Category: Comment

I am a Little Teapot..

~ millennialmatriarchs ~ 1 Comment

I suppose in today’s world, children don’t often see teapots. Fortunately, the poem ‘I am a teapot’, one of the cutest action-songs, is still a part of the pre-school repertoire. As the poem tells us, typically teapots have an opening with a lid on top, through which the dry tea and hot water are added; a handle for holding the vessel: and a spout through which the tea is served. And there may be a small air hole in the lid, though the poem does not mention it.

A teapot is basically a vessel used for steeping tea leaves  in boiling or very hot water, and then serving the resulting brew.  

Assassin Teapot: Essential Kitsch from China!

The teapot has a hoary history. It originated in China—of course! The first recorded one goes back to the end of the Sung dynasty (1271-1368). These were Yixing teapots which were red or purple-colored earthen vessels. These containers made in the city of Yixing are still produced today and still very popular and are considered the epitome of teapots.

The idea of the teapot spread to Europe after the East India Company introduced tea and teapots in the late 17th century. In the early 18th century, the Company used to commission Chinese artisans to make teapots as the quality of porcelain in China was better there than in Europe. But slowly Germany and then France got into the game, and started perfecting the art and science. In the mid-1800s, an English pharmacist William Cookworthy, after several experiments, finally hit upon a way to make porcelain similar to that made in China and set up a factory in Plymouth.  And from then on, English and tea and teapots became synonymous!

Many and fantastical are the shapes, sizes and colours in which teapots have been crafted down the centuries. It is a thing of beauty and elegance.

And it is this that the annual Sydney Teapot Show has been showcasing for over 30 years. This is an exhibition and competition where participants take up the challenge of making a unique teapot. Each year, there are specific themes, and this year’s categories are Australian Poets, Toy Story and The Natural World. There are also prizes for Best Pourer and Supreme Teapot – Best in Show. The Show celebrates craftsmanship at its best. As the organizers point out: ‘The skill of the clayworkers is employed in making a teapot – one of the more difficult tasks in ceramics – and their imagination and creativity is also evident in their response to the categories suggested’. The show started on 3 October, and is on for a month. Anyone lucky enough to be down under on these dates can catch the show.

Australia seems to particularly treasure teapots. The Bygone Beauties Museum there has over 5500 pieces! But it is not just in Australia that teapots are celebrated.  The Victoria and Albert Museum has a good collection. The National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian has some special beauties.

There are also several private collectors and collections. Sonny and Gloria Kamm of Los Angeles have been collecting teapots for over 35 years, and have about 17,000 pieces. Sue and Keith Blazye have 8,450 teapots in their home in Kent, plus around another thousand duplicates in the loft,.

Of special interest is the Chitra Collection. It is private museum of historic teawares.  As the site explains, ‘In 2011 Nirmal Sethia, the Chairman of the luxury tea company, Newby Teas, set himself the task of acquiring the world’s greatest collection of teawares to record and preserve tea cultures of the past. Today, the collection, named in honour of his late wife, Chitra, totals almost 2000 objects and is already the world’s finest and most comprehensive of its kind.’  So if you are not able to make it to Sydney, check out https://chitracollection.com/collection/ for a teapot-treat!

As the weather turns balmy, it’s the perfect time to bring out your teapot and sip a refreshing cup, while reflecting on these teapot-related pieces of wisdom!

‘Disciples and devotees…what are most of them doing? Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea!’ Wei Wu Wei (Theatre producer and philosopher)

‘A great idea should always be left to steep like loose tea leaves in a teapot for a while to make sure that the tea will be strong enough and that the idea truly is a great one.’ Phoebe Stone (Author and artist).

–Meena

Double Dutch

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Dutch tears—that is an intriguing term I came across recently. At first I thought it was an idiom, like Dutch courage or Dutch comfort. But turns out Dutch tears are a real physical thing–toughened glass beads created by dripping molten glass into cold water! When glass is dripped into water, it solidifies into tadpole-shaped drops with thin, long tails. These were first produced in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. These tadpoles exhibit unusual characteristics—the bulbous part of the drop can withstand being hit by a hammer without breaking, but even a small pressure of the fingers to the tail-end will dramatically shatter the whole drop.

Dutch tear

These very contrary properties led to a great amount of scientific curiosity and they were the subject of much research in the 1700s and 1800s. But it was not till recently that the mystery was solved. One breakthrough came in 1994, when Prof. S. Chandrasekar of Purdue University and Prof. M. M. Chaudhri of University of Cambridge used high-speed framing photography to observe the drop-shattering process and concluded that the surface of each drop experiences highly compressive stresses, while the interior experiences high tension forces. So the drop is in a state of unstable equilibrium, which can be easily disturbed by breaking the tail. But the complete explanation came in 2017 when these scientists collaborated with Prof. Hillar Aben, of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia and found that heads of the drops have a much higher surface compressive stress than previously thought—nearly 7,000 times atmospheric pressure. This gives the droplet-heads a very high fracture strength. (For a proper understanding of the science, please go to https://phys.org/news/2017-05-scientists-year-old-mystery-prince-rupert.html, rather than depending on my précis from there! Photocredit also to this page.)

