Durga Puja and Our Teenagers

Posted on September 28, 2011 by sudipta

When we celebrate Durga Puja in this adopted homeland of ours, one thought keeps on playing in our minds – how much does our children enjoy this festival? Do they feel the same as we did when we were kids in our homeland? Many of us had the idea that our children really don’t care much about this favorite festival of ours. Often we have seen bored kids playing hand held video games in the hallways of our festival venue while their parents enjoyed inside. We sometimes debated, whether we are forcing our kids to come to the festival just because we want to, or it is our duty as a parent to introduce them to our culture and traditions? Is it working? Can they feel the spirit of the best festival of our community?
To get a more definitive answer, I asked my fourteen year old son Omkar and his friends a simple question. What does Durga Puja mean to them? And here are their responses. Continue reading →

Durga Puja 2011 : New Jersey Style

Posted on September 23, 2011 by sudipta

It is said that you can take a Bengali out of Bengal, but you cannot take Bengal out of a Bengali. I’d rather rephrase it by saying that you can never take Durga Puja out of a Bengali. The greatest Bengali festival is once again knocking on our doors and the New Jersey Bengalis are gearing up to greet their Mother Durga with utmost fervor. Although according to the Bengali calender the puja starts (Maha Shasthi) on Sunday October 2, the enthusiastic New Jersey Bengalis are not willing to wait that long. ICC of Garden State will start their festival on Saturday 24th September and continue till Sunday the 25th. The Puja will be held at the Mt Olive High School, 18 Corey Rd, Flanders, NJ 07836. They have also lined up an impressive cultural program featuring the famous Bengali singer Nachiketa (more on Nachiketa later), a Bengali play from Toronto, and Soumen Adhikari, another singer from Kolkata. Several other local programs and great food also awaits the attendees. Note: I just learnt that ICC has canceled Nachiketa’s program due to lack of timely confirmation from the artist’s agent. Instead, they will be presenting Nirmalya Ray, a well known artist to the NJ music lovers. Continue reading →

2011 Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Awards

Aside

Ananda Mandir, NJ announces the following winners of 2011 Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Awards

for Literary Excellence:

Gouri Datta (Newton, Massachusetts)

(In Bengali Publications Category)

Tathagata Ghosh (Bridgewater, New Jersey)

(In English Publications Category)

***

The following were the judges who provided their

invaluable support

in evaluating the submitted nominations :

For Bengali Literary Award:

Sujan DasGupta,

Alolika Mukherjee

Sakti Sengupta

and

For English Literary Award:

Sumit Roy

Arundhati Sanyal

Narasingha Sil

For information on the submission of next year’s award, please check www.anandamandir.org or contact Pronoy Chatterjee: pkc_usa@yahoo.com or Debajyoti Chatterji: debsmee572@gmail.com

We All Have Names! Let’s Use Them!

Posted on September 13, 2011 by sudipta

We Bengalis have a special characteristic. We tend to setup familial relationships with almost any person we get acquainted with, especially when they are older than us. We cannot just address them by their names. We always want them to be our brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents etc.

We do it with good intentions. We feel that it would be irreverent of us to address the middle aged gentleman we just met as “Arunabho” or “Satyen”. Addressing them by their first name is next to impossible. So we need to make a quick judgment call and decide what relationship we would like to establish with this new friend. Based on the looks, if the gentleman or lady seem to be close to our age, we try to make them our elder brother (Dada) or sister (Didi). If they seem to be middle aged, then “Kaku” or (Uncle) seems to be appropriate for men, and “Mashi” (Aunt) for women. For women, a subtle transition from “Mashi” to “Mashi-ma” can occur but one needs to be quite careful with that judgement. Often it so happens, that if it is a couple we meet, we call the husband “Kaku” (paternal uncle) and the wife “Mashi” (maternal aunt) – an almost absurd (although not impossible) relationship. When we meet a couple, “Kaku/Kakima” or “Mashima/Meshomoshai” is a better bet. It is odd though that the relations, “Mama” (maternal uncle) or “Pishi” (paternal aunt) are not used very often for such acquaintances. If you are ever doubtful about your social status in this relationship scale, I suggest you walk down the pavement in Gariahat Kolkata. The hawkers and roadside vendors will give you a perfect judgment about your age. Many ladies have experienced their development from “Didi” to “Boudi” to “Mashi” to Mashi-ma” to “Thakuma” from these experts. Continue reading →

