Assam’s Changing Economy: New Industries, New Skills and New Opportunities

The Village That Is Slowly Disappearing

  Rongali Bihu, widely known as Bohag Bihu, is one of the most deeply rooted cultural festivals of Assam, a celebration that cannot be fully understood simply as an occasion of dancing, singing, wearing traditional clothes and preparing festive food, because beneath all these visible expressions lies a much older relationship between people, agriculture, animals, nature, family and community life. Celebrated around the beginning of the Assamese month of Bohag and associated with the Assamese New Year and the arrival of spring, Rongali Bihu represents a moment of renewal in which people symbolically leave behind the previous year and welcome another cycle of life with hope, happiness and social togetherness. The festival traditionally unfolds through a series of customs rather than a single ceremony, and these customs differ somewhat among communities, regions and individual families, yet their underlying meaning remains closely connected with the agricultural calendar and the cultu...

The Train That Stopped for No Reason

  The Great Depression was one of the most devastating economic crises in modern American history, but its importance cannot be understood simply by looking at stock-market figures, unemployment statistics, or the number of banks that failed, because behind every economic number stood millions of people whose ordinary lives were suddenly transformed by forces that they could neither predict nor control. During the 1920s, the United States had experienced rapid industrial growth, mass production, expanding consumer culture, technological innovation, rising automobile ownership, widespread use of electricity and radio, and an increasingly interconnected national economy, creating a powerful impression that American prosperity would continue indefinitely; however, beneath this impressive economic expansion were serious weaknesses, including unequal distribution of income, agricultural overproduction, excessive dependence on credit, speculative investment in the stock market, weaknesse...