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Playing with the germ of an Idea, Ray, the new series on Netflix, is brilliantly iconoclast and innovative from several points of view. Released in June, coinciding with the Ray birth anniversary, these four short films, harvested from four short stories Satyajit Ray wrote in Bangla, have, however, not drawn much viewer attention and criticism has been sharp, possibly because in the aged and established critic’s mind it is Ray films (which we have grown up with since the 1960s) that they are being compared with. First thing to remember is, these are not films made by Satyajit Ray.

If you are thinking of the Hindus as a homogenous and monolithic cohort, you are wrong. Even in case of their choice of Gods, Hindus are as divided as the country itself.

Amidst the visible falling number of new cases of COVID-19 in India, the invisible threat of the third wave of the pandemic may be approaching faster than expected. Complacency among the people as well as in government may add to its speed at a time when we actually need to be more alert and ready to run the race against the most dangerous Delta variant spreading in different parts of the world, the earliest sample of which was found in October 2020.

The persecution and eventual death of 84 year old Father Stan Swamy while in judicial custody has brought out many aspects of the perversion of the criminal justice system under the Modi regime.

New Delhi: Anurag Thakur on Thursday took charge as the 17th sports minister of the country succeeding Kiren Rijiju.

The Latin American countries are in the midst of a major political turmoil as in Peru, the rightists led by the defeated candidate Ms. Fujimori have launched a vigorous campaign to nullify the results of the presidential elections held last month in which the leftwing candidate Pedro Castillo won by 44,000 votes. The Peruvian army sources are hinting that they do not like the left and that has led to apprehensions that the conservative army leadership may stage a coup on the lines of Bolivia held in 2019.

With the reshuffle of the Union Cabinet, realignment in Bihar politics has just begun. The already dominant OBC politics in Bihar is sure to undergo a change because the BJP has focused on the OBC politics in the country which is also indicated in the inclusion of a record 27 OBC ministers in the newly reshuffled Union cabinet. The most fluid SC politics is the state may also undergo further realignment, the process of which has begun with inclusion of a rebellion LJP leader into the cabinet. BJP hopes to gain from these political churning, but only time will tell which of the political parties in Bihar actually benefited.

More than the inclusion of Sarbananda Sonowal and Jyotiraditya Scindia in Narendra Modi’s new cabinet, which was expected, it is the unexpected exclusion of old hands like Harsh Vardhan, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar which is surprising.

Narendra Modi loyalists and sycophants have been raining accolades on him for Wednesday’s union cabinet rejig and describing him as the most visionary leaders for his move to show the door to his ministerial colleagues, Dr Harsh Vardhan, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Prakash Javadekar and Ramesh Pokhriyal.

In the deep shadows of Pandemic, the society faces a divide, etched in blood. The vast sections of the masses, fighting the acute scarcity and steep rise in prices of essentials, also realise that the challenges are inherent in the system itself. To surmount them needs a struggle at the basics. The French revolution in 1789 had started with a hike in taxes on loaves. The epoch-making change came only after miseries and the exploitation of the masses reached a quantitative saturation that was imperative for the qualitative change. People were burdened with unprecedented tax hike, rise in prices, without consideration for other interruptions in agrarian production. Starving and dying, they could not face another blow, and stood up to fight for justice.