A Toast to New year 2015

New year 2015 around the corner, people all over the world are eagerly preparing to celebrate the event in a grandiose manner. This particular celebration is gaining momentum every passing year. Invariably, the young and the old, celebrate the event with lot of zeal and enthusiasm. Each one plans to celebrate it in a unique way, quite differently from the last year. Economic liberty has gifted a new kind of life style for everyone. Young boys and girls party whole night swaying rhythmically to the tunes of the hybrid contemporary music, which is the fusion of east and west. People travel to exotic places with families and friends to make the moment memorable. People reserve hotels and resorts much in advance to celebrate the event. Suddenly, there is a shift in the life style and everyone is hankering to embrace it. With New Year stepping in, celebrations bring new resolutions with new hopes to progress and have success in everyone’s life. Some continue with their resolutions determinedly, and some break halfway faltering. Knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, we have embraced global culture.

As a sign, this celebration indicates and reflects a globalized culture, which has spread all over the world over a period. Definitely, this is the result of information and communication technology, free- market policies and consumerism. Now, cultural practices have crossed local borders and acquired new meanings in the context of globalization. This all is the result of communication technology, which has mesmerized everyone. The global market has led to individualism and material progress. Each one is becoming aware of one’s taste and choices and wants to establish one’s identity, as personal identity matters a great deal now. Individuality is necessary for the progress of a person. However, when extended it to a family, a society, and a nation, this individuality seems to thwart the progress of the activities when done collectively. Individualism as a discipline always leads to differences of opinions and judgments.

Economics and politics particularly play an important role here. Power centers always dictate the terms and form the cultural patterns in a society, later everyone accepts them as trends. Due to the global market and information technology, the borders of countries have been erased, and as a result the global culture has embraced everyone. Internet technology has fascinated and facilitated people to such an extent that life does not move without it nowadays. When  information and images unfold at every home through T.V. and computers repeatedly day and night, naturally one feels at home with material thrown at one. It is mainly the communication technology, which is globalizing, not people. Even globalization also works as a commodity. Everything comes under the scanner of consumerism.

Languages, music and images as signs mainly reflect global culture these days. When the word Originality is put to test, a new emerging taste demands for fusions. Simulacrum  has become a feature of postmodernism. Pastiche is quite common now days in art, music and languages. When we listen to music these days, the strings of sitar and the strings of guitar together evoke a very different music and give us a different feel. The same way, the distinction between popular art and classical art has been erased and both are placed on the same pedestal. What we see and live in is hybrid culture.

Diversity is very essential for the progress of one’s growth. Diverse cultures always enrich one another by contributing with their finer nuances. In Indian art, we see the influence of Greek, Portuguese, British, and Persian arts. By the fusion Greek and Indian art, we had Gandhar Art. Indian art spiced with Persian art developed Moghul miniature school, appropriate to the Indian context then. The colonialism in India introduced its art practices and established art schools to provide proper art education in India. Absorbing all the fine elements, Indian artists developed their own style over time. From these examples, we come to know that diversity is essential to enrich and further our art practices in a new direction. The famous artist of the 20thcentury, Picasso, also had his inspiration from the African sculptures. The famous Japanese wood-prints influenced the famous artist Gauguin and enriched his palette. The differences in art, music, languages, food, clothes and so on, give different tastes and insights. However, globalization is bringing uniformity all over the world. One has to think seriously whether this uniformity is acceptable or not. If one says yes, there is nothing to do but to follow the universal trend. If you say no, then one has to try hard to keep ones uniqueness unaffected, which is very difficult to maintain in the present context.

Story Telling

There was a sparrow; it used to live in a small nest with …That is how a story unfolds.  Children listen to the narration with wide-open eyes and open mouth, half-eaten biscuits in their hands. Any slight sound would interrupt that absorbing moment.

