Guest Column

In August 1986, I joined as Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Dhenkanal forest division, supposedly a tough division.  In the very first month, while moving in the teak forests of Saptasajya,...

Thirtieth of January is marked as Shaheed Divas, or Martyr's Day in India, the reason being that this was the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. A child in the seventies...

My friends consider me a wordsmith (I make no such claim). Even if I am one, I was left completely speechless (wordless, that is) at the beginning of the year...

We have all experienced and witnessed instances of toxic masculinity in our real and reel lives. And increasingly so, in our popular culture, news, and social media in recent years....

Legends have it that Dalma was a gift from the Savaras, the non-Aryan tribe of Odisha known for their social harmony. They were the first to worship Lord Jagannath as...

Ever since the state enacted the Odisha Municipal Corporation Act, Mayors are getting elected indirectly in cities like Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Berhampur with Cuttack being the first city to have...

After the Super Cyclone devastated coastal Odisha in October 1999, the State Government constituted the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority to implement restoration activities and put in place a robust...

Henceforth the idiom ‘as white as snow’ would seem so much out of place. In coal mining regions of Siberia, the Kuzbass area, the snow is black. The landscape is...

A distant cousin of marriageable age on the lookout for an ideal match kept on ‘rejecting’ one marriage proposal after another. His mother, my aunt, who was both baffled and...

At around 2 am on Monday that my phone rang many times, but was unanswered. It was my friend from Montreal (Sudeshna, one of the senior disciples of Pandit Birju...