Stories written by Sujoy Dhar
One of IPS’s regular India-based writers for many years, Sujoy Dhar is an India correspondent with the Washington Times. He is the founder-editor of news agency India Blooms News Service and feature service Trans World Features, a columnist with Pakistan's Newsline magazine and a correspondent for PAN in Afghanistan. Sujoy also writes for a host of other Indian and international publications.
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Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin may have spoken out against atrocities on Hindus in her Muslim-majority country, but that has not prevented the Bengali intelligentsia in this eastern Indian city from denouncing the latest of her autobiographical works as pornography instead of literature.
Already under emotional stress from being infertile, Indian couples are finding that the artificial route to conceiving children is fraught with danger, and that sometimes it can be deadly.
A film that seeks to portray the turbulent final years of one of India's greatest heroes of its freedom struggle is finally under way, but not without controversy.
Those mesmerised by the 1969 classic by the late, celebrated Bengali filmmaker Satyajjit Ray, 'Aranyer Din Ratri' (Days and Nights in the Forest), can look forward to a fitting sequel complete with some of the main cast of actors - now older by 33 years.
India's bustling eastern metropolis, which in 1990 celebrated the 300th year of its 'founding' by British colonialists with much fanfare, is looking for a new birthday.
Fighting the vagaries of nature in the inhospitable terrain of the Sundarban Islands in the Bay of Bengal, which fall under the territories of India and Bangladesh, what Himangshu Jana has done since childhood.
A low-budget Bengali film on the quest for freedom by a sex worker's daughter is the rage in festivals worldwide, boosting the credentials of avante-garde director Buddhadeb Dasgupta as India's most accomplished serious filmmaker today.
A low-budget Bengali film on the quest for freedom by a sex worker's daughter is the rage in festivals worldwide, boosting the credentials of avante-garde director Buddhadeb Dasgupta as India's most accomplished serious filmmaker today.
Come Durga Puja, the raucous Indian festival in October dedicated to the ten-armed goddess Durga, and sex workers in this bustling eastern metropolis are in demand not just for the satisfaction of lust but also the dust on their doorsteps.
What happens when an Indian Oscar- wining filmmaker adapts on celluloid a novel by a controversial Indian Nobel laureate on the immigrant Indian community in the Trinidad of the 30s?
Once a robust member of India's defence personnel, 65-year-old Anil Haldar now has a face which is badly deformed and a body that shakes violently during his frequent fits of coughing.
Decrepit and battered from moving generations of people through this overcrowded eastern metropolis, the tramcars of the eastern Indian city of Kolkata are still streetcars named desire to many.
Tears stream down the face of the deaf-mute 17-year-old as she gestures fervently to what she went through eight months ago, inside the dark steely mass of a mobile prison van on the streets of this eastern Indian metropolis.
Communist politicians had different electoral fortunes in last week's state elections in India, suffering a humiliating loss in the tiny coastal state of Kerala but successfully defending its hold in the eastern state of West Bengal.
Indians and many foreign audiences' most enduring memory of Bengali actress Madhavi Mukherjee is her performance in the title role of the film 'Charulata', a black-and-white gem produced in the early sixties.
Every evening, Kalyani puts on cheap, garish make-up and waits for her clients in a dingy locality of this eastern Indian port city formerly known as Calcutta.
Visitors to this popular hill resort in the eastern Indian Himalayas come for the bracing mountain air and the spectacular view of the snow-covered Kanchenjunga - the third highest mountain in the world.
The organisers of a fashion show in this eastern Indian metropolis, formerly known as Calcutta, were surprised by the street protests outside the luxury hotel venue.