Police camp, roadside cafes set up to attract customers and make the place less desertedT
The cafe housed inside a recycled ship container in New Town all set for the opening on Tuesday / Sourced by the Telegraph
One can barely guess that a piping hot cafe next to the Eco Space Island in New Town is brewing inside a discarded ship container.
But look closely and you notice that the brightly painted exterior is made of — not cement but — metal. The kitchen is compact, rectangular-shaped and that its “windows” are but cut out of the metal walls.
Cafe@Ecospace is located inside a recycled ship container. Rather, the kitchen is inside the container and chairs have been laid out outside for customers to sit on.
The project is an initiative by New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA). “This stretch of road from Eco Space to Elita Garden Vista or Avenida complex had become unsafe with even a case of snatching having taken place a couple of years ago,” explained Debashis Sen, chairman, NKDA. “Thereafter a police camp has come up nearby, streetlights have been added and as a strategy we have decided to set up roadside cafes that will attract customers and make the place less deserted.”
Debashis Sen interacts with members of the women’s self-help group Rabindra Swanibhor Gosthi t the opening / Sourced by the Telegraph
To run the cafe, the authorities narrowed in on a women’s self-help group called Rabindra Swanirbhar Gosthi. “These women have been successfully running a food joint called Jagarani for three years opposite Eco Space and shall now run this cafe as well,” said Sen.
The women are excited about the venture. “We shall serve soups, sandwiches, rolls, chowmein, momos and more,” smiled Mahasinara Begum from behind her mask.
“At Jagarini, we would cook for 250 people a day but due to the pandemic very few people are coming now. Nonetheless we are supplying food to a safe house in New Town and doing home delivery. We realise that customers at the cafe will be scanty to start with but we are hopeful in the long run,” said Sabina Bibi, a resident of Rajarhat.
Their sandwiches are priced upwards of Rs 30, chowmein Rs 25 and lassi Rs 30.
As for the container, Sen said they went with the idea as they advocate recycling. “Since the metallic roof would get terribly hot in summer we built a shed atop and have added solar panels there. The women are also cooking with electric means instead of LPG,” he said.
The ladies are quite satisfied with their 20ftx8ft container kitchen, induction cooker and microwave. “This is more eco-friendly and is easier to clean than when using gas cylinders,” said Manoshi Maity, another member of the self-help group.
saltlake@abpmail.com
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Brinda Sarkar / September 18th, 2020
The state Panchayats and Rural Development department is laying special emphasis on fish farming through biofloc technology with the objective of livelihood support amidst the COVID -19 pandemic situation.
West Bengal Comprehensive Area Development Corporation (CADC) under the aegis of the department which is executing and pushing for biofloc to be adopted by the SHG groups across the state has set the ball rolling by setting up an infrastructure of fish cultivation through biofloc at its own office at Mrittika in Salt Lake. It is expected to be readied by this week.
“Biofloc is a technology using which one can produce fishes significantly in large quantities (in a small volume of water) as compared to the traditional form of aquaculture in large ponds. It is easy to monitor the fish movement, their behaviour and abnormalities as they will remain within a tank which in turn will facilitate taking the corrective measures immediately, ” said a senior official of CADC.
Probiotic and molluscs are used to eliminate chances of food particles and excreta of the fishes in polluting the water . These components produce planktons and prevent the production of ammonium nitrate which is toxic for the fishes. An aerator is used to add oxygen to the water.
“We will be creating a biofloc model in each of our 23 projects in the state and accordingly training will be provided. The seeds will also be supplied by us. The interested SHGs will bear have to bear the other costs. However the scheme can also be taken up under MGNREGA in which the government will bear the entire cost, ” said the official.
The technique is already being practised at Tamluk in East Midnapore, Ayodha Hills in Purulia and in some semi arid zones in Murshidabad, Jhargram and Birbhum.
Air-breathing fish rearing in cement tank by 60 farmers in Kolaghat has already seen success. Every 8 feet by 6 ft tank were provided with 500 seeds on an average each costing Re 1. In three to four months each tank produces 25 kg on an average (koi, singi, magur, ) whose average price is Rs 250 to 300 per kg. The income from each tank is around Rs 7000 a month so for 60 tanks the income is Rs 42,0000.
