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A dodgy blurring of lines

Arts, Culture & Entertainment
Light and bright(clockwise from far left) The amphitheatre, a Ravana made by children, the library and artifacts.Ashok Nath Dey & Vaishna Roy

Kolkata Centre for Creativity is a fabulous endeavour but it needs to curate its art more rigorously

For an enthusiast, walking on to the fifth floor of the 70,000 sq. ft. Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) is like stepping into art heaven. Clear glass skylight and walls pour warm November sunlight into a gleaming white quadrangle that’s dominated by an enormous bamboo-and-pith Ravana made by students the day before. On the sides are racks and racks of art books and material samples (like gold dust or polymer clay) of every conceivable kind.

At the far end are printers: a 3D printer that’s churning out an elephant in some kind of plastic, a large format digital printer, a laser cutter that’s etching out signages. All these resources will soon be available at a membership cost, say the organisers.

Glass, sunlight, space, white, and wood combine to make a wonderfully light and bright structure, one that glows and breathes, and is eminently suited to bring to life KCC’s aim — that of becoming an interactive, state-of-the-art, multi-disciplinary art centre. There’s a dance studio, auditorium, children’s art centre, conservation room and amphitheatre.

The ground floor has been set aside as 10,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the first floor showcases high-end artifacts and replicas sourced from around the world, while the second floor markets customised handicrafts (in a collaboration with designer Rajeev Sethi). In a nod to culinary art, a cafeteria specialises in signature vegetarian cuisine.

Two things are immediately clear: first that a lot of money and care has gone into the project, and second that Kolkata, and indeed every Indian city, urgently needs spaces like these. For this, the Kolkata-based Emami Group is to be congratulated.

Not so passé

What is less clear though is whether KCC itself understands what it wants to be. At the press conference held last week to inaugurate the centre — in its fabulous amphitheatre — words like museum, art centre, showroom, commerce, culture, spirituality were all thrown out easily and interchangeably, but the image that came through was that of KCC as high-end art and design shop. In coming days, it will become important for the centre to establish a distinct identity and stay true to it.

This is usually the task of the creative director and for KCC, that role is being played by Mumbai-based designer Pinakin Patel. At the press conference, Patel suggested that museums, and indeed art itself, has become passé. Statistics suggest otherwise: The Met saw 7 million visitors in 2017, while the Louvre saw 8 million, and the numbers are growing. The difference lies in how excitingly they curate and display their collections, unlike our own dusty, state-run storehouses.

Indeed, there are several exceptions to this now, both public and private, such as Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji, Delhi’s Kiran Nadar museum or Ahmedabad’s Calico Museum, which prove how well art can thrive, given funding, goodwill and discernment.

KCC’s gallery, Emami Art, was inaugurated with an exhibition of India’s early modernist and Renaissance man Dashrath Patel (1927-2010). Titled ‘School, A Retrospective’, there were around 92 pieces on show — his early oils, photographs and line drawings as well as some of the fabulous dinnerware he had designed as founder-secretary of Ahmedabad’s National Institute of Design. But disturbingly, the show also showcased pieces for sale made by the Dashrath Patel Studio in Alibaug, with no labelling to distinguish originals from reproductions.

Upon enquiry, an email stated that the gilded ceramic plates were produced in a kiln belonging to Dashrath’s friend, and the tapestries woven by artist Jayshree Poddar to Dashrath’s designs. But with dates, collaboration details and attributions missing across the show, it was impossible to tell if they were produced during the artist’s lifetime or are later reproductions. It was from the email that one discovered that the paper-on-plywood collages were sets of multiple replicas.

A wall panel said that works were “available for sale with an authenticity certificate from the Dashrath Patel Foundation,” but with no catalogued and printed records of the originals the artist left behind or the reproductions he sanctioned, there is a blurring of boundaries here.

Call for curation

These are early days, and KCC is, perhaps, still finding its feet. Which is why it was imperative that it find first-rate curators for its art shows at least. For example, names such as Nancy Adajania and Shanay Jhaveri come to mind for a Dashrath retrospective. Some will also remember the major retrospective of his work in 1998 at NGMA, Delhi, curated by Sadanand Menon.

