Dog Blogs Travel Trips

In early 2015, the organization I was affiliated with had an opportunity to expand their network to West Bengal. The euphoria of finally getting a chance to explore my motherland almost drowned in the agonising amount of research and data crunching I had to do, identifying key issues, organisations and movements across the state we wanted to work with. Scenes from the illegal quarries, Birbhum, West Bengal The data was baffling – West Bengal boasts of being the sixth largest economy in the country, and the state’s power infrastructure and roads and railways network is top notch as compared to the rest of the country. Despite having literacy rates higher than the national average, over 30% of the youth in Bengal remained unemployed in 2012-2013. 47 million unemployed young people. This was the same year the state recorded the highest rates of violence against women in the country. Savage destruction of fragile ecology of the Sundarbans and the North Bengal, at the foothills of th...

Puppy-sitting has taken its toll on me, and I've succumbed to the idiot box. Yes, I've been watching a lot of TV. And yes, I hate it. Regardless, I find myself glued to the TV on a regular basis, watching with fascinated horror all the ridiculously bejeweled women cribbing and indulging in complex plans of vengeance. As their husbands cavort with the caked-with-make-up ‘vamps’. That reminds me, I loathe how women feel the need to thwack on make-up at social dos while men get away with appearing in clean, ironed clothes! Bah! Anyway, getting back to TV…I blame my University degree in gender & culture, and my liberal parents who refused to indulge in gender biases because I am no longer able to enjoy even a dance ‘reality show’ without cringing at the ridiculous stereotypes being played out on a weekly basis. While TV has definitely matured since the days of ‘ Dostana ’, where homosexuality was openly depicted in mainstream, (though not celebrated, dammit!), uptight Bollyw...

I enjoyed being a kid. If you got hurt, you could cry and then someone would show you an ice cream and you’d forget. Digging a pond in your grandparents’ garden was the achievement of the day. Scrubbing out dirt from your fingernails afterwards was a huge success. Life was about basketball, chocolates, being late for breakfast or that twist of ‘black salt’ from the guy in front of the forbidden boy’s school. Small things meant such a big deal. Like swallowing an orange pip had me freaking out for days about whether or not I had an orange tree in my stomach. Or whether I should have eaten that minuscule chatar matar off the field (“God said never to waste”) or not. We played in the flooded school ground with no worries about mud stains and spent hours in a soap fight when washing out the very same mud. The sand pit was cool coz we made funny sand cakes and plastered the wall. The slide hurt our butts and skinned our knees and we jumped in piles of freshly mown grass. Growing up was full...