A couple of days ago I received an email from Calcuttatube’s Ankan Basu who asked me if I could place a link to your article in my website salilda.com. Only after reading your article and the reactions to your article I decided to write.
Like you I thought that Prithviraj could have been a little more polite. But your long and angry outburst to his comments really shocked and surprised me. Later Anirudha made similar comments – but politely. I guess between them they have made their point.
I read your article on Salilda published last year in which you said the Salilda died in a car-crash and that was heavily criticised in the SalilC Yahoo Group, a Salil Chowdhury online discussion group.
I hosted salilda.com in 1998 after several years of research. Since then it took me many years of hard work and many visits to India to search for new material and authenticate the facts. I am still continuing.
I still find new facts about Salilda’s music and his writings. Salilda seems to be endless. However I don’t know how long I can continue due to my advancing age (I am older than you). I have now given all my collection to Rabindra Bharati University for the Salil Chowdhury -Archive which they have recently started.
You say that you know Jyotidi. May be you could have asked her or Salilda’s brother Babuda (Samir Choudhury)for Salilda’s correct year of birth. It is 1922.
Salilda had also composed music for 45 Bengali films. I think you somehow missed that information.
I wrote about the Beatles songs in 1998 in the news section of salilda.com. . Salilda gave me those songs in 1988 while I was visiting him at Akash Deep. Nobody knew about this. But I guess you have seen this in salilda.com/news.asp. I remember telling him that Michael Jackson is now the owner of the copyright so he should be very careful before releasing these songs. Ultimately he didn’t.

Lastly, if you insist on quoting musicians who knew or worked with Salilda please talk to the people who were really associated and worked closely with him They are not Bhanu Gupta or Soumitra Chatterjee or Pranab Dasgupta. Surely Salilda deserves better. Bhanuda was associated with R.D Burman for 25 years and not Salilda (ask Anirudha or any RDB fan). Unless of course Bhanuda lived in a parallel universe ! Soumitra wasn’t a musician with Salilda’s group either. He also claims to have been with R.D Burman and nobody really knows Pranab Dasgupta ! You could have talked to Manohari Singh (since mid ’50s) or Goutam Ghosh of Rabindra Bharati or Y.S.Mulkey (since late ’50s) or Tapas Bhowmick or Buddha Ganguly (since ’70s) etc who have worked closely with Salilda over the last 40 years. That would have been much more authentic.

I do respect your passionate dedication to your profession and your wide experience. I am sure you also respect the hard work done by other journalists and web developers like me. Numerous people have copied from salilda.com and I can’t stop them. However, I always hope that someone, someday, just by accident, will say “courtesy: salilda.com”

May be I should stop hoping.

I sincerely hope that with my comments I have not upset you. I would not survive another outburst !

If you still want to communicate with me please write to fmajor7 at gmail dot com.

Kind regards.

Gautam Choudhury
Netherlands

best story ………..