Omid No More
A pair of Siberian cranes in Keoladeo Ghana, February 1994. Photo: Bernard Dupont/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Keoladeo Ghana, popularly called Bharatpur, was declared a national park in 1982 and a UNESCO World Heritage ‘Natural’ Site in 1985. The site originated in 1850 as a man-made hunting reserve for the Maharaja Suraj Mal of Bharatpur.
The hunting reserve was popular among the royalty, the British and the armed forces alike. There is a stone plaque here that describes a hunting excess from 1902 to 1964. In this time, the ‘highest score’ went to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, who killed 4,206 waterfowl using 50 guns, on November 20, 1916. The last engraved hunt is that of General J.N. Chaudhuri, chief of the army staff, who on February 23, 1964, killed 556 waterfowl using 51 guns in just half a day.
Uttam Kumar: Why Bengali cinema s colossus had a rough time in the Hindi film industry scroll.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scroll.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
As an earnest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray made the hills his very own. His approach to the hills in films such as Kachenjunga and Sikkim talk about his vision in two markedly different ways. Kanchenjunga on one hand is a feature film talking about muddle-headed characters negotiating loveless relationships in the backdrop of a family holiday in Darjeeling.
Revisiting Bengali films in the 100th year of Indian cinema May 20, 2013, 12:25 PM IST
Sharmistha Gooptu is a film scholar and has a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. She is a founder and managing trustee of the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF), and editor of the online South Asia Archive. She is also the joint editor of the journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) and the Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series. LESS. MORE
As Indian cinema celebrates its 100 years, attention, for a large part, has been centred on Bombay, where Dadasaheb Phalke’s mythological Raja Harishchandra- the ‘first’ full-length ‘Indian’ film- released in 1913. However, Calcutta, till 1911, the capital of British India, already had a nascent film industry in the 1910s, and was almost at par with Bombay in silent and first talkie eras– a history that is often forgotten. Over the years, Bengali cinema has had its own presence, producing