A wide variety of fishes can be cultivated through this technology like Koi, Magur, Singi, Telapiya, Pabda and even prawn.
source: http://www.millenniumpost.in / Millennium Post / Home> Kolkata / by Soumitra Nandi / September 21st, 2020
there was a time when all of poetry was a wild and endless epiphany
before recollections rolled anger roiled and ardour spent
retreading bookstreet now where time is liquid and burning drowning infusions sugarblack melting argument
smoking love
— calcutta, crow III
Well-known academic Brinda Bose has published her 21 poems in a chapbook, collected over a small lifetime during the first part of this year’s pandemic lockdown.
The early poems bear an uncomfortable resemblance to TS Eliot; by the third poem in the collection Calcutta, Crow and other fragments she finds her voice in the poem about her ageing parents:
whoever knew that such an ageless street as this the ageing might reclaim hunting still
for themselves, for others, for books, coffee, grass, frenzy and rapture restless poems that spiral up and down those grimy stairs vomiting fear and tenderness fervent, insomniac —
calcutta, crow III
By the way, she mischievously informs us that around her ageing parent’s eyes are crowsfeet.
tracking bruises that broke and made you
fingering lightly all the laughter that birthed the crowsfeet at the corners of your eyes.
After the early four Crow poems – more indebted to Sylvia Plath than Ted Hughes – she gives us four idiosyncratically titled poems on months, a kind of truncated barah maasa, viz “november: water”, “december: tree”, “january: gravestone” and “february: pocket”.
there’s something solitary about november like dark smudges on still water
like waiting for a friend to return from the river of summer (or is it from some mountain fall) not knowing that a prewinter bite has swallowed him whole
he’s left behind in the chair that he would sink into a hole shaped like his laughing mouth
— november: water
Or the sound of you, ringing lightly in my ear at an odd moment of afternoon when I tossed my head for the comfort of earrings swinging against my neck. A low sound it was, almost a memory of a whisper unheard. And then you fell out silently like a word unspoken and I flailed a cupped hand under my ear, my palm curved to catch a shooting star.
— february: pocket
A poem of unrequited young love captures a sensibility that is disappearing:
you said my eyes were like cactus flowers … you said you’d wade into my cactus flower eyes slain again and again by pleasure and surprise
that was a poem I wrote in youth.
there were no flowers that were my eyes. there was no you. there were only wanton pauper-poems careening about till the pennies ran out
— reprise
Then come the two prose poems collected under “words that bleed and fly 1 and 2”. The second one, “aubade”, is worth the whole collection. It is dedicated to another Bangla woman writer, Taslima Nasreen, a woman people equally love and hate for her personality and her poetry. The central metaphor of this poem addressed to a bidrohi Third World poet is a white cotton saree which is a battle flag, and which just as well could be used to herald a truce in the culture wars. The submerged metaphor is a refugee clothes bundle flung across a barbed wire fence at a border where it is impaled.
so you may land there but you shall not forget the words you left behind you in the lands you call your own, many cities that you had to leave one by one dhaka calcutta delhi trailing garlands of poems and prose and loves and conversations and writing, always writing. where can you go, where must you go, light and heavy on wings of words sharing stories and wine and the nostalgia of white. white summer sarees left behind at home…but wait, was that home?
…lives old and new are rolled up and hurled at the barbed wire fencing to pierce holes and squeeze dreams that are dead and dying through them like camels through eyes of needles
…just as you begin to believe that the roots are taking hold you must pack up your sarees and your stories in a weary suitcase and fly away again… the words find you again and again and tear into you and out of you and speed away to slam into other faces and names and tongues. to beat and flay and form fresh flags
of words, just like all your white summer sarees waiting to be worn and crushed and soiled with and poetry, splendidly done and undone in beauty, sadness and rage
words that bleed and fly 2: aubade
In my opinion, this poem is worth the value of the entire collection. Women, gays and poets, when most poets are all three, are left to mourn unrequited love. Bose acquits herself in the task most unsentimentally and in a modern idiom. At the same time she touches her readers deeply:
a dream implodes like a fat gooseberry in the mouth
— invocation 1
And this is the whole of “invocation 3”:
passion is both enraged and tender it’s where the shadow falls that slays or spares that is all
— invocation 3
The last poem, “poetry. still.”, talks about the two of you.
I take it to be a domestic setting in which a poet reconciles to everyday life inside the home and surrounding it even as she listens to “a snatch of voice” carrying her to a (fading) place where she wants to be, when
blood, skin, stone and bone batter homes and hills, roads and trees, rivers and seas.
