Posts

Where the bodies are buried

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There is a commonly used expression that drifts through conversations with remarkable persistence: “I know where the bodies are buried.” I found myself using that phrase three separate times recently. The first occasion was with a close friend in the legal profession who was struggling through a couple of difficult cases, and I reminded him that every sufficiently complicated legal matter eventually arrives at the same point: find the person who knows where the bodies are buried. Somewhere in every conflict there exists a keeper of inconvenient stories, someone who remembers what actually happened before the official version was circulated. The second occasion emerged during discussions about a project I have undertaken - to write a living history of the Department of Communication, my home for nearly four decades. A senior colleague wisely reminded me that if I wanted the real history, I needed to locate the people who know where the bodies are buried. Then, it came up a third time,...
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The Newcomer’s Comfort, the Old Story’s Erasure

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There are moments in life when you get to do something that looks ceremonial from the outside but feels surgical from the inside - cutting through layers of time, memory, obligation, and yes, loyalty - to arrive at something that resembles truth. I recently had one of those moments. I had the opportunity to honor a person who, quite literally, made my life - as I know it - possible. Not in the performative, LinkedIn-endorsed, hashtag-gratitude sense, but in the inconvenient, historically verifiable, narrative-defining sense. The kind where if you remove that person from the timeline, the rest of the story collapses like a poorly written third act. In doing this, I was constantly reminded of the comment to an earlier blog from the pedestrian philosopher hiding behind anonymity, who offered this gem: “More like ‘Mentor’ is the bandage, notthe wound.” One has to admire the ignorance. Not the clarity, mind you - but the confidence embedded in a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Beca...
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Five Years In: When Narratives Refuse to Be Ignored

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Five years. One hundred and ninety-seven posts. It began in the furnace of lived experience - the second wave of COVID in Kolkata, the spring of 2021, a time when oxygen cylinders became currency, fear became routine, and narratives became survival tools. Layered on top of that was the theatre of state elections, because history, in its usual lack of subtlety, prefers to pile crisis upon crisis and then sit back to see who notices the pattern. Five years later, as another round of elections circles back, I have the opportunity to acknowledge five years of writing.  These numerous posts also elicited two hundred and thirty-seven comments that chose to show up in public on the blog site, and an uncounted archive of messages that arrived privately - some thoughtful, some generous, some irritated, and a few that mistook irritation for insight. This was never meant to be a quiet archive; it has always been a space where reaction - of any kind - signals that something landed, something u...
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Anonymous Courage

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Anonymous Courage Those who are regular readers of my blog would have noted that in a mildly entertaining turn of events, a supposedly anonymous interlocutor has been responding to my recent posts with admirable enthusiasm, apparently operating under the assumption that anonymity has rendered him unrecognizable . It is a charming belief. One almost hesitates to disturb it. Because, in truth, the identity is not particularly difficult to discern. The patterns are familiar, the voice is consistent, and the performance - how shall one put this -lacks the subtlety required for a convincing disguise. And just to make the exercise even more efficient, I have already been generous enough to identify the author as male, thereby eliminating roughly half the possible candidates in one polite stroke. One imagines the remaining pool is now feeling slightly uncomfortable. Out of courtesy, I have chosen not to identify him. There is a certain generosity in allowing someone the comfort of their cho...
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Fakery Without Imagination

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Fakery Without Imagination The notion of being fake and creating information that appears plausible is nothing new. Because mythology, folklore, and everyday life have long operated where deception is not only permitted but often admired - provided it is done well. The Trojan Horse was not the work of someone with a weekend app, a digital photograph altering tool, and an inflated sense of their own cleverness. It required imagination, patience, timing, and most importantly an understanding of how people think. Good deception has always had a certain elegance. It respected the intelligence of the audience. It required the deceiver to be, inconveniently enough, intelligent. Fast forward to the present, where we have achieved what can only be described as the great democratization of fakery. The tools are now everywhere. Everyone has access. Anyone can edit an image, construct a narrative, alter a reality, and present it to the world with the quiet confidence of someone who assumes acce...
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The Safe Word: Mentor

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The Safe Word: Mentor (Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) In academia a curious word reappears with remarkable regularity: “mentor.” Universities, to their credit, actually use the word correctly. In the academic narrative the mentor occupies a specific role. The student is the protagonist; the mentor stands nearby, offering guidance, asking inconvenient questions, occasionally pointing toward a door the student may not have noticed. It suggests intellectual companionship without ownership of the story. It assumes a respectful distance between guide and protagonist. But words, like species introduced into foreign ecosystems, tend to mutate when they migrate. Outside the university environment the word “mentor” has developed an entirely new career - less about guidance and more about narrative sanitation. For instance, in a situation in which someone once played a rather active role in another person’s life, the messy, logistical, occasionally exhausting ...
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Redacted Naratives

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Unless one has been living under a rock one has heard the word redaction . It sounds official, procedural, almost responsible. Documents are released, transparency is declared, and then entire paragraphs look like they lost a fight with a black marker. Nobody says the document is false; they simply insist that some parts are “not relevant at this time,” which is a polite way of saying the truth has been rearranged into something emotionally convenient. What is fascinating is how perfectly this practice migrates into relationships, where people do not technically speak falsehoods, they just distribute edited versions of reality, and everyone pretends the missing sections never existed. Now imagine if every communication between two people suddenly appeared in its original form, no cropping, no selective memory, no curated narrative for public consumption, and this is possible with people like me who are archivists by the nature of their work – nothing is ever deleted – everything is sav...
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