Becoming Guardians, Not Gardeners! | Nash, Guha and More... ❤️❤️❤️

What happens when true friendship and vibrant scholarship come together?

#CaseStudy

#lovelyReads

#EnvironmentalHistory

#untrameled

#Friendship-ScholarshipCombo

I’m presently reading Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989) by Ramachandra Guha.

And this book, I should confess, took me straight to Harvard Graduate Roderick Nash who is credited with coining the term ‘environmental history’ thereby opening up the now-flourishing field of Environmental History to the world.

And this again took me back yet again, to Nash - his friendships and their scholarship that resulted in impactful transformations to our perspective of ‘wilderness’ and the natural environment.

So before Guha, let’s do a little bit of Nash! 😊

The life-long passion of Nash was to study the impact of human society on the natural environment.

When you have a passion, you necessarily need friends or mentors who encourage and support you in your passion and quest, ain’t it?

This blogpost provides an inspirational take on Nash, and how his ‘scholarly’ friendships coupled with his scholarship had a transformative and therapeutic impact on society.

Eminent environmental historian Char Miller, Pomona College, California, (and a friend of Nash) has given a lovely foreword to the book written by his friend Roderick Nash, (titled, Wilderness and the American Mind) which throws further light on the subject of Environmental History and how it all began.

Nash Saw the Missing Gap

When Nash began his doctoral studies in 1960 at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of the legendary intellectual historian Merle Curti, there was no such thing as environmental history.

Although some scholars and critics had written brilliantly about the human place in nature - notably Walter Prescott Webb, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx - Nash realized that no one had explored the fundamental role that wilderness as wilderness played in the nation's imagination.

So did another lucky break: Nash convinced the university archives to hire him to gather, organize, and sort through the papers of Aldo Leopold, arguably one of the twentieth century's most important conservationists — a perfect job for an aspiring historian committed to tracking alterations in Americans’ ideas about nature.

The Task Ahead of Nash (How he structured his Research)

Nash’s task becomes oddly straightforward - to trace this malleable concept’s evolution across time, to make sense of how succeeding generations of Americans made sense of the wild, what he calls the self-willed (literally, ‘wild’) world.

Assessing the Past Research and Creative Output to Plan for the Future

Nash does so by assessing the wilderness advocacy of such iconic writers as Henry David Thoreau, George Gaitlin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and John McPhee and by unearthing pithy political speeches that extoll America the Wild.

Newspaper editorials, like varied forms of artistic expression and cultural production, make good copy, as does the slow emergence of legislative initiatives designed to protect the public lands and the wildness they exemplified, culminating in the 1964 passage of the Wilderness Act. Nash's close attention to such an interdisciplinary array of sources, and to some of the quirky details they contained, sensitizes him to subtle changes in tone, texture, and temper.

One of these moments proved pivotal to his narrative and is emblematic of our understanding of a tectonic shift in American political culture.

Until the late nineteenth century, wilderness was a place to be feared, fought, and flattened. This rough terrain, and the native peoples who inhabited it, Euro-Americans argued, must be ‘civilized’, brought under control by gun, plow, and rail. No sooner was this end achieved, however, than a wave of nostalgia for the sharp, formative edges of the Western frontier swept through the urban East.

This psychic crisis - reflected in literature, poetry, and paintings - helped tip the scales in wilderness's favor, Nash argues.

A Newfound Perspective / A Revolution in Meaning

The wealth that came from an industrializing society allowed urbanites to “approach wilderness from the viewpoint of the vacationer rather than the conquerer,” a newfound perspective, a “revolution in meaning!”

Once reviled, a terrain to be grazed over, cut down, or plowed up, the idea of wildness emerged as a tonic for all that ailed modernizing America. A remarkable transition then built on itself.

From Transition to Transformation

By the early twentieth century, an appreciable audience embraced the idea of wilderness’s purity, a sensibility the contemporary naturalist John Muir deified through his odes to Yosemite and the Sierra Mountains, his “Range of Light”.  

In time, succeeding generations moved beyond the poetic appeal and drummed up a political demand for wilderness preservation. Among those who mobilized a legion of likeminded followers was Robert Marshall, a radical forester who in 1930 argued for the creation of an “organization of people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness”.

The Wilderness Society and Its Impact on Nash

Four years later, in 1935, Robert Marshall founded the Wilderness Society (with Aldo Leopold as its president), launching a special interest for special places. As its members fought to secure wilderness designations for portions of the national forests and other public lands — a fitful and painstaking process — as they struggled to fend off dams on the Colorado and other Western rivers that threatened to inundate cultural sites, submerge iconic landforms, and pacify whitewater, they also conceived of a broader resolution, the passage of a congressional act that would forever protect remnants of the wild.

