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By:

Shoma A. Chatterji

21 August 2024 at 4:19:40 pm

When the Red Flag Fades

Srijit Mukherji is arguably the most prolific filmmaker in Bengali cinema. His prodigious output inevitably raises questions about his versatility and creative consistency, just as his impressive tally of awards invites scrutiny of his artistic credentials. Yet his recent films, Shotti Bole Shotti Kichu Nei and Padatik, a bio-fiction on filmmaker Mrinal Sen, demonstrate his creative range and assured choice of subjects. With Winkle Twinkle, Mukherji reinforces his standing as one of the more...

When the Red Flag Fades

Srijit Mukherji is arguably the most prolific filmmaker in Bengali cinema. His prodigious output inevitably raises questions about his versatility and creative consistency, just as his impressive tally of awards invites scrutiny of his artistic credentials. Yet his recent films, Shotti Bole Shotti Kichu Nei and Padatik, a bio-fiction on filmmaker Mrinal Sen, demonstrate his creative range and assured choice of subjects. With Winkle Twinkle, Mukherji reinforces his standing as one of the more distinctive and enduring filmmakers in Indian cinema. Sixteen years after his directorial debut, Autograph, a personal take on Satyajit Ray’s Nayak, he continues to experiment with form and subject. Like several of Mukherji’s films, Winkle Twinkle draws inspiration from a celebrated Bengali play of the same name, written by Bratya Basu and staged in 2002. Basu, a formidable figure in Bengali theatre before turning to full-time politics, had drawn on Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, first published in 1819. Irving’s protagonist falls asleep and wakes up years later to discover that the world has changed beyond recognition while he remains essentially the same. Mukherji and screenwriter Padmanabha Dasgupta transpose this premise to contemporary Kolkata, turning it into a sharp political allegory. Sabyasachi Sen, a committed Communist activist, is presumed killed in police firing during the Emergency in 1976. His body is never found. In reality, he falls asleep and awakens in 2002, physically unchanged but confronted by a world that has moved on without him. The shock begins at home. His wife has aged, and his children have grown up. His son, Indro, who idolised Che Guevara alongside his father as a child, has become an active supporter of the Trinamool Congress. He has little patience for his father’s unwavering allegiance to the CPI(M), a party whose ideological universe has been shaken by the collapse of the Soviet Union. His daughter, born after his disappearance, studies at Indira Gandhi University, a name that evokes for Sabyasachi only the prime minister associated with the Emergency. Posters announcing Mamata Banerjee’s rise confront him on Kolkata’s streets. The political landscape has changed beyond recognition, but Sabyasachi cannot accept that the movement to which he devoted his life has lost its former certainty. Technology bewilders him. More distressing, however, is the discovery that an old party comrade has become a leader of a new political formation and amassed wealth through dubious means. The revolutionary’s world has not merely changed; its moral foundations appear to have crumbled. His wife, once his comrade and fellow traveller, offers him refuge, welcoming his return with affection. Their son, however, refuses to accept him readily. The father-son conflict becomes a confrontation between two political generations: one shaped by ideological conviction and sacrifice, the other by a more pragmatic politics of power. The film moves back and forth through time, mirroring Sabyasachi’s bewilderment and drawing the audience into his confusion. Politics, technology, education and popular culture have all changed, often in ways he cannot comprehend. Some of the sharpest moments are also the most humorous. Sabyasachi recalls filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak marching in a Marxist procession, unaware of how cinema has changed and that another Hrithik — Roshan — is now the more familiar name. When a man at a tea stall expresses astonishment that he has never heard of Sachin Tendulkar, Sabyasachi walks away, explaining that the only Sachin he knows is Sachin Dev Burman. A particularly telling image captures the film’s political imagination: a street magician’s scarf changes from red to green. The symbolism is unmistakable. The red of the Left, once dominant in Bengal, gives way to the green associated with the Trinamool Congress. The cinematography is equally impressive, particularly the transition from colour to black-and-white when the narrative revisits the past. Ritwik Chakraborty is outstanding as Sabyasachi, convincingly conveying the bewilderment and stubbornness of a man unable to reconcile his convictions with reality. Anasuya Majumdar as his middle-aged wife and Sohini Sarkar as her younger self provide strong support. The sudden violence in the father-son confrontation is perhaps the film’s principal weakness, disrupting an otherwise nuanced exploration of ideological estrangement. Yet, Winkle Twinkle remains one of Mukherji’s finest films. Its central insight is both poignant and political: Sabyasachi’s tragedy lies not simply in having lost years of his life, but in discovering that history has moved on without him and that the revolution he believed would change the world has itself become a relic of the past. (The writer is an National Award-winning film scholar.)

Completing Raman’s Unfinished Revolution

Writer: Dr. Kishore Paknikar
Dr. Kishore Paknikar
Nov 6, 2025
4 min read

Honouring Sir C.V. Raman means advancing his legacy by using RDI to transform India’s discoveries into enduring capabilities.

