Category Archives: Records, All

Soumitra Chatterjee | The tree’s gone, the shade remains

SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE 1935-2020 | MOVIES

Soumitra Chatterjee. File   | Photo Credit: NAGARA GOPAL

The actor, even in his mid-eighties, was not only active but also highly sought-after. Terms like ‘has-been’ or ‘yesteryear’ never applied to him

A piece of information, by itself, is dead wood – like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle – which comes to life only when you collate it with other pieces. Take actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s date of birth, for example. The fact that he was born on January 19, 1935 doesn’t say much about him. But if you place that date against October 1, 2020, when he last reported for a shoot before showing symptoms of COVID-19, you realise he was no ordinary actor but someone who was professionally active even when nearing 86.

Not many lead actors continue to work – or get work – at 86. None actually, if you discount Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas, Christopher Plummer and maybe a couple of other names that don’t lend to easy recall. Back home, there was exception in the form of Dev Anand, who continued to work until he died at 88, but by then he was long past his prime and was making those films only to feed his vanity.

But Chatterjee, even in his mid-eighties, was not only active but also highly sought-after. Terms like ‘has-been’ or ‘yesteryear’ never applied to him. Ernest Hemingway once said that no writer ever produced anything worthwhile after winning the Nobel; the same holds true for the Dadasaheb Phalke award in Indian cinema, in the sense that it invariably comes at a time when the awardee’s productive years are spoken of in the past tense. But not for Chatterjee. He got the award in 2012, and ever since then he got only busier by the year. In 2019, he had as many as 15 releases; and in the pandemic-hit 2020, almost as many of his films either released or are lined up for release.

So, how does one define Soumitra Chatterjee?

If you label him as a Satyajit Ray actor – they worked together in 14 films – his knowledgeable fans will instantly point out that he worked with numerous other directors too and that those 14, even though they brought him acclaim, form only a small percentage of the more than 300 films he did during his lifetime. In fact, with the notable exceptions of Ritwik Ghatak (whom Chatterjee claimed to have punched once, during a debate back in the 1960s) and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, he worked with nearly all directors, including Tapan Sinha, Mrinal Sen and Tarun Majumdar.

If you label him as a cinema actor, people will remind you that he did theatre too.

If you label him as an actor, someone or the other is bound to tell you that he was a painter, poet and an activist as well.

If you identify him as Feluda, there will be someone disagreeing: ‘No, he was more popular as Apu.’

If you classify him as a Calcuttan or a Bengali, they will say he was global, decorated twice by the French, with Order of Arts and Letters and with the Legion of Honour.

More an actor than a ‘hero’

But in debate-loving Bengal, one thing remains indisputable: that for several generations of Bengalis, the mention of the word ‘actor’ instantly brought two names to mind, Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee. There were the two colossuses. After Kumar, nearly a decade older and far more popular of the two, died at the age of 54 in 1980, Chatterjee became the lone flag-bearer of meaningful Bengali cinema.

Chatterjee was one of those very few Indian actors who, even while playing the lead in commercial movies, was acknowledged more as an actor than a ‘hero’ – a hero being someone one who can jump off a tall building without a scratch and can knock out a dozen bad guys with his bare hands.

While it was only fairly recently that some fresh air swept through Bollywood with the arrival of Irrfan Khan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Rajkummar Rao – mainstream actors who could draw crowds even without fight scenes – Chatterjee was all of them rolled into one, right from the black-and-white era. And considering that he was around for 61 long years, almost every Bengali – from nonagenarians down to teenagers – lovingly preserves in mind his or her own image of Chatterjee: the innocent Apu; the charming Amal of Charulata; the daring Feluda; the resolute swimming coach in Kony; the middle-aged man next door; the genial grandfather. His very presence on the screen was assuring: for filmmakers and audiences alike.

His passing is akin to the falling of an ancient tree. But while the tree is gone, its shade remains. It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that the trunk of the tree was essentially made of the 14 films he did for Ray. For, one will always wonder how Chatterjee’s career would have fared without Ray. For that matter, one can also wonder how Ray’s films would have fared without Chatterjee.

