Ari is also our elder statesman of inclusive development. For over half a century, he and Sarvodaya have advocated a nuanced approach to overcoming poverty, illiteracy and various social exclusions. Unlike some die-hard activists, Ari doesn’t ask us to denounce materialism or revert to pre-industrial lifestyles. Instead, he seeks a world without extreme poverty or extreme affluence.
Suddenly, his quest for social justice and equality is resonating all over the world. In fact, Ari has been speaking out for the 99 per cent of less privileged people decades before a movement by that name emerged in the West. In a sense, those occupying Wall Street and other centres of affluence are all children of Sarvodaya.
While Ari shares their moral outrage, his own strategy has been quite different. He didn’t occupy physical spaces in his struggle; he went straight to the fount of all injustice – our minds.
In this 2,400-word essay, I salute a hero of mine who continues to speak truth to power, and makes a difference to millions of people in his land and elsewhere. For doing this, he has been ridiculed, harassed and vilified by small minds and the state. He continues undaunted, and shows no sign of slowing down after turning 80.
Here’s another excerpt:
“In Ari, we find elements of Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent pursuit of the greater good); the Dalai Lama (interpreting Buddhist philosophy for the modern world); Martin Luther King, Jr. (struggling for the rights and dignity of marginalised people); Nelson Mandela (nurturing democracy and healing society); and Jimmy Carter (globalism with a humanitarian agenda).
“Yet Ari is more than the sum of these noble parts; he is his own unique visionary. And an adroit ‘remixer’ who constantly blends the best of East and West. He adapts our civilisational heritage to tackle the Twenty First Century’s anxieties and uncertainties. Thankfully, though, he doesn’t peddle simplistic solutions to today’s complex problems.”
I also recall my first encounter with Ari, in early 1991, when a tyrant leader of Sri Lanka had virtually declared ‘war’ on this unarmed, non-violent small man. I have interviewed him several times since then – the most recent was in March 2011, when I accompanied my journalist friend Aditya Batra from India to talk to Ari (photo, below).
This is the Sinhala text of my Ravaya column published on 13 Nov 2011, where I continue my discussion on the future of newspapers. I look at the last newspaper boom currently on in Asia, and caution that good times won’t last for long: take advantage of it to prepare for the coming (and assured) turbulence in the mainstream media!
J Seward Johnson's statue of Newspaper Reader - at Princeton University garden
Christina Scott: A funny story always got funnier when she related it...
I was travelling in the Himalayan Republic of Nepal when I heard the sad news: Christina Scott, a pioneering science journalist from South Africa, has just been killed in a road accident. She would have turned 50 on November 20.
Christina’s tragic and abrupt departure elicited an outpouring of grief, memories and tributes from science journalists, scientists and others who knew and admired her. I’m late to join that, I know, but here’s the slightly expanded version of what I just posted on SciDev.Net as a reader comment:
“Short, stroppy reporter with a funny accent. Likes to eat sushi. No head for alcohol and caffeine addiction.” That’s how Canadian-born Christina chose to introduce herself. Everyone has an anecdote about her, reminding us of the colourful and highly talented person she was.
Christina was passionate, articulate and had a clear vision of how science, technology and innovation could make a difference to millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She made science fun. She was also great fun to work with.
Christina and I didn’t meet that often, separated as we are by time zones and the Indian Ocean. But our few encounters — usually at professional gatherings of science journalists — left a deep impression.
We first met at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne in April 2007, where we were both speakers.
She and I were part of a memorable plenary session on ‘Reporting Science in Emerging Economies’ that was put together by SciDev.Net and produced by Julie Clayton. It had science journalists or editors from Brazil, China, India, Sri Lanka and Zambia.
It was Christina who came up with a novel idea to dim the meeting hall lights just as we started. In the semi-darkness, she lit a single cigarette lighter to symbolise how science journalists in the developing world struggled daily with power outages, poor literacy, unsympathetic editors and uncaring governments.
