The India of my Dreams
Friday, 4 September 2015
Monday, 11 May 2015
Monday, 20 October 2014
The wildlife photographer who has become a part of the forest
Sukumaran C. V.
“The shola forest and the meadows which have been gutted and destroyed by hunters at the hilltop of Nelliyampathy are the pang of my mind. Without having enough staff and funds, the forest department is quite hapless and helpless.The only one ‘weapon’ against wildfire in the hands of the forest department which fights the fire and the scorching summer is a banner which reads ‘Prevent Wildfire’. Without having enough staff strength and sophisticated methods, the department is playing a ‘fire play’ with the fire. We have to conduct awareness programmes among the people who live in and around the forest. It seems that everything is ending in this reply—there is no fund. If there is no fund to protect the priceless and precious flora and fauna, what else we should protect and conserve? The underground water sources (uravukal) of the earth are drying up in the parching summer. Earth is turning more and more parching and scorching. The answer to this ‘phenomenon’ is not trees but forests. We can plant trees, but we can’t plant or make forests. A small forest should grow in the minds of every individual. Only when it grows and spreads out from their minds; the land is covered with greenery. I have heard somebody saying that it rained as the result of their prayer. Never, friend; It won’t rain as a result of the prayer of the humans. It rains because of the prayer of other animals. The rain comes for them. What are the humans doing to the Earth?” (My own translation from Malayalam). This insightful writing comes from a person who sees forest and wildlife not through the typical anthropocentric view-point of the so called ‘educated’ society, and hence people like him are the really educated ones and this person is none other than the unique wildlife photographer N. A. Naseer. The passage is taken from his wonderful book written in Malayalam titled Kaadine Chennu Thodumpol.
“The shola forest and the meadows which have been gutted and destroyed by hunters at the hilltop of Nelliyampathy are the pang of my mind. Without having enough staff and funds, the forest department is quite hapless and helpless.The only one ‘weapon’ against wildfire in the hands of the forest department which fights the fire and the scorching summer is a banner which reads ‘Prevent Wildfire’. Without having enough staff strength and sophisticated methods, the department is playing a ‘fire play’ with the fire. We have to conduct awareness programmes among the people who live in and around the forest. It seems that everything is ending in this reply—there is no fund. If there is no fund to protect the priceless and precious flora and fauna, what else we should protect and conserve? The underground water sources (uravukal) of the earth are drying up in the parching summer. Earth is turning more and more parching and scorching. The answer to this ‘phenomenon’ is not trees but forests. We can plant trees, but we can’t plant or make forests. A small forest should grow in the minds of every individual. Only when it grows and spreads out from their minds; the land is covered with greenery. I have heard somebody saying that it rained as the result of their prayer. Never, friend; It won’t rain as a result of the prayer of the humans. It rains because of the prayer of other animals. The rain comes for them. What are the humans doing to the Earth?” (My own translation from Malayalam). This insightful writing comes from a person who sees forest and wildlife not through the typical anthropocentric view-point of the so called ‘educated’ society, and hence people like him are the really educated ones and this person is none other than the unique wildlife photographer N. A. Naseer. The passage is taken from his wonderful book written in Malayalam titled Kaadine Chennu Thodumpol.
N. A. Naseer is a wildlife photographer par excellence. What makes his photographs different from the usual wildlife photography is that he does not visit the forest only for photographing the wildlife. He is a part of the forest. His photographs show the serene bond between him and the animals. He has wandered through the forests for years together without camera in hand and has become a part of the forest as the animals, birds, reptiles, butterflies and insects are. Only after being a part of it, he started to photograph the forest and its children.
And his book shatters all our anthropocentric attitude and knowledge about forests and the wildlife. Usually the books on forest and wildlife are written from the perspective of the humans. But Naseer writes from the perspective of the forest and wildlife. He writes: “We should see forest as we look at a rainbow. We should touch the forest as if we touch a flower. We should glide through the forest as if we are in a dream. We should merge in and melt into the green of the forest. Then forest will take us with its thousand hands as if we are its children.”
Naseer, who can rightly be called the Rachel Carson of Kerala, says in the book: “Everything should change and change is needed for everything. But the only thing that should not be changed is forest. I don’t know how we can call those who kill trees and mountains and marshes humans….”
We can see poetry in Naseer’s photography and Naseer’s prose is also poetic. He poignantly and poetically shows us that the Western Ghats and the forests are the precious sources of bio-diversity and they are the forces of nature which sustain us.
“The fact that the greatness of a small ant or a small worm is greater than that of the humans will be known to us only when we sit beside them. Daily, we prove that the only creature that sows destruction on Earth is the humans. While each small creature works hard to sustain Planet Earth, all the activities of the humans contribute to the destruction of the planet. We are travelling on the road of self destruction without recognizing the report of the WGEEP.”
In his long years of forest life, he has encountered almost all animals and reptiles, in the wild, face to face. But no animal (the carnivore or herbivore) or reptile has ever attacked him. He says that the wild animals can perfectly differentiate the humans who are their friends, who see them with reverence from those who come to kill them, who see them as something dangerous.
“If the wild animals come just in front of us and if we reach very close to them, it is because of an intimate language, the language of heart, which is recognized by both the photographer and the photographed animals. We commit grave mistake when we consider it as adventure.”
