Daily wage worker suicides unlikely to end soon

One in four suicides in India is committed by a daily wage worker. Farmer suicides come way down the list, below the self-employed, salaried, unemployed, students, business and private sector suicides. Yet, unlike farmers, suicides by daily wagers do not grab media attention. Bharat Bhushan writes.

Floods, Papers and a Survival Strategy

While discussing about environmental calamities, we talk about destruction, damage, loss – of lives and of property, relief, and donations. These information mostly come to us through televised news reportage, newspapers, digital news platform, etc., and are either transmitted with a lot of theatrics (Bengaluru floods 2022)  or just passed off casually (Assam or Bihar floods generally, Maharashtra droughts, etc).

Somewhere between these two extremes, can be situated the many stories of loss that humans undergo while battling these calamities. Loss is always subjective. But sometimes, the stories, or rather, the fear of loss might cross the liminiality of subjective experience and become a frame work through which a community, that stands on throes of encountering loss, might perceive and even device a coping mechanism to, if not resisting, than at least minimalising the loss. Debashree Chakraborty explores.

The not so Great Escape: Assam’s trafficked workers’ horrific account of forced labour in Arunachal Pradesh

Farhana Ahmed reports on the horrific ordeal of workers from the Indian state of Assam who were lured by traffickers and trapped in a Border Roads project camp, from which, only a few could escape with their lives. Ahmed was a participant in CRG and Commonwelth Journalists’ Association- India‘s collaborative workshop “Climate Change, Disaster, Displacement and the Role of Media”, organised in Kolkata, India on 24- 25 August, 2022.

Indian fishermen in Pakistani jails: Freebies to families no solution

In the run up to the Gujarat state legislative elections, the Congress party has promised Rs. 3 lakh as one-time financial assistance to the families of the arrested fishermen languishing in Pakistani jails. A daily allowance of Rs. 400 has also been promised and a compensation of Rs. 50 lakh for every boat seized by the Pakistani authorities.

Compensating the fishermen and their families for loss of livelihood is a welcome move, even if it is prompted by the electoral compulsions. There are over five lakh fishermen in Gujarat who along with their families constitute an important voting population. However, throwing money at the problem is unlikely to permanently resolve the issue, Bharat Bhushan writes.

PR botch-up: Detention Centre presented as EWS housing for Rohingyas

For a few hours it seemed the government had had a change of heart towards Rohingya migrants with Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Puri’s announcement that 1100 Rohingya migrants living in Delhi would be given government housing. Within seven hours, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) overuled the initiative. It clarified that Rohingya migrants would remain in their existing camps, awaiting deportation to Myanmar. Bharat Bhushan writes.

Refugees in Their Own Land: The Forgotten People of the Indo-Bangladesh Enclaves

The Chitmahals are pockets of lands located in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya, as well as in Bangladesh, which owed their political allegiance respectively to Bangladesh despite being surrounded by India, and vice versa. Tamoha Majumdar writes about the people of the Chhitmahals, and their contested histories.

In the Language of Remembering: An Archive of the Passage of Memory

Medhashree Talapatra reads Aanchal Malhotra’s In the Language of Remembering, to understand intergenerational memories of the parition and the practice of their recollection.

Book Launch: Armenians of Calcutta, by Alakananda Nag

On Tuesday, 15^th of March 2022, Alakananda Nag’s book Armenians of Calcutta was launched in Kolkata. Nag’s book of photos, archives and text documents the forgotten lives of the Armenian community who have lived here for generations in Calcutta and shaped the landscape of the city. Tamoha Majumdar reports on the book launch of Nag’s book at the Goethe-Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata.

The Perceived Non-Citizens: The Citizenship of Perception

Kolkata protests against NRC- CAA, in 2019. Photo by Debalina Majumder.

In this introspective essay, Rishiraj Sen enquires into the many ways in which a member of a community may be perceived a non-citizen by majoritarian groups. Sen also teases out the implications of this perception.

“Frontier Dreams: Afghanistan in the Bengali Literary Imagination” with Mou Banerjee

The Center for the Humanities of University of Wisconsin- Madison organized a virtual Friday lunch event titled, “Frontier Dreams: Afghanistan in the Bengali Literary Imagination” with Mou Banerjee. Banerjee, an Asst. Prof. in History at the UW-Madison, talked extensively on the history of Afghanistan during the British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent, particularly from 1920s to 1940s. She pointed out the ways in which Afghanistan endured in Bengali imagination of that time, as opposed to in the British Colonial imagination. The discussion primarily revolved around the juxtaposition of the accounts of the landscape and history of Afghanistan through Syed Mujtaba Ali’s genre defyng work Deshe Bideshe (1948) or At Home and in Foreign Lands, against the occidental view of Afghanistan as a dangerous and ungovernable frontier. Tamoha Majumdar reports on the virtual event that was held on Friday, 4^th March, 2022.