Mycologist, Artist, Author: Beatrix Potter

August 3, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

Several generations of children grew up with The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The author Beatrix Potter is a familiar name in children’s literature, but what is less known is that she was also a notable woman of science, in an age when this was almost unheard of.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born on July 28, 1866 in London in a family that enjoyed culture and the arts. Although Beatrix was educated at home by a governess, she and her brother spent all their free time in the woods around their home, observing the small creatures that lived there, and even bringing some, like hedgehogs and rabbits home. Beatrix was a quiet shy girl who expressed herself through paintings and drawings of wildlife, and in coded notes in a secret diary.

When an uncle who was a chemist gave her permission to use his microscope, a whole new world opened up for Beatrix who could minutely study plants, and insects and make detailed sketches. Her interest in natural history was further spurred when she used to visit the South Kensington Museum. She found herself drawn to the study of plants and fungi as well as insects.

Beatrix’s interest in drawing and painting mushrooms, or fungi, began as a passion for painting beautiful specimens wherever she found them. As her biography says: She was drawn to fungi first by their ephemeral fairy qualities and then by the variety of their shape and colour and the challenge they posed to watercolour techniques.

In October 1892, on a family holiday in Scotland, Beatrix got to know Charles McIntosh, a local postman and self-educated naturalist who was also an expert on British fungi. McIntosh admired her pictures, sent her specimens to paint and advised her on scientific classification and microscope techniques. She sent him copies of her pictures in return. She would go on to produce some 350 highly accurate pictures of fungi, mosses and spores.

Beatrix also started hunting for rare varieties of mushrooms, and growing dozens of different species of fungi at home, in order to study their development. She was intrigued by their life cycle. By 1895, Beatrix Potter’s interest in fungi was becoming even more scientific. Following advice from McIntosh, she began to include cross sections of mushrooms in her illustrations to show their gills and used a microscope to draw their tiny spores. She speculated about whether these spores could germinate and the environments in which they might do so.

In May 1896 her uncle Sir Henry Roscoe, a prominent chemist, introduced her to the mycologist at Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens. This led to a post at the Royal Botanic Gardens where she produced faithful, detailed renderings, largely of mushrooms and toadstools as seen through a microscope. In addition to her art, the scientist in her also began experimenting with germinating spores of various fungi on glass plates and measuring their growth under a microscope. Her close observations and experiments, as well as her drawings showed in great detail how lichens, a common type of fungi found on rocks and trees, were actually not one but two different organisms that lived together. Her studies showed that this was a union between an alga and a fungus. The two different organisms are able to live together, with each of them benefitting the other in some way. Beatrix thus was one of the earliest to study and hypothesize what would later become the science of symbiosis. However, the botanists she showed her work refused to discuss even discuss the drawings she made.

Beatrix prepared a paper on her findings and submitted her work to The Linnaean Society of British Scientists but was not allowed to read it herself because, at that time, only men were invited to their meetings. The all-male panel rejected her paper and refused to publish it. Potter withdrew the paper, presumably to make amendments. But it was never published; and no copy exists today. Thereafter Beatrix turned her full attention to drawing and writing.

There is today some controversy about how serious Beatrix Potter was as a mycologist. But there is no doubt about the accuracy and detailing of her drawings and paintings of fungi which remain unparalleled, and are referred to mycologists even today. As her biography says: Beatrix Potter never saw art and science as mutually exclusive activities, but recorded what she saw in nature primarily to evoke an aesthetic response.

The name Beatrix Potter endures today as the author of well-loved children’s books. In 1893 she sent a letter with a picture story to a sick child of her old nanny which began with the words “I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.” Beatrix went on to create the loveable characters of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny and Jemima Puddle Duck, among others that had adventures in the 26 books that she published subsequently. Over 150 million copies of her books have been sold and have been translated into 35 different languages

As her books gained popularity, she channelled all the profits towards a large property called Hill Top which she purchased in 1905. Situated in England’s Lake District, this was her first farm. She enjoyed the quiet and solitude that the thirty-four-acre property brought her and this allowed her to work more efficiently. Aside from being a farmer and landowner, Beatrix also became recognized as a sheep breeder. She never lost her love for nature and became an advocate of traditional farming and the preservation of the wild environment surrounding the area. She continued buying patch after patch of land around her farm. By doing so, Beatrix hoped to further pursue her dream to provide land for the creatures that she had loved since her childhood.

Beatrix Potter died of bronchitis in 1943, aged 77, leaving behind a legacy across different fields of study. The British Natural Trust eventually became recipient to her donation of 4,000 acres of land. The property was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, and is now open to the public. Beatrix Potter’s love for the land and all its creatures continues to provide a haven for all life.

