Similar poems: Set 03

 Henry Wotton (1568-1639), The Character of a Happy Life

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are;

Whose soul is still prepared for death,

Untied unto the world by care

Of public fame or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,

Nor vice; who never understood

How deepest wounds are given by praise;

Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed;

Whose conscience is his strong retreat;

Whose state can neither flatterers feed,

Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray

More of His grace than gifts to lend;

And entertains the harmless day

With a religious book or friend;

—This man is freed from servile bands

Of hope to rise or fear to fall:

Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), If—

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Similar poems: Set 02

 Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey

MORTALITY, behold and fear!

What a change of flesh is here!

Think how many royal bones

Sleep within this heap of stones:

Here they lie had realms and lands,

Who now want strength to stir their hands:

Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust

They preach, 'In greatness is no trust.'

Here 's an acre sown indeed

With the richest, royall'st seed

That the earth did e'er suck in

Since the first man died for sin:

Here the bones of birth have cried—

'Though gods they were, as men they died.'

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings;

Here 's a world of pomp and state,

Buried in dust, once dead by fate.

James Shirley (1596-1666), Victorious Men of Earth

Victorious men of earth, no more

Proclaim how wide your empires are;

Though you bind in every shore

And your triumphs reach as far

As night or day,

Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey

And mingle with forgotten ashes, when

Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,

Each able to undo mankind,

Death's servile emissaries are;

Nor to these alone confined,

He hath at will

More quaint and subtle ways to kill;

A smile or kiss, as he will use the art,

Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.

PB Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Similar poems: Set 01

 Josuah Sylvester (1563-1618), Love's Omnipresence

Where I was base as is the lowly plain,

And you, my Love, as high as heaven above,

Yet should the thoughts of me your humble swain

Ascend to heaven, in honour of my Love.

Where I as high as heaven above the plain,

And you, my Love, as humble and as low

As are the deepest bottoms of the main,

Whereso'er you were, with you my love should go.

Were you the earth, dear Love, and I the skies,

My love should shine on you like to the sun,

And look upon you with thousand eyes

Till heaven wax'd blind, and till the world were done.

Whereso'er I am, below, or else above you,

Whereso'er you are, my heart shall truly love you.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), I Cannot Live with You

I cannot live with You – 

It would be Life – 

And Life is over there – 

Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to – 

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain – 

Like a Cup – 

Discarded of the Housewife – 

Quaint – or Broke – 

A newer Sevres pleases – 

Old Ones crack – 

I could not die – with You – 

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down – 

You – could not – 

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze – 

Without my Right of Frost – 

Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise – with You – 

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ – 

That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye – 

Except that You than He

Shone closer by – 

They’d judge Us – How – 

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to – 

I could not – 

Because You saturated Sight – 

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be – 

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame – 

And were You – saved – 

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not – 

That self – were Hell to Me – 

So We must meet apart – 

You there – I – here – 

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer – 

And that White Sustenance – 

Despair – 

Bullying records in school leaving certificates in South Korea

A kind of reverse bullying but perhaps will serve as a disincentive to every person who thinks about bullying in the first place.

Raphael Rashid, "‘We torment others’: the dark side of South Korean school life," The Guardian, 7 June 2023

Languages, hand counting cultures and mathematics

David Robson, ‘What’s the best language for learning maths?’ BBC Future, 26 May 2023.

Please see the video in the article. It discusses different hand counting cultures. If you have seen Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), you will know that it can be a matter of life and death.

