FACTS NEWS VIEWS

Suniti  and Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore had once written some thirty odd letters to Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay, the eminent Indian linguist. Pallav Mitra had taken pains to pen down an anthology in Bengali named, "Samasamayik drishtite Suniti Kumar" (eng. Suniti Kumar as remembered today) which contains these rare collection of letters. This book should be an authentic read and worth a collection. Sri Mitra will be remembered long for his efforts.

A GOOD BOOK THAT IS MISSING

Tales Retold For Easy Reading is a series in English literature published by Oxford University Press we all miss today. It was a series written on widest of topics, starting from 'crime and detection', 'world's greatest stories', 'Gulliver's Travels Stories', 'Myths and Legends' to Shakespeare's vast literature. One such series "The stories of Shakespeare's plays" was an excellent compilation edited by H.G.Wyatt and first published in England in 1939 and then subsequent editions and reprints brought out from India at a rather low cost. Priced only at seventy-five paise in India in 1968 and stories retold by H.G.Wyatt and David Fullerton in the most easily soluble form was a gift of the Magi you can imagine of. The first volume of this series which contained only seventy six pages in paperback bearing the best of Shakespeare's creativity like 'The merchant of Venice', 'Macbeth', 'The Tempest', 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' is unmistakably a reader's delight. Schools in those days invariably kept this book in their curriculum in seventh standard or class seven, as you like to call it. This book is one, I still remember reading during my off-study hours not remembering that I hated school books. Such lucid was the writing that it would unknowingly make you buy a 'Complete Works of Shakespeare' ,  you later realizing that how difficult it is to read his plays and enjoy. This series would be an ideal choice of a parent who stresses his or her child to learn correct English and while learning the language develop a subtle taste for good literature. There are some hand drawn illustrations of poor standard in it but it matters little when you are engrossed with the book. If this is re-published today, imagine how beautiful computer generated images can be incorporated. I failed to find in the internet someone from the field of  English literature reviewing this book and demanding a publisher to publish it. This writing of mine, I believe can barely inspire an adult to shed his sweat in some old book's store, for his offspring.

CRIES WITHOUT TEAR

(Extracts from a school boy's summer holiday diary)

It's the best time of my life, may be the 'best time'. I am on a summer holiday. I won't have to get up for the school. On these days I feel much relaxed when I leave my bed. No more wrinkles on my forehead, no more dull headaches. No more looking at the wall clock too. Only five days of the twenty-day honeymoon has gone, I believe. But I know it's not going to last long. Headaches will be back with stomach cramps in another fifteen days. Abraham, the bald headed six-footer, should have been a dull headed rowdy boxer instead of a maths teacher. He knows well, how to slap, taunt a student and turn him a fool out of the thirty odds in the class. So that you too start laughing. When he is angry he can kick you on the arse never thinking that you too have grown up hairy armpits like his and you deserve some kind of respect (at least like his pet 'Jojo') before the girls. May be he doesn't like an idiot-headed five- footer like me but he has a heart for Aron the all-rounder. He loves him like his son and sometimes its so overwhelming that the whole class keeps laughing. But I am not entitled to laugh with them. My father doesn't pay for my laughing, I am told by my class-teacher. If Abraham sees me enjoying with others he would drive a smart tight slap on my face colouring it violet with shame.

I don't know what is wrong with my cerebrum. Nothing goes in, in time. Not even a bit of easy trigonometry or an algebra. I know how to add, how to subtract and even multiply and divide. But not algebra. Bullshit, I believe my skull is filled with. But I am not sure of it. If it's shit from a bull, it must be smelling through my nostrils? But it doesn't. Still Abraham keeps on repeating that it's shit in my head and my classmates have started believing that too. Each time I tell him that I can't see properly from the last bench, he keeps on saying that its shit from the brain that obstructs my view. I know if I keep repeating my request, he will make me kneel down right in front of the black board. May be he believes, then only can I see the writings on the wall, best. 'A wall', I said? My classroom wall seems like a German wall that divides the east and the west. I can see the street corner from my seat. At four, when I am free, my blood pressure drops to normal. Then I am free to carry me around the street corner away to my home with ease. No more questions, no more humiliations, no more slaps, no more insults.

Trojan sits next to me in the class. He is a good friend of mine. He too is a six -footer but not like Abraham Sir. He loves me, he understands me and protects me too. When others start bullying me, Trojan comes to rescue. Others are afraid of Trojan because he is tall and stout like a colt who can thrust a solid blow to your head when he is angry. I have noticed Abraham too respects Trojan. I think it's Trojan's physique that brings him respect. Trojan too sits on the last bench but he doesn't have bull shit in his head like mine. Abraham doesn't say so but I know Trojan has thin watery crow shit in his vault. I have often seen crow shit on the back of his shirt. It must have spilled out of his head when he tilted. It's almost in the same way the shit in my head obstructs my view. I plan to gather some courage and ask Abraham about Trojan's head, one day.

