THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER - JO ANN BEARD

https://youtu.be/VkNIMtLUAG8

Jo Ann Beard (B 1955) is an  American Creative nonfiction writer, essayist, journalist and novelist. When she was working as an editor for the space-physics department's monthly publication in the University of  Iowa, the 1991 shooting massacre took place there. Her 'Fourth State of Matter'  that was published in ‘The New Yorker' in 1996, focuses on her grief, loss and shock of that incident. It also probes and investigates the violent shooting perpetrated by Gang Lu, a physics student, against five colleagues. Before he committed suicide. 

The Red Room - H. G. Wells

 

https://youtu.be/cmHIrTkgZ-Q

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), the 'Father of Science Fiction' was a celebrated English writer.  'The Time Machine' (1895), 'The War of the World' (1898) and 'The Invisible Man' (1897) of him depict futuristic ideas like time travel, invisibility and alien invasion.  His short story 'The Red Room', is a gothic story that explores the themes of fear, superstition and the power of mind.  It also stresses the need for developing rational beliefs and scientific temperament.

C.V. Raman as a Science Communicator : A Historical Perspective - G.V. Pavan Kumar

https://youtu.be/-VR5CV2oOcQ

Sir Chandra Sekhara Venkata Raman was one of India's most renowned scientists and Nobel Prize winner.  Moreover, he was an outstanding educator and a captivating public speaker.  Here, in "C.V. Raman as a science communicator : A historical Perspective," G. V. Pavan Kumar, the prominent physicist, explains how Raman's strong dedication to research. Apart from this, he also explores Raman's initiatives to popularize science and make it more exciting through his effective public talks and lectures.

A Day in the Country - Anton Chekhov

 

https://youtu.be/2HV076qTApg

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a renowned Russian dramatist and short story writer.  It was his profound knowledge of human nature and his unique depictions of ordinary life placed him among the great writers.  Actually, Chekhov was a physician by profession.  His well known plays are 'The Seagull' (1896), 'Uncle Vanya' (1897), and 'The Cherry Orchard' (1904).  His most popular short stories are 'The Bet', 'The Lady with a Dog' and 'The Complaints Book'.  In 'A Day in the Country' Chekhov depicts the link between people and their environment in an excellent way.  Though the incidents seem to be ordinary, they are of incredibly insightful experiences in every way.

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

 

 

https://youtu.be/tCyCp-xO2Is

Wendell Berry (B.1934) is a renowned writer, committed farmer and environmental Advocate from the United States.  He has authored over 50 books and won T. S. Eliot prize and the National Humanities Medal.  he is of the opinion that humanity must learn to live in harmony with the earth's natural rhythm.  In the poem, "The Peace of Wild Things", he shares a personal journey of finding solace in nature's embrace.

Light on a Dark Lady - Anne Piper

 

https://youtu.be/nxbhWYS0uXI

Roasalind Franklin (1920-1958), who had an untimely death due to cancer in 1958, a forgotten heroine, 'The dark lady of DNA'in the history of science, was a British chemist and an X-ray crystallographer.  She had her substantial contributions to the understanding of the molecular structure of 'DNA (deoxyribonucleic Acid), RNA (Ribonucleic Acid), viruses, coal and graphite.  Anne Piper, a close friend of Rosalind Franklin  and a renowned intellectual, talks about the gender bias that affected Rosalind Franklin's work and recognition in 'Light on a dark lady', especially, how her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were totally unrecognized during her life in the male dominated field.

Science and Dogma - Pushpa. M. Bhargava

 

https://youtu.be/dBAIbZ-_ze4

Dr. Pushpa Mittra Bhargava (1928-2017) who was a visionary, scientist, writer, thinker, institution builder and a strong proponent of scientific temper, was actually a fearless torch bearer of  rationalism and humanism. He was the founder director of Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. 'Science and Dogma' is an essay by Pushpa. M. Bhargava, featured as the twelfth chapter in the book 'Angels, Devils and Science'.  In this essay, Bhargava highlights the conflict between Scientific understanding and dogmatic beliefs, and talks about the need of questioning the dogmatic beliefs and accepting the scientific understanding for the true progress.

