Kolkata’s Durga Puja is India’s official nomination for the 2020 edition of the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Durga Puja is not only a religious festival, it is the most significant socio-cultural event in Bengal. Though predominantly originated in the Hindu ritual and legends, the Durga Puja celebration cross cuts the communal divide in many of its attributes. It is an epitome of harmony across caste, class, creed and religion.
Recently, I attended an Iftar party at a luxury hotel in Baghdad. After I finished the food, I found a nice, sweet dessert there, called Om Ali — a simple concoction: bread and pastry are combined with raisins, pistachios, coconut and almonds, then drenched in sweetened milk. It’s not the story of a royal chef preparing an innovative dish at the behest of a discerning king, but of a murder and a rather cruel one!
Humour is the foundation of a cartoon and it is its limitation. Attempts to rationalise humour in terms of today’s utilitarian social structure probably explain why political cartooning, and the genre of cartooning as a whole is a dying art. In a fast-paced environment such as the internet, memes emerged as a one-dimensional satirical illustration; they don’t engage with the issue and, therefore, their moral message and practical impact are limited.
Dolma is a family of stuffed vegetable dishes common in the Mediterranean cuisine. It slowly made a delicious journey from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of the Bay of Bengal, where it got the exotic transformation.
Roasting small chunks of meat is a process dating back to antiquity. Evidence of hominin use of fire and cooking in the Middle East dates back as far as 790,000 years. In the end, it doesn’t really matter who invented kebab. What matters is that fire has touched meat, that the meat is good, and the company is even better.
In 1227 CE, the thirty-seventh Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir Billah (reigned 1226-1242 CE) commissioned the construction of Al-Mustansiriyya madrasa in the capital city of Baghdad named in his honour. Construction lasted for six years and the school opened in 1234 CE. It was one of the oldest madrasas in the world. Al-Mustansiriyah Madrassa stands as a testament to Iraq’s resilience and endurance over the centuries and demonstrates that barbarism and terrorism of any kind, at any period, cannot prevail over culture and knowledge.
While I was posted at Jharkhand zonal office, I used to travel sometimes to Lohardaga, Latehar, Palamau, and Garhwa districts of Jharkhand from Ranchi and a small town named Kuru (कूड़ु), around 60 km from Ranchi, used to be my regular stop. There is a T-junction at Kuru. The road goes straight to the bauxite city of Lohardaga, while the right one heads towards Betla, Latehar, and Daltonganj. There are a few sweet shops selling famous chhena toast and dhushka.
Among the snowy peaks of Nepal and Tibet, stories tell of a mysterious ape-like creature called the Yeti. Purported to be a towering human-like figure covered in shaggy fur, the Yeti continues to excite dedicated believers still hoping for evidence that the mythical creature is real. The lack of hard evidence despite decades of searches doesn’t deter true believers; the fact that these mysterious creatures haven’t been found is not taken as evidence that they don’t exist, but instead how rare, reclusive, and elusive they are.