Earlier in that conference, Christina compared some of her professional tribe to extremophile bacteria: hardy enough to survive in very harsh environments. The broad conclusion from our session was that, just as life finds a way against many odds, so does science journalism. In conditions far from ideal, science journalism happens — and even thrives — thanks to the resilience, resourcefulness and commitment of its practitioners.
Christina Scott (left) making a point. Photo courtesy WFSJ
Christina excelled in communicating science through print, web and broadcast media. She switched easily between written and spoken words, and could hold an audience in any medium. Such multimedia journalists are rare.
But she didn’t allow the technology ‘tail’ to wag the journalism ‘dog’. In 2007, she was still wondering if Internet, computes and online communications could make much headway in reaching out a majority of South Africans. It wasn’t a lack of connectivity and computers any longer, but a more basic absence of electricity in many remote areas.
To her, old fashioned radio was still the most cost-effective way to reach more people quickly. That was also her favourite medium, one in which she did some of most memorable coverage.
Christina had a fine sense of theatrical performance to engage a live audience. She knew just how to shook and hook them. She had no time or patience for political correctness or euphemisms; she just spoke truth to power.
I learnt much by being in her audience, or sharing a platform with her. It was exhilarating to see how she engaged audiences full of jaded and sceptical journalists.
Once, during a panel discussing HIV/AIDS, she asked her audience how many were aged over 50 years. A few hands went up. “In South African terms, chances are you’re already dead,” she declared.
She didn’t have comforting words for those below 35 either: “You’re probably infected with HIV, and don’t know it yet — and go around giving it to others!”
That’s how she summed up the stark realities of South Africa, which has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. She then personalized, with a wish was that her daughter, then 15, would get through college without contracting HIV.
Christina Scott was a supernova who shone bright and fiery. Her trail would continue to blaze for a long time. But we won’t hear that spirited voice, in that funny accent, always ready to tell an interesting story.
This is the Sinhala text of my weekend column in Ravaya, published on 6 Nov 2011. To mark the newspapers’s 25th anniversary that falls this month, I begin some reflections on the future of newspapers. In this first piece, I discuss how science fiction and thriller writer Michael Crichton (1942-2008) once foresaw the fate of what he called ‘Mediasaurus’.
Now playing on a planet dear to you: 7 Billion People...and counting
When I was born in the mid 1960s, the world’s combined human population was around three and a half billion (having passed the 3 billion mark in 1960). In my life time of 45 years, this number has doubled.
We can never pinpoint it exactly, but the world’s demographers have agreed to count 31 October 2011 as the Day of Seven Billion. Sometime today, our human numbers will add up to 7 billion…and keep rising.
That’s 7,000,000,000 living and breathing people — all of who will need to be fed, clothed, sheltered and cared for in many other ways. And they will have higher aspirations in the 21st Century than ever before in history.
If I was too young to remember the day of 4 billion, which was sometime in 1974, I can well remember the last two billion marks.
In 1987 — the year I entered journalism — human numbers passed five billion. A dozen years later, in 1999, the six billion was reached. By then, I too had added my contribution of one co-produced human being (and stopped there).
Of course, it’s not just a numbers game. It’s far more complex, nuanced and dynamic than simply counting people. And as Einstein so wisely remarked, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”
During this year, National Geographic magazine is publishing a 7-part series examining specific challenges and solutions to the issues we face. The magazine introduces the series with its January cover story “7 Billion,” offering a broad overview of demographic trends that got us to today and will impact us all tomorrow. The first in-depth story will appear in the March issue, focusing on humans’ impact on the planet’s geology. Other stories will follow throughout 2011.
As I first highlighted in January blog post, this video accompanies the in-depth coverage:
Correction added by NatGeo editors: in 2050, 70% of the population will be living in “urban areas,” not “megacities” as stated in an earlier version of this video.