Learning About Our Heritage: A Task For The First Generation

Posted on August 21, 2011 by sudipta

by Amitava Sen

Durga A few years ago at the annual Durga Puja, the organizing club published a booklet for the benefit of the generation born and raised here, explaining the significance and meaning of the festival and its various events on different days. Rightly so, the narration started with Mahalaya, the new moon day preceding the Puja. Mahalaya is actually a day when Hindus, typically Bengali Hindus pay homage to the ancestors, culminating in Sharodiya Durga Puja six days later. Indeed, it is a Hindu practice to invoke the blessings of the ancestors before any solemn occasion, be it a wedding or an Annaprasan. But that was not what the author of the little booklet wrote in his explanation of Durga Puja for our children. Mahalaya, according to his narrative was the day on which Calcutta radio broadcast an audio musical, Mahishasurmardini. And that was all, what Mahalaya meant! Continue reading →

Bharat Sevashram Sangha NJ to present “Ekti Gnaye Thaki”

Posted on July 20, 2011 by sudipta

Bharat Sevashram Sangha presents the following events on July 24th as part of their Fund Raising Event:

Hindustani Classical Vocal by Mitali Banerjee Bhawmik with Pandit Sameer Chatterjee on Tabla and Kedar Naphade on Harmonium

ablaphilia: A Presentation of the four stages of life through vocal and instrumental music, composed and conducted by Pandit Sameer Chatterjee

and

“Ekti Gnaye Thaki” a play in Bengali (with English supertitles) written and directed by Sudipta Bhawmik, and produced by ECTA

What makes a family? Who are our family members?
Who is our brother and who is our sister?
What expectations do we have for our family? What are our demands?
Do we all live in a village of strangers?

…Villagers: Sankar, Lili, Subhodev, Aparajita, Dwaipayan, Sudipta, Abhijit
Music: Samya Goswami

“Ekti Gnaye Thaki” is the story of Ranjana and her brother, Rajat, reuniting after fourteen years. Rajat immigrates to the US with his family after Ranjana sponsors their green cards. The reunion is marked by its usual excitement followed by nostal-gia for their hometown Gobindapur they both left behind. Rajat becomes a critical link for Ranjana to relive her past, while Ranjana helps him come to terms with his decision to abandon his familiar world in Gobindapur. Ranjana is also ill and Rajat’s presence offers a long awaited emollient. As the brother and the sister often slip into the past, the rest of the characters are excited at the prospects of their future in the US, especially Rajat’s son, Rajib. Life gradually settles down and a quotidian harmony evolves. Yet from the beginning, the play occasionally and quite subliminally alludes to an underlying subplot that threatens the apparent calm between the two families. Eventually, through a set of related incidents, the undisclosed piece – a rather disconcerting one – is revealed. The disclosure tears apart the growing assurance of the families’ suburban life, and more importantly, sets in motion a drift into the past that interrogates those relationships that were deemed normal. Though this interrogation fractures a happy picture, however, it is through this fracture, we are invited to revisit something more important – the attachment between human be-ings. The play above all, irrespective of its specificities of time and place, is a commentary on what it means to be a human being in relation to those we hold dear in our lives.

