Berlin-Notes-III

How quickly time flies especially when you are not looking! The last two weeks have been quite interesting. While life on the secondment front has been a little quiet, with most of the work being the initial background research work for a new documentary film, it has been an instructive process nonetheless into how a documentary film takes shape.

First, I had a long discussion with Antonia, the founder of Loupe where I’m doing my secondment, on how documentary film production works in Germany, the commissioning system, the TV channels that buy or fund the documentaries and the budgets involved. Based on this and other discussions there are possibilities of collaboration with Loupe shaping up with two potential film projects on the anvil!

In between I got to go with Anne Schönharting, a German photographer, on two of her portrait assignments. While I didn’t have to do much it was interesting to see another photographer in action, especially on assignment shooting strangers and the methods she used to get a good portrait. This is something I’m not so good at so it was a good way to pick up some tricks and tips. No wonder then that Anne has shot some great portraits!

On a photo shoot with Anne

One evening I went for what I thought would be a very good discussion on ‘Art & Social Media: a long distance relationship?’ which was being organized as part of the Social Media Week and featured at least on paper some very interesting people from the art world in Berlin. Unfortunately, it turned out to be quite tepid and boring as there was nothing new in the discussion. Yes, we all know the art world needs to engage more with and make better use of social media. But at least I got a free t-shirt for my trouble!

At a Berlin Social Media Week event

Through Antonia, I managed to reach Joern, Head-Press Relations, WWF-Germany and through him got an offer to travel up to the Baltic sea to see seals, the largest carnivores in Germany! Needless to say, I jumped at the offer. So early morning on Wednesday I found myself on a train with Thomas, the cameraman for the shoot, to Stralsund, the coastal city that lies on the Baltic Sea. At Stralsund, we met up with Britta, Press Officer of WWF-Germany based in Hamburg and Catherine, the WWF-Germany researcher based in Stralsund who is in charge of a conservation project for the seals.

From Stralsund we drove to the island of Rugen. From there we went on a boat out into the sea. It is a beautiful coast, quite well known for the beaches on the nearby sea resort town of Binz as well as for the mysterious white chalk cliffs on the other side of the island. The boat ride was a little rough as the sea was choppy with a keen wind trying its best to throw us off course. But we made it to the spot where the seals had been sighted previously. Unfortunately, as expected because of the rough sea, the rocks on which they are usually seen were under water. But the seals did not disappoint us too much.

Berlin Notes II

So yesterday and today were quite hectic. Yesterday afternoon, I met an old friend for lunch. She was my senior in University and we were meeting after many years so it was good to catch up. We had some very nice Italian food and as it was a lovely and warm day went walking via the Museuminsel, an island in the Spree river that houses world famous museums like Pergamon and Bode, to Hackescher Markt and Alexanderplatz areas of Berlin which are these really nice open squares. Alexanderplatz, formerly part of East Berlin, also has the really huge fernsehturm or TV tower that is iconic for Berlin.

Bode Museum

In the evening I then went to meet my co ATSA fellow Rashmi Dhanwani, who is doing her secondment at the 11th International Literature Festival that is currently taking place in Berlin. We attended a few sessions, one on the limits of freedom of speech which had Fleming Rose, the person responsible for publication of the Danish Cartoons that created such a furore sometime back, another session on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the best session of all, an interesting discussion with Pankaj Mishra on how Indian society is dealing with increasing modernity. Later, we went and had a couple of drinks in the writer’s tent and engaged in some nice conversation with some very interesting Indian, Bangladeshi, Hungarian and New Zealander writers and poets including Altaf Tyrewala and Peter Zilahy who were so nice to talk to! So all in all a productive day.

The famous TV Tower of Berlin

Today my secondment started. As part of the secondment, which I’m doing with Loupe, I’ll be looking in on the post production of a film they have made from tomorrow onwards. I’ll also accompany them on a film shoot if possible. And whenever I find time I’ll be doing some background research for one of their upcoming films.

Through Antonia, who started and manages Loupe, I met today Anne Schönharting, one of the photographers who is managed by a well known photo agency called Ostkreuz, which was started by a group of 7 former East German photographers. I’ll also accompany Anne on a portrait shoot one of these days.

Berlin Diary I

Late last year, I received an ARThink South Asia Fellowship from the Goethe Institut for the year 2011-12. One of the components of the fellowship is that I get to go to Germany and work with a cultural institution of my choice to gain some first hand experience on how art institutions are run. So this is where I’m at now. For the next 4-5 weeks I’ll be based in Berlin. I’ll be on a secondment with a documentary film production company called Loupe for 3 weeks and for the remaining week and in between will be trying to meet people in the photography field.

