Blogs

We have seen two, virtually spontaneous, bandhs in the Northeast in the days just gone by. One was a relatively-short 12-hour Assam bandh called in protest against the letting off of the accused in the botched-up Parag Das murder case. The other was a much more gruelling 48-hour bandh called in Manipur over the cold-blooded, fake encounter of a former militant. Bandhs have been so rampant in the Northeast in the last 20 or so years that people have become inured to them. And bandhs, more often than not, are a success without the advocates of the bandhs having to drum up much support for them...

It’s been almost five to six long years since I had attended the second Brahmaputra beach festival which took place almost after two years after the first one. I had come home for my winter holidays and I got to know about then beach festival from my friends. I was really very excited to attend the festival as I had heard a lot about it from my friends and relatives. I kept insisting my father to take me to attend the beach festival and, therefore, my parents had to. After we reached the bank of the Brahamaputra we had to walk almost half a kilometre to reach the beach in question. Almost...

I was in dire need. Hence, I was furiously flipping through the pages of the Guwahati Yellow Pages (2009) and the Northeast Yellow Pages (2009) a few days back in order to get hold of a phone number of the Tarun Ram Phookan Indoor Stadium. There were around four to five numbers. Or, so I found. I tried dialing up all the numbers which were clearly printed in the yellow pages but unfortunately none of them actually worked. Either the numbers did not exist in the first place. Or no one answered. Either way, it did not help matters for me. Next, I tried taking recourse to the Dial-In service...

Majority of the people in Guwahati prefer travelling by the city bus because it is cheap, though not very safe. The local city bus charges only three-four rupees from passengers. Travelling by an auto on a regular basis becomes an expensive affair for the middle classes, or even anyone else. If ever by chance you happen to travel by a local city bus make sure that you get hold of a proper seat because the drivers are very rough as far as driving is concerned. There is a probability of you falling down inside the bus itself if you are as unlucky like me. You may even land up breaking your bones...

I always looked forward to visiting a green place within Guwahati city limits. But there was no such area which I could easily think of and locate it. We were a group of thirtyfive students from my college and we were taken to Basistha for our environmental studies project work. I had heard a lot about the Basistha temple from my parents and was wondering what exactly our teachers were going to show us in Basistha beside the age-old temple. Nevertheless, we all were excited to visit the place. Even though I had been staying in Guwahati for more than ten years, I never got the opportunity to go...