Worship of the Almighty as Divine Mother is an age-old tradition in India and a refined part of Indian culture. It has been in existence since prehistoric times, but geographically it is limited to Asian countries in general and India in particular, in the current century. The history of ancient civilizations of Indus, Greece, Rome, Babylon and Egypt bears evidences to the worship of Divine Mother in different forms – nature, art, learning, culture and enlightenment. But Mother Worship has evolved from a tradition into a living religion for Indians. In Bengal, it has reached the highest level of devotion and faith in feminine manifestation of the Divine.   

Kumari Puja at Belur Math in West Bengal, India

In Bengal, Durga Puja or worship of Goddess Durga, an incarnation of Shakti, is the most pious and popular form of Mother Worship. In the Bengali community, the elderly people address young girls as Ma out of affection. “To look upon God as Mother is the purest and the highest form of Sadhana,” said Sri Ramakrishna, who is believed to have worshiped his wife as Divine Mother. Mother is all-in-all for a child.

Kumari Puja, a special attraction of Durga Puja festival in Bengal, is held to celebrate this faith through ceremonious worship of young girls in sense of Divine Mother. Kumari Puja is called Kanya Pujan in North India. Bengal celebrates it on Maha Ashtami, the eighth day of Durga Puja, while it is held on the ninth day or the last day of Navaratri in other states of India. The place to be for Kumari Puja in Bengal is Belur Math, the headquarters of Ramakrishna Mission ashrams across the globe.

Kumari Puja is held wherever Ramakrishna Math & Mission is in the world. But, it is a cultural refinement, grand ceremony and spectacular ritual at Belur Math on the Hooghly River flowing between Howrah and Kolkata. Swami Vivekananda, the founder of Belur Math, had initiated Kumari Puja in appreciation of Sri Ramakrishna’s devotion to Divine Mother and faith in Mother Worship.

The saffron-clad monks of the Ramakrishna Order at Belur Math look upon a young girl as mother and worship her as a goddess, on Maha Ashtami. According to Sri Ramakrishna, little girls at the tender age when they are away from negative forces of the materialistic world are manifestations of the Divine Mother. A little girl at the pre-puberty phase of her growth is bathed in the holy Ganga water, dressed in a crimson red or fiery yellow sari with golden border, and adorned with jewelry.

Also Check: What Makes Durga Puja Grand Celebration for Global Bengalis

The same rituals are performed to worship the Kumari (young unmarried girl) and the same offerings are made to her as those during the worship of Goddess Durga. She is purified and sanctified through chanting of holy mantras. A spectacular arati is performed. Monks and devotees offer flowers at her obedience. The devoted hearts invoke her blessings through prayers. Kumari Puja at Belur Math fetches in a huge gathering of devotees, every year. Even, the whole ceremony is live telecast all over West Bengal.

To say in other words, Kumari Puja at Belur Math is a sacred celebration of the celestial bonding between the Divine and the human. Needless to say, the Kumari Puja ceremony is worth booking last-minute flights to Kolkata during the Durga Puja festival.

About Travel Beats

Travel Beats is an Indian Diaspora news portal by Indian Eagle, a leading travel organization for overseas Indians having a proven record of booking last minute flights to India. We at Travel Beats connect Indians abroad, including Indian Americans with their cultural heritage roots through our stories and features. 

Interesting Stories of Kolkata

• Kolkata’s Hand-pulled Rickshaws, a British Heritage
• Kolkata as Black & White Calcutta in the 1960s
• Kolkata Street Food Guide for First-time Visitors
• Eventful Journey of Kolkata Tram from 1867

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What are the best things to do in Kolkata this Durga Puja? Hopping across puja pandals, zipping through jostling crowds at puja spots, watching a Bengali art film, riding the underground Metro, visiting the Victoria Memorial, shopping at New Market, and having the quintessential Kolkata street food experience. If you go by a Kolkata street food guide for tips on what to eat on the roadside, you will feel like being spoilt for choice over a huge number of street food items in Kolkata.

