Friday, August 26, 2011

Walked on a guided tour around Visva Bharati

I spoke to a guide as a tourist and hired him and went on a guided tour around Visva Bharati campus just to crosscheck my knowledge about the place and also to figure out what all information they give to the visitors while on a tour.
My guide was a young guy, very humble and friendly types. He took me for a tour around the campus for almost One and half hours and charged me 200 bucks and was saying they are very less paid because tourists generally bargain a lot. Altogether there are twenty guides in Santiniketan. None of them are Government appointed authorized ones. Many of them are from outside and recently came to this profession but the rest are from Santiniketan and followed their family profession. Like my guide(Sajal Biswas's)father also used to work as a guide for Visva Bharati. Sajal learnt all the background and the dates from his father. The kind of information I got from Sajal was very superficial but put in a very poetic and over dramatic manner. It was extremely funny initially when he started elocuting one of the Tagore's poems aloud but I guess its a very common gesture with all the guides. They try to make things very interesting, describe everything in a story telling mood.He told me that he doesn't really know the history much but he could educate me with almost all the important dates. It was very funny that he kept pronouncing K.G. Subramanyam as 'k.P. Supraya' and Mural as 'Mooral'...... :)
While talking about the background of the sculpture 'Sujata' by Ramkinkar Baij, he described Sujata as Buddha's mother.
So these type of improper information and misguidance often reach to the tourists.
Also its very difficult to get a proper guide because generally these guides can be hired from the main gate of Rabindra Bhavana(Museum) but there are also rickshaw pullers as self claimed guides, who would want to take you on a rickshaw ride cum guided tour around Santiniketan. Theses rickshaw pullers always give wrong information and misconception about the place to the visitors who come from outside.
Overall the guided tour experience was very helpful for my research and interesting also because its been really long I have walked around a place with a guide.
Outside Rabidra Bhavana gate the guides sell these information booklets/guide books of Santiniketan. These thin, printed in very low quality paper with most uninteresting cover and overall look provide not so bad information and a map of Visva Bharati campus but I guess the content and the writing can any day be improved a little!
These books in English and bengali provide information about history of Santiniketan, other religious places and visiting sites around Santiniketan, biography of Rabindranath tagore, available courses along with admission rules to Visva Bharati campus, Tourist map of Santiniketan and a map of Visva Bharati.













































































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