pwØLª¢a - Bengali Cultural Society of South Jersey · 2015-03-26 · PAGE 2 pwØLª¢a VOLUME...

I hope everyone had a great winter. Knowing that the season is coming to an end can only mean one thing. Your BCS newsletter editor is scrambling to finish the newsletter before the season ends. After multiple BCS events during the fall months, things slowed down a bit in the winter. The Saraswati puja at the end of January was the only BCS event during the winter, and in your humble editor’s opinion was a great success. Similarly, I had received many community member submissions for the fall newsletter, but the submissions also have slowed down for the winter newsletter. Regardless of the number of submis-sions, it seems that inspirational stories about people beating great odds to achieve success or stories of people helping those who are neglected are the ones that seem to be submitted the most. So with Inter-national Women’s Day recently celebrated by many throughout the world, I have included stories about a couple Bengali women that I hope everyone will find inspiring. As always, I would like to end the message with a little humor, and if you have any submissions for the newsletter, please send them to [email protected].

Volume 31, Issue 4

pwØLª¢a

Bengal i Cultural Society of South Jersey (A Non-Profit Organization)

Message from the Editor

Winter 2015

Executive Committee (2014-2016) President: Indranil Sardar / [email protected]

Vice President (1): Bratati Bhar / [email protected] Vice President (2): Sunita Chakraborty / [email protected]

Gen. Secretary: Aparajita Mitra / [email protected] • Jt Secretary: Tuhin Ganguly / [email protected] Treasurer: Pradeep Banerjee / [email protected] • Jt Treasurer: Pradip Basak / [email protected]

Editor: Gautam Kar /[email protected] • Jt Editor: Prianka De / [email protected] Event Coordinator: Dibyendu Bose/[email protected] • Jt Event Coordinator: Debasish Chaudhuri / [email protected]

Communications Coordinator: Sunil Wattal/[email protected] • Jt ComCoordinator: Kaushik Ganguly/ [email protected] Ex-officio Members: Mona Putatunda / [email protected] • Sandeep Dhar / [email protected]

pwØLª¢a VOLUME 31, ISSUE 4

Editor: Below is a beautifully written poem by Apurva Chanda regarding a day that we as Americans will never forget, the

9/11 attacks .

A Day Never Forgotten

by: Apurva Chanda

The Twin Towers, standing tall.

Never thought they would fall.

But as soon as the planes struck,

we crossed our fingers for good luck.

Chaos and debris everywhere,

but the towers no longer there.

Slowly they had burned to the ground,

No trace of them will ever be found.

The Pentagon was also hit,

we only had minutes before the walls split.

One more plane in the hijackers’ hands,

but passengers made a move and ruined their plans.

The heroes saved the day,

unfortunately, many lost their lives along the way.

Thirteen years later, we still shudder at the thought,

of mighty towers collapsing right on the spot.

Every anniversary of that sorrowful day,

a moment of silence is given to the citizens who had to pay.

Day to day, we don’t give the thousands who perished a thought,

but in our hearts we never forgot.

From the Community


Editor: Below is a submission by one of BCS’s former committee president’s, Tapan Ganguly. This article is about an

amazing gentleman who rose from poverty to start several organizations to help give neglected children a chance at a bet-

ter life. The article was written by Mohua Das and published in The Telegraph. I couldn’t include the entire article here.

So for those who would like to read the entire article, below is the link.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150219/jsp/calcutta/story_4251.jsp#.VQDXzuGFn6P

Poverty-slayer steers poor on path of learning

Up close with the man who rose from the depths of poverty to transform the neglected interiors of Odisha by giving their

children an opportunity to craft a better future. A day spent with the 50-year-old founder of the Kalinga Institute of Industrial

Technology (KIIT) and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS).

First impressions

Achyuta Samanta has a unique gait. He glides past you taking five steps a second and is impossible to keep pace with. I

decide not to walk the talk but wait for the man to settle down in his office after his morning ritual, which begins with a visit

to the Jagannath Temple on the KISS campus on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.

Samanta pays his obeisance to each deity at the temple, a replica of the Puri temple but on a smaller scale. "Are you

deeply religious?" I ask. "Deeply spiritual," he corrects.