Education and inequality

        One of the greatest features of the neo-liberal world order since the 1970s has been a rise in inequality. The top 1% has gotten exceedingly wealthier, the next 9% has gotten significantly wealthier, whereas the remaining 90% has more or less remained stagnant if we take into account inflation. The poverty line has not kept pace with inflation. Figures suggesting that the percentage of people below the poverty line has shrunk, have failed to keep in touch with the reality we see around us.
Basic literacy levels and the percentage of people acquiring increasing levels of education have increased. Yet our practical experience, especially in India, of the vast levels of illiteracy we see around us in the weakest sections of society convince us that the token school education that they may or may not have received has long since receded into oblivion owing to lack of practice and lack of a sustained years-long educational experience during their formative years.
The literacy rate was almost 73% in the 2011 census, growing about 1% every year since 1971. Such a growth rate would take the literacy rate close to 100% in roughly 2041 irrespective of whether censuses take place then or not. However, these figures need to be taken as most other figures—telling a story which we may or may not choose to believe in. Is the literacy rate around us 85% in 2023? Is that what our practical experience tells us? I would argue not, living though as I am in Kolkata. The 2011 census revealed that out of a population of 42 lakh in Kolkata above the age of 6, the number of illiterate people was roughly 23 thousand, or 0.5%. This does not bear resemblance to my personal experience of having lived in Kolkata for almost four decades.
Education is often seen as the only way to break free from the cycle of poverty. It is seen as a panacea for all evils—poverty, child marriage, crime, etc. Teachers in higher education in India regularly bemoan the unfitness of their pupils for higher education given their lack of basic language skills, numerical skills and socio-historical awareness skills. The fault is shifted to school education. Statistics reveal that poor student-teacher ratio, lack of basic amenities such as a roof in the classroom, gender-specific toilets in the school building, access to clean drinking water, electricity in the classroom—these affect a large number of public schools in India. Private education is expensive and better, though not always. Like any generalisation, this too can be countered by the numerous examples of high-performing public schools across India. However, those are exceptions rather than the norm. Guardians who can afford, tend to admit their wards in private schools unless there are high-performing public schools in their vicinity. Statistics will tell us that it is a trend that began with the rise of neo-liberalism and the shift away from thinking of education as public entitlement. The neo-liberal philosophy would argue that the public is entitled to nothing. Those who survive on government dole better make do with what they are provided. If they complain, they ought to earn more and spend extra to buy private services and commodities from the open market. You get what you pay for.
The problem with this philosophy is a large section of the people has very little disposable income. Education as a commodity has to vie with all the other commodities on offer. Given the low amount of disposable income, most people prefer to send their wards to public schools if there is one nearby which has any modicum of acceptability. However, with most public schools continuing to languish in abysmal conditions, people are often forced to borrow to send their schools to a private school in the hope of acquiring escape velocity and breaking free from the shackles of their cycle of poverty.
A lot of hope is pinned on education. Yet when these students enter a school, they are subject to similar forces that they face at home—pressures of poverty, caste, gender, sexual orientation, location, etc. The lottery of life is often decided in our very early years. The dice are loaded from the start. The idea of justice tells us that it should not be so. We should not be victims of the conditions of our birth. Yet, it often is so. Stories of individuals surmounting the odds stacked against them are what inspire us. However, we must always remember that they are exceptional individuals. The trajectory is not common. Such individuals and their stories find mention in the media and are often given prizes for the fact that they have managed to traverse a larger distance in the trajectory of growth than most of us.
Trying to surmount the challenges of poverty through education is tough. Also, it is a conundrum. For the majority of the school going population, does education exhibit the changing fortunes at home of the pupils or does a better-than-average educational process change the fortunes at home for the individual? In other words, those who succeed in getting out of the poverty trap—do they do so because of what they learnt at school or because their family’s income increased?
The media often report about individuals who manage to break free from the poverty trap through disreputable means. All criminals are not born poor. Some of them were even born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths. However, a majority of people outside the top 10% who resort to financial crime have low educational skills irrespective of whatever formal certificates they possess. Education failed them. Moreover, they failed themselves in living the ethical life.
What is the solution? Throwing money at the problem will not make it go away. The money, also importantly, is never enough to throw around. Should one invest more in higher education and hope the teachers beginning from nursery level that the higher education system turns out are better educated and hence better educators? It should be mentioned here than anganwadi workers do not require to pass through the portals of higher education and they are often among the first teachers of a large section of Indian children. It is neither necessary nor desirable to increase the minimum eligibility criteria for nursery level educators.
The other target area of investment can be the nursery, primary and secondary levels of the school education system. Given that it is the education in these early years, that the rest of the education trajectory is often formed, it is crucial to invest in it if one believes in education being the cure to all evils. The first national education commission’s 1966 report envisaged a 4% of GDP spending by the government on education. It has been almost 60 years since that report but the percentage of GDP spending by the government on education has been a bit more than 2.5%. The Scandinavian countries (where inequality is low, poverty is low and educational standards are high) spend 7-8%; Brazil 6%; Australia, the USA and Mexico around 5%; the UK, China and Russia around 4%. Underinvestment by the government in education reduces the total money that can be spent on education by the government be it at the school level or in higher education. It is unfair to compare India to the Scandinavian countries because of vast differences in their nature. However, if one thinks of Brazil, China and Russia (the BRICS grouping) as large countries with similar levels of development as India (though there are immense differences among these countries at all levels), then the Indian government’s spending on education is still low.
If the Indian government reduces its spending in other fields and increases it in education and achieves that 4% of GDP mark, will it make India a better country? The answer to this question cannot be predicted as it has never been done. However, just increasing the spending will not reduce inequality. That requires similarly increasing the spending on health and public housing and creating enough job opportunities all the while ensuring a stability of population and an ability to prevent deterioration of the natural environment and climate—in sum, the main goals of any government. Performing the main development goals of a government with an eye to reducing inequality requires minute changes which cannot be reduced by education alone.
Education alone can neither reduce poverty nor inequality. Rather the current status of education in India further exacerbates inequality by perpetuating the systems that are already in place. The corporate world regularly bemoans that Indian graduates are mostly unemployable. The experience is borne out by most educators as well except those in elite institutions. Increasing the amount of vocational courses in secondary and higher secondary schools is unlikely to solve the problem if the other problems of school education remain. If a large number of students are not benefitting from general education in schools, they are unlikely to benefit if the type of instruction is changed to vocational practical skills.
In order to reduce inequality, one should not look perhaps towards schools but rather to government policy as a whole.
Critics may argue that inequality is the basis of life. Two siblings going to the same school are unlikely to live the rest of their lives on an equal footing. They may argue that the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity is flawed. Fraternity left out the women; equality is impossible to achieve and often undesirable if one thinks of positive discrimination in order to aid the weak; and one person’s liberty is another person’s captivity. Yet the point remains that global income inequality that had decreased in the 1950s and 60s, started increasing again since the 1970s.
Improving school education is likely to bring the intangible benefits of education—knowledge, awareness about the world, better language and numerical skills. Beyond that, there is perhaps little else that improving school education can achieve on its own.

