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Lest we Forget

Homage to Nitun Kundu

Fida M. Kamal
HUMAN beings do not appear to be the most majestic of creatures, unlike tigers and lions. Quite often appearances are unreliable and misleading. However, human beings have one faculty which no living creatures possess. Human beings are creative beings. Animals leave traces of what they are — carcasses and things — whereas humans leave traces of what they create, such as paintings, literature and monuments. Some of these are so magnificent, and that faculty alone is what makes human beings splendid.
Nitun Kundu was such a grand man. He was a
very simple man with simple habits — coming from the most ordinary background from the backwaters of Dinajpur. He lived and looked like an ordinary man. However, what he had left behind — his paintings and works — are really remarkable and outstanding, magnificent and imposing and impressive and splendid. His creative mind had made him majestic.
Originally named as Nitya Gopal Kundu, he adopted Nitun Kundu as his name. For me, he was just Nitun Dada or simply Dada. That is the Bangla word for elder brother - - an affectionate address of respect. I cannot say for sure when Nitya Gopal Kundu became Nitun Kundu. But Dada once told me that his loving mother used to affectionately call him by the name Nitun. Dada's love for and devotion to his beloved mother perhaps made him adopt his nickname -- Nitun - - as his first name.
It is said that Otobi was as much his child as his children, Amity and Animesh. Interestingly, all of them have the first alphabet of Bangla language as the initial letter of their respective names. A similar sounding word in English alphabets is "awe," which evokes a feeling of reverence mixed with wonder.
One is truly awed with the diverse talents of this gifted man of extraordinary abilities as he traversed his personal journey through the trials and tribulations of his life to the high points of his achievements and accomplishments. He had ascended by discovering the fullness of his gifts, his talents and faculties, and what he created on the way are monuments to the stages of his understanding of nature and of his own self — which poet W.B. Yeats called "monuments of unageing intellect."
It is always an exciting and rewarding experience to contemplate on the life and times of Nitun Dada. Such contemplation enables us to reflect on and learn lessons from the luminous light it throws on our own nature as human beings --from the primordial infant from which the whole exciting and rewarding adventure of man began.
He was a man with straight and strong spine. This was a result of his self-reliance all along -- from the lowest rung of the ladder where he stood many years ago, to the highest, which he occupied by his accomplishments at the time when he passed away six years ago. By dint of merit, distilled from the midnight burning oil, he had climbed the spiral stairway of success. As he had desired, he availed himself, in more than one direction. He trusted his own right arm more than the Aladdin's lamp of magic. Sturdy independence of opinion with idealism had been the chief characteristic of Nitun Dada's character. He could never bend his knee "before insolent might."
He would give you, when you first saw him, the impression of a sun-kissed palm tree, the very apex of uprightness. His toil -- he believed in the logic of living laborious days -- was touched with tense tranquillity, as his temper. But his inherent sense of humour, though restrained, served as a searchlight and revealed his wholesome humanity. His capacity to face life like a wrestler or a warrior, come what may, led one to think he had a secret source of strength, though he might not have been aware of it. His humanity and helpfulness was shilpi (artist). Closely related word in Bangla is shlpo (art), which also means "industry." Nitun Dada fused the artist in him with the industrialist in him. What a wonderful and amazing fusion! By training he was a painter. He was truly an artist. In establishing Otobi — the mammoth industrial undertaking --he never failed to remember that he was an artist in his heart.
The writer is a Barrister.