https://youtube/watch?v=R-lIUhACzhk heres the transcript of his speech at the KIFF: Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you, Kolkata. Thank you, all of you for all the warmth, for all the love. Thank you, Mamta di for always being as charming, energetic and hyperactive. Extremely wonderful to see her as always running around jumping around, making this wonderful Kolkata International Film Festival come alive with her energy. All the dignitaries on stage, all the superstars, the youngsters from Bengali cinema thank you very much. Mithun da, Jaya aunty, Amit ji, Prosenjit, Kamal Hassan sir…it’s an amazing amazing collection and gallery of people who are on stage and off stage. So many dignitaries and all I can say is, thank you Kolkatta, for adopting me so and giving me this opportunity to be here every year. Thank you very much. Just want to say a word about festivals because I have been coming here now for the last three years and I promise you, next time when I’m here, I will speak in Bengali so that Jaya aunty feels that I am truly truly truly from Kolkatta then. I’ll come to you and learn from you ah? So next time you stand here on stage I’ll also say I’m a true Bengali and we are welcoming everyone. Festivals like these ones and this is very heartening to see. Like I said I’ve been coming here for three years. Festivals are the most basic human expression of collective happiness over life I think. They have been so through the ages. Story telling in some form or other has always been part of this expression. Ever since the time that man began to organize himself into tribes and human society emerged. Society is advancing in a manner that is doing both diminishing distances between people and increasing them at the same time. Social networking for example allows you to interact with others without ever really interacting with them. That is why I think cinema matters. Because it brings people together in a single experience of life to which they relate collectively. To a nation like ours, a nation of diverse traditions, multiple cultures and immense beauty, cinema can be so many things. It can be the collective dream, the individual aspiration, the definition of identity, the loss of animosity, the sense of togetherness and the messenger that carries a voice across our boundaries into the rest of the world. Specially in a festival like this one, where people come from all over, to share stories and their telling, there out to be a feeling of celebration and happiness, a sharing of India and of life and its experiences. So on behalf of Kolkatta and humbly so as the ambassador of the state of Bengal, I wish all the dignitaries and film makers from all over the world the next few days to be the greatest celebration of your life because you are perhaps in the greatest, the most charming, the most loving city in the world. Just like the chief minister herself. I also hope creative interactions of this scale helps Indian films to reach the heights that great film makers present here tonight and who have passed away like the wonderful Rituparno have thought and had a dream for, over the years. So I leave you with the words of the great Mr. Satyajit Ray, “ What the Indian cinema needs today is not more gloss but more imagination, more integrity and a more intelligent appreciation of the limitations of the medium. What our cinema needs above everything else is a style and idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian”. I wish you all present here tonight a very very pleasant evening, and welcome to Kolkatta.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 14:46:19 +0000
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