So does the man who beat all odds to build one of the largest residential institutes for tribals in the world attribute his

achievement to fate or divine power? "The entire thing has been destiny and His blessings," Samanta stresses. "I've just

been a medium. How else could something so large come up so nicely and quickly in a state like Odisha without any back-

ing?"

Morning ritual over, we head to his office at KISS and find ourselves sitting in a pretty garden under a kadamba tree. Be-

hind him stand Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda and other icons carved in stone. The garden is

actually Samanta's office, with a glass-top table, a few plastic chairs and a wireless bell.

Although it's a working day with a packed schedule, Samanta looks relaxed and all ready for what turns out to be a long

and unhurried chat. We greet Samanta who turned 50 the day before but he shrugs it off. "It's just a date. I've no rashi, no

nakshatra. I was born into such a poor family that birthdays were never important. No one remembers. Just like street chil-

dren. If anyone wants to do something on my birthday, I give them gaali!"

An empty cup

From building KIIT and KISS to establishing hospitals, banks and infrastructure across Odisha, Samanta's cup is full and

often overflowing. But it wasn't like this always. In fact, he did not have a cup to begin with.

We rewind to Samanta's past when he was four. He woke up one morning in 1969 to cries and wails and realised that his

father had died in a train accident.

The shattered family - comprising seven siblings and their mother - moved from Jamshedpur where Samanta's father was

a contract labourer to Kalarabanka, a small village in Cuttack district.

"My father had no savings. So we grew up in extreme poverty. Sometimes we wouldn't get two square meals a day and my

mother didn't have a second pair of sari," says Samanta.

From the Community (Contd.)

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150219/jsp/calcutta/story_4251.jsp#.VQDXzuGFn6P


Going to school was, obvi-

ously, out of question. A

young Samanta would collect

dry leaves and sell them, and

at other times play with chil-

dren who did not go to school

either. "One day we were

running around making noise

near a primary school when

the headmaster stepped out.

He caught me by my ears

while the others fled," recalls

Samanta.

It turned out to be a blessing

in disguise. Taken aback by

the boy's condition the

teacher offered him a place

in the school. "He even

helped me out with chalk and

slate," smiles Samanta. "I

loved studying and I've al-

ways stood first right through matriculation."

But taking time out to study was a task. "Whatever I studied in class had to be enough for me. We lived in a thatched

house. There was no electricity and no money either to buy kerosene to light a lamp. My greatest strength was my mem-

ory."

When he was not at school during the day, Samanta would collect paddy from houses and return it in the evening after

shelling and sifting. The family would later feed on the leftover. "To add to the family's income, we would grow vegetables

in our backyard and I would cycle faraway to sell them. On my way back I'd shop grocery for villagers to earn some more."

All along Samanta carried on with his studies and went on to do a master's in chemistry. He got the job of a college lec-

turer but that wasn't what he wanted.

His battle with poverty continued to weigh down on him and goaded him on to get "the poorest of the poor out of their dark

days". The drive turned him into a social reformer, a move too bold for someone without a firm footing of his own.

"It was a huge struggle - the humiliation and the frustration I had to overcome," recalls Samanta. "I was 24 or 25 dreaming

these big dreams of setting up two institutions knowing nothing about the world. Neither did I have a background nor expo-

sure nor people to advise me. It was a Herculean task," says Samanta, who started out with Rs 5,000 he had earned by

giving lectures and private tuition.

He did not baulk at borrowing money from anyone willing to help his cause. "Four years later, in 1995, my debt ran up to

Rs 15 lakh and I saw no way to repay it. With my debtors getting impatient, I even contemplated suicide."

But as destiny would have it, "a bank came to our rescue with a term loan of Rs 25 lakh on our face value". And there's

been no looking back since.



KISS of life

Samanta cleared his loans and pitched KIIT in 1992. Part of the institute's revenues goes towards funding KISS, whose

genesis lay in a playschool set up in 1993 for 125 children of contract labourers. The refuge has since grown into a haven

for 20,000 children of 62 tribes, including 13 primitive ones, from 23 districts of the state.

KIIT sprawls across 22 campuses offering over a 100 graduate and postgraduate programmes to 22,000-odd students. If

KIIT ranks among the top 30 universities in the country, KISS has found partners in various UN bodies and is frequently

visited by Nobel laureates, opinion-makers and celebrities from sports and films.

