Guwahati, Aug. 6: Bhupen Hazarika was taken on a round of the ICU in a wheelchair this afternoon as he showed “marked” signs of improvement, two days after he underwent a bypass surgery in Mumbai.

Surjya Hazarika, the biographer of the Dada Saheb Phalke Award recipient, told this correspondent over phone that the singer-composer “looked improved” and “is in very high spirits”.

Hazarika, 83, was operated upon by a team of surgeons at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai on Tuesday.

The singer was taken off the ventilator yesterday morning and doctors attending on him described his condition as stable, Surjya Hazarika said, quoting the doctors.

“He is improving quite well. He was given a liquid diet in the morning and taken on a round of the ICU on a wheelchair around 2.30 in the afternoon,” he added.

The singer expressed his desire to listen to some of his own songs last evening.

“I played a few of his songs on my mobile phone. Bhupenda even sang along, humming the tunes and uttering a few words in between. It was a great sight,” Surjya Hazarika said.

Others who are keeping him company include the singer’s long time partner Kalpana Lajmi and Kamal Kotoky, his inseparable guitarist for all his stage shows .

“Bhupenda said that he felt like being able to sing better than he had in the last few years after coming out of hospital,” Surjya Hazarika said. He quoted doctors as saying that the singer would be kept in the ICU for “at least two more days” and was likely to be kept in the hospital for a week. “Since Bhupenda has said that he still feels a slight pain in the area where the incision was made, the doctors are monitoring him regularly. However, they said this was normal and there was nothing to worry about,” Surjya Hazarika said.

Bhupen Hazarika performed at a Bihu function this year at Rangia, his first since suffering a mild stroke a few years ago while performing at a Bihu function in Guwahati.

The surgery on Bhupen Hazarika — the most famous and popular modern-day personality in Assam — has generated statewide concern and people have offered prayers for his speedy recovery.

An overwhelmed Dr Hazarika looked in good health at the function. He thanked the huge gathering and people of Assam in general for showering their love on him. As he hummed a few lines from his epoch-making songs, including Manuhe Manuhar Babe, jodihe akanu nebhabe…, many in the crowd could not help singing along.

He was all praise for sculptor Sinha, who according to him, has portrayed his personality in a right way through the fibre glass statue.

“Dr Bhupen Hazarika is not only the beloved singer of Assam, but is also the flag bearer of Assamese society and culture. Through this initiative the AASU has just tried to thank him for his immense contributions,” said AASU advisor Dr Samujjal Bhattacharya. “It is for the first time that a living legend has unveiled his statue. The people of Assam are proud to have him and he will continue to inspire the younger generations,” he added.

It may be noted that the students’ body has established a statue of the legendary Goalpariya folk singer Pratima Barua Pandey at Chandmari earlier.

A sea of people, men and women, young and old waited by the sides of the road from Chandmari Nizarapar to Dighalipukhuri. Dr Hazarika was brought to the venue in a colourful cultural procession of traditionally attired youth and decorated elephants as thousands of students from various schools lined up on the road sprinkling flowers on Dr Hazarika’s caravan.

For Biren Sinha, it was an experience to cherish for lifetime. “He (Bhupen Hazarika) is my most revered artiste and his life and works has always inspired me. Bhupenda’s appreciation of my work has come as a blessing today, as I was very nervous doing this project,” he said.

The AASU has also organized a felicitation programme tomorrow at Latasil playground.

Congratulations,  and Thank you for your superb job  with the BH page.

A few years ago I happened to bump into an old article by Bhupen’da  himselfin the library of  Sudhakar Bhatt, a retired economist and a neighbor of ours  then in Naples.  Mr. Bhatt  went to school with BH at Columbia Univ, NYC in the early fifties, and reminisces him dearly. The article was in an issue of the Columbia Indian Student journal. My secretary Joyce was moved by the content of new-found piece, and agreed to provide her typing hand. I had it published in one of the issues of ‘Luitor Pora Mississippi’ in the nineties.  If you like, you can post it in the ‘articles’ column of your excellent page.

The second article, Melody Man by  Abhirook Sen, was sent to me by Amy (our daughter). It has also been collecting dust in my ‘My Docs’ folder. I don’t know the source of this piece, but, would like to share it too.

Please contact me if you have question.

Regards,

Ananta Nath

_________________________________

Ananta Nath, P.E, D.WRE
Chief Engineer
South Florida Water Management District
Big Cypress Basin
2640 Golden Gate Parkway, Suite 205
Naples, FL 34105
239-263-7615 Ext 7607
239-229-0238 (Mobile)
Fax: 239-263-8166

Melody Man

The Assamese poet’s repertoire of songs is firmly anchored in his environment.

