Mukherjee

I first saw a wall of photographs and text from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project by the Nepal Picture Library at the India Art Fair, New Delhi, in 2020, and I thought immediately how important a book that contained this archive would prove to be. Three years later, an exhaustive yet comfortably-sized book has been published, holding an extraordinary visual archive of Nepal’s feminist history. The research for this began in 2018, aided by a Magnum Foundation grant. A visual archive of a…

The Secret Diary of a Criminal Lawyer features 10 cases that Kolkata-based Asoke Mukherjee fought and won. Written by his niece, journalist Amrita Mukherjee, who has referred to the late advocate’s personal diaries, this book looks at his excellent track record through his long career, during which he successfully reversed the death sentence imposed on the accused in two cases. PREMIUM A court scene from the film New Delhi Times (1986) (HT Photo) In her first work of non-fiction, Amrita Mukherjee, whose…

Growing up in a family of doctors, I was fascinated by how they could hold forth about organs and diseases as if they were entities independent of the individual in which they resided. This conception of the human body as an amalgamation has a flip side, which Rajeev Kurapati talks about in his book Physician: “Physicians and biologists use the term ‘mechanism’ liberally in describing a disease process or an organic function. We describe our bodies as being made up of ‘parts’ instead of referring to them as…

 Your third book, The Song of the Cell is the story of the function and the dysfunction of the cell. It’s also the story of cellular engineering that has sparked a revolution in biology and medicine. How much of this story is informed by your practice as an oncologist and a cell biologist?My story is stitched right into every part of the book and ultimately ends with the chapter on the cancer cell — the selfish cell. I’m an oncologist, an immunologist and a cell biologist. There are so many parts of this book that have…

“Guftgu,” in Urdu, refers to a conversation, a free-flowing exchange of thoughts and ideas that carry each other like friends. Offset Projects’ first book, Guftgu, a first-of-its-kind deconstructed photo book is exactly that. Offset Projects’ founder Anshika Varma, also the curator and editor of the book, brought together 10 lens-based artists and photographers from South Asia to begin a conversation through their works in this volume. Comprising 10 zines that become chapters in the volume, the emphasis is on form as…

In spring 1858, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow published an unorthodox vision of the nature of living organisms. In his book, Cellular Pathology, he argued that the human body was simply “a cell state in which every cell is a citizen”. From a single originator, all other cells are derived, he argued, and when their function is disturbed, disease will often ensue.The origins of Virchow’s arguments are intriguing. A reclusive, progressive, soft-spoken physician who had eschewed a career in the church because he thought…

Shlok Mukherjee from Kolkata has won the Doodle for Google 2022 competition. Google has made the occasion of Children's Day special for India by announcing the winner of the 2022 Doodle for Google competition. Shlok Mukherjee from Kolkata, West Bengal has bagged the first prize in the contest. Informing about the same Google said, "The winner of the 2022 Doodle for Google competition in India is Shlok Mukherjee from Kolkata, West Bengal! Shlok doodles his hope for India's scientific advancements to take center stage."…

Cells build organisms from the ground up, and therefore to choose to write about them is to give oneself permission to explore almost any aspect of the living world. They are “a life within a life” as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, alongside a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconceptions to scientific truth.This is not just about clear-cut successes: alongside the…

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of four science books, including The Emperor of All Maladies, which won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction and the Guardian first book award. Born in Delhi in 1970 and educated at Stanford, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Harvard, Mukherjee is now assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, as well as a cancer physician and researcher. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and their two daughters. His latest book, The Song of the Cell,…

"Just as animals in the wild tend to size each other up, human beings too are inclined to profile each other.” This is the opening sentence of CNBC’s former anchor and managing editor, Udayan Mukherjee’s fourth book, No Way In, a novel about identity and secrets in contemporary India. It’s 2014 and the high-stakes national election is round the corner when we enter Jol Pori, the sprawling South Kolkata home of the Banerjees — a prosperous businessman Rana, his wife Ila, and their eight-year-old son Shubho. While Rana…