Good Friends and their Value to Society

Quite interestingly, Nash was a good friend of Howard Zahniser, (who was also member of the Wilderness Society) and whose canonical essay titled, “The Need for Wilderness Areas” (1956), paved the way for the passing of the famous 1964 Wilderness Act in the US.

Howard Zahniser wrote the first draft of the Wilderness Act in 1956. He chose the word ‘untrammeled’, and made the word connote with the concept of wilderness!

"A wilderness...is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man..." - The Wilderness Act.

Great Friends (Minds) Think Alike!

Howard Zahniser emphasises on the need to be a guardian than a gardener!

Nash also echoes similar views, says Char Miller.

Nash emphasises on the creation of “garden-earth”; that is, a thoroughly and completely guarded planet scrubbed free of its gritty peripheries, a pastoral paradise, whose roots run back through Thomas Jefferson’s deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden.

Coming back, how did environmental history begin in India? And yes, what was the role of Ramachandra Guha in playing a pioneering role in the environmental history movement in India?

Stay tuned… for updates! 😊

Courtesy: All quotes are from Char Miller’s foreword to his friend Nash’s Book on Wilderness and the American Mind.

"Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols"

Science of Secrecy | Monk & Cryptography

The Code Book | Vignettes

#lovelyReads

So let me begin this post with a question!

How many of you, dear readers, have watched Monk on Netflix, recently?

Monk and his crime investigations, are quite a treat to the inquisitive mind - as he capitalises on even the most innocuous of clues as codes to crack the most arduous of cases so effortlessly! 

Well, I love Monk’s mannerisms, and his cool approach to solving cases, in spite of the fact that he is beset with a host of his fears and phobias and his ‘perfectionist’ ways to life – that in a way makes the detective mystery TV series all the more exciting to watch!

Well, for newbies, Monk - Adrian Monk is a private detective who offers his services for the SFPD – the San Francisco Police Department – and helps them in solving even the most puzzling and unsolvable of cases!

In one particular episode titled, ‘Mr. Monk and the Three Julies’ - Monk has to find the murderer, who appears to be killing women with the same name as Natalie’s daughter.

Just then, Natalie hears a communication from the police dispatcher over the radio about a possible “code 187” involving a victim with the name ‘Julie Teeger’.

Police: All units, be advised, possible 187, name Julie Teeger, repeat, possible 187.

Natalie: (over radio) The-the victim’s name! Repeat the victim’s name!

Police: Julie Teeger.

Natalie: Oh, my God... what’s a 187? Mr. Monk, what’s a 187?!

Monk: ... Homicide.

Natalie immediately panics, and asks Monk what the code 187 possibly means.

Monk replies that, the code 187 is a police radio code meaning homicide. Immediately, Natalie grabs the keys, jumps into Stottlemeyer’s car, and speeds away, despite repeated protests from Monk.

For thousands of years, kings, queens and generals have relied on efficient communication in order to govern their countries and command their armies.

At the same time, they have all been aware of the consequences of their messages falling into the wrong hands, revealing precious secrets to rival nations and betraying vital information to opposing forces.

It was the threat of enemy interception that motivated the development of codes and ciphers: techniques for disguising a message so that only the intended recipient can read it.

The desire for secrecy has meant that nations have operated codemaking departments, responsible for ensuring the security of communications by inventing and implementing the best possible codes.

At the same time, enemy codebreakers have attempted to break these codes, and steal secrets.

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols.

The history of codes and ciphers is the story of the centuries old battle between codemakers and codebreakers, an intellectual arms race that has had a dramatic impact on the course of history, 

says Simon Singh - a popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist, in his highly engaging read titled, The Code Book.

The book talks about a different type of science - “the science of secrecy” - How to hide messages and the layers of meanings that lay hidden behind them.

It’s about cryptography.

The book covers the history of cryptography, right from the time it all began!

Queen Elizabeth has imprisoned her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on a plot to kill her. The only thing protecting Mary was that she had encoded all of her messages along with her conniving partners in crime!

On the morning of Saturday, October 15, 1586, Queen Mary entered the crowded courtroom at Fotheringhay Castle.

Years of imprisonment and the onset of rheumatism had taken their toll, yet she remained dignified, composed and indisputably regal.

Assisted by her physician, she made her way past the judges, officials and spectators, and approached the throne that stood halfway along the long, narrow chamber.

Mary had assumed that the throne was a gesture of respect toward her, but she was mistaken. The throne symbolized the absent Queen Elizabeth, Mary’s enemy and prosecutor.

Mary was gently guided away from the throne and toward the opposite side of the room, to the defendant’s seat, a crimson velvet chair.

