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Dwarakish, a showman whose passion fuelled a golden period in Kannada cinema
KARNATAKA : ARTS & CRAFTS: “TFA Award Winner for Creative Writing in Kannada”, Naveen Tejaswi: ‘Privilege has a lot to do with making art’
Winner of the TFA Award for Creative Writing in Kannada, Naveen Tejaswi, talks about his attempts to be heard in a language he understands.
“If someone asks me ‘Why do you make films?’ I tell them it’s because it has everything I like — music, photography and acting,” says Naveen Tejaswi. Naveen may have won an award for Creative Writing in Kannada from TOTO Funds the Arts, but behind that unassuming mien lies a creative soul who expresses himself through theatre, photography and films.
Hailing from Hosabale in Shivamogga, Naveen is a first generation student from his family and after completing his primary education from his village, came to Bengaluru to pursue a BSc degree from St Joseph’s College.
“I wanted to become a scientist, but after a while I realised that though I was good at it, I did not enjoy it.“
“If someone asks me ‘Why do you make films?’ I tell them it’s because it has everything I like — music, photography and acting,” says Naveen Tejaswi. Naveen may have won an award for Creative Writing in Kannada from TOTO Funds the Arts, but behind that unassuming mien lies a creative soul who expresses himself through theatre, photography and films.
Hailing from Hosabale in Shivamogga, Naveen is a first generation student from his family and after completing his primary education from his village, came to Bengaluru to pursue a BSc degree from St Joseph’s College.
“I wanted to become a scientist, but after a while I realised that though I was good at it, I did not enjoy it.“
Launchpad
“I was doing theatre in college and had started watching films. I had come to Bangalore in 2014, and would watch English movies everyday with subtitles to learn the language. Soon, I fell in love with the media.”
His stay in the city brought him exposure to world cinema, literature and photography, which only fuelled his creativity as he used to write poems, essays and short stories in Kannada, even as a youngster.
Naveen used to work part-time jobs in college and when he earned enough, he gifted himself a second hand DSLR camera and began taking photographs, eventually gaining a proficiency in it.
Today, Naveen writes and directs films casting people from his village. So far, Naveen has directed four short films and all of them done the festival circuit. Bidugade (Redemption) was a finalist at KIKSFF at California in 2019 and The Sicklehook was the official selection for EFF, Khanty Mansi in Russia for 2018.
More recently, his short film Habba Haridina Suggi Shivaratri was released on YouTube after it was rejected for its politics by a few film festivals.
“Over a 100 people from my village have been part of my films shot with minimal or borrowed equipment. They say it takes a village to raise a child — the same holds true for homegrown cinema. I call these my sustainable films.”
Though his short stories and films are in Kannada, “Last year I started writing in English too,” says Naveen, adding, “Called Track One, it won the Barbra Naidu prize for personal essay writing.” It motivated him to keep writing despite initial setbacks. Today, that story is part of St. Joseph’s Communicative English syllabus.
“When I first started writing, I used the dialect of my village because that’s what I think in. But when it came to validation — from established writers or professors, they couldn’t connect to those language patterns and nuances.”
Naveen turned down an offer to publish his stories in 2018 because the editors wanted to bring in a lot of changes to the language and approach to make it more suitable. That put a spanner in his imaginative works for almost five years. “During that time I battled with confusion on confidence on what is accepted and what is not. There were no other examples or a reference to the context of social, economic or political background of my village in mainstream media, making it harder to be accepted.”
In 2023, I finally decided to couldn’t stifle it any longer, couldn’t wait for the world to say it was okay. So I started writing again. These stories are set in my village which has 300 houses. Of these, perhaps 10 belong to members of the Brahmin community who are the landowners, while the rest of us work for them. We are the first generation to go to school and my stories look at the lives of people in the village.
Writer’s clock
Naveen has been working on a collection of short stories set in his village. “I’m interested in contemporary films and literature. I want to know how different artistes are seeing the world we are living right now.”
His winning entry for the TOTO Award were two stories from that collection.
“I believe the stories we tell or create stem from the place we live our experiences. Though there are famous writers in Kannada, due to their socio-political backgrounds, I couldn’t relate to their work. As a first generation student from an oppressed caste, and even while growing up, I would wonder why the stories of those around me were rarely found in any media.”
He agrees that Art imitates Life, and that, “people in pop culture exist too, but their stories are not real for me. I cannot relate to the things they do. I have come to understand that privilege has a lot to do with making art.”
He goes on to elaborate, “Art takes a lot of time and resources. For someone coming from a privileged background these things come easily.”
TFA wins
Talking about the stories which won the TFA Award, Naveen says, “One story is called ‘Suraghi’— it’s a flower whose fragrance lingers for days even after it dries, but it is not used as a temple offering. The story is about a father and his daughter. The father like his father before him have been workers in a Brahmin family for generations now. The story is from the daughter’s point of view — she wants to become a pilot when she grows up.”
“The other story is ‘Bangara,’ also the name of a flower called gold-petalled dahlia in English. This is a story about a mother and her daughter. The mother is a single parent and like most women in our village, after her day as a daily wage earner, she sits with them to dehusk areca from 9pm-11pm to supplement her income.”
