lately I discern, being essentially a part of the whole experience, a passivity in cinematic language in India...with contemporary directors using this medium not to pamphleteer, be it for good or bad, or articulate but to share experiences allowing absolute cognitive liberty to viewers. This space was long needed...now the viewers leave the cinema not with a moral but with a thought, a seed, a beginning...

Besides being particularly fond of people who are elegantly clumsy in their bearing while eating, I preserve a perverse habit of associating fine-dining with charlatans. The music in the ‘Talking while eating’ is always more appealing and preferred to the moronic tinkling of cutlery. In many of the new run of fine-dining restaurants of the city, where attitude is preferred to love-for-food, I feel terribly displaced. Surprisingly most of the celebrated eateries of the world I’ve had the opportunity of visiting, particularly in Europe, conspicuously promoted silence. [And definitely as inborn gastronomes Bengalis have always trusted their tongues more than Michelin’s.]

This hidden penchant for disorder has made Bengalis irrevocably vulnerable to dishes as profane yet profound as Phuchka, Tarka or the Roll...