“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
That’s called being speechless, there was this amazing drive from Kurukshetra to Dehradun.
After registering at the #BNLF counter we were free to saunter around the festival grounds. I was looking for the blogger street, I might have as well looked for Diagon alley.
The Indiblogger tag line, “I blog so you are” made sense, the proposed plan obviously was not executed. With three hours to kill I had a choice, I could trot around the town and do some site seeing, I had not done my homework to do so.
I could plonk around the place and moan, or I could adopt the family crest of the mongoose to find out…
It began with the philately the stamp collection, the collection was wonderful, a gentleman named Ajay Mishra had on display the first ever stamp from Dehradhun, it was spelt differently “Dehyara Dhoon” and about ten collectors put their stamps on display, governor of Uttarkand had his personal stamp collection on display too.
Customized stamps and envelopes were available, this was the contribution of the Uttarkand postal services. They would like a picture of the person, digitalize it and create stamps, though the experience was priced at 300/- I do not know the value of the stamps.
The range of aromatic oils, and the 35Rs./kg Reeta marketed in a fancy box for 270Rs./250gms was on too. I am ashamed to say I got conned into buying rice at exorbitant price.
There was this nice little Pahdi girl, who penned booklets on the customs of the region, and published it as digitalized illustrated books. The books were hand bound by her.
On one side were people moaning about loss of heritage, and reading habit, on another side, was a young man, who had collected folk art from the mountain, these included the tie dye, block printing and other forms, he has created DIY books, the options of natural dye’s and acrylic were available too. to me it appeared as away to connect heritage with the urban Indian.
Finally I hit Diagon Alley and spotted the blogger Tara doing her Calligraphy.
The Valley Of Words, had dispensed it vision of wisdom.
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