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May, 2006 @newagebd.com Main Page « Front Page « Metro « Business « International « Sports « National « Editorial « Op-Ed « Home « Timeout « Letters «

Fresh start The atmosphere at Pahela Baishakh was one of festivity and defiance. The Ramna Batamul was packed with people wearing colourful outfits. They moved to the rhythm of music at the ritual festival staged by Chhayanaut.    This was a Bangladeshi festival to the hilt, filled with masks, motifs, and traditional Bengali food. ‘The atmosphere is electrifying and it seems like people are really enjoying themselves. The kalbaishakhi jhor — norwester — seems to have swept away the past and its grief. People are really celebrating the opportunity of a new fresh start,’ said Rahmina Akhter, a student of Dhaka University.    Although the celebration of Pahela Baishakh — the first day of the Bangali New Year — used to be somewhat of an exclusive event, celebrated by the intellectuals in recent times, it has attracted more of the younger generation recently. One could see people of all ages getting together to celebrate the advent of the new year on April 14. ‘As kids, we were a little detached from Pahela Baishakh as we could not relate to its significance. But I believe it is crucial for Bangladeshis to celebrate such a huge part of our cultural identity,’ explained Majed Rahman, who was out with his two children to give them a taste of the celebrations.    The local carnival of mini food joints and stalls all over Dhaka was a fabulous sight. People flocked there for panta bhaat and other traditional food. ‘I think Pahela Baishakh is also a wonderful celebration of our traditional culinary delights. This is the one day when we truly eat like Bangladeshis,’ says Farhad Momen, a student who was salivating over his meal at the Dhanmondi Club Fair. Large queues formed in front of most Pahela Baishakh fairs in town but the difficult traffic and queues did not deter most Dhakaites from celebrating the day in the most festive of spirits.    Pahela Baishakh also provides a great opportunity to indulge one’s cultural needs as numerous cultural festivals were organised all over the city at different times. ‘With our busy schedules, people never get the time to relax and listen to good folk and traditional music. This kind of cultural festival is what people need to recharge themselves for the battle ahead in the next year,’ said Rahat Banu, a schoolteacher.    ‘In our country, we celebrate religious festivals or the Independence Day. Pahela Baishakh is a celebration of our cultural identity and the uniqueness of our calendar and our way of life,’ said Latifa Sharmin, a doctor.    The roads of Dhaka where a sea of red, white, yellow and green. People got their faces painted and the attendance at most fairs exceeded the expectations, especially compared to the last few years. Amidst the heightened security measures, the festive mood of the citizens was not dampened. It was almost as if people came out to make a statement. We are no longer scared and no one can intimidate us from celebrating our culture and our identity.    ‘This was true public expression solidarity. The people are not even bothered about the previous year’s blasts and security threats. Bangaldeshis have certain traditions and their way of life, and no one can stop us from celebrating that,’ said a group of students at the Gulshan Youth Club fair. The event organised by the Bengal Foundation had a massive fair with food stalls and stalls selling traditional decorative and gift items. A cultural festival featuring renowned traditional songs alongside band music was also presented as a part of the celebrations.    A bomb blast in 2001 at the Ramna Batamul had left gruesome bodies on this very day. The grisly sight of mangled hands and feet lurked in the minds of people since. The sudden rise Islamist militancy also seemed to be a threat to the spontaneous cultural festival. But this year, with the apparent effort of the state to quell such militancy, the people seemed to have become rejuvenated. Their multitude only strengthened the sentiment that Pahela Baishakh, the most Bengali of occasions, would not wither.    The dark clouds of the kalbaishakhi swept away the ominous shadows of the past.    - Adnan Khandker First Light That award-winning photographer GMB Akash has for some years now been at the frontline of photojournalism in Bangladesh does not come as news to us at SLATE. Since the magazine was launched in 2003, some of Akash’s internationally-acclaimed work has been showcased on these very pages. By association we have been a part of every triumph in Akash’s career from his first photo assignment for Newsweek to his World Press Photo award this year. This month, Akash launched his first coffee-table book of photography, a collection of some 26 photographs in a collaborative effort with none other than SLATE’s talented design director Laura Bonapace. Titled First Light, the spiral-bound, exquisitely designed and printed collection features Akash’s earliest work in black and white, ‘untainted by the purpose of living up to expectations or earning a livelihood,’ as he tells it. The photos range from the evocative, to the artistic, and even the comic. And to top it off, the captions, the English ones, are written by Reena Abraham, former-editor at SLATE. So it’s a triple-whammy for us. The photographer, the art director and the writer who collaborated in this stellar work are all among the people SLATE considers its own. Did we mention that the photography is top class? Well, it is. - MH First Light The photography of GMB Akash Glow Publishing Price: Tk 1,200 (a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Impact Foundation who help prevent and cure disability and disease in rural Bangladesh) Available at all good bookstores If you build it, they will come by Asif Saleh When I first saw the poster of the concert, I was sold. In this age, when everyone promises fusion but delivers kitchen sink remixes, this looked different. The poster had the caption ‘From Bangla beat to Afro beat’ and had an image of a group of ragged-looking Bauls hanging out in a truck. For the Bangla beat part, they brought singers like Arnab, Abdur Rob Fakir, Shahjahan Munshi and to present the rocking Afro fusion beat there was a relatively unknown group called Lokkhi Tera.    