Tag: Nepal

A Manmade Disaster or Climate Change?

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 16, 2024
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Salma A. Shafi writes from ground level at Noakhali

The Greater Noakhali region of Bangladesh is experiencing one of the most severe flood and water-logging crises in recent memory, driven by persistent heavy rainfall since mid-August 2024. The flood affected more than 5 million people, submerging houses, roads, and marketplaces, and leaving large portions of the region inundated. A total of 71 people, including women and children, lost their lives in the flood affected areas. With water levels reaching alarming heights, the disaster has raised significant concerns about vulnerability of the region for future flooding.

Almost every year floods occur in Bangladesh, but the intensity and magnitude vary from year to year. Their nature causes and extent of destruction gives them various definitions such as river flood, rainfall flood, flash flood, tidal flood, storm surge flood. The term manmade flood is a recent phenomenon attributed to encroachment on vital water channels, such as canals and wetlands sometimes for construction of roads and bridges and frequently for fish cultivation, hatcheries and shrimp farming.

Context of recent flood in Bangladesh

Since August 20, 2024, Bangladesh has been facing severe flooding triggered by continuous heavy rainfall and, according to the Bangladesh Ministry of External Affairs, water releases from Dumbur Dam, upstream in Tripura, India[1], a claim that is denied by the Indian government. Tripura also suffered severe floods and landslides[2] from this August. The flood impacted several districts in Bangladesh, including Feni, Noakhali, Comilla, Lakshmipur, Brahmanbaria, Cox’s Bazar, Khagrachhari, Chattogram, Habiganj, and Moulvibazar. By August 23, 2024, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief reported that floods had affected 4.5 million people across 77 upazilas in 11 districts. Nearly 194,000 people, along with over 17,800 livestock sought refuge in 3,170 shelters as the crisis continued.

In addition to widespread displacement, the floods led to tragic fatalities, with deaths reported across multiple districts. Communication with key river stations, such as Muhuri[3] and Halda[4], were completely severed, hampering collection of vital data necessary for relief and rescue operations. The extensive flooding has caused significant damage to property, crops, and infrastructure, displacing thousands of families. The disruption to transportation and agriculture deepened the humanitarian crisis, demanding immediate action to mitigate long-term impacts of disaster on the affected communities.

The flood situation in Noakhali District worsened due to continuous heavy rainfall and rising water levels of the Muhuri River. The district Weather Office recorded 71 mm of rainfall within 24 hours, exacerbating the flooding. Approximately 2 million people were stranded as floodwaters submerged roads, agricultural fields, and fish ponds. Seven municipalities in the district went underwater, with widespread waterlogging affecting both rural and urban settlements.

On September 1, 2024, the Noakhali Meteorological Office reported a staggering 174 mm of rainfall within a 12-hour period, causing widespread flooding and waterlogging across low-lying areas. The worst-affected upazilas include Noakhali, Senbagh, Sonaimuri, Chatkhil, Begumganj, Kabirhat, Companiganj, and Subarnachar, where over 2.1 million people were stranded. Additionally, more than 264,000 individuals sought refuge in emergency shelters and school buildings. The prolonged water-logging devastated local economy, particularly the agricultural sector, where vast areas of farmland, including Aman rice seedbeds and vegetable fields, were submerged, jeopardizing livelihoods of farmers and disrupting essential food production for a prolonged period.

With 90% of Noakhali district’s population impacted by this flash flood, the region faced critical humanitarian and environmental emergency. An analysis of the causes and consequences of flood and waterlogging in Greater Noakhali reveals an interplay of meteorological, infrastructural, and environmental factors coupled with geographic location of Bangladesh and the geo morphology of the river systems of the region. Bangladesh and India share 54 rivers of which the Teesta, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna forming the GBM basin are the most important. This river basin is one of the largest hydrological regions in the world and stretches across five countries Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Nepal. This basin area is home to 47 percent of the Indian population and 80 percent of the Bangladeshi population. Food security, water supply, energy and environment of both countries are dependent on the water resource of the rivers.

Uncertainty and Challenges in Flood situation

During the monsoon periods development of a low-pressure system over northern Bangladesh can bring very heavy to extremely heavy rainfall in Assam, Meghalaya, and Tripura posing great threat to flood-prone areas in Bangladesh. These overlapping weather patterns and regional dynamics create highly uncertain and dangerous situation, making it difficult to coordinate an effective response and leave millions of people vulnerable to worsening flood conditions.

Flooding in Noakhali region resulted from heavy rainfall and floods in western Tripura in August and as per MEA[5] news broadcast that the Dumbur Dam, a hydro power project had been, “auto releasing”, water as a consequence of the rainfall. The Dumbur Dam in Tripura is located far from the border about 120km upstream of Bangladesh. It is a low height dam (30m) that generates power and feeds into a grid from which Bangladesh also draws 40MW power. There are three water level observation sites along the 120km river course. As per news from the monitoring agencies excess water from the Gumti reservoir was automatically released through the spillway once it crossed the 94m mark which is the reservoirs full capacity. It is a known fact there is no comprehensive regional mechanism for transboundary water governance or multilateral forum involving the five Asian nations. The lower riparian nations particularly India and Bangladesh are therefore the worst sufferers.

Key Impact Areas in Bangladesh:

The flood in the Noakhali region was caused by overflow of water from the large catchment areas downstream of the Dumbur Dam. While river channels were not deep enough to accommodate the excess water, unplanned constructions on rivers and canals caused the water to spill into settlement areas causing humanitarian crisis unseen in decades. Kompaniganj and Hatiya upazilas (sub-districts) were completely inundated by floodwaters, while Subarna Char, Sonaimuri, Noakhali Sadar, Kabir Hat, and Senbag upazilas were partially affected. The flooding submerged homes, roads, and marketplaces, with water levels reaching roof levels in the high flood zones, waist-deep in some areas and knee-deep inside most homes. The rising floodwaters devastated farmlands, particularly Aman paddy seedbeds and vegetable fields, swept away, a large number of the cattle, poultry including the sheds which sheltered them.

Current Challenges

The ongoing flood crisis in Bangladesh faces several critical challenges. One of the most immediate issues is the submersion of roads and the disruption of communication networks, which has significantly hindered relief efforts. The situation is fluid, with new districts continuously being affected, complicating the delivery of aid and emergency services to those in need. This has also resulted in delays in evacuations, leaving many communities stranded without access to basic necessities.

Another key challenge is the conflicting information from different meteorological agencies. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department and the Flood Forecasting and Warning Center (FFWC) have issued varying reports regarding upcoming weather conditions. This uncertainty is affecting the preparedness of the affected populations, making it difficult for them to take timely and appropriate measures to protect themselves and their property.

Geo-political Tension in River Management in Bangladesh

Bangladesh, known as one of the most climate-vulnerable nations globally is facing increasing geopolitical challenges due to its strategic location on the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. Besides, annual monsoon floods, flash flood, particularly in northeastern districts of Sylhet, Feni and Cumilla, Noakhali are exacerbated by water releases from upstream dams, such as the Dumbur Dam. These actions have intensified tensions between Bangladesh and India, highlighting the complex dynamics of transboundary river management.

Despite legal recognition of rivers as living entities, both nations continue to exploit these water resources through infrastructure projects that disrupt natural river flows. Extensive dam and hydropower projects on shared rivers have caused significant environmental and social injustices downstream, impacting both ecosystems and livelihoods. This situation reflects a broader pattern of unilateral control and inadequate cooperation in water management, which contradicts international agreements and hinders equitable water sharing.

The Bangladesh-India Joint River Commission, established in 1972, is yet to resolve these critical issues. The recent floods have further underscored the need for more effective communication and cooperation between the two nations to prevent future disasters. As calls for water justice grow louder, there is increasing pressure on both countries to remove barriers and ensure the free flow of rivers across borders, upholding the principles of transboundary water governance and protecting the rights of those affected downstream.

Flood Map of Noakhali District, 2024. Map provided by Salma A Shafi

[1] India disputes this claim saying that they have been releasing the same quantity of water for the last fifty years. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/natural-disasters/india-has-no-role-in-bangladesh-flood-dumbur-dam-opens-automatically-for-last-50-years-tripura-official https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/india-refutes-claims-causing-floods-bangladesh-3683526

[2] The floods displaced 65,000 people and killed 23 in Tripura. https://www.reuters.com/world/india/floods-landslides-indias-tripura-displace-tens-thousands-2024-08-23/

[3] A river that starts in Tripura and flows down to Feni. Also, Muhuri Irrigation Project is Bangladesh’s second largest irrigation project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhuri_Project

[4] The Halda River is the breeding ground for carp and fishermen harvest the carp eggs. https://bsmrau.edu.bd/seminar/wp-content/uploads/sites/318/2020/08/003-Umme-Hani-Sharanika-seminar-paper.pdf

[5] Ministry of External Affairs, in this case Bangladesh.

