It has been very rightfully quoted, “Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” With reference to the quote, the documentary ‘The Assam Tribune: Nation Talks’ is a small token of appreciation towards the interminable and unceasing efforts of the newspaper towards the holistic growth of the region for the past eighty years. The Assam Tribune has been deep rooted to the soils of the state by means of its unbiased, clean and respectable journalism ever since the time of its inception. Just as Kaziranga National Park is the pride of the state; one cannot deny the newspaper to share more or less the similar honour for the people of Assam. Pondering back to the days of inception, I could still recall the days when struggling with crowd and sweat, I climb the city buses all the way from Noonmati to Voltas (the then bus stop for The Assam Tribune Office) onlyto post a simple classified advertisement in the leading English daily. But these simple and ordinary classified advertisements published in the newspaper helped me reach to the pinnacle where I am today. I had limited resources and various national and international level competitors to fight with back then. The best option I could find myself with was to adopt guerrilla strategies by approaching the most widely circulated newspaper in the region and publish frequent classified advertisements. It was The Assam Tribune which helped me to reach the local
denizens of Assam with the first punch line of CEC, “Join a
Good Name or a Better Institute; Decide In Your
Favour” in the most cost effective manner. Furthermore, it also helped us to celebrate our subsequent punch line, “Learn Computers in Coloured Monitors.” In a nutshell, The Assam Tribune helped us spread our roots and convey the message that though parochial; yet we are worthy competitors. Ever since then, there was constant support of the Tribune family for promoting our services and constantly acted as the fertilizer for nurturing the 25 years old big tree called CEC. Now, at the verge of its 25years of growth, it is on our part to gratify their never-ending support to CEC and many other regional
entrepreneurs like me. It should in fact be our duty to deliver and conserve the true essence of this golden era of the English daily for the future generations of Assam by providing them the rightful context of this intriguing piece of history in audio-visual format. Keeping all these in consideration, it has always been a dream for me and my spouse to showcase the rich history of this great organisation in the form of a documentary primarily focused towards the youth of this region in order to interpret the struggle and difficulty an organisation faces for maintaining parity with people’s expectations.
And I am literally thankful from the bottom of the heart that a very talented group of technicians and non-technicians helped me to realise my crave. It would be worth mentioning here that the entire CEC family has devoted the best out of them in order to portray the eighty-year-old journey of The Assam Tribune in the form of this documentary. I believe that the people of Assam would accept this small token of love and appreciation form the CEC-Parivaar with all their heart and soul.
Dipankar Dutta