That’s something Bengal can now debate.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Entertainment> Movies / by Bishwanath Ghosh / November 15th, 2020

City gets first racing team

Kolkata:

For motor sports enthusiasts in the City of Joy, it’s time to cheer! In a proud moment, the city got its first racing team with the official launch of ‘Kolkata Joba Racing’ on November 3.

The team was launched by Firhad Hakim, state urban development and municipal affairs minister, who is also the chairman of Board of Administrators, Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

The team is being promoted by Debdutta Mukherjee, popularly known as John Mukherjee – India’s first and only Marshal at the Formula I and Tathagata Mukherjee, a Formula 3 racer.

“It is indeed an exciting moment. Over the last few years, motor sports in the country have gained tremendous popularity particularly in cities like Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai.

However, there was no representation from Kolkata, which is so passionate when it comes to sports and culture. This racing team will surely go all over the world and make our city proud,” said Hakim, during the launch.

A racing event is scheduled to be held in Chennai this month and the racing team from Kolkata will be participating giving the sports fanatics of the city to cheer its own racing team.

source: http://www.millenniumpost.in / Millennium Post / Home> Kolkata / by Team MP / November 04th, 2020

Four Bengal climbers head to scale Ama Dablam

Kolkata:

For the first time from Bengal, 4 mountaineers will soon start their expedition to one of the most aesthetic and challenging peaks in the Himalayas—Mt. Ama Dablam. The peak rises 6,856 meters in elevation.

Overcoming the challenges posed by the pandemic, the mountaineers—Satyarup Siddhanta , Malay Mukherjee, Kiran Patra and Debasish Biswas, have already reached Nepal. The climbers left the city to reach Siliguri by train on November 1. They had to follow the stringent COVID guidelines of the Nepal government before leaving for the final expedition.

“We will face the daunting task amid the chilling weather conditions. When we will be scaling the mountain, the temperature is expected to hover around minus 40 degree Celsius mark. The steepness of the peak will be another hurdle that we will have to overcome. If everything goes as per plan, the expected summit will end on November 24 or 25,” said Siddhanta.

Interestingly, Prince of Bahrain will simultaneously take up the expedition along with the Bengali mountaineers. They will be assisted by a team of experienced Sherpas.

The team claimed that chances of frost or blizzard during the summit would be minimum. Rudra Prasad Halder, who works with the state Police, was also expected to join the expedition. However, Halder—who had climbed Mt Everest in 2016—had to stay back for official reasons.

source: http://www.millenniumpost.in / Millennium Post / Home> Kolkata / by MPost / November 03rd, 2020

India’s first underwater Metro line in Kolkata: A look at newly opened station

  • Union minister Piyush Goyal inaugurated the Phoolbagan metro station of Kolkata East-West Corridor earlier this month
  • The Union Cabinet earlier approved the revised cost of East-West Metro Corridor Project for Kolkata
Phoolbagan is the first underground station to become operational in the East West Metro corridor
Phoolbagan is the first underground station to become operational in the East West Metro corridor

With “world-class passenger amenities and elegant interiors” the newly opened Phoolbagan Metro station is Durga Puja gift for commuters in Kolkata. Union minister Piyush Goyal unveiled the Phoolbagan metro station of Kolkata East-West Corridor earlier this month. The 16.6 km long Corridor will connect Howrah on the West bank of the river Hooghly with Salt Lake City on its east bank.

Phoolbagan is the first underground station to become operational in the East West Metro corridor, which travels both below the surface and on elevated tracks, and also through underwater tunnels below River Hooghly. MG Road in the north-south main line of Kolkata Metro was the last underground station to be commissioned back in September 1995. All metro stations to become functional after that are either elevated or at grade level.

The start of Metro services at Phoolbagan Station is a “Durga Puja gift by the Railways for Kolkatans”, the minister said. “The estimates are that this line (East West Metro corridor) will be used by nearly 10 lakh people by 2035. That itself will be a huge service to the people of Kolkata,” he added.

The new line is expected to carry about 900,000 people daily

“The metro corridor will ease traffic congestion, enhance urban connectivity and provide a cleaner mobility solution to lakhs of daily commuters,” the minister said.