Salma A. Shafi is an architect and urban planner. She did her MSc. in Urban Planning from AIT, Bangkok, Thailand and has a Bachelor of Architecture (B. Arch.) degree from BUET, Dhaka. Salma Shafi has extensive experience in urban research and consultancy, specialising in urban land use and infrastructure planning, housing and tenure issues. She is a well-known researcher in the field of urbanisation and urban planning. Urban Crime and Violence in Dhaka published by the University Press Limited (2010), Housing Development Program for Dhaka City, Centre for Urban Studies, Dhaka (2008) and Feroza, a biography of her mother published by Journeyman (2021).

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Musings

Watery World

We live on a huge planet, a watery world, which is a small cosmos in itself. Keith Lyons discovers humanity in his local swimming pool.

In recent years, I’ve increasingly sought an elixir of life. Even though I know this magical potion won’t grant me eternal life — not even eternal youth. The elixir doesn’t even promise to cure all diseases, though it seems a lot of other people are taking this tonic as treatment for every kind of ailment.

My pursuit of this higher realm means that most days, if I am able, I take a break from work, life and the busy-ness of it all to replenish, relax, and rejuvenate. My woo-woo astrological friend reckons that because my star sign is Cancer (one of the three water signs along with Pisces and Scorpio), I am drawn to water. But then, we all need water. Water is Life. It keeps all life going – for without water, life cannot exist. As the saying goes, “No Blue – No Green.” We need water to survive, to thrive, for our hygiene, for our wellbeing, and for the ice cubes in our virgin piña colada cocktails.

When I heard about the prospect of a new swimming pool opening up nearby my home, in the dark days of the Covid-pandemic, I was doubly happy and expectant. I even turned up to the new venue before it had actually opened, when they were still finishing the build and checking all the systems worked. The local government funded facility offered not only a swimming pool, but also a point of contact for interactions with the council, and the pool was twinned with a modern library. In my mind, I imagined that it might be possible to go swimming, then to glide over to a cafe or bar to get a drink, and then to select a book to read while reclining on an in-water lounger. Could it possible? I know I had stayed at a fancy hotel with a wet bar in Macau, where the bartender served cocktails to me and a photographer as we lived our best lives — until the next morning when we didn’t feel so flash.

Water, as you may know, makes up over 70% of the Earth’s surface. Up to 60% of the human body is actually water — depending on how much fluids you’ve drunk. A cucumber is made up of around 96% water. I recall these facts from a high school science project as I push the button of the water dispenser and a half circle of cool water arcs up for me to catch as much as I can in my mouth. I’m thirsty and know I need to drink lots of fluids, as I’ve just spent the last 80 minutes exercising and soaking in warm water. And I feel like I’m dehydrated from all the exertion.

Ever since a new indoor swimming pool opened in my neighbourhood, I’ve been making the effort to go as often as I can, to move and stretch in the warm hydrotherapy pool and then relax in the even-hotter spa. It has become something of a pilgrimage for me, even on the coldest, rainy days of winter. My route there from my house goes along a new cycleway, through a park (where a dog recently tried to attack me on my bike) cuts through a local ‘secret shortcut’ beside offices and a new church, then tracks along an industrial area of factories, warehouses, and commercial premises. After 6pm, the road to the pool has little traffic, just the occasional truck and security vehicle. If road conditions, traffic and winds are favourable, I can be door-to-door in under 10 minutes. But once I enter the new complex, change into my swimming gear, and walk down the ramp of the hydrotherapy pool, time becomes less important. I change from the demands of a busy world to more me-time.

But there’s more than devoting an hour to honour and exercise one’s physical body. Moving in water offers benefits beyond the physical realm, whether one’s aim is to help the heart, the waistline or the body’s strength. Because water is a lot denser than air, water provides more resistance — around 12-14% — compared to doing the same exercises on land. That resistance assists cardio and strength training. There’s another factor for water-based activities: buoyancy. The feeling of being lighter or weightless when submerged in water means you take the pressure off bones, joints and muscles. It is the closest thing you or I might get to being in space. You don’t even need one of those NASA t-shirts with the iconic blue, red and white logo of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The 1.4-metre-deep hydrotherapy pool, which is kept at 33-36C, sits alongside the traditional 25-metre swimming pool, which is kept at 26-28C. The therapeutic pool’s inclusion in the new community complex was the result of lobbying by locals, who previously had to drive across to the opposite side of the city to access a suitably warm pool.

It has only been a few months since the pool opened, but already many come to the waters, from when it opens at 5.30am each weekday (7am weekends) to when the last are forced to leave at 9.30pm (8pm in weekends). I’m more of an afternoon and evening swimmer, preferring to go to the pool after work or at the end of the day. Some attend the twice-a-week gentle exercise class, where the average age is 65+. Others visit almost every day at nearly the same time.

Some arrive in wheelchairs, pushing walking frames, or hobbling on crutches. Others walk from the changing rooms to the water smiling expectantly as they pace towards the transformative pool. At mid-morning, with the light from the wall-to-ceiling windows slanting across the pool, it could easily be a scene from the 1985 movie, Cocoon, where the retirement home pool helped them rediscover their youth (it was full of aliens). If you had to paint the scene, there would be a lot of blue hues, along with off-white and grey tones, with silvery reflections off the water.

While some exercise by themselves, focusing on their routines, the set prescribed by their physiotherapist, or whatever takes their fancy, for many it is also a social time, as they aqua jog up and down the lengths, or stand at the sides doing calisthenics. If you listen carefully over the music soundtrack of upbeat, positive songs playing over the public speakers, you can hear the water gushing and flowing. It bubbles up from the floor of the pool. Jets roll in from the sides of the hydrotherapy pool. In the spa pool, there’s a force field strategically placed around the pool. Modern water treatment means there’s no smell of chlorine.

The pool is a very tactile, sensual in-body experience. It is also somewhat humbling. Patrons must change into suitable bathing costumes, which can be as skimpy and revealing as bikinis and togs, though some prefer full body covering for modesty or self-perceptions. The water in the hydrotherapy pool is so warm that there’s never any hesitation on entering. People are only limited by the speed at which they can move from the air environment to the watery world of buoyancy and drag.

My local swimming pool is a microcosm of the wider community, and the big wide world. As where I live has experienced significant migration in recent decades, it is certainly a diverse multi-national cross-section of the community. Chinese are the largest group, with a swim school, coached sometimes in Mandarin, operating most weeknights. There are also families from the Philippines, a group of learn-to-swimmers from Nepal, and occasionally a non-swimmer from India who needs to be rescued from the deep end of the main pool by lifeguards. On one afternoon and evening, the whole pool becomes ‘women-only’, with the blinds drawn so women can use the pools without the glare of men. With more refugees from other countries now making up our neighbourhood, there are often people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Kurdistan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Bhutan venturing into the pools for the first time.

Is the swimming pool I go to special? Can such a multi-sensory, multi-cultural, relaxing-yet-reviving experience only be found in my swimming pool? Nope. Seek out a public swimming pool in your area and discover another world.

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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Tags Afghanistan, Asia, Bali, Bhutan, China, Chinese, COVID, Earth, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Indian, Keith Lyons, Kurdistan, Macau, Mandarin, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pandemic, Somalia

Nostalgia

A Doctor’s Diary: Life in the High Ranges

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 16, 2024
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By Ravi Shankar

The van suddenly went quiet. Night had fallen and our driver was negotiating the bends and turns in the road carefully. The yellow fog lights cut through the mists lighting up the dense forests on both sides. We were in Idukki district in the western ghats of the southern Indian state of Kerala. This region is called the high ranges. Areas above 600 m in height from the mean sea level in the central Travancore region of Kerala have rich biodiversity and a cooler climate. The weather was beginning to get colder.

We were ill prepared for the cold as we were students from Thrissur in the plains, where it was always hot and sticky. The road continued over the top of a dam. The security officer wanted to talk to us in person before letting us through. We boldly rushed out in our slippers and lungis[1] only to return at double the speed to the warmth of the van. It was freezing outside. The short but intense exposure to the cold may have frozen many vital organs. During winter, the temperatures here can dip to around 4 degrees Celsius once the sun goes down.

We were on a college trip to Idukki while studying for our undergraduate medical (MBBS) course. We had visited Thekkady and Peeramede and planned to spend the night in the hill station of Munnar. The trip was long and tiring as we drove through the mist along winding roads. The night in the hotel was freezing but we managed with the clothes we had, and the blankets provided by the hotel. The steaming tea with cardamom was the highlight of the morning. We hungrily gulped down several cups to chase away the cold.

