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Two hundred years ago, on July 8, 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. He was less than a month short of thirty.

For over two years now, the world has been facing a pandemic the like of which has not been seen for a century, and which has already taken 15 million lives according to the WHO, without being anywhere near an end. This is an unprecedented crisis for humanity as a whole, which requires a massive effort on the part of every government, especially governments in third world countries where the people are particularly vulnerable not just to the disease but also to the destitution it brings in its train.

Constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair... (what) we have to accomplish at present (is) ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. This slightly paraphrased sentence is quoted from a letter a 25-year-old young man had written to a friend way back in 1843. The young man had lived for another forty years and he lived precisely by this maxim, applying it to not just the external world around him, but also to his own ideas as he set about analysing the world and changing it.

The legend of the Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray, has crossed one more year after his centenary celebrations began on May 2 of last year. The last icon of what is termed as Bengal Renaissance, died at the age of only 71 on April 23, 1992. Though his last film ‘Agantuk' was released in 1991, just a year before his death, the last eight years of his life since 1984 was controlled with strict medical supervision in view of his heart disease.

From a boy who ran away from home to become Hindustani classical music’s gold standard, Pt Bhimsen Joshi, who would have turned 100 this year, had he been living, had an extraordinary journey. Sometime in the early1960s, at a music concert in Calcutta’s Dixon Lane, in Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh’s living room, a bright and upcoming musician, Bhimsen Joshi, then in his early 40s, took his audience by surprise with his breath control during Taans, immaculate hold over ragas, and near breath iterations of phrases. All this while his grip remained strong on the distinct imprint of Kirana gharana, known for its impassioned rendering in the higher octaves. And yet, his was a different style, with shades from other gharanas infused as well. It was unheard of until then.

Saturday, April 16 this year marks what would have been the 133rd birthday of one of the most iconic entertainers in modern history, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s career spanned more than 75 years, from his childhood in the Victorian era to the late 1970s.

Karl Marx died in London on March 14, 1883. Three days later on March 17, Friedrich Engels in his speech at the grave of his best friend and partner in their bid to change the world, said: ‘On March 14, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.’

The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21 in 1848, doesn’t suggest that we should imagine the future. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels tell us that the future is harbored within things themselves, and that is why it is rational to desire it. So it makes no sense to establish a dualism between the present and the future; if we reasoned according to this dichotomy, then we would be condemned either to desire the impossible or else to suffer the curse of Adam and accept suffering and poverty as divine punishments. The Manifesto instead tells us to take up the tasks we are capable of resolving — and by “us,” Marx and Engels mean not individuals or an aggregate of individuals but a class determined by economic processes.

“Weerth, the German proletariat’s first and most important poet, the son of Rhineland parents, was born in Detmold, where his father was church superintendent.” So wrote Frederick Engels in 1883 of his friend Georg Weerth, who came into the world 200 years ago on February 17, 1822. “In 1843, when I was in Manchester, Weerth came to Bradford as an agent for his German firm, and we spent many a pleasant Sunday together. In 1845, when Marx and I lived in Brussels, Weerth took over the continental agency for his firm and arranged things so that he, too, could make Brussels his headquarters. After the revolution of March 1848, we all met up in Cologne to found the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [New Rhineland Times]. Weerth took on the feuilleton, and I don’t think any other paper ever had one as hard-hitting and funny.”

The Covid pandemic has posed a challenge to many people feeling isolated. We are amid the third wave Omricron. People look to new games during the pandemic. For the past two years, I too got clued into New York Times crossword puzzle, mini crossword, Sudoku, letterboxed, etc. All these are brain games and keep your mind sharp when the movement is restricted.