Plastic, play and Pala

I attended The Bengal meeting at The Conclave today early evening (picture: From left: Jogen Choudhury, H M Bangur, Arindam Sil and Sunil Gangopadhyay). 
Various issues were discussed about the past activities of the organization as well as the future activities to be taken up. One new project on the agenda of The Bengal is to launch an awareness campaign against the use of low quality use of plastic bags that is legally banned.

Though there is a law banning plastic bags measuring below a certain micron, but it has been very difficult to implement the law and would not be effective till the citizens of Kolkata become aware of the environmental damage caused by the use of such plastic bags. An awareness campaign, The Bengal members felt, was the need of the hour.

It was decided in principle that one market and one road would be adopted by The Bengal, in consultation with the Mayor of Kolkata and Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), as a model that could be replicated elsewhere as part of expanding the awareness campaign.

The Mayor was supposed to attend this meeting for the discussion, but he could not attend as he had gone to the accident site at Nagardeep. He, however, called me on phone and said that he would sit with us on the matter once he returned to Kolkata and also assured me of extending his full cooperation.

On Saturday evening I went to Hotel ITC to watch the comedy play directed by Aamir Raza Husain and Virat Husain. It was a Welcome Theatre production. It was sleazy humour. I enjoyed the popcorns served at the ITC banquet corridor more than the play. I was quite surprised by the crowd, normally in this type of event in Kolkata you get to see familiar faces from the social circuit of Kolkata, but I could not spot any known faces apart from Shukla Sil, wife of Arindam Sil, Purbayan and Taj Bengal general manager Mohan Kumar and his wife Seema.

I met Deepak Haskar in the Hotel's lobby while going to the Pala for the play. Mr Haskar is known to me since the days before he took over as the general manager of Maratha Sheraton in Mumbai. Whenever we cross each other in Kolkata, we fix up a plan to sit in Delhi for a meal or coffee but somehow it has not happened for quite sometime. All my fault. The ITC general manager, who is new in town, seems to have acclimatized himself with the city culture and its ways. Mr Zubin S Songadwal and his wife Monisha were welcoming and greeting everybody at the Pala and it was their warmth that prompted me to cancel all other commitments to spend the Saturday evening at ITC Sonar Bangla.

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