He was a formidable musician but seemed utterly human, a Peter Pan who wore his genius with deceptive lightness. Sandip Roy remembers Ustad Zakir Hussain.

'I often wondered while watching the film/trilogy, what if Durga had lived. What if Ray made The Durga Trilogy.' Sandip Roy looks back at Pather Panchali's Durga and the woman who brought her alive, Uma Dasgupta.

Ma Durga might be the city's most celebrated annual visitor, but Kali is the resident Goddess, notes Sandip Roy.

Urvashi Vaid dreamed of a common movement for social justice that could address them all: Racism, gender oppression and homophobia. Sandip Roy salutes the memory of Urvashi Vaid, one of America's most prominent LGBT activists, who passed into the ages this month.

By some strange and bizarre twist of fate, Omar Mateen did exactly what he did not intend to do. He took the lives of gay people and made them extraordinary. He infused their stories with a poignancy they might not have possessed otherwise. He enabled the rest of the world to see themselves in their stories, to weep at the sheer waste of lives cut short, says Sandip Roy.