Of course, Pinakin Patel was a friend of the artist and inherited the Dashrath Patel Museum in Alibaug, but that legacy comes also with a tremendous responsibility. And regardless of glib rationalising about removing boundaries between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, it’s impossible to overlook the devaluation of an artist of Dashrath’s calibre which is the danger of a loose show like this.

Richa Agarwal, art collector, daughter-in-law of the Emami family, and CEO of Emami Art, said that besides the Rs. 70 crore spent on the complex, an unspecified corpus fund has also been set aside. This is excellent news for a fund-strapped art world; and part of an ongoing movement where corporate houses are entering the art museum space.

KCC is an ambitious project, and for fruition it has to go beyond showroom into committed, serious art shows, archiving, cataloguing, lectures, workshops and more, with at least some of the latter heavily subsidised.

The finest such centres achieve either basic financial viability or use philanthropy to prioritise edification over commerce. This could be fairly straightforward, but KCC muddies the waters somewhat by endlessly harping on art’s ‘spirituality’ and ‘soft power’ even as Pinakin’s concern is clear when he says that KCC must become “self-sufficient” and not “go begging” to the promoters.

One phrase repeatedly heard during the launch was the “playful blurring of boundaries between art and commerce”. One has nothing against commerce, it’s the playful blurring that is worrisome.

(The writer was in Kolkata at the invitation of Kolkata Centre for Creativity.)

A wonderful structure, that glows and breathes, and is eminently suited to bring to life KCC’s aim

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> Sunday Magazine / by Vaishna Roy / December 02nd, 2018

The basti that has given golf 200 caddies

Business & Economy, Sports

Madar Tala Colony in south Calcutta’s Tollygunge area is locally known as “Caddiebasti”

Caddies Sheikh Halim, Raju Sardar, Sundar Kanti and Sharif Ali have fixed clients at the two golf clubs in Calcutta /
Manasi Shah

adar Tala Colony in south Calcutta’s Tollygunge area is not very far from the two biggest golf clubs of the city — Royal Calcutta Golf Club (RCGC) and Tollygunge Club. Within it is a basti or slum like any other. Vegetable vendor on one side, meat shop on the other, a pedlar on a cycle van selling rat poison, a tyre repair shop, row upon row of cellular houses, sagging clothes lines heavy with laundry.

Locally, this settlement is known as “Caddiebasti”. Caddie, as in the person who lugs a player’s bag and clubs during a game of golf, for a fee. “Two hundred caddies live here with their families,” says Mohammed Rajesh. He is 40-plus, started out in his pre-teens as a ball boy. His father was a caddie too and his grandfather as well.

It is 9am and he has just returned after caddying for his regular clients since 5 in the morning. Now he is sitting at the doorstep of his one-room residence. His smartphone is playing a Hindi film song from the 90s.

Rajesh says a caddie has “fixed” clients who pay him on a monthly basis. Temporary clients pay them according to club rules. The rates depend on expertise, though all training is largely informal, picked up from watching a father or an elder brother.

Rajesh talks about how RCGC organised classes for him and his colleagues last year. “It was about the rules of the game and etiquette. Then we had to take an exam, for which we were marked and, thereafter, assigned categories. Some of us were in category A and others in category B,” says Rajesh. “I am in A,” he adds after a moment’s hesitation and just then a pressure cooker at a neighbour’s goes off loudly, as if whistling in appreciation.

Sundar Kanti, 34, has recently been promoted to category A, but he has lost some clients — not everyone wants to pay extra bucks. But the caddies appear to be a united bunch. “If you pay less, no one will caddie for you,” Sundar threatens some invisible bad client, his tone near rebellious.

Pappu, reed thin, in his twenties — he refuses to share his last name — looks younger than Rajesh and Sundar. And though it is difficult to imagine him shouldering a burden of almost 12 kilos on his frail shoulders every day for many hours at a stretch, fact is he has been caddying for the last eight years. He has seven fixed clients, he boasts.

Sandip Dey, a caddie at RCGC loves to play a shot or two of golf /
Manasi Shah

Fifty-year-old Sandip Dey seems to be sulking — whether that is his general demeanor or he is just tired, we cannot say. “A caddie has to fetch water for the saheb, clean the ball, hand him the club, hunt for the ball and fetch it,” he rattles off dispassionately.

