View Articles

KOLKATA: Sholay, the movie which is arguably one of the most significant milestones of Indian cinema has turned 50. Released at a time when colour television sets were not part of our lives and mobile phones and laptops were not even in our wildest dreams, Sholay has not dated.

KOLKATA: Forty five years have gone by since Bengal’s matinee idol Uttam Kumar's passing away. And yet July 24, when he journeyed to the land of shadows remains a day of mourning among his fans, a tribe which is increasing though many of it were born years after his death.

A recent academic paper in Acta Astronautica, “The protection of AI-based space systems from a data-driven governance perspective,” authored by Giovanni Tricco and eleven others attempts to tackle a complex and timely topic: how our existing legal frameworks must adapt to be more autonomous, when it comes to AI-enabled satellites and spacecraft. Their work is welcome academic development on data collection, cybersecurity, and IP issues at the crossroads of space technology and law.

Talk of organising a retrospective of films of Guru Dutt, it will be welcomed. The audience would be all ears, at a proposal to make a show of films of Guru Dutt. And there is good reason for it as here was a man who turned melancholia into art. He turned his camera to the painful realities of life. His music showed how the pathos, the struggles and the failures can be turned into a fusion of melody long remembered after the audience leave the halls. Guru Dutt who was born in 1925, completes his 100th year on July 9, 2025. He had a short life passing away in 1964 at the age of 39.

LONDON: July 2 marked the centenary of the birth of the Congolese independence leader, Patrice Emery Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and icon of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa.

It was in the decade of 1840s, dominated by strikes and struggles and signified by upheavals and uprisings. Among them the most popular but brutally suppressed one that remained alive only for four days – but has kept echoing even after almost two centuries — was the June uprising. It was in Paris. The tensions between bourgeoisie and the workers were most intense here. By February 1848, there was the transition and a new society started emerging, divided in two streams.

His first love was reporting. And while on the job in locations as diverse as Paris and Biafra, Frederick Forsythe who passed away on June 9 dug out the nuggets of lives unknown which would later be the material of his best selling fiction. He was 86. Forsythe did not pen timeless pieces of literature. His works were fiction, pure and simple.

KOLKATA: One of his brothers was a freedom fighter against the British while another sibling was shot to death, Ngugi Wa Thinog'o found his home destroyed when one day he returned from school. The population had been herded to a "protected village" set up by the British to cement control on their colonial subjects.

On May 27, 1964 at 1.44 PM, India's first Prime Minister and one of the best chroniclers of this great nation's history breathed his last at his residence Teen Murti Bhavan. Nehru along with Indira Gandhi came back to Delhi on May 26 afternoon after a three day holiday in Dehradun. Nehru had not been keeping well since his last stroke at the Bhubaneswar session of AICC in January of 1964. After a short rest, the 74 year old Prime Minister, took to his normal schedule despite the requests by his panel of doctors to go slow. For Nehru, work was worship, and when he was not doing official work, he was reading.

LONDON: We are fortunate that the three pillars of Tony Benn’s socialism — the radical democratization of politics, the Alternative Economic Strategy, and antiwar internationalism — were explored in so many of his articles and interviews, and in his speeches to Parliament, demonstrations, conferences, and picket lines. Looking around at the world today and the challenges we face, Benn’s analysis is as relevant as ever and can help guide us through the tasks that lie ahead. So the publication of The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? The Political Writing by Tony Benn (Verso 2025), a new anthology of his political writing, couldn’t be more timely.