Category Famous Personalities

A master storyteller, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez ushered in a new era in the literary world by weaving magic with reality and giving a fresh spin to the conventional style of storytelling. The literary fiction style of magical realism has supernatural and dreamlike elements blended into the temporal world. Let’s read up on the author whose birth anniversary falls in March.

Tiny yellow flowers rain from the sky, magic carpets fly, villagers get haunted by ghosts, corpses do not decompose and trickles of blood climb stairs! The real and the magic merge here. Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez took fiction to a whole new level, seamlessly integrating fantasy and dreamlike elements into realistic settings. What he started came to be referred to as magical realism. Perhaps Márquez is one of the few Latin American authors who enjoyed so much international success. His works were universal and got translated into dozens of languages and sold by millions. Be it critical acclaim or widespread commercial success, Marquez enjoyed it all.

Early years

Born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1927, Márquez was the eldest of 16 children. His parents were Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia. His father was a postal clerk and telegraph operator. A large part of his childhood was spent living with his grandparents. He has mentioned that his maternal grandfather, Nicolas Márquez Mejia, a retired army man, was a great influence on him. He often called him the most important figure of my life when he was a teenager. Márquez moved to Bogotá. Although he began to study law here he abandoned his studies and started working as a journalist. He started working for the Colombian newspaper ‘El Espectador’. In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, New York and so on. He then decided to focus on creative writing.

Literary career                                                                                                                                

Marquez is synonymous with magical realism. He popularised the unique literary style of storytelling where reality and fantasy blend seamlessly. Marquez was also an avid reader. In an interview, he once remarked “I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague of idea of the 10.000 years of literature that have gone before.” Having said that Marquez always made sure that he never imitated the writers he admired. While Marquez is widely known for his work “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) which earned him the Pulitzer Prize his non-fiction works and short stories are equally famous “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985) is yet another famous novel of his.

When the newspaper where he worked was shut down. Marquez went jobless. Event while he was stranded in Paris and doing odd jobs, he started working on two novels titled “No One Writes to the Colonel” and “In Evil Hour” which were published in 1961 and 1962 respectively. Incidentally, the first novel “Leaf Storm” was published in 1955

“One Hundred Years of Solitude”

His masterstroke arrived in the form of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, where the story revolves around the isolated town of Macondo. The fantastical and magical elements in the story are written in such a way that they look like they are rooted in reality.

Marquez got inspired to write the story when he was driving to Acapulco, Mexico. He had moved to Mexico City by then. On reaching home, he tried to give shape to his idea and spent 18 months writing the novel. The book was published in 1967 and was an instant success so much so that it was sold out within days. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Magical realism

While Marquez is regarded as one who invented magical realism, the author never made any such claim. He often said that some elements of the genre had appeared earlier in Latin American literature. This style of writing later inspired writers across including Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie.

He died of pneumonia in 2014 at the age of 87.

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Delve into the lives of renowned literary figures who faced the pivotal choice of either retaining their day jobs or leaving them behind to embrace their true passion for the written word. Read on to discover how some of them drew inspiration from their jobs, seamlessly integrating their work experiences into their literary masterpieces.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie, the beloved ‘Queen of crime, has left an indelible mark on the genre of detective fiction. However, it may surprise you to learn that prior to her literary success, the English author worked as a pharmacist’s assistant until the conclusion of World War I. In 1914, when the U.K entered into war with Germany, Christie promptly joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, dedicating the next four years to caring for injured soldiers at a military hospital. It was during this period that she drew upon her pharmaceutical knowledge, particularly in the realm of poisons, to craft her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie’s involvement in the pharmacy profession was not limited to World War I, as she resumed her duties during World War II, amassing countless hours of invaluable work. Her experiences as a wartime pharmacist undoubtedly honed her ability to “imagine worst-case scenarios, gruesome deaths, and pharmaceutical murder”. Kathryn Harkup says in her book, A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie.