Bose has heard whispers in an adjacent room, freedom and commitment are not watertight compartments. They feed into each other – “Les Vases communicants” as the surrealist André Breton put it, “Nirvana’s in Samsara” as our rishis tell us. So though there is a steady acceptance of life and its domestic realities there is an emerging into the writerly life…The poem, and the collection, ends with an extended mutating image of liquid red, flowing like scarlet fruit juice from the mouth in an exultation of drinking. There is rebellion yet in colour, and there is poetry, say its last lines:
cries and whispers gutted in a red room. the colour spills out of the door and runs like a river down the road outside your home into the neighbour’s house like the juice of a crushed pomegranate cruising down a chin poetry. still.
Calcutta, Crow and Other Fragments, by Brinda Bose, Hawakal Publishers.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Uses of Poetry / by Hoshang Merchant / September 18th, 2020
Sharbari Datta with Dino Morea, dressed in one of her creations / Telegraph picture
Every time I would drop by her Broad Street residence for an interview, which would more often be a straight-from-the-heart adda lasting hours, she would be seated on one particular intricately carved wooden chair in her home studio, nestling her cup of tea, and urging me to munch on the carefully laid-out platter of snacks in front of me.
The chat would essentially be followed up with a lunch, often cooked by her with keen care for my preferences. Hospitable, humble and immensely talented — that was Sharbaridi for me, whom the world knew as the legendary menswear designer Sharbari Datta.
Rightfully credited to have introduced the Indian man to the world of fashion, Datta started her journey in designing rather informally in 1991 with a small exhibition that received unexpected commercial success. One exhibition led to another and the Sharbari brand was born. The first Indian fashion brand that solely focussed on men’s clothing.
“I always felt that Indian men were very inhibited when it came to dressing up. Due to the colonial hangover, the British influence, we always considered grey, pale blue or navy blue as the masculine colours that make for smart outfits. But nowhere else is it so. Be it Japan or Africa or Afghanisthan or Pakistan… the men always dress in bright colours… so are they feminine? I wanted to prove that there’s no clash between masculinity and bright colours. Our Indian tradition in menswear is of bright colours and nakshas. So why have we ignored it completely? A three-piece suit is not the only fashion statement for an Indian man. He can also make a statement in traditional Indian clothes,” she had told The Telegraph in an earlier interview, when asked about her bold decision to tread uncharted territory.
With hand-embroidery over hand-sketched motifs that drew inspiration from rustic and folk cultures as the mainstay, the Sharbari Datta school of design became the go-to for the Calcutta man for his wedding outfit, who even dared to don the brightly coloured dhoti that she introduced, breaking the norm of the beige or white piece of traditional drape.
Not just Calcutta, her unique aesthetics drew men from all parts of the country — from Ismail Merchant (among her first celebrity clients) to Sunil Gavaskar, Imran Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Shoaib Akhtar, Sourav Ganguly, Leander Paes to Abhishek Bachchan and many other Bollywood and Tollywood stars, they have all proudly worn a Sharbari creation.
But the artist in her was always that wee bit more excited when somebody from the art world would choose to wear her creations.
“I feel extra special when artists buy my work. Since I consider my work as artwear, I have felt that my work has been certified when people like M.F. Husain, Ganesh Pyne, Manjit Bawa, Paresh Maity and Bikash Bhattacharya have bought my clothes,” Datta had told us. Datta was the daughter of famous poet Ajit Datta.
Showcasing her work in exhibitions across the world and winning innumerable awards — including The Telegraph She Awards in the Creative Art category in 2016 — Sharbari became a name to reckon with in the Indian fashion fraternity.
Conquering the world from her home studio, she resolutely refused to expand into other areas of design, keeping her focus firmly on menswear for the most part of her career. “I have always refused to diversify into other areas. I have always been very focussed.
Menswear is a very difficult area because men are difficult to deal with when it comes to fashion. Most of them are rigid and not adventurous. Women are much more open and receptive, so that’s a much easier area,” she would tell us.
In 2017, Datta distanced herself from her brand Sharbari Studio, which she co-owned along with her son Amalin Datta and daughter-in-law Kanaklata Datta. She launched another brand called Shunyaa, along with partners, making the signature Sharbari aesthetics its design DNA. With an opulent store in Hindusthan Park, Sharbari had built a new world for herself.