So, we recommend five best street food items which you must have in the City of Joy. Notably, ‘Kolkata is the best destination for street food,’ according to a survey that the Taste of Travel conducted among 56727 respondents across 30 street food markets in India this year. 

It is jhal muri that is unique to the Kolkata street food experience for anyone and at any time of the year. One of the most popular evening snacks, it is a great mouth entertainer, both in and out of home. The locals are seen entertaining themselves over this crispy and spicy item, here and there in the city. Vendors are found selling jhal muri at public places including parks, gardens, cinema halls, markets, bus stops and railway platforms. It is made of puffed rice, fried lentils, and other crunchy ingredients mixed with drops of mustard oil, spices, chopped tomatoes and onion slices. You will see young boys and girls standing in long queues outside the puja pandals and spending time over jhal muri during Durga Puja.

Another evening special tongue-teasing item is pani puri that deserves to be among the top ten on a Kolkata street food guide for its popularity with the locals. This iconic Indian street food snack is known as puchka all over  the city. It is a tamarind mixed watery item with spiced potato mash in round chip. The mouthful relish of puchkas outside the Victoria Memorial, a brand icon of Kolkata City, is a craze with tourists. In the Bollywood movie Parineeta, a sequence featuring Vidya Balan, Sanjay Dutt and Raima Sen eating puchkas from a roadside vendor was shot at the Victoria Memorial. It is a must have on the festive evenings of Durga Puja.

India boasts a rich and diverse chaat culture – a common culinary thread in the multi-layered social fabric of the country. Mumbai, Delhi and other metro cities have papri chat, kachori chat, and alu chat in common, while Kolkata enjoys uniqueness for its distinct roadside chaat item – ghugni chaat. It is made from boiled yellow peas mixed with onion and tomato slices, seasoned with lime juice and spices, and served in small leaf bowls. Taste a few spoons of ghugni chaat to feel one with the street food culture of Kolkata. Bengalis are in the habit of taking ghugni chaat with slices of bread.

Kolkata street food retains the distinction of being unique to the culinary essence of the city, and harmonizes with the influences of other countries at the same time. It is chowmein that best reflects this dual identity of Kolkata street food culture. Made by frying boiled chow noodles with mix veggies in oil, chowmein is a borrowing from the Chinese cuisine. The main ingredient may be Chinese, but the smokey, spicy flavor is Kolkatan to the core. Bengalis are fond of egg and chicken chowmein, while veg chowmein is popular with the people in other parts of the country.

Do ask Kolkattans what they like to eat when they go out for shopping or watching a movie? Most of them will say for sure that it is spring roll stuffed with an omelet or chopped chicken or small mutton pieces. The mouthwatering bites of egg rolls, chicken rolls and mutton rolls define the pleasure of evening outings for the locals. Even the Bengalis born and bred in a cosmopolitan society prefer this street food to burgers. Kolkata will not disappoint you if you are veg. Paneer spring roll is also available there. However, rolls are served smoking hot with sauce and wrapped in a thin piece of paper.

Kachuri, moglai, momo, fish fry, chicken cutlet, and alu chop are the other must-try tongue teasers on the list. These items not only define the uniqueness of Kolkata street food culture but also reason why the city is called a city of foodies.

Travel Beats is a community portal by Indian Eagle, a leading travel organization for Indian Diaspora and booking cheap flights to Kolkata from USA. Travel Beats publishes interesting stories from India and USA. Subscribe to our free newsletter and don’t miss the latest updates.

Interesting Food Stories of India

• Best Places to Eat Biryani & Kebab in Lucknow
• Indulge in a Sin with Street Food of Mumbai
• Interesting Facts of Tirupati Temple Laddu
• Origin and Journey of Haleem to Hyderabad
• Popular Sweets of Bengal in All Seasons

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In some of our stories of Kolkata, we are eloquent about the street food culture, traditional Bengali cuisine and Durga puja festival of the city. There are many things to talk and write about beyond the cultural aspects of the 21st century Kolkata as the city has experienced highs and lows since its foundation in the year 1690. One of the major transformations that the capital of Bengal has undergone is that of its identity from Calcutta to Kolkata.

