Baul

I cannot claim myself to be any expert on Baul songs. I have heard my share of Baul songs, mostly from radio. However, I have been fortunate to have two coincidences working for me in this respect. First, I like wrtings of Sudhir Chakrabarti. He was a professor of Bengali, but his passion was Bangla songs. Though he started writing rather late, he has been relentless in churning out articles since he started writing popular articles with seriousness. These articles are not just nonsensical pot-boilers. There are goods and bads, but none is insignificant. Sudhirbabu's other passion is Bengali Folk culture. I think I have painted the description of the passion with too broad a brush, but could not find a better description than this. He doesn't do it as a paid occupation. It's his labor of love. I don't know whether he follows the right research methodologies or not. But I could not care less. His research produced books like ব্রাত্য-লোকায়ত লালন (Bratyo Lokayoto Lalon), বাউল ফকির কথা (Baul Phakir Katha). Through these books and other writings of Sudhirbabu I got interested in the Baul way of life, and especially the Baul songs, though I learned that Baul songs are part of the Baul way of life. Without understanding or experiencing the Baul way of life one can neither appreciate nor fathom the Baul songs.

My other, and possibly bigger, influence for Baul songs is my friend Sudipto Chatterjee. Sudipto teaches and works in theater and performace stidues. But he picked up a penchant for Lalon Shah pretty early on. I remember the day when I first met him, about fifteen years ago, he boasted that he had already collected all Lalon songs. Only later I could understand his pride in that posession. He (and Theater director Sumon Mukhopadhyay) travelled to Kushthita, Lalon's birth and workplace, in Bangladesh in 1997. The materials they collected there, and since then, finally bore fruit in the form of a Perfomance called "The Man Of The Heart". A performance on Lalon's life and work, writtent and performed by Sudipto and directed by Sumon. I have heard numerous Lalon songs from Sudipto, along with stories, anecdotes and explanations. I heard about Panju Shah, Duddu Shah first through him. These, Sudhirbabu's books, gave me a better idea about the journey of Baul culture through history, both social and political. In most case, these two were intermingled intimately.

Later, thorugh a Bangla folk band called দোহার (Dohar), I first heard Abdul Karim's song. And I was bowled over immediately. Later I tried to dig up information from the web about Abdul Karim, who uses Baul Abdul Karim as his bhonita in some songs. There is not alot of information about him on the web, at least not as much to satisfy my curiosity. However, I came to know that he is still alive and well, though he is over 90 years of age. He still writes songs. But he has already become an institution in Bangladesh. I could not figure out whether he leads a strict Baul life. But that does not matter to me at his point. You can check out some of his songs in Youtube by searching on his name.

The new voice of our time

A couple of weeks back our local cultural association Sanskriti organized its fourth Natyomela - a Theater festival. Our group ENAD could not participate in the festival this time. However, this year Sanskriti introduced a slot for an "outside" group. That outside group was ECTA from New Jersey. They brought a new play Taconic Parkway, written and directed by Sudipta Bhowmik.

Sudipta Bhowmik was somewhat known to the bay-area theater aficionados. He is operating in Bengali theater scene in north America for a while now. He is quite well-known especially in the east-coast circuit. For some reason, he never got a chance to bring his play to the west coast before. We, at EAND, were happy to do Ron - our last production - which was his play. I think that was the first exposure people got to Sudipta Bhowmik's work here in the bay area.

This time he also directed his three-cast play Taconic Parkway. It's a very powerful play. It may not put you in an internal conflict that Ron might have, but this play may well put you in a spell. He has masterfully woven an unusual story in a non-histrionic way. (That is, if you take the negative connotation of histrionics.) I will go out on limbs and say that Sudipta Bhowmik is producing some of the most powerful and important Bengali plays of our time. That includes Kolkata and West Bengal. (I am not very conversant with Dhaka's, or Bangladesh as a whole, contemporary plays, mostly due to accessibility problem.) More importantly, he is providing a glimpse to the actual USA-residing Bengalees. This is not the picture you get in mainstream magazines and mundane media portrayal.

Someday, I hope to write a more studied observation of his plays through more minute reading, but as a somewhat informed audience I can only appreciate his work. He is definitely blessed with some very competent actors. I am sure that helps him not only to mount a good play as a director, but also as a playwright since he can experiment with his characters. But still, the bottom line remains that he is writing some worthwhile plays of our time.

