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Who does not mourn the passing way of the Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier? Tributes have been pouring in to celebrate his trailblazing career as the first black male star in American film history, and as a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, and as the recipient of innumerable awards for his many acting and human rights contributions. These include the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field in 1964 — the first black performer to win an Oscar since Hattie McDaniel got Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind in 1939 — a British knighthood in 1974, and the Medal of Freedom in 2009. “Groundbreaking” is the most-used word in celebrating the life of Poitier, and no one can deny that he earned it.

April this year marks the 75th anniversary of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. This was convened by the infamous economist Friedrich von Hayek, who wanted to bring together a range of thinkers to oppose the advance of socialism and social democracy.

The most horrid period for mankind since it became conscious of its existence was the last 27 months of the corona virus pandemic fear laced era. The fear was not real for the tropical countries but induced by their rulers as they did not have courage or understanding of way of life and living. Humans were never encouraged to be without courage to remain like timid in hiding in safety of their closed door abodes.

Anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on December 26 at 90. "He was ready. He went to meet his God, ready and willing," said his 61-year-old daughter Naomi Nontombi in a tribute to her father.

Jay Chaudhry is a serial disrupter. Born in a small scale farmer in Himachal Pradesh, he went on to found and sell four high-tech firms before starting his fifth, Zscaler, a cyber-security behemoth that has made him the wealthiest Indian American, and put him #45 overall, on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans for 2021.

Lay readers in the SAARC region may be pleasantly surprised to learn that Karl Marx read and commented on the ‘concept of nothingness (Sanskrit: Śūnyatā; Pali: Suññatā; Vietnamese: Không)’ of Gautama Buddha in two letters, written on 18 and 20 March 1866. While staying as a medical tourist in Margate, England, Marx was, suffering from hidradenitis suppurativa which is a painful and chronic dermatological state that causes abscesses and scarring on the skin, hair follicles, specifically, sweat glands, usually around the groin, bottom, breasts and armpits.

For the past weeks, successful 30-year-old Irish author Sally Rooney has been in the headlines. Following her refusal to grant the translation rights of her new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) to the Israeli Modan publishing house, 70 prominent authors have now backed her decision in a statement.

Reds is a grand-scale historical drama based around the life and career of John Reed, a North American journalist who travelled to Russia to chronicle the Revolution. Based on his firsthand observations, Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, his 1919 classic account of the events of the Revolution which took place two years prior.

LOS ANGELES: My favorite film at AFI Festival from November 14 to 21I this year was The Real Charlie Chaplin, co-directed by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, who co-wrote the almost 2-hour biopic with Oliver Kindeberg. The highest compliment I can pay this documentary that traces the rise and fall and rise of the eponymous screen comic is that it is worthy of its subject who, of course, was one of motion pictures’ great pioneers.

Rituparno Ghosh’s premature demise in May 2013 cost contemporary Bengali cinema much. In fact, it precipitated a particularly debilitating imaginative drought that was felt by many but convincingly articulated by few. The reign of Srijit Mukherjee in this period has been doubly disastrous for Bengali film industry, given his commercial success and general popularity among the Bengali film-going audience. Occasionally, works by Kaushik Ganguly and Aparna Sen soothed somewhat, but hardly ever inspired.