The luxuriant golf course of RCGC is filled with cotton shrubs. There are cotton stubs, which can easily be mistaken for tiny golf balls. Sandip says, he is in this profession because he loves to play a shot or two. “Some clients let me,” he says, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Part of our job is also to humour clients,” interjects Goutam Hazra, 32. “It is a time-consuming sport and morales tend to wane,” he adds.

What about women caddies? Sheikh Halim, Raju Sardar and Sharif Ali, caddies all, break into a smirk as if it is a great joke. “There are no female caddies in India. But if you go to Thailand, America, you will find them,” 28-year-old Raju manages, in between giggles.

It is afternoon by now. The men of Caddiebasti are returning from “duty” in droves. They are dressed in tees, bermudas, some of them still have their caps on — all markers of the elite workspace they are part of and yet not quite part of. Some like Pappu will stray time and again — he says he tried his hand at various odd jobs — only to succumb to the lure of walking the green stretch.

Rajesh’s T-shirt reads “the Takeoff”. But his chatter and possibly dreams too don’t soar beyond golf. So what if his 12-year-old son is immune to golf’s magic? “You would have heard of Shiv Shankar Prasad Chawrasia,” he asks reverentially. Chawrasia is an Indian professional golfer; since 2008 he has won six Asian Tour events. Rajesh points eastwards and says, “He used to live there [in Bikramgarh] before he became so famous. His father was the greenskeeper at our club. And before he started to play, he was one of us, he used to work as a caddie.”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online Edition / Home> People / Manasi Shah – November 25th, 2018

The woman who could have won a Nobel

Science & Technology, World Opinion

Despite being a pioneer in the study of cosmic rays in India, Bibha Chowdhuri remains practically unknown.

Gifted physicist Bibha Chowdhuri /
Illustration by Suman Choudhury

Judging by her publications in journals such as Nature and Proceedings of the Physical Society of London, and her doctoral research work at the laboratory of renowned physicist P.M.S. Blackett in the UK, Bibha Chowdhuri was a gifted physicist. No wonder she was one of the young scientists — the first woman researcher — selected by Homi J. Bhabha to join the newly established Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, in 1949. Chowdhuri (1913-1991) served in renowned institutions of the country and was a tireless researcher till she died, unsung and unheralded, in Calcutta. No national award or fellowship of any major scientific society came her way. She does not figure among the 98 scientists of uneven quality in the 2008 book Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India, edited by Rohini Godbole and Ram Ramaswamy and published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of two physicists, a book has been published from Germany that throws light on the life and work of this remarkable scientist who happened to be a woman. Rajinder Singh, a noted science historian at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and Suprakash C. Roy, former professor of Physics at the Bose Institute in Calcutta seek to unravel the “story of courage and determination of a lady born more than a hundred years ago …for our younger generations to emulate.”

While her research contributions are well recorded and have been critically examined by the authors, not much material could be unearthed on her life. Chowdhuri was wedded to physics and led a quiet, modest and dignified life largely within the confines of her laboratory. A quintessential researcher who never aspired for high office, she hailed from an educated zamindar family in the Hooghly district of undivided Bengal and her mother was related through marriage to the family of Sir J.C. Bose. Chowdhuri was one of six siblings — five sisters and a brother. All of them were well-educated, thanks to their Brahmo lineage, and none of them married.

Chowdhuri obtained her MSc in Physics from Calcutta University in 1936 — the only woman in that batch — and plunged headlong into research, mostly at the Bose Institute. Debendra Mohan (DM) Bose [nephew of Sir J.C. Bose] and Chowdhuri published three consecutive papers in Nature, but could not continue further investigation on account of “non-availability of more sensitive emulsion plates during the war years. Seven years after this discovery of mesons by DM Bose and Bibha Chowdhuri, C.F. Powell made the same discovery of pions and muons and further decay of muons to electrons… using the same technique” and won the Nobel Prize in 1950. Powell acknowledged Bose and Chowdhuri’s pioneering contribution in his work.

In 1945, Chowdhuri joined “the cosmic ray laboratory of would-be Nobel Laureate P.M.S. Blackett (he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948) at a time when studies on extensive air showers in cosmic rays were one of the most important investigations in particle physics” for her PhD.

