Reflections

  This week, three of us visited the Prerna Educational Center in Salugara. The authorities were extremely troubled. On Sunday night, a couple of elephants had entered their grounds, breaking the gate and an adjacent wall. Having done that, they stayed for a long time as the students and staff cowered in the main building. After eating mangoes(!) and jackfruit from the trees in the garden behind the main building, they left as quietly as they had come. Not unnaturally, the authorities were worried. They are in charge of many visually handicapped children. While all the children that we met seemed to be thrilled at their experience, the people in charge of their wellbeing understandably found it frightening that such a thing could occur. And this was not the first time, apparently. Such incursions have been common over the past three years. They had not faced such problems earlier this even though their institution was one of the first in the area when all around them was either g...

    Naxalbari is the name that all Indians know. It is surprising really, because it is a small village in the Siliguri Subdivision of the Darjeeling District. It lies close to the Mecchi river and is just a hop, skip and jump away from Nepal. The population, Wikipedia informs me, was 1618 in 2011 when the last census was held. (We have dispensed with the census apparently together with many other things). The reason why everybody knows this name is that this was the place that started the famous Naxalite movement which was to be the Revolutionary Movement that would turn India red. Now it seems risible, but for those who lived through those days, especially in West Bengal still remember the panic created by the CPI (ML) cadres who fought the police, killed indiscriminately in the name of eliminating class enemies and were finally eliminated themselves in a paroxysm of state terror which remains a nightmarish memory and finished off so many young, bright, if misguided young ...

  The Darjeeling terai is part of the larger Terai region that extends across the southern foothills of the Himalayas, encompassing parts of northern India and southern Nepal. It is the area lying between the Teesta and Mechi Rivers. It is characterized by the Himalayan foothills, scrub savannah, sal forests, and clay-rich swamps. The region is crossed by several rivers, some of which are perennial and the rest seasonal. This region with all its huge diversity of plants and animals are very accessible to anybody living in Siliguri. However, one needs to have a guide. Those who have lived all their lives in Siliguri are familiar with most of these landscapes but for us Johnny come lately’s it is useful to have someone familiar with the tea gardens and rivers and forests of the region with us. Last year, the monsoon was delayed. In fact, there was practically no rain right from October 2022 until almost the end of June 2023, unlike this year where the rain gods have been kinder. Th...

    I interviewed Dr Eklabya Sharma, just a couple of days after the news broke that he had been awarded the Padmashri On behalf of the North Bengal Bird Newsletter. He was very busy, his phone was continuously ringing and on the particular day that we interviewed him, the Chief Minister of Sikkim was scheduled to come to his flat for lunch. Even so, he was kind enough to allot 30 minutes to us for this interview. We sat in the verandah of his third floor flat at Silver Oaks in Matigara with the welcome February sun warming us. It was a free ranging discussion and lasted a lot more than the time he had set aside for us. He talked freely about his journey to this level, his concerns about the environment and his ideas about the mitigation of climate effects (among other things).       NBBN: On behalf of the North Bengal Bird newsletter, allow me to congratulate you on the award of Padmashri. I am sure that I am joined with all our readers and well-wishers...

  Sir John Herschel  Sir William Herschel was born in the Electorate of Hanover in what is now Germany, but found fame and fortune in Britain where he emigrated at the age of 19. He is remembered as the person who discovered Uranus and several moons of Saturn and was instrumental, together with his sister Caroline in charting the stars with the help of superb telescopes that he and his sister constructed in their home in Bath, England. His son, Sir John Herschel was also an astronomer and, in a sense continued where he left off. However, today’s story is not of their scientific discoveries, but of how the son, Sir John was used by an unscrupulous newspaper in New York to perpetrate a hoax that led to a sensation in   the United States and the rest of the world and sold more newspapers than any other story in the past. Richard Adams Locke This was the era of the penny press, when cheap, easily available newspapers first began to come into the market. These newspapers wer...

It is now all but forgotten, but the entire area of North Bengal, including the parts that have after partition gone to East Pakistan and are now part of Bangladesh, had a proud record of anti Imperialist struggle. Today we mainly remember the politics of the region for the Spring Thunder and perhaps the Tebhaga movement,  and well we should , because they changed the socioeconomic status of not just North Bengal but also many parts of India for ever. But the foundation for struggle was laid down by many individuals, many of whom have receded into the mists of the past. I refer to men like   Dr. Charuchandra Sanyal, Khagendranath Dasgupta, Shashadhar Kar, Rabindranath Sikdar in Jalpaiguri, Shiumangal Singh and Dr Brajendra Bose Roychowdhury in Siliguri , Putulimaya Devi in the Darjeeling Hills and many others. It is also now almost forgotten that even in the Dooars, there was a strong Independence Movement, fanned by many leaders who organized the local people and tea garden w...

  One of the better marketing ploys in North Bengal in recent times has been the advent of the Vistadome coach. For Rs 900 you can travel from New Jalpaiguri to Alipurduar in a comfortable, air conditioned coach with rotatable padded seating and big glass windows. It is not very well known that you can do the same journey in the same train for Rs 85 in a second class compartment. The views are, to my mind, as good and you see a slice of life that you are completely deprived of in a tourist coach.   I have always enjoyed travelling in second class compartments in slow local trains. For the past couple of years, the pandemic deprived me of the opportunity to travel thus, but now with the pandemic hopefully ebbing, I decided that the time was ripe to venture for a short trip from Siliguri to Malbazar using the Dooars route by train. The Rail Yatri app informed me that there was a train that would leave the Siliguri Junction station at 6.10 AM towards Chalsa and beyond to Alipur...