I eventually completed my MBBS and got an offer to work at a hospital in the high ranges. The place was Ellakkal at a height of about 1100 to 1200 m. The road diverted from the main highway to Munnar at a place called Pallivasal, the site of one of the earliest hydropower stations in Kerala. The village is also known as the gateway to Munnar. The area had a mix of Malyali and Tamil culture. Many poor families from Travancore had migrated to Idukki in search of land and better prospects. Tamil families had migrated too. The nearest village to Ellakkal was Kunchithanny (little water in Tamil). I had seen a similar system of naming places after water in Nepal. There was Kalopani (black water), Ratopani (red water), Ghorepani (where horses are watered) and Tadapani (far water) among others.

St Xavier’s hospital where I was working was situated up an incline from the main road. The location was spectacular. The hospital was established in the 1960s and was once the only source of medical care for a large region but now several clinics and hospitals had been established in towns and villages. The view across the valley was breathtaking. In the evening the mist slowly moved down the valley eventually reaching the river far below. The thickly forested green hills draped in thick white mist that slowly cleared as the Sun gained in strength was the highlight of my mornings! The hospital was run by the Medical Sisters of St Joseph and owned several acres of land on the hill. They grew coffee and cardamom and other spices. My quarters were a newly constructed annexe to an old house situated halfway up the hill. The view from the veranda was spectacular. I used to spend my afternoons and evenings drinking in the magnificent views and reading my books and magazines. The hospital still exists and provides affordable health care to the people.

Dr Rodney Sebastian, the other doctor at the hospital had graduated from Kottayam Medical College. He was from the high ranges and a devout Christian. Many evenings there were prayer meetings at the hospital and people from the neighbourhood participated. The convent for the nuns was nearby. There was an old nun who was fond of gardening. Flowers grew well in the rich soil and the cool, moist climate. Multi-coloured roses were the highlight of the garden. There was a priest (Father) who lived on the other side of the hill next to the church. The deep phut-phut of his Enfield Bullet as he rode to the hospital was distinct. This heavy motorbike has a solid presence and is stable to drive on rough roads and undulating terrain. My cousin brother used to also ride one.

In the mid-1990s there was no internet and no mobile phones. The hospital had a landline. We lived more in the moment. Letters were still an important means of communication. My mother used to say that the arrival of a letter was as good as the arrival of a person. I have not posted a letter for a long time now choosing to go with email, voice chat, Skype and WhatsApp. During those days these were, however, all in the future. I never imagined the changes that would happen during the next two decades when I began working at Ellakkal.

We mostly had outpatients though we did admit people. Most of the admissions were for fever. Leptospirosis[2] was common. We also had X-ray facilities, and we sutured many wounds mostly caused by farm injuries. We did not handle surgeries and deliveries. We did not have any intensive care units and our lab investigations were basic.

We used to occasionally drop in to meet a doctor couple, Dr Verghese at Kunchithanny. His clinic was named John’s clinic, and he was called Dr Johnson by the locals. We knew some quacks, that is unqualified self-styled doctors, also practised in this area. The nearest big town was Adimali Adimali had a movie theatre, and a huge rock dominated the town. There were tribal settlements on top of the rock. The tribals were a deprived community. Long distance buses as local transport was something peculiar to the high ranges. The buses started from the town of Ernakulam over a hundred kilometres away and reached the high ranges through Kothamangalam. The buses had glass windows and were comfortable. Ellakkal was on the route to Rajakkad (literally the King’s Forest). There were many places named after rocks (para in Malayalam). Poopara (Flower rock), Santhanpara, Chaturangapara viewpoint were the most prominent.

Munnar was famous for heavy, dense white fogs that were almost opaque. The place was covered by a heavy mist most afternoons and evenings. The mist began a few kilometres from the town. Drinking cups of cardamom flavoured tea in the cold mist was a highlight of my visits to the place. The restaurant also served crisp dosas. We went on a trip to the Eravikulam National Park which took a lot of planning as both of us (Rodney and I) would be away from the hospital for over eight hours. Some of our local friends accompanied us. The route was through rolling Kanan Devan hills and expansive tea gardens.

The hills are owned by Tata Tea, and they grow the famous Kanan Devan brand of tea. I used to remember their advertisements starring the megastar, Mohan Lal. The park is famous for the Nilgiri Tahr. I remember it also for the leeches. We were badly set upon by them and the bites bled for over twelve hours. Once I also took a bus ride with my cousin to Maraiyur near the Tamil Nadu border. The route was through spawling tea estates. Maraiyur was an end of the Road Town those days. The place was famous for sandalwood. The security checks were strict to ensure people did not decamp with a few thousands of rupees worth of sandalwood in their pockets.

I visited Ellakkal once more after I left toward the end of the last century. The ensuing three decades must have brought about a lot of change to this spice garden. Tourism has boomed and Idukki district is a prime tourist destination. Internet has made steady advances and cable TV is now common. Several resorts have opened, and the roads have improved. They have opened a hospital called Morningstar. The pace of life has quickened with all the city folks coming to escape from their hectic city lives. Someone once said about Munnar and I quote, “In Munnar, time slows down, allowing us to savour every moment, appreciate the present, and find joy in

[1] A sarong is called a lungi in South Asia

[2] A blood infection caused by contaminated water and soil

Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

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Essay

My Love Affair with (Printed) Books

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 14, 2024
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By Ravi Shankar

The last two years have been especially sad ones for printed books and magazines. Toward the end of 2023, the iconic magazine, National Geographic stopped selling its print issues. And in April 2024, Reader’s Digest stopped publishing. Many other print magazines have also downed their shutters though the online version continues.

I grew up with the Reader’s Digest. My father subscribed to the magazine and each month a copy wrapped in a brown envelope arrived at our door. The envelope partially covered the magazine inside, and you could see the top and bottom of the magazine. The size was small, and this made for easy handling. Reader’s Digest was a magazine you could read comfortably in bed. During the festival of Diwali, there was a special wrapping for the magazine. We had several magazines in our house when I was growing up. My mother used to read many magazines in Malayalam (our mother tongue).

Reader’s Digest provided shortened versions of stories and articles that had been published elsewhere. Their skill was in condensing the material while still retaining the interest. There was a rich collection of reading material. There were also advertisements for other books published by Reader’s Digest. Unfortunately, these were beyond our family budget. I wanted to purchase these when I grew up and became financially stronger. My neighbour who was a scientist had some of these books that I occasionally borrowed.

Another favourite of mine was the National Geographic. My father was a faculty member at a banker’s training college in Mumbai and their library subscribed to National Geographic. He often brought the magazine home. I was mesmerised by the articles and the photos in the magazine. The artistic quality of the photos was superb. The magazine had only three or four articles in an issue but addressed these at great depth. I travelled to faraway places, to the bottom of the ocean, to within the human body and to outer space with the magazine. Later, National Geographic started a television channel, and I would watch the documentaries in the nineties.

We also subscribed to the Illustrated Weekly of India. This was in a large format and again had very good photographs. I still remember the column by the journalist Khushwant Singh titled ‘With malice towards one and all’. I was also a fan of the comics section of the magazine. I had a huge collection of comics and my father purchased both Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal Comics. Amar Chitra Katha introduced me to the rich history of India. Indrajal comics had superheroes like Phantom, Mandrake, and Flash Gordon. I used to eagerly await new issues. Most of my comics were lost when we shifted houses.

When the news magazine, India today, made an appearance, we subscribed to it and to Outlook and The week (Indian news magazines). During my school days in May, I used to eagerly await the new textbooks and notebooks for the next class following the results. I used to go with my mother to purchase these from a stationery store near the railway station. The smell of the new paper and the fresh ink was mesmerising. I loved to read some of the easier chapters in these books. Covering the notebooks with brown paper was another major activity. Our school year started with the rains in June.

My good friend, Sanjay Mhatre had a good library and loved to collect books. I loved to borrow from his vast collection. His collection on physics and cosmology were extensive. In those days, the erstwhile Soviet Union used to have cheap books of high quality for Indian readers. I remember the publishers Mir and Progress and I had several of their collections on science. The Soviet publishers used to hold exhibitions in our college. For twenty or thirty rupees, you could purchase high quality hard bound books. My introduction to quantum mechanics and to chemistry was through one such book.

At Thrissur in Kerala most of our medical textbooks were western and predominantly from the United Kingdom. There used to be an English Language Book Society (ELBS) that published cheaper versions of textbooks for developing countries. With our limited resources purchasing textbooks was a challenge. The two major textbooks published from the United States were those of Anatomy and Pathology. Those days we did not have online textbooks and online sources and were limited to the printed word.

I used to write for our medical college magazine and eagerly waited for the annual issue to be published. During my residency days at PGI, Chandigarh I was the literary secretary and was very involved in bringing out the annual magazine, The Resident. We also introduced a newsletter, ARDent Voice, with ARD standing for the Association of Resident Doctors.