By Avirook Sen

The structural engineer in Alaska turned the heat on full blast inside his car and hummed to the strains of Moi eti jajabor (I am a wanderer). The road was endless, he was cold, there was no one at home to talk to. But at least, on the music system, there was Bhupen Hazarika. And listening to him sing wasn’t very different from conversation. So the Assamese engineer picked up the phone and called the man in Dibrugarh: “Dada, your music is what keeps me going …”

Says Hazarika: “I never met the man, but I knew he was warm.”

From Alaska to Assam, to those who understand the several languages in which he sings — the Japanese don’t, but have their own version of his humanist ballad Manush manusheri jonyo — Hazarika’s songs could be any of several things. They could be letters from home. They could be promises of revolution.

They could soothe, exhort, excite or simply entertain. But whatever they do, there’s a face to it: benign, dreamy eyes under a lined brow, half covered by the trademark Nepali cap.

In the North-east, everyone knows that face (and that Rs 16 cap). More than that, they acknowledge he is the humane face of a disturbed region. In May, you will see him on television, travelling through the North-east and telling people elsewhere in the country that bad news isn’t all there is here. At 72, his wanderlust evidently hasn’t waned. The 13-episode series for Doordarshan,

Misty Lands of Seven Sisters — North-east India, has already taken more than a month’s gruelling travel to shoot. Hazarika is still on the move.

It’s been a long road. Hazarika wrote and performed the first of more than a thousand songs at the age of 10. At 13, he sang about building a new Assam and a new India. Precocious thoughts, but growing up in Tezpur, Assam, he would catch snatches of adult conversation. Eavesdropping on talk about Trotsky’s murder and the Indian freedom movement between grown-ups. These were filed away in a then unadorned head and used in lyrics.

Lyrics that promised change. And raised expectations in Assam. He found out during his recent travels that if he were a weaker man, the burden of that expectation would give him a stoop: “I met a man in Nagaon this time and he broke down in front of me, saying ‘You promised so much for us in your songs.

You made us hope. But life has been nothing like your songs’.”

It’s tough being Bhupen Hazarika in Assam. During the Assam Movement of the early ’80s, Hazarika was looked upon by an entire generation of agitating students as an inspiration. His music was their sustenance. He wrote and sang for them, drawing on the experience of singing with Paul Robeson in the US (he even went to jail briefly in America for his participation in civil rights’ rallies). As he had promised in his songs, change came. But not the kind of change he, or the people, wanted.

But we’re getting ahead in the story. He was trained in the arts at Banaras

Hindu University where he also got his first formal lessons in music. “I recall an incident after a college function where I sang. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the institute’s patrons, called me and gave me a Rs 50 note. He said,

‘Gana mat chodna (don’t stop singing)’.” Maybe he sensed Hazarika was about to become a lawyer and settle in Guwahati; after all music brought in just the odd 50 rupees. But things changed.

In 1948, after a stint as a producer at All India Radio, Guwahati, Hazarika left for the US on a scholarship to study Mass Communication at Columbia

University, New York. The main attraction, even then, wasn’t an Ivy League education. It was the chance to slake his thirst at Greenwich Village’s several watering holes for artists and performers. So he sang with American musicians, but most of all, he soaked in American folk music like a sponge.

Yes, there is evidence of American folk in his own work. But he mostly sings the folk tunes of his immediate environment. This is what makes him the consensus candidate, so to speak, for the post of emissary of the North-east.

There’s an amazing convergence of opinion about Hazarika all around the region: everybody likes and respects him. Something he is aware of: “If I wanted to be chief minister of this state, I could have ruled for 20 years without questions being asked.” He’s actually contested the assembly elections once (in 1967) and won comfortably as an Independent. Candidates in the recently concluded parliamentary elections went around canvassing, armed with

“certificates” from Hazarika (”I did it for people I liked personally, not for their party affiliations”). Even Paresh Barua, “commander-in-chief” of the banned United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has been known to call him up.

Hazarika has offered to mediate between the banned group and the Government, provided the ULFA agrees to drop its secessionist demand. “Barua and I talked about stopping this madness, but their position is intransigent and I am too

Indian to discuss the secession of my own state,” says Hazarika.

But what is a man with these credentials doing in Bollywood? “It’s a crazy place,” says Hazarika, “but it is one way of reaching people.” (Remember Dil hum hum kare from Rudaali?) But even in films, he started pretty early: in

1939, he was a child artiste in the second talkie film to be made in India,

Indramalati. More than 50 years later, in 1993, the film industry conferred its highest honour on him: the Dada Saheb Phalke award.

Time to retire? Not for Hazarika. There’s a film to be completed. Songs to be sung. Centuries whiz past at a Stonehenge-like mausoleum of the Jaintia tribesmen of Meghalaya. He walks through them for the camera. A tune is hummed. Stone warriors stand proud and listen. Their women lie with their ears to the ground. Hazarika is in concert.