Mary Queen of Scots was on trial for treason. She had been accused of plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth in order to take the English crown for herself.

Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, had already arrested the other conspirators, extracted confessions, and executed them. Now he planned to prove that Mary was at the heart of the plot, and was therefore equally culpable and equally deserving of death.

Unfortunately for Mary, Walsingham was not merely Principal Secretary, he was also England’s spymaster. He had intercepted Mary’s letters to the plotters, and he knew exactly who might be capable of deciphering them.

Thomas Phelippes was the nation’s foremost expert on breaking codes, and for years he had been deciphering the messages of those who plotted against Queen Elizabeth, thereby providing the evidence needed to condemn them. 

If he could decipher the incriminating letters between Mary and the conspirators, then her death would be inevitable. On the other hand, if Mary’s cipher was strong enough to conceal her secrets, then there was a chance that she might survive. Not for the first time, a life hung on the strength of a cipher.

Thus goes on, the gripping narrative, that Simon puts forth so eloquently, in this highly engaging read.

As information becomes an increasingly valuable commodity, and as the communications revolution changes society, so the process of encoding messages, known as encryption, will play an increasing role in everyday life.

Nowadays our phone calls bounce off satellites and our e-mails pass through various computers, and both forms of communication can be intercepted with ease, so jeopardizing our privacy. Similarly, as more and more business is conducted over the Internet, safeguards must be put in place to protect companies and their clients.

Encryption is the only way to protect our privacy and guarantee the success of the digital marketplace. The art of secret communication, otherwise known as cryptography, will provide the locks and keys of the Information Age,

says Simon Singh – aka Simon Lehna Singh, MBE, a British popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist.

So why wait? Do grab your copy from Amazon, and feel the sway of cryptography at its scintillating best!

pic courtesy: imdbdotcom

“The land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds!” ❤️

The Burning Earth | Sunil Amrith

An Insightful Overview

#lovelyReads #justReleased

ONCE UPON A TIME ALL HISTORY WAS Environmental history. Life was governed by the seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed.

Human societies used their ingenuity to wield fire, dam rivers, cut down forests: all to mitigate the risks of living.

They harnessed the power of the animals they shared shelter with.

Every culture had its gods of beneficence; every culture had dreams of plenty. A thousand years ago, those dreams grew more insistent. The scale of human impact on Earth expanded with the growth in human numbers.

And then things changed.

The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won. They believed that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power.

They believed that instant access to the prehistoric solar energy embedded in fossil fuels made them invulnerable. Their steam engines and lethal weapons conquered the world. In pursuit of freedom, they poisoned rivers, razed hills, made forests disappear, terrorized surviving animals and drove them to the brink of extinction.

In pursuit of freedom, they took away the freedom of others. The most powerful people in the world believed, and some still believe, that human beings and other forms of life on Earth are but resources to be exploited, to be moved around at will.

How have we reached this point of planetary crisis? It is the outcome of our creaturely quest for survival - the long and continuing struggle for food and shelter that still drives a large part of the human impact on the rest of nature.

It is, conversely, the outcome of the elite pursuit of luxuries - animal, vegetal, and mineral - that has spanned ever more of the world, ever more relentlessly, over the last five hundred years.

It is the outcome of energy-hungry economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, that turned living nature into lifeless commodities, sometimes with the liberatory intention of expanding human freedoms.

It is the outcome of our inability to imagine kinship with other humans, let alone with other species.

It is the outcome of the mutating hydra of militarism, armed with the power to destroy every form of life on Earth.

goes The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith.

A timely book, that is in tune with the urgency of our times by Sunil Amrith.

Sunil Amrith is Professor of History with Yale University, a prestigious Ivy League University.

About his childhood, Sunil says -

I HAD THE MOST THOROUGHLY URBAN OF CHILDHOODS in an Asian metropolis that grew vertically. My memories are of harbor lights and darkened movie theaters and air-conditioned shopping malls.

I paid little attention to the natural world, though nature seeped into my life unnoticed. To this day the rain I love is the rain that thrilled me then: rain that arrives abruptly and falls in sheets from stacks of inky afternoon clouds.

I grew up in Singapore, an island-city that imported almost all its food and even its water, a city as committed as anywhere on the planet to remaking nature for human ends.

From the 1960s to the present day, Singapore’s land area has grown by 25 percent.

The country’s engineers have conjured land from water - land made from sand dredged from river beds, held up with pillars drilled into the sea floor, and then sculpted into highways and parks and public housing and the world’s best airport. Even the climate was molded to the nation’s needs.

As a young person I was conscious of the idea of “sustainability,” which entered common use in the 1980s.