During the time I’m in Berlin I’m supposed to record observations of my time and learning here so for the next one month this is what I’ll be doing, hopefully on a regular basis. And now, after this explanatory prologue, the first installment follows:

So after all the last minute hassles I made it to Berlin after two tiring flights with a stopover in Helsinki (see photo). Dog tired due to the lack of sleep and the bad seats I got on the flights so feeling slightly numb now even though coming back to Germany should have been a little emotional.

As an aside, some of Finnair’s ground staff at the T3 New Delhi seriously need lessons in courtesy! The lady who gave me my boarding pass was rude, uncommunicative, did not give me a seat of my choice on both the flights (I was seated in the middle next to a really fat guy on the flight to Helsinki even though I asked for aisle seating on the window side) and to top it did not even inform me that I had not got my seating of choice! I only found out after I got on to the plane.

Waiting at the Helsinki Airport for a connecting flight

Moving on, for the time I’ll be in Berlin I’m sharing the flat of a German lady. It is a very nice and big place, one of those old Berlin flats with rather high ceilings having ornate work on them. The floors are wooden and make a nice creaking sound as you walk on them. The silence in the house takes a little getting used to though. I’m so used to the soothing hum of a fan while sleeping that when I was living in Germany before I bought a table fan just so I could run it for the background noise and sleep easily! I guess that won’t be possible this time so goodbye easy sleep.

The shimmering red curtains of my room!

From Pobitora to Manas

An eye witness account of the translocation of rhinos carried out in Assam between 27-29 Dec 2010 and 17-19 Jan 2011.

Note: An edited version of this was first published as a special feature in the Jan-March 2011 edition of Panda.

Prologue

It is 5 am on a Tuesday morning, towards the end of 2010, and a thick fog conceals the vast grasslands of the Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary, located about 60 km east of Guwahati. I’m on the back of an elephant, for the first time in my life I should add, sitting behind the mahout and hanging on for dear life with one hand while trying to shoot with a video camera with the other hand. We are following three elephants, each of which has one veterinarian equipped with a tranquilizing gun. Much ahead of them, lost in the gloom of the fog, is the locator team. Waiting behind at the elephant camp is the logistics team along with forest department officials and guards, WWF and other NGO staff as well as a host of other support staff. All of them are part of the team tasked with translocating rhinos from Pobitora to Manas National Park in northern Assam under the Indian Rhino Vision 2020 (IRV 2020, see below).

The sun is still not up but a faint glow suffuses the fog. An occasional bird call and grunts of the elephants disturb the stillness of the early morning. I slip into a pleasant limbo induced by the gentle rocking of the elephant. But it does not last long. A burst of static shatters the stillness. The locator team is contacting the veterinarians through the wireless. And they have some good news. They have found a couple of rhinos and apprise the team of the location. We rush together into the fog. By this time the sun has risen and is a pale disc hanging low in the sky. Suddenly, a little ahead of us, a silhouette resolves itself into the thick outlines of a rhino. Behind it is another rhino.

The First Attempt

The elephant I’m on falls back a little while the elephants of the tranquilizing team take up a triangular position to box in the rhino and enable correct targeting. Each tranquilizing gun is loaded with a diluted solution of the powerful narcotic-Etorphine. I’m told one undiluted drop of which if exposed to bare skin is capable of killing an adult human within minutes! However, the rhino doesn’t play to their plan. It quickly cuts through the fourth side before the doctors can take proper aim. We follow him and there begins a fruitless chase that lasts more than an hour and a half. By this time the sun has climbed the eastern sky. The fog has also cleared improving visibility. The tranquilizing team decides to leave this unsporting rhino alone and they move to a different location with the locator team. I return to the base camp to join the remaining translocation team there. I’m actually grateful for the chance to dismount the elephant, even if it was an enjoyable experience, as it was not easy shooting with one hand while hanging on to only a rope with the other hand.

The Second Attempt

The locator and tranquilizing teams then move off to a new location in another part of the sanctuary in the hopes of having better luck at finding rhinos. But little did they know that their luck would stay rotten until early afternoon. After a series of near misses, partial hits and uncooperative rhinos the tranquilizing team finally meets with success and manages to tranquilize a female. The rest of us rush to the new location to find the rhino tottering with her concerned calf hovering nearby. A decision is taken to tranquilize the sub-adult rhino also as it is a female too and more importantly would keep the mother and her calf together.

The mother quickly falls asleep and the logistics team swings into action. A bulldozer is brought in to dig a shallow trench next to the tranquilized rhino so that a platform can be placed there onto which the rhino can be rolled. This is soon accomplished.

