Township-based social group Club Friday celebrated its fifth annual day recently, with the focus being on helping visually challenged students. And true to the theme, the evening’s opening dance was performed by a visually challenged girl.

Sampa Ghosh, a student of Rani Karna, performed a tarana and received huge applause. “I suffered from a retinal disease in my childhood that affected my eyes. But I don’t let that stop me,” said Sampa, who studies sociology and runs a computer business. 

The chief guest at the event was Kanchan Gaba, a visually challenged lady who is a legal consultant and secretary of the NGO Turnstone Global. “There was minimum awareness about blindness during my childhood but through my NGO I now try to extend support to those with blindness, autism etc,” she said.

Club Friday awarded scholarships to 10 visually challenged students of Turnstone Global, donated a text-to-speech conversion software and 20 smart electronic canes (that will alert the user before an obstruction in the path). The sum total of the aid was worth more than Rs 2 lakh.

Also present were representatives of some organisations that Club Friday has helped off and on through 2015 such as Juvenile Diabetes Association (that holds sessions at Calcutta Heart Clinic & Hospital Society in HC Block on Sunday mornings) and Ideal School for the Deaf (in BF Block). Theatre personalities Rudraprasad and Swati-lekha Sengupta were also present.

“Club Friday has 21 members who, over the last five years, have raised funds to help the needy from various walks of life,” said secretary Aparajita Jha. “Through our work we have realised that there are many people out there who are benevolent and want to help others.”

Members then sang in chorus, led by president Manashi Raychaudhury, and then it was over to the inmates of the Dum Dum Central Correctional Home to stage the play Bhalo Manush under the direction of Sohini Sengupta of the theatre group Nandikar. 

Theatre feast

nSalt Lake Theatre presented two plays in the Calcutta Theatre Festival that depicted the plight of women in society. Both plays, staged at EZCC, were based on Tagore’s works. The first was a monoact Ghomta Khasa Nari, based on Strir Patra. Member Sanghamitra Ghatak, who enacted every role in the play, had also directed, choreographed and scripted it.

The play depicted the treatment of women in society and within a family, highlighting the plight of characters like Bindu, a homeless woman for whom death was the only escape. But strong characters like Mrinal defied the subjugation. “What the audience saw on stage was the result of a lot of practice,” Ghatak said later on. 

The second play, Ghater Katha, was directed and choreographed by Prasenjit Chakraborty and highlighted issues like child marriage. Debashis Brahma was applauded as narrator of the story, representing the river bank (ghat). 

“We chose these two plays to highlight how women have been ill-treated down the ages,” said secretary of Salt Lake Theatre, Monika Mukherjee. Chakraborty added that the plays were their way of paying tribute to Tagore.

Bharati Kanjilal

Salute to seniors

FE Block felicitated residents aged above 75 years on a recent morning when neighbours broke bread together and enjoyed live music. 

The lavish breakfast buffet offered everything from idli-dosa to puri-bhaji and the musicians played Manna Dey songs, ghazals as well as Hindi film songs. 

Among the residents felicitated was 87-year-old R.K. Gupta who, it was announced, had studied in the same college as freedom-fighter Bhagat Singh. “Bhagat Singh had been executed by the time I joined DAV College Lahore but everyone would talk about him and Lala Lajpat Rai, who was killed in the city some years earlier,” recalled Gupta, who moved to Haryana in 1947 before shifting to Calcutta.

“We felicitated 72 senior citizens who had registered with us beforehand,” said Ganesh Saraogi, an organiser. The idea of the felicitation originated from Vishwanath Changoiwala, a 75-year-old resident who had asked block committee members to engage the elderly in their programmes.

The meet saw MLAs Sujit Bose and Sultan Singh (himself a block resident), civic commissioner Pawan Kadyan and some councillors drop by.  
 

lIf you want to get a programme featured in this column, write in to The Telegraph Salt Lake, 6, Prafulla Sarkar Street, Calcutta - 700001 or call in at 22600115 in the evening or e-mail to saltlake@abpmail.com