Book Reviews
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The ‘Joy Bangla’ Deception – When Facts Ruin a Perfectly Good Myth
Ah yes, Joy Bangla — that glorious slogan of liberation, unity, and secular idealism. The golden chant that promised a utopia of linguistic harmony, free from the tyranny of religion. Or so we were told. Then along comes Prof. Kausik Gangopadhyay, wielding something utterly outrageous: data. And logic. And historical evidence. Honestly, the nerve of this man. In The ‘Joy Bangla’ Deception, Gangopadhyay does the unthinkable. He suggests that maybe, just maybe, the entire romanticised narrative of Bangladesh’s secular birth is a wee bit overstated. Heresy, I know. He dares to point out that the movement which began as a fight for linguistic rights quickly shapeshifted into a comfortable cover…
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Butshikan: Tears of Somanatha — A Reckoning Disguised as Historical Fiction
In an age when historical fiction often amounts to glorified costume dramas confused about whether they are history lessons or romantic novellas, Butshikan enters the literary space like a war conch. Ancient, resonant, and utterly uninterested in playing to gallery tastes, it does not pander. It provokes. This is not history retold. It is history reimagined through a civilisational gaze that neither flatters nor forgives. A Story That Refuses to Apologise for Its Intelligence How refreshing, in a world saturated with historical novels that treat the reader as a well-meaning but dim cousin, to find a work that assumes its audience might actually know the difference between the Cholas and the Chauhans. Butshikan…
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Holy Hype: Deconstructing the Mother Teresa Narrative
Ah, Mother Teresa. That ever-glowing saint from the gutters of Calcutta who apparently served India by showcasing her poverty to the world—on a silver (well, probably gold-plated) Western platter. If you’ve grown up hearing her name invoked in every moral sermon and school essay about “compassion,” you’ll understand the delicious satisfaction of reading Aroup Chatterjee’s The Untold Story. Finally, someone opens the curtains on the sanctified show—and what we find behind it isn’t quite divine. Dr. Chatterjee, a physician from Kolkata, offers not a book, but a scalpel. He cuts clean through the decades of media adulation and exposes something that every thinking Indian ought to have suspected: that the “Saint…
