Wish to visit a war memorial built by the British? This one is unique. It was built by the British, but inspired by Mughal architecture. The war memorial of Pepper Pot built in 1847, incidentally had no connection to any war fought in Kolkata. Entrance gate(left)
For a long time, Mirik was only a location you checked into on your way to Darjeeling. Beautiful and scenic, yes, but essentially good for a meal and perhaps a boat ride on the famous lake, but not for an overnight stay. However, that picture
It was a warm afternoon in 1982 in Kolkata, when legendary film maker Satyajit Ray received a phone call from none other than legendary science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke. He called up Ray after a screening of Steven Spielberg’s ET that sent waves across
Hawa lagey gaaner paley / Majhi amaar bosho haaley (The breeze makes the song-sails flutter / O boatman, be on the radar). None other than Rabindranath Tagore felt the charm of being on a boat for days, sailing on a river. His annual boat trips
Metcalf Hall With apologies for the hiatus between our last edition and this, we return to our walkabout of Kolkata’s oldest quarters. As promised last time, our walk this week will take us around the Esplanade area, and will be the last of our short walks.
Dhamrai Rath Yatra, Dhaka In a previous article, we had written about the grand Rath Yatra at Mahesh in Hooghly district’s Serampore area. Now in its 625th year, the festival in Mahesh is India’s second oldest Rath Yatra after Puri. Bengal is home to many more
Tanmoy Chatterjee A photographer of national repute, Tanmoy has taken some beautiful shots of Kurseong in the rains, and GetBengal is thankful to him for giving us an opportunity to publish his photographs Traditional wisdom says that the monsoon is not the best time to visit a
The term Dokra (or Dhokra) comes from the Dokra Damar tribe, an extensive ethnic community now spread all across India. This tribe produces the traditional metalsmiths of West Bengal and Odisha, who have given Dokra artefacts their name, and their technique of lost wax casting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPOTHJ3CH9g Rural cooking videos have picked up in recent years and the familiar frame of frail, aged women seated in their mud-plastered courtyards or farm fields with traditional earthen cookwares, Shil-nora or Sil-batta (grinding stone) and mortar and pestle, ready at hand and cooking up a
When it comes to authorship, folk songs can be hard to pin down. Many of our most popular folk songs have been around for what could be centuries, with their original creators remaining forever unknown. Such as the song ‘Bare bare ar asa hobe na