At Pokhara, Nepal the college library had a good collection of general books and novels in addition to medical books. I used to read a lot of novels and the author, Frederick Forsyth was one of my favourites. His meticulous research blurred the lines between fact and fiction. Sidney Sheldon was another bestselling author. Novels enabled me to travel vicariously to different places and through varied situations.

Today reading has become less common among the younger generation. Reading strengthens creativity and the imagination as you must imagine in your mind’s eye the situation the author is creating. Is it not magical that the author can communicate with you, the reader through squiggles on a page across the boundaries of space and time?

I started writing during my MBBS days. I still remember the versification competition I took part in and won the first prize. I used to participate in different literary events at my college. In Nepal, I combined my triple loves of writing, photography and hiking with articles for the newly started newspaper, The Himalayan Times. I met my writing guru, Don through the magazine, ECS Nepal. Don was the editor of the magazine and a powerful writer with a deep knowledge of Nepal. I learned a lot from his comments and suggestions and the workshops he conducted. I also used to write a medical column for ECS Nepal. ECS Nepal was a beautifully produced magazine with great photographs. Unfortunately, it stopped publishing around the beginning of the pandemic.

Other travel and lifestyle magazines were also published from Nepal but could not sustain themselves. In the Caribbean Island of Aruba, I used to write off and on for a daily newspaper published in English. Again, the newspaper ceased publishing. During the last two decades several print magazines have ceased to exist. I feel it is a great loss.

I do not read much on paper these days. Most of my reading is done online on computers, laptops and tablets. I also have a Kindle reader. Kindle screen mimics the appearance of paper closely, but it is not the same as reading a printed page. You can no longer feel the smoothness of glazed paper, the smell of fresh ink and the vivid colours of photographs. With the closure of the print version of Reader’s Digest, an era in print publishing has ended. The demise was sadly expected. Without printed books, our (my) world may never be the same again!

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Slices from Life

Hooked for Life and Beyond…

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date May 14, 2024
No Comments on Hooked for Life and Beyond…

By Ravi Shankar

I was hooked! It was my first exposure to a computer though I had read about these in the newspapers and seen them on television. I think it was a Spectrum personal computer popular in the 1980s. My friend, Sanjay and I did a few simple tasks and played a few games on the computer. The games of the 80’s were slow and clunky by today’s standards. In those days however they were interesting and enticing. BASIC was the most popular computer language then. We also had COBOL and a few others. My good friend, Sanjay Mhatre was a bibliophile and a free thinker, and I often used to visit his place and borrow from his vast book collection. However, even in the 1980s there was uneasiness and opposition to computers and the fear that it would replace people and lead to mass unemployment was often mentioned.

The rise of information technology (IT) and the important role to be played by Indian companies was still in the future. I expect artificial intelligence (AI) will also open new jobs in the future. At my medical college in Thrissur, Kerala, India computers were still rare. Communist Kerala had a love-hate relationship with computers and technology. Maharashtra (a western Indian state) was an early adopter of computers, and my tenth- and twelfth-mark sheets were computerised while my MBBS ones were handwritten. During my postgraduation at Chandigarh, computers gained prominence in our conversations. Our head of the department was gracious enough to offer the services of his secretary for typing our research manuscripts when she was free. The only other option was to pay for the service from outside providers. In those days WordStar and WordPerfect dominated word processing.

Creating slides for presentations was a challenge. LCD projectors were not available, and we had to create physical slides with cardboard mounting. The slides were created on early versions of PowerPoint and photographed using a camera to create the physical ones. My co-guide, Dr Anil Grover (then a cardiologist) at Postgraduate Institute (PGI), Chandigarh mentioned how computers will become increasingly common and encouraged me to learn the Microsoft package of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. PGI also started offering email facility on a limited basis. You had to write down the details of your email and take it to the IT section who will send your message. We had modems then, which took a while to connect and made a series of sounds with flashing lights while connecting to the internet.

In Pokhara, Nepal at the beginning of the twenty-first century, internet was still a luxury. Manipal College of Medical Sciences used to charge 10 Nepalese rupees to send a message. Faculty could type their message in Outlook and twice a day, the IT person would send and receive messages. In those days, a floppy disk was the most common external storage device, and I soon had a large and colourful collection of floppies. Floppies were not always reliable and sometimes the data on them could not be read. CD-ROMs were another storage device, but CD writers never became commonplace. At Mahendra Pul in the heart of Pokhara, a new cybercafé came up in the early 2000s offering internet browsing at 150 Nepalese rupees per hour. Compared to what we were previously paying, this was a steal!

The college also had an LCD projector though it was not commonly used by faculty members for teaching-learning. This was a large and clunky device. Earlier versions often had compatibility issues. You create your slides and hope for the best. These may or may not open on the laptop and may or may not be projected. One had to have a backup of the lecture on overhead projector (OHP) transparencies, just in case. We did not yet have easy access to computers or laptops. This came only later when the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) set up a drug information and pharmacovigilance centre at the teaching hospital. We got two excellent Dell computers, and the hospital provided us with internet.

The early computers were slow with a big, bulky, and heavy cathode ray screen. They had a blinking cursor and words appeared slowly after typing. The Hollywood movie, You’ve Got Mail (1998), follows the romance between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks developed through email. The movie is a good introduction to the early days of the internet.

We had purchased a home desktop computer in 2001 or 2002. This purchase was a financial disaster. The computer required frequent repairs and drained our finances. Google launched its beta version of email, Gmail in 2004, and I was one of the early adapters. I became a fan of Gmail right from the start. It offered significant advantages over the then dominant Hotmail, Yahoo mail and Rediff mail. The storage was larger and there was no need to delete your old emails. Kist Medical College in Lalitpur, Nepal had purchased Dell desktop computers, and these were among the best ones I had used. Fast and responsive with good memory and speed. These had LCD monitors and looked sleek and modern.

Computer technology has made significant advances. I read that if cars had made similar advances to computers we could drive to the moon and back on a litre of gasoline. Chips started getting smaller and more powerful and are today fought over by the global technology superpowers. A variety of online applications started making their appearance with the spread of the internet. Some of these eventually became the internet giants of today. In India, internet became widely available, and the costs dropped significantly. Mobile technology also made dramatic advances. In India most people access the internet and carry out online tasks using their mobile phones. For around 12000 Indian rupees today you can get a decent mid-range phone. Today mobiles in the palm of your hands have greater processing power than the giants of the 1950s and 1960s. I remember reading a comic strip where a visitor from the future time travels to the present. He laughs on seeing the supercomputer, the most powerful one on earth. When asked why he shows a small ball and introduces it as a computer from his time with much greater processing power than the humungous supercomputer.

One of the major advances has been cloud computing and cloud services. We have Chromebooks that work on web-based applications and needs the internet to do things. Both Google and Microsoft offer a range of services including storage, meetings, messaging, and applications for text, presentations, and calculations. AI is now an integral part of applications. PowerPoint offers the designer option for slides and creates stunning backgrounds. I recently attended a workshop on Copilot, the AI support software from Microsoft that is fully integrated into all their applications. I like the transcribing option for interviews and focus groups offered by Teams and later by Zoom and this makes my life as a researcher easier.

When I was growing up, I had no clue about what would soon become commonplace. The world wide web, the ability to browse libraries and art collections, video conferencing, online work processes, applying for government and other services online, online fund transfer and remittance are now at our fingertips. The COVID pandemic shifted a lot of learning and even assessment online. Presently we mainly interact with computers using a keyboard. I am a fan of the sci-fi series, Star Trek, where people interact with computers mainly using their voice. Voice commands are already available and steadily improving.

I was slow getting into social media. Their judicious use is to be recommended. Facebook keeps me updated on what my friends, acquaintances and former students are doing. LinkedIn is the professional face I present to the world, Twitter (now X) is a concise way to stay connected and YouTube is a major source of entertainment. Computers have changed our life for ever. At a basic level these are based on the flow of electrons through circuits and on the pioneering work in atomic physics done at the start of the twentieth century.

The last three decades have seen developments and changes at unimaginable speed. Who knows what the next three will bring? Will progress continue at an ever-accelerating pace or will we eventually hit a roadblock? We may have to wait for Father Time to provide the answers!

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Slices from Life

No Film? No Problem

By Ravi Shankar

The studio room was ill ventilated. The bright lights were making things hotter! We were at a photo studio in Bhandup, Mumbai, trying to take a family photograph. The photographer was trying his best to arrange us in a pleasing and photogenic composition. The process was however, taking longer than expected and my youngest brother was getting scared. He was beginning to cry and soon was bawling his head off. My mother has a knack of soothing and calming crying children, but this time even her efforts were not successful.

