A tale of a city

 Adda at City Centre Mall

Ekti Shaharer katha (একটি শহরের কথা / A tale of a city) a documentary film on Salt Lake City (Bidhan Nagar) produced by Bidhannagar Municipality. The VCD of this documentary was released yesterday on 14 Apr 2010 by Soumitra Chattopadhyay at Purbashree theater at  EZCC Salt Lake.

On this occasion, Rabindrasangeet, dance & poem recital by Soumitra Chattopadhyay and Bratati Bandopadhyay  was organised by the organisers.  Shompa Kundu, Manomoy, Paromita (London) were among the artists of Rabindrasangeet. At the end the film was shown on the screen. Soumitra and soma Dey were in leading roles. 

The film was not upto the mark. The dialogues and photography was very poor. More over, like everything, the film also is one sided. This was a good attempt and the film could have been a good documentary of Salt lake but somehow it failed.

In the film, there is a mention of the tasty cutlets (Chop/ চপ) of Tank No. 11, but purposely omitted the "Indira Bhawan" where once Indira Gandhi stayed during one of the Congress session, if I am correct, in the seventies. To avoid that pronouncement of "Indira Bhawan" & Indira Gandhi - they mentioned "this is the place where India's No. 1 politician, Shri Jyoti Basu lives. Since it was a documentary film, they should have mentioned the history of that Indira Bhawan with details of why and when it was built and who all stayed there including Indira Gandhi, PM of INDIA. The writer, producer have given a flavour of  nasty & narrow politics here. I am not a political person or politically inclined to any party but my point is that when you are showing the statue (only Head) of Karl Marx and Sourabh's academy why a  Prime Minister  should be ignored? It has to be because its writer Bishwajiban Majummdar, Chairman, Bidhannagar Municipality belongs to a political party, where Indira Gandhi can be ignored but not jyoti Basu.

The film mentioned about the greenery of the city, but it is silent  about the destruction of the greenery by the Bill Board advertisers/ hording owners on the Broadway avenue of Salt Lake. More over the  Broadway Avenue of Salt Lake  has been defaced by the Bidhannagar Municipality  by  putting  lot many hoardings on Islands and on the both sides of the Avenue. Because of these hordings, there are lot of destruction of trees on the Broadway Avenue. The trunks on the ground are the proofs of the destruction carried out by the hording owners/ advertisers. Chairman said once, there are plenty of trees in Salt Lake, nothing goes wrong if some are eliminated. To bring up a tree, it takes years, but they are hacked in minutes, just to clear the sight of the hordings. in the film these aspect has not been discussed, because it is produced/ scripted by the Chairman himself. So it can not be  classified as a  documentary film of today's Salt Lake.

"Palash" on Broadway Avenue

Broadway Avenue, in the early morning