On a cold December morning, every road in Nagaland seems to be leading to the Hornbill Festival venue. Large signboards, usually adorned with portraits of Naga people clad in their beautiful best traditional wears, welcome you to the ‘Festival of Festivals’. They are compellingly beautiful images – seeing one of them in a newspaper or a magazine will compel you to pack the bags and catch the next flight available.
The Hornbill Festival is a celebration of Nagaland’s traditions and cultural heritage. Sixteen communities–collectively called Nagas–come together at the festival venue to exhibit their wears, enact their daily life and re-create their energetic festivals at one place. Imagine spend a year travelling through rural Nagaland, witnessing their way of life and celebrations, and then think about bringing it all together in one-go. That’s hornbill festival for you.
Here is a collection of images from Hornbill Festival – celebrations, performances and portraitures, made in the last two years of leading photography tours to the festival.
The festival venue–called Kisama Heritage Village–just outside Kohima. The venue is far larger than just an amphitheater for performances. Surrounding the amphitheater are the resting places of the participating communities, restaurants, shops, museums and community areas.
Also see: my photography tour to Myanmar.
It was a pleasant October evening, but an unusual moment when I arrived in Mandalay. Our boat docked after a long journey upstream on Ayeyarwady, throwing us immediately into chaos that we weren’t prepared for. The road from jetty to the city was clogged with people in a celebratory mood. Loud speakers–giant black boxes decked on mini-trucks–blared loud and shrieking music on a road filled with revelers dancing wildly. Chaos, crowds and cacophony had conquered the road in a way I had never seen anywhere during my journeys across Myanmar.
Sunset hour at U-Bein Bridge, Amarapura, Mandalay.
In the last leg of our week-long trip in Myanmar that had taken us through the depths of a spiritual, graceful and congenial country, we had suddenly landed into an unexpected contrast. It was the last day of Durga Puja, and much of the Indian-descents in the city had gathered by the riverside for a procession and idol immersion. We got off the car, which we had barely boarded after alighting the boat that had ferried us from Bagan, and walked into the gathered crowd. Cameras strapped around our neck, we stood out as tourists in the completely-local crowd, and caught the attention of a few revelers in no time.
I stayed at two OYO rooms properties last month to understand the value they offer, pros and cons of staying with them and what is their promise to travellers. I also spoke in detail with Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer at OYO on why a traveller should stay with OYO.
If you live in any large city in India, you are probably not very far from a hotel touting the name of OYO rooms. OYO has expanded rapidly in recent months and has a large number of budget accommodation choices, now spread over hundred cities across India.
OYO Rooms proposition: predictability, availabily, accessibility, affordability
Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer at OYO confirms that they are rapidly expanding and bringing in a large number of hotels under their brand name. This is evident when you look for a room on their website. A quick search for Delhi returns 223 hotels. In Bangalore, they have 154 and 59 in Ahmedabad. They also have a presence in holiday destinations such as Ooty, Alleppey or Darjeeling, though in much smaller numbers.
The rapid expansion has been possible by working with existing budget to mid-range hotels and branding them as OYO. The hotels are managed by the property-owners according to a given set of standards and are marketed by OYO. According to Kavikrut, having a large number of choices ensures guaranteed availability–one of the four key values that OYO intends to provide. Others being affordability, accessibility and predictability.
A considerable number of their accommodations are priced at Rs.999. On the higher side, prices rarely go beyond Rs.3,000. OYO intends to work with properties within this budgets range in large cities, while they may add more expensive accommodations in leisure holiday destinations.
For the predictability part, OYO makes some minor modifications and improvements to the rooms to fit to their standards. They boast of a 250-checkpoint standardization in their rooms that offers some certainty to the guests walking in. This includes the facilities available in the room such as the type of linen, mattress, air-conditioning, wifi, type of showers and consummable materials. A frequent quality audit conducted by an OYO staff at the property ensures that everything is maintained in order.
How much of these work as claimed? I had a chance to stay at two OYO properties last month to discover this myself.