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Unlike other societies, India hardly ever encouraged physical prowess, adventure or competitive sports. We do, of course, have some wrestling but it is restricted to a tiny section of male pehlwans. We read of how the Kshatriyas jealously guarded archery from doubtful aspirants like Karan and how Ekalavya had to pay with his right thumb for daring to excel in an upper-caste elite sport. But, frankly, one sees no evidence of Kshatriyas organising sporting contests, once the Mahabharata was over and done with. Tribals, on the other hand, were more devoted to archery and organised regular hunting meets, but their increasing integration into the mainstream meant that they lost many such traditional skills. What about kabaddi or other village games? We are not saying that no one ever played games: we are simply stating that we did not value sports as highly as many European or African societies did and do.
While politicians quibble over the legality of the recent rules issued by the Central government curbing the movement and trade in cattle of all types and even camels, we may like to take a look at the big picture. The oft-quoted Article 48 of the Constitution is one among the many unrealized directive principles: desirable when able. It talks of banning the slaughter of milch and draught cattle, but the point here is that no one is advocating this patently uneconomical idea. We need to understand that even the best cows become a burden to poor farmers after their lactating period is over. So do old draught animals. Most farmers, many of whom are strict vegetarians, therefore, sell them off so that other humans and cattle can be better looked after.
On April 18 every year, museums in India celebrate International Museum Day and for a week or so, except for a small group of enthusiasts, all of this goes unnoticed by most of us. This is symptomatic of the disconnect between the average Indian and his heritage. Much of the mental or knowledge gap is thus substituted, rather effectively, with involuntary “correspondence courses” of post-truth half lies that are planted so vigorously on WhatsApp. But why is it that museums fail to attract us so passionately, while in the West or in the Far East, China, Japan and Korea splurge on setting up more and more museums and in drawing record footfalls?
The new game of appropriating national leaders who are long dead and gone as ‘Hindu nationalists’ is rather interesting. It competes with the pastime, popularised in the early decades after Independence, to absorb all divergent streams of the national movement under one banner of the ‘Indian National Congress’. This leads to eulogisation and ‘canonisation’ and here, one must examine the recent attempt to foist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as the most noteworthy icon of Andaman’s infamous Cellular Jail.
The unprecedented display of aggression witnessed in Bengal in April in the name of Rama Navami, has perhaps distracted the Bengali people from the good old traditional deities of Chaitra. This month, from mid-March to mid-April, has always belonged to Shiva, Shitala, Annapurana or Basanti and the very indigenous Dharma-Thakur. Bengalis were very clear that Durga came home only in Ashwin and reserved ten full holidays to rejoice in her name. What lent most colour to this month was Gajan, which is so similar to Taai-pusam in Tamil country. Throughout the month, several people dressed up as Shiva-Parvati, and wandered around streets and localities: singing, dancing and invoking Mahadev. It was the Bengali way of taking a religion to the streets, with devotion and pantomime, not with swords and threats.
Popular cults and their relationship with organised religion has been studied for several decades, not only by curious social scientists, clinical anthropologists, sympathetic folklorists, scholars of language and literature, religious or ritual practitioners as well as several other categories of observers. The two way transactions are the main elements but in this short report,we will focus on one specific aspect in one site over a long period to understand the inexorable process of appropriation of the mainstream religion.
It is only natural for a lot of good words to flow when a special anniversary year of a great human is celebrated. But what is of more importance to us is the discovery or rediscovery of certain facets of the person’s life and contributions that may have escaped our notice in the past or on which we have not given adequate importance. The recent celebrations on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita, has also followed this expected trail and several expositions of her sterling service to the Indian nation and people have been highlighted.
Classes were interrupted at will and the college shut down at sporadic intervals, which meant students lost irretrievable academic months and years. But Presidency is Presidency and some teachers dared the violence and gave tutorials in their rooms at considerable risk and others took makeshift classes in their homes.
If someone is serious about Doordarshan, it has to decide once for all whether it has to maintain some 50 mini-TV stations to produce just six hours of programming in an entire week.
My first recollection of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is imbedded in my mind, as it was also my first brush with the law. It was in January 1969, a month after I had appeared for my class 11 School Board examination, that my political 'mentor' decided that we must join a protest outside the Pakistani High Commissioner's office to demand the release of Sheikh saheb from jail. Who? Sashanka Sekhar Ray explained the Agartala Conspiracy Case and how the Pak government had put Sheik Mujib behind bars for two long years.