Thank you Sudiptada. Thank you for the plays.

Tin Pahaarer Gaan

I came across Birendra Chattopadhyay's work when, I believe, I was in high school or in first year of college. My impressionable mind immediately fell in love with his work. He was never a mainstream poet. But his poetry borne a unique and strong voice which I seldom found in others. Around the same time I found a cassette published by School of People's Art which contained songs and recitation of Birendra Chattopadhyay's poems. The songs were created out of his poems by Binoy Chakrabarty. He did and excellent job. Together with the poems and this cassette, Birendra Chattopadhyay made a lasting impression.





I loved a long poem called 'Tin Pahaarer Gaan' literally "The song of Three Mountains" or "The song of a mountain called Tin Pahaar". I starts with 'Pahariya madhupur metho dhulipoth' and continues to give a vivid and wonderful imagery. Around that time I also started composing songs. So I put tune to it - not tothe whole poem though. I stopped when I thought was the right moment for a song to stop. This was 1988-89. I kept it to myself and never published it. In 2007 I arranged it. This is that song.

Song puzzles

I have some old recordings in my possession. Old means really old - at least fifty years or more. I have a cousin, who is a professional Audio Engineer with a big studio in India. But his passion is music from a very very tender age. As they say, he lives for music. When he was a student, he used to roam around in Kolkata to collect old records. I guess these recordings came from those ventures. These are recorded from noisy 78 RPM disks. I haven't tried to cleanup the recordings. I have noticed in my earlier attempts of cleaning that unless one has lots of time and really good tools, it's better to leave the noise. Incompetent noise-reduction kills the song more than the noise does.

Move over to my Music Broadcast page and listen to the Recognize the singers section. If you can recognize them before I publish the name, drop me a line.

What is a great art?

I have found that my idea of art and its impact on the audience has changed over time. I understand, this is quite natural and most everybody else also experience this changing attitude towards art and its effect over time. It's just the other side of the fact that I get moved differently every time I read, say, the play Daakghar (The Post Office).

Art, no matter what form, needs to move its target audience emotionally. We - this term may need some elaboration, but please take it on the face value for now - tend to over-analyze art. I even feel that sometimes we go to some concert or play or read some book just to analyze and critique the art. And in the process we forget to enjoy it. May be, on a subconscious level, we are thinking, "I may not be an artist but I am a critique who can analyze and tear apart any artist's work - main hoon baap kaa baap".

What I said above is not directed to anybody in particular but me. I few months back I realized this sad fact that the gratuitous critic in me is coming in the way of my enjoyment and the art. My training and knowledge in some form of art, namely music and drama, is not helping me either. During an intense dramatic moment of a play, part of my mind is analyzing the blocking, the lights, the actors' business and so on. While listening a new song, my mind gets unnecessarily concentrated on the arrangement of the song, the chord progression, the crispness of the recording. In the process the dramatic moment and the song is gone, probably forever. The first experience never comes back.

I am actively trying to correct it since I found this lacking of mine. And trust me, it's not easy. Apart from untraining and retraining my senses and mind, there are some more philosophical dilemma to sort out. The biggest of them is, "Just because an art moves me emotionally, should I call it a great piece of art?" I tend to answer a subjective "yes" though I am fully aware that some second rate tearjerkers can and do move me emotionally quite often. And of course there is the other side too, where a piece, which is considered great art by many, failed to impress me at all. However, I rationalize that by accepting that it may be a result of my improper training.

The bottom line of art appreciation is training. Most of us are self-trained in art appreciation and most of us are smart enough to separate wheat from chaff. The problem is with the borderline staff - the staff that cannot be called great at the first experience nor cannot be pushed aside as crap. A great art will move you emotionally as well as give you enough food for thought that you ruminate for a few days, if not weeks. A crap art will give you neither. The borderline case will give you some. Unfortunately, the world of art is full of these borderline cases. And the fact that it is majority in the world of art forces us to bring out the critic from inside us more often than it forces us to just sit back and enjoy. That's a sad fact of thinking life.

After a hiatus

I just finished directing a play by Sudipta Bhawmik called Ron. It's a very relevant story of our time waited to be told. Sudiptada has weaved a magic spell of contemporary tale on an age-old philosophical conflict between the need to fight some wars and the principled position of anti-war. This not only looks at the current time, it does so from the first generation and second generation immigrants' perspective.