But I was drawn to study history by what seemed to be the more urgent struggles for political and social freedom that I saw unfolding all around me in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

When nature first touched my writing, it entered unbidden through the archives.

Amid the bloody accounting of Malaysia’s coroner’s court records, I stumbled on detailed descriptions of the neat rows of trees that provided cover for the buried bodies of Indian migrant workers on the rubber plantations in the late nineteenth century.

As I traveled through rural Malaysia to interview retired rubber tappers, I was surprised by how many of the stories they told me were about trees.

A line from the French historian of the Mediterranean Fernand Braudel came to my mind - “the land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds.”

A few years later, in 2012, I spent time in Yangon, Bangkok, and Mumbai within the space of a few months.

Within recent memory all three cities had faced extreme floods. A monsoon deluge in July 2005 submerged a substantial part of Mumbai. Cyclone Nargis leveled Yangon in 2008, with a toll beyond counting in lives and homes lost.

The Bangkok floods of late 2011 broke the fortress of levees that surrounded Thailand’s capital, which was no longer able to contain a Chao Phraya River swollen by a summer of unusually heavy rains. In all three cities, extreme weather cascaded into political disaster because of misrule.

In Mumbai, decades of unregulated construction had paved over the city’s natural drainage. In Yangon, a military government clung to power at any cost, denying the scale of the tragedy and shutting out international assistance. 

In Bangkok, rapid growth had wrecked the mangroves that once held back the waters. In all three cities the poorest people suffered most, those who lived in makeshift housing in precarious and low-lying settlements.

The most compelling writing on nature often comes from deep feeling for the texture of a particular landscape and a sense of kinship with the other species that share it,

says Sunil, in this insightful book, that traces those threads so beautifully from the 13th Century onwards, down until the present, showing alternatively, the interweaving of progress and disaster, that also includes a brilliant history of the spread of rice around the world.

And for once, we get to hear things from a person closer home, from the East on familiar historical events across a huge swathe of time.

The read is quite gripping, as it is interspersed with a lot of engaging anecdotes, and eyewitness testimonies, weaving together the economic, social and environmental history across the continents into its fabric.

A must-read book that’s akin to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement or Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

You may want to read a review of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in our past post HERE, where I was lucky and privileged to be part of the interactions we had with Amitav Ghosh on climate change at the Times Literary Festival, at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai. 

"I came from Loyola & MCC infused into me totally..." ❤️❤️❤️ | On the Lovely Lakshminarayan Sir ❤️

Sunday Inspiration | Invaluable Life-Lessons

from our Noble and Vibrant Senior Professors in MCC

#inspiration

#Dr.Lakshminarayan

Well, this post is the result of a lovely WhatsApp conversation that I had yesterday, with Dr. Lakshminarayan, former Professor of Physics, MCC, who also happens to be my beloved wife’s favourite professor in MCC.

Well, just a couple of days ago, I had posted a report on eminent MCC-ian Mr. Shreekumar Varma’s Endowment Lecture in our Department as part of the TG Narayanan Endowment Lecture Series.

Dr. Lakshminarayan had seen the post in their Facebook group, and so he spontaneously appreciated me for having done the post.

Took the cue/link from Shree’s posting on FB.

Missed being there.

Enjoyed your recapitulation of Shree’s talk.

Judesekar and I were schoolmates.

Your BLOG, it is nice.

Thank you.

This was the message.

I was quietly thrilled and felt so happy.

For three reasons.

Firstly, for the beautiful friendship that they have been cherishing since their schooldays, from 3rd standard onwards, that continues even now, when they’re into their early 70s – even post-retirement.

What a beautiful tribute to friendship. I felt like hugging him for this.

Dr. Lakshmi (as we fondly call him) is one of the best Professors MCC has ever known. Clad in his classy linen shirt, and formal trousers, with a thin briefcase on him, (that had his lectures and his day’s schedules within), the way he took class was a student’s delight. 

He was an outstanding cricketer as well, along with a host of cricketers – including Dr. Ganesh, Dr. Franklin Daniel, up until our youngest Professor in the Department, Dr. David Abraham Albert. 😊😉

He belongs to that lovely generation of MCC-ians who love, cherish, admire and celebrate all things MCC.

Secondly, when he said, ‘I missed it’ – he really meant it. Such a great admiration and a sense of pride and awe he has for his friend Shreekumar Varma and his lecture. He had this same admiration for his classmate Jude, who he says, rose up to the highest position in Nation as Director General of Forests, and Special Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, New Delhi. [Appointed by the President of India]

[On an aside, I should admit that, I was really in awe of Mr. Jude, as well, who was seated so casual and so cool, in the first row, without any airs or aura around him, having come quite early, to listen to his classmate’s lecture.]

