Since the beginning of the year, I have been busy with the editing
and publishing of the newsletters for Bengali Association of Greater Chicago.
Each issue has both Bengali and English contents. I am using MS Publisher 2013
for the newsletter. A major struggle is with the Bengali language software.
Bangla Word, the software most active Chicago area writers prefer to use, is
not compatible with MS Publisher. On my insistence, they switched to Avro, the
unicode based software. However, that was no cakewalk either. Several Juktakhar
(combined) words did not convert properly, no matter what I tried. I spent days
thinking about substitutions avoiding Juktakhar (joint word). Chattra (Student) was substituted by
Shishya. I am very glad that the original authors were kind enough to accept
these substitutions.
Now, I am working on the anthology which
will be done in MS Word. I thought our lives will be simpler, since we will be
able to use Bangla Word straightaway. Oh no - not so fast. One of the authors
told me today that she could not get the spelling of the word Arjun, the famous
prince in the epic of Mahabharata. Fortunately, this warrior prince, like most famous
people, has many names and Partha is one of them. Even with a Juktakhar, the
spelling of Partha looked right in Bangla Word. With great glee, she used
Partha in the humor story and I believe it worked.
We hope that everybody who read the story of Ramayana, one of the two major Sanskrit epics written by the sage Valmiki, knows Arjun and Partha are same guy who had
to cool his heels in the battlefield of Kurukhetra while Lord Krishna gave him
a very long lecture. This lecture is compiled in a neat book called Bhagavad
Gita containing mere 700 verses.
I am sure that my woes with Bangla font is not yet over. I am also
expecting submissions of a couple of Hindi poems in Devanagari script for the
anthology issue.
