A Handful of Stories

Reportage on health, science and politics. And some meditations on film

Author: sohinichattopadhyay

The Grandson Who Made Me Fall in Love with Ila Mitra

Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your thakma how much you admired her Dear Riten, I first met Ila Mitra through you in March 2021, deep in the global panic of Covid19, although she was already gone 19 years then. I had glimpsed her in disparate blogs and some newspaper articles in Bengali online but she was the…

The Seedling That Birthed a Tree of New Storytelling

50 years of Ankur. 50 years of Shyam Benegal, the anchor of the New Wave movement in Hindi cinema In that last light of day before it is all gone and the crickets have begun calling, a man hurries through paddy fields swollen with the rain that has fallen all day to a hovel that stands across his sturdy home,…

Of our 33 crore gods, only the goddess Shakti can be called a true sports hero

In our two epics, Ram, Lakshman, Arjun are star warriors, but battles are not won on their skill alone. Divine intervention and deception are needed. The story of Durga’s 10-day marathon battle that cemented her place among the top of the gods underlines her strength, willpower and stamina—all the things that count in sport The story about physical exercise that…

The Stories Before Imane Khelif

The Long and Troubling History of Sex Testing in Sport, a Practice Reserved Exclusively for Female Competitors Competitive sport has a long and unsettling history of forcing women athletes to prove their womanhood. Compulsory sex testing was introduced at the 1966 European Athletics Championships in Budapest, which required women to walk in the nude before a group of gynaecologists. One…

Palan: A filmic tribute to Mrinal Sen gets everything wrong

National Award-winning filmmaker Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan is a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for the death of a “servant” boy. The film won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from plain silliness, Palan is bloated with misdirected sympathy for the Bhadralok Palan is billed as a sequel…