On December 19, 2009 Jaya and I celebrated our 25th marriage anniversary at Saratoga Community Center, Saratoge, California USA. It was organized by our friends with the help of our daughter and son - Tua and Rik. About 170 people attended the ceremony and the speecehes and entertainment program ran for more than two hours. Food was catered by East West Catering of Berkeley run by our favorite Bengali chef - Afrooza Ahmed.
Though it was attended by many of our friends in San Francisco Bay Area, many of you could not attend due to geography. Just to give you a taste of the event we created a series of video clips. The audio quality is not as good as we wanted because of the ambient noise. Actually we have a separate nice audio recording as well but could not synchronize the video with the nice audio.
1. These are some of the historical tid bits consisting of some songs and poetry re-performed by us, 29 to 25 years later!
2. Pompy Bhattacharjee was the MC of this event. She did a duet with Sudip Nag as a starter.
3. Once I introduced Jayanta Roy in a Bay Area musical program as Jayanta Kishore Roy. Yes, Kishore is his middle name and Chingari (as in Chingari song from Amar Prem) was his IIT name. He sings a famous Kishore song from Namak-Haram here. Jayanta was also co-MC with Pompy.
4. From Kolkata and other places we received a few pre-recorded video best wishes including my mother, my sister Chumki and her husband Shankar, Mama (Jibanananda Roy) and Chandu (Chandranath Basu). My mother-in-law, though could attend the event in person preferred to a recorded speech rather than a live one. We also missed a couple of these recordings as they were received a little late. But we could include them here for your viewing pleasure.
5. My brother Babul (Sambit) just moved back with his family to India. But it was great to have at least one person to represent my side (my mother-in-law was representing Jaya). Here is what he has to say about the last 25 years and before that.
6. 'Baap' as Indrajit Roy is known from the moment he spoke his first syllable (in Queen's English of course), is also the only close friend in Bay Area who goes back to my IIT days (sorry to other dear Patelians if I don't know your existence here!). He claims along with many others to name me 'Sky(lab)' during my ragging period in 1979 - no doubt, success has many fathers!
7. Sudip Nag is also from IIT (surprise, surprise!) but Jaya was the one to discover him while rehearsing for a musical event back in 1996. For this event Sudip took the role of backstage planner and secret PJ-master. But he started with an old Hemanta song.
8. Sudip went extra miles to hide his Top-10 masterpiece PJs from us. And they are the stinkiest (or best, depending on the point of view) PJs I have heard in a long time ! You decide.
9. I first met Shyamal, though from IIT, in 1992 in Kolkata. He was one of the prime motivators for our immigration to the USA in 1995. Shyamal had some choicest stories of me and more of Jaya from our very early days in the US to share. He put his (and Cindy's) pinch of salt to them to make them more colorful.
10. Shyamal continues his stories...
11. In IIT Ankan Pramanik and his musical team was our competitor in Inter Hall competition. But here in Bay area we are in the same team. He asked us to Imagine what we could be if we joined him and John Lennon.
12. Tua and Rik with their 'corny' speeches and songs (their desccriptions, not mine) enthralled the audience.
13. ...and then they performed together, a first time without Jaya next to them...
14. Finally I had to make a speech without the help of a chotha (written document). But I was prepared by running it many times in my head during our Cancun trip earlier. Unfortunately what came out was completely different from the one I imagined!
15. ... and it was surely one of the longest in-promptu speech I gave...
And finally unless I mention the names of the people who planned and executed this memorable event, it wll not be complete:
Sushmita Datta - Project Coordinator
Sudip Nag - Project Planning
Gargi Sengupta, Jayinee Basu, Charles Stauss, Nandini Datta, Rik Basu, Arjun Roy - Decoration
Mistress/ Master of Ceremoty - Pompy Bhattacharya and Jayanta Roy
Video Photography - Dipitish Datta, Shirshanka Das
Still Photography - Bibek Ghosh
Audio/ Video Control - Sambit Basu
