In which I stalk elderly Bengali actors at the Apeejay Kolkata lit-fest

I enjoyed my time at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival very much – Maina Bhagat, Anjum Katyal and their team did a super job; the event was professional and extremely well-organised while also leaving a lot of room for warmth and personal attention. (This is a rare combination, for reasons that are sometimes beyond the control of fest organisers: the bigger a festival gets, the more impersonal it becomes; and if it remains too small or fund-strapped, a number of things at the organisational level can go wrong at the last minute.) Fine venues too, including the National Library and the Oxford Bookstore in Park Street, and the inauguration – which included a thoughtful speech on Indian film history by Shyam Benegal – was at the grandest setting one could have hoped for, the Victoria Memorial.

The session I moderated went off reasonably well, though given the many talking points and the number of panellists we could probably have done with an extra hour. (Then again, we could have done with an extra four hours, so no point in being too greedy.) The audience size and level of participation was just right too. Outside of the actual sessions, there were pleasing encounters with friends and new acquaintances. And I had a nice little chat with someone who played a notable part in two significant non-mainstream Hindi films of the mid-1980s before dropping so completely out of the movie world that you can barely find any mention of him on the internet today – but more on that, hopefully, in a subsequent post.

For now, I want to report that I shamelessly indulged my fanboy impulse by getting photos clicked with actors who played lead roles in two of my favourite Satyajit Ray films, Pratidwandi and Seemabaddha, more than 40 years ago.

First, the delightful Barun Chanda – in his 70s now but even more striking a presence than he was in his younger days – with whom I had two very warm conversations.

(At some point during the second meeting, we were both a little high and sentimental, and Mr Chanda may have sung a few lines of the song “Jeevan ke safar mein rahi / Milte hain bicchad jaane ko”. But don’t quote me.)

The second pic above came shortly after Barun’s dramatised reading with Tom Alter at the event “When Ghalib met Manto – Ek Guftagu”, centred on Rabishankar Bal’s book Dozakhnama (just translated into English by the tireless Arunava Sinha). Here’s a picture from that performance (Tom Alter as Ghalib on the left, Barun as Manto on the right):

And here is a photo from the Nemai Ghosh collection, taken on the set of Seemabaddha: the younger version of Barun, with Ray and Sharmila Tagore.

Second fanboy photo. I’ll probably regret revealing this in a public space, but Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha in Pratidwandi is one of my big movie-fan crushes. Here are two pictures of him, one at the fest, the other from the film, in 1970.
 

(More notes from the fest in later posts)