Helping the tigers of Kopijhola

(Note: a modified version was first published here.)

Advocacy to protect an important forest block in Central India’s Kanha-Pench corridor

The importance of corridors
Tigers need space due to their territorial nature. Sub-adult tigers are forced to move away from their birth ranges to adjacent protected areas to establish new territories. In this process they make use of available corridor forests that connect protected areas. The Kanha-Pench corridor covering an area of 16,000 sq km in Central India offers such crucial connectivity between the two major tiger source populations in Kanha and Pench through extensive tracts of forests. Together with the Kanha-Achanakmar corridor in Chhattisgarh, these forest tracts form one of the most important tiger habitats in the world. Such forest corridors offer much needed contiguity between different tiger populations, thereby preventing their isolation as well as subsequent loss of genetic vigour, and help in long term tiger conservation.

The Kopijhola Forest Block
The Kanha-Pench corridor is made up of different forest administrative blocks. One such important forest block is Kopijhola-Sonekhar, covering an area of 182 sq. km. The Kopijhola village has a population of about 450 people who depend on the forests for livelihood. In spite of the human settlement, the area around Kopijhola has good bamboo forests, mixed forests and teak plantations.

A survey on tiger occupancy by Wildlife Institute of India and WWF-India recorded the presence of tiger in the Kopijhola-Sonekhar block, including a direct sighting. This forest is also home to other wild animals like leopards, hyena, wild dogs, sambar, four-horned antelope, spotted deer and palm civet, to name a few. Subsequent to the tiger occupancy survey, WWF-India’s Central India field team consisting of Senior Project Officers-Sanjay Thakur and Jyotirmay Jena undertook a rapid survey of the Kopijhola Forest Block to assess its biodiversity and current status. During the survey, apart from megafauna, the team also recorded 30 species of butterflies and 57 species of birds. River Hirri flows across the forest block and has water availability even in summer. This availability of a perennial water source has resulted in the presence of sufficient prey base for tigers.

The Killing of Juliano Mer Khamis

On 4 April 2011, the Israeli-Arab actor, director and film maker Juliano Mer Khamis was shot dead in Jenin, Palestine.

This was not an unexpected attack. The Freedom Theatre that he had established had been attacked with Molotov cocktails in the past, its door torched, and Mer Khamis himself had received threats. ‘But what choice do I have? To run? I am not a fleeing man,’ he said in an interview. ‘I am an [Israeli] elite force man, formerly of the paratroopers. The only two things I gained from Israeli culture are Shlonsky’s translations of Shakespeare and adequate field training. Now I need it.’[1] In the end, even the field training given to Israeli elite troops proved inadequate to save Mer Khamis.

In his death, the world lost a brave and imaginative artist.

Juliano Mer Khamis was 52 years old. He was an actor and a director. He had acted in several films, including opposite Diane Keaton in the adaptation of John Le Carre’s thriller, The Little Drummer Girl, and in Amos Gitai’s Kippur. He got offers from Hollywood, where they wanted to make him the next Antonio Banderas. He certainly had the looks. But he preferred to stay in Israel/Palestine, and work at the Freedom Theatre he had set up in 2006. And once he signed the letter of boycott of Palestinian artists refusing to work in Israeli institutions, he gave up his acting career altogether.

The Freedom Theatre itself has a fascinating history. The precursor to the theatre was the Care and Learning Project set up by Juliano’s mother Arna Mer in 1989 during the first Intifada. Arna was an Israeli Jew, and had taken part in the Arab-Israel war of 1948. Subsequently, she joined the Communist Party of Israel and there she met, and later married, Saliba Khamis, a Christian Arab and Secretary of the Party. Juliano was named after Salvatore Guiliano, a handsome Italian bandit who led a revolt of landless peasants against landlords in Italy.

A man with a hyphenated identity, Juliano, then, was an Israeli-Arab-Christian-Jew. Or, as he famously put it, ‘I am 100 per cent Palestinian and 100 per cent Jewish’.

Arna worked in the Jenin refugee camp, possibly the worst of all camps in Palestine. This was in the late 1980s and early 90s, during the first Intifada. She drew the children into the theatre. These were children for whom destruction of homes and livelihood was a fact of life. For whom death was a fact of life.

