As responsible citizens of India, a group of people who were constantly worried about the underprivileged sections of our society founded the Student’s Mobilisation Initiative for Learning through Exposure (SMILE) in New Delhi in 1986. The main objective was to sensitise young people on various social issues. SMILE began its operations in the Northeast in 1995. Since then SMILE has been playing a leading role towards serving the youth specially street children, handicapped children, downtrodden girls, and orphans. With this vision in mind, the founders of SMILE set out to accomplish a mission...

Fond of playing the pepa with the bihu orchestra group, Dhiran Kalita never thought that one day he would have to move away from his village Raha and settle in Guwahati city. Performing bihu dance and playing the pepa still excites him. But he finds a tremendous change occurring among the young children today. He sees that his own children are not interested in enjoying the traditional bihu dance and the music. Today for many young boys and girls like Kalita’s children bihu is just a ‘local holiday’ to relax and reconcile at home and play computer games. Bihu is the most integral part of the...

I always looked forward to visiting a green place within Guwahati city limits. But there was no such area which I could easily think of and locate it. We were a group of thirtyfive students from my college and we were taken to Basistha for our environmental studies project work. I had heard a lot about the Basistha temple from my parents and was wondering what exactly our teachers were going to show us in Basistha beside the age-old temple. Nevertheless, we all were excited to visit the place. Even though I had been staying in Guwahati for more than ten years, I never got the opportunity to go...