Bahuchar Mata Temple

One of the many important temples of India, is the Bahuchar Mata Temple in Gujarat’s Mehsana district. Of the fifty one Shakti Peethas (abode of Goddess Shakti or Sati) in India, the Bahuchar Mata Temple is one of the three in Gujarat. It is believed that during the Tandava dance of Lord Shiva, the left hand or “bahu” of Ma Devi Sati had fallen here. She is the patron goddess of the eunuchs and is worshipped as Goddess Bala Tripura Sundari.

In September 2014, I had the opportunity to accompany a senior and celebrated photographer from Calcutta on a relative wet day. The 100 kilometre drive was rather uneventful, barring a few broken roads submerged by gushing water from overflowing waterbodies.

  • Faith
With Raju and Family

The Blue Shirt Uncle

Garia to me is synonymous with my grandfather, my father and his entire fraternity. I spent a few years of my childhood in Garia, when the nearest bus terminus was more than a kilometre away and the nearest water body was just below the window from where we would catch fish during monsoons. The lowlands, water bodies are all filled up with dwelling units and apartments. Garia boasts a very different land and skyscape and rightfully so, than it did in 1970.

My grandfather, the artist, lived in Garia, with a wife, a widowed sister, three sons and their wives, a daughter and her husband who lived nearby, two granddaughters and two grandsons – one of them being me. Of the three sons, my father was the youngest. Raju was my uncle’s son – and the youngest of my cousins. 

It was 2005. Raju, his family and his parents lived in Garia and theirs was a beautiful large open farmhouse with a pond surrounded with greens. To us, hailing from the concrete jungles of Gurgaon, this was a respite. We spent a large part of the day with my uncle and aunt, Raju, his wife Shefali and daughter Bebo, chatting, laughing and over a decent dose of exquisite Bengali cuisine. Yet the highlight of the day was the hilarious incident of Sujatha slipping into the pond and drenching herself. An incident over which Raju and I laughed even in 2021.  Our little daughter who thus far was busy in a typical cocooned nucleus family was overwhelmed by the variety of uncles, aunts, grand uncles and grand aunts and the unending list of relatives around her. Raju was wearing a blue shirt that day, and instantly registered as “ The Blue Shirt Uncle” for my daughter.

On a visit to Gurgaon, to his workplace at Panasonic, he visited us in 2011.  That was the only time and Raju the only one, who has ever visited us from Garia. My daughter was elated to have met “Blue Shirt Uncle” who was wearing a different colour now.

Part of my long unkept promise to my wife, that I would show her around in Tagore’s Shantiniketan was just kept, finally in December 2019 after 25 years followed by a six hour long delay at Bangalore airport. Our next stop was Kolkata. We wanted to meet everyone at one place and suggested that we have a grand family get together at Raju’s house – and idea that was shot down.

We eventually chose to meet for breakfast, and we were to buy local kachori-jalebi from the typical Calcuttan sweet shops. But hospitality sense won over epicurean desires and Shefali treated us to some very delicious home-made koraishuntir kochuri and phulkopir torkari – a delicious Bengali breakfast treat. 

I traveled to Kolkata again in January 2020, and was staying at the Radisson. We had agreed to meet up over breakfast one of those two days, but we never could meet. 

He surprised me when he called me last year to tell me that he has bought a camera and also joined group of photo enthusiasts. He made me proud again. And for more than a few hours over the next few weeks we chatted. I promised that I will introduce him to a few good photographers in Kolkata for peer learning and development.  I felt awesome supporting this little brother of mine – he had made me feel as some kind of role model.

He responded to my Facebook post on Bengali New Year’s day with a limerick. I had thought of calling him back and telling him about a letter that he consistently missed, making some of the words mean different than intended. Yet, by the time I caught up with him, COVID had already got the better of him. Raju celebrated life. He would respond to every sentence of mine with ” thik, thik” ( correct, correct), something I used to find funny. Raju used to love the tea at this stall round the corner of Garcha near Radisson… and above all he had a massive respect and love for me and Sujatha… underscored and intense. I could feel it over the phone and when we met him.

Raju grew up to become a thorough gentleman and an awesome soft-spoken, cheerful Bengali “bhadrolok” ; albeit in jeans and shirt instead of the traditional “dhoti-panjabi”. In the over four decades of his life that I have known him, I have never found him without the smile, nor have I found him complain.  I made fun of his bald since his was the most expansive one after my grandfather. And I had warned him, cajoled him to take care of his health.

The deadly COVID 19 pandemic had been around for more than eight months now and we were surviving in The New Normal which essentially required citizens to adhere to stringent COVID appropriate behaviour or CAB. It took me some time to fathom the excessive callousness several companies demonstrated by pushing their employees into a dangerously infection prone environment in spite of repeated warnings by WHO and Indian governments. Raju was on the streets, braving several kilometres of exposure on a daily basis.

In Kolkata, it seemed that the much needed vaccines were being either hoarded or blackmarketeered amidst governments wanting to control sales and distribution, while most of victims were being further victimized. We were blessed – our colleagues from workplace and their colleagues guided us to the medicine. They specially offered the medicine as stockist’s price. These sales personnel were the Good Samaritans working shoulder to shoulder with the much touted “COVID Warriors”.

