Homen Borgohain — the workhorse of the Assamese literary scene

 

The late literary maven was instrumental in seeding and nurturing many an aspiring writer, journalist, or academician

On May 12, 2021, the Assamese lost one of their guardian angels. In tributes and condolence messages flowing in from all sides, Homen Borgohain (1932~2021) has been referred to as a 'batabrikkha', a revered banyan tree that sustained an entire ecosystem of readers, writers and literary enthusiasts, now uprooted.

One of the foremost intellectuals of Assamese literature, Homen Borgohain has left for his heavenly abode. An eminent journalist also, he was an inspiration to writers and journalists in Assam. My heartfelt condolences to his family, friends & followers.

— President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) May 12, 2021

Having lived not just a moderately long life, but a meaningfully productive one, Borgohain has left behind a massive body of work. He has to his credit five collections of short stories, thirteen novels and novellas, around fifty volumes of non-fictional prose, four books that are autobiographical, several edited volumes, and a single book of poems titled Hoimonti (1987). He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1978 for his novel Pita-Putra (1999) but returned it in 2015 in protest against the Dadri lynching. Two of his other notable books of fiction, namely Matsyagandha (1987) and Halodhiya Soraiye Baodhan Khai (1973) were made into feature films, and the latter, directed by Jahnu Barua, won the national award in 1988. His Subala (1963) is notable not just for being the first ever work in Assamese literature on the life of a prostitute but also for being a decisive point in the development of post-war Assamese fiction, in the same rank as Birinchi Kumar Barua’s Jibanar Batat (1945) in waking up Assamese fiction from its long hibernation.

An esteemed journalist known for his thought-provoking and razor-sharp political writings, he was the founding editor of many weekly magazines like Nilachal (1968), Nagarik (1977), Samakal (1987), Sutradhar (1989). He also served as a special correspondent at the Calcutta-based daily Aajkaal, his work featuring in its North-East section, for a few years from 1981, where he wrote many pieces and was the first person from Assam to interview Mrs. Gandhi at length.

In his own words, he studied each day of his life like a student who was preparing for his exams. When interviewed, he put it thus: "I write two hours and read for two hours every day." This, in addition to the work he did in the capacity of a chief editor for various dailies, weeklies, and monthlies throughout his life. There is a word of Bengali origin in relation to music, 'riyaaz' — a constant honing of one's musical skills. Borgohain did that to his writing because he knew it required constant sharpening. To him the act of writing was what we call in Assamese neerab sadhana — quiet meditation — and he practised it rigorously, regularly and religiously so that the gift never left him.

Hailing from the remote and backward village of Dhakuakhana in the Lakhimpur district of Assam, Borgohain was an example of what a man of humble origins and unexceptional looks (it made him suffer from inferiority complex during the Cotton College days as mentioned in his immensely popular autobiography Atmanusandhan) could achieve. He was an inspiration to generations of Assamese youth in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, most of whom forayed into the world of reading with his books. On his death, the Assamese as a people are almost chanting in unison, “He introduced us to the world of books. Our love for literature began with reading him.” Not that the Assamese did not read before him, but the range and habits of reading changed substantially, a new reading public emerged from the lower and lower-middle classes.

A voracious reader himself, he did in the world of Assamese letters what the medieval saints did to the sacred texts by translating them from classical languages to regional ones, thus decoding these for common people and making knowledge open to all. Borgohain popularised the form of the personal essay in Assam, and applied his wealth of reading into these pieces, combining personal experiences and moments of introspection with allusions to and anecdotes from the worlds of literature, philosophy, civilisational history, etc. The 154 personal essays collected in the three volumes of Mor Tokabahir Pora (Pages from My Notebook) have reserved their due place in the canon for posterity. The index of contents from one of his earliest collection of nonfictional prose called Ananda Aru Bedanar Sandhanat (In Search of Joy and Sorrow) introduces the masses to names like Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Lee Masters, Goethe and Charlotte von Stein, Heinrich Heine, Dag Hammarskjold. He was not the intellectual’s writer (although he had everything that it took to be one) but the people’s writer. Like capsules, he packed knowledge in the simplest of forms, making it accessible to the masses, that too in a pre-Amazon and pre-ebooks era when not just readers but even bookshops were numbered.

Borgohain had a gift for spotting fresh or obscure talent — and not just spotting but encouraging them onwards. Despite his busy schedule, he took time out to draft letters of appreciation to these young minds, sent for them from his office, or rang them up asking them to submit work. He provided platforms to new and emerging voices, put his faith in writers whose works were turned down by other leading magazines that played it safe by only publishing trusted and revered writers. While it is not unlikely that a senior and experienced writer anywhere in the world would help or guide aspirants in that field, what sets Borgohain apart from all of them is the sheer number of people he had helped take flight. In Assam at present, be it established or struggling writers, or journalists, academicians or intelligentsia, there may be few who, at one point or the other, had not been mentored by him or taken him as a role model. That measures the magnitude of the Borgohain effect.

