Saturday, December 10, 2011
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Touch of Dynasty
All young student is expected to at least do their study, yet this kind of expectation is usually untenable to the young student, for what matter to them is to be free to play and to eat when they are hungry; and they seems to be always hungry.
The years of my schooling pasted without much significant events, a few here and there, with the exception of one normal incident that turn out to have leaved a permanent impression in my life.
It was normal as a student of class IV in a Chinese school, to be given a chapter to learn by heart as home task. On that particular occasion, most of my classmates did what we usually do. I, on my part did not even turn the book.
Next day, our class teacher promptly calls us up to find out whether the task was comply with. Soon he found many of us wanting. The defaulters were punished by a few strokes with a warning that it should not be repeated. If it were repeated in the future a tougher punishment would be given.
When my turn came, I was also found wanting. Instead of getting a few strokes of canning which should be painful I was spared. I was told to knee before the big photo of our National Father till I am told to get up. Time passes slowly, and it became more and more uncomfortable as it dragged on.
After one period of class it had become embarrassing, at the second period it had transformed into shame. Finally, I became the most noticeable shameless student of the class.
When I found it nearly unbearable, I picked up enough courage to ask my teacher for the reason which merited my special punishment.
What happened, till today, his words rang out loud and clear as it was yesterday, although it happened some 60 years ago ?
I was told to have a good look of the image of the person in the photo and identify him. I acknowledge him to be none other than Dr. Sun Yet-Sen, the National Father of China, It did not make any more than that his was responsible for the overthrowing of Qing Dynasty.
Then the teacher told me firmly that I ought to be ashamed and apologies to this great man who had sacrificed so much for the liberation of our nation. For I have not even care to use the talents that I have and have not even try to be a person I am to be. It is a shame for anyone who do not develop oneself and to be of service in the world we live in.
Somehow I could not help but to start to feel the shamelessness, worthlessness and uselessness. Tears soon followed, and with my teacher’s gentle prompting I made up my mind to do my best in the future by following his example of selflessness and perseverance in doing what I am born to do. From then onward I never failed to do my best and in the best of my ability.
Looking back, I realized on that fateful day I was touched by him whom I hardly know personally, but was so overwhelmed by his personality and example.
On recalling what happened that day, when he had touched and changed my attitude of life. I am proud and grateful to the Almighty for Dr. Sun Yet-sen and my teacher who cared and took the interest of the student’s future. I thank them for evermore.
PS : Dr. Sun Yat Sen was born on 12-11-1866 in the village of Cuiheng, Xianshang county, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China; which is 26 km north of Macau. But a certificate of birth issued by Hawaii that he was born in Kingdom of Hawaii on 24-11-1870, but the claim of Hawaii birth was based on typewritten testimony, and without any documentation from witnesses. He died on 12-3-1925 after illness in Beijing, China.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Treasures Of Ancient China
To extend the historical tradition of friendly exchanges between the two countries, the year 2006 was declared as Indo-China Friendship Year and a significant component of it was the organization of exhibition on “Treasures of Ancient India” during 2006-07 in the four cities of China-Beijing, Zhengzhou, Chongqing and Guangzhou. The exhibition of about 100 artifacts was a microcosmic presentation of Indian art offered to the Chinese people at their doors. In reciprocation, an exhibition on “Treasures of Ancient China” has been organized this year (2011) in four cities of India - New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. The exhibition has been jointly organized by the Archaeological Survey of India and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China. It showcases about 95 antiquities in various art forms ranging from Neolithic to the Qing Dynasty. The range of Chinese exhibits in the exhibition, which will be at the National Library , Kolkata from 8 th Sep to 7 th Nov 2011, is very large, covering jade objects, porcelains, decorative elements, terracotta, metal ware etc.
The exhibition is aimed at further strengthening the bond of friendship between people of the two nations.
