Make Calcutta Relevant Again

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. Coming out to a father who already knew. Losing his mother, father and stepmother in six years. Living with addiction, depression, and the kind of love that keeps pulling him back. All of it held together by a city, a team, and a family he chose. This is a conversation about art, identity, grief, devotion, and why Calcutta remains the one place that lets him be everything he is. He also closes the episode with a pledge. Three original artworks, auctioned for an animal shelter, with every rupee tracked transparently.

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 that he advertised on full pages of the newspaper. That building was Infinity Think Tank. It was inaugurated by Jyoti Basu. It started with 25 companies. Today Ravindra Chamaria's buildings across Sector V host over 500 companies, and around 50,000 people go to work there every single day. In this episode, Meghdut sits down with the chairman of Infinity Group to hear the story from the beginning. And on this episode, he makes a commitment on camera. He wants to bring Akshaya Patra to Bengal. At 74, he is building a 50-acre township for the elderly in Vrindavan. He says he has more energy now than he did twenty years ago. He says he is just getting started. If you have ever worked in Sector V, driven past it, or wondered how any of it came to be, this is the episode.

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 make music by hacking his neighbour's wifi in Belur to download software he could not afford. Nine years later he has collaborated with Alan Walker and Alec Benjamin, sits at 3 million followers, and has quietly become one of India's most listened-to producers. In this episode they talk about origin stories, the weight of responsibility, why cringe is just an idea waiting for a community, and where Calcutta's music actually goes from here. They also help us launch CCU Cartel, a residency that will bring out five independent Calcutta artists every year and give them a studio, a community, and a real shot.

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 nearly forgot to celebrate. They talk about how a boy from a lower-middle-class family whose mother earned 10 rupees a day teaching sewing built one of the city's most significant animation studios. How a kid who hated studying ended up creating an edtech platform with 70,000 subscribers and nearly a million downloads. And how he is now committed to making Indian and Bengali stories animated and watched globally by 2030. They also talk about the mindset shift Bengal desperately needs. The one that stops treating businessmen as villains and starts seeing entrepreneurship as an act of love for the city. Subrata Roy employs over a thousand people. He says his greatest achievement is not his wealth. It is knowing that every morning a thousand people wake up with direction because of something he built. This is that story.

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 son Kabir Azhar for Make Calcutta Relevant Again's first ever father-son podcast. They talk about what it means to inherit a legacy this large, the newspaper ad from 1947 that announced the New Market outlet on the morning of Indian Independence, and how P.K. Banerjee and Chuni Goswami used to come to Aminia straight from the Maidan after a match. And they talk about a Kolkata where a Muslim family runs the caretaking of a Jewish synagogue, where Eid and Durga Puja both belong to everybody, and where a plate of biryani has always been the most democratic thing in the city.

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-recognized Atal Incubation Centre, backed by NITI Aayog with up to 10 crore rupees in grant support, housed at Offbeat CCU on the EM Bypass, and built with one goal: to turn Bengal's best young minds from job seekers into nation builders.

In this episode, Meghdut sits down with Dr. Biplab Pal, IIT Kharagpur trained with 25 US patents to his name, to talk about what it actually takes to build a startup ecosystem from scratch in a city where business has always carried a stigma. They talk about the 500 startups they plan to support in five years, the NRI diaspora program that lets Bengalis in Bangalore and Pune adopt a startup from their home district, and why Bengal's first unicorn might not be an AI company at all but a mishti brand or a jewellery business that finally learns to scale.

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 talks about what COVID took from the community and what it gave back.

She talks about the father who fought against educating his daughter and is now Ektara's loudest advocate. And she talks about what it means to build something this large from the ground up in a city that is always told it cannot. We close this episode with a pledge. Make Calcutta Relevant Again and Ektara are building a fellowship of 10 young city ambassadors through all of 2026. If you have the time, the privilege, and the love for this city, this is your invitation.

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 believe that no algorithm can ever replace taste. From a college stage to 10,000 people at Science City - this is the story of how World Music Day became Kolkata's most anticipated cultural moment. And how two musicians turned their obsession into an institution. If you've ever wondered what it takes to build something real in this city - something that outlasts trends, survives algorithms, and fills auditoriums - this conversation is your answer.

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 collaborating with global icons like Beyoncé and David Bowie, Indrani shares extraordinary stories that have shaped her worldview. Together, Meghdut and Indrani explore identity, cultural roots, spirituality, creativity, social systems, environmental responsibility, and the importance of remaining authentic in a world that constantly pushes people to conform.

Watch this conversation to know more about her journey, stories and life.

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 festival. Our guest is Atri Bhattacharya, the Former Additional Chief Secretary, Govt. of West Bengal who went behind the scenes and changed UNESCO's mind when everyone else thought it was over. We also look back at who Atri was before he became a top officer. You will hear about his early life, his childhood stories and how he developed the sharp mind needed to win such a big battle for Bengal.

This conversation is a beautiful tribute to the spirit of Bengal. It shows how passion, intelligence and deep love for our roots can protect the traditions we hold closest to our hearts. If you want to know what it truly takes to fight for Bengal's legacy on the world stage, this conversation is an absolute must watch.