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On James Joyce’s 40th birthday, Sylvia Beach in Paris published his now most famous work, Ulysses, written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, 1914-1921. That was on February 2, 1922. Excerpts had appeared in the U.S. magazine The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. But deemed obscene, it was banned in the English-speaking world. The modernist novel immortalizes in its nearly one thousand pages a single day in Joyce’s home town of Dublin—June 16, 1904, the day he met Nora Barnacle, then a chambermaid from Galway, working in Dublin. Bloomsday, named after the main hero Leopold Bloom, has been celebrated in Dublin and the world over ever since Ulysses was published.

It’s an amazing thing to watch Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, currently playing on Apple TV+, after seeing a lot of other new American movies recently. The film’s beauty, ambition, and impact are so much greater than what even gets attempted these days, it’s discombobulating — like going up a mountain too fast and feeling faint from the sudden change in altitude.

Saonli Mitra, a legend in Bengali theatre who mesmerized the audience for more than three decades, passed away in Kolkata on Sunday after a prolonged illness. She was the daughter of the theatre icons of Bengal Sambhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra, but Saonli created her own space and produced two plays with epical dimensions.

One of my favourite works by the recently deceased writer-actor-director Peter Bogdanovich is a monograph called Fritz Lang in America. In it, he very sensibly argues that Lang’s directorial work in America is every bit as great and important as what he’d done in Germany, though he enjoyed nothing like the lofty status of cinematic god that Lang had once held.

Who does not mourn the passing way of the Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier? Tributes have been pouring in to celebrate his trailblazing career as the first black male star in American film history, and as a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, and as the recipient of innumerable awards for his many acting and human rights contributions. These include the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field in 1964 — the first black performer to win an Oscar since Hattie McDaniel got Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind in 1939 — a British knighthood in 1974, and the Medal of Freedom in 2009. “Groundbreaking” is the most-used word in celebrating the life of Poitier, and no one can deny that he earned it.

April this year marks the 75th anniversary of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. This was convened by the infamous economist Friedrich von Hayek, who wanted to bring together a range of thinkers to oppose the advance of socialism and social democracy.

The most horrid period for mankind since it became conscious of its existence was the last 27 months of the corona virus pandemic fear laced era. The fear was not real for the tropical countries but induced by their rulers as they did not have courage or understanding of way of life and living. Humans were never encouraged to be without courage to remain like timid in hiding in safety of their closed door abodes.

Anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on December 26 at 90. "He was ready. He went to meet his God, ready and willing," said his 61-year-old daughter Naomi Nontombi in a tribute to her father.

Jay Chaudhry is a serial disrupter. Born in a small scale farmer in Himachal Pradesh, he went on to found and sell four high-tech firms before starting his fifth, Zscaler, a cyber-security behemoth that has made him the wealthiest Indian American, and put him #45 overall, on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans for 2021.

Lay readers in the SAARC region may be pleasantly surprised to learn that Karl Marx read and commented on the ‘concept of nothingness (Sanskrit: Śūnyatā; Pali: Suññatā; Vietnamese: Không)’ of Gautama Buddha in two letters, written on 18 and 20 March 1866. While staying as a medical tourist in Margate, England, Marx was, suffering from hidradenitis suppurativa which is a painful and chronic dermatological state that causes abscesses and scarring on the skin, hair follicles, specifically, sweat glands, usually around the groin, bottom, breasts and armpits.