Fond of playing the pepa with the bihu orchestra group, Dhiran Kalita never thought that one day he would have to move away from his village Raha and settle in Guwahati city. Performing bihu dance and playing the pepa still excites him. But he finds a tremendous change occurring among the young children today. He sees that his own children are not interested in enjoying the traditional bihu dance and the music. Today for many young boys and girls like Kalita’s children bihu is just a ‘local holiday’ to relax and reconcile at home and play computer games. Bihu is the most integral part of the...

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...

Whenever I happen to cross the Zoo Tinali area or the Chandmari area I find that the drivers mostly stop their vehicles right before the zebra crossing or on the zebra crossing itself. I wonder whether they actually know what a zebra crossing is for. I still remember the day when the automatic traffic signal was introduced for the first time in Guwahati. People just didn’t bother to stop at the red signal for the police weren’t present. They were only concerned about driving on to their destination. Then the traffic police decided to control things manually because they knew that they will...