I was reminiscing on this episode recently and was thinking on how easy it has now become to capture photographs and video. For a long time, you had to use film to capture photographs. Photography was an expensive proposition then. Initially, you only had black and white films. Later colour films became widely available. The cost of films, of processing and printing photographs all added up.

Films were also only invented in only 1889, but they were highly flammable. ‘Safety films’ were introduces only in the last century in 1908. Before 1889, photographers had to lug around heavy glass photographic plates. The process of capturing images on film also took a long time. When taking portraits people had to stay still for minutes at a time. The older generation of cameras were bulky and heavy and difficult to carry around. Photography was a significant advance in human history. Before 1802, we had to depend on painters and portraitures to depict everyday scenes and special occasions.

The Eastman Kodak company invented flexible film to capture photographs and for several decades the company was a world leader in photography. Unfortunately, they were not able to fully adapt to the change to a digital format and after filing for bankruptcy the company is now back with commercial printing, film stills and movie production. The Japanese were the world leaders in cameras for several decades. Yashica, Minolta, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Olympus are legendary names. For a long time during my student days and early medical career photography was an expensive hobby to indulge in. My first purchase was an Olympus. A small and compact camera that captured great images. The camera came with a remote and a timer. Olympus made great cameras and usually the lens was integrated into the body and could not be removed and changed.

My good friend, Sanjay Mhatre in Mumbai, is an architect with wide-ranging interests. He was the one who informed me about large format cameras and the Hasselblad series. Large format is especially important in architecture. Another major German brand was Leica. These were very expensive. Dr Unnikrishnan PS was my batch mate and hostel mate during the MBBS course. He had a keen interest in painting and has now switched to photography. Recently he has opened a museum dedicated to photography, Photomuse (https://photomuse.in/) in Thrissur district in Kerala. This is India’s first museum dedicated to photography.

My first single lens reflex (SLR) camera was a Pentax. I had purchased this from New Road in Kathmandu in 2000. A SLR is a camera that has a mirror in front of the film and when the shutter is clicked the mirror moves up and the film is exposed. The mirror otherwise helps photographers see what they are about to click through the view finder. The view finder was very important as you did not have screens that showed you what you were about to click. These came much later. With the advent of screens showing the scene in front of you, view finders began becoming less common.

Himalayas — shot using the Pentax, Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar

Kathmandu is a very photogenic city with ancient monuments and temples, and I tested out my new buy under a variety of conditions. I had to wait to get the film developed before I could see how my photos turned out. One had to be creative and resourceful as immediate feedback was lacking. I also invested in a polarizing filter, and this was very useful in highlighting the contrast between the snow-clad mountains and the deep blue sky.

The camera was heavy and weighed around 1.2 kg but came with its own bag making it easier to carry. The camera accompanied me on most of my treks in Nepal. I was able to capture great images of the spectacular country. While hiking the hills, you had to stop, take the camera out of the bag, focus it, adjust the polarizer, compose the scene, and then click. Someone said that photography provided the sahibs with an excuse to rest and catch their breath during steep hikes. Karna Shakya is a famous Nepalese traveller and photographer who later he founded the Kathmandu Guest House in Thamel, Kathmandu. He has written about photography during his treks (in his books and articles) and the difficulty he faced while looking for colour films and developing the same in the 1970s in Kathmandu.

The cameras on mobile phones started becoming better from 2010 onwards. I had a Samsung mobile phone with me in Aruba that took good pictures. Aruba is a picturesque place with nice beaches and turquoise blue waters.

Aruba Coastline — shot using a Samsung Mobile. Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar

I eventually graduated to an Oppo smart phone with a better camera. This smart phone accompanied me on my travels in Peru. In late 2019, Realme introduced a new smart phone with a 64 Megapixel sensor.

Cusco Peru – Shot using an Oppo. Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar

Mobile phone manufacturers are constantly upgrading their cameras. The mobile camera war is hotting up. The image sensors started getting larger and cheaper. Samsung and Sony started investing in sensor research and development. Some mobile manufacturers collaborated with camera makers like Hasselblad and Leica to bring these cameras to mobiles. Around late 2023, I was looking to upgrade my smart phone and wanted a more powerful camera. There was a wide choice available. 200 MP sensors were available on some phones while others had 120 and 100 MP cameras. I did some research and found that most phones only shoot images of around 32 MP at the maximum. Usual photos are taken at a much lower resolution.

I eventually purchased an Honor phone with a 100 MP camera. I have used this widely during my travels and gives excellent results especially in good lighting conditions. Mobile phones are lighter and less obtrusive compared to a SLR. Most SLRs have also now shifted to digital sensors rather than film. With a mobile phone it may be easier to capture people in their natural situations. The trend today is to have one device that can do it all. Play videos, check emails, make online bookings, call, chat, capture images and video.

Capturing video has also become easier and many phones have image stabilisation and allow you to shoot in HD and 4K formats. There are a variety of software that integrate images from different sources and can edit and polish a video. Taking a photograph is no longer regarded as something special. Taking a video and posting it on social media is also very common. Many people earn their livelihoods through creating and posting videos on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. We have come a long way from dressing up in our best formals and going to a studio to get our photographs taken to capturing images, selfies and videos using our mobile phones. Only a very brave person can predict what the next hundred years will bring!

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Interview Review

The Subliminal World of Radha Chakravarty’s Poetry

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date March 14, 2024
No Comments on The Subliminal World of Radha Chakravarty’s Poetry

In conversation with Radha Chakravarty about her debut poetry collection, Subliminal, published by Hawakal Publishers


Words cross porous walls
In the house of translation—
Leaf cells breathe new air.

We all know of her as a translator par excellence. But did you know that Radha Chakravarty has another aspect to her creative self? She writes poetry. Chakravarty’s poetry delves into the minute, the small objects of life and integrates them into a larger whole for she writes introspectively. She writes of the kantha — a coverlet made for a baby out of soft old sarees, of her grandmother’s saree, a box to store betel leaves… Her poetry translates the culture with which she grew up to weave in the smaller things into the larger framework of life:

Fleet fingers, fashioning
silent fables, designed to swaddle 
innocent infant dreams, shielding
silk-soft folds of newborn skin
from reality’s needle-pricks, 
abrasive touch of life in the raw.

--'Designs in Kantha’

She has poignant poems about what she observes her in daily life:

At the traffic light she appears 
holding jasmine garlands
selling at your car window for the price 
of bare survival, the promise 
of a love she never had, her eyes 
emptied of the fragrance
of a spring that, for her, never came.

--‘Flower Seller’

Some of her strongest poems focus on women from Indian mythology. She invokes the persona of Sita and Ahalya — and even the ancient legendary Bengali woman astrologer and poet, Khona. It is a collection which while exploring the poet’s own inner being, the subliminal mind, takes us into a traditional Bengali household to create a feeling of Bengaliness in English. At no point should one assume this Bengaliness is provincial — it is the same flavour that explores Bosphorus and Mount Everest from a universal perspective and comments independently on the riots that reft Delhi in 2020… where she concludes on the aftermath— “after love left us and hate filled the air.”

The poems talk to each other to create a loose structure that gives a glimpse into the mind of the poetic persona — all the thoughts that populate the unseen crevices of her being.

In Subliminal, her debut poetry book, Radha Chakravarty has brought to us glimpses of her times and travels from her own perspective where the deep set tones of heritage weave a nostalgic beam of poetic cadences. Chakravarty’s poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mahasweta Devi and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named ‘Book of the Year’ 2011 by Martha Nussbaum.

In this conversation, Radha Chakravarty delves deeper into her poetry and her debut poetry book, Subliminal.

Your titular poem ‘Subliminal’ is around advertisements on TV. Tell us why you opted to name your collection after this poem.

Most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for a pre-conceived anthology. But when I drew them together for this book, the title of the poem about TV advertisements appeared just right for the whole collection, because my poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within. In ‘Memories of Loss’, for example, I speak of beautiful things that conceal painful stories:

In a seashell held to the ear
the murmur of a distant ocean

In the veins of a fallen leaf
the hint of a lost green spring

In the hiss of logs in the fire,
the sighing of wind in vanished trees

In the butterfly’s bold, bright wings,
The trace of silken cocoon dreams

So, when and why did you start writing poetry?

I can’t remember when I started. I think I was always scribbling lines and fragments of verse, without taking them seriously. Poetry for me was the mode for saying the unsayable, expressing what one was not officially expected to put down in words. In a way, I was talking to myself, or to an invisible audience. Years later, going public with my poems demanded an act of courage. The confidence to actually publish my poems came at the urging of friends who were poets. Somehow, they assumed, or seemed to know from reading my published work in other forms, that I wrote poetry too.

Did being a translator of great writers have an impact on your poetry? How?

