Mihir, having conquered the B.A. examination with that peculiar Bengali combination of ambition, anxiety, and ancestral expectation, was now seated upon the vast verandah of unemployment, not knowing whether to enter the temple of scholarship, the bazaar of service, or the crematorium of respectable idleness. At precisely this providentially purposeless hour, the daily Anandabazar produced, like a conjurer from a turban, an advertisement from Kalpa-Khali. A B.A.-passed privat

Weekly Top Ten Stories From India dated 29th May issue , 2026 ARTICLE 1 ; Telangana Unleashes ₹10 Lakh Zero-Interest Loan Push for SHG Women, Eyes 8,000 Village Enterprise Hubs In a move on 26 May 2026, Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy announced a comprehensive empowerment package for self-help group (SHG) women, directly linking them to agricultural and retail value chains. The state will allocate land parcels to SHG collectives for establishing supermarkets, logi

There are two kinds of journeys in my life. One begins with a government letter, three Excel sheets, a vehicle requisition, and a WhatsApp group called "Urgent Field Coordination." The other begins with Bala standing in the drawing room and saying, "Kallol, this time behave like a normal researcher, not an archaeological goat." Unfortunately, this journey began in both ways. And this time there was a third beginning too—a phone call that tied everything together. Srinjay's ca

Summer vacation, to us, meant three noble institutions—mangoes, afternoon ludo, and standing at the street corner in Calcutta while making plans for saving civilization. There were four of us: myself, Patla; our self-appointed commander Bhonda Banerjee; the bespectacled machine of logic, Tintin; and the permanently hungry Kabul. That year Bhonda made a declaration. “Look here, Patla,” he said, with the air of a man addressing the United Nations, “man must return to nature. Ca