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KOLKATA: The swinging '60s which revolutionized music in Europe and America did not leave India untouched. If there were the Beatles, Queen, The Rolling Stone, nearer home there came up Mohiner Ghoraguli in Calcutta together with Indian Ocean in Delhi and not to forget The Local Train; but arguably the most eminent import from the West in this period was pioneer of jazz saxophone, Sonny Rollins.

Technological development and innovation have been the driving force of human civilisation. With change in technologies, the production process, labour process and measurement of human contribution to social product undergoes change. The current phase of digital technology with AI as the emerging general-purpose technology is also going to radically alter the production process. Technological innovations either reduce the cost of production of existing goods and services, innovate new products or create new use values which didn’t exist earlier and can reduce the circulation time of goods and services by reducing transaction or transportation costs. All these in some way or the other reduce direct human effort or labour in the world of production and distribution.

Karl Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818 and died in London on March 14, 1883. Three days after his demise on March 17, Friedrich Engels in his speech at the grave of his best friend and partner in their bid to change the world, said: ‘On March 14, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.’

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818.The ongoing global turmoil compels us to revisit the ideas of Karl Marx, whose critique of capitalism remains strikingly relevant. The recent aggression by the United States and Israel against Iran once again exposes the extreme greed that drives contemporary imperialism. The underlying motive is widely understood: control over the vast natural resources of West Asia—a region that accounts for over half of the world's conventional oil reserves, concentrated largely in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the UAE, and Kuwait.

NEW YORK: A “fun” fact about the 1954 film Animal Farm, based on the novel by George Orwell, is that it was funded by the CIA (the same was true of the later screen adaptation of his 1984). The spy agency’s idea was to take the popular novel and its themes of workers’ revolution, communism, capitalism, and authoritarianism, and make it lean more towards an anti-communist, anti-Soviet stance.

Think of an actor equally at home on stage and screen, and Utpal Dutt whose birth anniversary was on March 29, comes to mind first. With an English accent which would have made even an Englishman envious, coupled with mannerisms to match, Dutt would have been welcome in any blue-chip firm that were many in what was then known as Calcutta; yet he chose the uncertain career of an actor.

It is five years less than a century when on March 23, 1931, Bhagat Singh was martyred in his early youth. Bhagat Singh was among those few urban youth, who pursued the path of liberation from the colonial yoke with an openness for new ideas, and had formed with his colleagues the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. Later when under Marxist influence, the last word Army was changed into Association.

Badal Sircar, a civil engineer turned dramatist, was born in Calcutta in 1925. He died in 2011 at the age of 86. His birth centenary celebrations have been observed nationally as he was the only writer of plays in Bengali in the second half of the last century whose works were translated in various languages in India and staged by leading theatre groups of those states. His ‘Third Theatre’ concept was the focus of discussions nationally at the level of the theatre groups.

Eighty years after Hermann Goering smuggled cyanide past his guards and cheated the hangman, Hollywood has returned to Nuremberg — not to replay the verdict, but to probe the mind behind the crime.

NEW YORK: Yet another Frankenstein film has made its way to the screen. Despite critical acclaim and projected awards, it has little in common with Mary Shelley’s novel. Readers interested in Shelley’s political vision and the historical pressures that gave rise to the book are far better served by turning to the original text. To mark the 175th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley’s death, we revisit this novel.