Immediately after the news of his demise spread, an old video of the stalwart has resurfaced, and has been doing the rounds, widely shared and forwarded in social media platforms. It is an interview where he is heard saying, “Till my last breath I will keep labouring hard. Just as you extract the juice out of sugarcane until only the bagasse remains, I will work till the last drop of life is strained out of me so that when I discard the mortal flesh I am no more than bagasse [translation mine].” And so he did. He remained active as the editor-in-chief of the Assamese daily Niyomiya Barta until his death, caused by post-Covid complications. What the Assamese as a race should remember and emulate is Homen Borgohain’s proclivity for hard work.

I would like to end this write-up with my translation of one of Borgohain’s poems, ‘Smriti’ (Memory); more often than not death and art reveal their true merit only retrospectively.

And all of a sudden, the familiar bird falls silent,

The ripe fruit drops so silently

The tree gets no hint of it;

The fields turn desolate, the rats maddened by the scent of corn

Silently vanish into the dark insides of a snake.

 

The silent workings of Death is a primordial law of Nature.

I, am its only, arrogant exception.

When Death’s infallible hand touches me

A fierce cry of protest cracks my heart open.

I look back again and again, a gory lament

Piercing out my throat disturbs

the ice-cold breeze of eternity, echoes endlessly.

 

Because tied to my very essence is a memory undying

of an endless time past and an unmapped time future,

The impress of a beloved’s face in the depths of the soul,

through the pain of separation endlessly unfading.

 

Memory is what is absent from the heart of Nature;

And thus, I recreate Nature’s old archetypes,

The bright lamp-like words penetrate Death’s infernal spread

So that defying the laws of Nature my undying grief

Can exercise its rights in another universe

Where I am immortal, an eternal promise of Creation.

*

(Here is a list of Homen Borgohain’s writings in English translation for those who do not read Assamese)

· The Collected Works of Homen Borgohain; translated by Pradipta Borgohain, Amaryllis, 2017.

· Astorag (Sunset). Translated by Ashok Bhagawati, Sahitya Akademi, 1996.

· The Field of Gold and Tears; Translated by Pradipta Borgohain, Spectrum Publishers, Guwahati, 1997.

· Pita-Putra (Father & Son). Translated by Ranjita Biswas, National Book Trust, 1999.

· Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India; Edited by Hasan Mushirul and Asaduddin M. (contains his story “In Search of Ismail Sheikh”), OUP, 2002.

· The Muffled Heart: Stories of the Disempowered Male (2005) translated by Jayita Sengupta.

· Asomiya Hand-picked Fictions selected by the North East Writers’ Forum (containing his story “In Search of Ismail Sheikh” tr. by Pradipta Borgohain), Katha, 2003.

(Written with inputs from Bijit Borthakur)

Source: The Hindu, 28/05/21

Till the end, Lata Mangeshkar remained her own person

 

It would be wrong to pin her down to a single identity, of a grand dowager queen of music, all white sarees, and an isolation of fervent religiosity and meditational silences

“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before”: Gloria Steinem

Lata was one of the three daughters born to a well-known performer in Marathi theatre, Dinanath Mangeshkar. Her father recognised her talent early on, and began training her when she was only five. Her younger and very talented sister Asha Bhosle told the Dogri poet Padma Sachdev later how their lives changed when their father passed away suddenly. The eldest, Lata didi, was only 13. The family first went to stay with their mother’s family in Thalner village in Dhule, then moved to Mumbai to a small house in Nana Chowk. Lata ji’s initial years in the Mumbai film industry of the early ’40s were full of struggle. Music directors used to the loud and somewhat shrill and nasal voices of singing stars from courtesan families, were reluctant to give the frail teenager a chance for playback singing. They found her voice “too thin”.

A person less in need of money may have argued and told them that screen voices needed to be more natural and fluid in the age of the new recording technology. But Lata’s overwhelming need was to earn enough for her family of three siblings and a widowed mother. So she played Eliza Doolittle to their Professor Higgins for a while. Flexibility is something young fatherless children learn early on in life. Lata did too. But like a true singer, even as she adapted to the composers’ demands, she kept alive her classically trained real voice and soon rose to be the patron saint of the “new” female voice of independent India. With her first hit song Aayega aanewala, from Mahal, she was no longer the awkward in-between singer. Even the great Bade Ghulam Ali Khan sahib is reported to have said of her that ever since he heard her sing in Raga Yaman, he forgot his own rendering, and that the girl just never goes off-key (Jab se iss ladki ka Yaman kaan mein pada, main apna wala Yaman bhool gaya! Kambakht kabhi besuri hi nahin hoti!). Another great composer of film music, Naushad, wrote about her: Watch her voice leap up like a ball of fire (Shola sa lapak jaaye hai, awaaz tau dekho!).