Yes, definitely. In particular, translating Tagore’s Shesher Kabita (as Farewell Song), his verses for children, the lush, lyrical prose of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Kapalkundala) and the stylistic experiments of contemporary Bengali writers from India and Bangladesh (in my books Crossings: Stories from India and Bangladesh, Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices, Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices and Vermillion Clouds) sensitised me to the way poetic language works, and how the idiom, rhythm and resonances change when you translate from one language to another. Translating poetry has its challenges, but it also refined my own work as a poet. Let me share a few lines of poetry from Farewell Song, my translation of Tagore’s novel Shesher Kabita:

Sometime, when you are at ease, 
When from the shores of the past, 
      The night-wind sighs, in the spring breeze, 
	The sky steeped in tears of fallen bakul flowers,
Seek me then, in the corners of your heart, 
    For traces left behind. In the twilight of forgetting,
	Perhaps a glimmer of light will be seen,
The nameless image of a dream.
	And yet it is no dream,
For my love, to me, is the truest thing …

What writers, artists or musicians have impacted your poetry?

For me, writing is closely associated with the love for reading. Intimacy with beloved texts, and interactions with poets from diverse cultures during my extensive travels, has proved inspirational.

Poetry is also about the art of listening. As a child I loved the sound, rhythm and vivacity of Bengali children’s rhymes in the voice of my great-grandmother Renuka Chakrabarti. She has always been a figure of inspiration for me, a literary foremother who dared to aspire to the world of words at a time when women of her circle were not allowed to read and write. A child bride married into a family of erudite men, and consumed by curiosity about the forbidden act of reading, she took to hiding under her father-in-law’s four-poster bed and trying to decipher the alphabet from newspapers. One day he caught her in the act. Terrified, she crept out from her hiding place, and confessed to the ‘crime’ of trying to read. Things could have gone badly for her, but her father-in-law was an enlightened individual. He understood her craving to learn, and promised that he would teach her to read and write. Under his tutelage, and through her own passion for learning, she became an erudite woman, equally proficient in English and Bengali, an accomplished but unpublished poet whose legacy I feel I have inherited. Subliminal is dedicated to her.

As a child I absorbed both Bengali and English poetry through my pores because in our home, poetry, and music were all around me. I was inspired by Tagore and Nazrul, but also by modern Bengali poets such as Jibanananda Das, Sankho Ghosh and Shamsur Rahman. In my college days, as a student of English Literature, I loved the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics.

Later, I discovered the power of women’s poetry: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, to name a few. I am fascinated by the figure of Chandrabati, the medieval Bengali woman poet who composed her own powerful version of the Ramayana. Art and music provide a wellspring of inspiration too, for poetry can have strong visual and aural dimensions.

You translate from Bengali into English. How is the process of writing poetry different from the process of translation, especially as some of your poetry is steeped in Bengaliness, almost as if you are translating your experiences for all of us?

Translation involves interpreting and communicating another author’s words for readers in another language. Writing poetry is about communicating my own thoughts, emotions and intuitions in my own words. Translation requires adherence to a pre-existing source text. When writing poetry, there is no prior text to respond to, only the text that emerges from one’s own act of imagination. That brings greater freedom, but also a different kind of challenge. Both literary translation and the composition of poetry are creative processes, though. Mere linguistic proficiency is not enough to bring a literary work or a translated text to life.

English is not our mother tongue. And yet you write in it. Can you explain why?

Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions.

Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded. ‘The Casket of Secret Stories’ is inspired by vivid childhood memories of my great-grandmother’s daily ritual of rolling paan, betel leaves stuffed with fragrant spices, and arranging them in the metal box, her paaner bata[1]. When she took her afternoon nap, my cousins and I would steal and eat the forbidden paan from the box, and pretend innocence when she woke up and found all her paan gone. Of course, from our red-stained teeth and lips, she understood very well who the culprits were. But she never let on that she knew. It was only later, after I grew up, that I realised what the paan ritual signified for the housebound women of her time:

In the delicious telling,
bright red juice trickling
from the mouth, staining
tongue and teeth, savouring
the covert knowledge
of what life felt like in dark corners 
of the home’s secluded inner quarters, 
what the world on the outside looked like 
from behind veils, screens, 
barred windows and closed courtyards
where women’s days began and ended,
leaving for posterity
this precious closed kaansha* casket,
redolent with the aroma of lost stories

*Bronze

But I don’t agree that all my poetry is steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of my poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, I have written about different places and journeys between places.

Take ‘Still’, which is about Mount Everest seen from Nagarkot in Nepal. Or ‘Continental Drift’, about the Bosphorus ferry that connects Asia with Europe. Such poems reflect a global sensibility. My poems on the Pandemic are not coloured by specific Bengali experiences. They have a universal resonance. I contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), a collaborative effort to which poets from many different countries contributed their lines. It was a unique composition that connected my personal experience of the Pandemic with the diverse experiences of poets from other parts of the world. The poem was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I guess my poems explore the tensions between rootedness and a global consciousness.

What are the themes and issues that move you?

I tend to write about things that carry a strong personal charge, but also connect with general human experience. My poems are driven by basic human emotions, memory, desire, associations, relationships, and also by social themes and issues. Specific events, private or public, often trigger poems that widen out to ask bigger questions arising from the immediate situation.

Sometimes, poetry can also become for me what T. S. Eliot calls an “escape from personality,” where one adopts a voice that is not one’s own and assume a different identity. ‘The Wishing Tree’ and the sequence titled ‘Seductions’ work as “mask” poems, using voices other than my own. This offers immense creative potential, similar to creating imaginary characters in works of fiction.

There are a lot of women-centred poems in Subliminal. Consider, for example, ‘Designs in Kantha’, ‘Alien’, ‘River/Woman’, ‘That Girl’, ‘The Severed Tongue’ and ‘Walking Through the Flames’. These poems deal with questions of voice and freedom, the body and desire, and the legacy of our foremothers. Some of them are drawn from myth and legend, highlighting the way women tend to be represented in patriarchal discourses.

The natural world and our endangered planet form another thematic strand. I am fascinated by the hidden layers of the psyche, and the unexpected things we discover when we probe beneath the surface veneer of our exterior selves. My poems are also driven by a longing for greater connectivity across the borders that separate us, distress at the growing hatred and violence in our world, and an awareness of the powerful role that words can play in the way we relate to the universe. ‘Peace Process’, ‘After the Riot’ and ‘Borderlines’ express this angst.

How do you use the craft of poetry to address these themes?

Poetry is the art of compression, of saying a lot in very few words. Central to poetry is the image. A single image can carry a welter of associations and resonances, creating layers of meaning that would require many words of explanation in prose. Poems are not about elaborations and explanations. They compel the reader to participate actively in the process of constructing meaning. Reading poetry can become a creative activity too. Poems are also about sound, rhythm and form. I often write “in form” because the challenge of working within the contours of a poetic genre or form actually stretches one’s creative resources. In Subliminal, I have experimented with some difficult short forms, such as the Fibonacci poem, the Skinny, and the sonnet. Take, for instance, the Skinny poem called ‘Jasmine’:

Remember the scent of jasmine in the breeze?
                   Awakening
                    tender
                   memories
                  bittersweet,
                   awakening
                    buried
                    dormant 
                    desires,
                   awakening,
in the breeze, the forgotten promise of first love. Remember?

The last two lines of the poem use the same words as the beginning, but to tell a different story. The form demands great economy.

I pay attention to the sound, and even when writing free verse, I care about the rhythm. Endings are important. Many of my poems carry a twist in the final lines. I mix languages. Bengali words keep cropping up in my English poems.

Are your poems spontaneous or pre-meditated?

The first attempt is usually spontaneous, but then comes the process of rewriting and polishing, which can be very demanding. Some poems come fully formed and require no revision, but generally, I tend to let the first draft hibernate for some time, before looking at it afresh with a critical eye. Often, the final product is unrecognisable.

Which is your favourite poem in this collection and why? Tell us the story around it.

It is hard to choose just one poem. But let us consider ‘Designs in Kantha’, one of my favourites. Maybe the poem is important to me because of the old, old associations of the embroidered kantha with childhood memories of the affection of all the motherly women who enveloped us with their loving care and tenderness. Then came the gradual realisation, as I grew into a woman, of all the intense emotions, the hidden lives that lay concealed between those seemingly innocent layers of fabric. The kantha is a traditional cultural object, but it can also be considered a fabrication, a product of the creative imagination, a story that hides the real, untold story of women’s lives in those times. Behind the dainty stitches lie the secret tales of these women from a bygone era. My poem tries to bring those buried emotions to life.

As a critic, how would you rate your own work?

I think I must be my own harshest critic. Given my academic training, it is very hard to silence that little voice in your head that is constantly analysing your creative work even as you write. To publish one’s poetry is an act of courage. For once your words enter the public domain, they are out of your hands. The final verdict rests with the readers.