The Face of 7 Billion is another interactive feature on NGS website. Zoom in on this graphic in which the world’s 7 billion population is depicted by 7,000 human figures, each representing a million people.
I don’t like the word population: it sounds cold, clinical and detached. Zoologists can talk about ant populations or elephant populations, but when demographers (and others, including journalists) refer to our the counting of species as human population, I somehow feel it’s too impersonal. Aren’t we more than mere numbers? So in my own writing and TV scripts, I use the phrase ‘human numbers’.
Can you visualise 7 billion?Semantics apart, our rising numbers are indeed a cause for concern. We didn’t quite see the ‘population bomb’ go off the way we were warned about – thank the secular Force – but we still face formidable challenges.
Our planet’s natural systems are over-stretched not only by our sheer numbers, but also by our technologies and consumption. The many signs of planetary stress include accelerated loss of species, fast spreading deserts, and declining air and water quality. To cap it all, scientists now confirm that human activity is changing our climate.
On the New York Times Dot Earth blog, science writer Andrew C. Revkin regularly examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.
In this column, which appears in Ravaya newspaper on 30 October 2011, I pay tribute to the late film and TV professional Titus Thotawatte. I recall how he founded and headed the effort to ‘localise’ foreign-produced programmes during the formative years of Sri Lanka’s national TV, Rupavahini, launched in 1982. In particular, I describe how Titus resisted attempts by intellectuals and civil servants to turn the new medium into a dull and dreary lecture room, and insisted on retaining quality entertainment as national TV’s core value.
Dumbo at 70: Have large ears, will fly -- forever!
It’s hard to believe, but good old Dumbo is 70 this week!
The adorable baby elephant (whose real name is Jumbo, Jr.) has been flapping his extra-large ears and flying into our hearts for seven full decades. Read more at IMDB
Released theatrically on 23 October 1941, Dumbo was Walt Disney’s fourth animated film. And at just 64 minutes, the movie was also the shortest and least expensive produced by the Studio.
Dumbo is the only Disney animated feature film that has a title character who doesn’t speak — he really is a creature of few words, or none!
Dumbo not only turned a profit, but charmed critics as well. The movie won the 1941 Academy Award® for Original Musical Score, was nominated for another the Academy Award for Best Song for “Baby Mine”, and took the Best Animation Design award at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.
Since its release, Dumbo has stolen the hearts of generation after generation, and can today be found on countless consumer products and the ever-popular Dumbo the Flying Elephant attraction at Disney parks around the world. And in celebration of the beloved classic’s 70th anniversary, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment has released Dumbo for the first time on Blu-ray.
Here’s the most famous song from Dumbo, Baby Mine, which Dumbo’s mommy sings to him. This is one of the all time favourite Disney movie moments that has made millions cry for 70 years. It is sung by actor and singer Elizabeth “Betty” Noyes.
This is my latest Sinhala column published in Ravaya newspaper on 23 October 2011, which is about human-elephant interactions in Sri Lanka, which has the highest density of Asian elephants in the world. I have covered much of the same ground in English in another recent essay, Chandani: Riding a Jumbo Where No Woman Has Gone Before…
Titus Thotawatte: The Magician
Emmanuel Titus de Silva, who was better known as Titus Thotawatte, was the finest editor in the six decades of the Lankan cinema. He was also a great assimilator and remixer – a ‘builder of bridges’ across cultures, media genres and generations.
Titus straddled the distinctive spheres of cinema and television with a technical dexterity and creativity rarely seen in either one. Both spheres involve playing with sound and pictures, but at different levels of scale, texture and ambition. Having excelled in the craft of making movies in the 1960s and 1970s, Titus successfully switched to television in the 1980s and 1990s. There, he again blaze his own innovative trail in Sri Lanka’s nascent television industry. As a result, my generation remembers him for his television legacy whereas my patents’ generation recall more of his cinematic accomplishments.
Titus left an indelible mark in the history of moving images. The unifying thread that continued from 16mm and 35mm formats in the cine world to U-matic and Betacam of the TV world was his formidable genius for story telling.