The most interesting thing for me was the concert was arranged at Queen Elizabeth Hall in South Bank, which is one of the top performing arts centres in present-day London. I had met the organiser Runi Khan once before and at the time she told me how she wanted to take Bangla music to the music lovers of the rest of the world and to the mainstream Western audience. I was really glad that she actually made it into a reality by arranging the concert.    As the concert day approached, I started getting emails from random people about attending. The interior designer Titli, the column writer Nadia, the Sundarban researcher Annu, Parapar musician Ollie — everyone seemed to be going to this concert. I bought eight tickets for my family and friends. I wanted all of us to enjoy this celebration of music. We dressed up and were ready to promote a Bangladesh that is very different from the Bangladesh as the Brits know it. It seemed like I wasn’t the only one who was thinking like that. It seemed almost everyone we knew in London was there that night — it became sort of a mini biyebari in Dhaka as one friend described it. No politics, no depressing thoughts about the homeland, just pure music. Suddenly we had a lot to cheer about in the little Bangladesh we create outside our daily life abroad.    The night started with a composition by Zoe Rahman, an up-and-coming talent in the London music scene. Zoe’s presence in front of the piano with her knee-length hair was captivating enough but her music was an amazing revelation. We will certainly hear more of this exciting talent in coming days. We wanted more but it was a teaser for the big night.    The real show started soon after. Ektaar Music put a group of musicians together and called it Ektaar All Stars. The actual concert started with Rob Fakir and Shahjahan Munshi. I must say that I was a bit apprehensive about how the bauls would perform in such a big setting. However, the two musicians allayed my fears. While Munshi’s performance was calm and soothing, Rob Fakir simply rocked the whole house. Sudipto Bordhon’s dhol simply made everyone start with foot-tapping and end up dancing. After Rob’s performance, it was Arnob’s turn to woo the audience and that he did without much effort. He started the show by saying that he was not feeling too well as his father-in-law had just passed away and he was thinking about his wife, also a singer, Sahana, who could not accompany him at the show. I guess that’s why we could forgive him when he lost the lyrics of one of the songs and to the amusement of the audience was searching through all the pockets of his shirt in the middle of the show. Barring that amateurish glitch, his voice and the contemporary lyrics of his songs mesmerised the audience. To the disappointment of the audience he just played four numbers. One of them was a new rendition of Tagore’s ‘Majhe majhe tobo dekha pai’. The kirton version of the song came alive with bass guitar and percussions and the treatment by Arnob. It was a new experiment.    The Bangla beat part of the concert ended with Arnob rocking the house to the tune of SD Burman’s ‘Takdum Takdum bajai Bangladesh-er dhol’. On the downside, however, there was a lack of articulate description before each of the songs for the non-Bangladeshi audience.    The hosting in the second part of the show was done by Kishon Khan, the pianist lead of the Lokkhi Tera group. Kishon was charming and was amazingly in control of the large group of musicians in his team. There were eleven of them from different parts of world. Among them, the two South Asians Fazal Qureshi and Pandit Dinesh are well known in their own right. The two young singers who debuted at the show were Armeen Musa and Aneire Khan. The Bangla numbers were played to a bluesy effect and those who were expecting traditional remixes were perhaps a bit perplexed but for a lover of world music, it was a feast of sounds, rhythms and experimentation. The bluesy rendition of ‘Naiare’ was particularly haunting. This was sung by Armeen, who is also the great-granddaughter of Bangladeshi folk legend Abbasuddin. For those who heard the original version of this song by him, it was a particularly thrilling experience to hear his fourth generation successor singing it, sixty years later. Abbasuddin would have been proud just like we were.    Kishon who spent some time in Cuba and is also the director of Cuban funk outfit Motimba, did not hide the influence of South American music in his compositions. His compositions were brave and kept the audience in rapt attention. He was seamless in moving back and forth between different genres of music and was very effective in taking the audience along with him.    The show ended in a brilliant finale where all the musicians showed off their musical talent with individual items. In the end, the show proved the old adage: If you build it, they will come. People packed the house paying 25-pound tickets to hear music from Bangladesh.