“Nothing would stop our trips to the Jatra. A bunch of youngsters would set off on cycles from our hostel in Ravenshaw college in the evening and move inside the Jatra venue doing nothing in particular. The buzz of the place was addictive. We would be there all seven days,” says Surya Narayan Satpathy, 72, a resident of Mehdipir, recollecting his experience of Bali Jatra. The venue then was Killa Padia. It is 1967 he is talking about. You can sense the nostalgia as he remembers those days. “The jatra is much bigger. But the feel of those days is missing. Maybe it is because age has caught on.”
