A change in path...

Inscriptions in the pyramid of King Unas. Portion of the Pyramid texts carved on the walls of chambers and antechambers ; the King's name appears in the cartouche. Dynasty V

Jayanti hills

Jayanti is the name of a river passing through the Buxa Tiger Reserve  in Eastern Dooars. The hills on the Eastern Side of the river and the small village on the western side are also named after the river as Jayanti Hills and Jayanti village respectively.

Jayanti village is one of the oldest towns in the region. In pre-independence India, the Dolomite mines of nearby Bhutan hills used to bring dolomite to Jayanti from where trains used to take it to other parts of the country. As the forest became reserved for the wildlife and nature took priority of economy, the railway stopped its operations and Jayanti slowly became a large village deep inside Buxa forest. Today the past glory of a burgeoning town is totally amiss from Jayanti. Instead what you see is a decaying village within a vibrant ecology. The nature has thrived here, the forest is green and the wildlife is aplenty. Although in the deep jungle sighting is not very common.

Tarpan - the ritual of offering in memory of forefathers

Mahalaya  is a sacred occasion observed a week before the durgapuja.  This day is of utmost importance for the bengalis. It is celebrated in order to invite Goddess Durga , the supreme power to descend on earth by chanting mantras and singing Devi Maa bhajans till midnight. 

This day is also considered the day of remembrance of departed souls of the family. The ritual of offering "tarpan" in memory of forefather's is commonly practiced on this day. Tarpan is offered on the banks of river ganga by priests for different group of devotees. The rituals start from early dawn and end during midday. it is believed that "tarpan" should be offered empty stomach and one should have food at the same place after completing the ritual.

High Hopes

A Purchase...

Bonds...

Contented ...

Silence and chaos ...

Squirell on a mission...

Squirrels are familiar to almost everyone. More than 200 squirrel species live all over the world, with the notable exception of Australia.

The tiniest squirrel is the aptly named African pygmy squirrel—only five inches (thirteen centimeters) long from nose to tail. Others reach sizes shocking to those who are only familiar with common tree squirrels. The Indian giant squirrel is three feet (almost a meter) long.

Like other rodents, squirrels have four front teeth that never stop growing so they don't wear down from the constant gnawing. Tree squirrels are the types most commonly recognized, often seen gracefully scampering and leaping from branch to branch. Other species are ground squirrels that live in burrow or tunnel systems, where some hibernate during the winter season.

Ground squirrels eat nuts, leaves, roots, seeds, and other plants. They also catch and eat small animals, such as insects and caterpillars. 

Egret

Many egrets are member of the genera Egretta or Ardrea which also contain other species named as herons rather than egrets. The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology. the word "egret" comes from the french word "aigrette" that means both "silver heron" and "brush", referring to the long filamentous feathers that seem to cascade down an egret's back during the breeding season.

Several of the egrets have been reclassified from one genus to another in recent years: the great egret, for example, has been classified as a member of either Casmerodious Egretta or Ardea.

In the 19th and early of the 20th century, some of the world's egret species were endangered by relentless plume hunting, since hat makers in Europe and US demanded large numbers of egret plumes, leading to breeding birds being killed in many places around the world.

Kharab se kharab chai...

This is one of the famous marketing gimmick mostly executed by eastern and north-eastern railway Tea vendors.

Probable benefits:

1) Helps to create a differentiated product which stands above the Branded product.
2) Thus giving a benefit to create better positioning of the product.
3) Using negative campaign, it stands out in the market which is highly unstructured without any brand of its own due to generic nature of tea.
4) Helps to be on the top of the regular or frequent passenger's/consumer's mind by giving a decent tea but quoting it as bad.


One thing, I would like to notify readers is that it is a Marketing tactics and not a strategy as the same tactics has been used by many vendors without any changes or definite lifecycle of the campaign.

This "Kharab chai" Brand did not have any copyright restrictions thus has been adopted/copied blindly by numerous vendors but with inferior quality tea, this has resulted in reduced popularity and notoriously sliding revenue in quick time.

Crabs of Bakkhali

All crabs are decapod crustaceans, which simply means they have 10 legs. Eight of these legs help in the movement (walking legs) and the first two, called claws or chelipeds (chela means 'claw' and ped means 'Foot'), in capturing prey, communication, mating and defense. The nearest relation to the decapod crabs are the anomuran crabs, which have only 3 pairs of walking legs. A typical example for the latter is the hermit crab that has a soft coiled abdomen protected by a snail shell. 


Crabs are usually aggressive towards each other, and males often fight over females. Social and mating behaviors are complex. Many make species - specific sounds by banging on the ground with their pincers or stamping with their feet, or make elaborate pincer movements. Mating occurs only when the female has just moulted and her new shell is not yet hard; the males however are in their hard-shelled form. Thus males may protect a female just before she moults, so he can have first access when she is able to mate, and may continue to protect her till shell hardens. Some males even carry the female around.


The Crab meat is very tasty and nourishing. Crab curry is a reputed cure for asthma. Similarly soup made from the swimming crabs Portunus sanquinolentus and P. pelagicus is commonly used by people just after recovery from malaria and typhoid. Scylla serrata serves as a cure for diarrhorea and dysentery.

Behind The Curtains...

 For decades, Sailen Pal has been making Dashabhujas, the 10-arm goddess, with consumate ease. This year though, the master idol-maker is struggling and wishes he had more arms to do the work. Sailen has taken just 12 orders this year against 32 last year. 