The post-independence picture of Calcutta may be a mystery and a matter of curiosity, at the same time, to many of the present generation. Travel Beats, an overseas Indian community portal, has woven a brief story of Calcutta in the 1960s.

The nightlife culture of Calcutta in the 1960s was an integral part of the sophisticated lifestyle of the elite and the rich. Park Street was the most happening place to spend out nights partying till wee hours. Cultured men and women from the upper reaches of society used to sweep down Park Street in their swanky cars and dance to the music of live bands at Blue Fox, Mocambo, Moulin Rouge and other restaurants of those times. Guests on a visit to Calcutta from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Manila were treated to the musical beats, fairy lights, and winey flavors of Park Street in the dead of night, in the 1960s.

Calcutta in the 1960s was a city of political upheavals, mass agitation, labor strikes and student unions’ protests. The turbulent being of the city served as the base of the Left’s rise in West Bengal. Deindustrialization of the state began to take place in the 1960s leaving the next generations high and dry. The Naxalite movement, led by the fuming youth of Calcutta in the 1960s, triggered the political agitation. A massive flow of starved, penniless refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the onset of the Liberation War of 1971 added to Calcutta’s socio-political stagnation.

In the 1960s, Calcutta was a city of middle-class intellectuals. The professionals including doctors, professors, lawyers, filmmakers, engineers, managers and artists belonged to this class of the then Bengali society. The British had created this intellectual class to support and expand their trade when Calcutta was the capital of India. The 21st century Kolkata takes pride in the achievements of the middle-class intellectuals, including legendary filmmakers, actors and writers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Uttam Kumar, Utpal Dutta, Suchitra Sen, Soumitra Chatterjee, Bikas Roy and others.

The Hooghly riverfront of Calcutta was a thriving industrial belt till the mid of the 1960s. Howrah was the throbbing center of industrialization in the northeast before and after independence. Calcutta was the second best port city, next to Singapore, in Asia. The then industrial recognition of Calcutta as one of the global leaders was based on the production and export of jute and tea. The Ranigang-Asansol-Durgapur belt with coal mines and manufacturing plants was known as the Ruhr of India.

The public transport lifeline of Calcutta in the 1960s consisted of hand-pulled rickshaws, double-decker buses, and trams. The present Kolkata has not parted with handcarts and trams yet, though double-decker buses are no more seen plying the busy streets.

The picture of Calcutta in the 1960s is too big to be framed in an article of a few hundred words. Why not travel to India to explore the difference between Calcutta of the 1960s and the 21^st century Kolkata? Indian Eagle books the cheapest flights to Kolkata International Airport throughout the year. 

Disclaimer: The tidbits of information for this story of Calcutta in the 1960s are collected from different sources on the web. We do not guarantee the authenticity of the information.     

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Take a break from the urban lifestyle and cosmopolitan ambience of Kolkata this month. Ride an express train or drive a car to Shantiniketan, a national seat of learning, an international center of fine arts, and a land of folk culture in Bengal. Shantiniketan is famous for Rabindranath Tagore, Visva-Bharati University, and Poush Mela. The inception of Poush Mela dates back to the 1894 in connection with the anniversary of the Brahma Mandir founded by Maharishi Devendranath Tagore in 1891 in Shantiniketan.

Shantiniketan’s Poush Mela is one of the popular cultural fairs in Bengal. This fair provides a window to the rural heritage and folk culture of Bengal. What had started as a small rural fair is a great hit with tourists in winter, today. Held for three days in the last week of December, Poush Mela of Shantiniketan holds a mirror to the life and culture of rural Bengal. Travel Beats, a portal for Indian communities abroad shares gripping glimpses of Poush Mela to introduce you to the Bengali cultural heritage in Shantiniketan.

Catch up with Baul Singers

Poush Mela is a celebration of Bengal’s rural life and folk culture which remain an incomplete picture without mention of Baul Sangeet or Baul Gaan, a Bengali folk music. Bengal is home to the community of traditional Baul singers who are identified with their unique musical instrument Ektara. Poush Mela is a famous stage for their performance. They sing about the common aspects of day-to-day life. The atmosphere they create by playing the Ektara feels spiritual.

