I was born to Maya and Manjul Kumar Bandyopadhyay, in our sprawling ancestral house at Hridaypur – a distant suburb of Calcutta. Poetry ,since infancy has been my interest, as my parents recall those days of my keen inclination towards memorizing, and reciting more than 300 odd nursery rhymes, short poems even as a 3 year old toddler. My own childhood ruminations remind me of my amorous tie-up with melody, rhyme, images and tunes, which must have developed in the ambiance around me – a vastness where the gradual aspects of nature, as the happily growing plant the blossoming flowers, and twittering birds enchanted a hymn of inspiration. What particularly mesmerized me was the echoing chime of a nearby temple-bell that strangely enough seemed to mingle with the twinkling glow of fireflies in the darkening orchards in our compound to create an ethereal mélange of sight and sound. . What particularly mesmerized me was the echoing chime of a nearby temple-bell that strangely enough seemed to mingle with the twinkling glow of fireflies in the darkening orchards in our compound to create an ethereal mélange of sight and sound.

And thus I grew up, from infancy to early childhood, and onto my teens.

The modern day icon of the theatre Sambhu Mitra, one of the pioneering entity of the cultural scenario of Bengal, albeit India, farsighted, a dedication, to be offered to the muse of poetry, he wrote, to me a fervent to me (I was in my early teens then) to share his own perceptions of certain basic elements of serious drama and elocution. While much of it went literally over my head then, looking back in retrospect it seems to be one of the greatest benevolences that I have received till now.

Letter of Sambhu Mitra...