–Mamata

Raiders of the Lock Art

August 1, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

Art thefts make the headlines fairly frequently (as do movies and OTT series on the theme). They have a long history—the first art heist probably dates back to 1473 when Polish pirates boarded a ship and stole Hans Memling’s a painting called ‘The Last Judgement’. They took it back to their country, where even today, it is displayed at the National Museum in Gdańsk. Italy has, since the 15^th century been trying to get the painting back!

Patriotism and national feeling were also behind the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 from the Louvre. Vincento Peruggia, a handyman at the Museum, along with two compatriots, spent the night in a closet there, and quietly walked away with the painting in the morning. Peruggia thought that the painting was an important part of Italy’s heritage stolen by Bonaparte, and wanted to get it back to the homeland. He hid the painting for over two years, trying all the while to sell it to a buyer who would help in the repatriation. It was no easy task, because the theft had gained international notoriety and everyone was on the lookout for the painting. Finally, after 28 months, a dealer whom Peruggia approached called the police, and the painting was recovered and Peruggia jailed. In fact, it is this theft which is supposed to have catapulted the Mona Lisa to the fame and popularity it enjoys today—few had really bothered about it before this incident.

The biggest art heist in terms of monetary value is the theft of several paintings of incalculable value from the Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The stolen works, still missing, include a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, and a Monet among others, and are valued at about $500 million.

Another art-theft that caught the popular attention was the one where the thief was dubbed ‘Spiderman’. Vjeran Tomic entered the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris several times without being noticed, by spraying acid on a window. On the final visit, he stole several artworks, including a Picasso and a Modigliani. He was finally caught.

The point of art thefts is a little difficult to decipher, because the stolen works are usually well-known and even if there are people willing to buy them, they can hardly be displayed, as they would soon be recognized. Of course there are some people who steal art for ‘noble’ reasons, like Peruggia who wanted to restore his country’s heritage. Or there may be others who are happy to pay in the millions and billions, and take enormous risks to enjoy the paintings in very private situations. Or maybe just the idea of outwitting complex security measures gives some a kick.

At least paintings are not too large and heavy, especially if the thief at some stage takes them out of the frame, and are therefore relatively easy to move and hide.

But that cannot be said of stolen public art. One of the most famous of such thefts is that of a Barbara Hepworth sculputre, Two Forms (Divided Circle), from its plinth in South London’s Dulwich Park. The bronze standing at 93 x 89 x 23 inches was installed in the Park in 1970, and disappeared overnight on 19–20 December 2011. While the art piece was valued at about £500,000, the thieves probably stole it to sell as scrap—for which they would likely have got £750!

Not at this scale, but our own Bangalore (and we personally) suffered such a loss last month. Raghu is an avid collector of locks, and seven of the locks from his personal collection were blown up in bronze, and placed on the kerbside of a large bank located on MG Road. The idea was to add an element of aesthetics and interest which could be viewed and enjoyed by all passers-by. Alas, on a night in June, one of the seven bronzes disappeared! And will probably be sold for scrap. A loss to the Bank, to us who love and cherish the locks, and to the general public.

Many curators and security specialists have thought through how thefts of public art can be prevented. Stephen Feeke, curator at the New Art Centre, a gallery and sculpture park in Wiltshire, offers common sense solutions—for instance, flood-lighting to deter thieves and vandals; securely gating and fencing the perimeter; and blocking access for vehicles, as a bronze sculpture is far too heavy to carry off without a car. Others suggest high-tech measures like using forensic coding that might allow the metal to be traced.

But many are united in that there must be an outcry and voices must speak out against these thefts, which are not only a personal loss to the owners, but a loss for the public for whom this may be the most accessible form of art.

Lady Lock did not have Lady Luck on her side the night she was stolen, but let’s hope our cities do more for their public art.

–Meena

Lollipop Day

July 25, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

July 20^th last week was marked as Lollipop Day—where else but in the US!

Well, and why not? Lollipops have been ubiquitous since for as long as any of us can remember. Toddlers and young children are happiest when their tongues are red or yellow or any of the other colours of the rainbow, and the sugar of the lollipop is coursing through their blood. So what if this is every mother’s nightmare!

The human predilection to lick and suck at sweet things goes back to pre-history. At that time of course, it was much more ‘natural’—people would poke sticks into honeycombs and suck the sticks—probably the earliest form of lollipops.

In China, Egypt and in the Arab world, fruits and nuts were glazed with honey and sticks inserted into them, to make for more convenient sweet-treats.

But the sweet as we know it today, has its origins in the late 16^th and early 17^th century. This was the time when sugar started becoming abundant in Britain (on the back of inhuman and slave labour in the colonies). The English started making boiled hard sweets, and inserting sticks into them. And there they were—the first official lollipops. The name itself probably originated in North-England, where tongue is called ‘lolly’ and pop means ‘slap’ — so ‘lollypop’ meant ‘tongue slap.’