Studying Natural History at the secondary level

 Mary Colwell, ‘Life Lessons: Why a Natural History GCSE is being introduced,’ BBC Wildlife (22 April, 2022)

The ride of an options trader

I read

Alexander Hurst, ‘How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic – then lost it all,’ The Guardian, 4 November 2022

and

I remembered my stint with options trading, which was my first brush with the stock market, in 2015. I had just finished Varsity on Zerodha. My monthly UGC fellowship was Rs. 32,500. I was without a permanent job and my PhD literature survey was returning more misses than hits. I wanted to hit the big shot. Having learnt the basics, I thought all I needed to do was buy at the cheapest point, sell at the highest point, and earn a crore in a month. I thought having learnt the basics of the stock market, I had hit the jackpot--I had unlocked the secrets of Warren Buffett and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and their ilk. In August 2015, I put Rs. 20,629 (almost 15% my savings) in Nifty options, and I ended up with a loss of Rs. 18,977, that is a loss of 92%. I felt like digging a hole in the ground and burying myself. On expiry day, when I ended up with this loss, after 3:30 pm, I had to go out of the house and go somewhere. On the bus, I looked at all the faces in the bus. Did they not realise that the Nifty had dropped by 5% in the course of two trading days? The world, in all its August heat and brightness, seemed to go on. I, in my curtained room, was apparently living in a world of my own. I was reminded of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I was like Icarus, a tiny dot in the background, while the world, like the farmer, was completely unaware of my presence.

I hid this loss from my spouse for some time because I was so ashamed of having lost such a huge chunk of the family savings. I did confess to her later.

I tried again in September. I put in some money, and ended up with a profit of Rs. 10,000. I thought, I have managed to win back from the world what the world had taken from me. I thought let me recoup my remaining Rs. 9,000. I tried doing that and poured the remaining 85% of my savings in it. I went all out to recover that 9000. On the day before expiry day, at 2:30 pm, I saw my trades going deep in the red and I exited all the positions. I finished September with a total loss of Rs. 36,411. After 3 pm, the markets started going in the opposite direction. By the close at 3:45, there was a 3% upside from the low at 2:30 pm. Had I held on for 30 more minutes, I would have noticed the trade going in the different direction and I would have made a profit of 2 lakhs! Instead, I had lost Rs. 55, 430 over the course of two months whereas my monthly salary was Rs. 32,500.