The new line is expected to take less than a minute to cross a 520-meter underwater tunnel. Depending on the time of day, it takes some 20 minutes to use the ferry and anywhere upward of an hour to cross the Howrah bridge.

“Since this corridor connects three most important parts of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area i.e. Howrah, Business area of Kolkata and New Settlements in Salt Lake it is going to revolutionise the mass rapid transport in Kolkata and adjoining Howrah and Bidhanangar. This will connect important landmarks like Howrah, Sealdah, Esplanade and Salt Lake Sector-V which is an IT hub,” the official statement mentioned.

The Union Cabinet earlier approved the revised cost of East-West Metro Corridor Project for Kolkata, Union minister Piyush Goyal said. The completion cost of the project estimated at ₹8,575 crore, Goyal added. The project is likely to be completed by December, 2021. “This will give a boost to mass transit system,” said Union minister Piyush Goyal.

source: http://www.livemint.com / Mint / Home> News> India / by Staff Writer / October 20th, 2020

Father Gaston Roberge Retained a Lifelong Love for and Commitment to Indian Cinema

Fr Gaston Roberge. Photo: chitrabani.net

The Canadian-turned-Calcuttan did not share the disdain arty Indian filmmakers had for commercial cinema.

The exchange between the little prince and the fox from the classic 20th century post-war French fable, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, holds the key to how two men – Satyajit Ray and Fr Gaston Roberge – met every Sunday at 9 am at the residence of Ray on the Bishops Lefroy Road in Calcutta. Like the fox and the prince, they kept their ritual and explored the world of ideas. Alas, now with the passing of Fr Gaston Roberge, we will never know who was the prince or the fox between the two. This rite of friendship lasted for 22 years, ever since their first meeting in 1969. They institutionalised their friendship in the form of Chitrabani, the first development communication institution in the eastern part of India, and thus the lore continues.

Unlike their rendezvous, I encountered Fr Gaston Roberge on three occasions, serendipitously – in Pune, Ahmedabad and Goa – in the early 1990s. The third time, at an International Canadian Studies conference, I decided to record the moment in the form of an interview which was then published in the Sunday Magazine of the Indian Express on November 13, 1994.  Each time it was his Canadian cadence of directness, and unassuming presence, coupled with the mischievous smile and the phenomenal capacity to talk cinema that stood out.

Let’s take the case of the blockbuster hit Sholay. This year marks the 45th anniversary of its theatrical release in 1975, and I do not recollect anyone who has brought together the arrival of the train at the Ramgarh and the Lumière brothers’ 50-second shot of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in Paris (1896) together in a sentence: It is in such moment of equivalence that one is deschooled and taken on a parallel journey of Indian cinema.

For Fr Roberge, “a proud Calcuttan”, embedded in culture and ethos of the host society – becoming native was a natural process. “I am at a loss when I am asked, ‘Where are you from?’,” he confesses. “I have been called ‘Fadar Gautam Roberjee’,” he said, recounting an incident of his earlier days after his arrival in Kolkata while learning the Bengali language and doing missionary work in the schools. When asked how he felt about that name, an accident of accents, he smiled. “I like it! I still use ‘Fadar’, he said to me. Fadar speaks Bengali with a French accent among other languages like Italian. Through interacting with Bengali people, I have come to know myself further,” he had said.

Writing about his journey to India, he said it was an “urge” to come over to India, to dialogue with her people, and learn from them whatever he might discover that he did not know, especially about God. “In return, of course, I was keen to share whatever my own tradition had given me. But my journey was one of discovery, not of colonization, religious or political. I had joined the Society of Jesus at the age of 21 years. I already had five years of religious life when I volunteered to come to India, and my superiors decided I would join the Jesuits of Kolkata.”

I recollect him telling me how the city was encoded in him in form of a tri-murti, an image with three faces: “the face of cineaste Satyajit Ray, Mother Teresa, the face of the rickshaw-puller in Dominique Lapierre’s The City of Joy—each representing the creativity of the intelligentsia, unconditional charity and the heroism of an ordinary citizen.”  He had a very close relationship with both Mother Teresa and Dominique Lapierre.