The McAviney Candy Company started marketing lollipops in 1908, but it was the Bradley Smith Company which really took it to scale. Manufacturing got automated, when the Racine Confectioners Machinery Company built a machine which could attach hard candy to a stick at the rate of 2400 sweet per hour.

Today, there are over 100 varieties of lollipops available today in all shapes and sizes.

And of course something like lollipops are sure to have many a bizarre record associated with them. So here are a few:

The largest lollipop ever made weighed 3176.5 kg and was created by See’s Candies (USA) for Lollipop Day 2012. It was chocolate-flavoured and was 4 feet 8.75 inches long, 3 feet 6 inches wide, and 5 feet 11 inches in height. The lollipop stick which was 11 feet 10 inches tall was not counted towards the record.

A lollipop-licking event was organized in 2008, in Valladolid, Spain. Here a world record of the most people (12,831) licking lollipops was made.

27 people lined up 11,602 lollipops in a line stretching half-a-kilometre in length to create a Guinness record. This was in South Africa.

But the weirdest has to be the record set by two boys bouncing a balloon back and forth 56 times without letting it touch the ground, using lollipops held in their mouth!

Today, there are lollipop flavours that suit the adult palate as well– lollipops in beer and wine flavours, as well as tea and coffee-flavoured lollipops.

And lollipops don’t need to be sweet. The Indian version—imli-based lollipops are, in my reckoning, the best! Today they are marketed commercially, but back in the day, my grandmother used to pound together tamarind, jaggery, chilli powder, salt, ghee and hing, put the shiny ball at the end of a stick and hand the treat around to us kids. Of course these were extremely restricted and made once a month or so, after much begging and pleading.

But we did also enjoy the store-bought sweets occasionally. Lollipops in those days were generally flat and in one colour. A particular favourite of ours used to be a longish one which had a hole towards one end so that it doubled as a whistle as well.

Today lollipops are often round, and come in a variety of other shapes as well. There is a wide range of sizes, and they are often in a riot of colours. Some are so large that even the most-eager 4-year olds cannot finish them at one go—leaving the mothers with the challenge of a sticky, drooly mess.

Popular as this sweet may be, one also has to be aware that it not only can lead to cavities, and other tooth and gum-related issues, but the sugar-high can sometimes be too much. So it should definitely be a rare treat.

–Meena

Rubik’s Magic Cube

July 21, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

It was all the rage in the 1980s. Every house had one, and it was fought over by adults and children. It was in everyone’s hands that were never still; it sparked contests and competition across the world. It was the Rubik’s Cube.

At first glance, the cube seems deceptively simple, featuring nine coloured squares on each side. In its starting state, each side has a uniform colour — red, green, yellow, orange, blue, or white. To solve the puzzle, you must twist the cubes so that eventually each side returns to its original colour. Easier said than done! To master the cube, you must learn a sequence of movements that can be performed in successive order. Mathematicians have calculated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations or ways to arrange the squares, but just one of those combinations is correct.

The creator of the puzzle cube was an unassuming Hungarian architecture professor named Erno Rubik. Erno Rubik was born on July 13, 1944, towards the end of World War II in the basement of a Budapest hospital that had become an air-raid shelter. His father was an engineer who designed aerial gliders.

As Erno described his childhood: I was an ordinary boy, wanting to do everything possible—and not possible. I climbed trees and had fun in other ways that weren’t allowed but were exciting to me. And I was curious and tried to make things. Nothing special. He love to draw, paint and sculpt, and went on to study architecture at Budapest University of Technology because he felt it combined the practical with the aesthetic. He went on to teach architecture and taught a class called “descriptive geometry” where he encouraged students to use two-dimensional images to solve three-dimensional problems

In 1974, 29 year old Rubik was tinkering in his bedroom which had lots of odds and ends, including cubes made from paper and wood. He tried to put together eight wooden cubes so that they could stick together but also move around, exchanging places. The object quickly fell apart. Erno kept at it, taking it as a challenge. After much trial and error, he figured out a unique design that allowed him to build a solid, static object that was also fluid. He then decided to add 54 colourful stickers to the cube, with each side sporting a different colour – yellow, red, blue, orange, white and green. That way the movement of the pieces was visible and trackable. Erno was lost in the colourful maze, but with no clue how to navigate it. It took many weeks of twisting and turning before he could finally get the colours to align.

