From the day I joined Cotton College I always encountered with a new young face who finally takes up the “begging profession”. This “profession” seems to be quite a common activity among those below the poverty-line here in Guwahati. Earlier, I used to find only old women or men begging. But nowadays young children are being pushed forward for begging because they can earn much more than the elders. Few months back I was walking down from my college towards the Panbazar area when a young girl, not more than five years old, followed me until I reached a bookshop. I was so overwhelmed by my...

Cellphones had always fascinated me as a teenager. So I wanted one the day I finished with my Class XII board exams. My father took me to a Nokia Priority Dealer and asked me to choose a handset. But there was none of my choice and therefore I decided to opt for a Samsung mobile. And I landed up buying a stylish sliding Samsung mobile (D840). My father was not very happy with my choice for he prefers only Nokia phones, as though others are not very trendy. A month after I got my cell I left for Delhi with my parents on a vacation. One fine day while we were on our way to Haridwar I found that...

We have seen two, virtually spontaneous, bandhs in the Northeast in the days just gone by. One was a relatively-short 12-hour Assam bandh called in protest against the letting off of the accused in the botched-up Parag Das murder case. The other was a much more gruelling 48-hour bandh called in Manipur over the cold-blooded, fake encounter of a former militant. Bandhs have been so rampant in the Northeast in the last 20 or so years that people have become inured to them. And bandhs, more often than not, are a success without the advocates of the bandhs having to drum up much support for them...