‘We’re not good Christians’

Juliano’s 2003 award-winning documentary, Arna’s Children, asks the question, what became of the children as they grew up? This film is a most remarkable document of our times – it gives an insight into life under occupation, and even more remarkably, it showed the world, for the first time, the faces and biographies of the young men who fought and resisted during the second Intifada. These were pre-adolescent children when Arna worked with them in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1993, she was awarded the ‘Alternate Nobel Prize’, the money from which went into the theatre. By the time the second Intifada began in September 2000, the children had grown up to be young men. Many took to arms. Many fell to arms.

In the film, we see young Ala sitting listlessly on the rubble of his home. Arna talks about it to the children. Why did Ala sleep in his aunt’s home last night, she asks. They tell her. Sitting next to Ala is Ashraf, with an angelic face. His house was next door to Ala’s. It got destroyed when they destroyed Ala’s house. Who did that, asks Arna. The Israeli army, says Ashraf. What will you do to the army, asks Arna? I’ll kill them, says Ashraf. Show me, says Arna, I’m the army. Ashraf gets up, and starts hitting Arna playfully. She then gives the children paper, which they tear to shreds. All right, says Arna, this is anger. And when we get angry, we have to express it. She then gives them paint and paper, and asks them to express their anger in a painting.

Years later, when Ashraf is already dead and Ala has become a fighter, Juliano meets him and asks if he remembers the painting he had done as a child in Arna’s workshop. Yes, says Ala. It was a house with a Palestinian flag on it. At the end of the film, Ala is dead too.

One of the critiques of the film has been that Arna’s work did not prevent the children from taking up arms in later life. Such a critique misses the point of the work that Arna – and Juliano – were doing.  It would have been so nice had Arna been a simple do-gooder, who healed tormented children by drawing them into the world of art. But Arna was not a do-gooder. She was a militant. In a 2006 interview, Juliano spoke about his mother’s work:

Villagers in Central India Set an Example for Conservation at the Community Level

(Note: First published here.)

Say no to establishment of a lime kiln to protect a reserve forest
Located in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandla district, Bagaspur is a pilot village where WWF-India is working with the villagers to conserve wildlife for the past six years. It is located inside Central India’s Satpura Maikal landscape, which is home to approximately 13% of the world’s wild tiger population. Among the issues facing the landscape are over-exploitation of the natural resources, particularly the wood from the forests. To overcome these, WWF-India has facilitated formation of a village level Forest Conservation Committee that sustainably manages the nearby reserve forest.

© SML Mandla Office/ WWF-India

A photo of a lime kiln

Overcoming the lure to make a few quick bucks
A few months ago, in 2010, the villagers of Bagaspur were approached by a lime kiln owner from a nearby village who promised them money to develop the village and construct the village road. He even offered to construct a temple for their use. In return he wanted the villagers to let him open a lime kiln in the village He had secured the required permission from forest department to source the wood from the surrounding reserve forest.

The villagers realized that the heating requirements of a lime kiln for a five day period were 2 – 3 truck loads of wood. The lime kiln owner had an assured supply of only a truck load of wood with the permissions in place. He wanted the villagers to source the remaining wood requirements from the reserve forest, illegally! He offered to pay for such illegally collected wood. The villagers, however, were against even sourcing fallen branches for the kiln from the forest, let alone felling green trees for wood on such a scale. They refused straight away.

© SML Mandla Office/ WWF-India

The reserve forest around Bagaspur village

Support to villagers by WWF-India’s field team
Undeterred by the refusal of the villagers the lime kiln owner then approached Girish Patel, part of the SML team at WWF-India’s Mandla field office, and offered to pay him if he could convince the villagers in agreeing to set up the kiln. But Girish also refused point blank. As he recalls, “I felt the villagers had rights over the reserve forest although not for illegal cutting for commercial purpose.”

When Girish also rejected the offer, the lime kiln owner even threatened him with dire consequences if he did not change his mind. However, both Girish and the villagers remained steadfast in their refusal and the kiln owner had to abandon his plans.

Girish says from his past experience that had this kiln been allowed to come up then many more kilns would have come up within a short space of time in the surrounding villages like Pauri, Thangul, Umaria to name a few, which would have led to rapid degradation of the reserve forest in the area.

© SML Mandla Office/ WWF-India

Villagers of Bagaspur meeting with WWF-India field staff

The villagers also wrote a letter to the district collector requesting him not to allow such a lime kiln to come up in their village.

As Mr. Sumeri Lal Marathi, President of Bagaspur’s Forest Conservation Committee concluded, “We, the villagers of Bagaspur, refused the proposed lime kiln as increased cutting of wood over the years would have lead to the erosion of the natural resources from the forest on which we all are dependant.”

By forgoing short terms gains for long term conservation needs, the villagers of Bagaspur have set an inspiring example.

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