My KOLKATA BLOG

On 1 May, on the birthday of Manna Dey, an unusual musical programme will be held in the city Kolkata to pay homage to the late maestro. Manna Dey Foundation & Ashabari magazine will organise this function jointly. Eminent singers of Bengal like Usha Uthup, Nachiketa, Haimanti Shukla, Indrani Sen, Rupankar, Raghab, Manomoy, Shampa Kundu, Sudeb Dey, Pallab Ghosh, Sriradha Bandyopadhyay, Anik Dhar, Jojo, Saikat Mitra, Parimal Bhattacharjee, Sujoy Bhowmik, Ashok Bhattacharjee, Dipankar Chattopadhyay, Jyoti Prasad Chatterjee and Ashok Bhadra will participate on the occasion and sing the popular songs of Manna Dey. Compere : Mrinmoy Kanjilal & Madhumita Basu. Venue : Uttam Mancha, from 5:30 pm onwards. No entry fee.

Next 2nd May is the 94th birthday of Satyajit Ray. On this occasion, week long function would be organised from 1 May '15 - 7 May '15 at ICCR. Soumitra Chattopadhyay will inaugurate the function and he would deliver Satyajit Ray Memorial Speech. The previous orators are Javed Akhtar, Shyam Benegal, Naseeruddin Shah. This year, Chatterjee's subject of speech is: 'Satyajit & his actors'. The speech would be of half-n-hour duration. Chatterjee acted in 16 films of Ray - out of this, 14 feature film and 2 short film. He'll deliver the prestigious speech in Bengali. Some rare still photographs of Ray with Chatterjee would be exhibited there which were not produced earlier.             After the inaugural function, Soumitra Chattopadhyay will inaugurate 'Prabandha Sangraha' - the compilation of essays and articles written by Satyajit Ray for various books and magazines. More than 50 essays will be there. "Smaran" - the remembrance - a section d...

Yesterday, on the auspicious day of Poila Boishakh - the first day of Bengali New Year 1422, devotees rushed to Dakshineswar Kali Temple to offer pujas to goddess Kali. It is the pic of crowd gathered there in queue, peacefully. Pic source: Newspaper -- A. B.

-- A. B.