Kumartuli or Kumortuli is located in the northern part of the city of Kolkata . The locality is a traditional habitat of the potters for nearly three hundred years. The potters or the artisans or the artists settled here during the restructuring of the Kolkata colonial region by the British East India Company . Earning a livelihood by making earthen pots and utensils first they gradually shifted to the making of the idols of Gods and Goddesses for various festivals round the year. With increasing demand and quality of their creations over time the artisans became famous and Kumartuli came to be known as the hub of idol makers supplying thousands of idols, particularly of Goddess Durga , to whole of the state of West Bengal and to NRIs of around 90 countries across the globe. At least three months before Durga Puja , the biggest festival of West Bengal and one of the biggest across Eastern India, more than five hundred workshops come alive with hyper activity day and night. Fir...
It is a fact of life that we keep on getting celestial or divine messages from the invisible world—particularly during times when catastrophes/tragedies happening in or about to befall our family or locality or country and we might as well call these as intuition or premonition or telepathy or presentiment or the like. Most of the times we fail to decipher these in time; sometimes we understand but fail to act upon it and some other time we comprehend enough to prepare well for it. From at least three months prior to my father’s demise I had been having a very disturbing time—wanting desperately to go to him, be by his side; dreaming about him and at times having a hallucination of seeing him around. However, living quite far away from home, I failed to act upon it due to various external factors including a persistent financial strain. As was inevitable, he passed away one early morning and I could reach home only on the sixth day travelling for three days on an ordinary train as book...