But to get back to my original thought process: When I had tried to think of possible meanings of Dutch tears , so many idioms featuring the Dutch came to mind. We are very familiar with some:

When someone speaks very fast or unintelligibly, we say they are speaking Double Dutch–in other words, nonsense.

When one takes a shot of alcohol to boost up one’s courage before doing something one is afraid to do, it is called Dutch courage.

And of course, the Dutch treat, where each one finds they have to pay for whatever they consume.

And if you talk to someone like a Dutch uncle, you are giving them stern and serious talking-to.

And here is a small sample out of a range of many lesser-used ones:

Dutch agreement, where the parties making the agreement are drunk. And the related Dutch bargain—a bargain settled when the parties are intoxicated.

A Dutch headache is a hangover. And a Dutch concert is a very noisy situation, as would be made by a lot of drunken Dutchmen.

Dutch comfort is comfort which comes from the feeling that things could have been much worse.

Dutch reckoning is a very high bill that’s neither itemised nor detailed, and hence a bit of a con.

Dutch gold is a yellow-coloured alloy of copper and zinc from which imitation gold leaf is made.

HR persons should not go looking for Dutch talent, which is more brawn than brain. And they should be wary of employees who take Dutch leave, i.e., leave without permission.

Readers would have noticed that most of these idioms show the Dutch in a bad light. And apparently, there is good reason for this. Most of these came into being about 1665 and later, when the Netherlands and England were vying with each other both on land (England won a Dutch colony what is currently New York), and on sea for the control of trade routes. During the 17th century, the Netherlands and Britain waged three wars against each other over 20 years. The deep-seated animosity must have spilt over to language, and given the number of such idioms, the English must have vied with each other to come with nasty expressions about the enemy. (While this explanation seems logical, there don’t seem to be such expressions which feature the Spanish. And England and Spain were enemies and rivals for a good long time too. Maybe there is a Ph.D. thesis for someone here!).

Fortunately, many of these mean-idioms are falling out of use. And we have the rise of the Dutch oven—the most sought after cooking device; and of Dutch auctions–a type of open auction where the price starts high and decreases until the first bidder accepts it—which are seen as fast and efficient, as they end as soon as the first bid is made. 

Here’s to many more Dutch-positives!

–Meena

The Healing Touch

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Almost all of us have been, at one time or another, a patient or the caregiver to a patient. And perhaps one of the enduring memories (good or bad) of that experience may be that of the doctor who treated. From the days of Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, the ‘doctor’ is one of the key actors in the story of life and death.

Society of Bedside Medicine Logo

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the “family doctor” was the first and last word in attending to every member of the family, from babies to the elders. Most of these are still remembered, not so much for their specialized skills, as for their comforting presence and availability, and their personal engagement with the patient. In most cases, the patient was known to the doctor from childhood onwards. Thus the diagnosis and treatment was closely linked not just to the physical, but also to the psychological aspects. Often it was ‘much less about specific diagnosis than it was about knowing the person in front of you and the illness they have, and sometimes the outcome depended much less on the nature of the illness than on the nature of the patient.’

Over time, with advances in the science of medicine, and the new developments in technology that enables more accuracy and depth of diagnostic tests, the medical profession started becoming more and more dependent on these tools. So much so, that in recent times, the first visit to the doctor results in returning with a list of “tests”, based on the results of which, the doctor would begin, at the next visit, to even “look at” the patient, let alone proceed further in diagnosis and treatment. No doubt these advances have led to a deeper understanding of disease and medical conditions, and have hugely benefitted their treatment.  But such advances have made modern medicine so high-tech, research-oriented, data-driven and time-crunched, that somewhere along the way, this has led to the ebbing of the “human touch”, as it were, in the relationship between doctor and patient.

There is however, a section of the medical profession which is promoting the revival of the practice of this ‘human touch’. They believe that physical examination is a key to developing trust between patient and physician. Dr Abraham Verghese is a passionate and leading advocate of this school of thought.

Dr Abraham Verghese is perhaps better known as an author. He became known for his book Cutting for Stone, and his recent book The Covenant of Water has been acclaimed. What is perhaps less widely known is that Dr Verghese is a practicing physician and teacher of medicine, who strongly endorses as well as practices what he calls ‘the ritual of the physical exam’ as the most important aspect of developing trust between patient and physician. He believes that the physical exam is a humanistic ritual that builds trust and creates the crucial bond between physician and patient—a bond that is at the core of quality health care

Abraham Verghese started his medical education in Ethiopia and completed it in India at the Madras Medical College, both places which followed the British system of medical education that put great emphasis on learning to read the body as a text. In an interview he recalled that he had the most wonderful teachers who were incredibly skilled at reading the body as a text. He feel that this is a dying art today. We are getting so enamoured with the data and the images, the CAT scan and the MRI. But sometimes we can lose sight of the human being. …When what patients really need is something simpler and they need to be listened to, they need to be cared for. 

