Column | Window Seat | 18.10.2020

 

Window Seat| Mrinal Chatterjee | 18.10.2020

R.K.Laxman at 100

On 24 October in 1921 a baby was born in Mysore- who would create the most popular cartoon character in India- ‘the common man’The baby, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer (R.K.) Laxman who was born on 24 October in 1921 in Mysore is one of the greatest cartoonists that India has produced. He is often called ‘Shakespeare of Indian cartoons’. He is best known for his creation, ‘the common man’, a slightly bald moustached man in mid-fifties with a bulbous nose wearing a checked coat and dhoti- who never uttered a word throughout his life span of over 50 years. His daily cartoon titled ‘You Said It’, appeared in The Times of India from 1951 and continued for over five decades. It enjoyed a cult status.

Laxman drew cartoons in Times of India, did illustrations for several publications including his brother novelist R.K.Narayan’s books, wrote fiction, painted crows for over half a century before crippling disease made him bed ridden. He died on 2015.

Laxman was the youngest of six sons. His father was a headmaster. Laxman was interested in drawing and illustration from childhood. As he  notes in his autobiography, The Tunnel of Time: “I drew objects that caught my eye outside the window of my room - the dry twigs, leaves and lizard-like creatures crawling about, the servant chopping firewood and, of course, and number of crows in various postures on the rooftops of the buildings opposite”

Laxman's idyllic childhood was shaken for a while when his father suffered a paralytic stroke and died around a year later, but the elders at home bore most of the increased responsibility, while Laxman continued with his schooling.

After high school, Laxman applied to the J. J. School of Art, Bombay. He was refused admission as the dean of the school felt his drawings lacked, "the kind of talent to qualify for enrolment in our institution as a student". Laxman graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Mysore.

While still at the Maharaja College of Mysore, he began to illustrate his elder brother R K Narayan's stories in The Hindu, and he drew political cartoons for the local newspapers and for the Swatantra. Laxman also drew cartoons, for the Kannada humour magazine, Koravanji.

His first full-time job was as a political cartoonist for the The Free Press Journal in Mumbai. Laxman later joined The Times of India, beginning a career that has spanned for over fifty years.

In his long and illustrious career, Laxman has played with every shade of humour -- wit, satire, irony, slapstick, buffoonery, tragicomedy, but has never stooped to invective. And that makes him India's most beloved cartoonist.

He has been conferred the Padma Bhusan and the Padma Vibhusan, the second highest civilian award in India.

Fishing Cat becomes the Ambassador of Chilika lake

The largest brackish water lagoon in Asia and India’s oldest Ramsar Site, Chilika, located in Odisha has an ambassador now– Fishing Cat. For the uninitiated, it is the only wild cat species in India that is a wetland specialist – the Fishing Cat. The globally endangered felid was found to be present all around Chilika. However, the marshlands fringing its north and north-eastern sections was where most evidence of its occurrence was found according to a recently concluded study conducted by the Fishing Cat Project (TFCP) and the Indian wing of Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance (FCCA), in collaboration with the Chilika Development Authority (CDA). This exercise was a part of the monitoring of the health and well-being of the Ramsar site.

The future plans of this collaborative venture between CDA and TFCP includes regularizing protocols to estimate Fishing Cat populations in Chilika and to create a Fishing Cat conservation network by involving local stakeholders, college students, researchers, non-government and government organisations

Fishing Cat is a Schedule-I species and deserves conservation measures of the highest accord in India like the Tiger and Elephant. Unfortunately, marshland and mangrove ecosystems, which are Fishing Cat habitat are in decline.

Chilika has one of the country’s largest extensive marsh-ecosystem spanning around 100 sq km. Welcoming CDA’s proposition, Tiasa Adhya, co-founder of The Fishing Cat Project says “Projecting Fishing Cat as the face of marshlands will raise the profile of Fishing Cat and marshland ecosystems globally and nationally which are otherwise neglected ecosystems. Locally, it will nurture their value among multiple stakeholders in Chilika.”

These marshes receive the maximum freshwater flow from the tributaries of Mahanadi and seasonal rivulets. Analysis of long-term data collected by Chilika Development Authority (CDA) shows that this area also has high fish abundance. This is significant given that fish is the lifeline of Chilika sustaining 2 lakh fishermen families and globally threatened piscivorous mammals like Fishing Cat, Smooth-coated Otter and Eurasian Otter.

The Naked Truth

This is a story about the Truth and the Lie.

The Truth and the Lie meet one day. The Lie says to the Truth: "It's a marvellous day today"! The Truth looks up to the skies and sighs, for the day was really beautiful. They spend a lot of time together, ultimately arriving beside a well.

The Lie tells the Truth: "The water is very nice, let's take a bath together!" The Truth, once again suspicious, tests the water and discovers that it indeed is very nice. They undress and start bathing.

Suddenly, the Lie comes out of the water, puts on the clothes of the Truth and runs away. The furious Truth comes out of the well and runs everywhere to find the Lie and to get her clothes back.

The World, seeing the Truth naked, turns its gaze away, with contempt and rage. The poor Truth returns to the well and disappears forever, hiding therein, in shame.

Since then, the Lie travels around the world, dressed as the Truth, satisfying the needs of society, because the World, in any case, harbours no wish at all to meet the naked Truth.

A Pessimist’s view

Nadal was French open champion in 2005.

Since then, most of us got married, had kids, struggled in our respective careers, managed to get a decent earning, gained weight, greyed hair...

