Most of the Hindu people of North India visit the Ganga river in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, at important times of their lives, like a marriage, a birth or a death, to bathe in the river and cleanse themselves for a new beginning. Now the photo shows the office of a Panda, so each family has a chosen Panda, you can say a family accountant. Whenever anyone from the family goes to Haridwar they go to their family Panda and get their visit registered in his record books along with details like name and number of people visiting, occasion, date etc. So these records are kept across generations with the same auditor's family. The volume of books look intimidating but they have a neat system of maintaining records and classifying them into house, street, locality and city levels.
