Flawless spelling. Robust binding. Outstanding covers. Stylish fonts. Such was the reputation of Calcutta's Signet Press, founded in 1943, that Nehru published the first edition of The Discovery of India with them. My ode (story at the end of🧵)
[Cover design: Satyajit Ray] ++ It was while working on the books of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay for Signet that Ray realised the cinematic quality of Bandyopadhyay’s writing. Of the story of a brother and sister in a village in Bengal steeped in tradition yet facing the inevitable incursions of modernity ++

The heroic Muslim in Hindi film is almost always Pathan-like, at times fused with the Arab: fair, loyal, shalwar-clad,
Why don't we see the lungi-clad Bengali Muslim or south Indian Muslim? In the season of #Pathaan, my essay on Amitabh's Saudagar +
moneycontrol.com/news/trends/en… where you see a rural community of Bengali Muslims. Amitabh is a palm sap tapper, Nutan a jaggery-maker . The film details rural Bengali life, how hard they toil. What could be a more authentic claim to citizenship than this? That they live and work just like us +

The Muslim in popular Hindi cinema is invariably a tall, rugged, Pathan-like or west Asian type figure. I believe the journalist Seema Chishti observed this and it is right.
In this light, I want to talk about Saudagar where Amitabh Bachchan plays a lungi-clad Bengali Muslim ++ The Bengali Muslim is invisible in Hindi cinema, as is really any kind of Muslim other than the Pakistani-Afghani-Irani style dashing, rugged often fair-skinned Muslim.
Saudagar is particularly special to me in the light of the current dehumanisation of the Bengali Muslim ++

Last week, I accompanied my mother to survey a piece of her ancestral land that has been litigated for almost 2 decades now. We have heard the tenants have sold the land to someone else. As they say in Calcutta, possession is 90 per cent ownership of property + There was a Left-affiliated party office nearby and we went in to ask if the news we had received was correct. The party official was courteous, made us speak to someone on the phone who told us to confirm the information and file an FIR.
How do we confirm it?
"You find out!" +

This week I had a conversation about end of life care with a physician. I've been thinking about it for years but unable to implement it as there are barely in doctors in Calcutta who talk death without intervention.
The few who do, do palliative care for cancer patients ++ Conversations about end of life care, in my experience, bring an uncomfortable silence, which carries the accusation that I am enabling the death of my patient, passive murder.
But the pandemic truly underlined the paucity of hospital beds in India. If an 80+ years old patient +

A #marathon running project in drought-prone Marathwada has opened up the possibility of govt jobs for young women. As parents begin to view their daughters as economic prospects, one behavioural shift is that girls may be fed the same as boys. My story +
fiftytwo.in/story/stamina/ Dowry remains a prevalent problem here: a doctor son-in-law costs about Rs 51 lakh plus a kilo of gold, a teacher Rs 10 lakh plus some gold. Higher education doesn't seem to pay off in terms of a dowry discount. On the other hand, sports offers more viable job prospects +

5 Sept is a good day to remember Prof Jadunath Sinha who filed a case of plagiarism against Prof Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in Aug 1929 for deriving substantive portions of his book Indian Philosophy Vol II from Sinha's Indian Psychology of Perception Vols 1 + II (image Wikipedia) Radhakrishnan was one of the examiners of Sinha's thesis at Calcutta University along with Sir Brajen Seal. Sinha is reported to have been a brilliant student who won several awards including the Premchand Roychand studentship. Here's Sinha's Amazon page amazon.in/Books-Jadunath… +

It was 1940. The Olympics, initially meant to be in Tokyo, became the first edition of the modern Olympics to be cancelled; WWII was imminent. A 15-year-old Calcutta girl Ila Mitra missed being the first Indian woman at the Games. This is her story +
thehindu.com/society/athlet… The 1940s were to be a devastating decade for Bengal. The famine, officially declared in 1943, was evident from rural reports in 1940 itself. Churchill was Prime Minister. Mitra passed her Intermediate exams with a first class, enrolled in Bethune and plunged into famine relief +

A #Dalit "servant" girl is found dead in her upper-caste Delhi employer's home, family is not told about her death, police cremate her body forcefully, beat up Caravan reporter writing on it.
No front-page or prime time news about it.
But remember Devyani Khobragade' story? >>

https://twitter.com/thecaravanindia/status/1318884745707724803

One reason that story about an Indian woman being paid less than minimum wage in the US received HUGE coverage is the international case. But another equally important reason to my mind is that Khobragade is a Dalit reserved quota officer. Suchitra Vijayan doesn't say it but >>

I hear an inherent sneer when Indians, news orgs says: "Even Bangladesh's economy is doing better than India."
Why this "even"?
The polite way to see this "even" is that it is used because Bangladesh is a younger country, formed 24 years after India >>

https://twitter.com/HuffPostIndia/status/1318438592109215744

The real reason Indians say "even Bangladesh" is because this country is seen as a nation of maids and rickshaw drivers providing the dirt cheap labour that keeps New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Calcutta running.
The real reason is also poor, lungi-clad, dark-skinned Muslims >>

