blog@Yantrajaal

Ever since I was a child growing up in Calcutta the advent of upcountry pilgrims for the Ganga Sagar Fair was an annual event. Every year, on the occasion of Makar Sankranti, when the Sun transits from Dhanu (Sagitarrius) to Makar (Capricorn), bus and train loads of pilgrims, mostly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, would descend on Calcutta and then head out towards Diamond Harbour and Sagar Island where the Ganga ( or Bhagirathi) river finally empties itself into the Bay of Bengal. The ashram and temple of Kapil Muni is the epicentre of a gigantic mela where 30,00,000 people gather to seek the blessings of Kapil Muni, Raja Sagar ( please note, this is NOT pronounced as Saagar, no long aa after S) and Raja Bhagirath, the king who "brought" the Ganga to this point. For the Bengali population of Calcutta, the Ganga Sagar Mela was never a big event and even if we had thought of visiting the place, the chaos that is traditionally associated with the event -- when 3 million people d...

We have been living in Calcutta for so long and yet rarely do we find the time to visit the Sunderbans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that is just next door. The Sunderbans is famous for two things, first the Royal Bengal Tiger and the unique estuarine-mangrove ecosystems that has protected Calcutta and Bengal from the fury of many Bay of Bengal cyclones and the resultant tidal bores. In the context of global warming and the rise in the level of the sea, it is very likely that a hundred years from now the Sunderbans will get submerged and then live on only in history and in people's memory. Hopefully, these pictures will help us remember this tragic, magic land! Our destination was the Royal Bengal Resort, near the Sajnekhali Reserve Forest But we started off from Godkhali, 100km from Calcutta, just beyond Canning and right across the Bidyadhari River from Gosaba, one of the largest and busiest bazaar/village in the Sunderbans. There are no roads in the Sunderba...

Gangani is an unusually picturesque place on the banks of the Shilabati River, near Garhbeta, West Midnapur, West Bengal. Here erosion by water has created strange earth and rock formations on the banks of the river and the red colour of the soil gives the place an eerie look. The following slide show will help explain what we are talking about. Some people refer to this place as the Grand Canyon of Bengal but of course in terms of size, the place is miniscule compared to the original in the US. This is what the place looks like in Wikimapia

Moyna Garh is a very unusual tourist spot that we discovered near Tamluk in East Midnapur. It was a fort with two moats surrounding it and it looks like an island inside an island. The fort has now been swallowed up by time but there are two ancient and very beautiful temples that are still there. These are some of the pictures that we took there the few boats that are available to ferry people had stopped plying by the time we reached around noon. However we managed to motivate on boatman to allow us the use of this rickety boat to reach the inner island This is a very ancient Radha Krishna temple. It comes alive during the Ras Festival in October-November This is the deity that is taken out in a beautiful, illuminated boat on the occasion of the Ras Festival This is the Noukeshwar Shiva temple. The Noukeshwar ( Lord of the Boats ) shivalinga is deep underground and the place gets flooded during the monsoon floods In celebration of Lord ...