Distinctiveness - Travel and Lifestyle Blog

  Durga Ma is on her way, and Messi cannot contain his excitement. Sometimes, the wait for an event is almost as enticing as the actual occasion. The hours before a crucial football match. The final days ahead of a long-pending vacation. The morning of an eagerly awaited arrival. Quite similar to the drumroll - rapid beats on a drum, increasing in intensity by the second - before the extravagant ending. This drumroll is supposed to build up to the main event and often gets sidelined in the dazzling lights of the main event. However, I often find this anticipation, this wait, to be an endearing adventure as well.  I have been indulging in such thoughts of late. Perhaps there’s something in the air, or maybe it’s the season itself. Because, folks, it’s that time of the year again. The buildup to the grand occasion that gets Bengalis world over supercharged.  Durga Puja is less than a month away.  While others may indulge in the religious intricacies of the oc...

  My father gave me a very special gift, a present handed down through the generations, and it took me years to realize it. My father had an enormous passion for writing. His works now lie scattered across Dooars, the place he loved with all his heart. He wrote of the blues hills and the pristine rivers. The carpet of tea plantations covering the land and the joys and sorrows of its people. He spoke of life, love, pains, and celebrations. I looked up to him when I wrote my first verse decades ago. My father’s words shaped lives yet managed to outlive the man himself. On this day, eleven years ago, he quietly slipped away, the notebook open and the pen sitting idly on his study desk. My father left behind a room full of books and unfinished works and a massive hole in our lives. I have long believed that everything I have written since has been meaningless. All my efforts, wasted, because he would never read them. My father would never let out a disappointed sigh upon iden...