Harper Lee

Harper Lee, the renowned American novelist, revolutionised literary history in 1960 with her groundbreaking work, To Kill a Mockingbird, fearlessly bringing the issue of racial injustice to the forefront. Prior to this transformative moment, Lee supported herself as an airline ticketing agent while embarking on a quest for a writing career after leaving law school. Despite her demanding day job with Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airways Corporation. Lee tenaciously pursued her passion by crafting articles and short stories in her spare time. In a fortunate turn of events in 1956, fate smiled upon her. Through her childhood friend-turned-writer Truman Capote, Lee crossed paths with the esteemed American Broadway composer Michael Brown. Remarkably, during the joyous Christmas holidays, Brown gifted her an extraordinary present-a whole year’s worth of wages-along with a heartfelt message. This granted her the freedom to devote all her time to writing. A mere twelve months later, Lee presented her agent with the initial draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, setting the stage for her exceptional literary career.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is renowned worldwide as the visionary behind Sherlock Holmes, one of English literature’s most iconic fictional characters. However, his contributions extend far beyond being the pioneer of modern detective literature. In 1881, Doyle earned his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications from Edinburgh, followed by an M.D. in 1885 upon completing his thesis. During his tenure as a general practitioner, he dedicated particular attention to ophthalmology (diagnosis and medical treatment of the eyes), studying the field in Vienna and working alongside renowned ophthalmologists in Paris. Upon returning to London, he established an ophthalmological practice near Harley Street. It was during his time as a medical student that Doyle was profoundly influenced by his professor. Dr Joseph Bell, whose exceptional ability to observe the minutest details about a patient’s condition served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate master of deductive reasoning. In 1891, Doyle experienced a severe influenza-induced health crisis, which prompted him to reevaluate his life’s priorities. Merely a year later, the first collection of 12 stories featuring the adventures of Sherlock Holmes was published.

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot, the distinguished recipient of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, stands tall as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th Century. Remarkably, Eliot sustained himself through various roles as a teacher, banker, and editor throughout his life. Since poetry remained his true passion, he pursued it during his spare moments. From 1917 to 1925, Eliot worked in the foreign transactions department at Lloyd’s Bank, dedicating his days to the financial realm. However, in 1921, following a nervous breakdown, he took a break from his banking career and completed his magnum opus. The Waste Land, which was edited by his friend and fellow American poet, Ezra Pound. Pound, along with a collective of writers, established Bel Esprit, a fund aimed at financially supporting Eliot’s transition to full-time writing. Despite Pound’s success in gamering pledges from several subscribers, Eliot refused to accept the money and remained resolute in retaining his day job. Nonetheless, The Liverpool Post, Chicago Daily Tribune, and the New York Tribune mistakenly reported that Eliot had accepted the funds while maintaining his position at the bank. Eliot expressed his disagreement, prompting the newspapers to publish retractions. In 1925, Eliot eventually parted ways with Lloyds, embarking on a new path as an editor at a publishing house.

Stephen King

Renowned for his spine-chilling and hair-raising novels such as The Shining, It and Carrie. American author Stephen King has reigned supreme in the horror genre for over five decades. His gripping tales have not only captivated readers but also found immense success on the silver screen, becoming blockbuster hits. As a young boy, King stumbled upon a treasure trove of fantasy-horror fiction books that once belonged to his father, igniting his passion for writing. By the tender age of seven, he had already embarked on his own storytelling journey. However, as he pursued his dream, King faced the need to support himself through various odd jobs. He toiled as a janitor, manned gas pumps, and even worked at an industrial laundry facility, all while persistently crafting and submitting short stories for publication. This striking career transition vividly illustrates that one’s current occupation does not determine their lifelong path. Instead, any job can serve as a stepping stone to something greater, as King’s remarkable journey exemplifies.

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Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches.

“More than 100 years after his birth, the art world cannot quite figure out if Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-89), was a genius or a madman!

He was just 14 when his works were first exhibited. At 17, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but was expelled after four years for defying his teachers.

