Baajlo Tomar Aalor Benu -- Mahishasurmardini and Us

I can never sleep on the night before Mahalaya. Be it the never ending list of resolutions I take on this day or the recurring memories of past Durga Pujas or may be the incessant barks of the street dogs outside; something or the other never let me sleep on this perticular night of the year. But this year one reason superseded all the other reasons: I was going to miss the Durga Puja at Calcutta for the third consecutive year.

I slept for around two hours last night, woke up at 4 am, turned on my laptop and double clicked on Mahishasurmardini.mp3. If you haven’t passed your childhood in West Bengal, you can not possibly gauge the extreme nostalgia we feel with this one and a half hour long radio program. Mahishasurmardini, written by Bani Kumar, composed by Pankaj Kumar Mallick, with vocal inputs from legendary artists from the golden era of Bengali Music and of course narrated by Birendra Krishna Bhadra, that is somehow got mixed in our genes. The show started in way back 1930. Since then the radio show is broadcasted on channel A of All India Radio, Calcutta every Mahalaya, 4 am sharp. Earlier, the show was a live one but as time passed, All India Radio decided to have a recording instead. At that time, the present version was made which was later released in Audio Tapes/ CDs by Saregama HMV. In nearly every household of Bengal, the Chandipath by Birendra Krishna Bhadra is echoed… since time immemorial. 

I remember those two years at IIT Bombay when we used to gather at the Main Ground at 4 am to listen to Mahishasurmardini together. As the sun would not rise in Mumbai till 6:30 am in October, 4 am was deep in the night’s darkness. But it was amazing to see how the darkness faded away with our collective enthusiasm. Such was our enthusiasm that we refused to play the piece using the mp3 file we had. Instead, we used an Internet Radio Sevice that relayed Calcutta-A signal from All India Radio all the way from Calcutta in real time. In the next year however, the online radio service was stopped in the following year and we had to use Washington Bangla Radio which I thing plays the mp3 anyways. Such was our enthusiasm that even some of our non-Bengali friends would come and join us to listen to the program. Big thanks to them. The only hiccup we faced was convincing the Main Ground Security what this bunch of 50 odd people was going to do in the main ground in the middle of the night. This year this event is being organised in Hostel 9 Mess instead of the Main Ground. Poor chaps… they will surely miss a lot.