This Article received from
Ananta Nath, P.E, D.WRE
Chief Engineer
South Florida Water Management District
Big Cypress Basin
2640 Golden Gate Parkway, Suite 205
Naples, FL 34105

Bhupen Hazarika

The Question Mark

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty” -warned Thomas Jefferson.

Lallu, the laborer in a Bombay wheat mill often wonders at a paradox of his times; why the sweat of his brow is not offering enough bread for his own children. Ramu, the farmer in Bengal examines a handful of soil and wonders how he should fight against erosion in his rice field, which was once so green! Osman, the skilled craftsman of Benares, whose golden sari decorations are bringing showers of admiration to many a sophisticated Indian princess in Paris and New York night clubs, wonders why he is unable to present an ordinary sari to his own daughter. The common man of India wants to know why he should vote this time for a particular rich gentleman whom he has seen only talking.

What are people’s responsibilities in a democracy? What are their rights? Why cannot he read the document that informs him of the confiscation of his property? What should he know as a responsible citizen to lead a decent human life? He has heard about a coming famine ‑ what should he know in order to end famine for ever? Inquisitiveness is natural to rational human beings, even to the unlettered ones. Education is helped by this natural enquiry in human minds, that comes as a result of the impact of the environment. One of the greatest roles of education is to facilitate free flow of ideas and mean­ings within the community, so that all the members can think its betterment. Can adult education be one of the solutions? Undoubtedly yes ‑ but it depends on what is taught.

The Content of learning

New India has a duty to bring to the understanding of the rural adult that he is a living member of the community. He must be acquainted with the forms of all the social, political, cultural institutions of society. A knowledge of the fact that the citizen is in a social environment whose laws bind him for the good of all must be awakened. Adult education should continually point not only towards active civic duty but also towards his civic rights, snatched away by vested interests of his own society. Civic education must be able to show the contradictions within him and the contradictions around him which create a decision and a conflict. When these conflicts in turn force him into new decision and a new conflict, only then may education be regarded as dynamic. Mere literacy does not always help. The educationists in Tagore, and Gandhi realized it fully. India’s problem of mass education is largely a rural problem because less than fifteen per cent of the people of India live in towns and cities as compared to fifty one per cent in the United States of America. Eighty five percent of India’s vast population are devoid of letters. Adult suffrage recognized by the Constitution of India without proper scope for adult education may very well be called a symbol without any meaning.

The Unhappy Remnant

The existing system of education ‑ a remnant of the British imposed one makes a sad commentary on the heart of free India. It has very little relationship

with the hopes aspirations and needs of the people. Indigeneous culture of the people is still neglected by the curriculum planners. The environment is not yet regarded as resources of education. Rigid and centralized administration kill local initiative.

Active participation in learning is hardly encouraged. The learning process centers around the outdated textbook, the teacher, and the bookish examinations that make self‑evaluation of the learner impossible. An Englishman once commented on the education of British India only a few years ago.

“If education is the transmission of life from the living, we do not know how to describe the system of teaching that prevails here. It is carrying death from the dead, through the dead to the dead.” (1)

In other words, it is a tyranny of formality. How can we blame an unlettered adult farmer of India today if he is scared of a ” formal education” in his mid‑ forties?

Meanings and Media

Dr. Hallenbeck mentions four types of circumstances in which educational experiences of adults occur: as the independent activity of the individual; in groups in relation to organized activities; in the community; and through the use of the media of mass communication. Of these the second and the third are of pre‑eminent importance, while the first and fourth are supple­mentary, gaining their significance from their relationship to the other two. (2)

The writer would touch a few pertinent thoughts on the fourth one i.e. mass communication media, by which millions can be reached. Success of the educational activity depends on the skillful use of proper techniques of communicating meanings to the masses. Technique of communicating ideas has developed dur­ing this century as a corollary of progressive educational theory.

“Communication is a term that covers a vast and varied field of human action. The mere uttered sounds, the audible symbols that make some difference in the environment of a listener and thus, as we say, convey a meaning, are in themselves difficult phenomena.

When these audible symbols are represented by visual symbols such as the characters of a written language, complications arise. They are both psychological and sociological and they are bard to

understand. In spite of that, of course, we go on in naive self­ assurance doing what is necessary to live in community; we communicate.” (3) observes Dr. Lyman Bryson. The technological, scientific and psychological upsurge during our century has brought into everyday use a number of media the more significant of which are popular print, radio, recordings and motion picture. Motion picture perhaps is the most effective, because it is “able, more than any art to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts” (4) according to Sergei Eisenstein.

