Make Calcutta Relevant Again

Some businesses begin with a mission statement. This one began with a five-rupee note, handed over by an old lady. In this episode of  ‪@makecalcuttarelevantagain‬ , Meghdut Roy Chowdhury sits down with Anant Nevatia, President and Trustee of the Rural Health Care Foundation, to trace how a businessman ended up spending decades bringing surgeries, sight and dignity to Bengal's villages. Why he...

Some conversations start as Adda and end up feeling like a manifesto. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut sits down with Saikat Chaudhuri, Faculty Director at Stanford University, to ask why Bengal is so good at ideas yet so uneasy about turning them into enterprise. He traces it back to the Adda itself, hours of brilliant conversation the West would have monetized long ago. S...

Two musicians who arrive from very different directions, yet meet in the same restless, questioning place. Some songs do not just play. They stop you where you stand and make you feel like they are singing about the exact street you grew up on. That is the feeling this episode chases, and it brings together two musicians who arrive at it from very different directions, yet meet in the same restles...

There is a nightclub in Mexico City, invitation only, and it is named after a Bengali revolutionary. There is a nightclub in Mexico City so exclusive you cannot get in without an invitation, where some of the biggest DJs in the world come to play, and it is named after a Bengali. His name was MN Roy, and before the club, before the legend, he was a revolutionary from Bengal who went on to found th...

When Paroma Ganguly left the law in 2015, nobody in her world could quite understand it. She was a fourth generation lawyer, trained under some of the finest legal minds of her generation, holding down a top law firm salary and the kind of security a Bengali family prizes above almost everything. And she walked away from all of it to sit with embroiderers and tailors and figure out how to tell the...

In this episode, Meghdut Roy Chowdhury sits down with Indranil Das to talk about the one layer of every company nobody protects, middle management, the bridge between the executives and the team, and why he believes AI and technology are going to hit that layer hardest. They talk about staying grounded when success makes it easy not to be. They talk about his two sons, one in Sweden and one in Can...

The very first thing he asked Princeton Club for was not money or a stage or a sound system. He asked them to drop the dress code. In 2012, Nishit Arora walked into Princeton Club with an idea for a weekly night of original music. If independent music was going to happen properly in this city, he told them, then shorts and chappals had to be allowed through the door. That one small negotiation tel...

In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut is joined by Debottam for a conversation that travels as widely as the man himself does. It moves from a childhood spent following his tea-taster father through the gardens of Assam and the south to boarding school years in England. The conversation turns, as the best ones do, towards what he wants to give back. He speaks about Matri Bhavan,...

In this episode, Meghdut sits down with his childhood friend, the artist and designer behind one of the most recognisable fashion brands to come out of the city in a decade. They talk about the morning Bobo woke up to find Deepika Padukone wearing his embroidered jacket on the cover of Filmfare, and how the brand blew up overnight. And they talk about the things most people never say out loud. Com...

n the year 2000, there was no IT company in Bengal. Sector V was empty land. Everyone told him he was foolish. Getting a telephone line in Kolkata took five to ten years. Broadband was something you read about in foreign magazines. And one man decided to build a futuristic intelligent building on that empty land, with its own telephone exchange of 2,000 lines and a 32 Mbps broadband connection tha...

Cizzy has spent close to a decade building Bangla rap, not just as an artist but as a scene. Banglar Thek, the Cypher Project, Thek Verse. He made the title track for this very podcast. His grandfather played the Esraj behind Mahishasura Mardini on Mahalaya. He went full-time into music after losing his father in 2020, and he has been carrying the community forward ever since. Gravero learned to m...

In 2023, Kurukshetra became one of the top three most watched shows in Netflix history. Number one for six weeks. 192 countries. Made in Calcutta. Over 800 Bengali artists worked on it. And when it happened, Bengali media covered almost none of it. In this episode, Meghdut sits down with Subrata Roy, the founder of Tuteopia and Hi-Tech Animation, to talk about the show that Calcutta built and near...

In 1929, a man from a small town near Lucknow started cooking biryani in North Calcutta with no restaurant, no advertising, and one recipe. Nearly a hundred years later, Aminia is serving 8,000 plates of biryani a day across 13 outlets, from Kolkata to Guwahati to Dubai. And that original recipe has not changed by a single ingredient. In this episode, Meghdut sits down with Mohammad Azhar and his...