Narrate your stories to children and enrich their little minds. Narration is also an art. Words enliven the characters and take children into a fantasy world filled with the rainbow colors. Children wander in that fantasy world with birds, flowers and animals. Past, present and future all open their wings at time in this world. These small wonderful trips into the fantasy world help them to build their own creative and imaginative universe. Why do we tell stories to children? Are we educating them morally through the story telling? Are we introducing them to creativity? So many questions arise one after another. We start telling stories to them at tender age. In the beginning, the stories start with the moon and stars and the characters of birds and animals. The physical features and the characters of birds, animals and objects are highlighted in the context of stories. These characters have moral responsibility towards children. Through these stories,we make an effort to discipline our children in the hope that they will be able to differentiate between good and bad. This very skill of differentiating and choosing  right things for them would help them to lead a happy life, in future. Usually, grandparents or the elders at home tell stories to their children, before taking them to bed. The story is half way and the children fall asleep. Next morning, they demand for the next half of the story. This story session is the backbone of their relationship. Now the nuclear families are in existence and there is no space for the story session as both parents are having jobs and lead a hectic life. Because of so many reasons, the joint family structure is vanishing rapidly, where grandparents and grandchildren stay together and enjoy the story secessions. Now in the school curriculum, moral science as a subject is included. Earlier this moral science subject was taught through the story telling by the elders at home. Through the storytelling, children are disciplined and a moral responsibility is inculcated in them towards family and society.We have a strong tradition of storytelling in India. The Panchtantra stories are quite famous in this direction. In Panchatantra Stories, we come across the stories of animals and the structure of the forest and the power play among  animals. Each animal’s character is brought out vividly and explains about the relationships among animals. These stories enlighten children on moral and political issues. There is an assumption that Vishnu Sharma wrote the Panchatantra stories in the 3rd century, in Sanskrit language. By the 11^th century, those stories were translated to other languages and became popular worldwide. Still these stories are prevalent and apt to the contemporary situation.

 A rich visual unfolds...  Here comes our big foolish cat Tom, holding a fish in its hand and mouth watering. Our small intelligent Jerry watches Tom from the corner of the room and plans to steal that fish…the cartoon continues .. Visuals explode.. visual culture intoxicates….

 In the present context, children are lured by T.V. They watch either animations or cartoons to recreate themselves. Sometimes they will indulge in video games.The T.V. watching is on rise more among the children because of the unending rich visuals. Today, we are leaning more and more towards visual culture. T.V. computers, laptops, tablets and mobiles offer rich, detailed visuals of different cultures, from the different corners of the world. A visual is stronger than a verbal or written word and impacts easily. No doubt, we are under the impression that this new technology offers us better knowledge of the world, but these visuals damage our talent for imagination, which is essential for creativity. Children keep watching the cartoons without a blink, they enjoy the story line but they will not divulge the moral of the story on their own. Someone elder has to pinpoint the hidden morals in the stories and explain about its importance to the child and its application to life. The Story telling is slowly vanishing because of the nuclear family pattern and the influence of T.V. In the story telling sessions, relationships are built with the elders in the family. These relationships are very important in one’s life. These relationships make our life happy and meaningful. Along with these relationships, children will inculcate compassion, tolerance, understanding, sharing, and sacrifice and so on. These relationships help one to build social life and social activities, After all, we are all social beings, alienating ourselves from these social activities is against our nature. We need to think on this line.  Here the story continues…. Man being adventurous and selfish, he started cutting the trees in the forest, the forest started vanishing… that vexed the king of the forest. The lion, king of the forest, summoned all the animals to discuss the matter. The animals thought of a plan to avenge men. As per their plan, the magician jackal came with its wands to the town and uttered some magic words and instantly all the vehicles, two-wheeler and four-wheeler, started following the jackal. The jackal dancing with a line of vehicles behind it vanished into the forest like Pied Piper… with the vanishing of the vehicles,  the life in the town came to standstill .. The story continues…

                                                                                                                        

Electrifying Moon and Coco-cola bottles

 Young waiters were running around non-stop, serving people at different tables with their favorite items. The atmosphere was very interesting and amusing. Families, young and old, had occupied lawn space. Different partitions provided different facilities to different people, who had come there to spend time with friends and families. The lawn space looked mesmerizing, the moon had appeared in complete circle, no artificial lights were around to mar that beauty. The people were talking in hushed tones with their favorite drinks in hand. It was a perfect scene. The milky white light of the moon had covered the whole area. Palm trees planted at the borders of the garden had stretched their shadows on the lawn. The light filtered in through the palm trees and fell on the grey-green grass, and created some weird design of light and shade. The winter cold was a little bit harsh. Therefore, the human bodies demanded something hot and spicy to ward off that chilling cold. An old Hindi film song came floating in the background and at some distance; a large screen was screening the visuals of the same Hindi song. The atmosphere seemed romantic. The old songs continued for some time with the electrifying moon magic.