Are you planning to bring out more books of poems/ translations? What can we expect from you next?

More poems, I guess. And more translations. Perhaps some poems in translation. My journey has taken so many unpredictable twists and turns, I can never be quite sure of what lies ahead. That is the fascinating thing about writing.

Thank you for giving us your time.

[1] Container for holding Betel leaves or paan

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

Click here to read poems from Subliminal.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Poetry

Spectacles of Life

By Kumar Ghimire


Perceptions paint the world,
Each with their own
Lens of preconceptions.
Only an infant remains unpainted,
Blind to the art of presupposition.

The white clouds in the blue sky, 
Perceived as dark,
When viewed through darkened lenses
In the garden, bloom to unravel secrets;
A revelation for the inquisitive,
Putting on the glasses of inquiry.

If you mask with restricted sight,
And the boundless sky shrinks to confinement,
Life mirrors the chosen spectacles,
Determining the hues of the lens
Through which you peer into the eye called life.

Kumar Ghimire is a poet from Nepal. He writes poems in Nepali and English language. His poems have been published in International Times, Ink Pantry, Synchronized Chaos, Grey Thoughts etc.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Tags English, Kumar Ghimire, Nepal, Nepali

Interview Review

I Kick and I Fly: Ratnottama Sengupta Converses with Ruchira Gupta

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date February 21, 2024
No Comments on I Kick and I Fly: Ratnottama Sengupta Converses with Ruchira Gupta

Ratnottama Sengupta has known Ruchira Gupta for more than 40 years. But reading I Kick and I Fly has made her see in a new light the young journalist who has become a force of change in the global fight against human trafficking.

Kiddy. Ruchi. Journalist. Documentary filmmaker. Emmy Award winner. Founder President, Apne Aap[1]Women Worldwide. Social activist. Agent of changes to international laws. Sera Bangali[2]. Ekta[3] Award winner. Professor, NYU. Cancer survivor. Essayist. Exhibited artist. Published novelist…

“What next?” I could have asked Ruchira Gupta. And without waiting for her to reply I could add, “Member of Rajya Sabha? The first step to even higher offices on the world stage.” Because? This kid born to Rajni and Vidya Sagar Gupta has dedicated her life-breath to ensure that not a single child is either sold or bought for sexual gratification in exchange of a few rupees.

Hardly surprising that when she picked up her pen while recovering from Covid in her family home in Forbesganj, she penned a novel like I Kick and I Fly. “A book that is a MUST READ for one and all who are interested in fighting, tackling, and – not or – ending sex trafficking,” as Anjani Kumar Singh, Director, Bihar Museum said at the launch in Patna. Because? It is a story of optimism as Heera the protagonist, overcomes unimaginable obstacles to emerge a path breaker in the Nat community who believed it was the fate of its girls to sell their body at puberty, or even earlier, for the welfare of their family.

Inspirational. And in the most absorbing way. Read this excerpt from the novel to understand how a message becomes engrossing read.

"My name is Heera. I am from a town named Forbesganj, in a state called Bihar, in northern India, very close to Nepal,” I begin. My voice is shaking along with the rest of me. But I go on. “My brother and I are the first people in our family to ever go to school, and I have grown up believing that being sold for prostitution is my Destiny. That there are few doors open to me as a child of an oppressed-caste family. Our people used to be wrestlers and performers. But overnight we were told we could not do those things anymore, that our entire way of life was illegal.”

My voice is shaking less now and I manage to look at people in front of me. “How do people survive when they are not allowed to do the work they know and love? For my family of nomads, it meant asking people for a place to live, and then doing just about any job they told us we could do. One of these jobs was having sex with people for money.

“These children and women had no choice but to sell their bodies in exchange for a place to live. For food to eat. And for their husbands to be given work. And though people say that times have changed, they must not have changed everywhere, because I have been told since I was a little girl that selling my body was what I had to do to support myself and my family. And I believed it. Many in my family believed it too.

“Finally early this year it was my turn to be put up for sale. My family was in a tight spot, in debt to the wrong man. I grew up in a red-light area, so I knew what it involved. There are no secrets kept from kids where I come from. So, I said No, and we tried to get around it.

“My mother paid back our loan, but the traffickers came for me anyhow. The first time I got away. The second time they got me, but I was rescued by my brother and teacher.

“When I was stuck in a tiny room with my traffickers outside the door, I asked myself why had they kept coming for me even when they had no claim, no right? And that’s when I fully realized that they believed my body belonged to them, and I knew for certain it did not. It was kung fu that helped me understand this. Because it is through kung fu that I learnt, my body would do what I told it to. That my body listened to me – and only me.”

I take a breath. “There is power in my body. My body connects me to my cousin, my aunt, my grandmother who were all sold for prostitution. But kung fu also connects my body to my ancestors, who were champion wrestlers. If both these things lived within me, could I choose which course I wanted to take?”

I look up now, realizing that I have memorized the final words on the page. “For most of my life, the answer to that was NO. But suddenly I felt that maybe there was another possibility. I didn't do it on my own: I needed my family to stand with me, and most importantly, a cheerleader who made me believe that safety could be mine. Rini Di taught me kung fu and opened the doors of the world to me. And that is how I have come to stand before you now.”

Heera stands before her teachers and her friends, other survivors of trafficking as an example who not only fights, successfully, the might of traffickers but who actually saves another trafficked girl. Who, even more importantly, instils faith, and courage, and dream… In her brother, her mother, and her father. Her brother Salman who always stood by her even as he studied for a better future. Her Mai who broke stones for a livelihood and gathered enough courage to take a loan to put in place a roof over their head. Her Baba who stands as a loser but accepts change and even starts to nurse a dream — for his daughter as much as for his son.

And so, when the Martial Arts Foundation awards Heera and her co-fighter friend, Connie, a scholarship to train for one full year in New York, along with admission to a local school, Heera too starts dreaming. Of a future, perhaps only twelve months down, when her family would be dwelling in a pink-bricked three roomed house. When Salman would study in a residential school in Siliguri. When Mai would have a betel shop. When Baba would be a porter at the railway platform. When her cousin Mira Di would be a seamstress with a tailoring shop of her own in the very backroom where she was forced to service men. When the corrupt policeman, Suraj Sharma, and the trafficker, Ravi Lala, would be in jail, no longer on the prowl in Girls Bazaar.

“It’s not a dream,” says Ruchira , reiterating the clinching line of I Kick and I Fly. “I have seen this transformation actually take place in Forbesganj. “There were 72 home-based brothels in the lane when Apne Aap started. Today there are two. Girls no longer sit outside waiting for customers. The two sisters who were locked up in the hut have finished school. One is a chef, the other is a teacher. The girl who was kidnapped is a karate trainer. Someone like Mai really has a betel paan leaf shop and someone like Mira Di is a seamstress. The cattle fair is no longer allowed to bring dance or orchestra groups.”

This was the perfect time to strike a conversation with Ruchira Gupta, I reckoned. And so I decided to shoot…

Me: How – rather, why – did you start writing I Kick and I Fly?

Ruchi: I started writing this story when a fourteen-year-old girl just like Heera won a gold medal in a karate championship in Forbesganj. She was being groomed for prostitution with other girls in her lane. A lane just like Girls Bazaar.

Her journey was not easy, it was heroic. I saw how she and her friends overcame hunger, fought off their fear and stood up to traffickers with grace and gusto. An annual cattle fair used to claim girls from that lane every year. When my NGO, Apne Aap, opened a community centre and a hostel there, we were constantly attacked by men like Gainul and Ravi Lala. They would stalk the mothers, the daughters, and me. They hurled abuses, threw stones, stole from our office and even kidnapped girls. We built higher walls around the hostel to prevent traffickers from jumping over. I posted guards outside my home, hired lawyers, filed police complaints and cases in court. Just like Mai, some mothers in the lane disobeyed their husbands even though they were beaten up. Their daughters were the first batch of girls in our hostel.

Me: Are all the characters real? Is the hope real? Do people in real life change the way Baba does?

Ruchi: Most of the events in the book are inspired by real people, places, events. To give you one example: A trafficking survivor from Indonesia told me how she was locked up and how she escaped from a brothel in Queens, New York, by disguising herself in a burqa. She is now a global leader in the struggle against trafficking. In my novel, Heera uses the same device to rescue Rosy.

Baba, Heera’s father, is also based on real-life fathers in the Nat community of Forbesganj. They would actually auction off their daughters to the highest bidder when the mela came to town! But as I began working in the red-light area I saw that they were not black and white criminals but human beings desensitised through decades and generations of oppression. Of course, there was no excuse that they did not try to fight back. I did see some fathers change when they saw their daughters succeed. Until then the possibility of a different future had not even occurred to them.