Marvel at Live Graffiti

No need to explore the lanes and alleys of Shantiniketan in search of graffiti. You will find graffiti as a live art on the faces of small children around you on the fairground. Their painted face and motley guise add to the colorfulness of the fair. The local children disguise themselves as priests, princes and gods to entertain the visitors in Shantiniketan’s Poush Mela.

Legends of Madhubani Painting

Learn about Local Culture

Poush Mela is a great time for the people of Shantiniketan and the neighboring villages. The locals including men and women actively participate in different rural games, which make the air of the fairground feel vibrant. Their exuberance and joy that the fair fills their day-to-day life with are sure to make you feel happy. You can learn a lot about their simple lifestyle and rural culture.

Music & Dance Festivals of India

Shop for Handicraft Items

Bengal has its own heritage of rural handicraft. The handicraft of Bengal comprises different forms of handcrafted art including terracotta. Bengal is a leading exporter of home décor items of cane, jute and terracotta, which you can shop for in Poush Mela. The fairground of Poush Mela is a great temporary marketplace for the folk artisans and rural craftsmen to sell their merchandise.

The Lesser-known Artists of Raghurajpur

Taste Local Sweetmeats

The fairground of Poush Mela in Shantiniketan is a makeshift culinary market with innumerable food stalls facing each other in several rows. The local sweetmeat sellers gather on the fairground to treat the visitors to the delicacies of rural Bengal. If you are a foodie, you must taste some because those local delicacies are not available out of Bengal.

Air travel to Bengal was never so cheap as it is now, because of Indian Eagle’s cheap flight deals for Kolkata throughout the year. Even cheap last minute travel to Kolkata is guaranteed at Indian Eagle. 

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Needless to say, Bengal is known for its sweet tooth. It won’t be unjust saying that Bengal has sweeter tooth than any other Indian state. Maach and mishti (fish and sweet) are inseparably interwoven with life in Bengal. People start their day with sips of smoking hot tea while eyeing over newspaper headlines and end the day with a piece of rasogolla or sandesh at dinner.

No wonder if Bengal is all set to get a brand new sweet hub in Kolkata. Yes, Kolkata will unveil the first-ever Mishti Hub in New Town on Poila Baishakh (April 15), the first day of Bengali New Year. The New Town Mishti Hub will be easily accessible to travelers flying from and to Netaji Subhas Chandra International Airport.

Since the date of inauguration was announced, the construction of the New Town Mishti Hub has paced up rapidly. The name of the hub will be announced in the days to come. The first of its kind in Kolkata, the New Town Mishti Hub will be selling the traditional sweets of Bengal, including the most popular Bengali sweets under one roof. Reportedly, not only the construction but also the ambiance of the hub will reflect the cultural heritage of Bengal.

There will be 11 shops at the hub including ten of the oldest and longest surviving local brands which have been in the business of sweetening mouths in the City of Joy for over 25 years. The 11^th shop will be selling the most regional sweets from different parts of the state, such as Sitabhog and Mihidana from Burdwan Town, Langcha from Shaktigarh, Chanabora from Murshidabad, and Sarbhaja from Krishnanagar. Each of the 11 shops at the upcoming Mishti Hub in New Town will have three compartments: display section, cash section and delivery section.

The gate number 3 of Eco Park in New Town will be the location of Mishti Hub, which is a deliberate move to pull in buyers from among visitors of Eco Park, the growing populace of New Town, and the airport-bound travelers. Once the New Town Mishti Hub is inaugurated, tourists, backpackers and food connoisseurs will be able to indulge their sweet tooth in the most popular Kolkata sweets and traditional Bengali sweets under one roof, instead of hoping on and off from shop to shop in north, south and central Kolkata.

Notably, the New Town Mishti Hub is one of the projects owned by Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO). It will definitely be on our list of the new tourist attractions in Kolkata, which includes the recently opened floating market with 150 boats and 228 sellers.

Will you be heading straight to Mishti Hub in New Town after landing at Kolkata International Airport and buy some sweets for your dear ones in the city?

