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...

When you're a year older, you start waking up a little tired, just a little weird and just that little bit confused. Birthdays are supposed to be happy right? That's what they sing! I agree with Sid though - "Birthdays mean you realize you're actually not immortal!" People around me have grown up. They are doing stuff. Started working. Started painting. Casanova steadied up. One got married. Engaged. Had kids. Working. Contemplated studying. Started  exercising. Began running. Went back to dancing. Learnt swimming. Doing something. I'm just busy trying to quit going crazy. Ever since I left Goa almost two months ago for training camps, I've been going crazy. At times polite, at times well mannered, strict, loyal, quiet, well dressed, no slang, "rashtriya" bhasha, "decent", meticulous, mathematical, awake, alert, far thinking, conservative, demure, explaining, understanding, sympathetic, observant, eat fruits, be fit, quit smo...

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...