When I grow up I wish to be a minister in the government. I know it requires little education to be so. Aron too has told me that. If by chance I am elected to the parliament I will make life tough for Abraham. Abraham doesn't have a brain to dream of that. I will promulgate a law that will deduct one point from a teacher when he fails to teach one student and two points if two students fail. And you know what is 'one point'? One point is half of one's salary. I know one plus one is two. And what is two points? I told you earlier that I can perform additions well. 'Two' is no salary. Then only I believe will Abraham learn how difficult it is to learn mathematics.

PEN AND THE SWORD

(Extracts from a school boy's summer holiday diary) The school teachers keep reverberating the same questions every alternate year without knowing how tiring and uninteresting it is to appear in the examinations.'Pen and the sword', 'A village fair', 'A railway journey' keep repeating like poor report cards intentionally published by schools every December. Don't they upgrade themselves like my friend upgrades his cell-phone every winter? A pen is no more made of steel or such durable material. It's made from plastic these days and cracks even when it falls over a bale of stacked cotton. I love my class teacher so much that my heart refuses to use even a single dirty word against him. Otherwise I would have met Mr.Stuartson, the Principal and told him that he holes up a pair of dinosaur's testicles in his skull vault. He still believes that his pen is mightier than the sword. It's not just bull-shit, it's the dirty smelling shit my nearby slum dwellers evacuate at the pavement edges. My father is another such empty vaulted dinosaur like my class teacher. Last year when the dipsomaniacs from my nearby slum came for a festival bonus without earning it, my goddam father refused. They slapped him twice on the face believing that a professor might need two slaps for the memory engram to work. But it did not. He straight went to Mr.Dobson the chief law-keeper. The law keeper was having a vertigo he suffers every saturday night from the medicine he takes, prescribed by his doctor friend, an honour'ble member of the supreme bureau belonging to my honour'ble country. My father didn't know that Dobson was a left handed strong bull. Dobson gifted him one slap on right side of his face and angrily snatched the pen my father kept in his pocket. 'Writing a complaint?.....' uttering, he tore the letter my father carried to his office. With a sixty kilometers an hour blow to the pen, Dobson broke open the cap and pushed it's nib into the wooden table. 'See what I have done to your pen, it now looks like a silver beaked kingfisher', he said and left the room.

(from wikimedia commons)

He came back the next moment, still smelling. 'Do you know this?' ,he asked, pointing at his holster. 'This is a sword, a modern day sword. Its getting smaller and smaller, like your laptop', he uttered, 'Its my pen too, it doesn't write I know but it can make holes. 'You can write with holes too' he laughed.

NOBEL AND NOBILITY

Once a cricket frenzy friend of mine asked me, "Do you know who the best judge is to decide when a batsman should be discharged leg-before-wicket?" It was a difficult question indeed knowing well that half of such decisions invited controversies. Not much aware of the game, I used my intelligence and replied with confidence, "The wicket-keeper", believing he is the only man looking staright into the ball and positioned exactly behind the batsman. "No" was the bold reply from my honour'ble friend. His lightning, disgruntled behaviour just floored me. Sharp came the right answer which I haven't even dreamt of. "It's the batsman himself", he said. But the irony is, how many such batsmen we know have walked away before the umpire had raised his finger? I know of one such living person who has the courage but had never dared to express. But courage without it being delivered is of little value. It's Barrak Obama, the American President. He knows that he is not worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize but he lacks the strength to express. He is an intelligent man who ought to know whether he is treading the right path or not. The road; one less travelled by, he took, only a few months back is no more with him. He may be remembered in the history books to be the first black President of "guardians" of this unholy world but the book likely is to be a "cartoon book". Its October of 2009 and its high time before the bells ring in second week of December. Let the man rise from his humble chair and show the world, the astonishing strength of the color of his skin and genuflect before the world saying, " Let me be the first to refuse the prize which I know am not worthy of". He may then find the whole world genuflecting before him with tears in their eyes.

SESH ANKA (The last act)

(review of a nearly lost Bengali film)

If you wonder how infinitely stable buildings and bridges were built in ancient ages without modern sciences' gift of electricity and computers, it is time to think why good cinema is not produced these days even with the advent of newest tricks in Physics and Chemistry. With markets flooded by ever increasing mega pixels of sophisticated cameras and high ended film institutes, there is no sight of rebirth of Ray, DeSica or Ghatak. It was by mere chance that I came across a compact disc from Angel Videos of SESH ANKA a black and white drama produced in 1963, which later turned out to be an eye opener to my rusty sense of fine arts.