When Meghdut Roychowdhury returned from abroad in 2017, he had seen what a real innovation ecosystem looks like at Stanford, at Station F in Paris, and across Silicon Valley. When he landed back in Kolkata, he realised Bengal had none of it. That gap became an obsession. Four years later, that obsession has a name. AIC Techno Innovation and Incubation Council is West Bengal's first government-...

What happens when two women walk into a slum in Topsia at 50 and refuse to walk out? Ektara happened. Started in 2011 with 20 women and no strategy, Ektara today runs one of the most extraordinary schools in this city. In this episode, Vinita tells the story of how it all started, and how she and co-founder Namrata convinced the founders of Tomorrowland to partner with them in three days. She talk...

What happens when two musicians choose a city over the world - and the city chooses them back? In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut Roy Chowdhury sits down with the legendary musician duo Sourendro-Soumyojit - the architects of Kolkata's most celebrated music event, the brains behind collaborations with Anoushka Shankar, Norah Jones, and Shankar Mahadevan, and the men who belie...

In this episode of MCRA Podcast, host Meghdut Roychowdhury engages in a deeply enriching conversation with filmmaker and activist Indrani Pal Chaudhury. Together, they explore the intersections of identity, culture, philosophy, creativity, and social transformation through the lens of Indrani's remarkable life journey. From her childhood memories of Mother Teresa and growing up in Kolkata to colla...

Calcutta’s Durga Puja won the UNESCO cultural heritage tag and made history. But here is the secret truth, UNESCO actually said "No" to Durga Puja at first. Calcutta was about to lose its biggest global dream until one man stepped into save our pride. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, host Meghdut Roychowdhury talks about the hidden fight that saved our city’s favorite fes...

How do swimmers eat while swimming? What happens when a jellyfish attacks? And what does it take to cross an ocean? From crossing iconic channels to taking on some of the world's toughest waters, Sayani Das joins Meghdut Roychowdhury to share the experiences, challenges and lessons behind her extraordinary journey. Through stories of channel crossings, endurance swims and life in the open ocea...

India is a treasure chest of culture, but it only stays relevant if we fight to keep it alive. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, host Sneha Chakraborty welcomes Sonali Chakraborty and Gopal Poddar for a candid look at the state of our rural arts. We explore how their initiative has moved beyond simple craft, evolving into a total village development model that has touched the lives...

How do you pull a legendary brand back from a ₹100 crore grave? Meghdut Roychowdhury dives deep with Om Prakash Saxena, the man who looked at a "sick" company and saw a fighter’s chance. This isn't just corporate strategy; it’s the story of standing before angry workers in a locked factory and promising a comeback. Discover how Duckback transformed from a debt-ridden relic into a ₹10...

Before the ICC trophies and the global superstardom, there was a long-haired kid from Ranchi that nobody in the big leagues was looking at. Malavika Banerjee saw him first. Meghdut Roychowdhury sits down with Malavika Banerjee to talk about a time when Indian cricket was changing, and she was the only woman in the room making it happen. From being one of the only women in the Eden Gardens press bo...

Is technology catching up to human creativity, or is it just another tool in our hands? We are joined by visionary artists Sushanta, Shibani Paul, and Prabir Das to discuss the intersection of ancient tradition and modern technology. From the streets of Kolkata to the digital frontier, we explore why the human spirit remains the ultimate "processor" for art. Watch as we discuss: The phil...

Calcutta has been called slow, outdated and irrelevant for decades.  But what if that narrative was always wrong? In this episode, Meghdut Roychowdhury sits down with Vargab Bakshi, a Calcutta boy who joined Shopify in its early days, became a millionaire before turning 30 and came back home with a very different story to tell.  They talk about what it really takes to build a business from scratch...

Every October Kolkata transforms into the world's largest open air art gallery. But behind every glowing pandal and every breathtaking idol there is a human story that never gets told.  Sneha Chakraborty brings together Deep Das and Eshika Chandra, two young artists who are redefining what Durga Puja means in the modern world for a conversation that is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. They tal...