Pratik Kanjilal
The writer is Associate Editor.
Articles By Pratik Kanjilal
Speakeasy: Charlie Chaplin to Vande Bharat Express, a history of the sped up video
On speed, velocity, acceleration and other superpowers.
Kolkata’s Street Theatre
All eyes were on Mamata Banerjee, as she publicly refused to allow the CBI to bag her police chief, leaving no air time for anybody else.
A Question of Identity
Through the everchanging frame of prehistory, a look at the evolutionary story of we, the people.
Speakeasy: A manual on how to keep calm and push on
A survivor’s manual in an increasingly totalitarian world.
Breaking Down News: The Face of Change
While television is no longer at the leading edge of news, social media is formalising transparency norms for political advertising.
Humphry House’s ‘I Spy With My Little Eye’ is a must-read in this season of suspicion
The timing could not be more appropriate, now that the number of fresh sedition charges is in double digits, with a herd of people targeted along with Kanhaiya Kumar, and three intellectuals in Assam, including the much-respected Hiren Gohain.
Breaking down news: They’ve lost the plot
The media— at home and abroad— can’t find their way out of dealing with illnesses or Brexit
What to expect in 2019: Works in progress
Human progress is continuous rather than episodic — so, the advances we shall see in 2019 would probably be the products of work that was pioneered years or decades ago.
The year in stories
A rich bounty of non-fiction narratives explains a rapidly changing world; the best of fiction mines the human heart
Breaking Down News: Age of Anxiety
2018 will be remembered as a cusp in the culture of communications, when public faith was withdrawn from large digital corporates and privacy became an overarching concern.
Speakeasy: A Question of Identity
Shorn of our professional markers, how do we define who we are?
Breaking Down News: Battle Ready
The army chief’s comments on women in frontline duties trigger a war of words
Change is in the air, on air
The state election results have mellowed TV warriors. So, is it the end of the prizefighting era?
Stranger than fiction
Author Yuval Noah Harari discusses humanity’s fictions about matters as diverse as revolution and the possibility of a dystopic world without women
Crystal clear
The theoretical physicist who wandered into chemistry and learned crystallography to answer one of biology’s oldest questions
Speakeasy: Up in the Air
Two stories tell us something about the future of flying
The Table is Set
An informed account of the periodic table, and how chemistry relates to the world around and within us
Breaking Down News: Two Sides of a Coin
While the Kartarpur pilgrim route between India and Pakistan leads to a political spin in the media, CNN is fact-checking the White House.
Breaking Down News: Fight Club
The farce that defines TV debates lives on while the Twitter CEO’s attempts to smash ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’ get drowned in outrage.
No Easy Answers
CNN’s White House reporter is denied access to the President for asking difficult questions while a paper shows why the media must learn the elements of analytics and artificial intelligence