Fr Gaston Roberge with Mother Teresa. Photo: chitrabani.net

In drawing attention to the imperative to think about cinema, he implores, “thinking allows the mind to progress in its search for plentitude and unity. When one is dissatisfied with a particular social order, one is tempted to reject the type of thinking that is associated with that order. This is indeed a mistake. For, if one cannot transcend the limitations of a social order with the help of the ideology of that order, one is not likely to be able to transcend the limitations of the alternative social order either, with whatever ideology.”

Writing was his mode of thinking – at the last count he had authored 31 books – especially after he discovered his inability to do much on the field during the violent times of the 70s in Calcutta during which many conspiracy theories flourished, making him, his work and the institution of Chitrabani the suspects of an international conspiracy, ranging from cold war rhetoric to missionary conversions.

The confluence of Derrida and his missionary invocation produces statements like:

“A text always already defies the authority of its author. What is true of films is generally true of all texts. The author of a text, filmic, literary or dramatic, is not the author—God.” (original stress)

In conversations, his pauses and the idea of silence were eloquent and an exercise in listening, an endangered practice as Nuruddin Farah would say. His witty deployment – “I am a priest” – as a strategic reminder of drawing the line in refraining to speculate in a discussion despite being tempted intellectually.

Woven into his discourse were emotion and theology and implicit in his teleological imbuement of Cinema was the providentialism. Once I asked him about Kalaignar Karunanidhi writing out god from the Tamil cinema. He paused and alluding to the 17th century tension between Blaise Pascal and Rene Descartes, who tried to dispense with God in philosophy, and quoting Pascal said, “the heart knows of reasons that reason cannot grasp”. Much like a Bernard Crick, he elaborated the treatise in defence of Indian cinema. “[P]opular films are collective dreams and song and dance is an integral part of it. Song and dance are sight and sound,” he wrote, invoking Bharat Muni’s Natyashastra. He was the Master Preacher of Film Theoryas the 2017 39-minute long documentary by K.S. Das encapsulates the remarkable Father Gaston Roberge.

Among the critical three decades of the 70s-90s, it was in the 80s that his work bore much meaning as filmwallahs, writers, academics, critics and even politicians were flailing in an effort to keep their feet on shifting ground, as everything was up for question.

At the beginning of the 80s, the film society movement, having spread across the nation fostering an orientation of an alternative film culture with an international outlook, found itself in a crisis as it embattled the state bureaucracy’s wrongful interpretation of its activities – sites of commercial entertainment. At the same time, as questions about Indian cinema became part of a milieu for the 800-odd graduates who had come out of the Pune Film Institute, brandishing “a consciousness of the social responsibility of the artist”, as Jagat Murari wrote about as the mandate of the institute. Fr Roberge countered the dismissive and patronising gaze of the film society-wallahs, as he sought answers in a fuller engagement with the popular Indian cinema. In response, Fr Gaston offered Another Cinema for Another Society, a militant manifesto of sorts: “A new cinema can only be born along with a nascent society and a new cinema can contribute to the growth of that society. ”

Similarly, the two key reports – the Patil Report of the Film Inquiry Committee (1951) and Karath Report of the Working Group of Film Policy (1980) – are like bookends to the bureaucratic rationalisation of the political economy of the Indian film industry. Often the disdain was visible, as the Karath report framed the film industry, “vulgar, trivial, reactionary, tasteless and exploitative”.

With his trademark clear-headedness, Fr. Roberge defined his position:

“Every effort should be made to salvage from total oblivion the report of the Working Group on National Film Policy (1980) for a new Indian Cinema. The report has ideological limitations but argues well for ‘another’ Indian cinema. This cinema would take on the social tasks which critics of the so-called commercial cinema want the latter to perform. In our socio-economic system, commercial cinema functions best when it is is spared the irritant of false expectations, and when the social value of the commodity it produces—entertainment—is recognised.”

He was a faithful witness to these turbulent times as Indian cinema was in the throes of its identity crisis – “good Indian cinema” vs “radical cinema” – as the questions of a ‘third cinema’ began floating around.

There were many endeavours in that decade in search of the quintessential Indian idiom.