Mr. Jude is seated second from left, along with his past classmates in MCC

Thirdly, his cute compliment and genuine appreciation for the blogpost that I had done on Mr. Shreekumar Varma’s lecture. Indeed, it took me at least three to four full hours to write down that post to perfection and post it on the blog before the day ended! 

Quite interestingly, the first comment that I had received on the blog, was from Mr. Shreekumar Varma himself. 😊 Speaks volumes to his humility for spontaneously cultivating this sense of appreciating others. 

Thanks a million Shree Sir. You made my day.

It might be a small word/a little compliment. But it really goes a long way in bringing the best out of others. Ain’t it?

What’s more…

Dr. Lakshmi added a few more insights to the next message that he had sent me, which runs as follows –

Mano, Shree & Jude were MA classmates.

Jude, got IFS, and discontinued after I MA, i think. Subsequently , i do not know if he completed MA elsewhere. Rose to highest position in Nation.

All of us were contemporary at MCC.

Jude & I were schoolmates from 3rd to 11th STD. at DB.

Ponnaiya, Mano & Shree were from MCCHS School, I think.

My classmate, PKC Paul & Mano were cousins. So, we had all interacted, even if for a brief while.

Also, some of the prettiest girls were in our class. So, our Physics class was familiar with other depts.

😊

The MCCians who came from BSc to MSc (to be my classmates) were also friends with other dept. guys.

I came from Loyola & MCC infused into me totally.

😊

The last line, (as I also told Dr. Lakshminarayan), is EPIC!

And a real inspiration.

How beautifully he’s said it.

Admire you dear Sir.

Viva la Dr. Lakshminarayan!

Viva la Mr. Shreekumar Varma and their lovely bonds of friendship!!

Viva la MCC!!!

PS: Dr. Lakshminarayan’s inspiring talk on “MCC Physicists and the Making of Modern India”, that he had given on 26th October 2012, in the Anderson Hall, is also here, archived for posterity, on our blog.

And this should be your real Sunday inspiration, you bet!

“The list of Physicists from MCC including legends like Dr. K. S. Krishnan, Mr. T. N. Seshan, Mr. M. M. Rajendran, Mr. S. Narayanan are some of the names that immediately come to mind. In fact, the impact of Physicists from MCC on the Indian State is of course part of Indian History”, he says… and yes...

You may want to read that inspiring POST on our past BLOGPOST HERE.

One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’

Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll | A Memoir

[By the Founder of Chennai’s Famous Snake Park & Crocodile Park Trust]

Rom a.k.a Romulus Whitaker

Well, I’ve just finished reading his inspiring memoir titled, Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years that he had co-authored with Janaki Lenin, and published by HarperCollins this year [2024].

Just giving us all, excerpts from his book, before we get to know more about him towards the end of this post. 

So here goes -

Mummy started me fishing when I was about four years old. She rigged a long straight stick with a length of string and a bent pin. I collected worms by turning over rocks in the yard and kept them in a jelly jar half full of soil.

I dropped the bait into the water and waited.

A sharp tug startled me. With a swirl, a fish almost took the stick out of my hand. I hauled with all my strength and flipped a struggling yellow perch on to the grassy bank next to the log. 

Before it could wriggle back into the stream, I dove on it, and the spines on its dorsal fin pierced my hands. Wiping the drops of blood on my shorts and ignoring the pain, I carried the fish home.

Hooking that fish set me on a lifelong obsession, which included catching barramundi in New Guinea, mahseer in the Himalayas, largemouth bass in the Everglades and channel catfish in the Mississippi River, to name a few.

My friends had small fishing rods, which were much better than my home-made one. One let me borrow a hook, which made fishing easier. I coaxed Mummy into buying me a proper fishing rod. This was when a decisive incident set me on my course as a snake missionary.

We rolled over rocks to find earthworms, what my buddies called ‘angleworms’, for fish bait.

One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’ I didn’t stop them, nor did I join in.

Not having seen one before, I was fascinated but afraid.

After the boys stepped back, I squatted near the battered creature and examined it. I carried it home on the end of a stick against their advice. Mummy and Gail were in the kitchen when I walked in.

‘The poor thing!’ Gail exclaimed. ‘It’s a harmless garter snake, Breezy,’ Mummy said.

‘It wouldn’t have hurt you.’ ‘I didn’t kill it, Mummy. The other kids did.’

‘Promise me you won’t kill a snake,’ she said. I readily did.

Perhaps this was when I became fixated on the reptiles and vowed to be their champion. After that episode, I took to turning over every stone—not for earthworms but for snakes. When I found one, I took it home alive in the jelly jar.

