View Articles

KOLKATA: Jana Aranya (The Middleman) inarguably one of the leading social oriented films of Satyajit Ray is five decades old. Looking back on its turning 50, the director shows he was in pace with the prevailing times as his anguish bursts into almost every frame of this iconic film.

Everyone by now knows the dreadful effects of the atomic bombs used by the US on human population at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945 respectively. Testimonies by the survivors, the Hibakusha and the reports by the Red Cross speak effectively of the catastrophe that occurred in these two places. Over two lakh people died. Number of people injured, rendered destitute, homeless and orphaned far exceeds this number. Effect of radiations on the generations after that is still felt. That was the time of unprecedented humanitarian crises and agony never heard of before.

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.