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You started training in vocal classical early and singing was perhaps the usual curriculum at home. How do you look back and trace your singing career back to those early childhood years?
   When I was only six or seven year old, I used to sing songs of different types. My parents, especially my father, encouraged me to learn singing, especially Nazrul Geeti, Nazrul songs and compositions in English. He arranged for me to take lessons from some renowned classical as well as and Nazrul Geeti artistes. He gave me every possible opportunity to pursue this art. When I was a kid, I used to hide in the garden whenever my music teachers would come at an appointed time and coach me. My father would go and bring me, almost forcibly, and make me sit with the teacher. Now, I realise that without my father's persuasion and determination, I wouldn't be where I am today. I know now how fortunate I have been.
   Did you want to particularly learn Nazrul Geeti?
   My teachers decided that I would be good at singing Nazrul. When I was seven or eight years old, I would participate in a radio programme for children known as Khelagar Asar. I also duly passed the audition tests in the radio and television. On the tele-screen, I used to perform in a programme conducted by Ferdousi Rahman, a celebrated artiste in her own right.
   But I started my training with classical music. Without a strong foundation in classical repertoire, it is impossible to excel in any form of singing. Munshi Raisuddin inspired me to move on to pure classical music. Alongside, I also learnt Nazrul Sangeet. I used to go to Bulbul Academy of Fine Arts for lessons in Nazrul Sangeet. The late-lamented Bedar Uddin used to teach us Nazrul Sangeet there. With my classical base-training, I could render Nazrul Sangeet with much ease. Before that I didn't know which type of music would actually suit my voice.
   When I grew up, the television authority asked me for another audition in the adult category of singers, and I got through. It was around 1965 when I started singing in television as a Nazrul Geeti artiste. Sohrab Hossain, Ferdousi Rahman, Sheikh Lutfar Rahman, Khalid Hossain, Laila Arjuman Banu were the maestros of the time. Among them, only Ferdousi Begum used to sing different types of songs, such as bhawaiya, Nazrul Geeti and what are known as modern numbers besides the vocal renditions of the classical genre classical music. I was fortunate to be considered in the same league as them.
   How come you have so few releases in your name?
   Unfortunately due to various reasons I could not release any album in the 80's; maybe it was yet to become a trend as it is now. And yet I was at the peak of my career. I was even switching to some modern songs. I got some offers to perform in the background music for films. But unfortunately I had to leave the country then. At the same time some of the leading artistes were releasing albums on Nazrul. My contemporaries, Shabnam Mustari,Yasmin Mustari, Siffat E Rabbani, Shaheen Mahmood and others were releasing albums. As they lived here, they could all take advantage of this new opportunity. I finally released an audio album titled Nijere Haraye Khuji, much later, and once again on my father's insistence.
   Now I am trying to release a CD but I am facing some difficulties regarding formalities artistes have to comply with, set by the Nazrul Academy; anybody wanting to release albums on Nazrul, arerequired to take permission from the Academy.
   Do you find any change in the music scene since you left in 1985?
   During my current visit, I got a call from BTV to go and record a programme. I had selected some songs. But when I started singing, the moderator of the event stopped me and told me that the tune of my song was incorrect. I was really confused. I had learnt in my childhood numbers like Brajagopi khele hari and Kon khane aaj bhirla tari and sung them many, many times. When I attempted to sing them I was advised to choose some other numbers. I picked up the tunes of these songs from the albums of the famous Angur Bala, Manobendra and others. Keno aasile bhalo bhasile, sung by Nilufar Yasmin, is now being questioned as to whether it is at all a Nazrul Geeti or not. I find this very disheartening.
   Was there ever a break in your career, for any reason?
   In 1985 we moved to Brunei and then to New Zealand, to settle down. There was a lull in my singing career when we were in Brunei due to various circumstances and it saddened me that I was not being able to sing as much as I wanted to. But once we moved to New Zealand I consciously picked up the thread of singing where I had left it and started practising music again. I, however, still felt that I was not doing justice to all that I had acquired, thanks to my parents. I was happy that at least I had revived my singing and was determined to keep it up.
   Now when I sit and sing with my friends and students in far off New Zealand, and attend musical events organised by the expatriate community, I feel invigorated; but I still miss performing in Dhaka, and it doesn't stop me from feeling that I am back in my country. I miss singing for my family and people who appreciate me. And yet when I am in Bangladesh I can hardly make time to perform or make recording that sometimes lead people to speculate about my giving up singing.

