PHOTOESSAY: Assault of colours

Place: DELHI

The Garden Tourism Festival is an annual pilgrimage for us, thanks to my mother's insistence. Held annually   over the third weekend of February, the festival is timed to show of the season's prolific floral outpouring at its best. Dahlias, geraniums, azaleas, pansies, chrysanthemums, daisies, gerberas and a whole lot more whose names remain unknown to me.

That brings me to my grouse over this festival, since I have been seeing it from its early years at Talkatora Gardens, it has remained fairly static in its format. There are potted plants usually sent by Rashtrapati Bhawan and a handful of corporate houses such as the Munjals, who bag almost all prizes. There are hardly any new names. The labelling is poor, with not even the names of flowers mentioned! The labels only mention the category of prize and rank, so you may read labels like - 'Garden Perennials - Second Prize', and be non the wiser on what the flowers actually are.

But anyways, flowers are always a delight, and my mother's love for them ensures we go every year, if only to buy plants for our terrace garden.

Here is a look at some pics from 2012's edition:

Purples are a favourite among flowers and gardeners clearly. A huge variety of flowers in numerous shades light up the show in royal hues.

Riverside stroll

The Kolkata skyline with the Hugli in the foreground. You can just about make out the lights of
Eden Gardens on the right

Place: KOLKATA

The Kolkata skyline seen from across the Hugli. This afternoon pic is taken from the Howrah side of the river, just south of the famous Howrah railway station.

A building in Bhawanipur, central
Kolkata. Note the hand drawn
rickshaws, outlawed years ago,
but still plying!

Kolkata, once the political capital of the British empire in India, has been a city in almost continuous decline ever since independence. Yet, as this pic indicates, it is a city that has potential. Though not visible from in this pic, it has an enormous treasure house of architectural riches. But years of apathy means most old buildings have little or no maintenance and are crumbling, the roads are chokingly full of largely obsolete traffic, there is little modicum of order and very little to suggest that at this time even a century, it was south Asia's leading city and fount of ideas.

The Hugli, part of the Ganga, is an integral part of the city's life stream, and thousands cross the river by boats and ferries on their way to work. There are still some ghats where a stroll is a pleasant experience and totally warranted. Try that, or a ferry ride upstream to Belur to feel the beauty of the city that has lost in decades of apathy.

The city has begun to show some signs of revival, though there is an enormously long way to go. 

Spud time

Harvesting potato in Bardhaman district of West Bengal

Place: BARDHAMAN

The humble, and now less popular among the weight conscious, potato's history in India is not really a very old one. But in the few centuries that it has made its home in India, it has already become almost the staple Indian vegetable.

Today almost all the potato plant grown in India is for domestic consumption. But there is another category - the process grade potato, which is used to make chips and french fries. Just 3% of India's current production of potato, this crop is much in demand by corporations who make potato snacks.

Lots of research,planning and innovation goes into this. This contraption here, the Bengal Potato Planter, is a locally produced contraption that does away with the need to harvest the crop manually. Traditionally the crop was harvested by hand, but this is too slow a process for commercial production, apparently. And you thought there wasn't much to the potato besides addictive snacking and feeling guilty!