The experience was one of the lowest points in my life. I realised that the stock market is irrational and beyond one's control. I deleted all emails related to the stock market (except a spreadsheet where I made detailed records for the sake of taxation and which I am using now to come up with these figures) and closed my Zerodha trading account. I even tried closing the ILFS demat account but it was a cumbersome process and that inactive demat account exists to this day. I gave up the idea of finding quick money and get rich-quick schemes and laboured through my PhD, applied for all reasonable jobs and managed to secure one in 2017.

By 2018, I realised, I had to pay income taxes for the first time in my life. I had had a bad experience with stocks and so stayed off them. I thought bonds were safer than stocks and with inflation adjustment in long term capital gains in bonds held for more than 3 years, I would be better off than fixed deposits. I invested Rs. 10,000 in January 2018 and have had an annual unrealised profit of 8.6%. I was not unhappy.

Then came the pandemic and the unheard of gains in the stock market in 2020. I was unsure whether I would keep getting my salary and so stayed out of it. But the greed got to me. In February 2021, I opened another demat and trading account with a different broker. I thought I would buy individual stocks and hold on to them for more than one year. I invested Rs. 30,000 in exactly 19 shares of 7 companies (all in the Nifty 50) over the course of one year. Then the market started going down. I exited 3 shares (of 2 companies) at 30% annual profit but I am holding onto 16 shares (of 5 companies) with most of them in losses.

I thought I had learnt my lesson. No more Nifty 50 direct stocks for me.

After I did my taxes for Financial Year, 2020-21, I realised that the government had made such rules that if I invested Rs. 50,000 every year in the NPS (in mostly a Nifty 50 index fund), I stood to make a lot of tax gains. Irrespective of my desire to have little to do with the stock market, here I am trying to time the market and invest Rs. 50,000 every year in the NPS.

I read Warren Buffett saying that in order to time the market, one has to be right twice. One has to know when something has reached the lowest and buy at that point of time, and when something has peaked, and sell then. Since, it is impossible to know either, and knowing two impossibles is beyond the realm of the possible, it is futile to time the market. Yet, here I am, having learnt perhaps nothing, being forced by taxation rules to give into this form of gambling.

I can fully empathise with whatever Alexander Hurst has written in the article mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Hum kaagaz zaroor dikhayenge