Even as he follows this practice as a sacred ritual, Dr Verghese has been working to institutionalize this in the United States where he has worked for several decades. He founded the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas, San Antonio where the motto was ‘Imagining the Patient’s Experience’. He is now a  professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford, where his old-fashioned weekly rounds have inspired a new initiative, the Stanford 25, teaching 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns. Verghese feels that doctors spend an astonishing among of time in front of the monitor charting in the electronic medical record, moving patients through the system, examining tests results. In short, bedside skills have plummeted in inverse proportion to the available technology.

The objective of this initiative is to emphasize and improve bedside examination skills in students and residents in internal medicine, and advocating for a similar national effort at all medical schools. Verghese himself teaches students at patients’ bedsides instead of around a table. As he says: I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important. A part of you has to be objective and yet you have to sort of try to imagine what the patient is going through.

This approach has sparked a movement of Bedside Medicine which believes that the bedside encounter between a patient and physician is central to the practice of medicine. There is also The Society of Bedside Medicine, a mission-based global community of clinician educators dedicated to bedside teaching and improving physical examination and diagnostic skills. Its purpose is to foster a culture of Bedside Medicine through deliberate practice and teaching to encourage innovation in education and research on the role of the clinical encounter in 21st-century medicine.

For many of us who wish for the return to the ‘family doctor’ in an age when this is almost an extinct species, the Bedside Medicine movement spells a ray of hope. This week is celebrated in America as National Physicians Week. In India also we mark Doctor’s Day on 1 July. While this day is marked by thanking doctors, it may also be a good time for physicians to remind themselves of the sacred bonds between the patient and the healer. In the words of Dr. Verghese At its very nature, the experience of medicine, the experience of being a patient, is very much a human experience—patients require the best of our science, but they don’t stop requiring the Samaritan function.

–Mamata

On A Musical Note: Of Earworms and Mondegreens

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Who hasn’t, at some time or the other, had a song or piece of music stuck in their heads, which just won’t go away! You get up in the morning, and suddenly you find yourself humming a tune. It follows you around the house, to the office, on the drive back home. It serenades you inside your head through dinner. And sometimes it is still there when you wake up in the morning!

Earworm
Credit: http://www.bu.edusynapse

This is what is called an earworm. Extremely irritating, but nothing to worry about. It happens to most of us at some time in life. A recent study of American college students found that 97% had experienced an earworm in the past month. Other studies have found similar results.

And don’t worry how long an earworm troubles you. Though the typical length is 10 to 30 minutes, research shows that for about 20% folks, the earworm lasts an hour or more. And some unlucky folks have been stuck with one for a year or even longer!

The term earworm comes from the German “ohrwurm,” which  is defined as a “cognitive itch” or “the inability to dislodge a song and prevent it from repeating itself in one’s head”. Several terms have been coined for this, including stuck song syndrome, sticky music, musical imagery repetition, intrusive musical imagery etc. The semi-official term is ‘involuntary musical imagery’, or INMI.

It has been a serious area of study since 1885, and scientists hope to get insights into the functioning of the brain. Several major universities have been undertaking studies into the phenomenon.

Sufferers try various ways to get rid of an earworm– by thinking of another song, singing the earworm song all the way through to its end, or taking up other tasks that require focussed concentration. But trying to get rid of an earworm may be counter-productive. One study has found that the harder people fight to quiet an earworm, the longer it tends to harass them!

Something that is not irritating to you, but may be to others if you sing, is a mondegreen. A mondegreen is a word or phrase in a song or poem that you get wrong–the result of mishearing something recited or sung. Incorrectly heard lyrics are called mondegreens.

The origin of the word itself is from an instance of such mishearing. In a column by journalist Sylvia Wright in the 1950s, she wrote about a Scottish folksong The Bonny Earl of Morray that she had listened to. Wright misheard the lyric “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and laid him on the green” as “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and Lady Mondegreen.” And ever since, such mishearings have been referred to as mondegreens!

The scientific explanation goes as follows: Hearing is a two-step process. First sound waves make their way through the ear and into the auditory cortex of the brain. On receiving the signal, the brain tries to make sense of the noise.  Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the sense-making, communication breaks down. You hear the same sound as another person, but your brain doesn’t interpret it the same way.

Sometimes we may just mishear something because it is noisy, the phone signal is weak, or there are other extraneous factors. Or it may be because the speaker is speaking in an unfamiliar accent or is mumbling.  So the sound becomes ambiguous and our brain tries its best to resolve the ambiguity—and gets it wrong.

Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym–word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided in different ways. This is similar to what we call sandhi vichhed in Sanskrit—the process of analysing and separating compound words into their component parts. Oronyms result in a wrong parsing of sounds when context or prior knowledge is missing.

Yet another reason could be letters and letter combinations which sound alike, and without a context, we can go wrong, and one sound can be mistaken for the other. An example often given to illustrate this is, :“There’s a bathroom on the right” being heard as “there’s a bad moon on the rise”.

When we hear a sound, a number of related words are activated all at once in our heads. These words could be those that sound the same, or have component parts that are the same. Our brain then chooses the one that makes the most sense. In this choosing, we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we’re more familiar with. An oft cited example is that if you’re a member of a boat crew, you’re far more likely to select “row” instead of “roe” from an ambiguous sentence. If you’re a chef, the opposite is likely.