Earlier, Satyajit Ray laid out the schema in Our films, Their films. As Chidananda Das Gupta was Talking About Films, we read that Kishore Valicha had pronounced Amitabh Bachchan as the urban machine. In the context of the Sikh pogrom, Nirmal Verma proclaimed at the Gandhi Peace Foundation the need to address “religion, the most prestigious thing in the life of every Indian. Why should we in the name of this faithless secularism try to deny the deepest, the noblest quality of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, every religion?”; K.S.Singh and Bapu Jayasinhji Jhala were trying to institutionalise visual anthropology in India; G.N. Devy was calling out the amnesia in literary criticism; Arundhati Roy scripted and acted in, In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones; and, Pankaj Mishra was still on his way to Ludhiana for his butter chicken!

Satyajit Ray and Fr Gaston Roberge. Photo: chitrabani.net

Despite cinema as his apostolic calling, he resonated with Arturo Escobar in the critique of development: “Sustainable development is an oxymoron and is not some project but a quality of human mind”. In the same vein, he added, “Spirituality is not a part of any religion but a quality of humans.”

With his friend Apu and uncle Bharat Muni, he made his way through the cinematic maze, addressing the poverty of Indian cinema, enriching the Indian people through a mass literacy in the means and technologies of communication as tools of conviviality.

Displaying admirable epistemic fluency, patience, discernment and prescience, the way Verrier Elwin responded to the tribal question, Fr Roberge did on the question of communication, and for him, the modality of cinema became a point of entry into that communication—human communication. All his life, Fr Roberge argued and endeavoured to define the social contract of image making in India, which unfortunately is under duress once again.

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.

source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> Film / by Narendra Pachkhede / September 01st, 2020

How a suicide in Calcutta in 1800s sparked a debate on applying English laws in India

The East India Company wanted the law of forfeiture to apply in the colonies, which would have allowed a suicide victim’s property to pass to the Crown.

The Court House, Calcutta, where the case would first have been heard. A hand-coloured print from the Fiebig Collection: Views of Calcutta and Surrounding Districts, by Frederick Fiebig in 1851 | British Library Online Gallery

In a delicate case from 1864, the Privy Council considered whether the English practice of forfeiture following a suicide should apply to a subject of the British Raj.

Following the death of Rajah Christenauth Roy Bayadoor in Calcutta on October 31, 1844, a second will was discovered, written by him that morning, which left a portion of his estate to the East India Company. Since his death was by his own hand, Bayadoor’s widow, Ranee Surnomoyee, disputed the validity of this will on the grounds that it was not written in sound mind. The court found in favour of Ranee Surnomoyee, declaring the second will to be invalid.

An appeal was then made to the Privy Council against this verdict on behalf of East India Company, citing the law of forfeiture in cases of suicide. A digitised copy of the response of the Council is available to view on the website of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute.

Known as felo-de-se within English common law, meaning “crime of his-, or herself”, suicide in England was associated with restless souls. Confirmed victims were historically buried at crossroads with a stake through their heart, possibly in an effort to stop the soul from wandering. The law was only changed to allow burials within churchyards following the tragic death of Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh in 1822.

Even then, restrictions still applied. In her book on Victorian attitudes to suicide, Barbara Gates states that churchyard burials were allowed without Christian rites and restricted to “at night, between the hours of nine and midnight, and his/her goods and chattels must still be turned over to the Crown”.

Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, took his own life in 1822, probably due to stress and depression caused by the strain of his political career and public unpopularity. The suicide of such a public figure inspired the re-examination of related English laws. Image from Jonah Barrington, Historic Memoirs of Ireland (London, 1833) Photo credit: British Library flickr

Intended as a deterrent to criminals, the law of forfeiture passed the deceased’s property to the Crown and away from inheritors. It also applied to suicides, which were considered a crime against the individual, God and the Crown. Abolished by the Forfeiture Act 1870, the practice was applied infrequently, even at the time of our case.

In the appeal, the representative of the East India Company did not further contest the second will. Instead, he argued that English law, including forfeiture, applied in the colonies. The privy councillors, therefore, had to consider the application of these laws in India.

They examined cultural differences between Britons and Indians to find examples of where British law did not fit with Indian traditions. The main examples given by the Council were polygamy and child marriage. Although shocking to Victorian sensibilities, these were part of the culture and beliefs of Indians at the time and so the East India Company had allowed them to continue. Therefore, by adapting English law to suit Indian culture, the East India Company had set a precedent.