The loneliness of the soul is what informs Ibsen's Brand. For proof, one must peer into the mind of the priest as he goes looking for God. Or maybe he has found Him already? That is the dilemma which the playwright places himself in. And then he advances a little, to place the burden of interpretation or understanding on the audience. In effect, it is an existentialist thought which Ibsen portrays in the play. Discontinuity? There are whole swathes of it, and they all come layer upon layer as you watch the transformation of a man, a priest to boot, from one in infinite love with Creation, in his own fashion, to one compelled to deal with the banalities of the temporal world. It is the mayor in the tale who more than any other character typifies the critical nature of the conflict. His world is peopled with thoughts of temporal gain, a world which is clearly threatened by the religious idealism of Brand. And there you have the focal point of the entire question before you. What, you ask, is the nature of the idealism the play propagates?
   Kamaluddin Nilu grapples with the question in all its loaded dimensions, through the excellent Bengali rendition of the work by Munzur-i-Mowla. There are obvious difficulties in translation, and always, in any language. What surely compounds conditions in the Bengali production of the play recently put on stage by the Centre for Asian Theatre is the very Scandinavian nature of the philosophy ingrained in the work. In the end --- and this is certainly an achievement of truly remarkable proportions --- Nilu and his artistes succeed in tying the threads which convey universality to drama, indeed to the vibrations of the soul. And so we go back to thoughts of the soul yet once more. The purity of Agnes, the young woman not supposed to be Brand's consort and yet ending up as the mother of his child, his spouse as it were, is a strong pointer to the kind of mix between the temporal and the spiritual Ibsen seeks to uphold in the tale. That is the simplistic part of the story. The more dense reality is that Brand's is an intensely difficult struggle, for reasons of the cosmic nature of earth-heaven link he plays around with as a man of God. His is a committed heart, one that does not at the same time forgive. The death of his mother takes second place in his perceptions of life as it should be lived. In the sense of the corporeal, he desists from seeing her before she dies; and once she is dead he feels no huge compulsion to observe her dead form. And yet a battle shapes up inside him, nearly consuming him in its fury. He survives, but perhaps only just?
   Which takes one back to the idealism factor. The universe Brand presides over or would like to see take form and voice is one which admits of no compromise. He is a stern Moses leading his flock to a Promised Land. He is no prophet, weighed down as he is by the innumerable demands on his being. But the bug of perfection which has seeded itself in him refuses, at the point when a more liberal view of life would have been in order, to relent. The flock, disappointed and disillusioned, melts away, or almost. There are no regrets in Brand. The mother in Agnes, increasingly distraught over the condition of their child, moves him but
   little. And yet moved he is when life takes leave of the child. The burial, the cold earth, the unforgiving loneliness of circumstance is what shakes him to his core. For one of those rare times in life, the priest is fatigued to his core. But his unflinching faith in God, in the kingdom of God he means to see emerge in his world, never quite deserts him. It is, as always, a conflict of gigantic moral dimensions.
   It is the hard heart, or call it a heart of stone, which drives Brand passionately to his goal. It is quite another matter that the goal remains elusive, beyond his mortal ability to grasp. And God, for the priest, is in need of change. It is not a stern and yet merciful Lord of the Worlds Brand is focused on. His aim is the emergence of a deity, or a transformation of the existing one, more akin to youthful vigour, in the mould of a young and vibrant Hercules. Beauty and power is what, when all is said and done, drives Brand's mission. Naturally there are the pitfalls, the stumbling blocks. The sybaritic nature of the society around him, the common pursuits of men whose business is to bring him a little down to earth, are realities he is hemmed in by. It is a mammoth struggle Brand puts up. The search for God, for a perfect body of men defined by a pristine instinct of religiosity, does not end when Brand falls with his face in the dust. The cosmos continues along its predestined pattern.
   Ibsen recreates the primordial sense of inquiry. And Kamaluddin Nilu transports his idea of God and soul into the landscape of the universal, enough to raise anew the ancient conundrum of the nature and being of God. It is an on-going dilemma. Brand falls silent without arriving at the answer. Meanwhile, new questions arise out of the spiralling dust.