Tickets are $75.00, $40, $25, student with ID $15.00 Dinner is included. For more information, please call Ashram at 732-422-8880, email: bssnj@hotmail.com

Rajar Chithi : A Playwright’s Note

Posted on June 9, 2011 by sudipta

Rabindranath Tagore in Berkeley California

About a year and half ago, when I was researching on Rabindranath Tagore’s visits to the USA, an incident caught my attention. It said, that apparently there was an assassination attempt on Rabindranath by some Indians during his visit to San Francisco in October of 1916. This piece of information shocked me to say the least and I started to dig into the matter further. I looked into several books on Tagore by well regarded scholars and slowly an image started to take shape. I’ll refrain myself from getting into the details of the various accounts published in several books (you may look for them in the attached bibliography), but just to put matters in context I’ll quote some references: Continue reading →

Badal Sircar – The Maverick of Indian Theatre

Posted on June 4, 2011 by sudipta

On 13th of May 2001, when the entire state of West Bengal was experiencing the euphoria of change, the landscape of Bengali theatre also changed forever. Badal Sircar, the maverick of Indian theatre, passed away almost unnoticed. But I am not going to write an obituary of Badal Sircar, neither I am going to write his biography. Rather I’d like to share with you my experiences with this theater personality through his work and from few of my personal interactions with him.

My first experience with Badal Sircar was when I was a child. In our campus (I grew up in IIT Kharagpur campus) the faculty, staff and students often staged plays and I think it was with “Boro Pishima” I first experienced theatre and it changed my life in many ways forever. Later I saw “Solution X” where my mother also participated in one of the lead characters. Few years later, when I was in high school, I went to see a student’s production (TDS _- Technology Dramatic Society) and was shaken to the core to see “Michhil” performed. It was an experience that I could never have expected. For the first time I realized that theater does not require a stage, does not require any expensive sets, any lights or any sophisticated sounds. All it needs are performers and an audience. And in most cases, the barrier between a performer and audience faded away – they became one whole theatrical entity. I also learned the term “Third Theatre”. The apparent simplicity of these production made me think, can theatre be so easy? My friends and I started to produce Badal Sircar, “Michhil”, “Bhoma” and others. We even started performing regular proscenium kind of plays in third theatre form. Continue reading →

Rajar Chithi

Posted on May 16, 2011 by sudipta

ECTA Celebrates Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th Birth Anniversary with “Rajar Chithi”

ECTA celebrates the great Indian Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary with a new play “Rajar Chithi’ (Letter from the King – a play in Bengali with subtitles in English) at the Edison Valley Playhouse, 2196 Oak Tree Road, Edison NJ on June 11th (6.30pm), and 12th (5:00pm). Tickets are $20.00 and can be reserved by email to bhawmik@gmail.com or online at http://ecta.ticketleap.com/rajar-chithi.

During Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to San Francisco in 1916, media reports claim that there was an attempt by Indian nationalists to assassinate Tagore. Fortunately the plan did not succeed and the poet was provided with high level security by the local administration. It was further reported that the primary cause for their failure was that the nationalists could not agree amongst themselves as to whether they should carry out the assassination. But was it really a failure that they couldn’t assassinate Tagore? Or was it the right thing to do?

The play “Rajar Chithi” is a fictional account of the moral, ideological and psychological conflicts these nationalist freedom fighters of India possibly had to experience to arrive at this decision. The play also offers a deep insight into the social, political and philosophical influence Tagore had on the people at a time when the entire World was going through a great turmoil.

The play is written and directed by Sudipta Bhawmik. The cast includes some very talented stage actors like Subhodev Das, Pinaki Datta and Piu Majumdar.

Chhandayan Presents “Rabindra Natak”

Posted on April 27, 2011 by sudipta

Chhandayan Presents “Rabindra Natak” – plays inspired by Rabindranath Tagore in celebration of his 150th Birth Anniversary

“The Last Flames”
an ECTA production
Written and directed by Sudipta Bhawmik

Basanta Koomar Roy, an expatriate journalist from India, is credited by many as one of the key persons responsible in popularizing the Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore in USA. But Roy fell from his idol’s grace for reasons that torment many a biographer and journalist even today. “The Last Flames” attempts to re-examine the relationship between Roy and Tagore and provides a peek at the human side of the great Poet’s personality.

“Mrinal’s Letter”
an Epic Actors Workshop production
Concept and execution by Gargi Mukherjee

Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Streer Patra

May 28, 4pm and 8pm

Actor Theater Workshop
145 West, 28th Street
New York, NY (3rd Floor)

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