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Kolkata has been a London of the East for years. Being an erstwhile capital of British India, Kolkata has multiple similarities to London. With tea, tram, the Victoria Memorial, Gothic architecture, the wax museum, the replica of Big Ben and the Eco Park resembling London’s Hyde Park, Kolkata is no less than the capital of Britain. With the newly opened floating market, the City of Joy has turned over a new leaf. The floating market in Kolkata likens the city to Venice or Thailand.

Located at Patuli on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, the floating market in Kolkata is a brand new tourist place for inbound travelers. Initially, 114 boats are anchored in an order on a sprawling lake, and as many as 228 shopkeepers are offering their fresh merchandise of fruits, vegetables, flowers and other daily commodities. There will be 150 boats, at least, in the near future.

Kolkata’s first market on water operates from 6 PM to 9 PM in the evening. It has wooden walkways for buyers and visitors to reach the boats at a distance from the shore. The floating market in Kolkata may not be as beautiful as Kashmir’s Dal Lake market, but it has its own beauty which glitters after the sun sets. The lake has been beautified with lively sculptures on the shore.

Actually, the floating market in Kolkata is a rehabilitation project for the welfare of the shopkeepers who were evacuated to facilitate a major extension of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee came up with the project based on her idea borrowed from Bangkok and got it executed at a cost of INR 9 crore. The market operates under the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority.

The locals have already started comparing the city to Bangkok and Venice. The floating market is not just a rehabilitation project but one of the places to visit in Kolkata. It will surely be among the best places for photography in Kolkata. Furthermore, the city boasts Seven Wonders of the World in the Eco Park.

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“If there is a will, there is a way.” This maxim is true about Professor Sugata Mitra who opened a solar-powered virtual school for children living below the poverty line in the dark interior or rural Bengal. His independent, solar-powered learning lab, ‘School in the Cloud’, reached out to a village named Korakati in the mangrove swamps of Sundarbans by the Bay of Bengal, where the rural economy consists of fishing, farming and forest harvesting.

Sugata Mitra is a professor of educational technology at the School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. A leading champion of minimally invasive education, he has a PhD in physics and 25 inventions in education technology to his credit.

The first solar-powered virtual school in Sundarbans, 110 kms from Kolkata, is a result of Professor Sugata Mitra’s 14 years of research on whether a group of children given access to Internet could learn by themselves. He has continued his journey since he conducted the first experiment in a Delhi slum in 1999 when he was the chief scientist at NIIT. He left a computer with Internet connection in the slum and noticed to his utter surprise that a group of slum children learned how to use the computer with no one’s help and without knowing English.

Based on his belief in Swami Vivekananda’s words, “You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul,” Professor Sugata Mitra’s independent learning lab with self-organized learning environment (SOLE) came to be known as ‘Hole in the Wall’ in 2013.

Korakati’s School in the Cloud in Sundarbans is one of the seven locations with self-organized learning environment, which Professor Mitra has spotted in collaboration with Microsoft, Newcastle University in the UK and others. He funded the project with his TED prize money worth 1 million dollars. The self-organized learning environment enables children to use online resources to learn and experience by themselves. It helps them improve their reading, speaking and comprehension skills.

Professor Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud in Sundarbans engages children with several constructive activities in a bigger world online. It also connects the children with ‘grannies’, a group of retired teachers from across the world, who teach and mentor underprivileged children through Skype.

When a local schoolteacher from Korakati approached Professor Mitra to brighten the lives of his village’s underprivileged children, Professor Mitra found it an opportunity to build a School in the Cloud in rural Bengal. Korakati’s School in the Cloud amidst huts in mangrove swamps is a standalone model of self-organized learning environment (SOLE).

Equipped with a 40-feet bamboo tower receiver for Internet bandwidth, the slower-powered virtual school has 150 students who come from different parts of Sundarbans. Some students come to school by walk while some others paddle bicycles for miles to reach school. The children are divided into groups and each group is given access to an educational website at a time. They use Google translator to understand tough English words in Bengali. They are given a topic for online research every day. Thus they surf Internet, browse education portals and collect information on their own.

