Aniruddha Rakshit posted Late Chinmoy Roy’s photo with the caption Basanta Bilap. This caption is the inspiration for this modest post. Chinmoy Roy was the star in my spring; interestingly he had also a strange appeal for our more girly moods. He was as thin as a reed, dark, medium height, crooked teeth and could look downright ugly, chugged about in body hugging clothes and wore his hair long. He looked less of a being from the film screen and more of a wasted guy from the streets. He was a breathless Godardian.

As a stereotype he had the typical look of the young men of Kolkata, politically charged with the dreams of revolution only if that was out of hormonal energy left unchanneled due to the chronic unemployment for the uneducated. Instead of seeking comedy through the characters contained within the film, Chinmoy’s comedy seemed to target the very youth of the Bengali society; it was as if the cinema was satirising the angry youth of its times. As a comedian he rose to the stature of a hero in Noni Gopaler Biye where he also had a double role in the form of his successful twin brother. Indeed, his striking presence on screen came in the form of Basanta Bilap, a multi-starrer in which he had to stand as a side hero to the doyen, Soumitro Chatterjee. He shone through that galaxy of Anup Kumar, Robi Ghosh, Tarun Kumar, Bankim Ghosh and others. Among his last was the character of Tenida, once again a social satire of an age just before the one that Chinmoy had so long addressed and laughed at.

Chinmoy died long before his death; the cause of his virtual death was the death of comedy of the Bengali cinema, in its literature and of laughter in the Bengali life in general. An inwardly competitive society that thrives on envy and jealousy instead of focussing on its strength, a society that produced more parasites than entrepreneurs and made progressively more and more inward looking and wallowing in self-pity and excuses, is not exactly one that can laugh at itself.