Once he found that the cube could be restored to its original state Erno Rubik submitted an application at the Hungarian Patent Office for a ‘three-dimensional logical toy’. Rubik now looked for a company who was willing to produce the cube commercially. It was not easy as no one believed that people would ‘play’ with such a toy. Finally in 1977 a small company that manufactured chess sets and toys agreed to manufacture 5,000 such cubes. The toy entered toy shops with the name Buvos Kocka or ‘Magic Cube’. By 1979, 300,000 cubes had sold in Hungary.

As the popularity of the cube grew and spread, even beyond Hungary, Rubik felt that taking it beyond Hungary needed an international collaboration, but that was the period of the Cold War when geopolitical tensions restricted collaboration with the so-called Western Bloc.

So Erno Rubik started to take his creation to international toy fairs where it met with lukewarm response. In 1980, at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, a marketer named Tom Kremer spotted the Magic Cube. He thought it was fascinating and made a deal to take it to America. Rubik got a contract at an American company, Ideal Toy, which wanted one million cubes to sell overseas. But due to copyright issues, they suggested that the name be changed. And so, Rubik’s Cube made its debut at a New York toy fair in 1980. Erno Rubik himself was invited to launch the cube. The shy professor with not very fluent English, was not the best of salesmen, but he was the only one who could demonstrate that the puzzle could be solved! The rest is history.

Rubik’s Cube became a craze. More than 100 million Cubes were sold over the next three years. Rubik initially believed the cube would appeal to those with science, math, or engineering backgrounds. He was shocked when, as he wrote, It found its way to people whom nobody would ever have thought might be attracted to it.

The Rubik’s Cube went on to become ‘one of the most enduring, beguiling, maddening and absorbing puzzles ever created’. More than 450 million cubes have sold globally, (not counting the many more imitations) making it the best-selling toy in history. It became much more than a puzzle. It has been described as ‘an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, and an inspiration.’ It has spawned speed-cubing competitions and an assortment of record breaking feats. But as Rubik once said, for him it is not the speed that is of essence; “the elegant solution, the quality of the solution, is much more important than timing.”

The educator in Rubik believes Arts should be an integral part of STEM education. He feels that the Cube demonstrates this fusion. The Cube has become a universal symbol of everything I believe education should be about: fostering curiosity, the rewards of problem-solving, and the joys of finding your own solution.

Even as the Rubik’s Cube became a global sensation, Erno Rubik remained a publicity-shy professor, continuing his “tinkering”. He started his own design studio in Hungary and began to work on new projects and revive abandoned ones, including puzzles called the Snake and Rubik’s Tangle. In an interview he said: I never planned to achieve this peak and had no idea that I would. And, after it, I had no thought that I’d like to do better. My only goal is to do well. I’m not thinking about whether people will like it or not. I need to love it and meet my targets, nothing else. What happens after that depends not on me but others. The Cube created the strongest connection with people—which is harder than being popular—maybe because it taught them that they could solve difficult problems and rely on no one but themselves to succeed. It has meaning, and that’s enough for me.

–Mamata

Another World Youth Skills Day…

July 18, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

In 2018, the proportion of India’s working-age population started growing larger than its dependant population (children below 14 and above 65 years of age). This bulge in the working-age population, called the demographic dividend is going to last till 2055—a total of 37 years.

But such a large population of young people is productive only if they are educated and skilled so that they realize their potential and contribute to the nation’s growth.

The harsh reality is that only about one in five Indians in the labour force is “skilled” as per the Human Development Report (HDR) Report 2020. India is 129th among 162 countries for which this data is available.

If the absolute numbers are a matter of concern, for me, the less-obvious ‘quality of skills’ is even more of concern.

Let’s look at a few indicators of how effective skill training programmes in India may be. With regard to many skills, a school dropout can be certified at Level 3 or 4 through a 3-month training programme. In the formal skill structure, which is the ITI and Polytechnic systems, the length of programmes is more respectable, but the courses and curricula are outdated by about five decades—some of these institutions still offer programmes in Stenography! The faculty may never have set foot in an industry, and the equipment, even if it is functional and not rusting, has not been in use in the real-world for at least 20 years. And the youth themselves, during their time in these institutions may never work on an industry shop-floor, or even visit a factory.

If skill is ‘the ability to do something well’ how do we expect youth passing out of such systems to do anything useful, least of all ‘well’?

Contrast this to Germany, which is one of the leaders in skill training. They base their skill training on the dual system which works because of the cooperation between Medium and Small Scale Enterprises, and vocational training institutes. Trainees in the dual system typically spend part of each week at a vocational school and the other part at a company. Dual training usually lasts two to three-and-a-half years. It is basically a combination of theory and training implanted in a real work setting. It is an integral part of the education system and is driven by industry and trade unions, who constantly upgrade and modify training modules and job roles. These occupations are certified by either a chamber of commerce or crafts or trades. About 70% of German youth go through this skilling system.