In the ’50s, Lata Mangeshkar was an undisputed star singing for all renowned composers: Shankar-Jaikishan, Naushad, SD Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal, Hemant Kumar and Madan Mohan. She sang some of the biggest hits for Madhubala in Mughal-e-Azam, including the timeless, Mohey panghat pe Nandlal…. Her long and distinguished career is not a tragic tale of continuing to shoulder the burden of someone else’s idea of how a woman should sing. She was a genuinely many-voiced singer who considered it an asset to be able to sing for a Madhubala, a Jaya Bachchan and even a Preity Zinta. Hers was a voice of a simple but grand inheritance from Marathi theatre, also a realisation of the paternal dreams and aspirations she had imbibed as a young girl. She was a rock to her family till the end.

Still it would be wrong to pin her down to a single identity, of a grand dowager queen of music, all white sarees, and an isolation of fervent religiosity and meditational silences. True, as an individual, Lata ji remained fiercely protective of her private life. But she was very much her own person. She did not follow the usual pattern of marriage, children and the possibility of a life long contention with a male who felt his masculinity threatened by an eminent wife. She chose, instead, to sing as and when and how she wished, and maintain her personal relationships with various men and women she cared for. She had little interest in theatrics. Her love for all things, from diamond jewellery to devotional music, was not a put-on act. Those aesthetics came naturally to her like to so many of our great musicians. But one admires her for, even as she pursued her music, rightly demanding that musicians be paid royalties, not be sent off with a one-time payment. If this created some disaffection between her and a few big ticket male singers, so be it. Her innate understanding of her self worth remained subtle and capacious till the very end.

Another loveable part of Lata Mangeshkar’s life was her deep and genuine love for cricket. In the cricket establishment she found the action-man dimension perhaps of a father she had lost early in her life. Stories about her romantic dedication to one such legend were also rife over the years. But she chose not to marry for reasons we will never know. The truth or otherwise remained between them. She never cared to discuss it publicly and none of the columnists and society reporters dared ask her about it. She did make clear that she did not wish to be reborn. Ever. And that her favourite poet was Meera Bai who sang Mai mai, kaise jiyun ree (Oh my mother how can I survive)”. “One should gracefully accept sorrow like happiness”, she said in one of her last interviews to a Mumbai daily

Of late, one sees a sudden swell in those who claim to have known her over the years and emphasise how she sang because Veer Savarkar urged her to sing or that singing a song like, Ai mere watan ke logo… was an ideal public display of true rashtra bhakti. From what one gathers about this unusually gifted singer, she abhorred histrionics or public displays of love or hate. She was among those like George Bernard Shaw who believed that patriotism is basically a conviction that the best country is the one that one is born in.

Professionally and personally, the marvellous weight of the pleasure her singing gives embarrasses hyperbolic tributes. Certainly, obituaries will call her “the last of a kind”, the “Sur Saraswati” in Hindi film music or “the greatest female singer in the Bollywood firmament”. For once, they will not be soppy clichés, for once they will ring true.

Written by Mrinal Pande

Source: Indian Express, 7/02/22

Philosopher-saint Ramanujacharya, and the Statue of Equality in his honour

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Statue of Equality, a gigantic statue of Ramanujacharya, on February 5 on the outskirts of Hyderabad. Who was Ramanujacharya? Why is it called the Statue of Equality?

Who was Ramanujacharya?

Born in 1017 in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, Ramanujacharya is revered as a Vedic philosopher and social reformer. He travelled across India, advocating equality and social justice.

Ramanuja revived the Bhakti movement, and his preachings inspired other Bhakti schools of thought. He is considered to be the inspiration for poets like Annamacharya, Bhakt Ramdas, Thyagaraja, Kabir, and Meerabai.From the time he was a young budding philosopher, Ramanuja appealed for the protection of nature and its resources like air, water, and soil. He went on to write nine scriptures known as the navaratnas, and composed numerous commentaries on Vedic scriptures.

Ramanuja is also credited with establishing the correct procedures for rituals performed in temples throughout India, the most famous being Tirumala and Srirangam.

Why is it called the Statue of Equality?

Ramanuja was an advocate of social equality among all sections of people centuries ago, and encouraged temples to open their doors to everyone irrespective of caste or position in society at a time when people of many castes were forbidden from entering them.

He took education to those who were deprived of it. His greatest contribution is the propagation of the concept of “vasudhaiva kutumbakam”, which translates as “all the universe is one family”.

He travelled across India for several decades, propagating his ideas of social equality and universal brotherhood from temple podiums. He embraced the socially marginalised and condemned, and asked royal courts to treat them as equals. He spoke of universal salvation through devotion to God, compassion, humility, equality, and mutual respect, which is known as Sri Vaishnavam Sampradaya.