Titus de Silva, as he was then known, was a member of the ‘three musketeers’ who left the Government Film Unit (GFU) in the mid 1950s to take their chances in making their own films. The other two were director Lester James Peries and cinematographer Willie Blake. Lester recalls Titus as “an extraordinarily talented but refreshingly undisciplined character” who had been shunned from department to department at GFU “as he was by nature a somewhat disruptive force”!
The trio would go on to make Rekava (Line of Destiny, 1956) – and make history. In his biography by A J Gunawardana, Lester recalls how they were full of self-confidence, “cocky as hell” and determined to overcome the artificiality of studio sets. “We were revolutionaries, shooting our enemies with the camera, and set on changing the course of Sinhala film. In our ignorance, we were blissfully unaware of the hazards ahead – seemingly insurmountable problems we had to face, problems that no book on film-making can ever tell you about!”
In the star-obsessed world of cinema, the technical craftsmen who do the real magic behind the cameras rarely get the credit or recognition they deserve. Editors, in particular, must perform a very difficult balancing task – between the director, with his own vision of how a story should be told, and the audience that fully expects to be lulled into suspending their disbelief. Good editors distinguish themselves as much for what they include (and how) as for what they leave on the ‘cutting room floor’.
The tango between Lester and Titus worked well, both in the documentaries they made while at GFU, and the two feature films they did afterward: Rekava was followed by Sandeshaya (The Message, 1960).
They also became close friends. At his own expense, Titus also accompanied Lester to London where they re-edited and sub-titled Rekava (into French) for screening at the Cannes festival of 1957. As Lester recalls, “Titus was a great source of moral and technical strength to me; his presence was invaluable during sub-titling of the film”.
Titus Thotawatte - photo courtesy biography by Nuwan Nayanajith Kumara
In all, Titus edited a total of 25 Lankan feature films, nine of which he also directed. The cinematic trail that started with Rekava in 1956 continued till Handaya in 1979. While most were in black and white, typical of the era, Titus also edited the first full length colour feature film made in Sri Lanka: Ran Muthu Duwa (1962).
His dexterity and versatility in editing and making films were such that his creations are incomparable among themselves. In the popular consciousness, perhaps, Titus will be remembered the most for his last feature film Handaya – which he both directed and edited. Ostensibly labelled as a children’s film, it reached out and touched the child in all of us (from 8 to 80, as the film’s promotional line said). It was an upbeat story of a group of children and a pony – powerful visual metaphors for the human spirit triumphing in a harsh urban reality that has been exacerbated in the three decades since the film’s creation.
Handaya swept the local film awards at the Saravaviya, OCIC and Presidential film awards for 1979/1980. It also won the Grand Prix at the International Children and Youth Film Festival in Giffoni, Italy, in 1980. That a black and white, low-budget film outcompeted colour films from around the world was impressive enough, but the festival jury watched the film without any English subtitles was testimony to Titus’s ability to create cine-magic that transcended language.
Despite the accolades from near and far, a sequel to Handaya was scripted but never made: the award-winning director just couldn’t raise the money! This and other might-have-beens are revealed in the insightful Thotawatte biography written by journalist Nuwan Nayanajith Kumara. Had he been born in a country with a more advanced film industry with greater access to capital, the biographer speculates, Titus could have been another Steven Spielberg or Walt Disney.
Titus Thotawatte was indeed the closest we had to a Disney. As the pioneer in language versioning at Rupavahini from its early days in 1982, he not only voice dubbed some of the world’s most popular cartoons and classical dramas, but localised them so cleverly that some stories felt better than the originals! Working long hours with basic facilities but abundant talent, Titus once again sprinkled his ‘pixie dust’ in the formative years of national television.