November 7 marks the anniversary of Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman’s birth, India’s first Nobel laureate in science. His life remains a clear example of how far intellectual courage can carry a nation, even before it possesses the institutional support or material wealth to nurture scientific inquiry. Using simple optical setups, tuning forks, sunlight, and glass plates instead of costly instruments, Raman observed how light scatters when passing through matter. What emerged from this quiet experiment would transform the study of molecular structure and show the world that India could produce science of the highest originality.


Quiet Revolution

Raman’s life shows us that true scientific greatness comes not from abundant resources, but from intellectual courage. Working in modest surroundings, he discovered the phenomenon now known as the Raman Effect, an achievement that reshaped modern spectroscopy worldwide. In fact, one could say that the Raman Spectrometer was the original RDI (Raman Discovered Innovation), a breakthrough born in India that became a global technology, yet one whose commercial and industrial potential we did not ourselves realize. This was not the fault of the scientist, but of the ecosystem that did not yet exist. The insight was ours, but the instruments, industries, and markets that followed grew elsewhere.


Today, Raman spectroscopy is indispensable in pharmaceutical quality control, materials science, forensic science, semiconductor fabrication, biomedical diagnostics, planetary exploration, and the preservation of cultural heritage. It shows how a single scientific discovery can seed entire technological domains. The Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme 2025, announced by the Prime Minister at ESTIC 2025, is India’s opportunity to ensure that such a story does not repeat. The knowledge generated in our laboratories must be developed, engineered, manufactured, and scaled within India’s own innovation ecosystem.


India today stands at a threshold that Raman could not have imagined. We have a broad network of national laboratories, research universities, technology institutes, and increasingly sophisticated industries. We have a young and ambitious scientific workforce fluent in global research languages, and an entrepreneurial ecosystem willing to attempt what earlier generations could not. Start-ups are venturing into plasma gasification, point-of-care diagnostics, climate-resilient agriculture, water purification, medical imaging, and small-satellite launch systems. The raw material for scientific progress, namely intellect, curiosity, and imagination, exists in abundance.


Knowledge conversion

What India needs now is alignment. We must be able to move from discovery to development, to product, to widespread implementation. Knowledge alone does not generate national capability. Knowledge that converts does.


The Rs. 1 lakh-crore RDI Scheme 2025, anchored by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), is India’s first systematic effort to build this conversion system. The establishment of an RDI Cell and a Special Purpose Fund allows research programs to continue beyond short funding cycles. The scheme funds ecosystems rather than isolated projects. These include shared instrumentation facilities, pilot-scale manufacturing plants, translational research offices, regulatory facilitation frameworks, and real-world test beds in rivers, farms, clinics, schools and industries.


This structural model is what enabled other nations to convert science into capability. The United States built leadership in semiconductors and computing through DARPA, where universities, suppliers, and users iterated together. Japan’s excellence in materials and precision engineering grew from long-term coordination between academia and manufacturers under MITI. South Korea’s rise in memory and display technology emerged from shared research roadmaps between institutes and industry. China’s position in solar manufacturing and batteries came from mission-linked scaling systems where translation was built into research from the beginning.


The lesson is clear. Scientific insight becomes national power only when research, engineering, manufacturing, and deployment are aligned from the start. To achieve this alignment, three foundational shifts are essential.


First, restore the legitimacy of scientific risk. Frontier science involves uncertainty and failed attempts. A culture that punishes failure gradually eliminates originality. RDI must protect curiosity and exploration while guiding translation.


Second, ensure continuity of teams and funding. Scientific excellence develops cumulatively. Laboratories become centers of gravity only when teams stay together long enough to form shared understanding. When research groups dissolve, tacit knowledge dissolves with them. Continuity is the precondition for depth.


Third, build translation infrastructure with the same seriousness that we build research laboratories. Discoveries must move through prototyping, supply chain integration, certification, regulatory clearance, field testing, and cost optimization. These steps require patient engineering and iterative refinement. Scientists must learn to think like engineers. Engineers must learn to think like users. Institutions must learn to measure progress in reliability and reproducibility, not only in publications.


This final point deserves emphasis. Translation takes time. MRI took decades to become clinical practice. Lithium-ion batteries took decades to become commercially dominant. The technologies that shape civilization mature gradually through repeated refinement. Rushing translation weakens ideas. Nurturing translation strengthens them. The success of the RDI Scheme 2025 must therefore be measured not by rapid announcements but by durable capability. This moment is promising: Indian industry is now a co-creator, not just a consumer.


With deeper manufacturing ecosystems, better quality systems, and modernized regulations, the private sector can finally partner with research from the start. Yet discipline is key - RDI must not be judged by start-ups or patents, but by reliability, reproducibility, and the ability to scale. True success lies in systems that endure long after the first funding cycle ends.


To honour Raman is not merely to celebrate his genius. It is to complete the unfinished half of his story. Raman discovered but the world built on it. This time, India must discover and India must build.


Raman once said: “The essence of science is independent thinking and hard work.” India has always had independent thinkers. What we needed was a system that allows knowledge to travel its full arc from curiosity to capability. The RDI Scheme 2025 is that system.


(The author is the former Director, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune; Visiting Professor, IIT Bombay. Views personal.)

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