Journalism of Courage
As Adishakti turns 40, remembering Veenapani Chawla who rescued theatre from the spoken word and gave the body full play
Adishakti Theatre Arts, an institution of performing arts near Puducherry, is on a campus covered with trees, half of which do not bear flower or fruit. When the group moved here in 1993, the artistes funded their theatre activities by cultivating and selling French bean, cucumber, radish and pumpkin. Three years later, as their art evolved, the performers no longer wanted to look at plants from the perspective of utilitarianism. The practice of taking produce to the market stopped and the fertile land was nurtured to grow a small forest.
What’s the writing on the wall at the Rashtrapati Bhavan?
The transformation of the Viceroy’s House into the Rashtrapati Bhavan was a leap from imperialism to nationalism in which the visual art played a major part. The pervasive influence of Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore impacted the world of art, too. It swept across the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and as far as the Vatican and the personal collection of the Mountbattens at Broadlands, Hampshire. Paintings of Sukumar Bose, of the Bengal School of art, adorn the walls at the Rashtrapati Bhavan and the house of the Mountbattens. In 1950, Pope Pius XII commissioned Bose, then art curator at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, to create a painting in Indian style on a Christian theme. Titled The Nativity – The Birth of Christ, the painting was at the Vatican and now it appears to be in a private collection.
‘It’s really important the BBC doesn’t just have a perspective from one country…we are not just a company broadcasting from London’: Tim Davie
In BBC’s older markets like India, there’s been an explosion of other forms and outlets for international news. The BBC is no longer our primary window to the world. How do you see the company evolving and competing in a crowded space?
I think one of the most important things for the BBC is to stay true to its values. If you go back to the basics, we are a public-service organisation, absolutely driven by impartial, fair news coverage, and content in many genres. So, in a very busy market, the last thing you want to do is do what everyone else is doing. You want to double down on where you’re different. And the BBC is different, in that it’s largely publicly funded, and it cares about the truth. What I’ve tried to do as leader of the BBC is be innovative in how we deliver things through digital means, making sure we were very, very fast-moving. But our values stay true and hold firm. We’re 100 years old, and we’re still growing. This year, we’re close to 500 million people in terms of our reach globally. It’s growing in India — we’re up to 72 million. So, I think, the appetite for trusted news sources and trusted content has remained strong. You could argue in this modern world, where everything is disputed, there’s so much noise, the value of a trusted source is going to become higher, not lower.
How India’s birdman, Sálim Ali, showed us the interconnectedness of life
From busting myths about fireflies lighting up the homes of weaver birds to explaining the whys and hows of the spectacular phenomenon of bird migrations, there has been, perhaps, no one better than Sálim Ali, India’s best-known ornithologist, to demystify the avian world. To Ali’s already formidable list of works, comes another: a collection of his radio talks. Edited by Tara Gandhi, Words for Birds (Black Kite), the book shows him doing what he did best — reaching out to a cross-section of society on birds and the stellar role they play in preserving our environment.
How we look away from self-serving sectarianism and open our minds to introspective reflection
Mai aaine mein dekhta hoon, main kahan chala gaya. Loosely translated from Urdu, this lyric says, “I am looking into the mirror and wondering where it is that I have gotten lost.”
Life has a way of living its journey with or without us. Its motions, beats, notes, cadences, scents, sounds and touch — all are of its own choosing; nothing we can predict, alter or conquer. With or without us, life will course through its journeys. Its rhythms, its pulse, its pace, its ups and downs, its seasons — nothing we can control. In many ways, life seems intangibly complicated, yet it throws us tangents and parallels that connect us to our own stories, paths, loves and relationships.
How Mother Nature engineers light and tough armours for her myriad species
It couldn’t be more ironical: the very effective, light armour they carry for their own homeland security (sometimes, used for offence) is swiftly leading to their own downfall — at our hands, and for reasons that ought to make us hang our heads in shame. The magnificent rhino, the quaint pangolin and the fierce porcupine are perfectly equipped to protect themselves: the rhino can upend a truck with a toss of its horn, the pangolin roll itself into a scaly ball which even lions cannot prise open, and the porcupine can put out the eye of the tiger with just one of its myriad quills. And these weapons are made of essentially the same thing: a structural protein called keratin — incidentally, it is also what our own hair is made of. And in our eternal wisdom, we believe that crushed rhino horn serves up as an aphrodisiac and pangolin scales have great medicinal value: as a result, both the animals are now teetering on the brink of extinction.
