Summer Stories: Final Chapter

Summer Stories: Final Chapter

Summer Stories  Last Chapter Blog Post

Highlights of this blog post:


The ‘end’ of summer was very eventful! The end of my semester examinations was followed by a lot of events, the first being The Edutainment Show.

What is the Edutainment Show?

The Edutainment Show is India’s first and only education fair focused on media, communication & design.

This year, Kolkata Bloggers was one of the 14 official partners of the show! On the first day, there were 13 panel discussions, among which, one was DigitalSpeak: Blogging as a new marketing tool. 

Anirban da, the founder of Kolkata Bloggers and an eminent photo-blogger, Poorna di, one of the most celebrated food bloggers in the nation, and Mr. Abhishek Chamaria, an entrepreneur and operations chief of Brainwave were the three speakers. The session was moderated by Mr. Aninda Das, the communications chief of Infinity Group.

It was surprisingly compact, because a lot of information was delivered by the speakers that day and the session lasted for 45 minutes only! Here’s a detailed blog post that covers the entire session.

Panel Discussion
From L to R: Anirban Saha, Mr. Abhishek Chamaria, Miss Porrna Banerjee, Mr. Aninda Das | Photograph by Souranil De

By now, you probably know that Shantiniketan is our second home. Whenever we get an opportunity, we plan a small trip, and spend two or three days there. We relaxed there from 12th – 14th June. Here are a few photographs from the first two days:

Toto
Travelling in a toto!
The house and its proud owner! :D
The house and its proud owner! 🙂

First three (2 of 3)

Gunja is always the subject of my experiments, and she always complies (after an initial fuss).

Gunja

The last day was splendid!

I bicycled as usual, and went into one of the roads that leads to a village. This time I took a video on my phone (and it is very shaky):

DSC_0017

DSC_0012

My uncle’s family came to visit Shantiniketan on the last day of our trip. There was a small photo-session at our house.

Humans (2 of 5) Humans (3 of 5) Humans (4 of 5) Humans (5 of 5)

We started our return journey at 5:45 PM. The rains had set in a few days back. However, we didn’t experience torrential rainfall in Shantiniketan. We came to know from Google Now that the clouds had already gifted Kolkata with heavy rain during our stay at Amaar Bari. As we moved towards the Durgapur Expressway, dark clouds started descending in the adjacent areas (that were in sight). The green fields became dark. From our distance, it looked a wee bit like a tornado.

Road (6 of 6)

Finally, when the rainfall started (and yes, this time it was torrential rainfall), the road became (almost) invisible. There was a strong breeze and coupled with that, since we were moving forward, the rain drops looked like arrow heads, which were crashing on the windshield! Baba drove on with great attention and expertise, and got us out onto the expressway within an hour. He later told us that driving in that weather was one of the toughest things he had done!

That day, the clouds had transformed the scenery (I brightened the images a bit to make them visible).

It's green. Wherever we look. One of the reasons why the countryside never gets old!
One of the reasons why the countryside never gets old – the greenery
Road (2 of 6)
When viewed in reality, these turns look amazing!
(This is the first time I embedded a watermark into a photograph of mine, so I would love it if you provided honest comments on how to make it better)
(This is the first time I embedded a watermark into a photograph of mine, so I would really appreciate it if you provided honest comments on how to make it better)
Train
Hopefully, within a few days, I’ll be on this train with a friend and travelling back to Amaar Bari

At Salt Lake City, we live in an apartment. We live on the top floor and above our floor is the rooftop. The staircase ends there (obviously), and there is a small room that contains not only the entrance to the rooftop, but miscellaneous items like a big trunk, chairs, etc. Here’s a photograph that will give you an idea of the ‘room’:

IMG_0630

When I climbed up on the roof of this ‘room’ a few days back, the sight was marvelous! The view from our rooftop is really good, but it gets obstructed by several buildings, tanks, etc. From the top, almost all the obstructions disappeared!

Along with this, there was finally some drama in the sky (as one of my friends would say), after it stopped raining. I went up with my tripod, and was finally able to take an unobstructed panorama!

The sky was actually like that towards 6:30 PM!
The sky was actually like this towards 6:30 PM! Click on the image to get the larger photo.
20 seconds of exposure of the lens towards 6:30 PM produced this effect!
20 seconds of exposure of the lens towards 6:30 PM produced this! The ‘skyline’ of Salt Lake City was visible for the first time!