Celebrating 18 years of BalakaA Bengali Socio-Cultural Association of Noida · Sector 61Celebrating 18 years of BalakaA Bengali Socio-Cultural Association of Noida · Sector 61
বলাকা — Balaka, Sector 61 Noida
বাংলা

What we build

Our pandals, year by year

Every October Balaka builds something the neighbourhood has not seen before. Here is what that has meant.

2026

Victoria Memorial

Victoria Memorial
A façade of bamboo, cloth and hand-carved foam, 63 feet high and 65 feet wide. It is not built on open ground: it is built over the Community Centre itself, every dome and column shaped around the building Sector 61 walks past every day.

The protima

The protima

Every year we do the same thing. We sit, we discuss, we deliberate, and we decide on a theme first. Then we go looking for an idol of Maa Durga that fits that vision. That is what we have done every year since we began — and it is what we did last year too.

At the workshop of the late Shri Salil Bhattacharya we saw many idols, all of them beautiful. But there was one standing quietly at the back, almost hidden behind the bamboo. We noticed her. We admired her. And then we moved on, and chose another.

Earlier this year Shri Salil Bhattacharya left for his heavenly abode, and a team from Balaka went to offer their condolences. We went back to that workshop. And there she was — still standing in the same place, as though she had been waiting.

We did not sit down and discuss it. We did not debate it. Each one of us simply knew: this time there would be no theme to match, no selection to make. We did not choose her. She chose us.

This time, truly, Maa Durga is coming home to Balaka.

Earlier years

2025

Cibeles Palace, Madrid

Madrid's city hall, rebuilt in Sector 61. The protima drew on Roman form while remaining entirely Shakti, her sari hand-painted onto the clay.

See all 12 photographs →

2024

Temple of Peace and Harmony

Five towers in white picked out in gold, built over and around the Community Centre so the building itself became the temple. The protima that year was blue.

See all 12 photographs →

2020

No pandal this year

No pandal was built in 2020. The pujo was held indoors, in masks, for far fewer people — the dhak played, the protima was dressed, and that was the year.

See all 12 photographs →
  • ABP Ananda — শারদ আনন্দ — নয়ডার বলাকা দুর্গোৎসব কমিটির পুজো

Also: 2017 Bishnupur Temple · 2016 A village Durga Mandir · 2015 Solar Energy Our Future · 2014 Eiffel Tower

Not just the pandal

  • 2019Electric cars from Tata Motors and Mahindra, brought onto the ground for visitors to test drive.
  • 2018Mitra, a humanoid robot, met visitors and their children — in Balaka's tenth year, alongside the Hawa Mahal pandal and a sixty-foot Twin Towers in LED.
  • 2016With Philips Lighting, visitors chose the colour Ma Durga was lit in and saw it change in front of them. The same year carried Save Fuel Save Nation and road-safety awareness with PCRA.
  • 2015Every light in the pandal ran on solar power generated on site, from panels on the Community Centre roof.
  • 2014Sixty feet of Eiffel Tower lit by three hundred thousand LEDs, built to make the case for saving power.

Every year since 2018 has its own album in the gallery. The years before that live mostly in people's phones and albums — if you have photographs of a Balaka pandal from 2008 to 2017, we would like to see them. balaka061@gmail.com