Includes index.

Acknowledgements -- Introduction: writing the history of contemporary Bengal -- Capital, labour and politics -- Decade of strike by capital -- A dying metropolis -- Does the left front favour the urban elite? -- Environment and employment : will the trade unions and greens join hands? -- The tannery workers of Tangra -- Lessons of Ayodhya : has the left lost its vision? -- The new right and the new left -- Party, mass organizations, and mass movements -- More on party and mass organization -- Votes and populism -- New issues, new perspectives -- Who is afraid of the migrants in Bengal? -- A library and an institution -- Hunger and the politics of life -- Rajarhat : an urban dystopia -- Dialogue and growth -- All die, but all do not die equally -- Chronicles of the ranks -- The fast emerging power vacuum -- Civil society and the politics of a society -- Is Bengal's restless spirit in decline? -- Contentious politics -- Claim making in the age of bio-politics -- That was revolt, this is civil war -- Elections in the time of a civil war -- Populism and peace -- Different ways of truth telling -- The idea of a front -- Elections and expanding our representative system -- Spring time in Bengal -- Their civil society, our civil society -- Stocktaking midway through the war -- Messy change -- Transitional challenges -- Governing the multitude/i -- Governing the multitude -- How to prevent a telengana type situation in West Bengal -- The challenge of building a non-corporate path of development -- A suggestion on Bengal's economic woes -- A square leading to many unknown destinations -- Early but inevitable errors in judgement -- A violent history of peace -- Political change is never for utopia -- Knight riders in Kolkata -- Perennial themes -- Eternal Bengal -- "It does not die" : urban protest in Calcutta, 1987/2007 -- Postscript -- The epoch of passive revolution -- Index -- About the author.