Malay Roychoudhury's Blog
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Dec.26.2011
I have encountered only a handful of people who are as selfless as Mr Mukul Kumar Mukherjee of Mumbai. I used to visit him when he lived in an airport quarter probably built by the Britishers. It was almost a village mileau in the heart of the then Bombay. He lived there with his brothers and...
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Dec.08.2011
Shalila's father Sudhir Kumar Mukherjee was a PRO in an Institution run by Britishers in Murry Hills ( now in Pakistan ) where her mother Amiya died within two weeks after giving birth to Shalila's sister in 1943. Since there was none to look after the children Shalila's maternal grand father...
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Dec.07.2011
Here you find Shalila Mukhopadhyay when she was two years and three months old on the lap of her Mejodadu ( brother of her maternal grand father ) with the members of The Bhattacharjee family of Nagpur, India, on the occassion of her Baromama's ( elder maternal uncle ) marriage. Baromama is seated...
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Dec.07.2011
Bengali poet Arunesh Ghose died in November 2011 at his Mathabhanga village in Coochbihar district of West Bengal, India. It is reported that he died while taking bath in his village pond. He was my interviewer for a very lenghthy interview for his own magazine called JIRAFFE, way back in 1985....
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Dec.03.2011
I find all the Bengali grooms after their marriage are gifted with special attention and affection of their mother-in-laws. Even those who divorce their first wife and marry again get the love and affection of the new mother-in-law. Unfortunately I didn't have a mother-in-law as my wife had lost...
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Mar.07.2011
Rabindranath Tagore was banned in my childhood. Yes. What I am writing here may be astonoshing, but true. The elders during my childhood in our Imlitala house at Patna, Bihar, India, wre dead against the Brahmo religion to which Rabindranath Tagore belonged. Obviously they banned the entry of all...
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Sep.03.2010
I have been asked by KABITIRTHA magazine to write a book on James Joyce. The book will be in Bengali. No one has written as yet, I am told. I don't know where to start.
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Mar.12.2010
I sold off my Kolkata flat for a pittance, gifted the entire collection of books, gramophone records, dics, cassettes, magazines etc to friends and readers and distributed the furniture etc to my neighbours. Everybody felt happy, including myself. I wanted to get rid of the nostalgia. People are ga...
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Jan.27.2009
Tridib Mitra was the most important activist of the Hungryalist Movement in Bengali literature. He was considered to be the Poster Boy of the movement. When other members loitered at Coffee Houses and Addas, it was he and his girlfriend who carried a ladder and pasted Hungryalist poetry posters...
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Dec.25.2008
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Traces of magic realism in Bangla Literature first appeared in the fictions of Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847-1919), who had fled from home in 1865 to avoid filial poverty, and toured various places in undivided India, during which he was discovered by Sir William Hunter in 1870 for his...
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Dec.22.2008
The legendary Bangla poet Falguni Ray was born on June 7, 1945 and died young on May 31, 1981. He wrote only fortytwo poems and six prose pieces in a span of five years, and this was the period we were together at Calcutta where he lived and in Patna where I lived during the 1960s. His oevre...
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About Malay
Malay Roychoudhury (b. 1939) is a Bengali writer, who also writes in English and Hindi. He is famous for launching the Hungryalist Movement in Bengali literature during 1960s, and is the only Indian writer who has refused the Sahitya Academy Award. He is...