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| Nirbhay 26.12.22 |
Thursday 29 December 2022
Monday 19 December 2022
Sunday 18 December 2022
Window Seat | Weekly column in English | 18.12.22
Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee |
18.9.22
Margaret
Bourke-White
I am writing a book on literature,
cinema, reports, photographs, cartoons and other art forms on partition of
India. I found that most of the photographs that we see on partition were taken
by Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). For the past seven and half decades, her
images have were found on the cover of numerous books, newspaper articles,
magazine features, documentaries related to Partition.
Born in New York City and raised in rural
New Jersey, Bourke-White ‘took to documentary photography in order to
disseminate the idea of inconvenient truth’. In 1936, Henry R Luce,
bought Life magazine and relaunched it, with Bourke-White
becoming one of the first photojournalist to be offered a berth there.
She arrived in India by early 1946 on
assignment to cover the transition of power, which by then was evident to
happen. She travelled around India documenting low life and high
people. She took some of the photographs of Gandhi, which later became iconic
(one with the spinning wheel comes immediately to the mind). She also took
photographs of Jinnah.
Bourke-White documented the aftermath of the so-called
Direct-Action Day in August 1946, which was announced by Jinnah following the
failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan. Her photographs of the riots in Calcutta
then are sometimes confused with the images she took following the Partition, a
year later. The article ‘The Vultures of Calcutta’ featured in the 9 September
1946 issue of Life, showing vultures waiting to prey
on the bodies of dead victims was later, intermittently and inaccurately, used
for depicting the carnage in August 1947.
 |
| Photo: Bourke-White |
She captured the Partition-related violence and migration,
as it ushered in the new dawn of independence. Her photographic essay, The Great
Migration: Five Million Indians Flee for Their Lives, was published
in Life magazine on 3 November 1947. She wrote: “All roads between India and Pakistan were
choked with streams of refugees. In scenes reminiscent of the Biblical times,
hordes of displaced people trudged across the newly created borders to an
uncertain future”
In 2010, Pramod Kapoor published Witness
to life and freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan with
a reprint of over 100 of her photographs. Kapoor wrote about them thus: “They
offer a kind of stately, classical view of misery, of humanity at its most
wretched, yet somehow noble, somehow beautiful”.
Family of Rani Laxmibai
The image of the Rani Laxmibai riding a horse with her
8-year-old son Damador Rao tied on her back with a cloth battling the British
soldiers is sketched in everyone’s mind, thanks to the folktales, paintings and
later plays and films. I often wandered what happened to her son, the minor
Prince of Jhansi? Did he survive after Laxmibai’s martyrdom?
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Recently I came across couple of articles, which said he did-
with great difficulty as many refused to help him and the persons loyal to Rani
Laxmibai, who were trying to protect him. He was forced to live in almost
anonymity in Indore. After Damador Rao died his son Laxman Rao Jhansiwale, was
given a pension of Rs 200 per month by the Britishers till India gained
independence. Laxman Rao and his next four generations continued to live an
anonymous life in Indore. Later, they shifted to Nagpur, where the sixth
generation descendant works in a software company and prefers to lead an
anonymous life.
Technology and rising disinformation
Disinformation and fake news have become a menace globally.
Governments across the world are struggling to enact laws to contain the
menace. However, the problem is that technology
advances far more quickly than government policies.
Thanks to bigger data, better algorithms, and custom hardware, in
the coming years, individuals around the world will increasingly have access to
cutting-edge artificial intelligence. From health care to transportation, the
democratization of AI holds enormous promise. Yet as with any dual-use technology,
the proliferation of AI also poses significant risks. Among other concerns, it
promises to democratize the creation of fake print, audio, and video stories. Fueled by advances in artificial intelligence and decentralized
computing, the next generation of disinformation promises to be even more
sophisticated and difficult to detect.
The lawmakers, therefore, as Chris
Meserole and Alina Polyakova of
Brookings Institution write: lawmakers should focus on four emerging threats in
particular: the democratization of artificial intelligence, the evolution of
social networks, the rise of decentralized applications, and the “back end” of disinformation.
Tailpiece: Why just two?
A man walks into a bar and orders 3
beers.
The bartender asks him why he gets
three beers the man told the bartender well one is for me and the other two,
for my brothers who live in Chandigarh.
The man does this for about a week and one day the man
walks in and orders two beers instead of three. The bartender asks him why just
two?
The man said, well my wife told me I had to quit drinking
but she didn’t say anything about my brothers to stop.
