Reflections

  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...

Gurdip Singh Flora ( his facebook profile picture appears below))  was my classmate at the Medical College,Calcutta. Soon after we graduated, he migrated to the USA.However his roots were in North Bengal. Little did I know that more than 25 years after that I would end up in North Bengal  and make it my home. I caught up with him after all of 35 years thanks to Facebook.  We have occasionally talked about North Bengal and I had asked him to write a guest post in my blog. However it has been a long time coming and I am posting this piece from his pen ( or computer) which has however seen the light of day elsewhere. I hope that I will be able to publish many more in the future. During the later days of British rule in India, it was felt that the people of the northeastern region were facing a shortage of qualified medical practitioners to tend to the sick in that part of the world. The physicians graduating from the Campbell Medical School of Calcutta and the Mitfor...

It is winter now in India and this is turning out to be cold one. The temperatures in Calcutta have reached unprecedentedly low levels and Siliguri is freezing, at levels that have not been seen for 5 years apparently. My wife tells me that the picnics parties are out in force in the Dooars and the forests are as pretty as ever. This is something that I miss a lot in Malaysia. There is no winter!! In the heights of the Cameroon Mountains and Genting Highlands you do get a coolness that is soothing but it is not the same as winter in the plains. The advent of winter is something that I always used to look forward to in India. It was the time when you could go for long walks in the Dooars area, in the forest trails, the birds and the trees a marvellous backdrop to a satisfyingly tiring exercise. One of my favourite walks was the one from near the Khunia More Forest office near the Jaldhaka river on the Chalsa road and through the forests of the Chapramari division up to Murti. The walk ...

The Pujas are just a few weeks away. The Bengali month of Bhadra is drawing to a close and Aswin will start next week, formally inaugurating the autumn season. When we lived in Calcutta the Bengali seasons went by almost unnoticed, but in Siliguri it is still possible to discern the procession of the seasons. I am now far away from Bengal, but I can imagine the hot sun and sharp showers that must be plaguing those working out of doors. The forests of North Bengal, are, I am sure , green with new growth and the undergrowth has grown, concealing the forest floor. The Teesta will be flowing at its highest and the paddy fields are green, the breeze causing waves to flow over them. The Jute crop is being harvested and the fibre is being separated in all the ponds of Bengal. The Saluk flowers are just showing themselves, the white flowers raising their heads from the waterbodies where they have lain dormant or the past eight months. The pink ones are particularly common near the Teesta and w...