Some mondegreens become the word!  For instance, the word orange was such a widespread mispronunciation of “a naranj” (from Persian and Sanskrit), that it became the official name of the fruit! One can think of any number of place-names which the English mangled, for instance!

Bollywood songs of course have their share of mondegreens. Though not systematically documented, some common ones identified include:

From the song Hawa Hawai (Mr. India): ‘Bijli girane mai hoon aayi’ being heard as ‘Bijli ki rani mai hoon aayi’; and from the song Banno (Tanu weds Mannu) ‘Banno tera swagger laage sexy’ being heard as ‘Banno tera sweater laage sexy’.

Raghu has these examples from his childhood (which he attributes to the poor sound quality of radio transmissions of those times):

Hearing ‘Yeh manzar dekh kar jaana’ (from the film Around the World) as ‘Yeh mandir dekh ke kar jaana’ (could be a jingle for a recent event!); and ‘Ahsan tera hoga mujh par’ (from the film Junglee)  as ‘Ahsan tera ho gaa mujh par’!

The only request: If you have a mondegreen, don’t sing the song aloud. You may give someone a more than usually horrible earworm!

–Meena






Santa the Traveller

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Tis the season to be jolly, and the jollity is best symbolized by the iconic Santa Claus. As Meena wrote this week, the legend of Santa dates back to fourth century AD. A bishop named Nicholas, in what is now modern-day Turkey, became known for his kindness and generosity to the deprived and needy. He was later canonised, and St Nicholas became one of the most popular saints in Christianity. He also became the patron saint of many European countries. Every year he was honoured during the Feast of Sint Nicholas where parents would leave gifts for their children who believed that he had paid them a visit during the night. The Dutch version of the saint rode a donkey and wore a tall pointy Bishop’s hat. On St. Nicholas Day a person dressed up as the saint went from house to house with a servant, either rewarding or punishing children depending on the work they had done. The good students got a gift meant to resemble a sack of gold, while the bad ones got lumps of coal.

The story of St Nicholas evolved over the years, with local embellishments, in different countries of Europe. In some parts of 16th and 17th century Europe, St. Nicholas was depicted as someone who handed out apples, nuts and baked goods, symbols of a bountiful harvest. In France and England, books became the gift of choice as more people became literate.  Gradually, small jewellery, wine and luxury foods became gifts of choice as well.

There were similar figures and Christmas traditions in many parts of Europe. Christkind or Kris Kringle meaning ‘Christ Child’, an angel like figure who often accompanied St. Nicholas was believed to deliver presents to well-behaved Swiss and German children. In Scandinavia, a jolly elf named Jultomten was thought to deliver gifts in a sleigh drawn by goats. English legend explains that Father Christmas visits each home on Christmas Eve to fill children’s stockings with holiday treats. Père Noël is responsible for filling the shoes of French children. In Italy, there is a story of a woman called La Befana, a kindly witch who rides a broomstick down the chimneys of Italian homes to deliver toys into the stockings of lucky children.

It is only in 1664 that the legend of Saint Nicholas crossed the Atlantic, to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, what is today New York City. For the next 200 years the legend of Sint Nikolas or Sinter Klaas (in adaptation) was preserved and protected by the Dutch settlers in America, along with his tradition of giving gifts.

In 1822 a poem, inspired by the Dutch legend, and originally titled A Visit From St Nicholas was published, which provided a more graphic description, (adapted to the new country and culture) of Santa Claus. The adaptation also included the pronunciation of the name in the New York accent, where Sinter Claus became Santa Claus. This poem by Clement Clark Moore, retitled as The Night Before Christmas became a classic. It is upon this, that the image of Santa as we know him today became firmly established.

To promote the tradition of gift giving, stores in America began to advertise Christmas shopping in 1820, and by the 1840s, newspapers were creating separate sections for holiday advertisements, which often featured images of the newly-popular Santa Claus. They also added to the attraction by introducing “live” Santas who would meet children and encourage them to share their “wish list’ for presents.  

Santa thus found a new identity in America. In 1863 a young artist Thomas Nast was commissioned to draw a picture of Santa Claus bringing gifts to the troops fighting in the American Civil War. He drew upon Clement’s description to depict a roly-poly, white bearded, cheerful figure in red clothes, to boost the troop morale.

Perhaps the large-scale commercialization of Santa as a ‘sales agent’ began in the 1920s with Coca Cola first using the red clad Nast figure to advertise Coke. In 1931 the company commissioned an advertising agency to create special Christmas sales campaigns using the Santa image. Santa was the key figure in Coca Cola advertising up to 1964. He appeared in magazines, on billboards, and shop counters, encouraging Americans to see Coke as the solution to “a thirst for all seasons.” By the 1950s Santa Claus became a popular endorser of a wide range of consumer products.

Today Santa Claus has once more crossed the Atlantic to become a global icon of contemporary commercial culture. St. Nicolas has indeed travelled a long way from being a kindly benefactor of the needy, to the ubiquitous jolly Santa Claus selling every dream and product imaginable—while the promoters jingle all the way to the bank.