The dangers of climate change - Carl Sagan

 

https://youtu.be/TCb4wJ6QoVo

Carl Edward Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. His notable works are Cosmos (1994).  'The dangers of climate change', is an excerpt taken from the fourth chapter of 'Cosmos', his famous book with a fine blend of science and Philosophy.  Here, he discusses how both natural and human activities have shaped and will continue to shape the Earth's environment.

Secularism and Scientific Temper - Dr. Pushpa M Bhargava

 

https://youtu.be/vrCCSuwrpPQ 

THE LAST STAND - Peter Von Puttkamer

 

 

https://youtu.be/kOOhLTcox_o

‘The last Stand’ is a documentary film directed by Peter Von Puttkamer, that deals with the environmental issues and the need to save the world’s last remaining ancient forest at Fairy Greek, British Columbia, Canada.  Experts like Wade Davis and Leila Salazar Lopez speak about the impact trees and plants have on our atmosphere.  The film reveals the need to protect the habitat while utilizing the resources in our territories.  It also talks about the solutions like building Carbon retaining technology from Silicon Valley Companies and about the things average citizens can do to save forest and the planet. 

Unfortunately with in a few centuries, one third of the world’s old growth forests have disappeared.  As trees act as biological pumps pulling water from the soil then moving it into the atmosphere, they have a cooling effect.  Thus it controls temperatures allowing animals to survive and sheltering abundance of life from fungi to millions of insects.  Having realized this, a battle was waged in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada to protect the last precious old growth forests in Fairy Greek water shed, against the logging Company Teal Jones, that was granted permission to cut down the rare old cedars and Douglas Firs there.  However, even after getting a court injunction by the logging company, Steve Andrews, the environmental photographer and other activists continued their protests. 

Similar protest is done by Amazon watch, headed by Laila Salazar Lopez along with Amazonian indigenous people to prevent industry and agri business from destroying Amazon forests.  They have brought to the jungle the celebrities like director James Cameron and Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and have invited the world attention to help stop rainforest destruction.  The similar tropical jungle destruction is also going on in south east Asia for the wide spread of palm oil plantations there.  Teal Jones logging company and others have replanting programmes.  But as they grow woods with monoculture seeding, it can’t conserve and preserve the integrity of ecosystem.  So, there happens an ecological down grade.  Little brown bat like creatures can’t survive.  Lichen like things have been affected.  Thus, the damages done are beyond healing.  So, prevention is better than cure policy should be followed here. 

According to Herb Hammond, a professional forester, wheat fields are actually grass lands that lack biological diversity but an old growth forest is a self-sustaining eco system. So, they should be preserved.  Moreover the trees that are thousands of years old have gained the power to be resistant and resilient and they have over come the climate changes.  Wild fires in Amazon are unfortunately intentional that are set to make way for agribusiness.  With in 30 years in Brazil alone cattle ranching driven by international meat packing companies has destroyed more than 7,30,000 square kms. of rain-forest.  Soya bean cultivation too, does the same there.  Moreover, the Amazon forest fires are leading to the drought. 

Maddie Hall and Patrick Mellor of Silicon Valley company ‘Living Carbon’ are progressing with their creating genetically engineered trees that will hold more carbon to face the climate change.  The non-pollinating, safe, fast growing trees are capable of having large carbon removal.  In this way technology will find a solution to the problem we face.  But it is up to all of us to do something we can do, to save the tree, to save the forests, to save the nature and thereby save ourselves and our generation.

Thulasidharan V. 

 

 

Above Pate Valley - Gary Snyder

 

https://youtu.be/8KdWPvdBdu0

 Gary Snyder (b:1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer and environmental activist.  Snyder is a winner of Pulitzer Prize for poetry and is described as ‘The Poet laureate of Deep ecology’.  As a young man, he spent his summers laying traits in the Sierras, Yosemite, where he began writing his first poems and published.  Yosemite, that includes Pate valley, is a National park in 3027 sq.km that was established in 1890.  This area is said to be occupied 10,000 years ago by the ancestors of Awahnechee tribes.  After the Mariposa war in 1851, the tribes were removed from there.  Yosemite is blessed with incredible rock formations like El Capitan, the world’s tallest granite monolith along with 3000 years old Sequoia trees and the likes. 