According to Chinna Jeeyar Swami, the Vaishnava seer behind the Statue of Equality, Ramanujacharya’s social philosophy was designed to cross the boundaries of the caste system and to embrace the whole of humanity.

“Ramanujacharya liberated millions from social, cultural, gender, educational, and economic discrimination with the foundational conviction that every human is equal regardless of nationality, gender, race, caste, or creed. We are celebrating his 1,000th birth anniversary as the ‘Festival of Equality’, upholding the view that the world is one family, ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’,” Chinna Jeeyar has said.

Where is the statue located?

The 216-foot-tall statue, which was first proposed in 2018, is located at the 45-acre scenic Jeeyar Integrated Vedic Academy (JIVA) at Muchintal near Shamshabad on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

The statue was proposed and designed by Chinna Jeeyar. The rituals for the dedication of the statue started on Wednesday (February 2) with over 5,000 Vedic scholars performing a maha yajna that is said to be the world’s largest of its kind in modern times.

Written by Sreenivas Janyala

Source: Indian Express, 3/02/22

Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity: In service of God and humans

 

Navin B. Chawla writes: Their unique brand of faith and compassion brings hope and relief to millions of destitute, sick and abandoned people, irrespective of their country, faith, or denomination

I was far away from Delhi when news trickled in that the government had not renewed FCRA permission to the Missionaries of Charity, the organisation that Mother Teresa founded in 1950. It was the year that our Constitution was promulgated and she was amongst the first foreigners to become an Indian citizen.

Associated with Mother Teresa for the last 23 years of her life, and with the MC sisters for over four decades, the refusal of FCRA permission came to me as a surprise, but I believed it was the result, as is often the case, of accounting errors, which would be corrected. And so it happened.

The sisters were able to explain the discrepancies to the concerned authorities and permission was renewed.2022 awakened to the 25th year of Mother Teresa’s passing away, in her beloved Kolkata. For me, it was also an occasion to recount a little of my association with her. We know where she started, a lone presence on Kolkata’s streets with no money, no helper and no companion. By the time she passed away, she had created, one small step at a time, the presence of her Order in 123 countries. Together, with her band of 4,000 sisters and brothers, theirs would remain a unique brand of faith and compassion, reaching out to alleviate destitution, loneliness, hunger and disease, bringing hope and relief to millions of the abandoned, homeless, dying and leprosy outcasts, irrespective of their country, faith, or denomination.

Although she remained fiercely Catholic, her brand of religion was not exclusive. Convinced that each person she ministered to was Christ in suffering, she reached out to people of all faiths. Hers was not the 19th-century brand of imperial evangelism. Unlike most in the Church, she understood the environment in which she lived and worked. In the course of writing my biography, I once asked Jyoti Basu, that indomitable chief minister of West Bengal, what he, as a Communist and atheist, could possibly have in common with Mother Teresa, for whom God was everything. With a smile, he replied, “We both share a love for the poor.”

With such a long association and so many memories, I can at best present a few vignettes of an arduous yet joyful life that was ordained for her. I vividly recall my first visit with her to a huge leprosy settlement, not far from Kolkata. It was a very moving experience to see her surrounded by hundreds of inmates, many with no arms or legs, all reaching out to hug or touch her. “Ma”, as they called her, had made them feel needed by giving them the important task of weaving the saris that are worn by the MC sisters worldwide.

During her visits to Delhi, where she had “homes”, I would help steer her through our labyrinthine bureaucracy. Over time, I became familiar with the work of the MC. The Shishu Bhawans were crammed with abandoned infants, dressed in cheerful clothes, stitched by the sisters or volunteers; the “house” at Majnu Ka Tila for abandoned elderly destitute persons; the home for disabled children in South Delhi, many suffering from Down Syndrome and cared for in their cots.

It was here that my daughters and I first met Kusum, then a child of six. Two things struck me at once. The first was that she could not stand, and the second was her infectious smile. Whenever I visited, this little girl always greeted me with a smile. As she could only crawl, the sisters, helpers and volunteers fed her, bathed her, dressed her in fresh clothes every day, and carried her to the toilet every time she needed to go. They changed her clothes each time she soiled them.

Painstakingly, she learnt to say “hello” to me and one day, to my delight, added “uncle” to complete the little sentence. Kusum was found begging on a street. On the afternoon the sisters found her, it was pouring. The drenched child had a wracking cough. Unable to find a parent or guardian, they customarily reported the matter to the local police. After her condition stabilised in a nearby hospital, they brought her to their “ashram” to join about 60 children with physical and mental problems. Doctors had opined that her legs and arms had been broken, perhaps deliberately. When I once asked her who had done this to her, she burst into tears. It was the only time she cried. For the rest of the time, Kusum’s smile would invariably reach her eyes. When she died at the age of 18, the sisters cremated her body at the nearby cremation ground.