There's been a slew of editorials in prestige publications) about Bollywood's inclusive values and how Modi are destroyed it.
This is the wrong way of looking at it. Bollywood has always broadcast Dilli's politics. In the Nehruvian years, it was secular socialism >> After Liberalisation, it was the NRI romance establishing Indian culture in global capitals. In the Modi years, it is Hindu pride in history and the muscular Hindu nation-state vanquishing terror in the capitals of Islamicate: Istanbul, Dubai, Tangiers, Kabul, Central Asia >>

#Tanishq ad: In January 2006, a prequel to the violence that unfolded next year in Nandigram in 2007 and developments in Singur, 14 tribal persons and a policeman were killed in a firing to protest the takeover of tribal land by Rotten #Tata's company >>
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubanesw… This Amnesty report from a year after the firing notes that the fine, upstanding Tatas in collusion with the Odisha govt
a) grabbed land with poor compensation
b) provided no information
c) didn't invite them for consultation >>
amnesty.org/download/Docum…

#TanishqJewelry: Columbia University published a report on abuse at #Tata Tea's plantations in 2014. These plantations are under an entity called APPL, managed by World Bank guidelines. But APPL means Tata plantations. Highlights from the report >>
web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/… "the management warned the team not
to trust what [tea] workers said because they were
"just like cattle, unintelligent, prone to mob mentality". At Namroop, the plantation doctor said we had to understand that the workers had "lower IQ".
Pg 26 here >> web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/…

The chocolate is slightly salty, but unlike those that come embedded with crystals of sea salt, the saltiness is uniform here. Deliciously so.

Like mildly sweetened peanut butter, with that same dreamy creamy texture.
For a certified dark chocolate lover, I am smitten The chocolate is produced by the same co-operative in Anand that is at the heart of Amul
But the push for the use of camel milk came largely from the NGO Sahjeevan, which works with communities in the Rann of Kutch, @amitangshu tells me. Their focus areas are pastoral societies +

#DoctorsDayIndia marks the birth + death day of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, a fabled doctor in Calcutta, and West Bengal's second chief minister after Independence. He was in office for 14 years. The story about him goes that he could diagnose a patient by their walk to his table >> Apparently, he planned his 'chamber' such that the distance between the door and his table was significant and he would observe the patient as they walked. This created the Sherlock Holmesian myth that famous doctors like to cultivate: that they can diagnose patients by seeing >

As the bubonic plague gripped India, buriers in Jaola (present-day Latur) refused to dig graves. They demanded higher wages as deaths soared uncontrollably at a time when it was unknown how the disease spread so rapidly. Their salary: Rs 12 a month >>
sohinichattopadhyay.com/2020/05/the-si… The district board conceded to their demands; their salary was increased to Rs 15. Such stories of assertion of rights by essential workers are hard to come by. Colonial archives rarely mention mortuary workers as archives contain texts that underwrite caste + class prejudices >>

This young man, 34, a neighbour of sorts in Salt Lake, died in a Pune hospital for lack of B+ blood. Think about it: B+ is one of the most common blood groups in India
He was privileged, Anglophone, savvy. Imagine how our health system has collapsed
m.timesofindia.com/city/pune/man-… In the first week of April, I had written about blood donations plunging and banks running dry. Maharashtra was one of the state's doing well then. In these weeks, things have gone from bad to worse clearly
livemint.com/mint-lounge/fe…

Over the past month, I have spoken to doctors across states in India for my series on non-Covid healthcare in the #lockdown. Govt doctors in Gujarat, UP, Bengal, Tamizh Nadu, Maharashtra have begun the conversation like this: "I can't talk about #COVID19 cases + deaths." >> "Other things, we can discuss."
My stories have been about other things--HIV+, organ failure, cancer, the elderly, blood drying up in banks, mental healthcare--so we spoke. Typically, doctors in BJP-ruled states have requested anonymity if quoted.
In Bengal, in particular >>

CP Surendran #MeToo
CP once chased me around a lawn party in Jor Bagh (to launch the publishing house Random House on India) when I worked at OPEN magazine. I'll explain what 'chased me' means. I got a bad vibe because he patted or touched me proprietarily, and I got a scare > I could have misread his situation which is why I decided to avoid him. He was also high, I thought. He chose to follow me around, calling me naive, sexually clumsy, inexperienced... variations on this theme. All of which I may have been. I was/am the earnest Bengali studious >

A thread about doctors based on my observations: #Delhi docs, esp. younger ones, do not touch patients. No clinical exam as is common in #Calcutta No open your mouth wide, turn your eyes to the light, examining your abdomen, listening to your breathing. They prefer test reports> I have observed this over the past several months as my father has stayed in and out of hospitals, mostly in. Only the older doctors in the hospital, by that I mean those near 60, carry stethoscopes. Is it an outraged #Caclutta habit to examine patients clinically? >