But for me, the picture of Sharbaridi that would remain forever etched in my heart would be of her sitting on that intricately carved wooden chair in her home studio, nestling her cup of tea while chatting her heart out.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Smita Roy Chowdhury / Calcutta – September 19th, 2020
If you don’t mind the old, if you find it elegant, not to say comforting, Broadway bar is the best party in town
Sandeep Sehgal at the bar at Broadway Hotel. Picture by Subhendu Chaki .
As the metal clinks against the glass, and the buzz mixed with laughter rises from the low tables covered in maroon or yellow tablecloths, and the shaded lamps throw light on black- and-white old Calcutta pictures, and the draught beer taps are placed on your table, and moonlight blended with electricity cracks in through the large glass windows on the front, you only miss live music. But then a tall gentleman enters the bar at Broadway Hotel through the side entrance.
He is very tall indeed. He appears silently at the door and then glides from table to table, ensuring that everyone gets a seat quickly, especially the ladies.
Sandeep Sehgal is the current owner of Broadway Hotel on Ganesh Chandra Avenue. Apart from lending his graceful, welcoming and slightly mysterious — he hardly speaks to a guest — presence to the place, he has also rendered a great service to the city.
He has kept Broadway Hotel and the bar, one of Calcutta’s most-loved places that started in 1937, the way he found them. Almost. Since he took over the hotel three years ago — the bar is on the ground floor; the four floors on top have rooms to stay in — Sehgal has just added one or two necessary, unobtrusive facilities to the bar and to the hotel. Such as the draught beer, AC, new crockery and a new menu that only adds to the old items, which include boiled eggs and the famous “Stock Market Toast” (named after bakery bread that was found near the Calcutta Stock Exchange building).
In the process he has assured old Broadway faithfuls, who form a substantial number of Calcuttans, that their refuge remains undisturbed. He has also performed an act of conservation — of a dear piece of the city, where “development” is a euphemism for demolishing the old.
Broadway, now, is exceptional in another way, as most bars in this part of the business district have either renovated themselves into a new-age tackiness to become unrecognisable or have turned into crooner bars. Or both.
I finally get to talk to Sehgal, 53, in his large and plain office on the first floor of the hotel. He was born to a Punjabi family in the city and educated here and abroad. “I am not going to change any of this. Because there is going to be no other place like this,” he reassures me personally.
Broadway always defied change, even in the hands of the earlier owners. Since the early 2000s, when most of the bars in the neighbourhood turned into crooner bars, Broadway stood its ground. Then, too, the bar had a loyal following, but mostly of office-goers.
It remained stodgy and refused an image makeover. Because it was confident of its charms, which begin with the old wooden doorway at the Ganesh Chandra Avenue entrance. It is a small cubicle by itself, possibly unique in Calcutta.
After Sehgal took over, the bar looks a little spruced-up, but still old and plain. So what is it that is so inviting?
Once you get in, if you are lucky, you may get a table by the large front windows. Or by the wall-to-wall mirror on one side. It does not matter really. The waiters will not trouble you with excessive attention, as in a snazzy restaurant, but will not neglect you either. The menu is exciting — you get everything from a robust Chicken-a-la-Kiev to succulent pieces of deep-fried Katla fish, and at prices that are quite old world too.
The old bar stands in a corner. On some evenings, you may spot another tall gentleman, much older, taking the same rounds as Sehgal. He is Mr Sehgal Sr.
But it is not one single detail. Here you are never rushed. They will let you be. Everyone is welcome. You feel good. You feel looked after.
Most of all, you feel free of the shiny oppressiveness of synthetic wood, glass and metal that defines the new restaurant chic. The new breeds such anxiety. It makes you feel that you are not up to it.
Broadway tolerates the old. You relax.
If you don’t mind the old, if you find it elegant, not to say comforting, Broadway bar is the best party in town.
That does not mean it is not cool. Far from it. The young, the trendy and the different are being increasingly spotted at Broadway. Some celebs too. A few scenes from the recent Bollywood film Dhadak were shot here.
Sometimes saving the old is good business as well.
Sehgal takes me on a guided tour of the hotel. The rooms are spacious ones, with old, unfussy furniture, very clean.
