Gunjon Dasgupta 
Samik Bandyopadhyay is one of the most significant theatre scholars and critics India has produced — Bengali, Kolkata-based, with decades of work spanning dramatic literature, film criticism, and cultural history. His scholarship on Tagore’s plays carries rare depth; he reads them not as literary texts secondarily staged, but as theatrical architectures with their own internal … Read more
The screen in your hand is not a lantern—it’s a singularity. We mistake the glow for freedom, but freedom doesn’t pull you inward. It doesn’t shrink your world to thumb-width. This is the civilizational black hole: no screaming, no fire—just gradual, gentle swallowing. One scroll, one like, one night lost to the feed. We aren’t … Read more
I had joined a ceramics mask-making workshop without expecting anything. But the moment they put the clay in my hands, I remembered making papier-mâché masks in my growing up days. For roughly two hours, my adolescent self took over completely. This is me, just after returning to reality, with the artifact in hand as proof … Read more
In winter I used to go to the Royal Calcutta Turf Club. Not to bet — I had no talent for that particular mathematics of hope and loss. I went to watch the horses. They were magnificent. Trained, disciplined, broken into a strange bargain: run for us, entertain us, make us money. They did it … Read more
The adults around me had names for me. “Completely inattentive, incorrigible,” said one teacher — not without real cause, though. I was failing to collect myself and apply: in school, in learning sessions outside it, in any recognisable social behaviour. I was a silent, fatherless child who had perfected the art of not being there. … Read more
The method that cannot arrive I felt I was standing on the beach, with the sun setting on the horizon. The sky and the surroundings, part of the water, even the air, the birds it was carrying had turned crimson. The vast ocean lay in front. I was there for a purpose. I wanted to … Read more
Gargee Sanyal was small and fair and easy to underestimate. First impressions suggested a housewife. Under some pressure, perhaps a schoolteacher — primary, not secondary. Nobody looking at her would volunteer the secondary school; she didn’t have the bearing for a classroom that needed managing. She was a High Court judge. Thirty-five years old, elevated … Read more
Not long ago, a madman worked the Gariahat crossing. He showed up at dawn with the traffic sergeants and stayed till the sodium lamps came on. Matted hair, a beard that had long since stopped being a beard and become something geological, an oilskin shirt, trousers held at the waist by a length of nylon … Read more
Nobody’s writing about this yet. Neurodivergent people — ADHD, autism spectrum, dyslexia, the whole range of wiring that doesn’t fit the standard-issue brain — are quietly having a field day with AI. Not because AI does their thinking for them. That’s the lazy take. Because for a certain kind of mind, thinking isn’t finished inside. … Read more
Trailakyanarayan Samanta — I tell you what, fuck Traila-whatever, we call him Sam. Now Sam had been a trucker all his life. Drove a heavy-duty 16-wheel monster on the highway, even cross-country. Tough, resilient, a sonovabitch. He gradually started to build his own fleet, and now it seems he has gone past his millionaire milestone, … Read more