Tonatuni Utsav

Children in colourful costumes appear in 'Toray Badha Ghorar Deem'.

The Daily Star (TDS) : Tell us why you are holding this type of festival?

Mahbubur Rahman (MR) : Our main aim is to highlight our rich traditional culture and heritage and also to revive our neglected cultural glory through producing materials and live presentations.

TDS: What other initiatives have you taken in this regard?

MR: We have a scheme on spreading and exchanging our culture internationally. Besides regular music, we are working with our enriched folk songs. We are staging live performances by children on our traditional rhymes with Puppet & Muppet. Recently we have done performance in Kolkata.

TDS: Tell us about the upcoming festival.

MR: We will pay our tribute to the internationally recognised and one of the best filmmakers of the world Satyajit Ray for his outstanding, incomparable work. Simultaneously we want to honour our Polli Kobi Jasimuddin. We will stage our own productions Kobor and nursery rhyme Toray Badha Ghorar Dim of Jasimuddin and Sattyajit Ray. At the festival venue we are holding an exhibition where some valuable documents, props, costumes, books, photographs and other personal belongings of Satyajit Ray and poet Jasimuddin will be displayed. Besides these we are going to screen some famous films, and introduce an award to encourage good movies and the filmmakers. Some internationally reputed personalities of the country and abroad are expected to take part in this festival.

TDS: Who are the distiguished personalities attending the festival?

MR: We are very lucky that the wives of Jasimuddin and Sattyajit Ray--Begum Momtaz Jasimuddin and Bijoya Ray, will be with us as special guests. Other distinguished personalities are mainly from Kolkata including Sandeep Ray, Shoumitra Chattarjee, Hoimonti Shukla, Tapen Chatterjee, Shobha Sen, Mamata Shanker and her ballet troupe, and a few others. They will be here to take part in different programmes of the festival, like recital on life and works of the two maestros, poetry recitation; above all their presence will encourage us to carry on the practice in future.

TDS: You are mainly working on children's issues, why?

MR: The children being the future of our country are still being neglected. The necessity of taking care of them and providing the facilities to nourish their merit is still not properly felt in the country. Moreover, we have a wealthy treasure of literary, musical and other kinds of cultural compositions for children, and we feel the urge to promote these.