বাংলা 
English 
Winter Pitha: Bengal's Age-Old Homemade Rice Cake Tradition
- Sub Title: New rice, date-palm jaggery and the festival of Poush
- Details
- Category: Lifestyle
When the new harvest reaches Bengali kitchens in Agrahayan, pitha season begins: bhapa pitha steamed over smouldering husk-fire on winter evenings, chitoi off the hot griddle at dawn, and patishapta rolled in a ribbon of jaggery. Fresh rice flour, date-palm jaggery and coconut filling—in their meeting lies the sweetest face of a tradition Bengalis have passed down for generations.
Ustad Allauddin Khan: The Sur Samrat of Hindustani Classical Music
- Sub Title: From a village in Brahmanbaria to the throne of the Maihar gharana — the life of the guru who trained Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan
- Details
- Category: Our tradition
Few figures in the history of Hindustani classical music have ranged as wide as Ustad Allauddin Khan — a musician who played the sarod, sitar, flute, shehnai, violin and even the saxophone, rebuilt old instruments, invented new ones, composed new ragas, and trained the most extraordinary lineage of disciples the music world has seen: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Pannalal Ghosh and Annapurna Devi. The guru of all of them, the "Sur Samrat" (Emperor of Melody), was a Bengali — born in the village of Shibpur in Brahmanbaria district, in a family of musicians. The child who ran away from home at ten in search of music spent the last half of his life in the hill town of Maihar in Madhya Pradesh, where he built the world-famous Maihar gharana — and earned a single, affectionate name from generations of listeners: Baba.
Pumpkin Festivals of the World: Autumn's Most Colourful Harvest
- Sub Title: From Halloween jack-o'-lanterns to the world's largest pumpkin exhibition in Germany — and the 3,156-pound record
- Details
- Category: World history
When the first chill of autumn arrives, pumpkins begin to rule the towns of the West — a grinning jack-o'-lantern on someone's porch, a rainbow display of thousands of pumpkins in a German palace garden, and a contest in America where giant pumpkins tip the scales at a thousand pounds. From October to November, the sweet pumpkin is the hero of harvest festivals around the world — art, food, sport and legend all rolled into one orange bundle.