Venue : Alipore , Kolkata - 700027
9 th Sep - 7 th Nov , 2011
( 10 am - 5 pm )
Phone : 2479 1381 / 82 / 83 / 84
Friday, August 19, 2011
I n d e p e n d e n c e
The invitation arrived bringing a sudden and somewhat similar feeling as those of the Virgin Mary at her visit to her cousin Elizabeth who was carrying a child.
The humble sensation of unworthiness brought forth by the bestowing of significant for being remembered in this great and unique occasion is the honour on behalf of the Chinese Community in Kolkata.
In a way this has shatter ambiguousness and darkness that held by us in spite of being born and lived in this land of our birth. With this some ray light and hope emerges to encourage us.
It is the beginning that has to bring us hopes for our future as citizen. We do hope the message of hope and understand will become stronger, with the removal of undue suspicion so that will bring forth the more enthusiasm and strength to fulfill our contribution as proud citizen of India.
JAI HIND !!
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
G L I M S E
Lost TribePublished: April, 2011
Pages: 252
ISBN: 9781456773380
This book is part memoir, part un-usual history of India and China, with lot of untold true stories about a small and an unique tribe that used to live in Calcutta’s (now Kolkata since 2001) China Town for as long back as the city of Calcutta which was established by the British East India Company in the 18th century, about the poignant story of an once vibrant tribe that was systematically rounded up by their thousands, women, children and infants included, then transported in special trains to a concentration camp in Rajasthan when a short sharp war broke out between India and China in 1962, many more were arrested in the middle of the night, taken to border and pushed across to China for deportation, even though many of them had never been or seen China before, such ethic-cleansing like measure were resorted to until it become a lost tribe. Emphasizing the fact that they were mostly small traders, shopkeepers & skillful craftsmen, diligently working and contributing to the local economy, never indulged in any antinational activity, yet when the far away border dispute cropped up between the governments of India and China, they were summarily arrested because of their ethnicity, this book also has many untold stories narrated by inmates of the only concentration camp interning the ethnic Chinese civilians during the later half of the 20th century, about how they lived, ate and stubbornly not giving up hope of being able to come out of it alive some day. When writing this book which had taken him more than four years of research and search for the relevant men and materials, he maintained that maximum care was taken to be as accurate and truthful as possible, he dedicates this book to the memory of the lost tribe as well as to the survivors from, and all those who did not survived in that wretched concentration camp
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Mission Focus on Chinatown, Kolkata
The Telegraph , Calcutta
21 June 2011 , Tuesday
page 18 ( METRO )
Can also read at : The Telegraph ePaper
Monday, May 30, 2011
A Fusion Of Yoga & Tai Chi
28 May 2011, page 14
Next month, yogacharya B K S Iyengar and the oldest Chinese martial artiste alive, Master Lu Zijian, will come together at an ambitious China-India yoga summit to be held in Guangzhou. The agenda: a dialogue on the traditional fitness regimens of the two countries. Not just that, Iyengar will lead a packed, three-day programme to guide around 1,000 yoga enthusiasts from China and abroad on the many interconnecting layers of the system. ‘‘I will go from the scratch to the ultimate,’’ says Iyengar, who is generously allowing beginners and veterans to take his classes.
Yoga reached China around 40 years ago and caught on like a wildfire despite the fact that the country has its own indigenous systems of mindbody regimens. There are about 15 millions yoga practitioners in China today.
This summit will see the entire yoga industry spread across neighbouring Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau converge at Guangzhao. ‘‘Tai Chi is now not as popular as yoga in China. Yoga is definitely more popular among the educated youth, especially the women—95% of the learners are women,” says Zhiyong Chen, who is directing the
event that has the backing of the Indian consulate and the Ayush (alternate health) department of the ministry of health.
Lu Zijian, who is fondly referred to as the Yangtze River’s Great Chivalrous Man, lives in Chongqin and practises the evolved Tao-based martial art and healing system, bagua zhang. He has lived through China’s historical decades and is today celebrated as China’s most healthy centenarian.
