Sunday Long Reads: Looking back at the journey of supermodels, interview with percussionist Trilok Gurtu and more

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What the Oscar-nominated documentary The Elephant Whisperers tells us about indigenous communities and the perils of development

A still from Oscar-nominated documentary The Elephant Whisperers. (Photo: Kartiki Gonsalves)

There’s something about Raghu. The first time that Kartiki Gonsalves saw him, in 2017, he was only three months old. She was driving home to Ooty from Bengaluru, and passing by the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, when she happened upon the orphaned elephant and his caretaker, walking by the side of the road. “Bomman (the caretaker) could tell how curious I was about Raghu, so he invited me to come along while he bathed him,” Gonsalves recounts. That was it. The documentary filmmaker fell in love with the spirited young elephant and spent the next five years following his story, as well as that of his human “parents”, Bomman and Bellie, and his “sister”, another orphaned baby named Ammu, The story took the form of the short film, The Elephant Whisperers, currently streaming on Netflix and up for an Oscar in the ‘Best Documentary Short Film’ category. “A beautiful bond developed between Raghu and me. We would play together, I helped bathe him, rubbed his tongue — he loves having his tongue rubbed — he would pull my hair, we would stick our tongues out at each other,” Gonsalves recalls.

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‘Music has nothing to do with fame’: Trilok Gurtu 

Trilok Gurtu (Courtesy: Trilok Gurtu)

FOR OVER half a century now, ace percussionist Trilok Gurtu has had a flagrant disdain for boundaries. Not because he does not value tradition or its indicators, but mostly because he isn’t satisfied with the prevailing idea at the heart of Indian classical music — freedom within a discipline. The antidote to this lies in Trilok’s restiveness, which allows him to go into unexplored realms. “It’s a difficult path but more satisfying,” he says.

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Scintillating sea creatures and what makes them special

The smallest sea horse is just 1.5 cm, the largest over 35.5 cm. (Source: Pixabay)

I can’t swim, let alone snorkel or dive, so I have never really encountered these scintillating sea-creatures in their natural environment. But it has done nothing to lessen my admiration and awe of them. These are my five top favourites.

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Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises takes on Sri Lanka’s ethnic, religious and class divides head on

Shehan_Karunatilaka (Courtesy: Hachette India)

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises came out just around the time that he won the Booker Prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida in October last year, which may explain why it has not been noticed that much. This collection of 30 sad-funny short stories, as its title says, is filled with surprises, pulling the reader into unanticipated turns and twists and sudden eureka moments.

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Ranbir Sidhu’s Dark Star is a meditative exploration of the impact of misogyny and masculine nationalism on a woman’s life

Dark Star
Ranbir Sidhu
Context
152 pages
Rs 499 (Source: Amazon.in)

Nothing happens in Ranbir Sidhu’s Dark Star. The short novel is an internal monologue of an old woman, who lives with her husband in his ancestral home in Punjab, and is trying to learn how to die. The reader travels through her memories of Partition, getting married to an unknown man and moving to London, living in California, the Khalistan Movement and the recent farmer’s protest.

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 JCB Prize for Literature 2022-winning translator Baran Farooqi on growing up among languages and why literature in translation matters

(Left to right) Mita Kapur, Sunil Khurana-Chief Operating Officer, JCB India, Khalid Jawed, Baran Farooqi, AS Panneerselvan (Courtesy: JCB Prize for Literature)

Long before reductive politics attempted to stereotype Urdu as the language of the Other, Baran Farooqi remembers growing up steeped in a culture of assimilation, in which one could slip in and out of languages with equal felicity. “As a child, I had often seen translations happening around me and it had never occurred to me that someone could find it to be a strange or unfamiliar activity. In fact, since I was as yet unaware of the debates around the act of translation, let alone the issues of politics and the cultural nuances involved in the process, I took up my first translation assignment without any fear or trepidation,” says the professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, whose translation of Khalid Jawed’s Urdu novel Ne’mat Khana into English, The Paradise of Food (Juggernaut), won the JCB Prize for Literature 2022, making it the first Urdu novel in translation to win the award.

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Japanese literary giant Haruki Murakami to publish new novel after six years 

Haruki Murakami (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Ex-jazz bar owner, literary legend and frequent favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Haruki Murakami, will be releasing his first novel in six years on April 13, a Japanese tome of 1200 manuscript pages, said his publisher Shinchosha earlier this week. The title, story and date of translation into other languages is currently unknown.

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