The two dream institutions of Samanta now spread over 400 acres on the outskirts of the Odisha capital. "We had never

dreamt that what was born in a rented house on a seed money of Rs 5,000 would turn into a banyan tree in 15 years. My

intention was to do something for poor people, honestly," says Samanta.

KISS gifts tribal children from the interiors of Odisha a holistic life of shelter, food and education (from the kindergarten to

the postgraduation level) free. Samanta has done what policy-makers could not. "The parents of quite a few children at

KISS are Maoists.... We've prevented at least 1,000 children from becoming Maoists and another thousand from dying of

malnutrition. Adivasis live in their own world in the dense forests. They don't understand the importance of education," he

says.

Samanta's biggest challenge was to convince tribals to let their children out of their world and into the home he had cre-

ated for them. "I would travel to interior villages and meet with families but it was tough. First, children are the best helping

hands in poor families. Secondly, they are steeped in superstitions and fears."

Samanta, who grew up in conditions worse than what tribals suffer today, says: "I know how poverty kills. I was born poor

but had I not been educated I wouldn't be sitting here before you. I had to do the same for them, to bring them to the main-

stream."

Samanta started with himself and his team scouting and handpicking children from families living below the poverty line.

Now the pioneer gets more than 50,000 applications each year.

"KISS is very popular among tribals now. They all want a decent life and when they see their children getting food and edu-

cation and wearing uniform, the parents get motivated. Apart from NGOs, district collectors and philanthropists who send

names, we have our own team travelling to interior villages to spot the most indigenous children. We bring poor non-

meritorious students and make them meritorious," says Samanta. Around 60 per cent of the students at KISS are girls.

Samanta is now a household name in Odisha, especially the tribals. He has also turned his village Kalarabanka into a

model village, complete with a residential high school, hospital, post office, bank and a police outpost, as well as safe

drinking water. He has also arranged for employment of 300 youths from 600 families under the national insurance

scheme.

Asked about his dreams, he says: "My aim is to set up 30 branches of KISS in 30 districts of Odisha and 30 branches in 30

Indian states by 2020."

With the hope of doing something for the tribal regions of Bengal, Samanta had met chief minister Mamata Banerjee three

years ago. "I plan to follow it up with government officials, especially the chief minister and the chief secretary soon. If I get

a patch of land I'd be very keen on setting up a KISS branch in Bengal."

Originally published in The Telegraph



2015 Saraswati Puja


Editor: Here is the first article in honor of the recent International Women’s Day. This one is about a maid who is a suc-

cessful author, but still continues to work as a maid. Some may be familiar with Baby Halder, but for those of us who are

not, I’m sure you will be very impressed with her accomplishments. The article was written by SNM Abdi and published in

Friday Magazine. Again, I couldn’t include the entire article here. So for those who would like to read the entire article,

below is the link.

http://fridaymagazine.ae/making-difference/maid-in-kolkata-1.1465828

Maid in Kolkata

It’s 11pm and Baby Halder’s day is just winding down. Dressed in a blue-and-white

salwar kameez, the 39-year-old domestic helper finishes washing a pile of dishes,

then mops the floor and turns off the kitchen lights before retiring to her small one-

room flat on the terrace of her employer’s palatial, well-appointed house in Gur-

gaon, on the outskirts of India’s capital, Delhi.

But she is not yet ready for bed. Even though it’s late and she has to start work at

6am, Baby fishes out a notebook from the desk and begins to write. “It’s become a

habit now,” she smiles. “I’ve got to write at least a few pages before I go to sleep.

It’s fulfilling at the end of the day.” Baby has a lot of reasons to smile. Although she

dropped out of school at the age of 12, the mother of three is already a popular

author. Her first two books Aalo Aandhari (meaning Darkness and Light in Bengali)

and Eshast Roopantar (Self-portrait) were literary successes in Bengali; her third

book Ghare Ferar Path (The Way Home) was published by Dey’s Publishing, a

Bengali publishing house, in December 2014 to rave reviews from the critics.

