A Dose Of Laughter And Fun

While enjoying Chetna’s post on the quiet intrusion of Iranian flavour in Indian languages, cuisines and socio-cultural fabric, I was really happy to note that she is quite familiar with the typical dialect of Bangla spoken in East Bengal (later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh) which is an interesting amalgam of Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. Etymologically the Urdu words may have their roots in Persian.

Chetna also surprised me when she revealed that her father-in-law hailed from the then East Bengal and that she was quite taken up with the humour ingrained in the dialect of that region known as Bangaal. Bengalis –  the Bangaals especially –  are known for their  rejoinders which at times border on the outrageous. However, the wit and humour of East Bengal is as distinct as that of West Bengal. I thought of grabbing this opportunity to talk about the short Dramas of Bangladesh, called Bangla Naatok (Bengali Play), which are replete with those  quintessential tongue-in-cheek repartees. To illustrate a few –

Shushkong Kashtong (Dry Wood) is the story of a very romantic hearted girl getting married to the most unromantic boy and what happens thereafter. There is one scene where the girl tells her husband,”Yesterday was Teddy Day. My friend’s husband gifted her a teddy. But you did not give.” To which the husband’s iconic reply is,”I don’t know your friend. Won’t she get angry if I give her a teddy?” What follows after this is anybody’s guess.

In another drama captioned Fun a girl tells her fiance to break off their engagement after a month of courtship. The boy wants to know the reason but the girl refuses to give any. Enraged the boy asks her to apologise to him. But the girl refuses to do that too. The boy in retaliation asks his mother to prepone the date of marriage to the very next week. What follows is the girl resorting to all kinds of tricks to get rid of the boy which even includes deploying the local goons to make him “understand” the urgency of the matter. However, the goons get bashed up by the boy and his friend. To irritate the girl more the boy happily informs her that all her henchmen are hospitalized. He even marvels at the uncanny resemblance of the goon with the girl when he smiles and how they’ll look like identical twins if only she’ll consider shaving off her hair punk style.

In Mr. Absentminded a mother grapples with a husband and a son, both suffering from acute absentmindedness. The son is a brilliant scholar but when it comes to day to day dealings he cannot remember the  commonest of  things. Suffering from stomach pain he consults a doctor (with whom he subsequently falls in love) who advises him to submit his urine sample for further tests. However, he absentmindedly brings the sample home. When his father, equally absentminded, looking for his medicines in the fridge, comes across a bottle of liquid the boy realises his mistake. The confused father, only half listening to his son,  remarks that he has heard of many Vitamins, like A, B , C, D and E but has never heard of Vitamin U.

In another comedy (I have forgotten the name) a boy catches a girl red handed standing on the water tank placed on the terrace of a high rise office building just about to take the final leap to death. Alarmed he tries to convince her in many ways to come down but the girl is adamant and tells him to go away. Finally, the boy comes up with a brilliant proposal for the girl which is if she  continues to live she may get a better opportunity of jumping off a building higher than the present one. And guess what that makes sense to her and she agrees to climb down.

Mahzabin Choudhury, a very pretty and the most natural actress, pairs up with Afraan Nisho in Shushkong Kashtong, Fun and the drama whose name I can’t remember while Tanjin Tisha, another pretty actress and Ziaul Farooque Apurba make a cute couple in Mr. Absentminded. Both Nisho and Apurba rock.

Many such Bangladeshi dramas are available on You Tube. Though technically these short films are not up to the mark but they make up in terms of entertainment, fun and humour.