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Not known to be a filmmaker with a penchant for rainbow themes, Bela Tarr's films stood apart for their unconventional method of direction and issues which stayed in the minds of the audience long after they have left the movie theatres. If the works of the Hungarian filmmaker who passed away on January 6 were sans traditional plotting, charmed by his films' languid pacing, stark black-and- white visuals and extended long takes, the movie buffs asked more. He was 70.

NEW YORK: Jack London’s journey as a socialist and a writer is a story of dramatic ascent and tragic decline. His socialism grew from lived experience: childhood poverty, hard labour in factories, and first-hand exposure to capitalism’s exploitative logic, crystallised in 1894. He was born on January 12, 1876 and died on November 22, 1916 at the age of only 40. The literary world in America as also in other countries is observing his 150th birth anniversary remembering his great career as a writer and activism in his short span of four decades.

Brigitte Bardot, who died at 91, was not merely a movie star. She was an event. Before Madonna, before Jane Birkin, before the age of celebrity-as-performance, Bardot arrived in the 1950s as something both unsettling and liberating: a woman who seemed indifferent to approval. Her beauty was not posed; it existed as if by accident. Her sexuality did not plead; it asserted. And when she abandoned cinema at the height of her fame, she did so without nostalgia or apology.

Often referred to by her initials B.B., Brigitte Bardot (91) one of the best-known symbols of sexual revolution, is no more. Apart from being an actress, singer and model, she was a well-known animal rights activist.

Having dodged bullets and ducked bombs for a considerable part of his working life, trailblazing war journalist Peter Arnett died in his bed. He was 91. Arnett managed to stay ahead of death in the different theatres of war. In the process, he brought eye witnesses to the world from the paddy fields of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, Arnett leaves behind a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come.

LONDON: Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol was published on December 19 1843. Eleven days later the Chartist Northern Star had this response, which was headed “a Christmas Carol”: “According to annual and praise-worthy custom the unfortunate inmates both of the workhouse and prison throughout the metropolis, will, upon Christmas-day be regaled with the usual good fare of the season. The proportions of the allowances will vary slightly in different institutions, but in all & good dinner will be provided.”

NEW YORK: Rob Reiner 78, and his wife Michele Singer Reiner 68, died in a tragic homicide at their doorstep in Brentwood in Hollywood home in Los Angeles, after sustaining multiple stab wounds from an unknown assailant. Investigations are on to apprehend the culprit. Reiner was mourned by politicians and Hollywood celebrities.

It is a well-known fact that contemporary “mainstream” economics, the only kind which is taught to students over much of the world, does not capture the reality of capitalism. What is less recognized is that this “mainstream” economics, not just in its existing incarnations, but no matter what new incarnations it assumes, is incapable of capturing the reality of capitalism. Let us see why.

NEW YORK: Leila Majaj Kirkconnell’s Under the Same Sky is more than a novel; it is a monumental work of witness and a significant literary achievement. It accomplishes what countless reports and statistics fail to do: It translates a vast, complex geopolitical tragedy into a deeply personal, sensory, and unforgettable human experience.

Friedrich Engels was the one without whom Marxism could not have been complete. Born on November 28, 1820in Barmen, in the Rhine province of the Kingdom of Prussia, Engels was inseparable from Marx. His father was a manufacturer. He was forced to leave his studies and join a commercial house in Barmen and yet he became one among the finest scholars and teachers of the modern proletariat. Lenin had written in his short biographical note on Engels, “From the time…the two friends came together, they devoted their life’s work to a common cause. And to understand what Engels had done for the proletariat one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working class movement.” In fact Marx and Engels were the pioneers of the working class movement, which they explained as a class struggle to liberate the proletariat from the evils that keep the exploitation alive in the modern society.