Whether is the length of the training, the rigour, the exposure and hands-on work in industry, or the up-datedness of the curriculum based on industry needs, where is the comparison between skilling in such a system and skilling in India? We can talk about the importance we place on skilling, tout the numbers (the National Skill Development Corporation website says 1,10,34,285 candidates have been certified through the flagship short-term training programmes), and the institutional structure and industry-involvement mechanisms we have put in place.

But to quote a 2019 ILO report on India,

‘Since 2013 … despite ongoing reforms promoting skills development, VET has not kept pace with general education, and its share of upper secondary education fell to 2.7 per cent in 2016. Moreover, VET does not respond to the training needs of young women. Only 17 per cent of VET students were girls in 2016, down from 20 per cent in 2000 (UIS, 2018). Non-formal and informal VET programmes do not reach a large proportion of India’s young people. Survey data collected in 2017 indicate that only 5 per cent of young people aged 14–18 were taking any type of vocational training, whether formal or not. And 59 per cent of those receiving training were taking courses shorter than six months.’

This should not be news to any of us. Each of us has experienced how difficult it is to find a plumber, electrician, carpenter or welder, leave alone one who knows their job, can problem-solve; one who turns up on time; one who works cleanly and cleans up their mess.

We are five years into our demographic window. And still have not put in place a critical building block, viz skilling. How can we hope to fulfil our dreams, aspirations and ambitions if we don’t bring about DRASTIC changes and SOON? We need to take an honest look at where we stand, admit we are not on the right track, and go back to the drawing board.

July 15 is marked as World Youth Skills Day. We in India too marked this last week. But Skill Days will come and go. When will our youth be able to access high quality skills?

–Meena

Living Your Dreams: Calvin and Hobbes

July 13, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ 3 Comments

I am an unapologetic follower of comic strips. This is the section of the newspaper I save up to savour after reading all the gloom and doom news. One of my all-time favourites is Calvin and Hobbes.

The creator of these iconic characters–six-year-old Calvin named after the Protestant reformer John Calvin, and his imaginary stuffed tiger friend Hobbes named after the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is Bill Watterson.

Watterson graduated from Kenyon College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, with a degree in Political Science in 1980. He started working as a political cartoonist for a local newspaper soon after he graduated, but was fired after three months. He then worked for a company creating ads to sell products, something that he hated. All the while he continued drawing, with the idea of creating a syndicated comic strip. It was five years before his dream could be realized.

The first Calvin and Hobbes strip appeared in a newspaper in November 1985. The characters and their adventures and ruminations were much deeper than just “comical”. They reflected the universal quest to accept the impossible and to embrace the irrationality of the moment. As Watterson once described it “My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships”. Watterson’s daily strip became an icon for all these elements and was syndicated to over 2,000 newspapers. Bill’s new ‘job’ was to come up with 365 ideas a year. For this he said he had to create a kind of mental playfulness. He sustained this for ten years. The last Calvin and Hobbes strip was published on 31 December 1995.

Despite the huge success of the characters, and in the face of intense pressure to allow related merchandise, Watterson never succumbed to what would have been a billion dollar industry. He believed that by doing so “Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards. I’m not interested in removing all the subtlety from my work to condense it for a product…Note pads and coffee mugs just aren’t appropriate vehicles for what I’m trying to do here.”

In 1990 Bill Watterson was invited back to Kenyon College to give a commencement address to the graduating students. His deeply personal and candid talk urges young people to follow their dreams even in the face of numerous challenges.

This month, as thousands of graduates across many parts of the world step out of the security of academic institutions and enter, with excitement and some apprehension, the vast, hitherto unknown world of work, Bill Watterson’s words offer encouragement, support and inspiration.

Sharing some excerpts.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery–it recharges by running.

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job. A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.

I tell you all this because it’s worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It’s a good idea to try to enjoy the

To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work. Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn’t in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

–Mamata

Homes for Hippos

July 11, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

Hippos hit the news every now and then. And in the past weeks, they have been a topic of some discussion in India, thanks to a request from the Colombian Government for us to provide a home to some of the ‘cocaine hippos’ that have become feral there. Actually, it is quite unfair to call them ‘cocaine hippos’—it is not like they snort cocaine. Their ‘fault’ is that they (or their parents/grand-parents) were owned by the infamous cocaine smuggler Pablo Escobar.

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian druglord, who was called the ‘King of Cocaine’, due to his monopoly of the cocaine trade into the US. He was the founder of the Medellin Cartel, and the wealthiest criminal ever, with his wealth being estimated at $ 30 billion in 1993, when he was killed at the age of 44, by the Colombian National Police.

