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| Nirbhaya, 25.9.23 |
Friday, 29 September 2023
Sunday, 24 September 2023
Window Seat. My weekly column in English. 24.9.23
Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 24. 9. 23
DD@64
On September 15 last, Doordarshan (fondly called DD) turned 64. It made a slow, almost hesitant beginning in 1959. It turned into a regular service in 1965 when DD began beaming signals to homes in and around the national capital. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India inaugurated the first broadcast.
By 1972, the services were extended to Mumbai and Amritsar. Within the next three years, seven more cities were included in the services. By the end-eighties, it became one of the largest broadcasting organisations in the world in terms of studio and transmitter infrastructure.
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From 1959 to1976, DD service was part of the All India Radio (AIR). On April 1, 1976, it became a separate department in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and later it was brought under the control of Prasar Bharati.
A new signature image was designed by the National Institute of Design and a signature tune was created by Pandit Ravi Shankar. The first telecast in colour took place on Independence day in 1982.
Eighties and nineties were the golden period for DD. Ramayana, Mahabharat, Hum Log, Buniyad, Malgudi Days and many other serials enthralled the audience. National and international events were covered. Regional language broadcasts began. DD went abreast with technological changes. There were expansions. At present, Doordarshan has 35 satellite channels and 66 studio centres across the country.
But the monopoly of DD was over from the nineties as private television channels made entry, competition for eyeballs began and gradually became more fierce and intense. There was a gradual decline of viewership with an exception during Covid lockdown, when DD hit record viewership. DD still has considerable viewership. In fact DD Free Dish, the only Free-to-Air Direct-To-Home service across the country reaches to about 45 million households as per the FICCI and E & Y.
The good old DD has the expertise and reach to enthral ‘desh ki janta’. It just needs more zest.
Santiniketan
Santiniketan (literally meaning the abode of peace), famed as the place where Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore established the Visva-Bharati University over a century ago has recently been declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is a momentous occasion for India in general and Shantiniketan in particular. It emphasises the profound cultural and educational significance of this place. Santiniketan represents a fusion of various pan-Asian modernist ideas. It skillfully blends elements of antiquity, medieval traditions, and folk culture from the entire region with a unique scientific temper and Indian aesthetics.
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This recognition not only honours the visionary contributions of the founder of Visva-Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore, but also acknowledges the enduring legacy of his ideas in the realms of art, culture, and education.
Shantiniketan was a dream of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore that was later on nurtured Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore.
Santiniketan has a long history. This place was earlier called Bhubandanga (after Bhuban Mohan Sinha, the Zamindar of Raipur in present day West Bengal), and was owned by the Sinha family. In 1862, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, while on a visit to Raipur, showed interest in land near Birbhum. There was only one building there, namely “Santiniketan” (which is still there adjacent to the Upasana Mandir). Debendranath Tagore bought the land and called the place Santiniketan, after the name of the existing house. He developed Santiniketan as a spiritual centre, where people from all religions were invited to join for meditation and prayers. He founded an ashram here in 1863 and became the initiator of the Brahmo Samaj.
Rabindranath Tagore wanted to initiate a unique form of inclusive education. In 1921 he established in Santiniketan a residential school and centre for art based on ancient Indian traditions and a vision of the unity of humanity transcending religious and cultural boundaries. Twenty years later on on 23 December 1921 he established Visva Bharti, a ‘world university’, recognizing the unity of humanity.
Distinct from the prevailing British colonial architectural orientations of the early 20th century and of European modernism, Santiniketan represented approaches toward a pan-Asian modernity, drawing on ancient, medieval and folk traditions from across the region. It gradually attracted talented teachers and students from across the world. After independence it became a central university.
Santiniketan’s World Heritage Site status will foreground the philosophy of inclusiveness.
Farewell
It was sad. The double Decker buses, which have been the integral part of Mumbai city transport since 1937, had the last service in mid-September 2023. BEST authorities decided to phase out the buses as part of ‘modernisation’ and operational cost. Mumbai had around 900 such diesel-run double-decker buses plying in the city at its prime. Later the number of these buses reduced due to various reasons, including high operating cost. BEST stopped inducting fresh double-deckers in 2008.