This is 2020 and Nadal is still the French open champion.

Some people never progress in this life!
(Courtesy: Social Media)

 

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The author, a journalist turned media academician lives in Dhenkanal. He has co-edited a book titled Mahatma Gandhi: Journalist and Editor with Snehasis Sur, which was published in 2018. Its Odia version is being published shortly.

mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com

 

Article | Sympathy and Empathy

Samaja, 16.10.2020

 

Article in Odia on Information overload

Samadrusti 1-15 Oct. 2020

 

Article in Odia: Bhay O Bhadrata | 12.10.2020

 

Odia daily Nirbhay 12.10.2020

Column | Window Seat | 11.10.2020

 

Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 11.10.2020

Empathy Deficit and why we should be concerned about it

Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”  Empathy goes beyond sympathy, which is broadly defined as understanding how someone else feels.

Empathy enables us to actually experience those feelings for ourselves. We feel the emotional pain of others as if it was our own. There is a Sanskrit word which comes quite close to it: samabedana (sama means same, and bedana means pain). There is another word in Sanskrit: sahanubhuti, which means the same feeling (sama means same, anubhuti means feeling). However, in English it translates to sympathy.

Studies in neuroscience have discovered that the key brain regions which evoke empathy in a person appear to be the amygdala, which is involved in the regulation of emotional learning and the reading of emotional expressions, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which activates when people experience their own pain or observe others in pain. But the most important region of all is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), also known as the prefrontal lobe. A "hub" for social information processing, the MPC modulates self-awareness and our awareness of other people's thoughts and feelings. It also appears to play an important role in "marking" certain emotional experiences so as to provide us with emotional shortcuts to actions that are positive and therefore likely to be rewarding.

These discoveries show that empathy is hard-wired and that we are primed for morality, hence the writer Jeremy Rifkin’s claim that these circuits are the source of humanity's desire for "intimate participation and companionship".

This finds resonance with several Indian seer’s claim of the basic goodness of human being and also with Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith's notion of a "moral sentiment". As Mark Honingbaum writes in the Observer ..(they) have come to regard empathy as intrinsically pro-social. When we empathise, they argue, we mirror the distress of an "other" and, unless our brains are damaged or we are developmentally abnormal, we are moved to alleviate their suffering. The result is that, like other modern moral sentiments such as trust and altruism, empathy is increasingly seen as a "social glue" and the evolutionary basis of human co-operation.

Empathy is vital for the running of a civilized society. Empathy is important for developing social relationships and being able to live with others. In fact empathy has often been termed as social glue- that binds the members of a society- even if they are not personally related or even know one another.

So why are we experiencing this downward trend in empathy levels, especially in young people? There aren’t any clear answers to this question.  Some experts are suggesting ICT (Information Communication Technology) may be largely to blame.

ICT may make communication easier and more frequent, however,  it promotes only superficial connections rather than the deeper connections you can only get in person. As Dr. Michele Borba, author of UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World, puts it: “It’s very hard to be empathetic and feel for another human being if you can’t read another person’s emotions. You don’t learn emotional literacy facing a screen. You don’t learn emotional literacy with emojis.”

The second reason could be the constant push to succeed. To be rich, at any cost. To acquire material possession- at any cost. And to be happy at any cost- as if happiness is a physical entity and one can buy it with loads of money. This misguided and fallacious notion of success and happiness is making us soulless morons.

Empathy is the bond on which human civilization sustains and thrives. Without empathy the bond slackens, and so does the growth and advancement of the civilization. Without empathy, we stop growing and gradually regress. Presently we are in a peculiar situation- call it an existential crisis. Our body and science are in twenty first century- poised for even further develo0pment. But our mind is regressing to the middle ages. A me-only existence will give rise to a hollow civilization.

Therefore, we need to practice empathy- at individual level, at family level, at community level and at societal level. Nature has endowed with empathy. We need to let the feeling flow and translate it into action.

Hathras

Hathras in UP is presently known across the country for the gruesome rape and murder of a dalit girl and the way Police and the administration mis-handled it.

Hathras should have been known for quite different reasons.

It was in Hathras that Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Duttta, then) found his first disciple at the Hathras railway station. It was  in 1887, on his way to Kashi, Vivekananda stopped at Hathras. It was here that he met the Assistant Station Master of Hathras Railway Station Sharat Chandra Gupta. He became the first disciple  of Vivekananda.  He later became  Swami Sadananda of the Ramakrishna Mission. Thus Hathras railway station has historical importance in the life of Swami Vivekananda and formation of Ramkrishna Mission. In fact, Hathras station should be refurbished to highlight its association with Swami Vivekananda.

Hathras is also the birth place of one of the finest Hindi satirist and humourist Kaka Hathrasi (1906-1995). Born as Prabhu Lal Garg, he wrote under the pen name Kaka Hathrasi. He also wrote several books on Indian classical music under the pen name "Vasant". 

Kaka Hathrasi

In 1935, he started publishing a monthly magazine Sangeet, which is the only periodical on Indian classical music and dance that has been continuously published for over 78 years.
It is a pity that Hathras is now known for the wrong reasons.

Tailpiece: Corona

What’s the difference between COVID-19 and Romeo and Juliet? One’s the coronavirus and the other is a Verona crisis.

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Odia translation of Harishankar Parsai's Hindi original story

Published in Sambad. 11.10.2020

 

Article in Odia: Problems of our Examination system | 10.10.2020

Nitidina. 10.10.2020