On her return, she joined TIFR. After eight years, she joined the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) at Ahmedabad. She was involved deeply with the Kolar Gold Mine experiment and discussed with Vikram Sarabhai, then director of PRL, about her future research plans. Unfortunately, after Sarabhai’s untimely death, she was not permitted to take up the planned work. It is unfortunate that at two critical junctures, once at the Bose Institute and later in PRL, she had to abandon the work she intended to pursue. She finally opted for voluntary retirement, moved to Calcutta to pursue her work on high energy Physics, continued as an active researcher with the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science and kept publishing her findings till almost the time of her death.

While Chowdhuri’s research in the fields of high energy and cosmic ray physics has been extensively reviewed and rated as “superb” by the authors, her life, devoid of any major recognition, raises many important questions, especially in the context of barriers women face even today, while pursuing science.

Just like C.V. Raman was reluctant to admit the first woman researcher to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, DM Bose too was initially not enthusiastic but eventually accepted Chowdhuri as a research student. The situation was not much different in the West.

In her introduction to the book Women and Science in India: A Reader,a collection of interesting essays, Neelam Kumar states that “science continues to be characterised by low number of females, clustered in disciplines considered feminine and confined to the ranks of invisible, poorly paid assistants, and other lower positions.” In the same volume, Namrata Gupta and A.K. Sharma write about the “triple burden” —- In addition to the double burden of career and home, the long hours in the laboratory demanded by scientific study and research constitutes the third burden — faced by women in science. The issue of “passive discrimination” and of invisible barriers are also no less important.

The authors of the book on Chowdhuri cite Godbole and Ramaswamy that till a few years back only five per cent of the fellows of the Indian National Science Academy were women. Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Women in the Room: Why Science is still a Boys’ Club, argues that society encourages men to take up science and discourages women. In an interview to The Manchester Herald during her research days, Chowdhuri had said, “Women are terrified of Physics — that is the trouble. It is a tragedy that we have so few women physicists today… I can count the women physicists I know, both in India and England, on the fingers of one hand. At school, scientifically-inclined girls choose Chemistry; perhaps because a really sound grasp of Higher Mathematics is one essential of any physicist’s equipment.”

Singh and Roy deserve praise for having written a scholarly and dispassionate analysis of what Chowdhuri achieved. One hopes that the book would lead to more material on Chowdhuri emerging from her students who may still be alive. It may also prompt the government to take due cognisance of Chowdhuri’s life and honour her memory as a way of expiating our collective apathy towards her.

A Jewel Unearthed: Bibha Chowdhuri by Rajinder Singh and Suprakash C. Roy was released by German publishing house Shaker Verlag recently

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Online edition / Home> Science / by Amitabha Bhattacharya / November 25th, 2018

A tribute to Jagadish Bose, who proved plants have life

Amazing Feats, Green Initiatives / Environment, Leaders, Nature, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Group of scientists recreates Bose’s experiment, which was not received well 100 years ago

Bose’s peers in the West may not have got the same results as him because of the water used /
Image: The Telegraph

More than 100 years after Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted the experiment that established plants have life, a group of scientists in Calcutta came together this year to repeat it.

Supriyo Kumar Das, an assistant professor of Geology at Presidency University, led the initiative. The others on the team were also from Presidency — Debashis Datta and Rabindranath Gayen, both assistant professors of Physics, Snigddha Pal Chowdhury, a research associate in the Geology department, Abhijit Dey, an assistant professor of Botany, and Saranya Naskar, an MSc student of Physics.

Bose, who had joined Presidency College in 1885 as a professor in the Physics department, had conducted the experiment in a laboratory on these very precincts. No matter how much he is hailed today for his scientific genius, in his time Bose’s experiment had not been received well.

It all began when Peter V. Minorsky, a botanist and professor at Mercy College in the US, got in touch with Das earlier this year. Minorsky wanted to know about the groundwater composition in the College Street area, where Presidency University stands.

Says Das, “It is from him that I heard about the prejudices against Bose. In the course of our exchanges, I got interested and emotionally involved with Bose’s work.”