The impact of Professor Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud is visible in the children’s day-to-day performance and development, which is documented regularly. Motivated by this new-age learning system, the children are educating themselves on English language, comprehension, collaboration, online research and Internet literacy with flying colors.

Professor Sugata Mitra is confident that his project ‘School in the Cloud’ will work anywhere, on seeing the success of its standalone model in Sundarbans.

Travel Beats by IndianEagle is a digital publication for Indian Diaspora to keep up with news and stories of India. Subscribe to Travel Beats’ free newsletter and receive exclusive stories on time.

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Google India and Tata are the latest harbingers of women’s digital literacy in rural Bengal. The search technology giant in collaboration with the Tata Trust has launched the Internet literacy program, ‘Internet Saathi,’ ushering in an era of e-Renaissance for women in the rural backwaters of West Bengal. The program is aimed at inducting 1 lakh women into the world of Internet in 400 villages across Bengal. (Watch the ‘Internet Saathi’ video below)

The then undivided Bengal had always been on the forefront for women empowerment through education during the pre-independence era of India. The noble souls of Bengal, including Satyendranath Tagore, Raja Rammahon Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita were the torchbearers of women’s literacy during the Renaissance of Bengal. Even the female members of the great Tagore house, Jorasanko Thakuarbari in the then Calcutta, had added to the collective effort to bring women out of the veil of ignorance to the light of literacy.

Unfortunately, in the post-independence era of India, West Bengal failed to further the efforts made by the legendary reformists, activists and revolutionaries for such possible reasons as political hurly-burly, socio-economic erosion, mass agitation, labor strikes, student unions, immigration of refugees from East Pakistan and likes. However, Bengal is at the threshold of a positive change in its socio-economic fabric through Internet literacy of rural women just as every dark cloud has a silver lining.

Google and Tata will jointly train rural women about the World Wide Web and its uses under the Internet Saathi program. Once those women are certified to be Internet literate, they will be given a bicycle, a smartphone, a tablet and some training material so they can carry the torch of digital literacy to their neighboring villages.

First the rural women from Purulia district of Bengal will be brought under the purview of the ‘Internet Saathi’ program, which will gradually be rolled out across the rural interiors of West Bengal, according to Sapna Chadha, Head of Marketing, Google India. Language barrier and remote geography are major obstacles between the mission and its success.

Only 8.7% of Bengal’s rural female workforce is self-employed. Only 0.9% of the working rural women of Bengal fall in the regular / salaried category. So Google India’s Internet Saathi program is expected to empower the rural women of Bengal with digital access to agriculture, educational and healthcare resources for their socio-economic betterment.

Launched in India in July 2015, Internet Saathi has spread across five Indian states. At the current phase of the mission, Google India is focusing on Internet literacy of rural women in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and Uttar Pradesh.

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The festival de Cannes 2016 has started rolling out the red carpet for its inauguration on May 11. A short film from the regional cinema of India, not multibillion Hindi film industry, is the sole official Indian entry on the list of 18 films in the ‘Cinéfondation’ category of the international French Riviera.

Gudh (meaning Nest) by Saurav Rai, a young filmmaker from Darjeeling in the Indian state of West Bengal, is the only Indian film to represent India at the 69^th Cannes Film Festival this year. Gudh is a short autobiographical film.

Gudh is a memoir of my childhood in a very raw and bold form. It also depicts my relationship with my parents and grandparents. My individual style of filmmaking is not pleasing to anyone. – Saurav Rai, an alumnus of Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) in Kolkata.

Saurav Rai is the fourth SRFTI alumnus to travel to the international Cannes Film Festival. He is currently busy shooting for a travelogue in New Delhi. The last three Bengali films by SRFTI alumni – Tridib Poddar, Anirban Dutta and Raka Dutta – to have represented Indian Cinema at the Cannes were Khonj, Tetris and Chinese Whispers in 2002, 2006 and 2007 respectively.