When I asked Mother Teresa how she and her mission could care for hundreds of thousands of destitute persons, and what made this possible, she explained to me simply but meaningfully. “You can, at best, look after a few loved ones in your family. My sisters and I can look after everyone, because for us they are all God”. So, the leprosy-affected man chained by his brothers in a hut, the infant left under a truck and saved just in time from prowling dogs, the woman dumped on a rubbish heap by her own son and left to die because he had now secured her property, were manifestations of her God in suffering.

Perhaps the most succinct summing up of Mother Teresa’s life and work was made by the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, John Sannes. In his speech at the Nobel prize ceremony in Oslo in 1979, he said: “The hallmark of her work has been respect for the individual and the individual’s worth and dignity. The loneliest and the most wretched, the dying destitute, the abandoned lepers have all been received by her and her sisters with warm compassion, devoid of condescension, based on her reverence for Christ in man… This is the life of Mother Teresa and her sisters — a life of strict poverty and long days and nights of toil, a life that affords little room for other joys but the most precious.”

Written by Navin B. Chawla

Source: Indian Express, 14/01/22

Kumar Gandharva exemplifies the unity of form, meaning and being

 Thirty years ago, on January 12, 1992, it seemed that the pulsating rhythms of the universe had gone silent forever. On this date, Kumar Gandharva drew his last breath. We are yet to fathom the full measure of this loss or take full stock of his legacy. One of the upsides of living in our age is the unprecedented availability of the recorded archive. When we were students in college it was hard to access more than a few stock recordings. Anyone who had access to rare or private recordings became our best friend. His Kabir recordings (the one oeuvre Kumarji was sent to this earth for) were, of course, freely available and widely known. But getting our hands on other cassettes was pure gold.

But now, thanks to newly released archives, his corpus comes into full view. The full range of his nirguna bhajans, Marathi natya sangeet, even his incredibly playful compositions on ordinary life and the seasons, all can be heard in relation to each other. In other artistes, this over availability can be a liability: You have to sift through, to get to the peaks. In Kumarji ’s case, it has the opposite effect: Almost each recording seems like a discovery of a new summit, a different way of capturing a haunting incandescence, and weaving his whole being, and ours, in a melodic current.

The attempt to measure the loss or legacy of Kumarji  seems totally out of place for both practical and philosophical reasons. Much superfluous ink has been spilled on issues that almost seem beside the point. The first is the question of his innovation: His departures from tradition, much to the consternation of purists who would want to reduce tradition to mere convention. Of course, he was innovative, even revolutionary, in almost everything he did. There is a cottage industry cataloguing his innovations: From the bol aalaps, the incredible use of short taans, the new bandishes. But, as he always insisted, juxtaposing innovation against tradition is a serious mistake.

A tradition is more like a foundation on which more has to be built; a grammar is meant for expanding language, not constricting it. The second is the constant opposition between the folk and the classical. It was often said he made high classical popular (by departing from convention), and he made popular folk classical. In retrospect, these categorisations, while useful for some pedantic scholarly purposes, seem almost antithetical to the singularity of what he did and the unity of the musical experience he produced.

The title of one poignant set of homages to him, “Kaaljayi”, one who has conquered time, is probably as apt a title as one can give. But conquering time does not mean eternal — a kind of fixity that transcends all flux. In his interviews, he always comes across as impatient with that kind of talk. He also had a particular allergy to the word often used in connection with music, spiritual, as if it were one part of life, not life itself. These are very tempting terms that we lazily use to lock us into the binaries he was always trying to unsettle.

His music has the intense and blazing energy of the whole of creation pulsating through that connection between sabda and raga that only he could produce. He is unusual in how much the bols of the bandish, or the sahitya, is important to him and how much care he took to explain them. Listening to Kumar Gandharva, it is difficult to agree with the great TM Krishna’s claim in A Southern Music that in the musical experience language is important only as sound, not linguistically; words have to be conceived as a musical form not a poetic form. In a sense, this is true; after all it is the raga that shapes the form and the musical experience is accessible even without the linguistic meaning. But in Kumarji — what made all his recordings so exceptional — the music was a vehicle for not just sound but meaning. His particular emphasis in singing was also a vehicle for meaning, not just sound.

It is just hard to fathom the full power of all those glorious moments in his singing without meaning: The explosive “Oham Soham Baaja Baje/Trikuti Dham” or the erumpent, “Ganga Gangana” in his great Raga Shankara. Or, even more mischievously, the bandish he composed “Karan De Re Kachhu Lalla Re” (imploring his toddler son to let him work). Even the sound “jha” in jhini, is meant not just as sound, but to accentuate the effect of the meaning “jhini” has. You almost get the sense that it was the careful deliberate braiding of sound and meaning that lifted Kumarji beyond the mere virtuosity of many great artistes. To claim this is not to deny the autonomy of music, or to reduce it to its meaning. But it is to return to one central point: Kumarji exemplifies the unity of form, meaning and being.

