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Bangladeshi youth are protesting against a new Bollywood action thriller that portrays 1971 struggle for independence from Pakistan wrongly. The thriller, titled Gunday, depicts the bloody creation of Bangladesh as a byproduct of a 13-day battle between India and Pakistan beginning on 3 December 1971. According to the viewers, the film apparently indicates that Bangladeshis were involved in crimes like arms smuggling while there were insinuations that they preferred identifying themselves as Indians.

“India makes a power point”, announced a front-page Times of India headline with triumphant finality when Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella was named the CEO of the global software giant Microsoft, referring to the company’s well-known “Power Point” programme. “India on the move!” and “India raises [its] toast”, exulted other major papers.

Woody Allen is quite an idol to many people. They like what films he makes, what he says, and often nod at what they think are ‘deep’ statements on life itself. Recently, he has denied the allegations by his foster daughter that he had sexually molested her when she was 7. She describes the sickening details and bit-by-bit the pretension behind the awkward, bespectacled one comes apart. When such idols are exposed, the reaction of idol-worshippers are a good clue to how sections of society are happy to look away from the sins of one person, if they like some other aspect of the person. Whether these aspects are different from each other is a different matter.

Taslima Nasreen, one of the most famous Bengali authors alive, had scripted a TV serial named ‘Doohshahobash’ (Difficult intimacies) portraying 3 sisters and their lives – standing up to kinds of unjust behaviour that are everyday realities in the lives of women in the subcontinent. Nasreen has long lent a powerful voice to some of the most private oppressions that women face, often silently. The private channel of Kolkata where the serial was slotted ran a very visible advertising campaign – Nasreen’s name still has serious pull among Bengalis. Nasreen had made it clear that the serial had nothing to do with religion.

India was as much shocked as the rest of the world when the news of the tragic assassination of the US President John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kennedy’s fiftieth death anniversary was recently celebrated with the top leadership of the Democrats including President Obama and former President Clinton and his wife Hillary present on the occasion. There are many who believe that had Kennedy lived longer, the Indo-US relations would have bloomed and taken a different direction. During his brief tenure, besides food aid, there were several US projects that emerged including the Tarapur plant, Kanpur IIT and Nagarjuna Sagar project in Andhra Pradesh.

In my childhood years in urban Bengal, ‘Boshe Aanko’ (sit and draw) painting competitions were a rage among the pre-teens. Anecdotes gathered from others make me think that this was prevalent in many areas of the subcontinent. Today, the definition of ‘coolness’ does not include such things, especially among the more Anglo-Americanised segments of society, but that was then and there. A ‘village scene’ figured among the most popular themes that one would draw.

In the most murderous attack on what is left of the ever-terrorised Christian population in Pakistan, Islamic terrorists killed at least 85 worshippers at the All Saints Church in Peshawar on 22 September. Inspired suicide bombers were the weapon of choice to target the Christian congregation. The death count is still rising, as more people succumb to their injuries in the hospitals. Outright murder represents the sharpest edge of what Christian and other ‘constitutionally’ non-Muslim people endure in Pakistan. Their daily life in a nation-state that officially considers them unequal in various ways to official Muslims is not pretty. Usurpation of property, blasphemy charges, attacks and destruction of places of worship, rape and subsequent forced conversion (or the reverse order) of womenfolk form the visible tip of a much broader systemic antagonism.

The government’s move to ask playschools to adopt mother tongues as their medium of instruction in the place of English is fraught with unforeseen consequences, none of them beneficial.

It was a coincidence that on the day the rationalist, Narendra Dabholkar, was shot dead in Pune, the newspapers carried the report that all the local bodies in Niyamgiri, Odisha, had voted against the proposed mining for bauxite in the region by a multinational company.

No good deed goes unpunished, they say. I am going to manipulate the sentence, contextualising to the current scheme of things and state. ‘No good deed goes without a punishment.’ Most of you have done a good deed today, or will proceed to do so through the course of the day.