++
Journalist turned media academician
Mrinal Chatterjee lives in Dhenkanal, Odisha. He also writes fiction and plays.
He can be contacted at mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com
Thursday 15 December 2022
Sunday 4 December 2022
Saturday 3 December 2022
Window Seat | Weekly column in English | 4.12.22
Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 4.12.22
Development Dilemma
Policy makers seeking inclusive
growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural
transformation, which is potentially inequitable, and keeping a check on rising
economic inequality.
Simon Kuznets, a
Russian-American economist and statistician won the 1971 Nobel Prize in
Economics for his research on economic growth. Kuznets’ work on economic growth and income distribution led him to
hypothesize that industrializing nations experience a rise and subsequent
decline in economic inequality, characterized as an inverted "U",
which later was known as the “Kuznets curve."
He posited that the economic
inequality would increase as rural labor migrated to the cities, keeping wages
down as workers competed for jobs. However, the economic mobility increases
again once a certain level of income was reached in “modern” industrialized
economies, as the welfare state takes hold.
But this did not happen. In the last
half a century since Kuznets postulated this theory; income inequality has
increased both in advanced developed countries as well as in many developing
countries including India. As per the WID (World Inequality database),
since 1981 the share of the wealth of the top 10% and top 1% has consistently
increased, while the share of wealth of the bottom 50% has consistently
declined. For the most recent decade, the top 10% group has taken up more than
60% of the total wealth in India. This is in sharp contrast with the mere 6% of
the total wealth shared by the bottom 50% of the population, suggesting a
significant increase of wealth inequality in India over the past 40 years.
So? The bottom line
is we must rethink about our economic policies.
The Story of Madras Courier
It
was 201 years that Madras Courier,
the first newspaper to be published from Madras Presidency ceased publication.
It was published on October 12, 1785 by Richard Johnson, a former British Army
captain. Unlike Hickey’s Bengal Gazette
the first newspaper published in India
from Calcutta in 1780 it received official patronageincluding waiver of postage
for circulating the paper within the presidency and waiver of freight charges
for importuning equipment through the company’s ships. The newspaper was
careful not to offend the East India Company in any manner unlike Bengal
Gazette.
Madras Courier
continued for 36 years before it closed publication on 1821. Competition drove
it out of circulation.
Morale
of the story: official patronage is no guarantee for survival of a newspaper or
for that matter a television channel.
Resurrection
From
a broken, abandoned figurine - to the present shape- that's what is possible
and that's what my colleague Bareenath Jena, Technical Coordinator at Indian
Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal did. In two days flat. This
figurine is called Brundabati. It is used to plant Tulsi (basil) sapling and is usually placed near the entrance of
the house. This tradition is in vogue in Odisha, Bengal and some part of the
neighbouring states.
At
IIMC, Manvi, a young student celebrated her birthday by planting a Tulsi
sapling on it.
See
the smile on the face of the lady, rediscovered from within the broken
figurine. That's NATURE smiling.
Football Fandom
If
there could be an award or reward for fandom, India could win it hands down. We
Indians make great fans. We even have a movie titled Fan and a song in it dedicated
to the fans. Shah
Rukh Khan plays
a dual role in this film as film star Aryan Khanna and his obsessive fan Gaurav
Chandna, who looks just like him.
Our love for Cricket is legendary.
Cricket is just not a game for us. It is a religion, and the cricketers are
revered as demi-gods.
Forget Cricket,
which we play at international level, we are great fans of games which we may
not even play (or do not qualify to play) at international level; football for
example. In fact India has never played in the World Cup although they
qualified in 1950. But that does not deter us from becoming great fans of the
‘oh so beautiful game’.
Consider this: football
frenzy is sweeping Kerala and Bengal, the two states which have craziest of
fans in India. Bangladesh, probably because of its proximity to Bengal also has
this craze. Argentina and Brazil dominate the
World Cup soccer conversation in Bangladesh, a phenomenon that transcends
generations and geography.
I really think that
it is good that India is not playing the world cup football. It is good, because we have no baggage. We can
pick our own favourite and turn ourselves to be its fan. We can change
allegiance too easily without any bite on our conscience- kaunsa apna log hai!
So pick up a can of
beer, settle down on a couch, pick your favourite and be what you can be really
very good at- a cheering fan.
++
The
columnist a journalist turned media academician lives at Dhenkanal, a central
Odisha town. He also writes fiction and translates poetry.
mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com
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