Frontline & Chai

Why don't the people of Kolkata want to work hard? Why is there a constant complain of deteriorating work culture? Why can't West Bengal progress despite being bestowed with natural goodness? Why is the only state in India that has the sea, mountains and forests, cannot have a thriving tourism industry? Know the basic 5 reasons who Kolkatans are lazy.   

I’ll get straight to the elephant in the room: Do you think -parts of Pakistan will now unite with India?

Most Pakistanis will say No. Most Indians will say No. 

Now that I am so well settled in Canada for 15 years, after my revolutionary journey which I talked about in my blog, “Word rape me at night’, would I want to go back and settle in India now? Let’s weigh the possibilities. 

We can no longer toss the concept away as a figment of some crackpot's imagination. We are now seeing them. Perfectly sane US air-force pilots and navy personnel have been speaking about them extensively and now Australia's 60 minutes has an entire episode devoted to them.     

There are something around for us to take it seriously. Now the U.S. military has acknowledged them and has a new word for them UAP --- Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

The the question is not whether they exist or not but how will we react when we meet the being in an UFO: The real-life ETs. 

Read more in my book WTF I Found God here: https://www.amazon.ca/WTF-Found-Kaberi-Dutta-Chatterjee/dp/0992078466/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1633552548&sr=1-4

How, as a Bengali, from Kolkata, have we acclimatized in a foreign land, keeping all our Bengali values intact?

And why should you care about NRI’s like us, as we are referred to? We have left the motherland.

Today’s guest in my podcast is Sushmita Paul, Bengali writer, editor and teacher settled in Austria, Graz, which has a huge historical reference as being a major power seat for the Nazis during WWII. Today we get rui mach in Bengali stores there. That is, of course, a totally different story.

Please welcome Sushmita.

After listening, please feel free to write to Sushmita at psc.susmita@gmail.com

And to me at kadchat51@gmail.com

Thanks for listening

This podcast is about a close encounter that I had with the third kind in the year 1994. And this will be a dramatic podcast, where I will be telling you the story of my first such encounter, I dared where angles feared to tread.

It was that era when the world believed God created only Adam and Eve. God did not create them. The were neither. They were derelicts, social outcasts, feared, despised and ridiculed by men and women alike. Their coarse voices, their filthy language and obscene gestures embarrassed the ‘normal’ and the ‘civilized’, who would never know what is it to be neither… or both.

The pain was written in their lewd hostility. If nothing else, their unabashed strip-tease was sure to make people shrink away. Yet, at the core of that body, which is neither male nor female but an ungainly mix of both, lay a soft human heart. Eunuchs (or transgenders) eat, sleep, drink, pray, bleed and shed tears just as anyone else. And they were not considered humans among humans.

At least, until after April 15, 2014, 20 years of my write-up appeared in The Telegraph, when Supreme Court in India granted transgenders the right as a third gender on, issuing the landmark verdict recognizing transgender rights as human rights, saying people can identify themselves as a third gender on official documents.

Before that they did not even have voting rights. Now there are transgender principals in schools, and they are a part of the working class. Even in the Aadhar card in India there is a 3rd gender, called “Others”.

This is a podcast just encompassing the natural-born eunuchs., or third kinds. This is not about the other others. 

(Read and view the picture of Hamid Masi here: https://kaberic.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/a-close-encounter-with-the-third-kind/) Please remember there were no internet news stories those days and as such, there can be no link to the newspaper. But we do have a photo of the original newspaper. Check it out!  

Write to me at kadchat51@gmail.com

When we were celebrating the New Year bash of 2020, we hardly knew what we were celebrating. We barely knew that the year we are celebrating is a monster, who was coming at us with a new kind of cane to beat up humans in the creepiest possible way --- in such a way that we couldn’t even fight back immediately, we couldn’t even see our enemies. We were throttled by a microscopic enemy in such a way that humanity went into hiding for a long time: Literally. The roads were abandoned, we were imprisoned in our homes, stepping outside was a crime, we were literally living a horror movie.

2021 seemed just a sequel. So now, how do we say, have a great 2022? Shall we say, Welcome 2022, we are ready for you!

So today my podcast guest is the young man who escaped the Talibans. Tune in to listen to his bone-chilling experience about how he escaped from the Talibans when they occupied Afghanistan. I played a a small part in his escape. I created a GoFundme funding, where we collected over $10000 to help him escape. I want to extend my thanks to all those who have contributed and want to let you know that he is now living in a completely new country with his little brother and uncle and is able to survive because of that contribution.

View this story on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BW-r6uBw1Jo

This is the 3rd and final leg of the Dhananjoy Chatterjee hanging case, which started with my solo podcast about how I was asked to attend the hanging. Please check that out among the episodes. In this podcast, my guest is Moumita De Das, the Assistant Professor, School of media and communications, at Adamas University. Why is she here? Today we are going into that depths of hell once more to reiterate exactly what happened during the execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, whose hanging is increasingly becoming a controversial discussion. And with every passing year, with the film Dhananjoy made in 2017, we might be looking at a very murky case, haphazardly concluded and the convict hanged, the justification of his death penalty is clearly becoming debatable.

Moumita was in the newspaper as a journalist at that time and was covering Hetal Parekh’s school reactions. She is presently teaching the importance of media laws in democracy, under which the Dhananjoy case is now a subject matter under the headline: A negative impact of media.

Please go on my blog to check out the pictures of that day's coverage, which Moumita now teaches her students at the university as a professor: https://kaberi.ca/2021/12/11/how-did-hetal-parekhs-friends-feel-about-dhanajoy-meet-moumita-who-talked-with-them/