Aalo Aandhari, a thinly veiled autobiography published in 2002, was a success in

Bengali. But it was its English translation, A Life Less Ordinary, published two years later, that made Baby a literary phe-

nomenon after it sold more than a million copies. The book was translated into 24 languages including French, German

and Korean and heralded Baby’s arrival on the literary scene.

It detailed her life as a child bride, at 12 marrying a man 14 years her senior and becoming a mother at 13. She went on to

have two more children but then fled her abusive husband, finally ending up as a maid in a rich man’s house.

The book attracted rave reviews from across the world and she was invited to several book festivals.

The New York Times compared it to Pulitzer Prize-winner Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, saying “[Baby’s] book provides

a moving depiction of life for millions of impoverished Indian women, and of aspects of Indian society not usually the focus

of novelists’ attention. It’s a simple description of a grim existence that has no need of embellishment with literary tricks.”

Baby, who has attended several major literature festivals in Frankfurt, London, and Jaipur, and dined and discussed litera-

ture with world-renowned authors including Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, admits that all three books of hers are

autobiographical in parts.

“I had a very tough life. I really struggled until I arrived here,” she says, referring to the home of Prabodh Kumar, a retired

professor of anthropology and the grandson of famous Indian novelist Prem Chand. “He was kind enough to give me a job

as a maid. And my life could not be any better.”

So, why does Baby – who has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian and BBC, earned decent royalties,

and travelled abroad for book fairs, literary festivals and book launches – still toil as a maid in Prabodh’s mansion?

In Celebration of International Women’s Day

Baby Halder and Prabodh Kumar

http://fridaymagazine.ae/making-difference/maid-in-kolkata-1.1465828


In Celebration of International Women’s Day (Contd.)

“I’m very superstitious,” says the author. “I have this great fear that if I stop working as a maid, I won’t be able to write at all. These are very frightening thoughts.

“Moreover my simple life suits me. There are no complications. My needs are few. I’m happy and comfortable. And if I change my lifestyle, where will I get the raw material for my books, which are essentially about marginalised people and therefore appeal so much to the common man? I’m averse to taking risks.”

Born in Kashmir, Baby was barely two when her family migrated to Durgapur, a city about 150km from Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, in search of better prospects. Her family struggled to have even one square meal a day. Baby’s father, Narendranath Halder, now 80, earned a pittance as a truck driver. “He would get drunk and regularly beat my mother and me for no reason.”

Fed up with the abuse, her mother Ganga Rani walked out of their house when Baby was only four. “Although I loved to study and read and write, I had to drop out of school because my father could not afford to pay for books and my uniform,” she says.

When she turned 12, Narendranath married her off to an alcoholic twice her age. “And I became pregnant with my first child at 13,” she says.

Seven years after Subodh was born, she had another boy Taposh, then two years later, a daughter Tia.

“My husband would return home inebriated and beat me severely even for minor issues,” she says.

Unable to take it any longer, she did what her mother had done years earlier – she walked out of the house, abandoning her husband of 12 years. But there was one difference – she took her children along. “I was 24 when I jumped into a train from Kolkata and arrived in New Delhi in search of a new life in 1999,” she says. She found a maid’s job but changed em-ployers frequently as she was overworked and underpaid.

Finally, 14 years ago, she landed in Prabodh’s home. “He was so kind and took me in with the children. He gave me a job and then allowed me to dream of becoming a writer.”

“One morning I saw her near the bookshelf in my drawing room looking through the books, stopping to read a few pages in one then flipping through another while dusting the shelves,” he says.

Baby, who saw her boss staring at her, thought she would be rebuked for shirking her job and quickly promised not to waste time. “But I told her to relax and said she was welcome to read all the books during her free time.” He also gave her a pen and a notebook, and encouraged her to put down her thoughts on paper.

Baby could not believe it. “That was the first time after over 25 years that I was holding a notebook,” she says. “I love reading but I could never pursue it because there weren’t any books at home, nor did I have the time.” But now here, in Prabodh’s house, she was surrounded by books.

“I enjoy reading Bengali books and there were plenty here,” she says. After reading a bit, particularly books by Taslima Nasreen, Baby decided to follow Prabodh’s advice and write.

Baby credits Prabodh with all that she has achieved. “He blew out all the carbon dioxide from my life and infused it with oxygen,” she says.