With some help from interpreters, the two masters will “compare Tai Chi and yoga, their principles and similarities, how they look at the human body, mind and spirit, and how they work to improve them”, says Chen.
Senior Iyengar teacher Birju Mehta, who will be among the team of six from India, says the Indian and Chinese systems perhaps have parallel end goals though they follow different processes. Iyengar has held large-scale yoga summits across the world—the last in Russia two years ago. But this one is generating a lot of buzz because it sees the coming together of people who have inherited similar systems. And also because Iyengar has declared that this will be his last foreign yoga tour.
The yogacharya remains a staunch classicist in a world where yoga has acquired some really outlandish forms.But he is also open to dialogues with other traditions and last year had a public interaction with the Dalai Lama over Indian and Tibetan traditions.
Monday, May 16, 2011
TAGORE AND CHINA
On May 12, 2011, Chinese ambassador Zhang Yan attended the launch of the new book Tagore and China hold in Alliance Francaise de Delhi. Chinese Indian scholar Tan Chung, Special Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs in charge of public diplomacy Jayant Prasad, publisher of the book and other experts and academicians all in total over 100 people also took part in this event.Mr. Tan Chung gave a briefing of the book and a retrospection of Tagore and his visits to China. The book, which collected articles and essays about Tagore by both Chinese and Indian scholars, was published by Sage Publications, and edited by: TAN CHUNG , AMIYA DEV , WANG BANGWEI and WEI LIMING ( Peking University, Beijing, China ) .
TAGORE AND CHINAedited by: TAN CHUNG Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi and Academic Associate, University of Chicago
AMIYA DEV Fulbright scholar to USA
WANG BANGWEI Peking University, Beijing, China
WEI LIMING Peking University, Beijing, China
Published : May 2011 , Pages : 420 Size : Crown: 7" x 10"
Imprint : SAGE India , India (INR) Rs 895
Tagore and China is the first full account in English of Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China and its civilizational import. Perhaps for the first time, exhaustive material related to the visit has been collected.
The book charts Tagore’s ‘grand visit’ in 1924 undertaken in response to China’s ‘Tagore fever’ and the series of talks he gave there, their antecedents as well as impact. Also discussed is the foundation of Cheena-Bhavana at Visva-Bharati—and thereby of Chinese studies in India—and Tan Yun-shan’s lifelong dedication to it and the Sino-Indian love it held.
This well-researched book unearths new material from Chinese sources to confirm the devotion of Tagore’s interpreter, poet Xu Zhimo, to him and Tagore’s affection for Xu Zhimo. Tagore’s two personal visits to Xu Zhimo, preceded by the latter’s visit to Santiniketan, have also been detailed.
Supplemented by several rare photographs, Tagore and China is a fitting tribute to Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary and is going to be of abiding value to Sino-Indian understanding.
About Tan Chung
Immediately after his birth in April 1929 in Malaya, Tan Chung was carried by his mother and aunt to Santiniketan to be shown to his father, Prof. Tan Yun-shan ( Tan Yunshan was the Founding Director of the Department of Chinese Language and Culture "Cheena-Bhavana" at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan) .
Gurudeva Rabindranath Tagore was glad to see the baby and christened him “Asoka” --- the Bengali name, Tan Chung could, unfortunately, never use. Tan Chung returned to Malaya(now Malaysia)with his mother who was the principal of the Aiqun Girls’ School at Batu Bahar. He was then raised in China from 1931 to 1954. He came to India to be united with his parents and studied at Santiniketan from 1955 to 1958.
He then started his career teaching Chinese language in India from 1958 to 1994 continuously in the National Defense Academy (Khadakvasla), School of Foreign Languages of the Ministry of Defense (New Delhi), Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He also taught Chinese history at Delhi University from 1971 to 1979.
Tan Chung has published ten books in English and six books in Chinese. His 'China and the Brave New World', published in 1978, 'Triton and Dragon', published in 1985, and 'Dunhuang Art', published in 1994, are used as reference books for university students in India,USA,Taipei, and Hong Kong.