Every aspect of Escobar’s life was larger-than-life. Like the emperors of old, he set up a menagerie at Hacienda Napoles, his huge ranch east of Medellin, and kept giraffes, elephants, ostriches, and other exotic species there. Four hippos—three males and one female–were part of this menagerie.

When he was killed, authorities did not quite know what to do with these animals, and just left them in the estate—where not unexpectedly, they multiplied. In about 25 years, there were close to a 100 individuals (the number may stand at over 150 today). A single hippo can eat over 35 kg of grass and other green plant material in a day, posing a threat to local biodiversity. Being large and heavy animals, they stomp the ground and compact it as they move over the same area day after day. They defecate in the water, and end up polluting rivers and water bodies.

Efforts to curb the population explosion have not met with success. About 15 years ago, the local government tried culling the animals, but this led to protests across Colombia and was thankfully stopped. A sterilization programme is in place, but the hippos breed faster than local experts can find, catch and castrate them (We can’t even manage it with stray dogs, what to talk of hippos!).

Hence the plan to ship the hippos to various countries which are ready to receive them. Mexico has agreed to take 10 of them. Colombia has approached India to house 60 of the animals at the ‘Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Kingdom (GZRRC)’, being created by Reliance Industries in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The plan has not met with enthusiasm by any wildlife expert. Housing them in zoos is an expensive proposition. Hippos are native to Sub-Saharan Africa, not India, and definitely cannot be released into the wild. (However, based on a small fragmented tooth unearthed in Madhya Pradesh, researchers claim that India was home to hippopotami nearly 5.9 million to 9,000 years ago. The hypothesis is that they entered Eurasia from Africa, and then diversified in South Asia before going extinct. But even if they ever were native here, they haven’t been for many millennia.)

There is no doubt Colombia has a problem. Apart from destroying vegetation and biodiversity, hippos are also a threat to humans. They are known to be very aggressive, and can chase people on land, as well as capsize boats in the water. They sometimes raid fields and come into conflict with humans.

And it is also true that a safe home must be found for the hippos—they are only living their life as they were meant to. How can they help it if someone uprooted them from their home and brought them to a new continent?

But bringing them to India definitely does not sound like a good idea. The recent import of cheetahs should serve as a cautionary tale. We need to protect our biodiversity and trying to introduce non-native (at least in human memory) species is not going to help either our diversity or the introduced species.

–Meena

Gracious, graceful, generous: Shobita Punja

July 4, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

Those are my memories of Shobita Punja, who passed away last week. She joined the Governing Council of Centre for Environment Education (CEE) when I was a rookie-professional there. And from then on, for the decades that followed, we would have the privilege of meeting with her twice a year when she came for the meetings, and then again at workshops and seminars. And over the years, she went from advisor to friend.

And in every interaction, she was indeed gracious and generous—taking the time to talk to each one of us, enquiring about our projects, and giving her inputs gently and generously. Most conversations gave us a new perspective to the way we were looking at things.

And of course she was graceful. Her lovely cotton saries; her low, loose bun; her warm smile.

We all wished we could be half as erudite and elegant as her. Or even a quarter would do!

When we first met, she was heading the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), and they were bringing out innovative teaching materials to ignite the love of our history and culture in school kids, and supporting that with teacher training to ensure that the material was used in the right way in the schools. There was much to learn and share, for she was doing for the cultural environment what we at CEE were doing mainly for the natural environment. Both CEE and CCRT were pioneers in introducing experiential learning pedagogies, in getting children to look up from textbooks at the real world, and in trying to question and contextualize their experiences; analyze and synthesize their learnings. And these were revolutionary thoughts for the ‘80s! (Today, the ideas are not new, but how effectively they are put into practice in their real spirit is still a question mark).

She was truly a pioneer! She did her BA in Art History when it was definitely not seen as a subject with any great career openings, at least not in our part of the world. This was followed by a Master’s in Ancient History from JNU and another Master’s in Art Education from Stanford. She was awarded a Ph.D. for her contribution to Art Education.

From CCRT, Shobita moved to INTACH, and established a Heritage Education and Communication Service there. She was the moving force behind the restoration of the Chowmohalla Palace and Museum at Hyderabad. As an erstwhile resident of that historical city, I can aver to how authentically it was done and how proudly we used to be to show it off to our visitors. The restoration won the coveted UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award, apart from many other accolades. Chowmohallah after its restoration was the site for many beautiful music and dance performances, made even more beautiful by the settings. Shobita was also behind the restoration of the Jai Vilas Palace Museum, Jaipur and Reis Magos Fort, Goa.

She was a prolific writer, with over 20 books to her credit, ranging from one as recent as the 2023 co-authored ‘A New History of India: From Its Origins to the Twenty First Century’, through scholarly books on Khajuraho and Banaras, to children’s books including ‘Listen to the Animals’ A Fabulous Collection Of Takes For Children,Illustrated by Mario Miranda.

