Walking or driving through Kolkata’s BBD Bagh area, the magnificent General Post Office (GPO) building is hard to miss. It has been part of the city landscape forever, or so it seems. In reality, the GPO was only designed in 1864 by Walter Grenville, but
The ancient settlement of Jaynagar-Mojilpur stands at the gateway of the Adi Ganga in the Sunderbans. Most Bengalis know the twin towns for ‘Joynagarer Moa’, a seasonal sweet made of date-palm jaggery and Kanakchur ‘khoi’ (popped rice, akin to popcorn). That apart, Joynagar-Mojilpur is also
Who else but Rabindranath Tagore can come to the rescue of our battered mental health in these times of crisis? And why not? After all, he himself witnessed deaths of near ones over and over again to diseases that do have a cure today. His
It was French journalist and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who in 1849 first coined the saying, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they remain the same). He could easily have been talking about what is said to
In around 1820’s, an ambitious Moira (sweetmeat maker) named Ramchandra Das from Debrajhat village in Burdwan-Khandagoshi arrived in Calcutta, then a melting pot of adventurers, businessmen, bootleggers and people from all walks of life to try his luck in this burgeoning city on the banks
Filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak was often found here at a table, indulging in heated arguments with his friends, seen walking out in a huff, only to return to the 150-year-old drinking hole of Calcutta, tucked in one corner. As the oldest bar of the city, Chhota