    The National Education Policy of 2020 has led to the establishment of an academic bank of credits where one can store one’s course completion progress verifiables and redeem them for a certificate, a diploma or a degree. Change is the only constant and if matters are unsatisfactory, as much of our education system is, we must strive to change it continually in order to achieve a more just education system. Striving towards the hitherto unknown is not the point of education. We do not wrench our hands in despair because we cannot stop the rotation of the earth. We do not expect our immediate education to achieve such unexpected seemingly impossible results. Education is often seen as a way of knowing what others already know and of catching up with them in terms of status, be it intellectual, social or financial. As an end-product of education, we seek the fairness that society otherwise denies us. It is debatable whether education exacerbates the inequalities that exist in society outside educational institutions or whether education is the panacea to undo the inequalities that beset society.
Striving towards universal literacy as a first step is a fairly modern state of affairs if one considers the history of humankind. Being literate and going through the educational system is something without which centuries of human beings have gone through, leading lives no less or no more happier than ours. What then is the point of education?
Certificates, diplomas and degrees—till recently these were only material objects and now they are soon to be available also in a demat form. What do they indicate? Do they indicate anything more than what a personal interview or a practical demonstration of skills can indicate? I would argue that the answer is no. However, interacting personally with applicants in the job sector or asking them to demonstrate their skills before hiring them is impractical. Hence, these verifiables. They are supposed to authenticate a certain standard and magnitude of satisfactory skills that job-seekers possess and that is required to complete the job that they are offering to do.
Till this new academic bank of credits churns out its first batch of certificates and diplomas, such verifiables indicated that their beholder had completed a course. Now, in addition to that meaning, they will also indicate that their possessor has failed to complete a course that they had signed up for. Instead of being solely a mark of achievement, they will also become a mark of failure. Dropping out of courses is like life. It happens. The academic bank of credits is being implemented in only the top institutions which follow the UGC’s mandate. The rank and file of the Indian higher education system is not required to follow them. Presumably, this is so because the authors of the NEP envisage that those who had managed to secure admission to the top institutions are the crème de la crème of the Indian school education system and hence they are savvy enough to drop out of a course and yet possess a set of skills that entrants to less distinguished institutions lack. The new certificates and diplomas will be a mark of failure but for those who will seemingly wear it as a badge of pride with an illustrious school education pedigree.
How to make the best of what is afoot and how may it be tweaked in order to further the idea of a more just education system? What to do with higher education drop-outs? Vocational education, which we need more of but which is often upheld as a second-grade alternative to the conventional three/ four/ five year undergraduate course, is an alternative but how to bring it into this system? Sajid Javid, the conservative UK politician, had school grades which were deemed low and he was offered a vocational educational track. He went on to change schools so that he could escape the vocational track which the educational system was offering him as the only choice. Changing schools led him onto a career path which made him one of the global heads of Deutsche Bank, a position one may argue more intellectually strenuous to get oneself into than that of a cabinet minister. Generally, opting for vocational education often signals the end of more bookish education.
If one is not aghast at offering vocational education to drop-outs from the top UGC-led institutions, one would see how the academic bank of credits is a good way to prevent drop-outs in higher education and also offer vocational education as a realistic career path.
Studying one year of humanities of a two or more year course, dropping out, and then leaving with a certificate is neither here nor there. Substitute the humanities with any other branch of study and the result is the same. One does not learn either the history of a literature or the fundamentals of a science or of a branch of engineering in one year. If all three/ four/ five year undergraduate courses were so arranged that all non-major subjects are studied only in the first year, then that would increase the chances that at the end of the first year when one becomes eligible to get at least a certificate, one has some basic knowledge of communication and the basics of the humanities, social sciences, sciences, commerce or any other stream. If the student drops out after having cleared the first year exams, handing over a certificate is unlikely to make it a useful verifiable. What is likely to prove useful is that those first year credits will be stored in the academic bank. S/he can utilise the time after dropping out to re-assess oneself and decide if s/he wants to re-enter higher education and if so, whether to pursue the same stream as earlier or a new stream. Year one of humanities basics, year two of science intermediate and year three of engineering advanced is impractical. However, year one of humanities basics, followed by year two of vocational intermediate and advanced is likely to prove more useful. Year one basics, if they do not focus on the core discipline courses but instead is all the minor, extra departmental general skill enhancement courses that are peppered throughout the current three/four/ five year structure, are likely to prove useful. Years two to higher should focus only on the core courses.
The year two exit point which is now going to hand over a diploma may similarly be re-designed. A diploma in the history of literature where one is aware of the history of literature in some eras but not in others or a diploma in computer science where one is aware of the ‘for’ loop and the two-dimensional array but not of the SQL database is unlikely to be useful. Year two must be designed in such a manner that it offers the complete basics of the core courses. Given my profession as a literature teacher, one suggestion would be to impart the skills required to scan lines of poetry, to identify figures of speech and form a general idea of the overview of literature as the subject matter of year two. If a student drops out after year two and decides that literature is not his/ her area of interest, a diploma in literature is unlikely to equip the student with skills which are perhaps necessary to teach literature in a school but it is perhaps enough to enable the student to pick a profession where language skills are required, for instance, as a mass communication professional.  Given the basics of extra departmental courses that s/he undertook in year one, the student would also have formed a general view of the stream that s/he enrolled in. The student should have an option to do year two of a vocational education course even then. The student may return to literature studies and complete year three and if there is a year four, then that too but if not, the student should be able to pursue vocational education and get down to the meat of it without re-doing basic general skills courses which most programmes contain.
The idea of the NEP to prevent drop-outs in higher education is noble. How best to execute it? Handing out verifiables which do not verify knowledge but rather that one passed some exams is unlikely to further the cause of Indian higher education. In the unequal world that we live in, more people are likely to possess a verifiable than earlier. Yet, the value of that verifiable would be paltry and the inequalities that education seeks to address would remain. What students need when they find themselves wandering and lost is to be pushed in a direction where they can find a more dignified way than the one they would have made their way into as a drop-out.