Suddenly, the big screen switched to cricket show on demand. The cheer up girls appeared in life size on the screen like angels. The people from the lawn also cheered and waved to the girls in return, forgetting their girlfriends and wives for a moment. In the cricket game, as the scores went on raising high, the electrifying moon was declared clean bowled out for zero. With the appearance of coco-cola advertisements during the short breaks, demand for the bottles increased, along with finger chips and fried peanuts. More and more people arrived as time passed and joined the cricket club. Having bowled out for zero, the moon started diminishing, as the demands went high for coco-cola bottles and finger chips, on the other side.  Values of life change as time rolls on.

Frozen Feathers

Hearing the chirping of birds at my windowsill, I got up surprised. I was thinking what had brought so many birds to my window at that early hour. I directed my look towards the window, but there were no sign of birds. I got up hastily and opened the doors of the window, and stretched my neck to have a look at the birds. Not a single bird was visible!  Was it a dream or hallucination? I murmured to myself.  Really, I was happy to have heard the chirping of so many birds at a time, at my windowsill in the early morning. Because of that chirping sound of birds, my morning seemed different and blissful.  However, it was confusing and disturbing.  After some time, I heard again the chirping of birds at some other corner of my house, as I was eager to know, I rushed towards the sound. To my utter surprise and disappointment, it was a ringtone from a mobile. It was a live-recorded version. I have heard and read that ringtones are disturbing and killing birds all over the world. Now a day we do not see sparrows and crows very often in our surroundings. Once, these were quite common birds, which used to sit in the verandas, on the compound walls, on the roofs chirping, crowing the whole day. When crows crowed sitting on the roofs the whole day, it meant some guests would come that day. Like mail carriers, they brought coded messages

.               When I refer to a crow, only the cartoons of R.K. Laxman, an eminent cartoonist, come to my mind. He has so beautifully rendered, familiarized and intimated crows to us that everybody started loving that ugly crow. When R.K.Laxman visited our college, we requested him to demonstrate and he obliged us by drawing a couple of drawings, mainly Mr.Citizen and his famous crow. His speech, full of humor, delighted us.

Nowadays, we are seeing fewer and fewer birds due to the heavy progress and impact of technology and global warming. As urban space is expanding, the forest, natural vegetation, is shrinking day by day. As a result, birds and animal species are extinguishing rapidly, and wild animals in search of food are entering in to urban space. We human beings are the cause for this catastrophe. With intelligent brains and efficient hands, we have created this irreversible malignant situation. Now, we rarely see birds in our surroundings, who were our daily visitors once, especially sparrows and crows. Just to invite birds to our garden, we have placed a big mud pot filled with water, so that birds can come and drink water. A couple of black birds, with red feather on their heads, come to our garden everyday in the morning, flutter their wings in the water pot, each taking its turn.  Sometimes, Small birds in rainy season come here and take shelter in the palm trees. This summer, an announcement was made through T.V and Radio  requesting people to keep small water pots and some food on their house roofs for birds.  Some people reacted sensibly and positively, and kept some food and water for birds. Some neglected this as if it were not their concern at all.

In recent years, architecture has changed significantly. We see all around the world towering buildings coming up in thousands and thousands, every year. These buildings, mostly, have glass coverage on all the four sides. It is trendy, inspiring and encouraging for the one who sit inside the structure and work, because one can have simultaneously both inside and outside views, and enjoy. Sitting in the glass cubicle, one can see birds flying high in the sky, the white clouds brushed here and there with silvery sunlight floating, through the glass panes. This all sounds very rosy and poetic.  Nevertheless, the distressing point is that thousands and thousands birds die every day, hitting to the glass panes. Birds fly innocently and blindly in to the glass panes, thinking it is an extension of the sky, which is just a deceptive reflection.  Hitting to the hard glass, birds die instantly. Every day birds are dying in thousands. The condition is worsening day by day. Due to these reasons, many spices of birds have already extinguished.

By destroying nature and its habitats, can we live in peace? This concrete jungle is definitely going to suffocate our life and of our next generations too.

Gayatri Desai