Kumarji always acknowledged his debt to the folk traditions, not just for the musical forms they bequeathed to him. But like Tagore, taken in by the Baul singers, what the “folk traditions” offered was not just musical forms to be shaped, but the unity of life and music. Singing or being in communion with a nirgun bhajan was not a matter of just meaning or musical form: It was being in a non-attached carefree state. The timelessness is not a sense of the eternal, it is just the sense that no moment is instrumental to anything else, especially the future. As he once put it, “without having that kind of nature, you cannot put forth that kind of (nirguna) voice. The voice has to match the mind.”

A programme announcement of the Indian State Broadcasting Service in the Indian Listener of June 7 1936 lists Kumar Gandharva as a “boy prodigy.” On August 15, 1947, as India gained independence, if Raghava Menon is to be believed, he was singing Raga Chandrakauns on radio. He then battled with TB and lost his voice for a full six years. By the time he took his last breath, he had not only become one of the greatest musicians of all time, he had arguably become the highest point of Indian culture, embodying its form, meaning and even sense of play. He created a world — free, expansive and liberating, and unsettling in the deepest sense. As Madhu Limaye who listened to Kumarji in jail during the Emergency wrote to him, he gave us a glimpse of the secret vibrations of the universe. But Kumarji would have smiled: “Yeh Khel Roop Ka/Khele Mahadhir. (This play of forms/plays the Mahadhir).”

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta 

Source: Indian Express, 13/01/22

Dr. Ronald Weinstein, telepathology pioneer, dies at 83

 

Weinstein’s drive for advancing telepathology included not only widening medicine’s reach but also bringing greater humanity to it.

Written by Neil Genzlinger

In August 1986, a doctor in Washington, DC, manipulating a microscope, examined a tissue sample from a breast-cancer patient and correctly diagnosed that her tumor had spread. What was unusual about the diagnosis was that the tissue sample and the microscope were half a country away, in El Paso, Texas.

It was a demonstration of a technology, now known as telepathology, which enables specialists to render diagnoses and other medical opinions from afar using various telecommunications technologies. At the time, the internet was in its early stages, fiber optics were not widely available and the high-definition screens now common were unknown. So for a doctor to remotely control a microscope and see a clear enough image to render a conclusion was a significant breakthrough.

The demonstration had been arranged by the founder of Corabi Telemetrics, Dr. Ronald Weinstein, who at the time was also chairman of the pathology department at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago and had led the team that perfected the technology. (In fact, he is credited with coining the term “telepathology.”) He spent the rest of his career furthering telemedicine of various kinds, first in Chicago and then, starting in 1990, at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, where he was a founder of the widely admired Arizona Telemedicine Program.

Weinstein saw early on the potential for telepathology to broaden medical access.

“The limited availability of pathologists in some rural locations and areas serviced by federal medical centers is a bottleneck in the United States health care delivery system,” he wrote in the journal Human Pathology in May 1986, a few months before his groundbreaking demonstration.

By the time he died last month, his early vision of telemedicine’s possibilities had become an integral part of the health care system, not only in pathology but also in numerous other specialties. The Arizona Telemedicine Program, which he directed for 25 years, had “linked more than 160 sites in 70 communities, bringing clinical services — in some cases lifesaving — to hundreds of thousands of patients, many of whom live in Arizona’s medically underserved areas,” Dr. Michael M.I. Abecassis, dean of the College of Medicine, said in announcing Weinstein’s death to the University of Arizona community.

Weinstein’s wife, Mary (Corabi) Weinstein, said he died of heart failure Dec. 3 at a medical center in Tucson, Arizona. He was 83.

Ronald S Weinstein (the S did not stand for anything and carried no period) was born Nov. 20, 1938, in Schenectady, New York, to H. Edward and Shirley (Diamond) Weinstein.

He studied pre-med at Union College in Schenectady, but at his father’s urging took a course in government. He got the top grade and received a Ford Foundation summer fellowship working for Rep. Samuel Stratton of New York — “a transformational education for me,” as he put it in a 2019 Founders Day lecture at the Tucson college. The skills he learned then, he said, served him well all his life, especially in his efforts to bring in government funding for medical initiatives.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at Union College in 1960, he enrolled at Albany Medical College, attending from 1960-63 and also working for several summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In the 2019 lecture, he told the story of mistaking a rumpled older man for a janitor and asking him to empty the trash can, which the man did. A few minutes later, someone told him the “janitor” was actually Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist. He went to apologize, and the Nobelist became a friend and mentor.