The French Surrealists were then trying to apply the theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali knew of Freud’s study of dreams and was fascinated with capturing them in paint.

International acclaim was not long in coming.  In 1933, he put up solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City. He became Surrealism’s poster boy.

In addition to Freudian imagery – staircases, keys, dripping candles – he also used his own symbols. His most famous painting “The Persistence of Memory”, features three ‘melting’ watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches is draped on a strange form that is meant to be Dali’s deflated head!

As his fame grew, Dali diversified into jewellery, clothes and furniture design, painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Spellbound” and set up displays for store windows.

He cut an extremely eccentric figure, with his dashing clothes and moustache. He once showed up for a Paris lecture in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflowers. For a book promotion in New York, he dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed!

In 1974, Figueres in Catalonia, Spain, opened the Dali Theatre-Museum with works donated by him.

PROFILE OF TIME

In Dali’s paintings, the concept of time is different, it melts. Everything is fluidic. The Profile of Time, a sculpture by Dali, has the soft watch hanging and drooping from the branch of a tree. The watch appeared for the first time in Dali’s 1931 painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’. The watch can be seen to be melting and finishing off as a huge drop.

APPARITION OF FACE AND FRUIT DISH ON A BEACH

The painting by Dali works on illusion. He called them ‘double images’. In this, there are three simultaneous images at work in a single painting. Dali’s double image paintings had a huge fan following. It is more like a puzzle. Here, one can see an illusion of a face, the image of a dish full of fruits, that of a dog.

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WHO TOLD “CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION”?

Rabindranath Tagore’s artistic genius endeared him to millions around the world. A man of prodigious literary and artistic accomplishments, Tagore is recognised as one of the architects of modern India. Let us look back at his iconic last public address, “Crisis in civilisation”.

Despite his failing health, Rabindranath Tagore attended his 80th birthday celebration in Visva -Bharati. Shantiniketan, West Bengal, on May 7, 1941. His public address for the occasion titled ‘Crisis in civilisation’ was not only his last speech in his beloved university, but also his last public pronouncement. His parting message to the world dealt with the state of modem civilisation and how it had been shaken to its foundations by war and oppression.

Tagore’s activism

Tagore’s involvement with various issues pertaining to social reform began quite early in his life. By the time the poet turned 20, he had already authored several essays commenting on the burning issues of the day. The writer’s engagement with the idea of nationalism changed throughout his life.

In the first decade of the 20th Century, Tagore emerged as one of the strongest proponents of the Swadeshi movement. The years leading up to the movement came under the writer’s pro-nationalism phase.

He withdrew from the movement in 1907. His work during this period showcased his disillusionment with the ideology of the nation and the Indian nationalist movement as a whole.

What is a nation?

The late 19th Century witnessed the idea of a nation emerge in the Indian consciousness. It was chosen and propagated by Indian intellectuals and political activists to invigorate a sense of unity among the citizens. At the time it was seen as a necessary tool to fight against the colonial forces.

But Tagore fiercely denounced this idea. He felt a nation-state was only a representation of organised power and had a mechanical function.

The nation as a machine

Tagore argued that a nation fundamentally prioritised commercial expansion and economic profit over humanity and moral values. The poet elaborated how this western idea was the reason our people and natural resources were exploited in the first place by the European invaders.

His thesis on the topic asserts that the mechanisms of a nation transform men into one-dimensional units of machinery whose purpose in life is limited to the creation of surplus wealth at the expense of the weak.

The nation as a machine, fine-tuned for profit-making, disturbs the spirit of harmony which is the quintessential feature of Indian history and culture.

Crisis in civilisation

Tagore began his address by commenting how old age is a time for reflection and recollection. Looking back at the vast stretch of years that lay behind him, he finds himself shocked by the change in his attitude and that of his countrymen.