In conclusion, the Privy Councillors expressed their surprise at an effort to enforce forfeiture following a suicide as late as 1844 and their confusion at its application to an Indian Hindu. They found in favour of the descendants of Rajah Christenauth Roy Bayadoor and allowed them to retain possession of his property.

The author is a Cataloguer of Modern Archives & Manuscripts.

This article first appeared on the British Library’s Untold Lives Blog.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> History Revisited / by Matthew Waters / October 12th, 2020

Principal of MP Birla Foundation School dead

Herbert George, who headed the Behala school since 1988, was known as a ‘strict disciplinarian’

Herbert George / File picture / Our Special Correspondent / Calcutta

The principal of MP Birla Foundation Higher Secondary School, Herbert George, died in the city on Monday following a short illness. He was 75.

George had been principal of the Behala school from 1988 and was known as a “strict disciplinarian”. He gave importance  to both academic and co-curricular activities. Before joining MP Birla Foundation, he was associated with Don Bosco Liluah and St Augustine’s Day School, Calcutta.

He is survived by his son and daughter.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Special Correspondent / October 20th, 2020

City gets new 10 million gallon water reservoir

Help in increasing the supply to areas south of Bhowanipore that receive potable water from the Garden Reach plantTh

The plant can produce 185 million gallons of water every day, but there is only one 29 million gallon capacity reservoir to stock water / Representational images from Shutterstock

A 10 million gallon water reservoir was inaugurated adjacent to the Garden Reach waterworks on Wednesday.

The reservoir will help increase the supply to areas south of Bhowanipore that receive potable water from the Garden Reach plant.

The plant can produce 185 million gallons of water every day, but there is only one 29 million gallon capacity reservoir to stock water. The new reservoir will start functioning from Thursday; it will increase the storage capacity, a civic engineer said.

Rashbehari Avenue, Gariahat, Golpark, Ballygunge, and parts of Kasba and Jadavpur receive potable water from the Garden Reach waterworks. All these places will benefit, the engineer said. “We can now supply water more efficiently. The demand changes with season… the demand is more in the mornings. The additional water in the reservoir can be diverted to areas where demand is more.”

A reservoir is required to store the water that is produced during lean periods when the demand is less. “The demand is always less at night. But if we have more storage capacity, we can go on producing water at night that can then be thrust into the supply network in the morning. This will increase the pressure of the flow and take water to pockets that face water shortage now,” the engineer said.

Mainak Mukherjee, the chief engineer of the CMC’s water supply department, said the operation of the new reservoir would be completely automated. “There will be minimal human interference. Chances of errors will reduce because of automation. The system will give alerts in case there is any abnormality in any component and this will help address the problem faster.”

Firhad Hakim, the chairperson of CMC’s board of administrators, inaugurated the reservoir.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online /Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Subhajoy Roy / Calcutta / October 15th, 2020

Quest to build a ‘beautiful society’

Birth centenary of children’s museum founder Jugal Srimal

The portrait of Jugal Srimal that was unveiled on Friday / Bishwarup Dutta / Jhinuk Mazumdar / Calcutta  

A girl in her early 20s seated on a wheelchair came to Nehru Children’s Museum in 1992 because she wanted to learn how to operate computers. She could not speak but had a compass fitted to her head and a book of letters on her lap, which she made use of to point out and express herself.

The person at the museum who was approached did not want to refuse her but was unsure whether they would be able to accommodate her. So she approached the director.

Founder Jugal Srimal took the girl to the class she wanted to go to and told the students that the “main objective” of Nehru Children’s Museum was “to build a beautiful society’, not to train them in operating a computer.

Members and staff of the museum paid tributes to Jugal Srimal, the founder-director of Nehru Children’s Museum, on Thursday on the occasion of his birth centenary. 

“That society will be built by all of you. No matter whatever the challenges are for a beautiful society, each one of you has to hold hands…,” Sikha Mukherjee, the administrative secretary of the museum quoted Srimal as telling the class, back in 1992.