In the poem ‘Above Pate Valley’, that is taken from Snyder’s debut Riprap, Snyder describes his working on a trail crew in the mountains. Here, he talks abut the incredible rock formations, the fertility of soil, the magic of animals and his finding an obsidian arrow head flake.  He also talks about the profound insights that he derived from them and its making him realize the archaic values of Earth and his connection with nature. 

The poet and other members in the crew completed the last section of the trail by noon, on the ridge that was 2000 feet above the creek.  Then they began to walk through the Pine groves and reached a green meadow. Though the sun was blazing there, the  air was cool.  There they sat and ate cold fried trouts.  Then the poet found an obsidian, a flake volcanic glass from the ground.  On their moving through the bear grass, they found a lot of flakes, arrow heads.  They might have been used by the tribes, who lived there in the previous centuries, in their weapons and arrows.  Actually, that part of the land was said to be the land of fat summer deers.  By using their trails, they even visited the poets camp too. The poet and the likes with the help of drill, pick, single jack and dynamite made their trails and reached that place.  Similarly, the tribes are said to be reached there ten thousand years ago, through the trails that they had made then.  In this way the Pate valley and Sierra Nevada mountains have been remaining there from the time immemorial and still allow others to invade. 

Thus the poem highlights the grandeur and immensity of nature, the continuity and interconnectedness of human existence with the natural world.  Snyder’s skillful use of imagery that creates a sensory experience in the minds of the readers helps to explore the themes of time, human existence and the interconnectedness of all things. 

-----Thulasidharan V

Questioning The Universe - Stephen Hawking

 

 

https://youtu.be/_G_zCSqdcOs

Stephen William Hawking (1942-2018) was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.  He authored ‘The universe in a nutshell (2001) and ‘A brief history of Time’(2005). When he was doing his graduation at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with the motor neurone disease that gradually, paralyzed him with in a decade.  After the loss of speech, he communicated through a speech generating device, in the beginning through the use of a handheld switch and at the end by using a single cheek muscle.  Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. 

Songs and stories of the world - Kaleidoscope - Part - 3 - Module - III - Plays - Module - IV - Prose & Speech

 

https://youtu.be/kRKVsfj8F1M

Module – III – Plays

The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 1 (The log, Scene) William Shakespeare

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the band of Avon, is hailed as the Universal dramatist.  He wrote 154 sonnets, 39 plays and three narrative poems.  He continues to be the most widely read studied and critically analyzed writer of all ages.  His plays are translated to all ‘living languages’ of the world.  His play ‘The Tempest’ is regarded as his swansong.  Prospero, the Duke of Milan was usurped by his brother Antonio, lives in a Mediterranean Island with his only daughter Miranda Prospero using his magical powers creates storms and torments the survivors of the shipwreck.  Among them, Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples, is one who falls in love with Miranda.  It is beautifully visualized in the 1^st scene of the third act of ‘The Tempest’ that is called as the log scene here.

Ferdinand is given the work of piling up the logs by Prospero. Though he is not used to such hard labour of removing thousands of logs, the sweet thoughts of Miranda refresh his labour.  Miranda enters then and says as her father Prospero is at study, he will come only after three hours.  So, she asks him to take rest while she does the work for him.  But Ferdinand refuses and their further talk makes them fall in love with each other.  Ferdinand says as she is so perfect and peerless, at the very moment he saw her, he fell in love with her.  On hearing these words, Miranda weeps and says that she is a fool to weep then. Though she hasn’t seen any men other than her father, she wants only Ferdinand. The couple touches and takes each other’s hands and pledges their love.

