An Author’s Afternoon with Arunava Sinha

July 20, 2016: Today was the 33rd session in the series of An Author’s Afternoon at the Taj Bengal Kolkata.

The event was originally fixed for July 21st 2016 but we realized that July 21 is the Trinamool Martyr Day and we immediately decided to pre-pone the event by a day. Every year on July 21 the whole of Kolkata comes to standstill for most part of the day since lakhs of people would converge on Esplanade – the hub of the city.

The guest author for the session was Arunava Sinha who has done a great job translating many classic, traditional and modern Bengali literary works into English. Over thirty of his translations have been published in English so far and more are in the offing. Arunava has won the Crossword translation award twice for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011). His translations have been published in the USA and UK in English. With Manoshi Chatterjee Young upcoming author Priyanka Mookherjee conducted the tete-a-tete with Arunava. It was a regaling session with the author playing out to the gallery. The thirty third Author’s Afternoon session will also stand out from all earlier sessions in a not-so-healthy way as more than double the number of guests turned up for the event than the venue could accommodate. For the first time we had to restrict entry as it was not possible to accommodate all of them. Also, most of them did not technically qualify as guests since An Author’s Afternoon adheres to a strict invite format under which only 25 to 30 (approx) guests who duly confirm via SMS are invited. This situation happened because the author had put an invite on his Facebook and many of his admirers thought it was a walk-in session and turned up for the event.

Today I shall be leaving for Jaipur as quite a number of events and meetings are lined up.

ess bee