Memories and anecdotes were shared about Srimal, who was also the founder trustee of Tagore Foundation, a trust formed to promote Bengali culture.

Srimal got the land on Chowringhee Road, on which the museum stands, from the Bengal government in 1969. The museum was inaugurated on November 14, 1972.

The museum has clay models that narrate the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata and costume dolls from over 96 countries, some of which were collected by Srimal. Various embassies have also presented dolls to Nehru Children’s Museum.

“There are over 1,000 dolls now, about 350 of which were collected during my father’s time,” said Srimal’s son Sudip, who is now director of the museum.

Jugal Srimal was born in an “aristocratic and cultured zamindar family” of Azimganj, Murshidabad, on October 8, 1919. “If my father would have been here today he would never have allowed us to celebrate this day. He was always against publicity…. For his centenary, we had planned a five-day programme with 1,200 invitees, but because of Covid-19 we had a small programme remembering him,” said Sudip Srimal.

From the oldest employee of the museum Ramendra Das to senior employee Dipti Biswas, each one had a story to share. Jugal Srimal’s work was not restricted to the museum but went much beyond that, said Prabal Dutta, joint director of the museum.

Dutta spoke about the founder-director’s reading habits. “He would not be able to go off to sleep at night without reading but he had noticed that the habit of reading was going away…. He thought that people were not interested in buying books or borrowing it from library, but if the books reached them the interest of reading would sustain. So he formed Tagore Mobile Library,” Dutta recalled. Jugal Srimal gave away his collection to the library.

Those who attended the programme said they were missing the children. The institute has 1,400 students learning various activities like song, dance, painting and drama.

On Thursday, a portrait of Jugal Srimal made by 20-year-old Sourav Saha, who has been learning painting in the museum since 2015, was unveiled by Rotarian R.K. Bubna.

A book titled “Shishuder ja prappo ta jeno tara paye”, written by the founder before in the 1940s, was released on Thursday. Granddaughter Indrani Sengupta, now the secretary of the museum, found it among his manuscripts.

“I was young and not ready to take the responsibility but he told me it was not about age but how I handled the responsibility,” said Sengupta.

“…Last eight months have been difficult but we have paid our permanent staff and used up our savings to tide over this period. We have appealed to our friends and well-wishers and many have responded,” said Sudip Srimal.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/ The Telegraph Online / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Jhinuk Mazumbdar / Calcutta / October 10th, 2020

Veteran sports journalist Kishore Bhimani dies

The septuagenarian suffered a cerebral attack recently and was undergoing treatmentK

Kishore Bhimani / Twitter / @t2telegraph

Veteran sports journalist and cricket commentator Kishore Bhimani died at the age of 74, family sources said on Thursday.

He is survived by his wife Rita and son Gautam who is also a well-known TV personality.

“He had suffered a cerebral attack a few days back and was undergoing treatment,” a family source said.

Bhimani was one of the most recognised English voices of the 1980s.

Following his death, a pall of gloom descended on the country’s sports fraternity, with tributes coming in from all quarters.

“RIP Kishore Bhimani..he was one of the good Old Fashioned Crkt writer who took Crkt writings like a player who takes to playing…Condolences to his Spouse Rita & Son Gautam.. GodBless All Always.. Fondly,” legendary Indian spinner Bishan Singh Bedi tweeted.

“Farewell Kishore Bhimani. Cricket journalist and a true lover of #Kolkata,” politician Derek O’Brien wrote on Twitter.

Bhimani was commentating when Sunil Gavaskar became the first player to reach 10,000 runs in Test cricket, during the drawn match against Pakistan in Ahmedabad in 1987.

One of the most sought-after Indian cricket writers who would be wooed by British publications in the 1980s, Bhimani was also on air during the final moments of the famous 1986 tied Test against Australia at Chepauk.

It is said that Imran Khan, during his captaincy days, was a regular at Bhimani’s residence whenever he was in Calcutta.

Bhimani had worked for Calcutta daily ‘The Statesman’, was a noted columnist and wrote ‘The Accidental Godman’.

He was the president of Calcutta Sports Journalists Club from 1978 to 1980.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online / Home> Sports / by The Telegraph Bureau & Agencies / Calcutta – October 15th, 2020