Nimai Chandra Pal is in a similar situation. He usually makes 40- 42 Durga idols each year. This year, he has accepted 22. He isn't sure if he can finish even these on time. 

Sailen and Nimai are among 250-odd resident artistes at the idol-making hub Kumartuli in north Kolkata who are facing a massive manpower crunch this year. 

Alnitak,Alnilam and Mintaka

Well, you must be thinking of the post name...Orion's Belt or the Belt of Orion, also known as the Three Kings or Three Sisters, is a  asterism in the constellation Orion. It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Looking for Orion's Belt in the night sky is the easiest way to locate Orion in the sky. The stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as the Belt of the hunter's clothing. They are best visible in early night sky during the Northern Winter/Southern Summer, in particular the month of january  at around 9:00 pm.

What do you know about spiders?

Spiders are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs and chelicerae with fangs that inject venom. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all other ordersof organisms. Spiders are found worldwide on every continent except for Antarctica, and have become established in nearly every habitat with the exceptions of air and sea colonization. As of September 2015, at least 45,709 spider species, and 114 families have been recorded by taxonomists.A herbivorous species, Bagheera kiplingi, was described in 2008,but all other known species are predators, mostly preying on insects and on other spiders, although a few large species also take birds and lizards. Spiders use a wide range of strategies to capture prey: trapping it in sticky webs, lassoing it with sticky bolas, mimicking the prey to avoid detection, or running it down. Most detect prey mainly by sensing vibrations, but the active hunters have acute vision, and hunters of the genus Portia show signs of intelligence in their choice of tactics and ability to develop new ones. Spiders' guts are too narrow to take solids, and they liquidize their food by flooding it with digestive enzymes and grinding it with the bases of their pedipalps, as they do not have true jaws.

Male spiders identify themselves by a variety of complex courtship rituals to avoid being eaten by the females. Males of most species survive a few matings, limited mainly by their short life spans. Females weave silk egg-cases, each of which may contain hundreds of eggs. Females of many species care for their young, for example by carrying them around or by sharing food with them. A minority of species are social, building communal webs that may house anywhere from a few to 50,000 individuals. Social behavior ranges from precarious toleration, as in the widow spiders, to co-operative hunting and food-sharing. Although most spiders live for at most two years,tarantulas and other mygalomorph spiders can live up to 25 years in captivity.

Benefits to humans

The Ch'ol Maya use a beverage created with the tarantula species Brachypelma vagans for the treatment of a condition they term 'tarantula wind', the symptoms of which include chest pain, asthma and coughing.Spider venoms may be a less polluting alternative to conventional pesticides as they are deadly to insects but the great majority are harmless to vertebrates. Australian funnel web spiders are a promising source as most of the world's insect pests have had no opportunity to develop any immunity to their venom, and funnel web spiders thrive in captivity and are easy to "milk". It may be possible to target specific pests by engineering genes for the production of spider toxinsinto viruses that infect species such as cotton bollworms.

Possible medical uses for spider venoms are being investigated, for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia,Alzheimer's disease, strokes,and erectile dysfunction. The peptide GsMtx-4, found in the venom of Brachypelma vagans; is being researched to determine whether or not it could effectively be used for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia,muscular dystrophy or glioma. Because spider silk is both light and very strong, attempts are being made to produce it in goats' milk and in the leaves of plants, by means of genetic engineering.

Spiders can also be used as food. Cooked tarantula spiders are considered a delicacy in Cambodia, and by the Piaroa Indians of southern Venezuela – provided the highly irritant hairs, the spiders' main defense system, are removed first. 

A human sized spider's web can even stop a Jumbo Jet

Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia is a specific phobia—it is the abnormal fear of spiders or anything reminiscent of spiders, such as webs or spider-like shapes. It is one of the most common specific phobias, and some statistics show that 50% of women and 10% of men show symptoms. It may be an exaggerated form of an instinctive response that helped early humans to survive,or a cultural phenomenon that is most common in predominantly European societies.

Honey!

It was a summery afternoon I was sitting in my garden having high tea. Suddenly I could hear a buzzing. I took out my camera and started clicking. But while taking the pic I realized that how much time does it take for a bee to make an adequate amount of honey.

Production Of Honey
Honey is produced by bees as a food source. To produce about 500 grams of honey, foraging honey bees have to travel the equivalent of three times around the world. In cold weather or when fresh food sources are scarce, bees use their stored honey as their source of energy. By contriving for bee swarms to nest in artificial hives, people have been able to semidomesticate the insects and harvest excess honey. Honey bees transform saccharides into honey by a process of regurgitation, a number of times, until it is partially digested. The bees do the regurgitation and digestion as a group. After the last regurgitation, the aqueous solution is still high in water, so the process continues by evaporation of much of the water and enzymatic transformation.

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The Great Cattle Race of the farms of West Bengal

It was onset of monsoon and the cattle race festival is the most important festival to celebrate for the farmers. the festival is held for good monsoon and better yield. After a 3 hours journey in motorcycle from Kolkata to Jalabaria where the festival will happen. I reached the village and everyone seemed to crowd around a filed. I went closer only to find out the final race of the festival. It was a great race where the owner of the cows slides on the water in a wooden plank connected to three cows at a time. It signifies the great heritage in our farmlands and the people tend to live every moment despite the various hardships faced by the farmers.

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