But maybe her most seminal work was her first book, ‘Illustrated Guide to Museums of India’. Nothing like this had been done before for our heritage collections, and it set a benchmark. What is wonderful is that it is available to all free online, thanks to the UNESCO archives. All you have to do is click on: https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.84193/page/n17/mode/2up.

Shobita, you have left us, but your contributions and the memories of your grace and presence will live on!

May your soul Rest in Peace.

–Meena

Charming Worms

June 29, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

Aristotle called them the ‘intestines of the earth’. Cleopatra declared them to be sacred and forbade Egyptian farmers from removing them from the land. Japanese religious lore has a story about them. Certain of the Shinto gods decided to create the world’s creatures from living clay; formulating, in turn, animals, birds, fish and insects. At each stage their creations asked: ‘What shall we eat?’ When they created Man, he was told to eat everything. Then, the gods noticed some small clay scraps that had been dropped and decided to create worms, which they instructed to live underground and eat soil – although they could come to the surface from time to time in search of anything they found edible.

These creatures are what we call earthworms. Archaeological evidence suggests that worms have been around for 600 million years. These underground creatures hardly made news or were subjects of serious scientific research. It was Charles Darwin who studied earthworms for 39 years, who reaffirmed the value of these lowly creatures when he said, “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals in the world which have played so important a part in the history of the world than the earthworm. Worms are more powerful than the African Elephant and are more important to the economy than the cow.”

Darwin’s observations, investigations, conclusions and pronouncements were published in 1881, six months before his death under the title The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Darwin estimated that an acre of mid-19th-century arable land, the result of centuries of gentle pummelling and fertilisation by farm animals and traditional toil by countrymen, contained 53,000 earthworms. He further calculated that, over the course of a year, the worms moved 15 tons of soil to the surface – a process known to agrology as bioturbation.

Many years later, in more recent times, when much of the soil surface has been degraded from the onslaught of chemicals and industrial agricultural processes, scientists have once again recognized that the presence and activities of earthworms have a dramatic effect on the soil habitat.

While eating the soil, the earthworm absorbs the nutrients it needs and casts off the rest. Under ideal conditions, earthworms are believed to eat and digest their entire weight in castings in a mere 24 hours. The nutrient content of the castings, which have gone through the earthworm’s digestive system, was found to have 5 times more soluble nitrogen, 7 times the soluble phosphorus, 11 times the soluble potassium, and 3 times the soluble magnesium plus a smaller amount of calcium. Most earthworms also mix the plant litter and organic matter into the soil, increasing the speed at which they decay and release nutrients into the soil. In these ways, earthworms recycle nutrients from dead plants and other soil organisms so that they can be used again.

Earthworms are also incomparable builders of soils. Their means of travel thorough the soil — pushing, tunnelling and eating their way through all kinds of organic matter. soil opens it up for the benefit of aeration and water seepage. The underground burrowing systems that they create increase the amount of water and air that reaches the plant roots and other soil organisms, helping their growth. Soil that has a good population of earthworms is always easier to work and plants seem to thrive in it. Thus earthworms have been given new sobriquets such as “farmers’ friends’ and ‘ecosystem engineers’.

Earthworms are getting their due. One of the quirky celebrations of these usually hidden-from-sight creatures is a festival held in some parts of England–the Festival of Worm Charming. While we know of snake charming and snake charmers, this one is certainly not part of a regular vocabulary.

Traditionally worm charming, worm grunting and worm fiddling refer to methods of attracting earthworms from the ground, mainly through creating vibrations on the ground.

Darwin was perhaps the first to study earthworm sensitivity or otherwise to light, warmth and sound. His experiments included placing lamps, candles and hot pokers close to them, blowing tobacco smoke over them, sounding a tin whistle and playing a piano close by and having his son play a bassoon loudly. He observed that it was only vibrations that caused them to become active.

Scientific experiments apart, using vibrations to bring worms to the surface has been traditionally used by fishermen to collect worms as bait. In recent years, this activity has taken the form of a competitive sport.

An International Worm Charming festival is held every year June in Devon in England. As with all competitions, this one has its rules and etiquette.

The aim of the competition is to “charm” the earthworms to come to the surface of the soil by creating vibrations on the ground. Traditionally this was done by sticking a rod called a ‘stob’ (like a pitchfork) in the dirt and smacking it with a simple rod known as a ‘rooping iron’. This competition allows different ways of creating the vibrations—tapping the soil with feet, “twanging” the ground with a fork in the soil, but strictly no digging.

The wormers are given a 3×3 meter square of land to fiddle, grunt, and charm their way to championship glory by collecting more worms than anyone else.