(The following are his photographs which show us this language of intimacy between him and the wild animals. When I informed him my intention to write an article in English on his wonderful book, he himself sent me the photographs to attach with the article. I have seen many ‘educated’ writers and activists, but I have never seen a man who is as humble as N. A. Naseer and hence I consider him as the really educated one. He is not ‘educated’ in the man-made universities to destroy Nature; he is educated in the school of Nature and by Nature. Hence he tries to protect and conserve Nature and Mother Earth as possible as he can.)
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This language of intimacy is the thing which makes Naseer the only wildlife photographer of his kind.
And the following insight makes his book the most important one of our times: “The roots of our indigenous trees have the power to sustain the coolness of the earth and collect water in them. It seems that those who pull out the roots don’t know that our small state which lies in a slanting position from the south to the west is sustained and protected by the power of the roots of the still remaining green patches….When the vapour that rises in the west from the Arabian Sea travels south on the wings of the winds, Western Ghats and its greenery are needed to block and cool it. Only then we will have drinking water through rains, only then there will be rivers, only then the atmospheric temperature will come down…But we are not interested in protecting the forest or the soil or the rivers. We are organizing seminars and meetings to wipe out the still remaining green patches in the name of development, and for the ‘farmers’ and the estate owners”
Naseer shows us the pristine, pure, serene, beautiful and
wonderful world of not only the big animals, but of the insects, butterflies, flowers, birds and even of the leaves and roots too. When he describes the different musics of the forest, the music you hear when it rains in the forest and the music you hear when it doesn't rain, we really experience the ecstasy.
Let me conclude by translating a story with which he concludes the chapter on birds and their music titled Kaadu Paadunnu (Forest Sings): “Once, a Zen teacher (Zen Guru) entered into his class room and when the students were respectfully waiting to hear his words, a small bird started to sing sitting near the window. The class room fell into silence. After a while, the bird stopped singing and flew away. Then the Guru said: ‘Today's class is over’”.
Let me conclude by translating a story with which he concludes the chapter on birds and their music titled Kaadu Paadunnu (Forest Sings): “Once, a Zen teacher (Zen Guru) entered into his class room and when the students were respectfully waiting to hear his words, a small bird started to sing sitting near the window. The class room fell into silence. After a while, the bird stopped singing and flew away. Then the Guru said: ‘Today's class is over’”.
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Monday, 5 May 2014
450 years of Shakespeare, the secular Bard of the World
Sukumaran C. V.
Shakespeare approximates the remote and familiarizes
the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were
possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be
said that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but
as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed. This therefore is
the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.—Samuel
Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare).
April 23, 2014 marked the 450th birthday
of William Shakespeare, the greatest and marvelous creative genius the world
has ever seen. We can even form a library with the books written on
Shakespeare. There are many writers who are remembered forever only for their
writings on the Bard. The most famous examples are A. C. Bradley, the author of
Shakespearean Tragedy and Wilson
Knight, the author of The Wheel of Fire.
And almost all well-known English writers have written on Shakespeare. Samuel
Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats…the list is never ending. What makes Shakespeare the subject of
so many books and why he is read more than any author in the world was or is
read?
The reason is, as Samuel Johnson says in his Preface to Shakespeare, “…the
composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches,
and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and
sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful
pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display
cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and
polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and
diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by
impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”
I was attracted to Shakespeare by Julius Caesar. Mark Antony’s brilliant
speech by which he wins the sympathy of a hostile people and turns them against
the conspirators enthralled me and thereafter, I spent months and years on
Shakespeare and found that the most remarkable fact about Shakespeare is that
his plays are astonishingly secular. Let me borrow a passage from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy:
“…although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of
Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of
life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy….while
Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of
non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially
in one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or
Christian. He looked at this secular world most intently and seriously; and he
painted it with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his
own, and, in essentials, without regard to anyone’s hopes, fears, or beliefs.
His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
power.”
Read any of Shakespeare’s plays, you don’t feel that
you are reading something written by another human being. Each play takes us
into different aspects of human life. Again, in the words of Bradley: “We
cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or
at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important
works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always
look at things in one light; but Hamlet and
Henry IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and
Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these
reflections.”
When we read a literary work, we can garner the views of the writer, it may be religious or fanatic or progressive; but when we read
Shakespeare we can only see Life and its evergreen emotions. There is no
religious or theoretical dogma; there is no intolerance or fanaticism or racism
that smothers life and its emotions. The powerful creative genius of
Shakespeare celebrates secular life and its ecstasy and that is why even after
450 years, Shakespeare is still living and is loved.
Only an extraordinary creative genius can produce
the following dialogue (of Shylock in The
Merchant of Venice) four hundred years ago when the prejudice against the
Jews was predominant in Europe:
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we
not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we
will resemble you in that.”
In the present day India, where caste and religion
wreak havoc on the innocent, we have to learn the truth that the Dalits, the
Adivasis, the OBCs, the caste Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians and everybody
are ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases and healed by the same means’. If we learn this precious truth, it
will blur our caste and religious identities and we all will be humans.
And who can forget the dilemma of human beings, of any age or of any locale, beautifully expressed through Hamlet, the character who ‘has been the subject of more discussion than any other in the whole literature of the world’, in the world-famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy of the first scene in the Act III of the play Hamlet?
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
The English actor John Philip Kemble as Hamlet in 1802, in the grave-yard scene.
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