, education, justice delivery, health care, life style, travel, tour, hospitality sector, road traffic, safety of vehicles, and may disrupt altogether existing technology, pattern of innovations, research and development. It will affect wokings of media world enormously as well. The way Big Tech and governments worldwide are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence, there are worries about future of humans. Could humans be fast approaching the point when machines do not need human inputs any more?

When the protesting students approached Dr. Muhammad Yunus to head interim government in Bangladesh, the Nobel laureate had several examples he could turn to while weighing his options. While French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declined to be a leader of the 1968 students’ movement, Russian author Alekxander Solzhenstein refused to pursue Presidency in the post-Soviet Union era because he preferred an authoritarian regime with traditional Christian values. Author Vaclav Havel went the other way. He accepted the offer to become President of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

After catching attention with her National Award winning big screen debut as Lakshmi, a low caste and morally ambiguous villager in Shyam Benegal’s Ankur 1974, Shabana Azmi has pitched out a rare feat of winning five National Awards for – Ankur, Arth (1983), Khandhar (1984), Paar (1985) and Godmother (1999)— and a masterful turn in both mainstream and arthouse movies. Azmi is arguably one of India’s most gifted actresses.

Early this week, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award. The $75,000 award is given to an international non-fiction writer based outside Canada by The Writer’s Trust of Canada. “Through a compelling and essential body of work that braids memoir, philosophy, history, sociology and criticism, Mishra proves he is a master of disassembling and uplifting magmatic argument and pressing issues of identity, nationalism and belonging,” said the jury in a press statement.