English departments in India by UGC-Special Assistance Programme status

As found through search engines on the internet

1. Centre of Advanced Study (CAS)
a) Jadavpur University (Phase 3)

2. Department of Special Assistance (DSA) 

a) University of Delhi (Phase 3)
b) Jawaharlal Nehru University (Phase 2)

c) University of Hyderabad (Phase 2)

3. Departmental Research Support (DRS)

a) University of Calcutta (Phase 3)

b) Jamia Millia Islamia (Phase 3)

c) Osmania University (Phase 2)

d) Vidyasagar University (Phase 2)

e) University of Kerala (Phase 2)

f) Tezpur University (Phase 2)

g) Visva Bharati University (Phase 2)

h) Aligarh Muslim University (Phase 2)

i) Panjab University

The legacy of David Attenborough

             His voice has enthralled millions across the world. His now-abandoned Instagram account was the fastest to be followed by a million people. He is often considered to have seen the most number of places in the world, starting his overseas sojourns soon after the Second World War when air travel started to become popular and seeing them before some of them disappeared from the face of the earth. The images that he brought alive on screen from the greenest jungles to the whitest polar regions to the bluest oceans with their giant whales and multicoloured marine life have made a large section of the TV watching population more aware of the earth and the various non-human species which inhabit it. He has been lucky enough to have enjoyed good health and be involved with a job he likes well into his late 90s. His work ethic is comparable to his Queen Elizabeth II, born seventeen days before him. The world, and its various species, has been lucky to have him around.
            His legacy may seem to mirror the smoothness of the vivid images which he presented on screen. Yet, there have been those who have had issue with his legacy. By presenting nature as undisturbed, was the urgency of climate change and the endangered nature of the landscapes and life he was presenting toned down? By travelling across the world and presenting uncommon images, was he enticing the rich to follow suit and did he threaten the sustainability of the environments he presented by attracting tourists?
            Son of an academic father and a mother who was interested in the arts, David Attenborough was born into a cultured household. By the time, he took up a job at the BBC, his elder brother Richard had already become a fairly well-known actor on both the stage as well as the screen. His early life and his initiation into the appreciation of the natural world have been recounted by him in various media to the point where his regular followers know there is little new to learn in another iteration of it. His discovery of ammonite fossils in commercial mines near his childhood home in Leicester, his father urging him to find out about them from the natural history museum and guiding him to seek knowledge from experts and find out on one’s own instead of being spoon-fed with answers on the tap, his reading of the nineteenth-century explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his acquired fascination for birds of paradise, studying zoology and geology at Cambridge and later studying social anthropology — these have been well-documented in his various memoirs.
            Much of his early work with the BBC does not survive owing to the limitations of technology and the cost of film reel during the 1950s. His career in the nascent medium of the television and with movie cameras placed him at the vanguard of technological advancements in the medium. Till date, pioneering visual reproduction techniques have been often used in natural history movie productions much before they have made their way to fiction movie productions.
            When we think of natural history movie productions, we think of the BBC’s natural history unit in Bristol. David Attenborough never worked for that unit. He was born in the greater London area and other than the period when his father was working at Leicester, he has maintained residence in the greater London area. Desmond Hawkins, a young producer in the BBC’s west region, started producing a series of programmes on natural history for the radio. He wanted to move to the television department and suggested starting a natural history unit in Bristol. Attenborough was invited to join the department but declined preferring to stay in London with the family he had just started. Thus began the sequence of long-distance collaboration of the BBC’s natural history unit and which continues to this day with its team of producers and film makers working across the globe but knowing that they will find a haven for their footage at Bristol. Even though the BBC has a licence fee to achieve some kind of balance in financial sheets, the pressures that a public service broadcaster faces has forced many of these filmmakers to find other outlets for their productions. American streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+ have taken on some such content to satiate the craving for natural history that exists across the globe but the sustained support and nurturing that the BBC provides is perhaps unique in the history of moving pictures.
