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...

One morning in cold cold Delhi I woke up and felt like I'd just hit a massive  block in my life.Bangla ma’am had a great way of expressing that feeling. Only, she used it to describe her frustration with my pathetic spellings – she called it “hotasha”. Complete and overwhelming despair! And she spent hours painstakingly going over the difference between all the random bangla “sho”s. And I spent hours painstakingly researching organisations which would take as far away from Delhi as possible. And before I knew it - I was hugging Jess in Goa . Yes, yes, I work in Goa . Yes, yes, the Goa . Yes, yes and yes - land of sun sand and sea. And clear skies. And navy nights. And stars carelessly scattered around. And the fireflies with their lit up bums, flitting around and lighting my way when I’m gingerly stepping over the broken stairway to my office at night. And that oh-so-fat moon and bathes the backyard with a strange silver glow. There’s Baga the bitch who quivers with pleasure whe...