‘It’s a milksnake,’ Mummy said.

She took a photograph of a four-year-old me holding it, recording the event for posterity. As cold spring merged into warm summer, I caught gorgeously patterned milksnakes that the village kids called checkered adders, tiny delicate ring-necked snakes, Dekay’s snakes, sleek and fast ribbon snakes, and garter snakes.

I tried different handling techniques, eventually learning to move one hand over the other as the snake slithered. The excited ones shat and musked on my hands, and each species had a distinctive odour. For instance, garter snakes stank worse than skunks, but milksnakes weren’t so bad.

I also got bitten a lot, making the local boys react, ‘You’re gonna die. You’re a goner. Just wait and see! A checkered adder bite’ll kill you in an hour.’

Mummy bought Snakes of the World by Raymond L. Ditmars, who later became one of my heroes. Of course, I couldn’t read it by myself.

She read aloud the chapter titled ‘The New World Harmless Snakes’ several times.

Before long, I had memorized their names and every detail about these creatures’ habits and temperaments.

Mummy helped me convert an old aquarium into a terrarium in which to keep snakes as pets. To feed them, I caught grasshoppers and small frogs in the fields.

Another time, I found a shed snakeskin under a rock. Back at home, I examined it with my plastic magnifying glass. The skin was inside out. ‘Mummy, snakes shed their skins the way we take our socks off,’ I announced my discovery.

The eye of the snake was covered by a single rounded lens of skin. Everything about them was so wonderfully different. I made out faint long lines down the back. A garter snake.

As her parents had encouraged Violet, Ma reinforced my curiosity. Everyone expected I’d outgrow snakes. As a teenager, I became enamoured of motorbikes, but my interest in snakes didn’t wane.

As long as I can remember, snakes have been the focus of my fascination and love.

I was so lucky to grow up in the northern New York countryside, where harmless snakes were common. The wilds of the Kodaikanal hills in south India, nurtured that love to an obsession during my schoolboy years.

Many conservation pioneers started their careers as ardent hunters, a phenomenon captured in the 1978 book The Penitent Butchers by Richard Fitter and Sir Peter Scott.

As a high school student, I killed and skinned birds for a museum collection, which put me on the fringes of scientific research.

For a year after I graduated, what people call a ‘gap year’ these days, I shot spotted deer and blackbuck to eat, stalked a marauding leopard and guarded crops from elephants. In Wyoming, I spent more time hunting and fishing than getting a college education.

You may wonder how a boy who grew up loving snakes could exploit them. It’s for that reason this is not a memoir, but an autobiography.

If I were to cleave to the single track of how I am viewed—a reptile conservationist, educator and researcher—a lot of back story would be missing. In an autobiography, authors are caught between extolling their virtues and achievements, and camouflaging their raging egos.

It would be dishonest to chronicle the awards and applause, and airbrush my bloodthirsty past off the record. The simple thing to do would be to leave out these inconvenient parts as they are not acceptable activities for a conservationist today.

That way I’d escape the criticism that’s sure to come. By revealing my bloody hands and early love of destruction, whether it be of animal life or explosives, you, the reader, can see the real me with all the warts.

I make no apologies, since I don’t view myself as a conservationist— that’s a label others have bestowed upon me.

I’ve always done what I loved, whether fishing, hunting, catching snakes or championing the cause of habitat protection and protecting snakes,

writes Romulus Whitaker, the famous 81-year old herpetologist, and the man renowned for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, as well as for his work conserving India’s rainforests - the habitat of so many endangered species.

Interestingly, the idea of the park was conceived to rehabilitate the Irula tribe, who are known for their expertise in catching snakes. Well, the tribals of the Irula tribe went jobless after the government had announced a ban on snake trading.

It was Whitaker who helped the Irula tribe to get involved in extracting snake venom used for the production of antivenom drugs.

"A person sitting next to you has a story that you don’t know anything about" ❤️

Shreekumar Varma

Author, Blogger, Critic, Columnist, playwright, poet

On Song @ The 13th Edition of the TG Narayanan Endowment Lecture

Today | 5th December 2024 | CMS Auditorium

Mr. Shreekumar Varma releasing Cornucopia

An eminent MCC-ian of the 70s, Shreekumar Varma, [who had his schooling in MCC School, Chetpet, and later went on to do his BA, MA and MPhil in English at Madras Christian College, and also taught in the Dept of English for one year] – was the speaker for the 13th Edition of the TG Narayanan Endowment Lecture today.

He spoke on the topic, ‘Writing to Live: Stories within Stories’.