He had been savagely criticised by George James Peirce, professor of Plant Physiology at Stanford University. Peirce wrote in the journal, Science, in 1927: “The trouble with Bose… is that while his curiosity is directed to biological phenomena, his mind is inadequately equipped with the information and habits necessary for accurate study, and his reflections are addressed to philosophical problems.”

In 1929, the Indian Review reported that G.A. Perrson, who was from the US, was unable to find pulse in plants. And years later, in the mid-1960s, in the Handbuch der Pflanzenphysiologie (Encyclopaedia of Plant Physiology), it was said, “Unfortunately Bose’s theoretical views and his emotional style of reporting have generated what may be an excessive skepticism concerning the validity of his observations.”

This is what Bose had observed. By devising a wire electrode — an invention three decades ahead of its time — he identified a pulsating layer of cells abutting the vascular tissue in plants. In an email to The Telegraph, Minorsky says, “In the last few years, plant biologists have come to recognise this layer is the site of propagating waves of calcium release that are involved in communicating stress from local points of occurrence to the rest of the plant. The discovery of this calcium wave is one of the more exciting discoveries of the 21st century, and Bose’s ‘plant heart’ predates this discovery by a century.”

Bose has left notes aplenty about every aspect of his historic experiment. One of the lone omissions is the kind of water used. Says Das, “Being a geochemist and scientist, I understand the composition of groundwater and the effect of chemical stress of sodium on plants. I also know that the composition of water varies from place to place.” He adds, “It occurred to us that Bose’s peers in the West might not have got the same results as him because of the water used.”

PULSE TEST: A repeat of the experiment at Presidency University that Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted in the 1900s /
Image: The Telegraph

In Bose’s time, water was supplied to the Presidency campus from Palta in the Barrackpore area. Das points to a spot occupied by an elevator on the ground floor of Baker Building that houses the Physics department and says, “This is where the old pipeline ran.” Currently, the municipality takes care of the water supply. It comes from the Tala tank in north Calcutta.

When Das and and others repeated the experiment, they decided to use water from every possible source Bose might have accessed. “He could have also used water from the Ganges or from the pond in College Square,” says Das.

Datta explains, “We wanted to check the potassium and sodium concentration. Electricity flows through water only when there are some ions present in it. Possibly, the scientists from the West had not used ionised water.”

The “repeaters” used for the experiment the plant Bose had used — the Desmodium motorium, locally known as bon charal. Minorsky explains, “The lateral leaflets of Desmodium are unique in the plant kingdom for their pronounced and unprovoked oscillatory movements. If conditions are optimal, one can watch these lateral leaflets move at a pace slightly slower than the second hand of a watch.”

According to Minorsky, Bose enjoyed certain enormous advantages over his Western peers. First, Desmodium motorium is a native of Bengal, so he had access to an ample supply of healthy, thriving specimens. In contrast, in the West its cultivation was restricted to glasshouses. Those days, glasshouses were often heated by wheelbarrows of burning coal. These released a gas called ethylene, which in turn affected many plant processes, including a decrease in overall excitability. Second, he points out Calcutta’s temperatures and how they lend themselves to plant study. “Temperatures of 30-35° Celsius, which occur commonly, are optimal for studying plant movements and excitability. The temperatures at which scientists in the West studied plants would have been much lower,” he says. Finally, there was the salty water advantage.

Dey arranged for 21 Desmodium plants. Each was kept in a beaker full of a distinct water sample. Thereafter, they were all kept in a controlled atmosphere. Says Gayen, “We placed them in glass beakers and left them in the laboratory, where all the lights would be kept on so that all of them were exposed to the same amount of light. The air conditioner would be set at a particular temperature to control the humidity. We would connect the probes to two different parts of the stem. The source meter was used to read the fluctuating signals.”

The brainstorming went on for months and the experiment lasted a fortnight. Das says, “The apprehension of failure was there. But the moment when we got the first response was exquisite. The horizontal line that appeared on the screen formed a peak and then fell only to rise again. Though our graph did not have peaks and troughs as tall as Bose’s, we definitely had got a graph that roughly replicated the ECG graph of humans.”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Online edition / Home> Culture / by Moumita Chaudhuri / November 25th, 2018