During the four-day festival, to be held at Kolkata’s Nandan Film Centre, Cox will introduce every film and give talks at the local film school. The actor, who revealed last week he would star as former House of Commons speaker Michael Martin in a new BBC drama, has been a regular fixture in Scotland this year. I do feel that my heritage is part of who I am,” he says. “It is a tortured heritage, but it is very muscular. This play rings so many bells with me. I have no difficulty with it at all. I have no difficulty with the starkness of it, the loss of it, the accuracy.

Calcutta’s first mill opened in 1855; seventy-five years later, the city was producing 70% of the world’s jute products. With a never-ending supply of raw materials right on its doorstep, it made far more economical sense to concentrate the industry in Bengal, rather than half-way around the world in Scotland.Today there are Scottish veterans forming the Calcutta and Mofussil Society: veterans of the Indian jute industry who like to congregate in places like the Monifieth Golf Club, to partake of Indian food, speak Hindi, and reminisce about their days in the East. The majority of Calcutta’s mills were owned by expatriate British businessmen, but they were run by Dundonians. Ambitious jute workers moved from Dundee to Calcutta in the 1850s, and they ran the industry there for the best part of a century. The last ones returned to Scotland in the late sixties, having been made to feel rather uncomfortable and unwelcome in independent India. They joke about it now, of course, but they heard the labourers keeping the rhythm while loading and unloading jute, singing what sounded like ‘hey-ho, the sahib’s a saala’ (meaning, pretty much, that the boss is a bloody bastard). It is the best way to build bridges,” he said. “I don’t know if there is any better way to do it. Using culture is the best way to engage with any nation. There is an appetite for film and there is a great appetite for cultural exchange. Something is telling me it is ripe for it again. There is so much political crap around, especially between east and west, there is a real need for something else. This can cut through that.” Dundee (1939, b/w), The city of Dundee, its people and industries: jute, jam, and journalism. Premiered at a meeting of the British Association in Dundee, September 1939, the screening was abandoned midway owing to the declaration of war. Director: Donald Alexander. But more entrenched was the social divisions among the colonials. The Establishment of the Colonial masters and their descendants, members of the Tollygunge club (which only admitted, for instance, its first Indian member thirty years after Independence!), looked down upon the Jutewallahs as mere labourers, bottom of the social heap. The bankers in Calcutta considered themselves higher than the jute mill office managers; naturally, the latter had to find people in the mills to look down upon as well, people like the assistant mill managers and their flunkies. These various hierarchies very rarely mixed socially. Those raucous parties were always among Jutewallahs of a particular social stratum. In this fascinating film, Brian journeys into his past and travels to Calcutta, following in the footsteps of the Dundee jute workers who left the city to seek fortunes in India. Brian says: "The 'jute wallahs' left Dundee for what they hoped would be a better life.Next month, we'll see one of Dundee's most famous sons follow in their footsteps in a voyage of discovery. You see that in the people who went out there - they were up for an adventure. For me it was to go south and become an actor. Dundee had one of the best theatres in the country but I didn't properly appreciate that at the time." The Hooghly was the centrepiece of the world of jute, providing berthing for ships bound for Dundee as well points of disembarkation for the Jutewallahs arriving to take up their new jobs and accommodations along the river banks.

The film also touches on the taboo, as it was at the time, of Anglo-Indian relationships - and Dundee's dual status as the UK's whaling capital as well as having one of the country's biggest populations of females per capita. However, change was coming as the balance of power in the global jute industry shifted from Dundee to Calcutta. If Dundonian workers wanted a future in jute there was only one place to go - India. But they were Scots and the sun always shone, so they did what they always did best: wild parties. The bearers would be in their splendid turbans and cummerbunds, the cooks aflutter; the Scots fell upon the gin and whisky bottles; there would be tennis and swimming, and by the end of it, they would be drunk silly, in the pond, the mill tank, everywhere... It was exhilarating to see Hindus and Muslims working together in such harmony. In fact, jute for me is a metaphor for binding. We even discovered a mosque and a temple standing side by side in the vicinity of one mill,” said Cox.The cemetery is in a terrible state. Many of the graves are broken, it’s overgrown with weeds and the entire place reeks of extreme neglect,” said Cox. In their search for the graves of fellow Scots, the crew was helped by Norman Hall, the caretaker of the cemetery for years now, and his wife Loretta. Cox and the crew were rewarded — “we discovered a good 10-15 graves of people from Dundee who had lived in Calcutta and worked in the jute mills in the vicinity,” said Archer. But of course that social power was exclusively within their own milieus. As far as the bosses of the mills, the rich upper-class were concerned, the mill-hands were so much cattle. The mills were incredibly noisy and many workers went deaf; the dust and fibre in the air destroyed their lungs. Still generation followed generation into the mills, entire families occupied in creating wealth for Dundee. There was something very familiar about Kolkata,” he said. “The roughness of it and the Victorian architecture, it was very much still a city of empire. I remember seeing the barges on the Hooghly River in Kolkata with piles and piles of jute, with names of these mills in Dundee. I found that weird.” There is that predilection about drink in the Irish, it is a kind of a cliché, but it is also about the nature of celebration and storytelling, and the fact that they do celebrate, the whole spirit of the seanchaí, that is such a powerful spirit.”