He finished his medical education at Tufts University in 1965 and completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, which at the time was experimenting with an early telemedicine program linking it by television camera to a clinic at Logan Airport in Boston. He was asked to look in on a few cases and, he said, “that stuck in my mind.”

In 1975 he became chairman of the pathology department at Rush-Presbyterian in Chicago, and 11 years later he was ready to introduce the idea of telepathology, founding Corabi Telemetrics, one of several companies he created or helped create to bring ideas developed in academia to market.

“Sears and Roebuck never intended to get into the financial business,” he said in a speech a few weeks before the 1986 demonstration of his new technology, referring to the retail giant’s expansion into banking at the time. “But somewhere along the line, engineers figured out how to put satellites in space and revolutionized the financial industry. And what I’m going to talk about today is how the very same changes are going to revolutionize the way that we practice medicine.”

Weinstein took his expertise to the University of Arizona in 1990, becoming head of the pathology department at the College of Medicine. By the mid-1990s telemedicine was well established, at least as a concept, and Bob Burns, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives who later became a state senator, had a computer programming background and took an interest in it, securing financing for a statewide initiative.

When the state asked the university to oversee the project, “they gave us the best man they had,” Burns said in a phone interview. That was Weinstein, who was named director when the program was initiated in 1996.

The project, Burns said, made a particular effort to bring medical expertise to remote areas, Indian reservations and prisons — and even abroad, to places like Panama.

Elizabeth A. Krupinski, a longtime colleague and collaborator now at Emory University, said Weinstein had both vision and people skills.

“He had a knack for identifying where and how aspects of health care process and outcomes could be improved, devising a potential solution, then finding the right people to work with to make that vision a reality,” she said by email. “That process always included bringing in people from a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives to truly optimize the results, and to bring in trainees so they could be a part of the future.”

Weinstein’s drive for advancing telepathology included not only widening medicine’s reach but also bringing greater humanity to it. One effort he was involved with, at the Tucson Breast Center, enabled women to have a breast biopsy, get the results and consult with a specialist on the same day, eliminating what could be a long and stressful wait.

That was an issue that frequently came up during Weinstein’s time on the project. “The majority of phone calls I get are from women who want to know where their breast biopsy report is,” he told the journal Health Executive in 2007. “The terror in their voice is really moving.”

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1964, Weinstein is survived by a daughter, Katherine Weinstein Miller; a son, John; and two grandchildren.

Source: Indian Express, 6/01/22

Who was Archbishop Desmond Tutu?

 

Deshmond Tutu was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end racial segregation and discrimination by the white minority government in South Africa from 1948 till the year 1991.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the social activist and Nobel laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, died at the age of 90 on Sunday.

Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s and in recent years he was hospitalised on several occasions to treat infections related to his cancer treatment.

South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa called Tutu’s death as “another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa.

Who was Desmond Tutu?

Deshmond Tutu was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end racial segregation and discrimination by the white minority government in South Africa from 1948 till the year 1991.

He is regarded as a contemporary of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, and became the face of the moment outside the country.

He spearheaded grassroot campaigns around the world that fought against apartheid. Cultural and economic boycotts were often methods adopted in these campaigns. He emerged as a key figure in the movement in the mid-1970’s and has become a household name across the globe.

Tutu has politically stayed away from the African National Congress(ANC), that was at the forefront of South Africa’s liberation movement and refused to back its armed movement.

Nobel Prize

Deshmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system. The prize highlighted the non-violent manner in which he fought against the system.

Tutu has been regarded as an outspoken human rights activist who highlighted and spoke out on a range of issues around the world including climate change, Israel-Palestine conflict, among others.

Recently, he also condemned President Jacob Zuma over allegations of corruption surrounding a $23 million security upgrade to his home.

Early Life

Before joining the anti-apathied movement, Tutu worked as a teacher and recalled how the system of educating blacks infuriated him. He quit teaching in 1957 to join the church and was ordained as a priest in 1961. He also studied at St. Peter’s Theological College in Johannesburg and King’s College London.He was named as the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, becoming the head of the Anglican Church, South Africa’s fourth largest and retained that position until 1996.

Tutu was asked to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) after the nation’s first free election in 1994.

Source: Indian Express, 26/12/21

Aung San Suu Kyi

 Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese politician. She is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. On December 6, 2021, the Myanmar special court sentenced her to 4 years of prison for violating corona virus restrictions. This has drawn worldwide criticisms.

Who is Aung San Suu Kyi?

• Aung San Suu Kyi served as the State Counsellor of Myanmar between 2016 and 2021. The post is equivalent to that of the Prime Ministerial post. She is the youngest daughter of Aung San. Aung San is the Father of Myanmar.
• She was detained before elections in 1989 and house arrested for 15 years. This made her one of the world’s most prominent political prisoner.
• She was called the “Children of Gandhi”.

