Revving up for events in Kolkata

The last few days kept me busy in office preparing for the three-day event in Kolkata to mark the Birth Centenary of Sachidananda Vatsayan Agyeya, popular as Agyeya, at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations on September 21^st, 22^nd and 23^rd, 2011.

Preparations are also on for another programme which I will be hosting in Kolkata to mark the Birth Anniversary of Late Dr Prabha Khaitan on the 28^th and 29^th of October 2011 based on the anthology In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology(Penguin India, 2009), co-edited by Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale.

In the last three days, I had meetings with Rachana Banerjee, Chaiti Ghoshal, Koneenica Banerjee, Arindam Sil, Ujjwal Upadhyay, Partho Chatterjee, Arpita and many others regarding these upcoming events.

In fact, on Sunday (August 7) I am initiating the Prabha Khaitan Memorial Lecture Serieswhich is being co-hosted by The Taj Bengal. The first Guest Speaker would be Dr Sonal Mansingh.

This evening I concluded a series of meetings and dropped in at Hyatt around 10 PM missing out on the main event – an enthralling melange of ballet and other exotic western dance forms titled The Magic of Russian Ballet– which I was looking forward to.

This event was organized by Mark Lorenz, General Manager, Hyatt Regency, Kolkata, and Rana Vikram Anand, Co-Head, Commercial Banking, The Royal Bank of Scotland, NV, were the co-hosts of the event.

I had a brief chat with Marc and his wife (picture). Though Marc has been in Kolkata since early 2011, I only met him this evening. Earlier he was in Santiago and I chatted with him about Chile. He told me that he was the Manager in one of Santiago property where President Smt Pratibha Patil had come with a delegation to Chile and stayed and how he organized the reception with Indian food.

Tomorrow evening I have invited Dr Sonal Mansingh and Aparna Sen to my home for dinner.

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