This is a good time to remind ourselves that Christmas is a season of giving, before it became a season of acquiring and owning more and more. Merry Christmas and warm greetings of the festive season.

–Mamata

‘Tis the Season to Rejoice. And Make Santas!

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With a 5-year old to entertain, I am always looking for suitable activities. And Christmas brings not only joy but a host of Santa crafts too. Like Ganesh, Santa lends himself to being rendered in paper, board, foil, plastacine, with balloons, with cotton wool….you name it. The ability to cut out circle-ish shapes is the main criterion for being able to undertake Santa-crafts. My house is currently filled with good, bad and indifferent renditions of Santa!

Santa

As a corollary, I was curious to learn about Santa sculptures. I did not recall seeing any statues of this beloved character. And they seem to be surprisingly few in number—or at least, they don’t seem to be well documented.

But there is one very well-known sculpture—famous in some eyes, infamous in others!

This is the piece by the American artist Paul McCarthy. Always controversial, McCarthy works in several media—performance, sculpture, painting, installation and ‘painting in action’. He is an analyst and commenter on mass media, consumerism, contemporary society and the hypocrisy, double standards and repression of American society. His objective is to showcase everyday activities and the mess they create.

In 2001, the city of Rotterdam commissioned McCarthy to create a Santa to be placed at the prominent Schouwburgplein square near De Doelen, the city’s orchestra building. He was paid 180,000 euros, a very reasonable amount for a large sculpture by such a prominent artist.

McCarthy delivered the bronze sculpture—and controversy started. Santa was supposedly holding a pine tree in his hand. But many saw the object in his hand as having sexual overtones, and the statue gained the nickname of Butt Plug Gnome.

There were protests by the people of Rotterdam who refused to allow the sculpture to be installed in Schouwburgplein. City officials then tried to install it in Rotterdam’s main shopping street, but this plan also met with resistance. It was four years before McCarthy’s sculpture was set up and unveiled in the city’s Museum Park. It stayed at that spot for three years. However, thanks to general discontent about its highly-visible location, it was moved to a less prominent location within the Museum Park itself.

It was only on November 28, 2008 that the sculpture, which was intended by the artist to critique the consumer culture that surrounds Christmas,  and  is supposed to depict the king of instant satisfaction, symbol of consumer enjoyment, found a permanent home in the Eendrachtsplein Square in Rotterdam.

Another well-known statue of Santa which again has a complicated story is in Turkey. The original Santa was St. Nicholas who was born in 270 AD, in Patara, a small town in Antalya province in modern-day Turkey. He accepted the Christian faith and became the bishop of the nearby town of Demre. The story goes that he used to be so upset by poverty and unhappiness that he used all his wealth to combat it. He dropped bags gold coins down chimneys and gave nuts and fruit to good children, and often helped to look after the sick and elderly—one can see the linkages with activities associated with present-day Santa. Various generations of Santa statues stood in Demre for many years.  But in 2008, the then-standing statue was removed during some construction work by city officials, and has not been replaced despite protests. Authorities say they will re-install the statue when they find an appropriate spot for it!

Nearer home, there are less controversial, though also less permanent Santas. India’s well-known sand artist Sudharshan Patnaik has made sand sculptures of the beloved figure for the holiday season over the last few years.  Last year he created a giant 1.5 tonnes , 60-feet wide sand-and-tomato Santa Claus on Gopalpur Beach. Before this, during Covid in December 2020, he created a giant three-dimensional sand installation of two Santas holding a mask, carrying the message of wearing masks.

May this holiday season bring peace, health and happiness to all!

Meena





Be a Sport!

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This month games have been in the news. From cricket dominating the headlines, to Meena’s pieces on the importance of play for the all-round development of children. Toys are perhaps the first objects that children interact with as they learn how to ‘play’. Beginning with supporting the development of psycho-motor skills, toys also encourage imagination and creativity.  As the child explores and discovers, in its own way, the toy becomes way more than what it was formally designed for. Toys can become the central characters in a gamut of games and make-belief adventures. The child’s interactions with toys also begin to lay the foundation of the sense of ownership (“my doll, my truck”), which also lends itself to possessiveness when the same toy is ‘snatched’ ‘begged’ or ‘coveted’ by another child. 

It is at this early stage then, that the field of games introduces other instincts such as ownership and competiveness, often leading to conflict. This is where the concepts of ‘sportsmanship’ are also planted (or not planted), well before the child graduates from toys and imaginary play to more formal games, and then on to sports.  

A game is described as a physical or mental recreational activity involving one or more players, defined by a goal that the players try to reach, and some set of rules to play it.

A sport is a physical activity carried out under an agreed set of rules, with a recreational purpose: for competition or self-enjoyment, or a combination of these.

The two terms have also spawned two related terms—sportsmanship and gamesmanship.