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The double decker buses have disappeared from Kolkata roads too. In Kolkata, the Double Decker buses were first introduced in 1920 and over time occupied pride of place. However, they were discontinued in 2005.
It was an experience to see the Kolkata or Mumbai road scape from the second floor window of the bus. Gone are those days.
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Sunday, 17 September 2023
Saturday, 16 September 2023
Living in the Now | Weekly Column | 15.9.23
Living in the Now | 15.9.23
Un-crowd our Cities
Across the country our cities are bursting in the seams. By 2040, some 270 million more people are forecast to be living in India's megacities, where overcrowding, shoddy infrastructure and severe pollution are rife. Many cities have become urban management nightmares as the infrastructure is not keeping pace with the influx of population. Slums are increasing even as the open spaces are decreasing.
Over a third of the metros are slums or near slums with very high densities of population. Northeast Delhi has a density of over 70000 a square mile. Dharavi in Mumbai has an astounding 733,000 people living in a square mile. Besides the metros, smaller cities like Guahati, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi, Raipur are also expanding far beyond their capacity.
People from rural areas are migrating to towns and cities, mostly to the capital cities. Consider this: Mizoram has a population of about 12 lakhs; out of which 3 lakhs- quarter of the entire population live in its capital city of Aizwal. In Sikkim out of the total population of little over 6 lakhs over 1 Lakh live in its capital city of Gangtok. There are several reasons, mostly logistical, psycho-social and aspirational, for people from rural areas migrating to towns and cities. However, the overcrowding of cities is creating myriad problems.
It is time to consider un-crowding our metros and cities.
As social commentator Mohan Guruswamy writes, “Most capital cities have a concentration of government offices of various tiers and responsibilities crowded in as close as possible to the real and imagined corridors of power.” That could be shifted out of the capital city to less crowded towns. For example, apart from the ministries, departments and agencies, we also have a concentration of PSU corporate offices in New Delhi. Many of these actually need not be here. Why is the Indian Meteorological Department required to be in New Delhi? Why must the Director General of Civil Aviation be in the capital? It goes just as well for the ITBP, CISF, SSB, BSF, ICG, ICAR, ICMR, ICHR, SAIL, BHEL, COPES and so many others.
The same situation is there in almost all capital cities of the states. The more offices are concentrated in one city- it attracts more people and more pressure on infrastructure.
Consider the case of Bengaluru, which is now easily one of the most traffic-congested cities in the world. Its stop and crawl traffic is responsible most for its deteriorating air quality and the millions of man-hours wasted in traffic crawls and jams. The disastrous consequences of not doing anything about the ever-worsening traffic are now well known.
But all the solutions that are proposed is to further modernize it will create even bigger and faster mass transit systems, more civic amenities and efforts entailing more construction. These attempts to make the cities ‘better’ paradoxically only attract more people to it, thereby adding to its problems rather than removing them. Then there are some things that are only possible by flattening the old. How can we ever modernize the overcrowded inner areas of many of our cities without reducing the number of people in them? Our inability to protect our rivers and air are testimony to this.
Dispersing offices across the nation/state will not only decongest Delhi/other big capital-cities, but will also become economic drivers that will modernize smaller towns and result in far more dispersed urbanization.
In fact one can make an argument for moving the state capitals out of hopelessly over crowded cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Patna and Lucknow.
Many countries including China and Malaysia have tried to decongest their capital cities by leaving behind the economic capital and taking out the political capital. Malaysia’s political capital is located at Putrajaya, a brand new city that straddles the highway to the international airport.
The BJP in its 2014 manifesto had spoken of creating a hundred new cities to propel India’s economic and social transformation. Since coming to power it has been scaling down that vision. It is time to think big again and create new cities for and of the future.
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\https://www.odisha.plus/2023/09/un-crowd-our-cities/
Saturday, 9 September 2023
Window Seat, Weekly Column in english, 10.9.
Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 10. 9. 23
Intersection of
AI and journalism
Technology has
always been a disruptor of the status-quo and creator of new paradigms. A
humble wheel and plough kick-started agriculture and civilization took
baby-steps. Compass made navigation easier and that helped in exploration and
discovery of new lands. Invention of the steam engine changed the way we used
to commute. Electricity made living easier. Modern medicines, antibiotics,
vaccines saved millions of lives. Telephone, Telegraph, Radio and Television
changed the way we used to communicate. The Internet and Mobile Phone
impacted the form and speed of communication like never before. It impacted
several areas. From trade, business to banking, from education to health
services, from governance to collaborative trans-national research- almost
every area was impacted. The latest entrant in the long list of
disruptive technologies is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is changing the
prevalent practices of many areas including media ecology with great speed. New
forms of journalism are emerging. New questions related to journalistic ethics
are emerging in the light of intersection of AI and journalism. As it happens
whenever a new disruptive technology emerges- many of us are overwhelmed. Some
see the new technology as a ‘destroyer’; equal numbers see the opposite. They
view the new technology as the ‘creator of a new world’. The truth probably
lies somewhere in between and in our capacity and willingness to adopt it and
adapt to its requirements.
Grass as the
harbinger of autumn and Puja season
As the milky
white flowers of ‘Kash’ (Kashtandi in Odia, Kahuwa in Assamese, Saccharum spontaneum) bloom near
water bodies, river banks- you feel the soft footsteps of Autumn. It heralds
the Puja season in the entire Eastern India- beginning with Ganesh Puja,
climaxing with Durga Puja and ending with Saraswati Puja.
Kash occupies an
important space in the cultural-visual landscape of Bengal and Odisha. In many
Bengali and Odia films, swathes of Kash flower have been shown as a symbol.
Remember the scene in Satyajit Ray’s magnum opus ‘Pather Panchali’, where Apu
and Durga run out into a sea of kash flower as the train approaches. Recently I
came across a beautiful graphic on Raksha-bandhan, which had all these
elements.
Kash, by the way,
is a grass native to the Indian subcontinent, which can grow up to three
meters.
A Teacher’s Pleasure
I am writing this
on 5 September, Teachers Day as I am receiving messages from my former students.
I have been a teacher for over 23 years.
It feels great to
suddenly meet an old student after long years. The pleasure doubles when you
meet his/her kids.
It was a pleasant
surprise as Madhavika, my student at IIMC, Dhenkanal in 2005-6 came to meet me
in a moving train. ‘I saw you getting in’, she said, ‘Sir, my daughters are
interested to meet you’. We are sitting in the next compartment.
Little while
after, she comes with her two pretty daughters, the eldest of 10 years and
studying in class V and the youngest 5 years, studying in class I. They were
wearing identical frocks. We had a lively chat. I knew that they were enjoying
their school life in Bhubaneswar even better than the USA, from where they
joined only six months ago. They were particularly amazed to learn that ‘Mummy
ki vi teacher ho sakta hai.’
Want to buy a
plot on the Moon?
After Chandrayaan
3 landed on the moon, jokes are doing rounds that builders are advertising for
‘earth facing’ 3/4 bedroom flats on moon.
But a quick
google search showed that there is actually an organisation which has been
selling land on the moon since 1998. The legal standing of the organisation is
unclear. But there are people with surplus money who are buying/gifting land on
the moon. Check out this website: lunarregistry.com
But be very
careful before you shell out your hard earned money.
Truth- on a
banyan
Once in a while you find profound
truth at the most unlikely place. I found this - printed on a round neck
banyan. It reads: ‘Nirlajyam Sada Sukhi’. Shameless is always happy. Look
around, you’ll realize how true it is.
Tail-piece:
Natural Disasters
Overheard at a tea stall:
No one teaches a Volcano
how to Erupt....
No one teaches a Tsunami
how to Rise...
No one teaches a
Hurricane how to Sway...
No one teaches a MAN how
to choose a "WIFE"......
Natural Disasters Just
Happen !!
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Monday, 4 September 2023
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