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West Bengal

Schools to remain shut in Bengal till further notice

Students of Classes 9, 10, 11 and 12 have been attending the classes in batches in physical mode with Covid protocols. But the department now has decided not to hold further physical classes amid a steep rise in Covid cases. Students from Class 1 to 8, however, were attending classes in virtual mode.

Descent into kitsch~II

The way we love to engross ourselves in the popular parlour debates on television, splitting hairs on bytes that range from the inane, the exotic, the histrionic to the crude and the vulgar, we have lost ourselves to what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘the ecstasy of communication‘. And when this obsession is supplemented by social media, our virtual walls and posts become a kind of anonymous monitoring screen of the hyperreal expressed through the scenic repetition of disembodied sounds and images, an addictive process of acting out that is located neither in the actor nor on some remote stage

Descent into kitsch~I

The CPI-M‘s ‘slide‘ towards ‘bourgeois decadence‘ was the talking point quite a long time ago. West Bengal under Mamata Banerjee is witness to degradations and abnegations consuming us almost daily, which is ironic for, at a personal level, Miss Banerjee has always remained a great enthusiast and patron of all forms of art and literature

Spotlight on Bengal

It is highly likely that a bhadralok-promoted Bengali exceptionalism grew in direct proportion to the decline of West Bengal, but such exceptionalism never became a mass phenomenon, not even in the heyday of ‘progressive‘ Left rule