When we look at Durga's image in her desperate battle against the ferocious Mahishasura, we may also notice that her family members appear rather disinterested. Handsome Kartik does not lift his weapons; Ganesh appears almost smiling; Lakshmi holds on to her jhampi more tightly and Saraswati looks pretty with her veena. To understand this strange situation, we have to turn to history, first from other countries and then closer at home.
The first mention that one gets is about the celebration of shining lights is when Ramachandra returned victorious to Ayodhya, though Lakshmi does not feature here. The Kamasutra of Vatsyana, whose final product also appears like the Ramayana in the 3rd or 4th century AD mentions Yaksha's night, when houses should be illuminated with numerous tiny earthen lamps. ‘Yaksha’ were usually short pot-bellied indigenous creatures who stood outside temples as dwaar-paals. The Jain acharyas, Hemchandra and Yashodhara, describe this ‘Yaksha night of lights’ and this point to the Brahmanic adoption of a popular local observance.
B V Keskar was Pandit Nehru’s Information Minister for a decade, from 1952 to 1962. For him, Hindi film songs were a strict ‘no-no’ where Akashvani was concerned, as in his opinion, it should be the mission of the public broadcaster, to encourage only classical music. He had to face a lot of pressure and ridicule for this rather obdurate stand, but there is no doubt that had it not been for him, Indian classical music may have never reached and enthralled the common man,because classical music by its very nature was meant primarily for the elite.
The year was 1967. I had joined Class X, in the Humanities Section, with an enviable track record of standing last or second last in every class from VI onward. The crowning glory was my failure to pass Class VIII, followed by my close shaves in my second year in the same class as well as in the next class, when I studied Science in the ‘Higher Secondary’ stream, where one had to fight all the time. The other ‘feathers’ in my cap were the several warnings received for ‘poor conduct’, mischief and misbehavior. In other words, I was declared an ideal bad student when I joined, not without trepidation, the first day in my new class.
Every major nation in the world has a public broadcaster and there must be some reason why they do. Before we can discuss the shortcomings of Prasar Bharati, the autonomous body that supervises Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR), we may recall that even as its Act was passed by Parliament in 1990, its spirit of autonomy was vitiated by two sections, 32 and 33, which took away with the left hand what the right gave. They ensured that all its major decisions like manpower, recruitment, service conditions, salaries and critical issues would be decided only by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (I&B).
On the 16 th June 1912, Rabindranath Tagore reached London aftersailing for three weeks. He had utilized the journey to complete the last lotof his translations and was relieved that he had finally made it. His disappointment for not being permitted to travel in March of that year, on health grounds was thus overcome.
Prasar Bharati came into being on 28 th November 1997 after Prasar Bharati Act of 1990 was finally implemented by the Government and the Directorates of All India Radio (Akashvani) and Doordarshan were separated from Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and placed under an ‘autonomous body’. It was a momentous decision that came some seven years after Parliament had taken pains to conceive of a Public Service Broadcaster, whose character was eloquently worded in the Statement of Objects and Reasons.
Swami Vivekananda was one of the greatest patriots, thinkers, philosophers and spiritual leaders, India has ever produced. He lived only for thirty nine and a half years, of which he devoted the last nine and half years totally to the service of humanity. Though he left the world well over a century ago, Swamiji’s teachings remains very relevant to us in the twenty-first 21st Century. This is more so because mankind is struggling more now to adjust to more frequent socioeconomic changes. The very rapid pace at which developments are overtaking us is surely leading to a transitory segment of social confusion, unrest, and apprehension. This produces a very demanding and stressful life style.
“Life was solitary, poor, nasty,” droned the professor on a hot, lazy afternoon when the body clocks of most students signalled that it was time for a lovely surreptitious siesta, without actually dozing off on to the next guy’s shoulder. This was sometime in my first year at Presidency, when I was being introduced to the wondrous possibilities of how the State had emerged in history.
I had no idea that George W Bush had chosen to accompany me to Rome during the weekend — en-route to Albania from his G-8 conference in Germany. This gentleman seems to excite agitationists all over the world, and Italians are, even without much provocation, a rather excitable lot. Thus the city of St. Peter was now in the hands of protestors and the Italian government felt that the situation was so serious that the normal police would be unable to handle it. Hence, one was treated to a very rare spectacle of witnessing the smart, semi-military crack force, the carabinieri on real time prowl all over Rome — in their dark blue macho uniforms and their threatening rifles and pistols. Girls, both turisti and local drooled over those handsome hunks that were straining to impress them with their crackling walky- talkies.