Gamesmanship refers to the strategic manipulation of the rules and the spirit of the game to gain an advantage over opponents. While not necessarily breaking the rules, players who engage in gamesmanship employ tactics that push the boundaries of fairness. This may include exploiting loopholes, distracting opponents, engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, or using psychological tactics to gain an edge. While gamesmanship may be within the confines of the rules, it can undermine the principles of fair play and the spirit of the game.

Sportsmanship refers to the values and behaviours exhibited by the players that uphold the spirit of fairness, self-control, respect for rules, opponents and authority, and integrity. Sportsmanship fosters positive relationships among players, promotes teamwork and healthy competition, encourages accepting victories and defeats with grace, and thereby enhances the sports experience.

Poor sportsmanship, while not exactly using manipulative tactics, includes unethical behaviour such as intentionally injuring opponents, taunting or insulting players, or disrespecting officials and fans. 

We teach children the importance of sports, but sadly do not pay enough attention to also inculcating the values of sportsmanship from an early age.  We send them to coaching classes to hone their skills in a sport—from tennis to football to hockey. Large academies are set up that identify budding players and rigorously mould them to become “champions.” These instil in the young minds the yen to be winners always, to be the best, the fastest, and the strongest at all times. They also laden them with highest of expectations. The aspiring champions carry on their young shoulders the burden to always meet these expectations, at any cost, including personal burn-out and breakdowns.

This expectation balloons manifold in the eyes of spectators of team games. It manifests itself in the fanatic fandom of a favourite team. This is what buoys the playing teams and fuels the culture, and indeed, the enormous business of spectator sports. Support and encouragement of one’s favoured team is necessary, even desirable in sports. But when this balloon bursts, leading to a mass wave of intense negative feeling, it is certainly not sportsmanship. What we have forgotten in our love for ‘our team’ is that it is more than one team that makes a sport a sport, that that it calls for dignity and grace to acknowledge that we cannot always be the winner.

Participation in sports develops important skills, but this needs to be combined with developing the values and behaviour of sportsmanship. Even as we coach our young minds and bodies to excel in sports, it is important to remember that they also need coaching in sportsmanship. This involves engaging also with their hearts and emotions. It means emphasising respect for the opposing team in every circumstance—win, lose or draw, on or off the field. It means extending goodwill not only to one’s own team mates and coaches, as well as the others who support the players in many ways, including the spectators.  

While healthy competition is an important ingredient of a competitive sport, unsportsmanlike conduct cannot justify the end—winning at any cost. Competing with honour and fairness need not be a dampener to the skills and excellence of players. Rather a game well played to the best abilities of both teams enhances not only the quality of the game, but the ambience within which it is played. 

As the curtains fall on the mega spectacle of World Cup cricket, let us remind our children (and indeed ourselves) that the true spirit of sportsmanship means that it doesn’t matter what the outcome of the game is, it is not just about winning or losing; it is also about empathy, about the person or people you are competing against; they deserve to be shown the same respect you would show them outside of sport. Sportsmanship centres on three vital life-skill components of Respect, Losing with Dignity, and Winning with Humility. Let this principle be the guiding factor in the long game of life, as in the many games that we play in many fields.

Be a sport! May the best one win!

–Mamata

A Cry for Children

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This week Meena wrote about Children’s Day in India which is celebrated on 14 November each year, marking the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. It is in this same week that another children’s day is celebrated. This is Universal Children’s Day which is celebrated on 20 November every year to mark the date when the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  

There had been previous discussions about children in the international community. Declarations on the rights of the child had been adopted by both the League of Nations (1924) and the United Nations (1959). Also, specific provisions concerning children had been incorporated in a number of human rights and humanitarian law treaties. However amidst global reports of children bearing the brunt of grave injustice in many forms–from health and nutrition, to abuse and exploitation, it was felt that there was a need for a comprehensive statement on children’s rights which would be binding under international law.

In response to this the UN initiated a process of consultation which led to the drafting of a comprehensive document keeping the child as the focus in all realms—civil, political, economic, social and cultural. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 20 November 1989 and entered into force in September 1990.The Convention is the most rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history; more countries have ratified the Convention than any other human rights treaty in history. Three countries, the United States, South Sudan, and Somalia, have not ratified the Convention.

The Convention outlines in 41 articles the human rights to be respected and protected for every child under the age of eighteen years.

The articles can be grouped under four broad themes:

Survival rights: include the child’s right to life and the needs that are most basic to existence, such as nutrition, shelter, an adequate living standard, and access to medical services.

Development rights: include the right to education, play, leisure, cultural activities, access to information, and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. The term ‘development’ includes not only physical health, but also mental, emotional, cognitive, social and cultural development.

Protection rights: ensure children are safeguarded against all forms of abuse, neglect and exploitation, including special care for refugee children; safeguards for children in the criminal justice system; protection for children in employment; protection and rehabilitation for children who have suffered exploitation or abuse of any kind.

Participation rights: encompass children’s freedom to express opinions, to have a say in matters affecting their own lives, to join associations and to assemble peacefully. Children have the right to be heard and to have their views taken seriously, including in any judicial or administrative proceedings affecting them. As their capacities develop, children should have increasing opportunity to participate in the activities of society, in preparation for adulthood.