His 'India and China: Twenty Centuries of Civilizational Interaction and Vibrations', co-authored with Professor Geng Yinzeng of Peking University, is Part 6 of Volume III of the series of History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, published by Centre for Studies in Civilizations, New Delhi. His 16th book is 'Rise of the Asian Giants: Dragon-Elephant Tango'（2008,Anthem Press). His 17th book 'Tagore and China' has just been released .
Tan Chung has been active in developing Chinese studies in India in various capacities as the Head of Chinese and Japanese Studies of Delhi University, Chairperson of the Centre for Afro-Asian Languages and of the Centre for East Asian Languages of Jawaharlal Nehru University. He helped create the unit of East Asian Studies in the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (New Delhi) when he was Professor-Consultant there from 1990 to 1999. He was the founder Co-Chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies ( Delhi ) from 1990 to 2002.
He guest edited a special issue on 'India and China' for the Indian Horizon, the journal of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 1994. He has been the Honorary Consultant of the Editorial Board of The Selected Books of Oriental Cultures, Beijing , from 1996 to date.
He popularized the concept of 'Chindia' in China, and brought out the Chinese language book, Chindia --- Idealism and Realization in 2007.
Tan Chung is the recipient of Padma Bhushan award in 2010.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Chinese Musician Strikes Tagore Chord
Kolkata , May 5 , 2011 (Thursday)
Times City , page - 6
She loves to play Tagore songs and dreams of lending a Mandarin touch to the bard’s tunes. They could serve as a bridge between the two ancient cultures, helping people from the respective countries realize the affinity in their music. Chinese musician Liu Yuening , who plays the Yangqin — a santoor-like instrument with its origin in the Middle-East — shared the stage at the Town Hall with singer Prateek Choudhury on Wednesday. But Yuening, an acclaimed music researcher, is bent on striking a melodic partnership between Indian and Chinese musicians.
“A few minor alterations to a Tagore song can convert it into a Chinese rhythm which could be readily appreciated by listeners in our country. I have been playing these tunes in China and would love to do it in Kolkata where everyone swears by Tagore. I expect this to pave the way for a collaboration between classical singers from India and traditional musicians from China. They have a lot of common ground to work on,” said Yuening.
Based in Beijing, she started learning yangqin at the age of nine. By the time she was 12, Yuening had been hailed as one of the leading yangqin players in the world. She went on to do a doctorate from Hungary, where she spent two years researching music. In 2009, she spent seven months at the University of Delhi for a cultural research programme as an Asia Fellow of the Ford Foundation. It was during this stint that Yuening chanced upon the santoor and was taken aback by the similarity between the instruments. “Yangqin originated in the Middle-East and has its European and Chinese variants. In India, it’s the santoor... music in the region has common roots,” said Yuening.
It launched her on a mission to identify the commonalities in Indian and Chinese music. “First, the musical scale in our notes is similar. Secondly, the inspiration behind Indian classical music and Chinese traditional scores is the same — nature. Finally, both India and China have a strong folk music culture and draw heavily from it. These left me convinced that there would be a common origin, a starting point which unites our music,” explained the musician.
The quest brought her back to India in 2010. Yuening travelled to Kashmir for a lecture on Chinese music. “The people there were quite receptive and showed interest in my music. I got little chance of exploring the area, though,” she said. She rounded off her trip with a concert in Kolkata. “The visit gave me the chance to study Tagore songs more carefully. I kept playing the tunes and hit upon the idea of giving them a Chinese touch. Even my friends in India thought it was a brilliant idea and that it could be the ideal starting point for a musical collaboration,” she added.
It will lead to the more difficult task of identifying the similarities in Indian ragas and Chinese scores, realizes Yuening. “Let Kolkata and Tagore songs be the launching pad. I will have done my bit for music if I can accomplish the task,” signed off Yuening.