8888 Uprising

Aung San Suu Kyi became famous through 8888 uprising.  The 8888 uprising is also called People Power Uprising. It includes a series of protests throughout Myanmar. It was caused by withdrawal of currency notes without compensation, police brutality, economic mismanagement, totalitarian one – party rule of Ne Win, corruption. It led to the resignation of Ne Win.

Why was Aung San Suu Kyi sentenced to jail recently?

She was sentenced to be prisoned for two charges. They are inciting the public against the military of Myanmar and also for breaching COVID1-19 protocols. Currently, she is facing 11 charges that can bring a maximum imprisonment of 102 years. The other major controversial cases against her are as follows:

• Alleged use of walkie – talkies by her security guards
• Corruption in granting permits to buy a helicopter
• Violating the Official Secrets Act

What is the issue?

Aung San Suu Kyi is the leader of National League for Democracy. The military of Myanmar holds 25% of total seats in the parliament. In 2021, the a newly elected lawmakers were to hold the first session of the parliament. The military imposed a state of emergency just before the session citing voting fraud in the elections. Through emergency, the military grabbed the power in coup. This was the third time the military grabbed  power in Myanmar since its independence from British rule in 1948. Following the coup, Aung San Suu Kyi was detained.  Such scenarios where military grabs power is called coup de tat.

P C Mahalanobis: Data scientist, nation builder

This renowned scientist, statistician helped formulate the blueprint for India’s industrialisation. He also founded Indian Statistical Institute and devised the Mahalanobis distance.

Born in Calcutta to Probodh Chandra and Nirodbashini on June 29, 1893, Prasanta Chandra Mahalabonis was the eldest of six siblings. His grandfather Gurucharan was involved in the Brahmo Samaj and was a follower of Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath Tagore. He was encouraged to pursue intellectual interests quite early in his life.

After passing out of the Brahmo Boys School, he joined the Presidency College and graduated in physics in 1912. He travelled to England where he joined the King’s College, Cambridge, for further studies. There, he met the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and was deeply influenced by him.

Career

He worked for a while at the Cavendish Laboratory with physicist CTR Wilson. He returned to India and was appointed professor of physics at the Presidency College in 1922. He taught there for three decades but the job did not stop him from pursuing his new found interest in statistics He formed a group that was interested in statistics. Later, that core group expanded and eventually, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) was founded in 1932. In the next year, he launched Sankhya: The Indian Journal Of Statistics, a milestone in the history of science in India.

He also established the National Sample Survey in 1950 and set up the Central Statistical Organisation to coordinate statistical activities. He became a member of the Planning Commission in 1955 and continued in that capacity till 1967. In 1959, the ISI was declared as an institute of national importance.

Major contributions

Mahalanobis devised a measure of comparison between two data sets, now called Mahalanobis distance. Widely used in the field of cluster analysis and classification, he first proposed it in 1930 in the context of a study on racial likeness.

Later, he introduced innovative techniques for conducting large-scale sample surveys, calculated acreages and crop yields, using the method of random sampling. He devised a statistical method called fractile graphical analysis, used to compare socio-economic conditions of varied groups. He introduced pilot surveys, advocated the usefulness of sampling methods and included topics such as public opinion, consumer expenditure, crop acreage and plant disease.

In 1923, he married Nirmala Kumari, daughter of educationist Herambhachandra Maitra. His birth anniversary is celebrated as the National Statistics Day. Totally dedicated to his profession, he remained active with research work till the very end of his life. He died on June 28, 1972, a day before his 79th birthday.

Honours, achievements

Considered the father of modern statistics in India, he was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in 1968. He was also conferred a large number of awards by international organisations, underscoring his stature as a luminary in his sphere.

He chaired the UN Sub-Commission on Sampling (1947-51) and became fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, UK, in 1954. Top statistical organizations in erstwhile USSR and the United States also honoured him, as did the King’s College, Cambridge.

.He was the backbone behind India’s second five-year-plan (1956 - 1961) which laid the blueprint for industrialisation and development in India. It was a period during which hydroelectric projects and five steel plants at Bhilai, Durgapur, and Rourkela were established, coal production increased, more railway lines were added and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission of India were established.

2.In England, Mahalanobis was introduced to the journal Biometrika. Intrigued by it, he brought the complete set of the journal to India. In 1933, ISI brought out Sankhya - a journal along the lines of Biometrika.

3.The actor Shazad Latif portrayed the character of Mahalanobis in the 2015 movie titled The Man Who Knew Infinity, which was based on the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the math genius whom he was influenced by.

He analysed 60 years of data regarding the floods in Odisha and published his findings in 1926. This analysis later formed the basis for construction of the Hirakud dam on the Mahanadi river.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20/08/2019