Here goes –

Dr. Manohar Samuel, my classmate in BA and MA, Dr. Franklin, the gracious young man then, who remains gracious even today, Dr. Ganesh, Mr. Keshav, an active Alumni member, the grandguru – Prof. Cherian Kurian, my MA English classmate - Mr. Kantharaj Jude Sekar, IFS, Director General of Forests, New Delhi, (Retd), my BA Classmate – Anand Ponniah, who was responsible for ‘driving’ me here today and to all my good friends... and I have a special word of appreciation for the excellent rendition of the State Anthem of Tamil Nadu - thamizh thaai vazhthu by the Dept Choir. 

I first stepped into this beautiful campus 50 years ago, and I did my PUC, BA, MA, and then  went to Bombay – I was a journalist – I came back did my MPhil for one year, and afterwards I was called back to teach English Literature in the Dept of English.

Two weeks ago, there was a book release – that had a lot of old faces from MCC around me – and there was this girl – who is now a famous film director, who was an assistant to Maniratnam, and who later went on to do her own films, and now she’s done a serial too. She came up to me and said, Sir, you were the one responsible for my interest in creative writing. It’s an amazing thrill that you feel – any teacher feels – when a student comes back and tells you that!

And this is what we do! You take stories from someone else and pass it on to others. This is what we do in class, and this is what a writer does as well.

Beyond the rhetoric and intellectual and critical discourse, there is the very core of our literary pursuit that we often tend to forget: The story. 

Not the story in the book, but the stories of the world and the stories of you and me – without which the story in the book would be orphaned.

Mr. Shreekumar Varma on Song...

There are two ways of writing –

Doing the done thing all over again. You follow the masters – whether it’s literature, or architecture, or mathematics or public administration. In the case of literature, if you are a writer, you study the great writers, the thinkers, the classical masters the modern writers, and then you write a beautiful poem, novel, play or essay that will fit the same mould, flow in the same waters, and be true to what you were taught.

Then there is the second way – the yet to be done thing that you create.

You read the masters, you research a field, you look around and see the people, the neighbourhood, and finally, you look within yourself to find the story that needs to be written by you.

In the second case, you know your art. But when you begin your creation you do according to your experience, your mind, your heart, or rules. It may have been done before, but the world sees a difference in it – a creativity, a freshness, a new quality that can be named after you!

I’ll give you an example. I will show you two pictures – both are self portraits by Picasso the Artist. The first one was painted by him – his self-portrait when he was 15 years old, in the year 1896. He must have studied the masters, and wanted to paint a lot when he was young.

Then he grew and he grew and he grew. Out came cubism. The masterstroke of Pablo Picasso. And then when he was 90 years old, he painted his last self-portrait.

The first and the last...

Now just imagine if he had painted this self-portrait the first time. Would he have got this recognition. They’d have called it nonsense.

He studied the masters, had his creativity, went into the route which no one else had taken, led these people through that path and showed them what he’s capable of. And cubism is a recognised, big part of the art scene today.

That’s because you have to learn to be simple. You have to learn everything else to be able to know yourself. Your art grows within you, watered by the stories around you, and the stories that came before you.

Many of you must have been familiar with Arunagirinathar - a Tamil saint and poet who lived in the 15th century and is known for his devotional hymns to Lord Murugan.

There are a couple of stories about his life – one miraculous and the other, more matter of fact.

In the film version, Lord Murugan appears before him, and Arunagirinathar (played by TMS) asks him, what should I do to attain you, my Lord?

Lord Murugan simply replies, Chumma iru. (do Nothing). It means, be still.

That doesn’t actually mean do nothing. It means, you have to look at the world, study everything, you have to go through that process. You cant simply paint your last portrait and say, this is me!

You have to go through all that. Only then your path will be recognised.

So that I think, being still, is the primary way to what’s lying inside you. There’s so much within you.

Each of us – sitting here – looking and admiring other people’s works, movies, reading books, new discoveries, you have so much to offer, if only you look within yourself and see the stories around you.

In an art school for example, the students are taken on little excursions and told to paint what they see! - the trees, the skies, the birds, the flowers, the animals, etc.

They are also taught the techniques of art and the process through which a thought or an idea can be turned into a piece of art.

In the study of literature, that little excursion of discoveries would be about stories.

Along with our own personal stories, our most important stories include those of our families, our friends, our neighbours and our colleagues.

Two, three, four decades from now – those college friends, with whom you are sitting today! Just look at them and see, how much of friendship there is now, and how much of friendship was there in the past! will they be sitting with you today like the way my friends are sitting here. Those are the stories. 

A person sitting next to you has a story that you don’t know anything about. Those are the stories you grow up with. And that energises you – while you are learning all these technical things – the intellectual discourses and critical studies, etc.

The more stories we have, the more we can understand other people and the world. The more we understand and welcome, the less we will condemn and reject. And this an important lesson for a writer.