Prospero, who is watching all these without their knowing it, prays Heaven to rain grace on the two lovers and leaves. Actually, Prospero is the architect of the love story of Ferdinand and Miranda who has already preplanned all these.  Miranda is a living representation of female virtue blessed with beauty and kindness.  Moreover Prospero believes that he can reverse all that happened twelve years ago by their marriage.  Thus the log scene of ‘The Tempest’ becomes the scene of love and reconciliation.

 

 Module – IV – Prose and Speech

Getting Up on Cold Mornings – Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the contemporary of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt was a great poet, journalist, critic and essayist. He wrote on a diverse range of topics with epistolary style. His humourous and delightful essays were published in ‘the Indicator, ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Examiner’. In ‘Getting Up on a Cold Morning’, Hunt describes one’s reluctance to get up on cold mornings as a ‘hellish torture’, in a mock serious way.  As there were no snowy winters before the sinning, Hunt accuses the sinning of Adam and Eve was the reason for this.

Hunt begins his essay ‘Getting up on a Cold Mornings’ with Giulio Cordara, an Italian writer and a Jesuit, who wrote a poem about insects, the troublesome creatures that were created to annoy the humans after the Sinning.  Everyone knows that it is pleasant to life in bed on cold mornings and no one wants to get up early until and otherwise there is a compulsion.  Actually the sudden transition is a hellish torture like the dragging out of the lost soul is by harpy-footed furies from fire and thrusting them into ice.  The reason behind all these is the sin of Adam and Eve.

When Hunt is asked to get up in a cold morning to shave by his servant, he asks him to bring hot water and waits for the hot water to cool down.  Thus he postpones his getting up.  Only slaves and business men who are mad after money would get up in the cold morning.  He remarks the poet Thomson, who used to get up at noon.  He also says as there are no proofs that early rising is good for health and longevity of life, we need not follow it. Really, a sudden change in temperature on our getting up in a cold morning brings shock to the body and thereby affects good health.  Moreover, on talking about the longevity of life, he says that Holborn, the longest street in London is not beautiful.  So, all long things are not beautiful.  In this way he concludes that a short life with joys of late rising is better than a long life with the suffering of early rising of cold mornings.  However, at the end of his essay he says it is up to the readers whether his suggestion is to be accepted or to be rejected. Thus, in an amusing way he concludes his essay ‘Getting up on a Cold Morning’.

 

 Crediting Poetry – Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) who won Nobel Prize in 1995 for literature is a major modernist poet of the 20^th century.  He was born in Northern Ireland in a family of farmers and cattle sellers.  He was a prolific writer and critic and authored over twenty volumes of poetry, including ‘North’(1975) and ‘Seeing Things’(1991), where he reflected the violent political struggles between the catholic republicans and the protestant unionists between 1968 to 1988. ‘Crediting Poetry’ is the lecture he delivered at the Swedish Academy on his getting the Nobel Prize, where he credits poetry that helped him realize the voice of truth and to see the rightness of the world.

Heaney began his speech talking about his three-roomed traditional thatched farmstead in rural Londonderry in 1940s. In their childhood days they used to hear the sounds of the horse in the stable and the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen.  The aerial wire that came from the chestnut tree to the room brought the news through the voice of the news reader of the Radio Eireann (Irish Radio).  Then he loved Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn’ for its language. In his adulthood he loved Hopkins’s poems for the intensity of exclamation and Robert Frost’s poems for his accuracy and his down-to-earthiness.  Then he began t o love the poems of Wilfred Owen and Patrick Kavanagh. Thus he realized the poetry’s ability and responsibility to say what happens and how they affect the society.

Heaney also mentioned the killing of the Protestant workers who were returning home in a mini bus in 1976 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).  Similar attacks were done to Catholics by Protestant paramilitaries.  Here, Heaney referred to Homer who compared the tears of a wife on the battle field for the death of her husband to the tears of Odysseus for his men.  As Homer’s image brings the people to their senses, Yeats’s poetry too reveal the contemporary savagery in his words, ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare’.  So, the poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It helps us to choose the rightness from the wrongness all around. Thus Heaney credits poetry for its poetic form and poetic power.

----Thulasidharan V