IIT'S a long way to go to die - but that's exactly what happened to many of the women of Dundee who "disappeared" after travelling to India to cash in on the jute industry of Calcutta. Cox’s family history is steeped in tragedy, but also in community. His father died when he was eight. His mother, who worked as a spinner in Dundee’s jute mills, had repeated nervous breakdowns. The image is not inappropriate, since Brian Cox, one of the stars of Conor Mc- Pherson's The Weir , sees the theatre in quasi-religious terms. Two hours earlier, a full matinee audience on a wet, dreary day had hung on every word as the actors explored the aching nature of loss, ghosts and memory. Half and ten and nineBy the time she wrote these lines, the time of jute in Dundee was already passing. The jute barons strove to outdo each other in the grandeur of their mills, playing ‘my chimney is bigger than your chimney’. They failed to see that their industry was nearing its end. The balance of power in the world of jute had shifted to Calcutta. The evening was far more pleasant with the entire crew heading to the Tollygunge Club. “The idea of filming at the club was to capture what the social life of the Scots living in the city must have been like,” ventured Archer.Brian said: "My family history is bound up in jute. My parents followed their parents into the mills but the closest I got was as a wee boy, peering through the open doors of the Eagle JuteWorks on a hot summer's day. I use Stevenson's great saying: 'I travel not to go anywhere but instead to go, the great affair is to move...' It's easy to laugh at that thought but these people had a real go and had interesting lives, and I admire them for that." Brian said: "In India, I sampled jute pakora. I had no idea you could eat it. It's actually very nice. They make soup from it too, but I didn't try that.

For many of them, the move to India paved the way for a lavish lifestyle of parties and luxurious living. For others, it was the end of the road. He grew up amid the clatter of the Jute mills, where both his parents began their working lives. The Jute trade, making hessian from India's "golden" fibre, dominated Dundee for over a century, linking it with Calcutta. Now it is fast becoming a memory. Brian Cox's Jute Journey is a journey into Brian Cox's own past, and on to Calcutta in the footsteps of the Dundee Jute workers who left to seek their fortunes in India. Director: Brian Ross. Producer: John Archer. A Hopscotch Films Production. Brian says: "My folks followed their parents into the mills but the closest I got was as a wee boy, peering through the open doors of the Eagle Jute Works on a hot summer's day. I recall being dazzled by all the noise, the dust and the activity." The labour of the Indian workmen was far harder. Day in and day out they toiled in torrid heat and corrosive dust. Discipline was harsh in the mills. As long as they worked hard and were punctual, they had jobs. If not, well, there were millions others desperate for a job, any job. Just as in Dundee decades earlier, the conditions and support for Indian workers in Calcutta were dire. There were no tribunals, no unions, no reprieve.May: Navhind Times. Starting small. Integrative, holistic nutrition and lifestyle medicine expert Luke Coutinho, recently launched his book, “Small Wins Everyday” … I began working on this book in January 2022… Some of our most complicated cases from cancer to diabetes to Alzheimer’s to other diseases have been successful as we teach our patients to make small life style changes on day at a time… Because this has worked for us, we thought we should put it into a book and share it with the world… Video: 30 May: Herald. GOA @36: Young are grateful for Goa’s Statehood… Goa was finally liberated from Portuguese rule on December 19, 1961. It became a Union Territory of India… A pivotal referendum took place in 1967, resulting in their choice to remain a Union Territory. Eventually, on May 30, 1987, Goa attained Statehood… Youngster like Sheefa Tonse reveal what they think about Statehood… “Statehood is important,” she says “as it helps establish Goa as a state with a distinctive entity…” 6m.40s The Marwaris, business-oriented clans from Rajasthan, became the new kings of jute. They had been involved in India’s jute industry from the very beginning, but they continued to employ Dundonians as managers. Interaction between the Scots and the Indians increased substantially. The Jutewallahs trained up Indian colleagues; in some conservative mills, however, there were still lines that could not be crossed. Several of them who fell in love with Indian women found themselves fired from their jobs. messages and online donations to Parkinson's UK, please visit https://antoniogonsalves.muchloved.com/