Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Birth control should go unrestrained, but there must be no restraint on publication of Oriya books, said the founder of Ama Odisha and Editor of Sambad, Soumya Ranjan Pattanaik while speaking on occasion of launching of the fourth collection of short stories by veteran media person Prasanta Patnaik on July 17.
Dwelling on Orissa’s present literary scenario he stressed on necessity of books in Oriya in massive scale as the people’s spine rests on their vocabulary. He regretted that in the land of love for the mother tongue where because of that love modern Orissa had taken birth defeating all align conspiracies, Oriya is drifting below day by day as an applied language. He called upon all language papers of Orissa to adopt the mission of language protection from unconcerned administration and stressed that Authors, publishers and critics must wake up to restore the impaired dignity of the mother tongue of the people.
When in recent times, publications of novels and poem books have declined in Orissa, short stories have ample acceptability, he observed. But he stressed that authors must mix with the grassroots and focus on the common issues vis-à-vis individual’s so that people will find the books to be their own and literature can play its role in nation building. Had Gopinath Mohanty not gone to Koraput or Prof. Biswaranjan to Phulbani, Paraja or Phulabanira Chithi could not have manifested with illuminating details of their subjects, he noted, while congratulating Prasanta for having reflected life as he has observed as a journalist in his stories.
Prof. Biswaranjan, editor of Khabar, gave a lively critique on the book throwing light on how it could be termed as a live humanitarian history, not mere imaginative narrations.
Octogenarian writer and editor of “Samaya” Mr. Satakadi Hota, presiding over the colorful event, dwelt briefly on the history of Oriya short stories and highly commended Prasanta’ work for the precise depiction of human being’s soft self in incisive perfection.
The author gave a short account of the backgrounds of his stories. Chief Guest Prafulla Ch. Ghadai, Minister Finance, welcomed the book and profoundly commended it to the public.
Publisher Nrusinga Prasad Mishra of Cuttack Students Store coordinated the function.
The book is captioned as Krushnachudara Ranga (Color of Bougainvillea). It has 20 short stories written when he was in the prime of his youth. Most of the stories are based on the philosophy of life, which he adopted from Nobel Laureate Earnest Hemingway’s worthy words, “a man can be destroyed, but he can not be defeated, if he is true to himself”. Persons deeply observed by the author in piercing eyes of a journalist have come in as characters in these stories. The 144 page pack of lively stories is priced only Rs.80/-