The previous owners, who were deeply attached to the property, had asked Sehgal, who also owns the restaurant Flavours of India on AJC Bose Road, Calcutta, and Hotel Utsav in Santiniketan, if he would make any changes.
“But I would not change anything,” Sehgal repeats. “We can’t make another property like this.”
“I will have to replace the furniture when they become too old. But this red oxide floor? These beams? Where will I get them now?” he asks.
Sehgal was also particularly careful in retaining all the staff. “In the hotel we have third-generation guests coming,” Sehgal says. The waiters and the visitors know each other. Besides, Sehgal did not visualise the hotel without the people who were a part of it.
If he has to renovate the hotel, the old Great Eastern Hotel will be his model. “Not the new one,” he stresses. “The old one.”
Sehgal reveals his height is 6ft 6”. He walks tall.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Online / Home> West Bengal / by Chandrima S Bhattacharya, Calcutta / September 15th, 2020
When Kalimul Haque, 45, joined the Nepalipara Hindi High School in West Bengal’s Paschim Burdwan district a decade ago, he was faced with a challenging task.
Misha Ghosal(HT)
When Kalimul Haque, 45, joined the Nepalipara Hindi High School in West Bengal’s Paschim Burdwan district a decade ago, he was faced with a challenging task.
“Such was the reputation of the school, that not only the students passing out of the institution were facing a bleak future, but I was badly scolded by a senior education officer of the district in my first meeting. On that day, I decided, that I would do something for the school,”
While in 2019, the Nepalipara Hindi High School at Labourhut, with more than 3600 students, was selected as the best school in the state by the West Bengal government, on Saturday Haque, a doctorate in geography, received the National Award.
Today, the school boasts of smart classes, a rooftop kitchen garden with hydroponics, water harvesting, vermicompost and students prepare their own teaching material under the guidance of teachers. From ten classrooms and one toilet in 2010, the school now has 57 classrooms and 24 toilets. Earlier students of classes, five, six and seven used to sit on the floor. Today the school has class 11 and 12 with all streams.
“Developing the school had almost become my addiction. My family supported me throughout. I am happy that I could do it,” said Haque who has received several awards including the Siksha Ratna award from the state government.
Meanwhile, in north Bengal, Misha Ghosal (51), the headmistress of Dhanapati Toto Memorial High School in Alipurduar districts’s Totopara, a home of primitive Toto tribes, had been working tirelessly for 11 years to make the school stand out among others. A postgraduate in Mathematics, she received the National Award on September 5.
“Even though I hail from Alipurduar district I had studied in Kolkata. So when I got selected for the head master’s exam and I was offered the school in the remotest corner, I was a bit afraid. But then, I took up the challenge and thought of doing something for the school and the society,” she said.
When she joined the school in 2009, only one student from the Toto community, having a population of only 1585, was able to cross the Madhyamik (class X board exam) hurdle. This year the success rate is over 80 percent.
Totopara, is a small and remote hamlet by the Indo-Bhutan border and remains marooned during the monsoons. One needs to cross seven rivers to reach the village. She almost single-handedly turned things for the school having 250 students.
“I worked hard to first win the confidence of the community and started two hostels. The school was developed from government-aided to government-sponsored so that it becomes financially sound. Now my aim is to uplift the quality of education in the school so that students can find jobs,” she said.
Rita Toto was the first female graduate from the community in 2010.
source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> Education / by Hindustan Times, Kolkata-Siliguri / September 05th, 2020
The cycle is as good for our personal health as it is for our environment, not to mention women’s empowerment: Lipika Biswas
Lipika Biswa cycles on a road in Kasba / Picture by Subhendu Chaki
Lipika Biswas’s landing in Europe for the first time in July 2018 was with a thud. She was in Frankfurt where first the immigration officer would not believe that a woman from India was on a two-month cycling tour in Europe, alone. Then Biswas realised that no mechanic was free to help her re-assemble her bicycle, which she was lugging behind her packed in a box.
But Biswas is not someone who gives up easily. Getting to Frankfurt had not been easy either.
She calls herself a solo traveller. An Eastern Railways employee where she works as a senior clerk, Biswas, who turns 52 on Wednesday, had planned the Europe tour meticulously. She would bike from Germany to Iceland. With loans from friends and a very supportive family, she had managed to put together Rs 4.5 lakh for the trip, and had trained herself relentlessly, but had missed the bit about the re-assembling.