She is also full of praise for Urvashi Butalia, India’s leading feminist publisher, who translated her first book into English and printed it. Butalia is now translating Halder’s second book, Eshast Roopantar, which captures the euphoria immedi-ately after the release of A Life Less Ordinary.

For all her fame and trips abroad, Baby doesn’t wear trendy clothes, shoes, watches, handbags or visit beauty salons. She doesn’t possess gold jewellery worth talking about. The entire income from her writings has been invested in a small house in Halishahor, an hour-long train ride from Kolkata, where she hopes to live one day. So what are the real rewards?

Baby is taken aback by the question. But she thinks hard and says with a big smile, which highlights her dimples, “Earlier my children were ashamed to introduce me to their friends. But now they proudly say, ‘My mother is a writer’. Originally published in fridaymagazine.ae


In Celebration of International Women’s Day (Contd.)

Editor: Here is the second article about another Bengali woman who, like many of us, was born in Kolkata and raised in the U.S. Through many trips to Kolkata, she has helped develop several programs to help empower young children. The article was writ-ten by Darielle Britto and published in www.dnaindia.com.

International Women's Day Special: How singer Isheeta Ganguly is empowering young lives

The theme for the 2015 International Women’s Day is 'Make it Happen' and singer Isheeta Ganguly has been doing exactly that by empowering street children through her organisation Neerupama.

Born in Kolkata, Isheeta was brought up in the United States but she returned to India to follow her music aspirations. Releasing her first Rabindra sangeet album at the age of 15, Isheeta has eight albums under her belt since beginning her musical career at the age of seven. While obtaining her BA from Brown University and a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University, she often spent her university vacations in Kolkata, volunteering at a local municipal school and at the Child In Need Institute (CINI). It was during her volunteer work, that she realised she wanted to make a difference in the lives of these children.

“Working with street girls during trips to Kolkata, particularly in health and education, made me think that I definitely wanted to do something in the space of empowering young girls,” Isheeta says. That's how she went on to found Neerupama in 2008, which provides organisations with essential programs to give children an opportunity to turn their life around.

“Instead of reinventing the wheel and creating a safe house for children, I decided to partner with CINI, an organisation that was doing outstanding and credible work,” says Isheeta. Having previously worked in healthcare, Isheeta focused on interventions in health and hygiene. Through Neerupama, she developed three resourceful programs to provide for the children in Kolkata and now in Mumbai since 2014:

Reach: This program provides English literacy to the children, focussing on teaching them to converse and build opportunities if they want to go to secondary school, but more importantly for basic employment and vocational training.

HealthNet: is a public health awareness programme which is focused on basics like washing hands and information on respira-tory and diarrhoeal disease. It was created to empower children, so they could go back to their home environments and train their families with what they learned. This could ultimately help prevent diarrhoeal and acute respiratory infections related deaths.

Arts for Starts: is a performing arts programme where artists from around the city, like renowned actors, dramatists and musi-cians, conduct a session with the kids.

Through the Neerupama programmes, these children showed dramatic improvements over time. “We measured English capabili-ties over three months, six months, a year and found marked levels of improvements in conversational English and basic health knowledge,” says Isheeta.

While all three programmes have been successful in making a huge impact on the children, it was the performing art sessions that were most powerful in healing traumatic pasts like facing sexual abuse and abandonment. Being exposed to music and dance brought out a positive change in the children.

“In the arts programme, whenever they were around music and dance, a lot of these kids who had clearly been through all kinds of trauma, would come out in completely different ways,”says Isheeta. “I felt it had a profound effect on healing these kids who could not talk about what they had been through.”

Isheeta found that the performing arts has a unique quality to allow the children to stay focused on the present. “It has the power and ability to stir and move the subconscious like nothing else can,” she says. “You can’t change the past, but you can live in the moment. And there is nothing more in the moment than feeling the power of music, theatre, or the power of dance either as a spectator or a participant.”

The programme has helped restore hope back in their lives and seeing the profound effect of dance and music, Isheeta now hopes to scale her efforts using mass media as a means to impact minds. “If you can create a solid product on film or through music, that can be shared with hundreds and thousands of kids that will resonate.”

