yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

Ban Raha Hai Ras  Boat ride to the Man Mandir Ghat (venue) was the beginning of fun. The boatman used all his skill and experience to navigate around the fishing nets. We reached late by about 45 minutes but in time for a song that talked of the virtues of keeping Banaras and Ganga clean. Am a fan neither of the Swachchh Bharat Abhiyaan nor of the trash being dumped in Ganga - I made some effort to hide the irritation. A friend sitting along however let out a smile – along with placing hand on head - when a local politician took the few minute space on the dais to extol virtues of the ruling party. The first performance was by Malini Awasthi. What little I had heard and read about her fell short! To convey in short – with her songs on Holi she brought the festival early to Banaras. And how! Her connect with the audience and repertoire reminded me of Gurdas Mann. A glimpse of her performance here . A young boy, about 6 or 7 years of age, walked to the stage and t...

Dhrupad Mela Tulsi Ghat ~  Banaras So simple and Indian the arrangement was. Neither did one notice ‘security’ males in uniform nor the ‘decked’ up females to make announcements or offer flowers. Flowers and diyas were present on the stage though – once in a while someone filled the oil! It was not ‘over’ sanitized either - had the audience at ease! Our love for hierarchy too was apparent in the 2 large chairs which sat empty most of the time. The diversity and skill of performers had a wide range of audience. Someone we had tea with had come for the 4 day event from Bombay, enjoyed from 6 pm to 6 am and slept over during the days!  Majority audience, however, seemed to be either from Europe or Bengal. Where then are the Banarasis one wondered aloud! Especially the younger generation whose representatives we had seen in crazy numbers walking the Panch Koshi Yatra a day ago!   Expresso coffee machines are not an extinct species in Varanasi unlike few ...

Title: Wild in the Backyard Author: Arefa Tehsin Publisher : Puffin Books – Published by Penguin Group Year: 2015 Pages: 229 Chapters: 25 Thanks are due to Chitra, iWonder , Arefa and Penguin. Written by Arefa Tehsin this book takes us into a world inhabited by different species that visit our backyard – species we often see, but know little about. Each species is brought to life through in-depth research into its habits, sketches, anecdotes and questions. The beginning The prolific writer Arefa Tehsin has authored multiple books for children, including ‘ The Land of the Setting Sun and Other Nature Tales ’ with Raza H Tehsin. She also writes columns and articles for newspapers and magazines. She begins this book, Wild in the Backyard, with a dedication that brings together bookstores and forests in an interesting way: ‘To my father, who took me to the bookstore and the jungle, who held my hand, yet left me alone. At both places ’. Few lines could h...

Strangling a wildlife rich area The India Bangladesh Border is to be fenced. This is the status. India’s Supreme Court has set up a “Coordination Committee” to expedite work on the border fence with Bangladesh . A two-member bench of Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice N Fali Nariman has set up the committee. It will be headed by Union Home Ministry’s Border Management Secretary and include the Chief Secretary of Assam. This committee will work out all issues related to border fencing. The committee will find out how to complete the fencing work within the stipulated timeframe.  http://bdnews24.com/neighbours/2015/11/06/indian-sc-sets-up-committee-to-push-for-border-fence-with-bangladesh There are some problem areas where work is pending including the stretch in Mizoram. This is where the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) comes in. Some stretches of the road are pending on account of multiple reasons. These include the road under discussion in Mizoram’s Mamit district;...

Questions in search of answers Review of a book which in some ways takes off from Ken Robinson’s much quoted line “ We are living in revolutionary times, but our educational system is a relic of the 19th Century Industrial Age ” published in the February 2018 issue of Teacher Plus. The review on Teacher Plus here and the book on MGIEP here . Thanks are due to Teacher Plus and Nirmala. Title: Textbooks for Sustainable Development: A guide to embedding Year of publishing: 2017 Publisher: United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development Pages: 186 Over the years as one dabbled in education (especially environment education) one faced a number of questions. Questions which were critical but which did not have clear answers and did not get the attention they deserved. Questions like why was our education so fragmented and removed from our lives? Was this data dr...

~ Some glimpses of the few days of thrill ~   ~ Moving on a raft along the India – Bangladesh border ~ ~ In the Dampa Tiger Reserve ~ ~ Eclectic North East publishes this post in its March 2018 issue ~ The River. So little do we city bred know of a river! This stuck me on the first day of our trip and would re-visit me each day of the trip. Colours where the happy streams came down to join the river we were akin to a nature’s flowing palette; a poetic reality! Insects came out in no small numbers when our rafts bumped into vegetation along the banks. They, as if, checked us out and troubled no further. The only bridge we passed under still carried the weight of the last seasons flood.  It was neither easy nor very pleasant to imagine ourselves on the rafts with that form of the river. Within the 60 km stretch the river’s width varied from 4 to 40 meters and it had different sounds, sounds I could not comprehend. The water is in ripples where it is too sha...

Making history come alive The Hindu – EDGE – published this piece on 22 nd January, 2018. It is an abridged version of the piece published by Teacher Plus in its November 2017 issue. The piece in EDGE here and Teacher Plus here . Thanks are due to Shalini and The Hindu. ‘ She is not interested in museums ’, a friend said, of his daughter. He left me wondering. The history lover in me was not very happy. I frequent museums and try to savour those at places I visit. Here I speak not just of large and exquisite collections like the ones at the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay but also of smaller museums. Museums in capitals of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland have taught me about the homes and festivals of people there, the clothes they once wove and wore, their fishing and cultivation practices and more. Today, we also have privately owned museums. Some of them like the textile and vessel museums at Ahmedabad boast of very focused and novel collections. Then, of...