            Natural history film making and watching may seem repetitive. Yet, with advancements in technology, the art of making and the details which one can watch keep changing all the time. Has the focus of Attenborough’s film making also changed with time? Surely it has. In the 1950s, one saw much more of him on the screen. He was there in the forest, on top of the tree, hidden in the bushes, with animals crawling over him. The 1950s were when the UK was still experiencing a loss of its colonies. But colonial trajectories and colonial projects and mindsets were very much enmeshed in the population of the UK. The journeys that Attenborough made in the 1950s were often to former colonies—to British occupied Guyana rather than French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese colonised Guiana, to Papua New Guinea rather than Indonesian Papua. His 1950s Zoo Quest series was, as the title, implied, about animals and zoos. Zoos or animals in captivity were far removed from animals in their natural habitat as portrayed in natural history film making. The Zoo Quest series was about collecting animals. One may even say stealing animals. This brings to attention the idea of using animals as museum collectibles, as an object to be stared at. Since the 1970s when climate change and environmentalism started to become significant issues globally, the idea of the zoo has changed drastically in some places whereas in some settings, it has remained similar to the idea of the menagerie of ancient times. Reading his 2002 Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (available both as a book to be read as well as in audiobook format read by Attenborough) may make the modern reader appalled and cringe at such blatant continuation of the colonial project. However, one must realise that to see is to be aware. When one thinks of scientific experimentation on animals which disappeared from public spectacle after the 1670s and was hidden behind the laboratory door or the rise of industrial meat farming and abattoirs in the nineteenth century which concealed some animals from public view, one realises that it has coincided with the change in human relationship to other species.
            David Attenborough’s most important legacy is to make people aware of the natural world. Without awareness of the variety of life on earth, we would have been less compelled to look at the larger picture of the perils of climate change. It is easy to think of one’s immediate surroundings as the be-all and end-all such as when the 45^th POTUS scorned at the idea of global warming because of a particularly frosty American east coast winter even though that year was the hottest year on earth recorded till then. To overcome such scepticism, often propounded by political leaders because of a combination of ignorance and vested interests and who have mass followings, the images are necessary to bring greater awareness. Images not only of sooty skies above industrial landscapes but also of the beauty of our planet, of the variegated clownfish, the almost-extinct brightly coloured corals, of the savannas and of the birds of paradise in the rainforests, and the Antarctic sea lions. In order to save the planet, we need to be empathetic to it and its beauty.
            Attenborough’s shift to raising environmental awareness, combining academia and accessibility, happened sometime in the late 1990s. Before that, in the 1970s, shortly after completing a postgraduate course in social anthropology, Attenborough also presented programmes about people and cultures, rather than on just animals. His A Blank on the Map (1971) about people in New Guinea was one such programme. A more accessible production of this kind is the 10-minute BBC radio episode titled ‘Adam’s Face’, Life Stories (2009). His first programme to deal exclusively with the human effect on the natural world was State of the Planet in the year 2000. It may be that the programme should have been made twenty years earlier. Late to bring this to the scene he may have been, but he has been at it ever since. Natural history film making is now much more collaborative and is a much larger team effort than it was in the 1960s when it was just Attenborough and a few of his colleagues. Attenborough is often now the writer of his shows and sometimes he contributes with only his comforting voice as the narrator. His on-screen appearance is limited to a sequence or two and is a minuscule portion of the total recording that took place. Yet he is there to bring home the message. The 2020 David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet had him shooting in the abandoned ruins of Chernobyl.
            He shot a few programmes in India in 1960. Since then, he has returned to India to shoot various programmes. He has been awarded with honours in India as well. Biju Patnaik, in the half century after independence, had been associated with the annual Kalinga Prize for the Popularisation of Science. After awards to Julian Huxley in 1953 and Konrad Lorenz in 1969, David Attenborough was awarded this UNESCO prize in 1981. More recently, shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic began and most of the world went into lockdown, the Indira Gandhi prize, which was set up shortly after the death of Indira Gandhi, was awarded to Attenborough. The trustees perhaps had the occasion to watch some of his productions in the lockdown. The Year Earth Changed (2021), about the restorative effects of the lockdown, had him just as the narrator. He may have been late in alerting his viewers to the biggest threat to this planet but perhaps his viewers should not be late in acknowledging the joy of awareness that is brought into the lives of millions of TV viewers by David Attenborough.