Guwahati woke up on the first morning of 2019 to a piece of news that Saurav Kumar Chaliha would have approved of: though traffic police had detected 417 cases of drunken driving the previous night, they were more impressed by the many citizens who “used sober drivers to make the celebrations safe”. It was a candidate for ‘Good News Day’, observed by Chaliha’s fan club on Tuesday.
Chaliha, or SKC, one of Assam’s most popular short story writers, led a dual life. Till he breathed his last on June 25, 2011, very few knew that his real name was Surendra Nath Medhi, a Physics faculty at the Assam Engineering College. SKC was so publicity-shy that he did not receive the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1974. The Akademi later had the award sent to him. But his fan club has dedicated the first day of the year to his memory, celebrating it as ‘Good News Day’.
The SKC fan club has 21 executive committee members and hundreds of members across Assam and beyond. Zebin Ahmed, a librarian at the century-old Cotton University in Guwahati, is its president.
Began with essay
“We began celebrating January 1 as Bhaal Khabaror Din (Good News Day) in 2010 to mark one of his feel-good essays in an Assamese daily published on January 1, 1998. In that piece, he had underlined the importance of starting the New Year with positive news,” said Mahesh Deka, secretary of Saurav Kumar Chaliha Anuragi Samaj (SKC fan club). SKC’s write-up may have been intended to promote one of his most popular stories, ‘Bhal Khabar’, published that year. But the idea stirred his fans enough to plan a meeting on New Year’s Day every year.
Mr. Deka said that had SKC been alive, he would have liked the traffic story, where the focus was more on the citizen’s concern for road safety than on the number of people booked for drunk driving.
Ritually, the fan club members scan newspapers and television channels for inspiring news on January 1, avoiding, as SKC desired, the coverage on accidents, murders, violence, rapes, or corruption.
On Tuesday, fan club members read out a couple of his stories and discussed the narrative and characters of a couple more. Actor Papori Medhi enacted a monologue based on his story ‘Gharua Ghatana’ (Domestic Incident).
Aauthor Arup Kumar Dutta said that SKC was a rare writer who enjoyed the kind of fan following typically associated with film, music and sports stars.
