Proud to be a Sikkimese: Sikkim Travel, Culture & Local Heritage

 

I have never seen a long roll of clouds over the sky, for me this rare occurrence witnessed at Daramdin, West Sikkim this morning was something that fascinated me the most.

--> Gandhiji was at Hill Cart Road near Kak Jhora with Anne Beasant and Deshbandhu Chitranjan Das in 1925. The Toy Train track runs alongside the road, and a hand-driven rickshaw is behind it.  (c) Fallen Cicada - Unwritten History of Darjeeling Hills by Barun Roy pic: beacononline.wordpress   The latest issue of  The Week , dated December 27, 2009, had something stored for me. The national magazine's cover story was “Myths of Our Time,” which had a few stories webbed around our cultural and social beliefs, but there was little truth in them. One article excited me the most; it was the sole reason I put my hand forward when I saw it hanging in one of the shops in Gangtok. The story's headline read, “Gandhi did not say Hey Ram when shot.”  The story was against the belief of Gandhi's followers that it spread to every corner of the globe. But the fact remains strong that Gandhi did not utter anything when he was shot by Nathuram Godse with...

Another fascinating input to my finding led me to some unknown discussions about the origin of the earthen tower story . We believed the story was related to Lepchas , but close to the Lepchas are the Limboo and Newar communities , who share the earthen story to have belonged to them. The Limboo community believed they were the earliest settlers in this region, and it was their story. At the same time, the Newar populace claimed they were the potters who built the earthen tower, told a local from Daramdin .  Close to the vicinity of the Daramdin bazaar , there lays a cave made from the chink of a huge stone. Small openings take us to a chamber where the locals believe it to be a meditation room. Many locals said they had become aware of this cave since childhood and played around it. The so-called cave has a cube-shaped stone scored in such a fashion that it seems symbolic of some ritual activities. The walls on its left are closely associated with some inscriptions of the Limboo l...

I am sure there are thousands of readers worldwide who read this article of mine and yet we do not know each other. One of the primary reasons to start a blog was to reach the furthest of the poles. I want to make new friends and learn about different cultures and traditions but could be that I am not able to connect my way of writing to their thoughts. When I had newly joined Weekend Review as a newspaper reporter sometime back in 2003 my mentor Mr. Sujit Chakraborty used to tell me.  "When you write an article, do make it a point to write it in that way in which you like to read.” The same theory has been with me since then, whenever I write an article I keep in mind it should be the easiest even if the layman could never have any difficulty reading it. Today I want to share a few of my secrets about the world of blogging. I had been surfing web pages since 2001 and it took me more than five years to start my blog. I here want to mention the name of one person that has in s...

Rajender Singh Negi OneWorld South Asia   20 December 2007 New Delhi: Located in a small hamlet in Boormajra in Punjab’s Ropar district , a government school was adjudged as India’s greenest school for the second time. The second and third prizes went to Government Secondary School, Daramdin, Sikkim and Apeejay School, Pitampura, New Delhi respectively. At a ceremony here in New Delhi on December 17, Prof Krishna Kumar , director, National Council for Educational Research and Training gave Green School Awards 2007 to all 20 schools short-listed from all over the country. Gobar Times Green School Programme (GSP) was started last year by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-profit organisation. Sunita Narain , director, of CSE, explained the reason behind starting the programme: “We started this programme because we very strongly believed that the environmental issue was going to be absolutely critical in India and that this issue would...

NEW DELHI : A government school at Boormajra in Punjab’s Ropar district , a rural school in a remote corner of Sikkim and one school each from Delhi and Noida have been adjudged the “greenest” in the country by the Centre for Science and Environment. These schools were conferred the Green Schools Awards-2007 at a ceremony organised here on Monday. The awards -- being given out since 2006 under CSE’s Green Schools Programme -- were presented this year by National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) director Krishna Kumar. The top award this year was bagged by the Government School at Boormajra for the second time. In 2006, the school had beaten all other contenders in the race by presenting remarkably precise audit documents. The data also reflected the effort that the school community -- with limited resources -- had made in managing its water. The school was reusing almost 50 per cent of the spillage from taps to irrigate the school grounds. “In 2007, the stud...