Each teams comprises 3 members: a Charmerer, a Pickerer and a Counterer.

Once all teams have found their plot everyone is allowed to begin “Worming Up”. This is doing whatever you need to do to get the worms out of the ground without digging, forking or pouring harmful liquids onto plots.

“Worming Up” lasts for 5 minutes after which the competition really gets underway.

15 minutes are allotted to all teams to get as many worms charmed out of the ground.

Any team or competitor caught cheating will be publicly humiliated and almost certainly disqualified.

The International Judges’ decision is final.

All worms must be returned unharmed to the ground after the competition.

The Worm Master presides over the Festival. The Official Cheat tempts entrants by offering them worms so that they can cheat. Old Father Worm Charming offers advice and guidance to would be worm charmers. Finally, there’s the International Judge who is the rule of law in all things to do with arbitration in worm charming disputes.

What a way to spend a sunny summer’s day! While India is known as the ‘land of snake charmers’, this festival may well lead England to be known as the ‘land of worm charmers’!

–Mamata

Desperately Seeking Women-Power

June 27, 2023 ~ millennialmatriarchs ~ Leave a comment

The Global Gender Gap Report 2023 is out, and the news is not good for us in India. Well, if you are an untiring optimist who insists on seeing a glass with some drops of water in it as half-full, you will stop me and scold me. For after all, India’s ranking in the list of 146 countries which have been studied, has gone up 8 places, so that we stand at 127^th, up from 135^th last year.

But for me, as I go through the report, I don’t know see how we can take any comfort from this. Even if we are to view ourselves in a comparative light, we need to pause and consider that Nicaragua and Namibia rank at 7^th and 8^th, compared to our 127!

The report measures gender gap on four major dimensions: Economic Opportunities, Education, Health, and Political Leadership.

The first bucket, to quote the report ‘contains three concepts: the (labour) participation gap, the remuneration gap and the advancement gap’. The second bucket of Educational Attainment ‘captures the gap between women’s and men’s current access to education through the enrolment ratios of women to men in primary-, secondary- and tertiary-level education’. The Health and Survival sub-index provides an overview of the differences between women’s and men’s health by looking at sex ratio at birth, and the gap between women’s and men’s healthy life expectancy. The last bucket of Political Empowerment measures the gap between men and women at the highest level of political decision-making through the ratio of women to men in ministerial positions, and the ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions.

If we look at India in terms of these dimensions, less than 30 per cent of women participate in the labour market. Women make up 89 per cent of workers in informal sector, which means they are probably underpaid, do not have job security or any other benefits, and work in unsafe, unhealthy and unregulated conditions. Less than 2 per cent firms in India have female majority ownership, and less than 9 per cent have females in top management positions.

Close to 30 per cent women report having faced gender violence in their lives.

We rank 117^th in terms of percentage of women in Parliament and 132^nd in terms of women in ministerial positions.

That is underwhelming in terms of performance and overwhelming in terms of the task ahead. A practical way to start may be by looking at the factors that are measured to arrive at the rankings. This can probably help a government, an organization and a community and a family work out specific plans and targets.

To get into the details of the employment and economic opportunities segment, the factors include: labour-force participation (including unemployment and working conditions); workforce participation across industries; representation of women in senior leadership; gender gaps in labour markets of the future (including STEM and AI related occupations); gender gaps in skill of the future.

What might that mean for a government? Well, maybe setting targets or incentives/disincentives for public and private sector for employment of women? Importantly government must ensure workplaces, public spaces and transport safe, so that women are able to travel and work without fear. To a large extent, government does walk the talk on gender positions? Many of our Ministries and Departments are headed by women-bureaucrats; the largest public sector bank has been headed by a woman; we have women heading government research labs and scientific institutions, playing a part in our space and nuclear programmes, now full-fledged in the armed forces, etc. But doing this even more aggressively will set an example to the private sector.

What might that mean for a corporation? That they move forward from celebrating Women’s Day to taking a hard look at their policies, systems and culture to see how they can become truly inclusive employers.

What might it mean for educational and training institutions: That they don’t, by action or inaction, deny girls opportunities; that they counsel and encourage them to take up STEM courses and careers.

What does it mean for communities? That they examine their conscious and sub-conscious biases, and understand how these affect their actions; that they make the community safe for girls and women.

And most importantly, what does it mean for a family? That they don’t discriminate against girl-children; that they provide them opportunities; that they don’t belittle their aspirations and abilities; that they don’t deny them their rights; that they help them fight their battles and give them a winner’s mindset.

It’s a long, hard journey. If we aspire to be at least in the top half rather than the bottom half of the ranking,the journey has to begin with every individual—in our hearts, minds and actions, today.

–Meena

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2023