The Convention establishes in international law that States Parties must ensure that all children – without discrimination in any form – benefit from special protection measures and assistance; have access to services such as education and health care; can develop their personalities, abilities and talents to the fullest potential; grow up in an environment of happiness, love and understanding; and are informed about and participate in, achieving their rights in an accessible and active manner.

Even as the world will be reminded of the Convention on the Rights of the Child this week, this year is tragically one where these very rights are being destroyed minute by minute. More than one hundred children are killed every day in the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank. Thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble of entire townships razed to the ground. Hundreds are dying in hospitals which are being ruthlessly attacked from the air and ground, including premature babies who have not even yet had a chance to take a breath on their own.

Never before in history have so many children faced the horrors of relentless violence, hunger, thirst, displacement, and so many as yet untold terrors. What will be the future of those who do survive this new holocaust?

Which of the Rights listed above will we have the courage to place before them? How can the world appease them, and our own consciences, with a flourish of the Convention on the Rights of the Child?  

In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, eminent Palestinian activist, essayist, novelist, who was killed by a car bomb in 1972 at the age of 36 years.

I wish children didn’t die.

I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends.

Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?”

They would say: “we were playing in the clouds.

How much longer? How much further?

–Mamata

New Master Craftsmen

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Last week Meena wrote about Master Craftsmen. From Vishwakarma, the  legendary master architect and craftsman and an era when manual skills were highly respected and valued, to the present day when such skills are not as highly valued, as a result of which skilled craftspeople are increasing hard to come by.  

In an age when manual work, with attention to the minutest detail and quest for perfection is often eclipsed by industrialized mass production, there is a small and surprising band of new-age Vishwakarmas. This is the league of Lego enthusiasts who spend hours and days (and considerable manual dexterity) putting together little blocks to create mind-boggling structures.

Nathan Sawaya is considered to be the first artist to use Lego bricks in fine art. A high-powered attorney, he would come home and build with Lego bricks as a way to relax. Eventually he gave up his law career to dedicate himself to Lego art. Today his sculptures which range from a 20-foot-long Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton to a tiny tree consisting of one brown piece on the bottom and one green piece on the top, are exhibited in galleries.

A Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recreates classic paintings using Lego bricks. Among these is the famous painting by French painter Claude Monet called Water Lilies. Weiwei has recreated this as a 15-metre-long art piece using 650,000 Lego blocks.

Source: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

Other artists around the world have used Lego blocks on many occasions to pass a message of social awareness, or simply to entertain the imagination. Street artist Jan Vormann fills in cracks and crevices in damaged walls with Lego building blocks. He calls this ‘art meets functionality approach to repairs’ Dispatchwork. Today there is a worldwide network of people inspired by him who contribute to this creative repair approach.

Lego is usually associated with a children’s hobby kit. It is considered the epitome of an educational toy, and Lego sets have long gained a place at the top of the list of the world’s most popular toys. 

Interestingly the simple interlocking block-shaped toys that we know today as Lego bricks were the invention of a Danish master carpenter and joiner named Ole Kirk Christiansen. In 1932 when Europe was in the throes of the Great Depression, Christiansen opened a small woodworking shop in the village of Billund, with his son Godtfred who was just 12 years old, to manufacture stepladders, and ironing boards from left-over wood. They soon expanded their products to include wooden toys like simple yo-yos, trucks and ducks on wheels, made out of birch wood. In 1934 they gave their business the name Lego, a contraction of the Danish words leg godt meaning ‘play well’.

The company soon built its reputation as a high-quality toy manufacturer and business spread. The company itself grew from only six employees in 1934 to forty in 1942. The product line also expanded to include clothes hangers, a plastic ball for babies, and some wooden blocks.

It was in 1947 that the company made the move that would define its future.  Lego bought a plastic injection-moulding machine, which could mass produce plastic toys. By 1949, Lego was using this machine to produce about 200 different kinds of toys, which included a plastic fish, a plastic sailor, and small plastic bricks which had pegs on top and hollow bottoms, allowing children to lock the bricks together and create structures which simple wooden blocks could not. The ‘automatic binding bricks’ as they were called, were the predecessors of the Lego toys of today. In 1953, the automatic binding bricks were renamed Lego bricks. In 1957, the interlocking principle of Lego bricks was born. But these bricks were not too sturdy, and they did not stick firmly to each other.

In the meanwhile Lego had been working on a stud-and-tube design that facilitated the bricks to snap together firmly. They obtained a patent for this in 1958. This was the game-changer. The new system gave children the chance to build something sturdy, without it wobbling, or coming undone. Lego also made sure that new bricks were always compatible with old ones. In fact Lego has not changed the design of its bricks since 1958 when they got a patent for what is called the “universal system” so that each piece is compatible with all other pieces, regardless of the year or set it belongs to.

As the interlocking blocks grew in popularity, it was observed that children used the bricks in innumerable different ways to create more than just single structures. This led to the Lego Sets which had additional components like vehicles, street signs, bushes etc. to create streets and cities. The landmark addition of the wheel (around brick with a rubber tyre) in the 1960s brought in numerous new possibilities. With the production of 300 million tiny wheels per year, Lego out-manufactures the world’s biggest tyre manufacturers! The younger children were roped in to Lego-land with the launch of the larger Duplo bricks for pre-schoolers. 