Yet, by then, much precious time had already been lost in finding a bed in any hospital. He was admitted with much damage. And much precious time was lost in procuring and eventually administering the vaccine. By mid-morning, on my sister’s birthday, Raju moved on after a prolonged and brave fight against the virus. He died a hero.

A week ago a rationale kept playing in my mind. I had lost my brother in December 2016, my mother in December 2017, my mother-in-law in June 2019 and my paw-in-law in September 2019. It seemed that the last two deaths of 2021 in the extended family; of my cousin sister, Mistidi’ of NOIDA and Uncle Leo from Goa would have evened out, at the rate of one death per year. My grandfather’s legacy is now reduced to two of three sons, two of three daughters-in-law, three of five grandsons and two of three granddaughters. The rationale simply failed to add up. The statistics were clearly inexplicable. This pain was excruciating and poignant.

This virus has brought us down to our knees. Our egos crushed and animosity demolished. Too many happy and noble souls passed on and away from us forever, in these last few months alone. Raju was a wonderful human being. His legacy should be all about goodness, smiles and unconditional affection.

The virus is here to stay. For a long while. Beyond the numbers and beyond the statistics.

Yet, the legacy of my daughter’s “Blue Shirt Uncle” and my dear cousin brother Raju, will carry on forever, as more and more people fight against this virus; most winning and some succumbing. The love and affection we exude will far surpass the evil attack of the virus.

And that indeed will be the true tribute to my brother.

The Kashi Diaries

My first visit to this arguably oldest metropolitan town was in April 2016, and yet, it was not until the recent solo week and meeting about a dozen more people in one of the most celebrated religious pilgrimage towns of India, that the unique peculiarity of Varanasi became apparent to me. There is so much more about Varanasi, that one can well spend an entire lifetime reading and telling stories and moments about the temple town. Everytime I have visited Kashi, there’s been a few new stories to tell….

Avian Love

Phoenix dactylifera was the first scientific name I had learnt in school before Passer Domesticus, Columba livia domestica, Corvus splendens splendens and then onto Haliastur indus, Phalacrocorax niger, Phoenicopterus roseus . Admittedly, I did have a penchant for complicated names, and never shied from bragging the expansions of KLM and KGB. Srikumar Chatterjee was a senior scientist with the Zoological Survey of India’s Calcutta branch and was a co-passenger with my parents to and from his workplace in the same “chartered bus”, during the early 1980s, when I was introduced to him. Much before I learnt about “ornithology” or picked up a Dillon Ripley or Salim Ali, Srikumar’da had introduced me to a group of individuals with a vested interest in nature and conservation. They called themselves “Naturalists” and formed a club “Prakiti Samsad” or Nature Team. My tryst with birds, cannot be complete without a reference to the influence that the zoologist & good friend Srikumar Chatterjee had on me in those formative years, although I must say, that none of these made me a wildlife enthusiast anymore than anyone else. Srikumar Chatterjee was a member of the early Indian expeditions to the Antarctica and while many journals refer to photographs shot by him, there are hardly any of his photographs on the internet. I have a copy of his famous Albratross over the Antarctica shot circa 1982. Having lost touch with him, I tried to track him down a few years ago, when I got to know that he died of depression, a year after he returned from the Antarctica expedition. Wildlife photography is not my forte, but who doesn’t love nature.

Jhalawar

My confidence on the MapMyIndia GPS device was gradually on the ebb, when we conceded to ask for directions to passersby. As I stopped by a corner, rolled down the glass and was about to ask the two burly local cops for directions to Jhalawar, my friend Dr. Mitra promptly quipped – “These people must be the rehabilitated bandits from the Phoolan Devi gang”. …
Jhalawar is a small town in East Rajasthan, about 30 kilometers before reaching the Madhya Pradesh border on the National Highway 27. Every year the locals of Jhalrapatan celebrate the Hindu festival of “Kartick Purnima”. The inauguration begins with a long procession of different groups of people like students, boy scouts, stage actors and above all cordially invited tourists. The tourists who travel from the farthest of places are accorded more importance.

Gwalior Light Railway

On a trip to Mathura, Vrindavan, Barsana and adjoining areas during Holi 2017, we had two days of inactivity in the region. We decided to take a drive along the narrow gauge, Gwalior Light Railway or Maharaja Railway. The Gwalior Light Railway was built by the Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of the Gwalior State. In 1942, the Gwalior Light Railway was renamed the Scindia State Railway. In 1951, the system was purchased by the Central Railway. The stretch of 198 kilometers made it the world’s longest narrow gauge railway, and it remained so till the government shut it down in 2020.

Vrindavan

On the long route from Delhi to South of India, one of the initial stopovers on the national highway before Agra and Mathura. In spite of living close to Vrindavan for almost three decades, in the National Capital Region that is an area comprising of New Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and parts of Faridabad, it was not until 2013 that I first visited Vrindavan with a camera, solely for photography.

Escape Festival of Music 2013

In 2013 we drove up to Naukuchiatal, in Uttarakhand a northern state in India. Young men and women were to perform live in what is known as the Escape Festival of Music.