2nd Gitanjali Mango Festival

2^nd Gitanjali Mango Festival

10^th to 12^th June, 2011. Utsav Complex. Uttorayon, Siliguri

Organized by

Modella Caretaker Centre & School (MCCS) and The Orchid Choicest Enterprises Ltd

As promised last year, this year again the Gitanjali Mango Festival is being held, almost around the same time and ofcourse the same venue. With all your cooperation, the event was a great success last year. There were about 30,000 footfalls, 2000 kilos mangoes handled, 200 mangoes in competition, 35 varieties on sale, 100 competitions and cultural programs organized, all in the three days. Even the tourism stalls received extraordinary response. And believe it, this was the only ‘Mega Mango Event’ for East and Northeast India.

As the festival was dedicated to the 150^th Birth Anniversary of Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore and 100 years of Gitanjali last year, the title Gitanjali was added to Mango Festival. The name every year will remain the same to remember the Kabiguru’s love for Mango Orchard (Amrakunja) and this year’s theme will also revolve around him and in a greater context will be ‘Epar Bangla-Opar Bangla’, the cultural ties between India’s West Bengal and Bangladesh based on Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore.

Taking into consideration, the response at the tourism stalls, this year a special travel mart will be organized, Rural Tourism Baazar, based on the theme ‘connecting heritage beyond boundaries’, which will be coordinated by Association for Conservation & Tourism (ACT). The Northeast part of India, which is connected to the country through the Siliguri Corridor or the Chicken’s Neck as it is often called shares about 98% of its borders with Tibet (China), Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, which amounts to about 4500 kms of International border and only 02% with the country. As per the ‘Look East Policy’ of India, the success of this region lies in trade and cultural ties with the neighbouring countries and we believe rural tourism can be a major tool to achieve it. As ACT has organized 02 major policy workshops based on cross-border tourism, the responsibility has been left to them.

The Mango Exhibition and Competition, Mango Eating Competition, Cookery Classes and Mango Recipe Competition, Seminars, Sit & Draw, Picture Postcard Art, Picture Story Writing, Mango Quiz, Ethnic Dress Competition, Face of the Day, Cultural Programs will continue like last year. The new activities which will be added would include Alpana Competitions (revival of a old domestic art form of Bengal), Poster Exhibition based on Heritage Sites of Bengal, A Trio of Films from Shekhar Das will be video projected by the Director himself who will be available for interaction, Ajoy Roy’s documentaries of Bengal and India’s Northeast will be projected by the maker himself and more surprises to come during the Festival.

We shall meet again on the 5^th of June, 2011 at 3PM (15:00 hrs) for the Reception Rituals of the Festival with plantation of Mango Trees at the venue, The Utsav, Uttorayon, Siliguri.

6^th May, 2011                          Abhaya Bose, Organizing Secretary

Chautare, the storytellers from East Himalaya

EDITORIAL

 

 

 

In the East Himalaya, including the countries of India, Nepal and Bhutan, when people walk from one place to the other, they rest at strategic locations, which look into beautiful valleys or snow-capped mountain peaks or scenic villages…a place to relax the eyes, body and mind. Here, when they meet the others, they have stories from the past, present and future.

            The idea of documenting these stories came to me in the late 1990s & early 2000s, when I tried documenting the stories from the DHR (Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, an UNESCO World Heritage Site) with the support of ACT (Association for Conservation & Tourism) and Help Tourism. The project was always at the back of the mind. This is when Ajoy Roy, our friend and the present President of ACT, took up the initiative of telling audio-visual stories from all the places where Help Tourism has been working actively with communities. He has directed and produced more than 20 stories from the East Himalaya, all partly supported by Help Tourism and ACT. I am trying to put them online.

            Jashoda Chettri, the Assistant Secretary of ACT from Sikkim, who also leads several community initiatives in Northeast India on behalf of ACT partly, supported the ‘Confluence’ indigenous storytellers’ fest at Gangtok sometimes in July, 2010. Again in 2010, Andrew Vigar started corresponding with Help Tourism about story telling from the communities of East Himalaya. With the suggestion of Help Tourism, he has already made 02 visits in to Arunachal Pradesh and he was put on to the Singpho (Xingphu) and Idu Mishmi communities and he insisted that ACT and Help Tourism should start with the story telling project…and it is on.