Tears, laughter at Bengali Convention
Farewell hugs were exchanged and eyes grew moist after the light and music dimmed at Madison Square Garden.
Reunions of old classmates, feasting on rasogullas, and arguments about everything under the sun quite as feisty as at the College Street Coffee House in Kolkata...Only, it was all happening in New York.
The occasion was the 25th Annual North American Bengali Convention July 1-3, which was attended by nearly 10,000 people - Bengalis mostly of West Bengal origin - from all over North America, Britain and India.
Farewell hugs were exchanged and eyes grew moist after the light and music dimmed at Madison Square Garden here at the end of the convention.
It spread over nine locations, including Manhattan Centre, Hotel New Yorker, Hotel Pennsylvania, all in the shadow the Empire State Building, as also at facilities in Chelsea, Gramercy Park and SoHo, and was described as the biggest ever.
When the last strains of the closing song by Kavita Krishnamurty died, those expatriates who came from far and near for this annual event expressed a sadness they compared with Vijaya Dasami, the last day of the Durga Puja.
Subodh Sarkar, popular Bengali poet and professor of English literature at City College, Kolkata, recited the lines from Shakespeare's "The Tempest": "The revels are ended...the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces... shall dissolve and...like an insubstantial pageant fade."
Founded in 1981 by a New York group, the Cultural Association of Bengal (CAB), the convention was initially just a one-day seminar drawing friends and acquaintances from the tri-state region, CAB chairman Prabir Kumar Roy told IANS.
After three years, the convention soared from its New York nest and travelled annually to city after city in the US, twice to Toronto, and once to Kolkata, growing with the community over the years, Roy said.
This time the convention opened at Madison Square Garden with "Dui Desh, Ek Mon", or "Two Lands, One Heart", a spectacular collage of "Bande Mataram" and "God Bless America" danced to clockwork unison by 70 tri-state dancers.
Among those who spoke at the inauguration were two of the world's longest serving politicians -- India's Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee and US Congressman Gary S. Ackerman, a Democrat from New York.
However, youth was the focus both in the selection of this year's awards and in the choice of events. The three honoured with Exemplary Achievement Award were Deeptankar DeMazumdar, a scientist-physician doing post-doctoral research on the brain and heart; Indivar Dutta-Gupta, an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago who has received awards for both his academic achievements and human rights work; and the violin prodigy Robert Vijay Gupta, 17.
The Philanthropic Contribution Award went to Aveek Sarkar, the Kolkata media tycoon who owns print publications, Star TV and Penguin India; Purnendu Chatterjee of the New York based Chatterjee Group; West Coast philanthropist Kali P. Chaudhury; and Mani Bhaumik, who helped develop Lasik eye surgery at California's Northrop Corporation Research and Technology Center.
Among the film, theatre and literary invitees from Kolkata were Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, filmmaker Goutam Ghosh, Bratya Basu, Sova Sen, classical vocalist Rashid Khan, and painter Shuvaprasanna.
For the literary seminar, award-winning novelist Chitra Bannerji Divakaruni came up from Houston, and Goutam Dutta came east from Warren in New Jersey. The seminar drew a record crowd, with standing room only at the back, thanks to the presence of the Bangladesh-born writer Taslima Nasreen. Signatures were collected at the convention for a mass petition, seeking grant of Indian citizenship to Nasreen.
All in all, it was, as Shuvaprasanna said: "Except for Durga Puja, this surely is the biggest Bengali event anywhere in the world."