There are many contemporary Bengali films on unconventional subjects, which are traveling to international film festivals like New York Indian Film Festival for premiere. The Cannes 2016 has selected only one film from Bengal, while NYIFF 2016 will screen seven Bengali films in May. – IndianEagle

Born in Mangwa, a small village in Darjeeling district of Bengal, the 29-year-old Saurav Rai has depicted his childhood as a tale of two places – Darjeeling in India and Kathmandu in Nepal – with hints of the Gorkhaland movement for independent statehood of Darjeeling in the background. Gudh in Nepali language depicts how the political upheaval in demand for a separate state affected his childhood.

The selection of Gudh as India’s official entry to the 69^th Cannes Film Festival is not his first international achievement. Saurabh Rai’s previous short film Monsoon Rains had traveled to the Munich Film Festival in 2014. He aspires to bring alive the untold stories of rural India on celluloid for a global audience.

Saurav Rai admits being influenced by the Satyajit Ray films and Mrinal Sen films from the golden era of Bengali Cinema and Indian Cinema at large. He likes watching popular art films by late Rituparno Ghosh from the next generation of Bengali filmmakers. Whenever he is accused of defying the grammar of filmmaking in his narrative technique of Gudh, he refers to his grandfather who used to compare him with Einstein as a stupid child.

Saurav along with his sound designer Ankita Purkayastha will leave for the 69^th Cannes Film Festival on May 10. The jury of the Festival De Cannes 2016 selected Gudh short film out of the 2300 films from film schools across the world.

Travel Beats is a fast-growing news portal for Indians and NRIs by IndianEagle, a leading international travel organization. It publishes the latest news about travel, aviation, culture, humanity and entertainment from India and USA.

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The leading ladies of Indian politics are always ahead of their male peers. Sonia Gandhi, President of the Indian National Congress, has already got a temple dedicated to her in Telangana. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa was the brand face of relief materials distributed to the victims of Chennai floods. She will soon be immortalized through consecration of a temple in her honor at a whopping cost of INR 50 lakh. Smriti Irani, the HRD Minister, is being referred to as the Goddess Durga of Indian Parliament for her recent fiery speech on the JNU fiasco. Wait! West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee does not lag behind them.

Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee proved to be a dark horse in the race with them. A Bengali film on her life, political career, struggles and triumphs is all set to hit the screens in April 2016. Titled Baghini (Tigress), the film will be released before the upcoming assembly elections in West Bengal to highlight Mamata Banerjee’s leadership, achievements, initiatives and image.

“The film on CM Mamata Banerjee will depict an inspirational story of Bengal’s iron lady from her childhood till historic rise to political power. The film Baghini is aptly titled since she is known for her unflinching determination and straightforward attitude. It is primarily meant to send a message across the nation that any woman of substance like her can reach dizzying heights of power and success in any walk of life,” said director Nehal Dutta during the trailer launch.

The makers of the film Baghini deny any sort of similarity between CM Mamata Banerjee and the protagonist of the film by saying that it is not based on but inspired by her life and career. However, their denial seems to be invalid from the trailer in which the main character resembles Bengal CM in appearance.

Ruma Chakraborty, who plays the protagonist Indira Banerjee in Baghini, sports a humble appearance and a simple look like that of Mamata Banerjee. The trailer shows Ruma Chakraborty wearing white cotton saris and a pair of chappals (slippers). Ruma Chakraborty has already essayed the role of Mamata Banerjee in two Bengali plays on the latter. She is excited to play the same in reel.

Producer Ajitesh Mondal says that neither CM herself nor her party was approached for any inputs during the research. The story, the plot and the character: all are based on the information sourced from different public domains. That’s why he prefers calling it a ‘non-political’ film on women empowerment with an inspirational message for the women of India.

The political career of Mamata Banerjee is full of controversies including her rigid opposition to the construction of Tata Nano’s manufacturing unit in Bengal, her objection to the selection of Pranab Mukherjee for the presidential seat, her diplomatic differences with the ruling party in Center, and likes. However, both the director and the producer deny showing anything controversial in the film Baghini on Bengal CM.

The shooting of the film on CM Mamata Banerjee is almost over. The makers plan to hold a special screening for the CM and her party before its public release in April.

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