Bengali New Year

Boishakh is the first month according to Bengali calender. First day of this month, we bengalis celebrate New Year. The day is called as "Poila Boishakh". Poila Boisakh is not only a beginning of New Year. It is not only worship of 'Lord Ganesha', 'Halkhata' and sweets. It is a day which gives us the true spirit to look forward with new motivations. We welcome the new year with all friends and family members. Normally people try to have typical Bengali food in this day. All these are just to make the day a bit special, memorable to our life.
A large part of this new year party is cultural program. From my childhood I used to see that the day starts with "Nabobarsher Boithak" on television. Famous singers, dancers, poets, writers they all take part in the program, perform and share their precious thoughts on this particular day. Since this is the beginning of a new year, it has a huge impact on Bengali Film Industry also. Lots of films get started their journey hoping for success. In Kolkata Nandan is the cultural hub of the city. You will surely find on road drama, dancing and singing activity, where famous personalities perform with other people.
If I talk about Poila Boishakh the first thing should be HaalKhata. This is puja of Lord Ganesha. The businessmen start their income for the new year with a copy(named haal khata) blessed by Lord Ganesha. In every shops, the owner distributes sweets and namkins between the customers. There is also a trend to buy jewelry on this day.
This will be the second year when I will be away from my family and hometown in this day. I will be celebrating the day with my Bengali friends in Mumbai in an evening with a small cultural program. There we all will perform and welcome the New Year. Now we all are busy with practicing dram, songs and dance. You can visit http://eso-he-boishakh.blogspot.com for more details of the program. But that blog is written in Bengali, so I think those who can understand Bengali can only understand the posts. I will update the program details

Yashotsav

Let me share my another experience of cultural event in my organization, where I am working now. This is basically the annual day of my office. But before the D day we have different competition between different group of people. We have drama competition, dance competition etc. I remember we performed in a 15 min skit (script was written on run time) in the semifinal, and for that round we were the champions. I will upload the video of the same. In the skit we had a very nominal make up. However it was all fun.
Other than this skit we had a movie competition. We prepared a movie based on the theme "Inspiring Performance". Some shots of this movie we did outside. For me this was just the first outdoor shooting. Everywhere stopped in their way and asked us..... "What movie you are shooting?" .... "Who is the Hero?"............ "Where is the Heroine"............ "By what time will it be released?" . etc etc etc................. And you don't believe that they were so co-operative. We stopped one auto rickshaw and asked the driver if he can consider for 5-10 min for the shooting. He readily accepted that, and started to make himself prepare for the shooting. It was really hard to say him that he will not going to be the part of the shooting. So we had a fare bit of fun out of this. Do not ask me for the feedback of the movie, I can't explain how we failed in this project, though we learnt from this.

We had lots of fun in the face paining competition also. The team had maximum no of face painted, won the challenge. Though we painted some jem, but there were no points on quality. We lost :D. But it was a great fun to paint some one's face. Actually competition was so tough we were not at all waiting for the permission of the person if he/she wanted to painted his/her face or not. Whenever we saw a face without color, we just painted, just like Holi.

Get Set Go

At last I have convinced myself to write something on my first BLOG. Since I created this blog, I was confused what should be the proper lines to start with. Now I realized that giving own introduction is the best thing, where I don't have to be innovative. I can share something about myself which will boost my confidence also.
Hi, I am Kaustav Banerjee, a 24 year old guy from West Bengal. I am now staying in Pune for my job. Really missing my hometown. Other than my job profile I like to engage myself with cultural and social programs.
Aahhhhhhh!! yes I got a real good topic to talk about. I spent all my initial days in Kidderpore, Kolkata. In 2003 we changed our residence to Botanical Garden, Howrah. I thought I would face a lot of problem in finding new friends, and yes that was true. In my new area I hardly found people of my age. Those starting days were depressing. But now I have lot of friends in my new area. Do you know how was it happen. This is all because of one cultural program. :))
Believe me. Actually what happened me and my elder sister thought to organize one cultural program on the day of "Rabindra Jayanti" (Tagore's Birthday). But the main problem was finding kid performers (mature persons are really tough to handle). Eventually we visited every single house of the area and asked if there was any kid who wanted to join our program. We got a huge response. We thought to arrange the program in our terrace, but with these number of participants we had to arrange for a stage. Thanks to Harun Kaku(uncle) who made the stage for us absolutely free. We got lot of support and the program was a hit, rather super hit. Then I found the people in the area are really good and supportive and now I am sure I have a good rapo with them also. We gave our Organization's name "Prayas" . Last year we completed four successful years of Prayas.
oh!!!!! this is too much for today. Sure I will let you know more about our Prayas.
Keep in touch.