In May 2002, when veteran broadcaster (and good friend) H M Gunasekera passed away, I called him the personification of the famous cartoon character Tintin. I never associated Titus personally, but having grown up in the indigenised cartoon universe that he created on our television, I feel as if I have known him for long. Therefore, Therefore, I hope Titus won’t mind my looking for a cartoon analogy for himself.
I don’t have to look very far. According to his loyal colleagues (and his biographer), Titus was a good-hearted and jovial man with a quick temper and scathing vocabulary. It wasn’t easy working with him. That sounds a bit like the inimitable Captain Haddock, the retired merchant sailor who was Tintin’s most dependable human companion. Haddock had a unique collection of expletives and insults, providing some counterbalance to the exceedingly polite Tintin. Yet beneath the veneer of gruffness, Haddock was a kind and generous man. It was their complementarity that livened up the globally popular stories, now a Hollywood movie by Steven Spielberg awaiting December release.
Perhaps that’s too simplistic an analogy for Titus. From all accounts, he was a brilliantly creative and multi-layered personality who embodied parts of Dr Dolittle (Dosthara Honda Hitha), Top Cat (Pissu Poosa), Bugs Bunny (Haa Haa Hari Haawa) and a myriad other characters that he rendered so well into Sinhala that some of my peers in Sri Lanka’s first television generation had no idea of their ‘foreign’ origins…
Titus was also a true ‘Gulliver’ whose restlessly imaginative mind traversed space and time — even after he was confined to one place during the last dozen years of his life.
Years ago, I resolved not to watch any more documentaries about elephants – I have sat through far more than my fair share of them at film festivals across Asia and Europe. I have nothing against elephants; it’s just that most films about them are so predictably formulaic. Sooner or later, they all suggest: we greedy humans have robbed these giants of their jungles, and are now driving them to extinction.
While that is undeniable, the ground reality is a bit more nuanced. But few filmmakers or film commissioners want to go there. In any case, even the most balanced conservation film would still be trapped in an anthropocentric view of the human-elephant relationship: how differently might an elephant tell the same story?
Given these misgivings, I was pleasantly surprised by Arne Birkenstock’s new film, Chandani: The Daughter of the Elephant Whisperer (88 mins, 2010). He proves that it is always possible to find a refreshingly new way of telling a very old story.
The German film, shot entirely on location in Sri Lanka, centres around a young girl who loves elephants so much that she wants to spend the rest of her life tending to them. Sixteen-year-old Chandani Renuka Ratnayake is the eldest daughter Sumanabanda, the chief mahout at the elephant orphanage in Pinnawela. They hail from a family that has tamed and looked after elephants for generations. Lacking a son, he agrees to let Chandani train as a mahout.
There is only one small problem: Chandani is going where no Lankan woman has gone before. Other mahouts and the community doubt whether the eager young lass can rise to the many challenges involved in this hitherto male-only profession.
Sumanabanda brings home an elephant calf named Kandula, and assigns it to Chandani. Under the watchful eye of her father, Chandani does all the feeding, bathing and other chores. She has to divide her time between school and her boisterous charge. Soon, the two young ones bond with each other.
She also receives guidance from a wildlife ranger named Mohammed Raheem. He takes her to the Udawalawe National Park, an important habitat for wild elephants. There, she gets glimpses of the daily skirmish between wild elephants and humans for the land claimed by both species.
Exploring the relationship between children and elephants is a recurrent theme for filmmakers across cultures and genres. An early example was Elephant Boy (1937), a British adventure film directed by documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty and Zoltan Korda, based on Rudyard Kipling’s “Toomai, of the Elephants”. A few years ago I watched the Japanese film Hoshi ni natta shonen — with a goofy English name, Shining Boy and Little Randy — directed by Shunsaku Kawake in 2005. It was the bittersweet story of a young boy who goes to Thailand to become Japan’s first elephant trainer.
The child character is usually male, possibly influenced by Mowgli of Jungle Book fame. But here, Chandani is playing herself: she has grown up watching the complexities of ex-situ conservation of the largest land mammal.
