09 Feb 2012
Ghosts of a Massacre
Nirmal Ghosh on unquiet memories
Sitting under the broad ficus tree at Thammasat University's campus in historic Bangkok, it is difficult to imagine the stomach-churning violence that engulfed the university in 1976 – the year I began university in Kolkata.
It was a vastly different world then; the Vietnam war had just officially ended but the Cold War was still very much on. There was no such thing as cable TV; in many countries there was no such thing as TV. It was still the era of the radio.
On Oct 6 that year, military and police units and righ- wing mobs savagely attacked several thousand left-wing