The 1970s saw more additions to Lego sets–miniature figures (referred to as a minifig) with moveable arms and feet to populate the Lego towns; castles and knights to create a medieval world; pirates to sail on high seas, and astronauts to ride into space, and almost everywhere that a child’s imagination could take it.

The introduction of the immensely popular themes like Star Wars and Harry Potter contributed to the soaring sales, making this a multi-billion dollar industry. However it is heartening to find out that Lego has a strict policy regarding military models. They do not make products that promote or encourage violence. According to the company “Weapon-like elements in a Lego set are part of a fantasy/imaginary setting, and not a realistic daily-life scenario.”

Despite the scale and volume of production, there is no compromise on quality. The process used to mould the bricks is so accurate that only 18 out of one million bricks fails to meet quality standards. The original founder Ole Christiansen believed strongly in the values of creativity, individuality and, above all, quality. The Lego Group’s motto, “Only the best is good enough” was created in 1936, and is still used today.

Today there is a large international AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego) community. One of the challenges in the Lego world is to become a “master builder”. Coincidentally one of the most expensive Lego items is the Taj Mahal set which has over 6000 pieces to construct the Taj Mahal. Where centuries ago master craftsmen toiled with slabs of marble to create this magnificent timeless edifice, today the new master craftsmen work with plastic bricks to create its replicas.

–Mamata

Be a Sport

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Last week on 29th August, we marked National Sports Day in India. August 29 is the birth anniversary of the legendary hockey player Major Dhyan Chand, and there could be no more fitting day than this to mark our commitment to sports.

sports

I know little about sports. Just enough to wish that we could do a little better on the world scene; just enough to wish young people across the country could access good sports facilities and meet their potential; just enough to wish that there was not so much bureaucracy, bias and barriers in sports.

On the occasion, I thought I would look at where we stood viz a viz other countries in sports. The Olympic tally and other such statistics are of course known to all. But during my exploration I found very interesting statistics on a site* which evaluated countries on their ‘sportiness’. That looked interesting, so I got to exploring it. I would not have thought I would find India anywhere in the top-half of the table. To my amazement, I found we ranked 16th out of 134 countries, with a total score of 48.66/100, compared to top-ranking Germany’s 72.4%.

While the initial reaction was to celebrate, somehow it didn’t sound quite right. So I looked a little more closely at the data behind the ranking. The methodology considers 10 parameters to arrive at the results. These are:

  • Olympic medals
  • Winter Olympic medals
  • Elite sports ranking
  • Sports participation rate
  • Gym membership per 100k population
  • Health and fitness mentioned as hobby
  • Playing sport mentioned as a hobby
  • Watching sports mentioned as a hobby
  • Fitness apps
  • Fitness spends

I can pick a lot of holes in the methodology. The foremost is the choice of parameters which explains why India could be ranked so high–you will understand what I mean when we break down our standings in each parameter:

We stand 48th place in Olympics medals.

We have won no medals in the Winter Olympics. (Of course we can question this as a criterion, given that hotter countries do not have the same opportunities as colder ones in these sports).

We rank 37th in elite sports ranking.

Our sports participation rate is a dismal 13%, among the lowest of all the countries in the study.

Our gym memberships also rank among the lowest in the table. (Again, it may not be a fair measure given the lower incomes in developing countries and hence lesser ability to spend on this.)

How then when we score so low on these parameters, do we rank a high 17th?

The factors that follow will explain the anomaly:

A whopping 43% per cent cite health and fitness as their hobby, way higher than the sportiest nation Germany. Only Sweden, Austria and South Africa rank higher than us. Well, one can claim anything. And these are just what people say in a survey, without any proof of what they do in this regard.

Intriguingly, 35% say that they play sports as a hobby, just 2 per cent lower than top-ranking Germany. Now, from my lived experience, I would never suspect that there were so many people in our country who played for a hobby. Given the statistics on sports participation, as well as lack of sports facilities, who and where are all these people who claim to be playing? Did the survey reach out to rural areas, or was it confined to a few cities? What age groups did it consider?

The parameter of how many people watch sports as a hobby is much more believable—we stand among the top 3 or 4 in the table with a whopping 48 per cent of Indians being serious sports-watchers. This is one of the major factors which tilts the results in our favour.

So in sports as in many other facets, we are ‘watchers’ rather than ‘doers’. Yes, if we were to go by TRPs of cricket match telecasts, sure India should count as a seriously sporty nation. But when it comes to taking sports seriously, or even to making health, fitness, sports and games a part of our culture and lifestyles, there is such a distance to walk.

So a good time to think about what it would take to really make us a sporting nation.

And also a lesson to closely look behind rankings and gradings before jumping to conclusions!

–Meena

PS: Confession: I don’t play sports at all. But I do walk and cycle regularly. Forgive me, I am a product of my generation.

*(https://us.myprotein.com/thezone/motivation/which-are-the-worlds-sportiest-countries/)