Antaranga New York

So here is my article from Jara Parijayee's August-September 2011 issue, reproduced by permission.

Text © DURBA BASU

New York, up close

Like all of my musings on New York, this too must be tagged with the names of both the cities I divide my existence in. This is the first page of my article in Jara Parijayee's  current issue (August-September 2011), now on the stands. A scanned PDF looks infinitely better this JPEG reincarnation I made out of it, but this is all that the blog's interface would allow!

Text © DURBA BASU

Local News

I'm very happy that Sthaniya Sambaad has won the award for best feature film in the New York Indian Film Festival! So happy that I decided that that must register on the blog somehow, even if only with a two-line post! Strange coincidence that the award came on the Tagore sesquicentennial which I had been looking forward to, and that Ore grihobaasi, which is something like a refrain in the film was the song with which my training in Rabindrasangeet commenced. 

Sthaniya Sambaad at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011

Sthaniya Sambaad (dir. Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas, 2009), which I have blogged about here, makes a comeback to New York in 35mm film format at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011. Click here to go to Sthaniya Sambaad's page on the festival's website. I will probably not make it to the festival, and have to be content with rereading my blogpost here, written after I first watched the film last year at Tisch :)

Fake IPL player and the intellectual

I wrote this post 2 years ago, during the 2009 IPL season, when the Fake IPL Player blog was a rage. I gave it a title and left it brewing, and then completely forgot all that I wanted to say in it. Since it will not assume a fuller shape, I decided to publish it as it is.

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If bloggers could have their Kubla Khans, then this post is it for me. I am giving up in vain after trying for long to recreate what spurred me to write the title of the post, but it’s now gone forever.
The Fake IPL Player blog kept me glued to the networld like countless other cricket fans. At the same time in Calcutta, intellectuals had become extremely vocal in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, and had formed a platform that openly critiqued the state administration in West Bengal, especially in the wake of Nandigram and Singur. What connected these two happenings for me was that cricket and politics seemed to have become two arenas where onlookers/commentators/non-actors had assumed responsible agency and were speaking out in a way that was compelling attention. What has been bothering me for sometime now is the way the word intellectual (and its Bengali counterpart buddhijeebi) has been deployed in the WB press, especially in the last two years. Translation theory has now grown past the notion of the necessity of producing equivalents, and is instead more attentive to why cultural differences may make it difficult to produce equivalents in the first place. I am not here bothered about the satisfactoriness of intellectual or buddhijeebi as translations of each other. What bothers me more is the whole notion of the intellectual. Buddhijeebi literally is someone who earns his/her living by intellect. Do people who do not write poetry or direct films or act in them… not require the use of their intellect to earn their living? Or are their contributions not beneficial for society at large? The Fake IPL player blog refreshingly brought these issues up again. Though it ended with a disappointingly didactic dénouement, here was the follower of cricket reflecting on the game. Do followers of cricket qualify as intellectuals?

That thing called feeling

My report on the second Commodities and Culture Leverhulme workshop held in Kolkata during 12-14 January, 2011, is now online. Read it at the network's website here

Hiatus

Scout will soon make up for her dormancy. Stay tuned!