S M Akash, Chattogram;
Chattogram is the commercial capital of Bangladesh. The port city is also a land of natural beauty and happens to be one of the country’s geographical ornaments and a key driver of economic dynamism.
The people of Chattogram district speak a regional variant of Bengali language called Chittagonian. Alamgir Apu (http://www.alamgirapu.com/) took an exceptional initiative to popularize Chittagonian in digital format. Alamgir is an enlightened professional journalist and writer from Chattogram.
Through his initiative, Cplus TV (https://cplusbd.com/), he started broadcasting news and publishing contents in Chittagonian from 2016. In the past Chittagonian also known as Chatgaiya, was more prevalent in all spheres of culture, such as dramas, songs, jokes, riddles, poems, journey songs, turn songs, poetic songs, sports bullying and many more in the region. But after the 1990’s, the use of this unique Bengali variant began to decline gradually.
It now has come to the point where young generation find it rude and unsmart to speak Chatgaiya. Alamgir Apu began noticing this when he returned from his expatriate life in the USA. He felt passionate about working with this issue. Therefore, in 2016 he institutionalized Cplustv to tackle with the situation. Facebook recognized the initiative (https:// www.facebook.com/ cplustv) in 2017 by putting the blue button, YouTube recognized the channel of the same name (https://www.youtube.com/c/ CplusTvctg/ featured) with silver button in 2018.
Cplustv was awarded the Certificate of Appreciation Medal from the Institute of Modern Mother Tongue of Chattogram University on February 25, 2020. BDApps, a subsidiary of Robi, one of the largest mobile operators in Bangladesh, presented the People’s Choice Award on July 29, 2019.
It is now become a very popular channel in the region and it is one of the 10 members of the IPTV Policy Committee of the Ministry of Information of the Government of Bangladesh.
Alamgir spoke with “The Bangladesh Today” about the success and obstacles of driving the initiative forward. Born in a Muslim family in Chipatli village of Hathazari upazila of Chattogram district Alamgir received his master’s degree in 1999.
In his professional life, Alamgir Apu worked as a Chattogram Bureau Chief (2007-2012) for the satellite tv channel RTV, a staff reporter for ATN News in the capital of country (2012-2014). After working in electronic media for almost 8 years, he moved to the United States in 2014 with his family. There he worked for New York Community IP TV “Time Television”. His took a course on the future of online TV at the famous New York Film Academy. From then on, out of curiosity, he moved to Chattogram again with his family.
Working with Cplus for two years in a row, he is getting a huge response from the people. “Although I have heard many kinds of insults from family members. But today I like this thinking that now I have been able to create about half a hundred jobs in different countries around the world, including Chattogram. By creating content based on different cultures in Chattogram, I am able to feed the eyes and minds of millions of people every day, I am able to pay VAT and taxes to the government. Like satellite TV in my mother tongue, night news on Cplustv has gained wide popularity in the country and abroad.”, Alamgir remarked.
Regarding the way forward Alamgir said, “I am working and moving forward with the dream of creating a digital platform by applying this regional language of Bengali in all fields on online in the future.”
