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This 184th Birth anniversary of Tagore on May 8-9 (25th Baishakh – Bengali calendar) coincides with the Victory Day-meaning the end of German fascism 80 years back Also this is time when India and Pakistan are engaged in a war once again. It is in fact the perfect moment when one would want to focus on his vision of true internationalism, which has been mired with the jingoistic ultra nationalist feelings that has been whipped up by a part of our political society.

BERLIN: “No inviting Russian and Belarusian representatives to commemorations” — thus reads a nonbinding directive issued to German government officials by the Foreign Office, with regard to the eightieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Should the situation escalate, the circular continues, states and municipalities should consider calling the police to have Russian and Belarusian diplomats removed from the premises.

The émigré communist journals arrived clandestinely into India from the beginning of the 20th century. The first communist journals from within the country also made their appearance. In all these publications, Marx and Engels appeared as the ideological ancestors of Bolshevism. Since then, the communists and their followers were the principal propagators of the teachings of Marx and Engels in India. Some non-communist members of the academic profession also took some initiative.

Remembering the dehumanising stories with all their bestialities, the compelling human ethos undefeated, stands victorious over the terror. This one truth alone has the right to wear the crown of thorns as humankind moves on, evolving ever, always.

KOLKATA: Karl Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818. He died in 1883 in London. India appeared in the writings of Marx and Engels over a period of about four decades: from the 1840s to the 1880s. The first reference to India — to the Indian gymnosophists, to be specific — appeared in Marx’s doctoral dissertation. The Indian caste system is mentioned in The German Ideology. The division of labour under the caste system is distinguished from division of labour in the modern workshop, in The Poverty of Philosophy.

The Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray stepped into his 104th birth anniversary on May 2, 2025. The maestro died in 1992, at the age of only 71. He left us without finishing many of the proposed film and writing projects which he had undertaken in his last years. Bengal lost not just a great filmmaker, but also a writer of extraordinary calibre, who opened up the Bengali children and adults to a new world of adventure and science fiction in their mother tongue.

From 1836 to 1844, the Chartist movement started in England. It helped the working class to take a political role. It was also a time when in 1847-48, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto came out interpreting the role of the working class, concretising it in a general form, and soon it was applied in whole of modern history. In 1848 and 1850, it became more concretised during the class struggles in France. Working class no more remained amorphous. It was emerging as a strong force in the world history, developing its own strategy and also tactics, and in the process became a conscious historical class. The entire process was traced and analysed with a concrete application of materialist conception of history. For the first time, the concrete role of the proletariat was identified.

I first met Sanjay in 2010 when I was doing a project on the theme of non-standard workers and social dialogue practices in India (the first ever project initiated by the International Labour Organisation in the world at that time). His “office” was situated in the slums of Dharavi. The office was as disorganised as it could be with poor furniture and papers generously strewn around. I was doubtful whether I was visiting the right place and the right person!

The architect of first path breaking event that heralded the new socialist society, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was born on April 22, 1870. According to laws of historical materialism, or following the materialist concept of history, Socialism follows capitalism. Whichever socio-economic formation replaces the former stage is always higher. Socialism is also higher than capitalism and superior to it. It is always the result of evolution of productive forces. It takes a new route while in transition. This transition from the industrial to higher levels of industrial organization is always according to historical materialist stance in full.

Sanghamitra Chakraborty’s just released book ‘Soumitra Chatterjee and His World’ is perhaps the first authoritative biography in English of the great Bengali icon, who was not just the chosen on-screen face for Satyajit Ray, featuring centrally in fourteen of his twenty-eight feature films, but also a writer of plays, a director, a poet and the pro-active editor of one of Bengal’s prestigious literary magazines “Ekkhon”. In his younger days, Soumitra was sought after by the youth of Bengal for recitation programmes, while in his last years, he focused on painting, and many of works got appreciation from eminent artistes like Jogen Chowdhury.