Dehradun, Makarsakranti heralds the beginning of a year full of fairs and festivals all over India, and has a special reverence in the hill-state of Uttarakhand.

Today, when the young are forgetting the ways of the ancient, here in the heartland of Pauri district, ‘gendi ki kauthik’  celebrated on Makarsakranti, continues to rekindle & refresh the human spirit.

As dawn breaks over the mountains, droves of crowd can be seen from miles away,  making their way down the trails to converge at Tyodoh gaad close to Rishikesh. This traditional spot, tucked away into the forest, away from the maddening crowd, has been for decades, the venue for two days of festivities which begin on Makarsakranti.

Close to two thousand hill-folks from over twenty villages, within a 10 km radius of each other, collect at this very spot year after year. This annual fair is meant specially for daughters & daughter-in-laws who haven’t visited their maternal home off late. For young brides like Krishna, this is as close as she can get to home. A year since marriage and she has been counting days to be at the fair, smiling away waving to her friends Krishna tells us, “ I have come to meet my married sisters and friends from adjoining villages, this is our meeting point, I cant wait to sit with them and talk.“

With lines of wisdom stretched across her forehead, Bhuri Devi gets nostalgic, relishing piping-hot savouries off the pan, she says, ‘I make it a point to come to the fair every year to meet my married daughters and a daughter-in-law married in Rishikesh and then return home, where I live with my cattle and sheep.”

For hill-folks here, fairs like these are a welcome break from the mundane life they live. This is one day on the calendar, when men, women and children turn out in their fineries to shop until dusk, eat traditional sweets, meet up with friends and family whom they had met, perhaps last year, same time, same place.

Mussoorie, Leopard sighting in the hill-station, that too in the heart of winters is not uncommon. Yet, CCTV footage of a leopard strolling into the empty hotel lobby in Barlowganj end of town, on the evening of 8th of January, has taken everyone by surprise.

The thirty-second clip shows how a leopard walks in through the hotel’s rear-lawn adjoining the oak forest below the property and saunters through the lobby at 6:48 p.m and exits from the hotel reception. The regal animal walks calmly through the lobby without any fear, looking around. Thankfully, there was no loss to life or property, but the video went viral within hours of being shared on the social media.

A few year’s ago an adult feline was caught on a CCTV camera of the Nirankari Bhawan, on the Camel’s Back road. While, last year, pug marks of a leopard were captured on a mobile camera by a resident living in Guru Nanak Fifth Centenary School.

While incidents like these are one off, but come winters and these majestic creatures move from the higher reaches to lower climes in search of food, making these sightings rather common.

If one was to go by history, then there is little to fear, assures author-photographer, Ganesh Saili, “Camel’s Back burial register recorded that a certain Clarence Thomas Wyatt died in January 1949 aged 33 and the cause of death recorded  is ‘accidentally mauled by a panther (feline family).’

None-the-less, what is sad to see is how instead of roaming about the forests, wild animals like this one, have to find pleasure in the concrete jungles that have replaced his habitat by us humans, which might in the near future, give rise to man-animal conflict, for no fault of theirs.

Here’s a link to the CCTV video: