SS RAAJAMOULI’S BAAHUBALI: THE BEGINNING opened in theatres on 10 July last year, in a season overcast with the muscular release of Yash Raj Films’Bajrangi Bhaijaan, starring Salman Khan. Baahubali, featuring the Telugu stars Prabhas and Rana Daggubati in lead roles, came with one of the biggest budgets of any Indian film (Rs 175 crore), the promise of spectacular vistas…
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Oh! Calcutta
Old-world charms and multi-cultural delights are discovered in ‘dirty Calcutta’ By Sohini Chattopadhyay | 1 December 2015 The grey, gorgeous sulk of the Kolkata monsoon is best spent in bed, listening to the intense, melodic rain. Another way, equally endorsed, is dreaming with a book and a pot of tea, preferably, with the phone switched off.Home for the rains this time…
‘I can’t take it anymore’: Sights and awful sounds from the labour room of an Indian public hospital
A reporter goes undercover to see how women are treated in a large government facility in Kolkata By SOHINI CHATTOPADHYAY | 31 May 2015 Munmun Mukherjee is a good patient. She lies quiet on the white stone delivery table of the government hospital in Kolkata but for an occasional low moan. Even this is muted, the edge of her voice flattened, as…
Inside the Fellowship of the Relentlessly Positive
India is said to have the third highest population of HIV positive people in the world. It’s no longer a disease anyone seems to talk about though there are fresh infections everyday. Funds are drying up and everyone’s looking away. But for those newly diagnosed, for those who have been living with it for years, hope comes from within the community…
It Happened One Night
Thirteen people have been sentenced to 20 years for the gangrape of a tribal woman in West Bengal’s Birbhum district earlier this year. The trial was so swift that the judge didn’t wait for forensic test results. Many Rashomon versions of the case exist, but the long shadow of one political party is common to all of them
My Father, Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri
The first time Dhruva N Chaudhuri read his father’s book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, that grandiosely acclaimed and superbly intimidating work that placed him in the short list of people praised by Sir VS Naipaul, he was 17. The first time he fully understood the book was when he was well into his seventies. “I have read the…
The Bengali Woman’s Running Diary
I began running, in grief and confusion, five years ago. My grandmother passed away suddenly one morning, a couple of days after my cautious and measured father allowed himself to answer without a sigh that she seemed much better. A little more than a week before, she had been sent home from the critical care unit, and I had interpreted…
Why Can’t HIV-Positive Indians Get Life Insurance?
It is a handsome November afternoon outside, and the mood at the monthly meeting of the Delhi Network of Positive People in Neb Sarai is relaxed, cheerful Saturday. There is giggling and catching up, a wedding invitation has been issued to all present, there are plans for singing and dancing later on. Tea is being made, biscuits have been ordered,…
Sari and I
The sari in the urban office space is a message: see, I can handle this extravagant, ancient garment without zippers and stitches and convenient buttons. I can wrap it round and tuck it in strategic places without looking absurd. I can walk around, climb up stairs, carrying yards and yards of excess fabric on my person, without tripping. I can…
Another Ethnic Cleasing in The Neighbourhood
THE PERSECUTION OF THE ROHINGYA IN MYANMAR On a boggy, fermented scrap of land by the dregs of the diseased Yamuna, a group of men stand in a circle and play. The ball looks like it is made of bamboo, a lamp-shade like thing with shapely cracks. They are playing a version of Sepak Takraw, a sport popular back home in…