Her organisation Neerupama, named after her grandmother, means beautiful, which is what she says the children she works with are. It has not just been rewarding to be able to make a difference in their lives, but it has been equally satisfying in the way they have received it, she says.

“I think what has moved me so deeply are two things, the fact that they would never ask for anything and then, how grateful they are that you just showed up. The fact that you've come to conduct the class or session just lights up their world, because so much of their little lives has been about people just not showing up," adds Isheeta.

Her advice to young girls and women wanting to make a difference is, "Start small and do what you feel is natural." Any change can make a huge impact, she believes. Originally published in www.dnaindia.com


Children from Calcutta Muslim Orphan-age (Boys/Girls) were among those taken by the volunteers to the camps to take part in activities ranging from Pre-miere League 5-a side football matches to cricket tournament.

Volunteers of Make A Difference (MAD) took 120 children belonging to four different shelter homes in the city for the Dream Camp.

The Dream Camp is one out of MAD's four child-centric projects to provide the kids with an all time holistic experience. It is a three-day outbound activity that creates a platform for the children to dream about their future goals.

With the Nirbhaya incident and daily accounts of abuses of women hogging the pages and TV screens, the tiny tots of Boys' Orphanage staged a skit about sexual abuse of girls driving home the message.

The children, formed into teams and asked to come up with a skit highlight-ing burning social issues, did it on their own with little mentoring by the volun-teers of MAD, the NGO spread across 23 cities including Kolkata.

The third such camp of MAD's Kolkata chapter was organised at Kashi Vish-wanath Seva Samity where the kids were brought from several shelter homes.

"Our motto remains that even the most vulnerable children in society should be able to realise equitable outcomes," a spokesperson said.

Published in www.thestatesman.com

Kolkata's iconic Metro Cin-ema set to don a new look By Tasmayee Laha Roy

KOLKATA: One of the oldest cinema halls in the city Metro Cinema, is all set to get a new look. Inaugurated in 1935, Metro Cinema still stands tall at Jawa-harlal Nehru Road. But sans movie buffs, the grand chandeliers have gath-ered a thick film of dust. All that, how-ever, shall soon be a thing of the past.

Kolkata festival to cele-brate Indo-Japan cultural ties IANS

The 30th edition of the Indo-Japan cultural festival will kick-off in Kolkata on Saturday, March 14th to cele-brate and strengthen the ties be-tween the two nations, a statement said.

"The 30th In-Nichi Bunkasai (Indo-Japan cultural festival) celebrates the cultural bond between India and Japan. It is a platform for the conflu-ence of cultures where language is not a barrier," a Japan consulate statement said on Friday.

Organised by the consulate in col-laboration with Nihongo Kaiwa Kyoo-kai Society (a Japanese language organisation), the event will witness students and teachers of both coun-tries perform songs, dances and skits at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture.

Songs by the children of the Japa-nese Supplementary School in Kol-kata, a Japanese skit by the Japa-nese and Indian teachers, modern Indian dance, and a Japanese drama enacted by the Indian stu-dents are some of the items to be performed, the release said. Published in www.thestatesman.com

Girls from minority pock-ets attend dream camps PTI

Giving them a glimpse of a better life, a national NGO took children of the city's minority pocket, including girls, to 'Dream camps', away from the grime and sweat of their daily existence.

Inspired by their success at Metro Mum-bai, the owners of Metro Cinema - Metro Realty, have decided to start renovation work at their Kolkata prop-erty soon. The company will invest Rs 40 crore for the same.

The death of single screen theatres is not a new thing in the city but with Metro, Kolkata would welcome another boutique mall and multiplex out of a heritage structure. Spread over 8,50,000 square feet, the grade III heri-tage building currently has just two floors to it.

Post renovation, the property named Metro Emporium would be divided be-tween a retail, multiplex and F&B wing.

Designed by New York-based architect Thomas Lamb, the hall was once used by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to promote their films in the city. Way Out West was the first film to be screened here. The same theatre ran Bobby for 52 weeks in 1973. Hence, the new mall would also have a memoir section dedicated to the 70's blockbuster.

