RIFLE RANGE BOY

Durga Sohay (Bengali, 2017) One cannot take Durga worship out of Bengali culture. In this thriller and family drama, much like the externally angry feminine power that paradoxically nurtures the worlds, in the ten days of Durga Pooja, a negative character appears in a family, blends with the family and through love and attention, changes her perspective of life for the better. It tells the tale of an extended family which lives under one roof. An ailing widowed father who had just been discharged from a hospital for a heart attack stays with two sons, their wives and a grandson. On the surface, they all look like a big happy upper-middle-class family. The two sons run a successful jewellery started by the father. Brewing beneath is animosity between brothers and sister-in-laws. A maid is recruited to care for the father on the first day of the pooja. Over the few days as the prayers progress, we realise that people with different demeanours, some seeming bad hearted and the ki...

Encountering Kali  (In the margins, at the centre, in the west) Edited by Rachel F McDermott, & Jeffrey J. Kirpal To the uninitiated, like the Europeans who arrived on the Indian shores to encounter its natives paying homage to a gory angry looking dark imaged Goddess with weapons of destruction hanging from her multiple arms, wearing a necklace of human scalps, skirt of human limbs and protruding tongue, it must be the image of Devil itself. For the non-believers, it must have appeared like devil worship and a warped sense of divinity of the tribal people. To the natives, however, it is their expression of the embodiment of how the world is to them. The world is a cruel place. Man's survival is paved with the daily struggle against the elements of Nature and is a constant combat against various atrocities. It is not easy, but life has to go on. Civilised people in India had apparently realised these long ago, even before the spread of Brahmanic and Vedic teachings. The ...