In these days of solitary confinement, this correspondent remembers a one-time lawyer and courtier in 16th century France who inscribed a few lines in Latin on a pillar of his study that read like this: “…. on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still...
Read MoreThat Vital Need for the Pestilence-stricken Multitude
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s . . . Thus exploded the raging King Lear in Shakespeare’s play when he realised that his two daughters were trying to deprive him of all that represented his identity. The king’s daughters were...
Read MoreRe-reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’
“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” writes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague (La Peste). “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.” Albert Camus never made the...
Read MoreConfinement, isolation and Marcel Proust
To ……….. In these days of government recommended social isolation, we have days, may be months, to meditate on the benefits of inaction. It is nothing new though for the ‘magnum opus’ of the French author (bearing the title of À la recherche du temps perdu) mentioned in the title of this piece has also been translated as ‘In Search of...
Read MorePostural reflections
Ours is a downcast generation. It appears that soon the entire humanity would curl up. By wedging the buttocks in an armchair facing a screen, the homo sapiens is shrivelled. Back problems are the evil of this century. From osteopathy to treadmills in workplaces, resistance is planned so human bodies may recover from bad postures. The Macintosh and the...
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- Benoite Groult-pencil sketch
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- Manohar Malgonkar
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- Ajit Dutta
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- Satinath Bhaduri
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