ওয়াশিংটন বাংলা রেডিও Washington Bangla Radio USA

Good News for all the fans of Teni da and Narayan Gangopadhyay. Oikyo Natyo Goshti is bringing back the charm of Teni da to the people of Calcutta. 

Calcutta, Dec 20, 2011 (Washington Bangla Radio / Penning Creations) Noted Indian theater actor-director and head of the Kolkata-based internationally renowned Nandikar drama troupe Rudraprasad Sengupta shares some of his thoughts behind the 2011 Nandikar's National Theater Festival - the 28th consecutive year the landmark event in Indian theater is being successfully organized.

Sengupta emphasizes the ability of theater to break the boundaries of language and cultures constricting mankind to specific chunks of civilization, and shares with us how one of the best plays he has had an opportunity to watch was in Poland in the Polish language, which he could follow in spite of knowing only a couple of words of the language.

Speaking during the inauguration of the 28th edition of the Nandikar National Theatre Festival (full report here), the man who took Nandikar from a theater group to a social institution for theater spoke about how the art of theater doesn’t just need revival for its aesthetic beauty but also its power as a social tool.

Listen to Sengupta online via WBRi on-demand radio broadcast service.

Washington, DC, September 10, 2011 (Washington Bangla Radio) Commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Thakur, Shri Barid Baran wrote "Rabindramoyee" which depicts the comparison of THREE very popular and well known female characters created by Rabindranath - SHYAMA, CHITRANGADA and PRAKRITI (in CHANDALIKA).

The similarity between these characters is that they wanted their loved ones desperately. But the dissimilarity lies in the ways they opted to pursue their loved ones and the final outcome of their love.

Shyama sacrificed the life of a young paramour of hers in order to save Bajrasen from death as she was infatuated with him and wanted him at any cost.

Chitrangada, the only child of the king and the one to inherit the throne, falls in love with Arjun, the third of the five Pandava Brothers in the Mahabharata. But after Arjun refused her as she was not an attractive woman. She changed her appearance by the boon of Kamdev in order to reach her goal.

Prakriti was shunned by everyone around her as she was born to a lower-caste untouchable family. Her life changed when Ananda, a buddhist monk asked for water from her and made her understand that she is as human as everyone in the world. Prakriti felt re-born as a human being and fell in love with him.

However, the outcome of their love was different also.

In spite of everything Shyama did to get her love, Bajrasen left her, when he came to know about the sacrifice of life in order to save him.

After changing her appearance Chitrangada did win herself Arjun, but Arjun being a warrior looked for Chitrangada, the warrior and she came back to her original form.

Prakriti wanted Ananda and even tried her mother's magic powers to obtain him. But at the end of the day he was a monk, a hermit - a saint who had no attraction for material matters.

Listen to our special presentation - a Washington Bangla Radio exclusive.

Washington DC, June 13, 2011 (Washington Bangla Radio) John Van Burek lives in Toronto and is a director, translator and theater teacher. In 1997, he founded Pleiades Theater whose main goal is to celebrate global cultural diversity through plays that originate in languages other than English.

His current project has been to direct the English drama "The Post Office" translated from  "Dak Ghor" by Rabindanath Tagore. Translated by Dr. Julie Banerjee Mehta (also recently interviewed by WBRi) this is the first professional level performance of "The Post Office" in Canada. The play was  performed with an international cast from May 7 through June 4, 2011 at the Berkely Street Theatre in Toronto, Ontario. 2011 also marks the 100th anniversary of the writing of "The Post Office" which has been translated into some forty languages and performed all over the world.

Listen to a fascinating chat with John.

StanfordBongs is a cultural interest group of Stanford University students representing the culture of Bengal and the Bangali diaspora. They are a community of Stanford students, post-docs, staff and faculty drawn together by their love and pride of all things Bengali from the banks of River Ganges to the banks of River Padma. They serve as a Bengali social network and cultural tether for new and existing students and others at Stanford by organizing cultural and social events celebrating Bengal and the Bangali way of life.

SYNOPSIS

Kolkata@crossroads.com is a futuristic science fiction narrative that delves into the glorious future of a technologically superior Bengal. The story is set against the backdrop of a Bengali wedding at an age when marriages are made by DNA sequence alignments, when robots have replaced most human services and when cloned food products are commonplace. Yet, amidst all these changes, there is a bedrock of constancy in the Bangaliyana and Bengali way of life that pervades the future as well. The marriage ceremony is disrupted by an unexpected turn of events that soon reveal why this future world is in jeopardy of being shattered.

Listen to the full Bangla Shruti Natok via Washington Bengali Radio.