The elephant orphanage, set up on a 10-hectare coconut estate in 1975 to look after young elephants whose mothers have been killed — often in violent confrontations with villagers — is now home to nearly a hundred elephants. A captive breeding programme, introduced in 1982, has resulted in several live births.
Pinnawela continues a long tradition — going back to over 3,000 years — where elephants are captured, tamed and trained in Sri Lanka. Jayantha Jayewardene, an expert on Asian elephants, says the elephant, although tamed and trained, is not quite a domesticated animal in the same sense that dogs are.
As he explains in his book, The Elephant in Sri Lanka: “It (the elephant) is an immensely powerful animal whose strength and wild nature calls for caution in handling it, especially during capture and the initial training stages. Later on, using less than a dozen words of command, the handler, called a mahout, is able to exercise control over this powerful animal. In most instances, the elephant and mahout develop a strong and lasting bond.”
After months of training, Chandani faces her moment of truth. She has to accompany Kandula in the local perahera, the procession that tours the streets with decoratively dressed elephants as star attractions. Peraheras are noisy, crowded and sometimes chaotic affairs: participating elephants and mahouts need focus and coordination.
The young girl and elephant prove their mettle. If Chandani’s family and peers are impressed by that public performance, the indifferent state is not. Sumanabanda is belatedly informed that he is not legally allowed to raise an elephant at home (even if he paid ‘good money’ for the creature). Eventually, he and his daughter agree that it is best for Kandula to return to the jungle. Their emotional attachment is strong by now, making separation painful. As Chandani watches Kandula being taken away, she reflects on her chosen future…
Relaxed Drama
The film is labeled as a documentary, but there is considerable movement, tension and other emotions that lend it a dramatic quality. Evidently, many sequences have been scripted. We don’t know how much time and effort that entailed. It probably helped that Chandani and Sumanabanda seem ease-going people. The director has managed to get even the (usually stiff) government officials to relax for the camera.
By staying tightly focused on his characters, Birkenstock avoids a common pitfall in many elephant films that either eulogise pachyderms or editorialise too heavily about their predicament. He blends striking images with an evocative soundtrack to tell a compelling story that is informed by real world issues — but not deep immersed in them.
This mix is welcome indeed. In 2000, when I served on the global jury of Wildscreen, the world’s leading wildlife and natural history film festival in Bristol, UK, we told filmmakers that simply documenting animal and plant behaviour and their habitats was no longer adequate in a world facing a multitude of environmental crises. There was an urgent need, our jury statement said, for films that explored the nexus between the natural environment and human society — both the conflict and harmony between the two.
Chandani and Kandula the elephant
Forming the backdrop to Chandani are the tough choices confronting biodiversity conservation in Sri Lanka. The wildlife ranger Mohammed, in particular, brings in both specialised knowledge and official perspective — mercifully without any activist shrill. Hard core environmentalists might not find this film ‘green enough’. For mass audiences worldwide, however, it conveys a very important message: how some ordinary Lankans are doing their bit for inter-species harmony against many odds.
That is no small accomplishment on our crowded island which has the world’s highest density of wild Asian Elephants. The first-ever nationwide elephant census in August 2011 produced a total of 7,379 jumbos across the island: 5,879 of them were spotted near parks and sanctuaries, while another 1,500 were estimated to be living in other areas. Some environmentalists were unhappy with the methodology and questioned its results. But even imperfect data can inspire more systematic conservation measures.
Sooner or later, we have to answer the hard question: how many wild elephants can the island’s remaining forests realistically sustain? This has already sparked off heated arguments. In the long-term, the survival of the Lankan Elephant might be assured only though captive breeding.
Meanwhile, every year, a few dozen elephants and humans perish in increasingly violent encounters over land and food. As we search for lasting solutions, we need more Chandanis, Mohammeds and Sumanabandas to show us the way.
Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene is far more interested in wild-life in urban jungles than wildlife in natural ones.
Open Minds! 