"The main facade of the building would be kept intact but it would be having four floors and a terrace that would be utilized for a skybar. The skybar would be something like what Asilo at Palla-dium Hotel in Mumbai is.The terrace overlooks the Netaji Indoor stadium, the Maidan and the Curzon park, making it perfect for a sky bar," Nester D Souza, general Manger, Metro Realty.

Also, LMC architects of Mumbai will work around a theme in the entire mall to keep the nostalgia of the place alive.

Art Deco detailings ranging from grand chandeliers, stained glass windows, to brass railings and period wooden doors and furniture will continue to be a part of the property.

Metro's strategic location on the Espla-nade makes it a prized property even today.Though the present rental value of the current unorganized commercial properties in the area range between Rs 400 per Rs 350 and ` square feet, with Metro giving way to a boutique mall, the rentals are bound to go up.

Published in economictimes.indiatimes.com


Music

Editor: Well, if you like Rabindra Sangeet and can understand French, then this could very well be for you. The article was writ-ten by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey and published in timesofindia.indiatimes.com.

Gems from Tagore in French soon KOLKATA: Calcutta University's department of French and Alliance Francaise will jointly produce an album of Tagore songs that have been translated into French with an aim to spread the poet's works among the French-speaking people across the world. A professor of French literature at Calcutta University and some members of Alliance Francaise toiled hard for years trans-lating the songs of Tagore. The translations were done by French teacher at Alliance Francaise Mainak Ganguly and for-mer head of the department of French at Calcutta University Paromita Das. French literature expert and former director of Alliance Francaise, Kolkata, Alexandre Martinez, helped design the eight songs chosen for the album, while percussionist and composer Tanmoy Bose arrange music for it. The album has been named "Ravi: Tagore Songs in France". It is only incidental that Ravi in French means delighted. Cal-cutta University French professor Madhuchhanda Dutta has sung the songs in French, while the original songs were sung in Bengali by Rupankar.

Originally published in timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Editor: I don’t want to bring bad luck to the Indian team by putting in an article about the ongoing Cricket World Cup tournament, so below is a World Cup related article about Kolkata and Sourav. The article was written by Pooja Mehta and published in www.iamin.in.

World Cup is here but Kolkata misses Sourav

While the entire country is yet to come to terms with the fact that Sachin Tendulkar will not be a part of the World Cup, the city of ‘dada’, Kolkata, is yet to get over with Sourav Ganguly’s hang-over. No matter how long has Ganguly stayed away from cricket, certain sports clubs near his resi-dence, Behala, still miss him the most.

While the local clubs are decorated with posters of Ganguly – including his iconic pose – while he takes his shirt off at the Lord’s, members of the club still idolise him as their ‘hero’. “The para culture of the city is an integral part of Kolkata. For years, para cricket has been associ-ated with ‘dada’ and it seems it will always be. We will be creating a replica of the World Cup trophy, stick posters of Ganguly, Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan,” said Mayukh Roy, a resident of Rashbehari. In the last several World Cup tournaments too, which did not see the participation of Ganguly, his supporters were spotted shouting ‘dada’ for every 4s and 6s the cricketers of the Indian cricket team hit.

He may have quit cricket for many years now, but the love and affection Ganguly receives is enviable.

Originally published in www.iamin.in.

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2015 BCS Events

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Local Events

Karaoke is back at the ICC. Third and fourth Wednesdays of

each month from 7:30pm to 9:30pm, starting on the 18th of March. The 3rd Wednesday will be Bengali and Bollywood night, with Bengali poetry and songs from 7:30pm to 8:30pm, and Bollywood from 8:30pm to 9:30pm. The 4th Wednesday will be English songs from 7:30pm to 9:30pm.

Watch the India team’s Cricket World Cup matches at the ICC.

Next match will be the quarterfinals match against Bangladesh. Please go to the ICC website or check the Cricket World Cup schedule for date and time of the match. I think there could be a charge of $5. Nothing is written on their website, but I have re-ceived emails that mentions a $5 requested contribution.

BollyTrim and Zumba Fitness classes by Nadia Neubert will be

held at the ICC on Tuesday’s at 8:00pm to 9:00pm. The class is $20 per month or $7 per session, and is now offering resistance training.

Please visit the ICC website at www.iccofsj.org for more informa-

tion on the above events, or other events such as SAT Classes, Senior Citizen’s Program and dance classes.

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