The spirit of a condemned 20-year-old student wanders through time, linking together four stories of people struggling for survival in this gritty meditation on poverty, natural disaster and political strife in India. A middle-class family's home is no match for the monsoons, while another clan's morality is compromised when famine strikes. Young boys smuggle rice, and politicians pity the poor while living in the lap of luxury.

A small company advertises for 100 vacancies and 30,000 apply. The applicants are all from the ranks of the poor and there is a virtual riot. Everyone around is seeking for opportunities. Among them are the applicants who desperately need the job, the photographer who is busy seeking a scoop, the village moneylender who is busy exploiting the poor, the ineffective police, the employers who are advertising posts even while a six month old strike has nearly caused the workmen to become destitute. It is a story of society captured in a tiny framework of a small business. Ultimately, the workmen, the unemployed and the farmers all get to gether to protest against this exploitation.

The bread-winning daughter in a middle-class family fails to return from work one evening. The saga begins with worries at home, followed by midnight searches and finally a deepening crisis arising out of economic and moral constraints prevalent in the society. Yet the film speaks of hope and of strength hidden behind despair.

A young, idealistic director arrives in a village to make a picture set during the Great Bengal Famine. It’s a film that he hopes will reveal the problems and privations still current in rural India.

A pre-teen servant boy dies of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning on a cold winter night in the kitchen. The household is suddenly plunged into psychological turmoil, torn between guilt and fear of a police investigation and the resulting scandal. As events unfold, the employer and his wife reveal their petty, hypocritical selves.

Subhash is a photographer from the city, who has come to take pictures of some old temples and ruins in a village. Ruins fascinate him. While in the village, he gets acquainted with a young woman, Jamini, who has had her heart broken in the past, by another visitor from the big city. Will history repeat itself, or will she find a way out of the ruins at last?

Burning with a desire to be a journalist, a young man gets his chance when a publisher -- the father of a friend -- suggests that he write a story on the daily life of the people in his house (several families worth of people). The material turns out to be too incohesive and abundant to work into a pointed, thematic article, and just when he is about to give up, his younger brother asks him a simple question: "How many coal burners are there in Calcutta?" This triggers an idea for a story about Calcutta's pollution -- and the aspiring journalist dreams of myriads of burner-toting citizens invading the publisher's home demanding redress. Maybe he is finally on the way to a story that matters.

When the elderly mother of a Kolkata middle-class family commits suicide, no one has the courage to read the old woman's diary. When the eldest son returns from Germany, his anxious questioning brings to light the disorientation experienced by the family and the way world history penetrates into the fabric of individual lives.