More than any creative writing techniques or templates, this is the important thing – to understand and try to get into the mind of another. In my life, the process began with my years in this college. The train rides, the people I met, my fellow students, my teachers – everyone had a story. I only had to listen. And because I listened, my own story was enriched.

And then I became a journalist in Bombay. Imagine the number of stories I was exposed to.

So many interviews added more and more stories. And in Bombay I also worked in a magazine run by the film industry. So I can go anywhere – any film party, any shooting, go and interview any producer, director, and so during that time I was in close contact with the story tellers, the actors, the musicians.

And I was getting my dose of life in various forms. Most important thing is – life is a changeable thing. It doesn’t stay the same forever. We are constantly evolving and our stories are growing. 

We are a work-in-progress, until the day we die. We are not finished products. That’s one of the most important things for a writer to learn. That’s why you find this self-portrait of Picasso when he was 15 and that one when he was 90. When you can trace the first book of an author and find the progress when you read the last book of his.

Everybody has a story. For example, Charles Dickens earned money to get his father out of prison. At twelve, he worked in a shoe-polish factory, and you know what he wrote. Whatever you experience goes into your creativity.

Ken Kesey, who wrote his novel titled, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962, was janitor in a mental hospital. The novel is also set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, and the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of psychiatry, and a tribute to individualistic principles.

What he experienced went into his creativity.

Perumal Murugan, closer home, born into a family of farmers in Tiruchengodu – his father was a farmer and so he couldn’t earn enough to support his family. So he ran a soda shop in a cinema theatre in Namakkal district. And Murugan became a Professor in Tamil Literature. See the deadly combination of theory and the lived life which is obvious in his writings.

To be continued…

Our Lovely Band of Professors - Past & Present

The lecture was well-attended by all our students, and faculty and students from other city colleges as well.

The Q & A Session was highly engaging with thought-provoking questions donning the post-lecture session.

Student authors including Shreya, Lekhaa, Ganga Santhosh and Gracelin were honoured by Mr. Shreekumar Varma. He also took a photograph with them.

Cornucopia, the exclusive Literary Magazine of the Dept of English, designed by Prof. Christina Dhanasekaran a.k.a. DeeCee was released by Mr. Varma on the occasion.

A host of our past professors and former Heads of Department graced the occasion – including Dr. Mekala Rajan, Dr. Ganesh, Dr. Azhagarasan, Head, Dept of English, University of Madras, and other luminaries. 

Our Vibrant Student Authors with Author Shreekumar Varma

Dr. Franklin Daniel, Head, Department of English, was at his wittiest best, while welcoming the gathering - that had us all in splits – setting forth the tone and the tenor for what’s to follow.

Dr. Rufus while introducing Mr. Shreekumar Varma, was highly appreciative of his friends who’ve been with him right from his school days in the 1960s up until today – seated proudly in the first row to listen to their classmate’s lecture. He then quoted from Mr. Varma’s blog (thinkopotamus.blogspot.com) – On his tryst with writing.

Here goes – (from Mr. Shreekumar Varma’s Blogpost)

Sensitivity and a sense of self does strange things to you sometimes. You are aware that you - this being on two legs, seeing the world through two small pin- holes in your face - are living an entire life, making things happen and impinging on other people’s lives. One day, you’ll close those eyes forever, and life as you know it will end.

My wife says that I get so involved in my writing that I reflect every emotion I write about. She’s wary about my subjects and gets jittery when I write dark events.

Invariably, some of it seeps into real life. My third play, Platform, lay waiting for some months before a director picked it up.

The play was appreciated and drew some brilliant performances. During the cast party at the director’s house one rainy afternoon, the male lead (who’s now gone on to do feature films) took me aside.

He said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for some time. It’s amazing, there’s such a marked resemblance between my life and that of the character you wrote for me. No one knows that part of me, but you’ve been so accurate!”

I patiently explained to him that I hadn’t written the character for him. I hadn’t even known who was going to direct the play, much less who was going to act in it!

After the Lecture - Meeting with our I MA Students

I have now got used to the fact that my writing may precipitate or reflect events without any help from me. I’ve come across people who’ve lived the lives and moments that I’ve described while sitting in the privacy of my room. I think creativity is a link between ourselves and the universe. What awakens in us might have gone to sleep in some part of the universe, or vice-versa, quoted Dr. Rufus, from Mr. Shreekumar Varma’s blogpost.

Overall, the programme was highly rewarding in every way to all of us who had gathered together to listen to our own fellow MCC-ian!

Viva la MCC!

Photos Courtesy: Therese Maria | Painting Courtesy: rarehistoricalphotosdotcom