In Frankfurt, she lost a day trying to get a mechanic to help her and several Euros, which would always and instantly be converted into rupees in her mind. “I paid Rs 3,500 as taxi fare in Frankfurt just to move to a new accommodation,” says Biswas, a resident of Kasba. The next day she got to work herself, going by instinct, and put together her bike, and set off for Mainz, when she also realised that she did not know how to use GPS.
But the roads held her up, as she was borne by the kindness of strangers.
Biswas had been a mountaineer from 1994, the year she joined the railways. She wanted to be an adventurer. She had grown up in Palta, on the outskirts of Calcutta, attending school there and college in Naihati. “I was a tomboy. I played daant-guli. No dolls for me,” says Biswas.
She joined a local mountaineering club, Nababganj Mountain Lovers, and with them, as with others, “summited” several Himalayan mountain peaks. In 1995 she trekked up to Kalindi Pass, which connects Gangotri and Gastoli. Within a few years, she was a veteran. For two years, 2014 and 2015, she was part of an Everest expedition team, but on both occasions she had to return from the base camp as the expeditions were cancelled.
She had always loved cycling. The last few years she has turned to these “magic wheels”.
“I still wanted to go far,” she said. To be able to go up mountains that seem to be rising straight up is to conquer fear. “While going up I would think not again. Coming down I would want to return right then.”
But she also wanted to go alone. It would help her to confront the final frontiers of fear. A doctor friend, her adviser, told her to try Europe. It would be “safe”.
So there she was, on way to Mainz from Frankfurt, on a bicycle assembled by herself for the first time.
In Mainz, she was told at a late hour that she would have to cross the Rheine to camp. Biswas would either be hosted by members of Warm Showers, an international free touring cyclists community, or stay at Airbnb places, or camp in her own tent wherever possible, even in someone’s garden, spending as little money as possible on food. But in Mainz, the couple told her she could stay the night at their place. This would be the first of the many homes that would be offered to her by strangers.
“One of the best things about cycling is meeting people,” says Biswas. She made many friends in Europe. She did not face a single incident of racism, she feels. She felt appreciated, though she surprised many as an “Indian woman” out on such a tour.
She rattles off the names of places she visited: Mainz, Cologne, Duisberg, to Arnhem, Amsterdam, Zalk (a village in the Netherlands), back to Germany, and Fehmarn, from where she entered Denmark. Then she visited Sweden and Norway. From Norway she reached Iceland from Faroe Islands by ferry. Reaching Iceland was an emotional moment. She biked through the country from Seyðisfjörður to Reykjavik, from where she took a flight to Calcutta via Copenhagen and Delhi.
“On some days I cycled for 100 to 120km,”says Biswas. “My friend from Calcutta insisted that I go wild camping. So I stayed alone in the forest at Kronsjo the night before I entered Norway from Sweden.”
She discovered the pleasure of railway waiting rooms. At Lunden, near Flam in Norway, she decided to spend the night at the tiny railway station just because it was so heart-stoppingly beautiful. She was the only one at the waiting room, surrounded by mountains and an immense solitude.
She also made friends out of a few Indian ambassadors at the capitals. “Despite some problems, the tour went off quite well,” says Biswas, who was back in Calcutta after two months.
Only to be back in another part of Europe the next year, same time, for two months. She took off from Vienna, biked through Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia to Istanbul, where she had a brainwave.
She felt she must visit Greece. She went to the island of Lesbos, the home of Sappho, the greatly admired poet of ancient Greece who also gives her name to the Sapphic tradition.
Biswas visited the island, but when she wanted to enter Turkey again, from where she would take the flight home, she realised that she had a one-entry visa. She spent a deeply anxious night with her passport taken away, after which she was finally granted another visa for Turkey.
Last year in April, she had also gone on a bike tour of Sri Lanka, but with a friend.
“And I will go again,” she says. And looks proudly at her three bikes – a folding bike, a mountain bike and a touring bike — which are all parked happily inside her bedroom at her small Kasba apartment.
She wants Calcutta to be more cycle-friendly. The cycle is as good for our personal health as it is for our environment, not to mention women’s empowerment, she points out. During the pandemic many cycles are out in the streets.
“But in Calcutta cyclists should also learn to follow traffic signals,” she insists.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Online / Home> West Bengal> Calcutta / by Chandrima S Bhattacharya / September 14th, 2020
