Winter is greeted in West Bengal’s Santiniketan with a colourful burst of culture, art and performances, in a festival called the Poush Mela. Shoma A. Chatterji soaks in the ambience at this festival that Rabindranath Tagore made into an annual event. Today it attracts visitors from India and abroad. Poush is the month in the Bengali calendar that coincides with the onset of winter, from mid- December to mid-January, according to the English calendar. It is when trees shed their leaves, when migrant birds fly into this part of the world, when the Bauls assemble at the Poush Mela from…
Author: oiop
Indian cities like Delhi and Bangalore have been in the news in recent times for the intolerance and violence shown towards people from the Northeast. Longnam W. Kharpuri from Meghalaya, who studies and lives in Delhi, says she is subjected to all sorts of racism and innuendos. But she would much rather familiarise and sensitise people, than play the victim. I have been living in Delhi for around six years now. I started my B.A. at St. Stephens College in the year 2008. I’ve been here since then, and I’m now doing my M.Phil from the Arts Faculty of Delhi…
It is laudable that the current government is keen on cleaning up the Ganga river. But it will require gargantuan and sustained efforts over the next two decades, before the almost doomed river can start breathing easy, says Tirtho Banerjee. The urgency shown by the Narendra Modi government to clean up the Ganga river deserves accolades. But the apparent earnestness should not be restricted to mouthing rhetorics. It should be backed by concrete, solid actions. Cleaning such a long filthy stretch in 18 years, as the government promises, is no joke. It calls for sustained efforts on a war-footing. The…
Selfless devotion and valour (1914-1947) Nand Singh was born on 24 September 1914, in village Bahadurpur in Bhatinda district of Punjab. He enlisted in 1/11 Sikh on 24 March 1933. During the Second World War, his unit was deployed along the Road Maungdaw-Bothidaung in Arakan in Burma in 1944. Japanese attempts to recapture the hill features occupied by the unit were beaten back. A feature, later called India Hill, was left unoccupied as Subedar Mehar Singh’s platoon had been pulled out to protect a disabled tank. During the night of 1 March, a Japanese platoon infiltrated into the area and…
The red-breasted goose that breeds on the Siberian Tundra adopts a clever strategy to protect its young ones from arctic foxes. It builds its nest near the homes of birds of prey such as the peregrine falcon. The falcon, which has its own chicks to protect, viciously attacks any fox that dares to venture near its nest. Thus the chicks of the red-breasted goose are also saved from attacks. Amazingly enough, the peregrine falcon does not prey on the geese and their young. In return, the geese emit loud calls to alert the falcon about a lurking predator.
Some states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu conduct what can be called ‘rural Olympics’. However, Punjab has the distinction of hosting the oldest rural Olympics in the country. Kila Raipur, a dusty town near Ludhiana has been organising the sports fest since 1933 with the idea of revitalising traditional games that are fast losing ground to more popular modern-day games. The three-day sports fest held every February attracts participants not only from India, but also from Canada, USA, Singapore and England! Be it kabaddi, cart-racing or tent pegging, young and old alike display an amazing…
India’s enormous biodiversity and wildlife makes it a magnet for tourists from all over the world. But we have to demonstrate respect and love for our own natural heritage, before we can expect others to do so. “You are a guest of nature… behave!”
One of the more remote Indian wildernesses, Taley, in the Lower Subansiri District in Arunachal Pradesh, is a 337 sq. km. sanctuary that has so far been protected by its sheer isolation. The Apatani tribe that has lived in the area for eons is now facing pressures from the ‘outside’ world. The same pressures that seek to usurp natural resources for consumption by distant urban centres, also threaten a host of endangered wild species, including elephants, tigers, clouded leopards and pheasants for which the Subansiri Valley has always been famous, writes Bittu Sahgal. THE boatman steered his craft upstream for…
People from the Northeast didn’t figure much in the radar of the rest of the country, especially a few decades ago. That isolation may actually have done them some good, says V. Gangadhar. Let us be honest, how much do we know of the Northeast? I would say not much. We associate it with one of the monsoons, though the Southwest monsoon is more famous. What else about the Northeast monsoons? If it was too heavy, it affected cricket matches in the region. I remember the number of test matches which were lost due to rain in Chennai. And yet…
For those Indians who believe the world wars were never fought on Indian soil, Akul Tripathi describes the Battle of Kohima, when British and Indian soldiers fought and won against the Japanese in Nagaland’s capital, against all odds. This effectively halted the Japanese march onto Delhi, and was a very significant tuning point of World War II. War. Gruesome and ugly, it is, we are told. As bad, or worse than famines, floods and plagues. The very scythe of Hades and the charging buffalo of Yama. If there has been one feature constant in the history of human existence, it…