Maulana Azad observes that expansion of mind of the adult can be largely effected today through the use of scientific methods and machinery; he believes that there is experience of countries like Russia and the U.S.A. where open air drama, the film and the radio have been used to very great effect. Russia has in fact succeeded in carrying out her successive five‑year plans largely through the use of such scientific methods and machinery. We should benefit by the experience of these countries and draw upon the vast stores of educational films that have been built in Russia and the U.S.A. (5) Put what about our Indian film world which stands second to the U.S.A. in the field of production? The quality of some hardly rises to the minimum standard of the ridiculous. The producers of the so‑called “educational films” produce films without analyzing the maturity level of those for whom they are meant, or knowing the educational effect of it.

Bureaucracy and red tape in State‑controlled broadcasting system of India have snatched the initiative front the “programme planners”. The planners schedule programmes for rural listeners of the total population) without getting any scope to know and feel the people’s needs. Lay participation is neglected. In new China, the problem of scarcity of radio receiving sets has been greatly solved by “listening, societies” in worker and farmers’ organizations. This initiative from the masses comes only when they feel that the socio‑educational institutions belong to them and are used for them. In China, important news have been communicated to the rural masses by “living newspapers” in dramatic form. Because Mao‑Tse‑Tung is convinced that “those who cannot yet read want to see plays and look at pictures; they want to sing and hear music. They form the public for our literature and art”.(6) Bernard Shaw’s following remark can very well be used in the case of India ‑ “The number of people who can read is small, the number of people who can read to any purpose is much smaller, and the number who are too tired after a hard day’s work to read at all ‑ enormous. But all except the blind and deaf can see and hear.” (7) Experience, both vicarious and direct, makes learning permanent and fruitful. The problems of verbal symbols, radio, recordings, still pictures, motion pictures, exhibits, field trips, demonstrations, dramatic participation, role‑playing and contrived experiences on the one hand and direct purposeful experiences on the other meanings effectively to the adult learner. If India’s teeming millions are to learn and relearn while they work and hand, are in the domain of instructional materials and methods, which facilitate imparting of real meanings effectively to the adult learner. If India’s teeming millions are to learn and relearn while they work and rest, progressive theory of education for life must be practiced under a truly democratic administration. And for that, research workshops in administration, teaching technique, role of instructional materials and community projects for the bene­fit of rural adults are of utmost importance.

Considering the emphasis in Gandhi’s Basic Education Scheme and Tagore’s rural education on observation and first‑hand experience, the importance of the use of audio‑‑visual methods (a development of mass communication theory) is evident. Because of the lack of funds, bad transportation, and the need for reaching large groups in a quick way, it is essential to discover ways and means by which education can be carried on through the use of mass comnunication media. Press, radio, films and educational institutions should act Lit u coordinated way for adult education drives. Since occupations and their teaching have been of great importance for the economic reconstruction of rural masses, it is in this very area of technique that modem materials and methods can be of most value. Since such programmes depend mainly on educators to work in it, this seems to be a particularly appropriate time to give pre‑service and in‑service education in mass communication techniques in the teacher training institutions of India. It will help to make education informal and interesting ‑ and enable the adult educators to carry out their programme during both the working and leisure hours of the masses. Active participation in all life situations would lead to better understanding of their occupations and to a fuller life. Behind all these lies the theory that communication of ideas should have an unbroken flow. The masses have a right to know ‑ and education should transmit the information for a social change and rejuvenation.

A Step Forward

Every State wants to draw attention of the people by education through mass communication media. Media being neutral, the ruling power might use them for either good or evil purposes.

The attention structure within a state writes Dr. Laswell of Yale University “is a valuable index of the degree of state integration. When the ruling classes fear the masses, the Rulers do not share their picture of reality with the rank and file. When the reality picture of kings, presidents and cabinets is not permitted to circulate through the State as a whole, the degree of discrepancy shows the extent to which the ruling groups assume that their power depends on distortion,” In a static state, education may be only for preservation of reaction and not a step forward.

(1) As quoted by Minoo Masani. in “Picture of a Plan’;

(2) UNESCO Publication, 1949. Article by Dr. W. C. Hallenbeck

“Methods and Techniques in Adult Education”. p. 80

(3) Lyman Bryson 2 The Communication of Ideas”‘. p. 1

(4) Sergei Eisenstein, “Film Form”. p. 5

(5) Maulana AzIad `Verbatim record of the Educational conference” New Delhi, 1948. p. 4

(6) Mao‑Tse tung “Problems of Art and Literature”. p. 11

(7) As quoted in “Fundamental Education”‘. Report of a special committee to the preparatory commission of UNESCO. p. 279

(8) Harold D. Lasswell “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society“, Communication of Ideas (edited by Bryson). P. 50.

This Article received from
Ananta Nath, P.E, D.WRE
Chief Engineer
South Florida Water Management District
Big Cypress Basin
2640 Golden Gate Parkway, Suite 205
Naples, FL 34105

Dr. Bhupen Hazarika and Late Pratima Pandey Baruah singing together the famous Paul Robeson song “We are in the same boat brother”.
[Dibrugarh Kendriya Rangali Bihu Utsav, 2000]