Prithvijit Mitra - TNN
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Have A Say
Saturday, 19 March, 2011 , page - 4
Times City , Dance Of Democracy
Empowered Chinatown to have a say in citizens’ mandate
And you thought this 100-year-old ghetto did not want to integrate, let alone press the V-button. The country’s only Chinatown, now better known as the Land of the Fat Mama, is increasingly being swept by a tsunami called ‘didi’.
Prodded by the Election Commission’s rigorous voter-list updates, more and more of the city’s Chinese residents are now empowered with photo ID cards, ready like never before.
“Even if we still prefer to remain cocooned, we are not indifferent to our citizenship rights,” say Monica Liu, owner of the Beijing chain of restaurants. A Kolkatan for the past 40 years, Liu keenly watches the ‘breaking’ news flash on the small screen in the run-up to Bengal’s historic elections, even as she swears of being ‘strictly apolitical’.
Dominique Lee, who runs a food-processing unit, was more forthright: “People are riding high on the ‘Mamata’ hurricane.”
Referring to the excitement, Clemen Tseng, a supplier at the other Chinatown,Territi Bazar,say,“People voted en block for the Trinamool in last year’s KMC elections. Here’s the conclusive round.”Meanwhile, it’s difficult to discern what matters more — change or citizenship. The latter is a touchy subject for the ‘apolitical and apathetic’ 1,000-odd population in the melting ‘wok’. Chinatown, spread over KMC wards 58 and 66 (starting from Chingrighata in the north to E M Bypass in the south and Hatgachhia in the east to Christopher Road in the west), does not factor in the poll fray. But for those living here ‘each vote counts’.
“One vote translates to avowing an individual’s democratic rights,” say leather businessman Liang Chen, 68, who was recently included in the voters’ lists.
All those who have acquired the ‘hallowed’ status (Indian citizenship) sound as keen. “I got my Indian citizenship only in 1999. Some of my family members still don’t,” avers Paul Chung, 70, former president of the Indian Chinese Association for Culture, Welfare and Development.
His community’s pangs were captured in the chopsticks. One was reminded of The Legend of the Fat Mama, the popular Rafeeq Ellias film on the bittersweet story of the Kolkata Chinese community and its migration to Toronto and elsewhere in the aftermath of the 1962 Indo-China war. The Chinese have been barred from getting Indian passports ever since.
Isheng Chen, 56, a leather unit owner, possess Indian passport but has been left out of the voter lists. “The passport allows me to travel to Canada where my wife, Liong Chen, lives. But I need voter card,” he says. The political dadas who have been enthusiastically “booking” walls for graffiti did not heed Chen’s repeated requests.
Community leader trader Francis Chia, 60, sounds disillusioned: “We’ll vote, but it’s no use.”
The two-square-km walled township is overrun with filth. Drinking water is also missing in Tangra, frequented by Kolkatans for lip-smacking Chinese food. The stench from the open drains juxtapose the illuminated eateries. Most tanners have refused to shift to the Bantala leather complex despite the Supreme Court order.
The Trinamool is into a whispering campaign saying it would let the tanneries stay. But people like Nan Kui, a schoolteacher, are not buying the poll promise. “The government’s Chinatown beautification project is dormant. Building a Chinese tower isn’t exactly an emergency. We need basic amenities.”
Ajanta Chakraborty
Times Of India , Kolkata
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The Year Of The Metal Rabbit
Chinese New Year ( year 4709 ) falls on February 3 , 2011
1st & 2nd February 2011 : Lion Dance Show at Tangra Bazaar ( Pei Moi Chinese School )
3rd February 2011 : Chinese New Year 4709
5th & 6th February 2011 : Fete & Dance Party at Pei Moi Chinese School
Let's welcome the year 4709, the Year of the Rabbit
Sunday, January 9, 2011
China Town issue of Robbar
Pratidin , also known as the Sangbad Pratidin is one of the popular Bengali daily newspapers of Kolkata.
WALKATHON
The Chinese community participated with great enthusiasm . 
