"Some institutions are built with brick and mortar. Others begin with borrowed chairs, a shared dream, and a few neighbours who decide that from now on, something will belong to everyone."
There are organisations that begin with constitutions, committees and carefully written resolutions.
And then there are those that begin with a few people sitting together one evening and saying, almost casually—
“Why don’t we do something together?”
Parnasree Pally Milan Sangha belonged to the second kind.
The year was 1967.
Parnasree was still young then.
It was not yet the neighbourhood we know today. Houses stood apart from one another—mostly modest one- or two-storeyed homes, separated by stretches of open land. Ponds interrupted the landscape. Empty plots grew wild with grass after the rains. Roads were fewer, evenings quieter, and neighbours knew not only one another’s names but often the small details of one another’s lives.
Many of the families were newcomers.
They had arrived with the peculiar courage required to begin again in an unfamiliar place.
A house had been built here, another there. A sapling planted beside a boundary wall. Children had begun discovering shortcuts across vacant fields. Women exchanged bowls across courtyards. Men returning from work stopped to talk at the roadside.
Brick by brick, Parnasree was becoming a locality.
But a locality is not necessarily a community.
For that, people must find a reason to come together.
In 1967, they found one.
Kali Puja.
The idea was wonderfully simple.
Why should the Puja belong to one household?
Why not have a Kali Puja that belonged to everyone?
Not my Puja.
Not your Puja.
Our Puja.
Perhaps nobody present that evening realised how consequential that small change of pronoun would become.
There was very little money. There was no grand pandal. No elaborate illumination. No professional event management, no sponsors, no giant hoardings announcing the celebration weeks in advance.
There was simply enthusiasm.
And enthusiasm, in a young neighbourhood, can be a surprisingly useful form of capital.
Someone went from house to house collecting contributions. Someone knew where an idol could be arranged within their means. Someone produced a table. Someone else brought benches. Chairs arrived from neighbouring houses—borrowed for the evening, each perhaps carrying the marks of a different family and dining room.
There must have been arguments too.
Every good Bengali Puja has them.Where should the idol stand? How much could they afford? Who would arrange the flowers? Who had forgotten to speak to the priest? Who was going to bring the chairs back the following morning?
Those details have mostly disappeared from memory.
Perhaps that is as it should be. Because what survived was more important.
People came. One can imagine that first Kali Puja night. Parnasree would have become dark rather quickly after sunset. Beyond the little gathering, there were still open fields and ponds. The sounds of the city were farther away then. And somewhere within that darkness stood a small image of Goddess Kali. A few lamps. Some flowers. Incense rising into the night air. Children running about because children have never understood why solemn occasions require them to remain still. Older people talking. Neighbours meeting neighbours they had previously known only by sight. Someone calling across the gathering for another chair. Someone distributing prasad.
Someone worrying whether there would be enough. There probably was. There usually is. The idol may have been small. The collection may have been modest. The chairs may have been borrowed. But something happened that night which nobody had needed to budget for.
A neighbourhood discovered itself
Among the people associated with those founding days were:
Sri Moni Mohinta
Sri Madan Roy
Sri Kshitindra Mohinta
Sri Apornesh Banerjee
Sri Nirapada Dutta
Sri Khitish Dutta
Sri Rishikeh Bala
Sri Rajen Halder
Sri Banabehari Acharjee
Sri Bhupen Mondal
Sri Amulya Das
Sri Dr. Achintya Mukherjee
Sri Today, these are names in the history of an organisation.
In 1967, they were simply neighbours.
People with jobs to attend to, families to care for, bills to pay, children to raise and ordinary worries waiting for them the next morning. Yet they gave something to Parnasree whose value could not have been calculated then. They gave the neighbourhood a place to gather. And perhaps that is how a club is truly born. Not when somebody hangs up a signboard. But when people begin to feel that a certain patch of ground belongs, in some small way, to all of them.
The first Milan Sangha was a humble affair. A bamboo structure. A thatched roof. A sheet of tin carrying a name:
পর্ণশ্রী মিলন সংঘ
স্থাপিত — ১৯৬৭
Nothing about it suggested permanence.
Bamboo ages. Thatch must be replaced. Tin rusts in the Bengal rain. And yet the idea sheltered beneath that roof proved considerably more durable than the roof itself. The Puja returned the following year. And the year after that. More families joined. Children who had once come holding their parents' hands began coming with friends. Responsibilities passed from one pair of hands to another. The collection grew. The arrangements improved. The little celebration became an annual expectation. And somewhere along the way, almost without anyone noticing exactly when it happened, a Kali Puja had become an institution. So had the club that organised it.
Years accumulated. Parnasree changed. Vacant plots disappeared beneath houses. Houses grew another floor. Then another. Roads became busier. Shops appeared. Streetlights replaced much of the old darkness. Children grew up, left for college, found jobs, married, moved elsewhere. Some returned. Some did not. New families arrived who had never seen the ponds that once stood where buildings now stand.
And Milan Sangha changed with them.
Its activities travelled beyond a single festival—into culture, sport, social service and the countless small acts through which a community looks after itself. The Kali Puja grew too. The little idol became a grander celebration. Borrowed chairs gave way to organised seating. The modest arrangements of 1967 evolved into the lights, crowds, artistry and anticipation that generations of people across Parnasree and Behala would come to recognise. But growth has a curious way of concealing beginnings. Stand amid the Milan Sangha grounds on Kali Puja night today—surrounded by lights, people, music and celebration—and it is difficult to imagine the darkness that once lay beyond that first little gathering.
Yet perhaps, if one could remove the years for just a moment, the old scene would still be there underneath. A bamboo shelter. A thatched roof. A few borrowed chairs. A small idol. Some neighbours standing together.
And a tin signboard catching the light of a lamp:
পর্ণশ্রী মিলন সংঘ
স্থাপিত — ১৯৬৭
They could not have known what they were beginning. Perhaps the best beginnings are like that. Nobody announces that history is about to happen. Someone brings a chair. Someone lights a lamp. Someone calls the neighbours. And people come. Nearly six decades later, the faces around that light have changed. The neighbourhood has grown taller, louder and busier. The celebration has become larger than those first organisers could reasonably have imagined. But something has remained remarkably unchanged. Every Kali Puja night, people still come together. And somewhere within all those lights burns the small flame that a handful of neighbours lit in 1967. They thought they were organising a Puja. They were building a community. And they gave that community a name—পর্ণশ্রী মিলন সংঘ
#60Years60Stories | Story 01
Parnasree Pally Milan Sangha
