Joe Shearer
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If it was the movie Chittagong, it was made by the husband of Shonali Bose, Bedabrata Pain, and starred Manoj Bajpayee, Nawazuddin Siddiqi, and actors of that stature. There is a little personal history.
@Bilal9 has this apocalyptic vision of a Bengal over-run by northerners. He is not entirely wrong. In the 40s and 50s, the Punjabis were very strongly entrenched in Calcutta. There was this gentleman Pran Prashad, worked for Bird & Co., one of the agency houses, who got the bright idea of telling the then British Managing Director that the newly independent Indian government at the centre was planning to put him (the Briton) behind bars for economic crimes of an undefined nature. That gentleman took the next flight out, and left the company to Pran (Bijji) Prashad and his other Indian colleagues, Shantanu (Sean) Ghosh, Santanu Ghose, and David Gillani; both the Ghosh families children were students with me, one right through school, the other, briefly, at College, before wafting her way to Bryn Mawr, en route to a marriage with a Swedish Count named Douglas, a descendant of the Black Douglas of Scotland.
Bijji Prashad was a baraati at my father's wedding, but he was there as a substitute. He substituted for his Mama or Mesho, I don't know which, Suraj Lal Dass, who was in the Port Commission, and later MD of the Indian Tube Co. Ltd., a joint venture between Tata Steel and British Steel. SLD was very prominent in Calcutta society, mainly because he was married to the famous beauty Ashru Kona, alias Kona Dass. They had four children, the kind and motherly Juni Di, Binni Di, the stunningly beautiful, and Radhika, who was even more good-looking than Binni Di. There was a brother who was a tea planter, went native, and died fairly early. Juni Di married Tutu Bose, and they had a daughter, Shonali. The marriage didn't last, and Juni Di died of cancer at an unreasonably early age.
Binni Di was an air-hostess. I suffered the deep chagrin as an impressionable teenager of seeing an exquisitely beautiful young woman march up to my father and kiss him in the middle of Dum Dum Airport, with the policemen around him bugging their eyes out, and my father looking appallingly complacent. At some point of time, she got fed up of the life she was leading, became a Marxist and is today a top leader of the CPM, married to a former party Secretary.
Radhika married 'Hurricane' Roy's son, Prannoy, and helped him set up NDTV.
They brought up Shonali, who became an activist right in college at Miranda House itself, and made the film Amu. Binni Di acted in it, and the Bengali half of her came out superbly. If you haven't seen Amu yet, just stop what you are doing and see it NOW. Shonali married Bedabrata Pain, had two children with him, and lost one in a tragic accident. Their marriage broke up, but Pain managed to make Chittagong, again a film that you need to see just this minute.
Bijji Prashad and his wife Soni had several children; it is one of the ironies that like Binni Di, one of them became a committed Marxist, and is a very well-known academician in the US, Vijay Prashad.
@Bilal9 @Arthur @Species @bluesky
@jbgt90 - I told you about meeting Binni Di after more than (ouch!) 50 years at NALSAR. After Kona Dass died in a tragic car crash, SLD married R Adm Kuruvilla's sister, Sushila; she was not a popular woman. They retired to live in their own property, Hampton Court in Ooty, that they bought from a family friend of ours, Sushila Adige, widow of Ram Adige, of the Tamil Nadu police, another IP officer. If you've heard the name Adige in connection with Manu Chhabria, you know now whose son Narayan is.
@Naofumi @xeuss
@jamahir - they don't make Communists like they used to.
