VOL - III
JUNE 2022
ISSUE - 01
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Dear brethren, The 19 celebrates its third birthday. On the 24th of June. It was on this day that the newsletter came into being in the year Anno Lucis 6020. A year lost in the calendar of mankind, such has been the viciousness of the pandemic that rippled out – a catachresis for a catastrophe of veritably tsunamic proportions — from an otherwise little known town in China. It was on this day that RW Bro Devendra Lal Thapar launched what he felt the pressing need for a connectivity among the Masons of Bengal, when all physical associations had been so abruptly severed. Severed by a spiked ball, visible only under the most powerful microscope, wreaking devastation on a scale of global dimensions, — the parleys, animated, if the spread was genuinely zoonotic or otherwise notwithstanding. And he – the DGM, in case you have lost the thread, dear reader – elected, in the fitness of things, to do so on a day that three hundred and three years ago had seen the formation of the Grand Lodge of those who had then been pejoratively referred to as the Moderns – a term that stuck — at an alehouse in London. And so it is that the first issue of this third volume rolls out again on this day, variously known as St. John’s Day and Universal Brotherhood Day. A virtual cake may be then, brethren?
Moving on to the month under review, May, mercifully, turned out a respite from the punishing April that gave a foretaste of what the torments by fire and brimstone in Hades would feel like, especially to those, yours truly not excluded, straying from the straight and narrow, — “the due bounds of mankind”, to summon the language of Masonry. The intermittent squalls, locally known as kaal-baishakhi, shrank the mercury in the capillary by several relieving notches. Petrichor has seldom wafted a more cool fragrance. That did not, however, lower the strident clamour for the air-conditioned Temple. Especially when the elaborate ceremonies of Initiation, Passing and Raising featured on the agenda. Were those Lodges not so lucky contemplating skipping the Charge After Initiation, the Second Degree Tracing Board or the Traditional History? The all-seeing eye never shuts, brethren.
While there was no significant event in the month to write back home about, — er, report in these columns, — the one that has evoked general interest is the advance notice that the Annual Convocation and Communication would be held on the 23rd of July. Jackets, mothballed away since the ides of March, are being drawn out from closets and aired. With marked reluctance, though. Speculations are doing the rounds if the DGM would accord another nod, however grudgingly, to what may be alluded to as deshabille, or would it be a strict dressed-up-to-the-nines this time, the groans of discontent not quite inaudible. It bears mention – in a not unrelated context — that the Western Temple, where the District Communications are traditionally held, has a score of fans whirring away. Cold comfort. For the ensembled. The blade, however, is taking out his dinner jacket and debating a buckrammed wing collar to a turndown, especially in view of the Ladies’ Night that is to follow. So is the concern among a few if a stresemann after sundown would elicit frowns from the sartorialist.
The District, however, has more serious affairs to tend to than matters vestiary, other than issuing a terse dress code: the reports of the various officers, the minutes of the last communication, the agenda of the forthcoming, the audited accounts, the performance reports of the Lodges, the appointments to the various offices, the formation of the boards and trusts, the logistics of the attendance of the members of the out-station Lodges, the fare that would earn the approbation of the epicure. And a myriad other things that go to make an event successful. Or, inversely, the myriad other things, that not paid heed to, would queer an event. To resort to the succinct, GN has his hands clichedly full. It is not without reason that the DGM reposes explicit faith in this able lieutenant of his, secure in the knowledge in his trans- and cisatlantic sojourns that everything would be tickety-boo. Bros Darayas and Subir lend him, the DGS, able support. No brethren, be assured, this concise observation is not a grudging concession to these two gentlemen; they genuinely rally round. As do the entire staff, liveried and otherwise. Looking forward to this red letter day exactly a month away.
Editor
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EDITOR: Amit Dutt
Mobile: +91 98312 23230, E-mail : a_k_dutt_06@yahoo.com
DISTRICT GRAND SECRETARY: Gyanendra Narain Singh
Mobile: +919230613338, 9903033599, E-mail : dgsofbengalfm@gmail.com
Freemasons’ Hall, 19, Park Street, Kolkata – 700 016, West Bengal, India.