After the play there was a short Q&A session with the playwright where he said that the play is definitely anti-war. But I am positive nobody can call it propagandist. I actually found it to be well-balanced and portrays the viewpoint of a soldier and his family's perspective in a very touching way.

After being involved with immigrant Bengali community theater for about 7-8 years, what I find most challenging is to capture the imagination of the community. The issues, the problems, the dreams, the hopes, the frustrations, the achievements of the first generation immigrants are different from the folks back home. Yes, this is true that the first generation, especially we the Bengalis, do enjoy living in a bubble of nostalgia when it comes to culture. We prefer Rabindrasangeet over classic Jazz, Bhimsen Joshi over George Gershwin, Kishore Kumar over Norah Jones. We prefer to go and see the current crops of group theater when we visit Kolkata, but seldom make attempts to see the local repertory theater's productions. However, we do live our lives outside that bubble and constantly get challenged by a different world than what we used to face back home. Our theater should capture that.

In Ron, I thought, Sudiptada could strike the golden balance there where he could evoke a sense of nostalgia within the realm of our everyday existence. Our third production Chhenra Collage also struck that balance, it seems. Even after our tenth production some of the regular audience still refer to the third production. I may have some conjectures as to why this is happening, but cannot really tell for sure. But one thing is for sure, I like to continue doing this kind of theater where we can introspect our contemporary lives with compassion and humor.

15 Park Avenue

I have been a cursory follower of Aparna Sen's works. The ones that I have seen are Parama, Paramitar Ekdin and 15 Park Avenue. I have seen neither 36 Chowrangee Lane nor Mr and Mrs Iyer - the two most acclaimed movies of Aparna. I haven't seen Sati or Yugant either. And though I watched the telefilm Picnic, I don't remember anything from that movie except a shot where (I think) Farida Jalal singing 'mera laal duptta malmalka'.

For me Parama was a disaster. But I liked Paramitar Ekdin quite a bit. Aprna's narrative style and treatment of the subject went well. And the acting from Rituparna and Sohini stood out.

I can say almost similar things about 15 Park Avenue. The narrative style went well with the subject. Acting was quite well all around. But I have some peeves about the character development. Take the case of Anjali, done by Shaban Azmi. It's the weakest among the major characters of the film. It's too white with almost no grey except some patchy outbursts here and there. It takes an actress of Shabana's caliber to impart convinciblity to the character. The mother character played by Waheeda Rahman didn't get enough screen time to develop. Though Aparna is one of the very few directors who can create a believable female character with only a few strokes. That happened here too. Aparna's handling of human interaction between two females is also something that stands out from most of his contemporaries.

Konkana Sensharma excelled in her character. True it was the proverbial 'author-backed' character - but still it was not at all easy to play a psychological patient and a complex character. She seems to have an array of acting capabilities in her. Her face speaks with the same rich diction as does her round voice.

In the storyline, I thought, the coincidence of Joydeep (played by Rahul Bose) seeing Mithi (KS) was a spoiler. It could have been somebody else. But bringing Joydeep back, the director was forced to spin a subplot of Joydeep's present relationship with his wife - which, to me, didn't add anything to the main plotline other than some distractions.

Another aspect that Aparna disappoints me frequently: it's the cheap attempt of showing some universal message/philosphy. Take the scene where Mithi is forced to go through a Ojha-session. With all the onscreen hocus-pocus, the superimposed audio track plays Anjali's class lecture on quantum physic or some hifi physics topic. Where is the subtely, Aparna? Again near the end of the film, Kunal says "She is looking for something" when Anjali reply "Aren't we all?". Jumpcut. C'mon. It's too cheesy to come from a director like Aparna.

Dhritiman was ok too, but just Ok. And this is first time when Dhritiman (as Kunal) as an actor failed to impress me.

The screenplay was good, and the film is paced well - barring a patch of 15 minutes before the movie picks up the pace again at the end. Audio (including music) design was adequate for the situations. Deep strings worked really well. The outdoor shots are convincing. Dubbing was quite well done. Though I thought there were places where the mood of the scene could have manipulated with some more innovative light designs.

All in all, the film is a worthy one to watch and Aparna scores again as a very competent director. I will be looking forward to her to get a great film, someday.

[An old post - recycled. I wrote it in February 2006]