Experience Odisha, a perfect blend of tradition & modernity

If you are passionate about art, heritage and culture, both ancient and modern, we call upon you to join us in an exciting trip of the magnificent land of Odisha
Known as Kalinga in ancient times, Odisha is forever remembered as the place where Ashoka, a bloodthirsty conqueror became a worshipper of ahimsa. Dhauli, the site of the Kalinga war that pushed the Magadhan king into the realm of Buddhism, stands by the side of the River Daya near Bhubaneswar.

Times Passion Trails is an initiative that gives you the unique opportunity to revisit the pages of history and explore all the wonders of this enchanting state that stretches from mineralrich plateaus in the north-west to the Bay of Bengal in the south-east.


Traditionally known as a temple town, Bhubaneswar boasts of ultramodern IT parks, top-class institutions of higher learning and well-equipped healthcare facilities. The Odisha capital is one of the country’s fastest growing modern cities where the day begins with the sounds of temple bells and hymns and ends with brain-storming sessions on medical science, technology and other important contemporary subjects in various seminar halls.

Right on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar are the historic Khandagiri and Udaygiri, the twin hills famous for their rock caves built during the rule of King Kharavela about 200 years before the birth of Christ.

Inscriptions at Khandagiri and Udaygiri narrate the life and times of the great ruler. Magnificent multi-storied caves built for Jain ascetics, which dot the hills, not only represent ancient architectural brilliance but also stand as eternal symbols of peace and love.

If one is an admirer of art and crafts, one can follow our travel trail to Kalabhoomi, a pupular craft museum with a rich collection of curated exhibits. Here one can embark upon an artistic journey by having interactive sessions with qualified craftspeople. For cultural enthusiasts, there is a lot to see, experience and learn in Odisha, where 62 tribes with distinct traditions, lifestyles and food habits live. The best place that offers a peek into tribal life and practices is the Tribal Museum in Bhubaneswar.

History buffs can have a great time at Dhauli where a majestic Buddhist stupa reminds one of how King Ashoka became Dharmashoka from Chandashoka after the Kalinga war. Ashokan rock edicts located near Dhauli stand as proof of the welfare initiatives taken by the Magadhan emperor more than two millenniums ago.

A drive down to the village of Pipili takes one to a road dotted with exquisite applique works on either side.

Every house here is engaged in making colourful and attractive canopies, wall hangings, bags and umbrellas. What truly represent the grandeur and magnificence of local architecture are the temples built centuries ago across the state. The Sun Temple at Konark, a Unesco world heritage site, is a 13th century marvel that lords over Chandrabhaga, a bewitching beach lying between Bhubaneswar and the holy city of Puri. Hundreds gather here to enjoy the mesmerizing sight of the sun going down the horizon at dusk every day.

Further down south is located the seaside town of Puri, the abode of Lord Jagannath, Odisha’s most revered deity.

This 12th century shrine is one of the India’s char dhams (four holiest centres, a visit to which, devout Hindus believe, absolves one of all sins).

Every morning and evening, thousands arrive in Puri to pay their obeisance to the Lord and partake of its mahaprasad (holy offerings). The annual Rath Yatra in Puri, when the idol of Lord Jagganath is taken around in a chariot for public viewing, draws tens of thousands of visitors from within and outside of India.

Anees Salim and the swansong of a quaint small town

 
“…(her) breath like dead moths, fell on me at regular intervals.”

Pace. What does pace do to a narrative? The Russian formalists advanced the key insight that literature defamiliarises the ordinary, and by some alchemy, makes it appear like a discovery. Sometimes, it is to place the lens of observation so close, much like in Georgia O’ Keeffe’s vein, wherein the object under scrutiny leaps at the viewer with such force of minutiae as had not been noticed before, in the process morphing into a new object altogether. At other times it entails narrating the experience at a pace that completely alters it. Like “The Small-Town Sea” by Anees Salim that recreates the quintessential small town where the everyday lengthens into looming shadows, lurking in the street corner for weeks, becoming fodder for gossip, making familiar, and while offering a womb-like intimacy, also destroying with its brazen intrusiveness.

The entire first half of the narrative in “The Small-Town Sea” is given to the impending death of the terminally-ill father Vappa, a failed writer, who, in a true poetic flourish, moves his family to Bougainville, a near dilapidated bungalow by the sea where they wait for the in-articulate-able. So, it is essentially a wait for death, punctuated by several near-deaths, rumoured deaths, false alarms and close encounters of a deathly kind. And in using delay as a mechanism, he mimics a sense of lengthened time in small towns. Citrus odours intensify sadness, in an undeniable tribute to Marquez. Humour seeps in where you least expect it. Flashes of morbidity flicker unexpectedly in the mundane. Without knowing that one is humour and the other is morbidity. And without the writer fussing over either. The narrator, a boy, notices everything without the hypocrisy of the grown-ups, experiencing loss and death without the padding of adult defences, crashing down on the nails of experience. Loss and abandonment is evoked in a raw, unsentimental way. Sentimentality, a sometimes helpful attribute he shuns (or hasn’t cultivated yet), and that is precisely what intensifies the narrative, and breaks your heart.

Then there is a marked stamp of self-referentiality. “The Blind Lady’s Descendants” is an expansive suicide note and the mildly autobiographical “The Small-Town Sea” is a winding letter to one Mr Unwin, a London-based literary agent. Needless to say, it’s not benign. Salim’s father, who worked in the Middle East was a failed writer. Salim, too, waited for very long to get a publication deal and those fears might have been accentuated, being based in the small town of Varkala where opportunities were few and far between. The weight of the unwanted legacy of failure was another liability: the horror of attracting a destiny you have fought across generations to keep at bay. The vocation of writing can be treacherous that way.


Important things are always happening outside their confines, the small towns can, at best, lend them mileage through gossip. So this fear of being elided as inconsequential is constant. At best you can be part of the mass rally when an important leader does a sortie and an impersonal wave of the hand at the teeming sea of humanity. And later both the leader and venue is mythologised to a cult status borne by that rare brush with importance. There is no doubt that this inability to publish for a considerable time fostered fears which could have been disruptive but Salim refused to give in.

Salim paints the small town with the incisive detailing of a topographer, the boys biking through dappled tracts of coconut groves, the heartless cliff, bananas in people’s backyard, the clay streets together evoke a peculiar, unchanging landscape. Small town in the lineage of a Narayan or Naipaul, as an inward-looking, self-sustained unit could itself be on its way out, along with the amalgam of its unique responses developed to questions of life, a fountainhead of stories, given the all altering influence of media in these times. In a way, the Indian small town is already moving into the space of memory and nostalgia.

Salim’s reticence is in news. Like a private act of dissent in a world that is increasingly becoming driven by social media, where there is a compulsion to be constantly seen and heard, Salim has declared an avowed abstinence from award functions/events. In so doing the litterateur brings back the focus on the “word” and eschews the trappings of a burgeoning new “Literati”. This choice is an act of courage today. And this is the wry in him, along with the vulnerable in equal measure.

Anees Salim has been recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Blind Lady’s Descendants.