“This lady is 60 years old now, and her daughter is married and living away. The mother wants to spend more time with her grandchild but not able to. The story explores the dynamics of their relationship, the gap caused by liking and disliking certain things about each other.”
Both ‘Suraghi’ and ‘Bangara’ won the TFA Award for Creative Writing in Kannada this year. At his acceptance speech, Naveen said he would be using the award money to start an art centre in his village. “It’s called Bheema Shale and on April 6, 2024, we will officially launch the centre where we will conducts a camp for spoken English and music.
“My friends from Adavi, a Bengaluru-based collective will teach us to play the tamate (a hand drum), while I will take the English class.”
The TOTO Awards were instituted 20 years ago by Toto Funds the Arts, a non-profit trust set up in 2004 in memory of Angirus ‘Toto’ Vellani. The annual Toto Awards are intended to encourage and recognise potential in artists under the age of 30.
source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)
Digital database on Indian flora launched at Bengaluru’s IISc
Sankara Rao, Visiting Professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), launched “India Flora Online”, a digital database of the flora of India on Monday at the IISc.
The database, which is the country’s most comprehensive attempt to document its plant wealth, “fulfils the country’s need of bringing the country’s plant or floral wealth into one searchable source,” said Professor Rao, in an earlier interview with The Hindu.
“It is the culmination of many years of hard work,” said Usha Vijayaraghavan, Dean, Biological Sciences, IISc., at the launch event. She added that the initiative builds on the individual collection of Father Cecil Saldanha, who worked at CES in the eighties. “Individuals matter and individuals who care about plant diversity, plant ecosystems, and cataloguing what is present now, preserve for research tools of the future.“
In his presentation, Prof. Rao took the audience through the database. “Access to information on plants creates a sense of connection with nature which is necessary,” said Prof. Rao. “We do not know as much as we think we know about the floral diversity in our country.”
Evolutionary ecologist and conservation biologist Kamal Bawa, founder of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), who was also present at the event, commended Prof. Rao’s work and remarked: “I think this effort is very worthwhile and going to result in a resurgence of interest in plant biology in India.”
source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)
‘Indocleftcon’ to be organised from April 18 to 20 in Mangaluru
INDOCLEFTCON, the annual conference of the Indian Society of Cleft Lip, Palate, and Craniofacial Anomalies will be organised in Mangaluru from April 18 to April 20 to bring together cleft lip professionals for discussion and deliberations.
Society president K. Mustafa and conference organising committee chairman Manjunath Rai said in a statement here on Friday, April 12, that the theme of the conference would be ‘merging boundaries.’ Keeping in mind the theme, the society intends to propagate modern concepts and team-based approaches to develop a better understanding between various specialities providing cleft care. The conference would be a blend of pre-conference courses, scientific lectures, panel lectures and debates.
Founder and director of Healing Lives, UAE, Jani Vishwanath Jagtiani, and playback singer Sannidhanandan will attend the inaugural programme at 6 p.m. on April 18 at the Indiana Convention Centre in the city.
source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)
IIIT-B develops tech to empower blind students, aims to promote inclusivity
“Today a lot of visually impaired students cannot continue their education with their other fellow mates in schools, owing to their disability.
According to a report published in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology in 2022, there is an estimated 4.95 million blind persons and 70 million vision-impaired persons in India, out of which 0.24 million are blind children. However, this number could soon become less of a hindrance for the visually impaired as students from the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) developed a first-of-its-kind technology to help vision-impaired students get a seamless learning experience in physical classrooms.
Mayank Kabra, a final year M.Teach student with his peers– Divyansh Singhal, Chinmay Sultania, Soham Pawar and Anshul Maduwar made this cost-effective technology to promote inclusivity in all educational institutions and has also acquired a patent for ‘System and method for assisting the visually impaired.’
“Today a lot of visually impaired students cannot continue their education with their other fellow mates in schools, owing to their disability. There are no solutions for it yet, either one has to invest in a very expensive device, study separately or discontinue their education, told Kabra to TNIE. He added that they wanted to address this issue and help the visually impaired to have a seamless learning experience.
“The idea was to create something that would help the visually impaired track what professors are teaching in live classes. The technology comes with hardware which is mounted on the finger and uses a digital board. When the student puts his/her finger on a flat surface, the board is virtually mapped on it. The vibration inside the finger device will help them trace the shape of the diagrams, figures or text on the digital board,” explained Kabra.
The device works on a six-dot braille system, tiny motors and microcontrollers. The device is as heavy as an oximeter that was used during COVID-19. He further added that the device is equipped with braille dots, allowing the user to understand the text in real time. These devices will be connected through Wi-Fi or the local board to transfer information. The team has been working for about a year on the device. Kabra informed that similar devices in the market are valued at over Rs 50,000, however, this one will be cost-effective and accessible to all groups in the society.
The finger-mounted device is built keeping in mind school children as they are the first ones to drop out of pursuing formal education. The IIIT-B team is looking at testing it in some schools and NGOs, with a firm belief that it would need only basic adjustments and children can activate it with just a button’s click. The team is looking for collaborators who will help them manufacture the device on a large scale and take it to the public.
source/content: newindianexpress.com (headline edtied)