Rabindranath Tagore
Outside of his native Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore is probably best known for Jana Gana Mana, India's national anthem. Now there are two efforts in making his work better known outside of Bengal.
DD One began a weekly series of Tagore's songs on May 13. The series is broadcast at 10:30 PM IST and will run for a year. According to Indiantelevision.com,
... A unique aspect is that Gurudev's compositions have been translated into Hindi while retaining the originality of the musical and lyrical flavour of Tagore.
The songs have been rendered by some of the best known voices - both classical and popular. Some of the singers include Anup Jalota, Anuradha Paudwal, Bhupinder Singh, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Vinod Rathore, Suresh Wadekar and Mitali Singh.
Somnath Chatterjee (CPI-M), Speaker of the Lok Shaba, who represents Tagore's Shantiniketan and surrounding areas, also released a DVD (the first of a series) of songs of Tagore. No word on how or even if these DVDs will be made available to the public.
The second effort is a CD called "Mere Mann Main Dhadkan Main" to be released by T-Series. Hindi versions of Tagore's songs are sung by Indrajit Dasgupta, a government tax official, and narration preceding the songs is provided by Amitabh Bachchan. Bollywood actors Ashmit Patel and Rituparna Sengupta (who is also a veteran of Tollywood, that is, the Bengali film industry) will be featured in a video.
Mere Mann Main Dhadkan Main was announced with great fanfare this past January. At that time, it was said that the recording would be released in February. Nothing happened. Now, with renewed buzz, it seems that the release might be imminent. I couldn't find anything on the T-Series web site.
No comments:
Post a Comment