Author: Sukanta Chaudhuri
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 243
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8180280004
Description
Sukanta Chaudhuri has been writing a fortnight column for The Asian Age since the paper commenced in 1993. His View from Calcutta is sometimes about the city-its condition, its people, its culture; sometimes about the state of West Bengal; sometimes about wider Indian issues; and sometimes about world affairs or life or nature as a whole.
His pieces blend the concerns of the individual thinking citizen with the sensitivity of a literary scholar and urban analyst of standing.
REVIEW
I am a Calcutta; in being narcissistic for my city I have actually been narcissistic for myself, at least a part of myself. I shall try to show how all kinds of things, across the Hooghly river and the borders of India, look from this very special watch-tower.
Contents
MY CITY
The View from Calcutta
A City with an Image
Rich Men and Poor
Joy, Love and Charity
A Tale of Two Cities
Save the Tramcar
A City that Treasures Its Birds
THE MIGHT OF THE STATE
Of Power and Privilege
Servants of the people
No Complaints
Governments Don't Say Sorry
Loyal Servants
In the Public Interest
What's the Use of Working?
The Fire-Signal Factor
Portrait of the State as Profiteer
Dead Babies and Living Men
Ensuring the Government of the Elect
THE WORLD OF BUSINESS
Time for Traders
Customers, Not Kings
Business Ethics and the Social Good
Mind Your (Own) Business
TEACHING AND LEARNING
A Placid Teacher's Work Diary
Value Education
Invention and Inertia
Sour and Sweet Fruit on the Tree of Learning
Advanced Education as an Export Commodity
Our Children, Their Children
THE GIFT OF TONGUES
Plain Speaking about Unplain Language
The Mandarin Language
Pronouns of Class
LIFE AMONG THE BENGALIS
The Independence Struggle that Began after 1947
A Pitiful of Shops
On Doing Useless Things
Medieval Calcutta
In Praise of Sanitary Engineers
Strangers and Brothers.
Coming to Terms with Tagore
TRAITS OF SOCIETY
Blaming It on the British
On Grumbling, Complaining and Campaigning
The Economics of Ticketless Travel
Museum Pieces
The Playing Fields of Eden
Migratory Birds
The Subcontinent at the World's Far Edge
The Main in the Middle
The Promiscuity of Cultures
What's Wrong with Being a Crorepati?
The Poisonous Breath of Serpents
REFLECTIONS AND SPECUALTIONS
On Late Trains and Missed opportunities
The Semicolonial Writer and the Globculture Machine
What Can We Learn from Mother Teresa?
Home and the World
KOLKATA
On Naming Cities
TEXT AND PRETEXT
Harry Potter and the Transfigurations of Language
History out of Fiction