Fotos

The Murti river runs across the Gorumara National Park in the dooars of North Bengal. The place where this is shot is also called Murti. There is an old bridge across the river that serves as a connection between the two banks.

Gorumara literally means a place where cattle ('goru' in Bengali language) used to get killed in large number... probably because of the large number of tigers and leopards in the forest. Time has changed, ... though there are leopards, the census says that there are hardly any resident tigers in the National Park! The absence of big carnivorous game has unsettled the ecological balance, and now there are plenty of Gaur (Indian wild bison) and deer in the forest.

No exception for the cattle now, they seem to outnumber people by orders of magnitude, each family seems to possess 4-5 cows on the average!!

The borders of the National park are dotted with villages and the cattle are driven across the bridge to the forest side every morning. The same things repeats in the late afternoon. The scene is funny at times. The bridge being a narrow one, vehicles have to wait until a big herd crosses it... quite a cattle-traffic jam, and it takes some special skill for getting the cattle into and across the bridge :)