'Sesh Anka' is a full length feature film in Bengali produced from one of the Tollygunge studios in Calcutta. The movie was a hit but never counted a milestone. Based on a rather common story of 'whodunnit' it is worth watching how sheer power of editing, crisp dialogues and a bit of good acting can turn a film spellbinding. There are two types of 'whodunnit'. In the first type the person responsible is disclosed by the director at the very beginning of the film and later the magic continues in describing how it happens. In the second type, the feature never tells you who the culprit is and the viewers are mesmerized as the magic unfolds. Though the first type is surely the difficult one to portray ('Psycho' from Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder's 'Double Indemnity'), the second type will only be remembered when its member will not lose its magic even on repeated viewing. 'Sesh Anka' is a member of the second type.

Directed by Haridas Bhattacharya, Uttam Kumar (all time hero of Bengali cinema) had the courage to act as an anti hero at the pinnacle of his acting career. Running through fourteen reels of celluloid, as it was measured in those days, Sharmila Tagore (Soma) as an actress recalls her charming innocence in Satyajit Ray's films in 1950's.

The film begins directly with title cards as was the style in those days, depicting innumerable names involved in the making of the film. But it delivered a unique haunting background music with it, which would later repeat itself in variations making it a string suspending the story. Uttam Kumar plays the role of Sudhangshu Dutta an affluent businessman who falls in love with Sharmila Tagore, daughter of a reputed (knighted by the British), wealthy lawyer of Calcutta. Sudhangshu had been married earlier to one named Kalpana. Kalpana died in a train accident. And it was then when Sudhangshu finally decided to marry Soma. Soma knew of Sudhangshu's earlier marriage but could not resist marrying him. There is nothing special about the camera work in this film which will make you restless but repeated jump cuts blending uniquely with excellent editing will attract your attention. The dialogues are down to earth relentlessly combining with the tempo of the film. The film never loses its tempo.

While the movie progresses it is worth to keep a watch on the background music. Soon after the first shot you will find a variation of the introductory theme when Sudhangshu hears Soma play a Tagore song on the piano. You will find repeated jump cuts and not fade outs hold the tempo of the film. But there is a unique transformation when the haunting introductory music (scene at the railway level crossing when Sudhangshu recalls Kalpana) dissolves into a song in Sudhangshu's lips (sung by Hemanta Mukerjee "ami to jani...."). Through jump cuts the film shuffles from one serene romantic moment to another hair raising drama of murder and moral decay. There is good music, fair amount of suspense (Salim Mia behind door) blending contagiously with persistent good acting. At one time viewers are bound to shift their attention from Uttam Kumar (the hero) to Bikash Roy (multiple identity). There are a complex set of dialogues describing dozens of little known places through which the plot has shifted. This is a style you often find in a detective book and you need to go back through pages to recapitulate them. But recapitulating in a motion picture is not possible. I would suggest viewers to be extra attentive in some shots where dialogues flow randomly (in the court scene and the last scene where Sudhangshu's brother- in- law comes in). Actor Kamal Mitra is one very man who will steal your attention once more while playing a lawyer's role and remind you of Edward.G.Robinson in 'Double Indemnity' as an insurance claim officer. Good actors are everywhere on this earth, you just need a pair of trained eyes to locate him.

The cinema holds the quality of a good detective novel where the latter grows complex to more complex as it reaches the finishing line. This movie is not a melodrama but it reaches a melodramatic suspense with the arrival of Debesh Sen but too loud back ground music at this juncture inhibits the film reaching Hitchcockian quality. The soundtrack of a train will remind a serious viewer of the importance of a background music in cinema. But the message "CRIME DOES NOT PAY" at the end of the film reflects the director's childish effort.

Credit goes to Haridas Bhattacharya, the director in visualising Raj Kumar Maitra's novel that the latter can be turned into a good cinema. Editor Santosh Ganguly will be remembered for his repeated jump cuts. Pavitra Chattrjee's music is mind blowing when taken into account the scond grade movies in those days. It is important in a thriller, how it unfolds. Based on this criteria 'Sesh Anka' deserves ten upon ten. But the irony lies somewhere else. If Kalpana (name of Sudhangshu's dead wife) is the soul character around whom the movie revolves, is it a sheer coincidence that the movie was produced by "Kalpana Movies"?

FACTS NEWS VIEWS

Rejuvenating Bengal School of Art
It is time for the premier institution 'Asiatic Society' at Calcutta to express their humility they inhabit, towards the invaluable, rapidly destroying, paintings and sculptures of Bengal school of art. The society has recently acquired valuable objects of art from private collectors who were eager to giveaway to save the priceless ones from desuetude and damage. The objects will be restored and displayed for public viewing shortly. The list includes timeless pieces from Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Ramkinkar Baij and others.