Reflections

The Dooars are one of the most beautiful parts of India. As the tourist brochures say, it is full of lush forests, the second largest concentration of the one horned rhino, rippling streams, mountains and tea gardens. The tea gardens have been part of the landscape for about a hundred years. When you drive down towards Hashimara over the Coronation Bridge, they lie on both sides, lush green, full of shade trees and the workers with colourful baskets picking tea leaves- it is really a dream destination. Unfortunately it is also one of the killing fields of West Bengal. Until I came to live in Siliguri I had no idea of the poverty and disease that is rampant in these gardens. I first got an inkling of the state of affairs when some newspapers highlighted the starvation deaths that had taken place in the Tea Gardens of the Dooars. Unfortunately the attention span of the newspapers nowadays does not extend to two consecutive daily editions and the story was lost when we began to discu...

When we were children, snake charmers were a popular mode of entertainment. Together with bandarwalas and bhaloowalas, they entertained us hugely in those days when TVs did not exist and movies were a rare treat. Even in cities like Kolkata where we grew up, once in a while a snake charmer or a bandarwala would turn up and perform to huge popular acclaim. We were not aware, or did not care to see the cruelty involved in trapping and training these animals, nor did we ever think of the consequences of trapping snakes from the wild. We fully believed that the snakes we saw were poisonous and likely to bite at the least provocation. We were also convinced that the Sapura charmed the snakes by the music of the flute that he played. As we grew up we learnt that the animals were ill treated, the snakes were defanged and there was in fact no danger from these reptiles who only swayed to the movement of the flutes and could not in fact hear the music. I was reminded of all this when I read a...

Buxa Fort is now known as a tourist attraction and is in the dense forests of North Bengal. We spent some time there a couple of years ago and took some pictures of the fort and the post office which is one of the remotest in the country. There was a hue and cry sometime back as the Postal department wanted to close it down. However the move has been stalled for the moment. However the story starts long before the British period when the fort was used to incarcerate political prisoners, including, famously , Netaji Subhash Bose. The Buxa Dooar (Dooar meaning a door) was one of the several entry points into Bhutan from the plains of Bengal and Assam. This particular port was used in the medieval and early modern times as a conduit for trade between Bengal and Bhutan and via Bhutan with Tibet. This trade lasted till the early nineteenth century when the British took over the administration of Cooch Behar and a adversarial relationship developed between the two powers which culminated in...