When hope unfurls in a downtrodden human being, it is like a tendril. I saw it in the eyes and actions of some fathers in the red-light area of Forbesganj when their daughters won gold medals in karate.

Me: You have not learnt kung fu. Why did you project Rini Di – clearly your alter ego – as a kung fu teacher? It is a physical art of self-defence. How precisely does that connect with, or help, girls who are in the river of flesh?

Ruchi: I still remember, it was early morning when a boy came to my home with his mother to seek help. His sister and cousin were locked up by traffickers to stop them from coming to the hostel. We had to mobilise the police to get them out. I noticed then that the girls were badly bruised while the traffickers were unscathed. I wished that the girls were able to fight back.

Our Apne Aap women’s group met that afternoon at the centre. Everyone was afraid that we would be beaten in retaliation for the police raid. That’s when I suggested martial arts classes. The women loved the idea. I used to see a couple teach karate teacher near the rice fields to boys in a private school. We hired them and the classes began. Soon the bullying in schools stopped.

As the girls started to win competitions, something changed. The very townspeople who had agitated to urge the principal to expel our red light children began to respect them. And the fathers in the community began to see value in their daughters. The biggest change was in the girls themselves. They began to own their bodies and value themselves. As they gained self-esteem, they began to do better in class. Soon more mothers began to stand up to the traffickers and even to their husbands in the lane, saying they would send their daughters to school.

Me: How did Apne Aap help change the picture at the ground level?

Ruchi: Today Apne Aap has educated more than 3,000 girls from red-light areas through school and college and is still continuing to do so. They are in jobs as animation artists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, managers of pizza parlours and of gas stations too.

Our NGO’s community has become a safe space to hold meetings, share stories, get food, do homework, and plot against traffickers. Women, very much like Mai and Mira Di, meet regularly in the centre to solve their problems. They fill out forms with the help of Apne Aap workers to access government entitlements like low cost housing, ration and loans. They go collectively to talk to the authorities when there are delays.

The Apne Aap legal team helps victims to file police complaints, testify in court and get traffickers convicted. The real Gainul and the real Ravi Lala are in jail. In 2013, Apne Aap survivor leaders and I testified in Parliament for the passage of section 370 IPC, a law that punishes traffickers and allocates budgets for services to the prostituted and the vulnerable.

Before these could happen, I had shown my documentary and testified to the UN and to the US senate for laws that would decriminalise the victims; increase choices for vulnerable and trafficked girls and women; and punish the traffickers and sex buyers. I can proudly say that my testimony and inputs contributed in the passage of the UN Protocol to end Trafficking in Persons and the UN Trafficking Fund for survivors as well as the passage of US Trafficking Victim Protection Act.

Me: Ruchi you come from an established, politically aware, well connected and much respected family. You grew up in the metros and now live an international life, mostly abroad. You won a coveted award for The Selling of Innocents. You helped in the making of Love, Sonia. Why did you not continue to make films? In short, what compelled you to start Apne Aap Women Worldwide?

Ruchi: As you know, I started as a journalist right after graduation. I learnt to ask questions, and I listened. The question that changed my life was: Where are the girls?

I was researching a story in the hills of Nepal when I came across rows of villages with missing girls. I had asked this to the men playing cards in the villages in Nepal. I followed the trail and found that a smooth supply chain existed from these remote hamlets to the brothels of India. Little girls, perhaps only twelve, were locked up in cages in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai for years and sold for a few cents night after night.

All the girls were from poor farming families. Many, like Heera, were from nomadic indigenous communities or marginalised castes. Like her, they were either not sent to school, or bullied until they dropped out, or pulled out by their fathers and sold into prostitution.

I was sad, then angry, and finally determined to do something about it. That’s how I ended up exposing the horror in my documentary. When I was on the stage in Broadway receiving the Emmy in 2013, all I could see beyond the glittering lights were the eyes of the mothers who had broken their silence to save their daughters. I decided in that instant to use my Emmy not to build a career in journalism but to make a difference.

I did two things. I dubbed it in six languages and I travelled across the world with it. I screened it in villages to show parents what the brothels were like. I showed it to the UN and the US Senate when I testified against the crime that is human trafficking. It contributed to a global push by activists that led to a new UN protocol to end trafficking and the first US anti-trafficking law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

Me: What was your magic wand?

Ruchi: I had no magic wand. I didn’t even have experience to stop the kidnapping of girls, or knowledge about how to put traffickers in jail. I was an English literature student from Kolkata’s Loreto College who joined The Telegraph while pursuing my honours degree graduation. But as a journalist, I saw the reality and invented ways to move forward.

Something had happened while I was filming the documentary. A pimp had stuck a knife to my throat. I was in a small room. There was nowhere to run. Suddenly, I was encircled by the 22 women I was interviewing. They told the pimp that he would have to kill them first. He knew it would be too much trouble to kill so many women, so he slunk away. I was saved. That moment changed my life.

The Emmy award money helped me start Apne Aap Women Worldwide with the women who had bravely spoken up in my film. I listened to the women who said they had four dreams: Education for their children; a room of their own; an office job; and punishment for those who bought and sold them. That became my NGO’s business plan.

I learnt that the best solutions came from those who experience the problem. The idea of the hostel, the idea of food in the community centre, and even the idea of karate came when we sat in a circle in the mud hut that is our community centre. It evolved into a grassroots approach which we call asset-based community development – ABCD or the 10 Asset model. Every woman or girl who becomes an Apne Aap member gains ten assets – both tangible and intangible. These are: a safe space, education, self-confidence, the ability to speak to authorities, government IDs and documents, low-cost food and housing, savings and loans, livelihood linkages, legal knowledge and support, and a circle of at least nine friends.

Each of these assets is a building block in an unfolding story of personal and community change. I wrote this novel to share with you that change is possible.

Me: Ruchi you had come up with the art-documentation, The Place Where I Live is Called Red Light Area. You got the girls to make a series of videos about different aspects of their life. You supported a documentary on the scheduled tribes. What inspired you to shun Art For Art’s Sake and pursue Art as Activism?

Ruchi: I learned in a very practical way the power of women’s collective action and the importance of sticking by one another. I promised myself I would never give up on those women’s dream. As a result, today thousands of girls have exited the prostitution systems from brothels across the country. There is more awareness about sex trafficking globally. And there are better laws and services for victims like Mira Di in over 160 countries.

Me: But we still have miles to go before we sleep…?

Ruchi: Yes, because the truth is that there isn’t one but many, many more Heeras. Girls Bazaar still exists in many parts of the world, including the USA. The brothel in Queens is real. The International Labour Organisation estimates there are more than 40 million victims of human trafficking globally with hundreds of thousands of victims in the US alone. Human trafficking is the second largest organised crime in the world, involving billions of dollars, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Me: So, what more actions would you suggest to tackle the issue? Through IKAIF, an upbeat tale of an underdog’s rise to victory, you have shown that ‘lost girls’ earmarked for ‘the oldest profession’ can erase their ‘destiny’ through education, and reliance on their own inner strength. What other positive actions would you suggest?

Ruchi: Heera’s is a story of hope in spite of great odds. It’s about our bodies — who they belong to, the command they can give us. It is about friends who make changes you want in your life. It is about a community that resolves to make change contagious, and succeeds.

You too can ‘Join The Movement’ to create a world in which no child is bought or sold. You can do that in so many ways. You can 1) Sign the freedom pledge on my website Ruchiragupta.com.

2) Learn more about the issue by reading I Kick and I Fly, and by watching The Selling of Innocents on my website.

3) Create further awareness by sharing the book, the movie and the pledge on your social media handles.

4) Volunteer and intern with Apne Aap or a local NGO in your town.

And you can Sponsor a girl like Heera on apneaap.org!

[1] Oneself

[2] The Best Bengali – An award given by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group

[3] Unity: The Ekta Award is a National Award from India

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Poetry

A Song of Life

By Sushant Thapa

A fakir sings of life,
In abandon,
He plays his string instrument. 

Who said you can't
Pluck a smile and
Garden millions of them?

Writing the pain
And erasing it is
Like the ocean
Washing the shore.

The dew of dawn glistens
After night closes its purdah*. 

Autumn's bare fate
Is spring's blooming reason.

Seasons follow one another;
Life sets and shines
Like seasonal sunshine.

Life can bloom,
While you appreciate
Waiting on a bench,

Under the reddish
Rhododendrons
That decorate and
Light up the landscape.

The seashells long to be collected! 



*Curtain

Sushant Thapa writes poetry, book reviews and flash fiction. He has an M.A. in English from JNU, New Delhi. He is a lecturer of English and Business Communication in Biratnagar, Nepal.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Tags Biratnagar, Business Studies, English, JNU, Nepal, New Delhi, Sushant Thapa