Even at his weakest moment, Tagore was anguished by the state of the country as he said. “The wheels of fate will one day oblige Englishmen to give up their Indian empire. But what kind of a country will they leave behind them? What stark wretched misery?…. What wasteland of filth and hopelessness?” (an excerpt from Crisis in civilisation)

The writer recalls how educated Indians of his generation who studied English literature and liberalism once foolishly believed in the magnanimity of the English, and their idea of enlightenment. He utilises this opportunity to announce that the West has failed in establishing itself as the emissary of light and knowledge, and now all hope lies with the East.

“As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man…Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the Sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage” (an excerpt from Crisis in civilisation) According to Tagore, the defining feature of Indian civilization which we are on the verge of losing is sympathy. Referring back to the ancient text of Manusmriti and the idea of ‘sadachar (proper conduct), he suggests that the Indian interpretation of the word civilization has always sought to establish a relationship with the world not through the cultivation of power but through fostering sympathy. To attain true liberation, Indians must first become aware of their heritage and the spirit of India, which has been suppressed by the wholesale acceptance of western education.

DID YOU KNOW?

1. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

2. Tagore was the founder of Visva-Bharati, a public central University, located in Shantiniketan, West Bengal,

3. The preface of Tagore’s most acclaimed work, Gitanjali, was written by another great poet of the 20th Century. W.B. Yeats.

4. On 14 July 1930, Rabindranath Tagore visited Albert Einstein’s house in Caputh, near Berlin. Their conversation was recorded and published as “The Nature of Reality” in the Modern Review magazine’s 1931 January issue.

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Dr.Bhim Rao Ambedkar declared no. 1 scholar in world by colombia University. He was a world-class lawyer, social reformer and number one world-class scholar as per the Ministry of Social Justice, Government of India. Ambedkar graduated from Elphinstone College, University of Bombay, and studied economics at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, receiving doctorates in 1927 and 1923 respectively and was among a handful of Indian students to have done so at either institution in the 1920s. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar is remembered as one of the most respected and revered leaders India has ever produced. To the young and old alike, he is an icon of equality, fraternity and social justice. He advocated politics with values, democracy with fraternity, and religion with social responsibility.

Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, in the Central Province (presently Madhya Pradesh). He was the fourteenth and the last child Ramji Maloji Sakpal and Bhimabai Sakpal. Bhimrao was a brilliant student who earned two doctorates in Economics from the prestigious Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He was a well-known statesman, ambitious leader, erudite economist, expert jurist, dynamic journalist, brilliant scholar, prolific writer and social reformer, all capsuled into one. As the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, he was its principal architect. He championed the cause of the Dalits, women, the poor and other socially backward people of India. He was the first law minister of independent India. After a prolonged illness, he died in the year 1956, a few months after converting to Buddhism. The country honoured him with the highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, posthumously in 1990.

Coming from a poor and backward class who were treated as untouchables, the Ambedkar family was exposed to the sheer brutality of the caste system and its atrocities in life. The bitter experiences in life gave him enough fire to burn with the desire for social justice and equality and shape him as a social reformer. He campaigned against social discrimination towards the untouchables of his time. He condemned child marriage and the mistreatment of women in society. He vociferously crusaded against the caste system in India. He fought for the legal protection of the Dalits, and for equality of opportunities through the reservation system. He inspired millions and represented the voice W for self-respect, intolerance of injustice, and struggle against social and economic oppressions.

As a political philosopher and architect of the Indian Constitution, Dr Ambedkar had a prophetic vision of how political parties, down the decades, would use caste and creed to influence voters. Perhaps the India of today is what Dr Ambedkar had feared seven decades ago.

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In 1999, American author Tracy Chevalier published Girl with a Pearl Earring, a novel directly inspired by one of Vermeer’s most famous works of the same name. Set in 17th century Delft, Holland, Chevalier presents a fictional account of Vermeer, the girl in the painting and the artwork itself.

Girl with a Pearl Earring portrays a young woman sitting before a dark backdrop. Though seemingly inconsequential, this stark and shallow background beautifully contrasts the figure’s cream-colored skin and translucent eyes, which are fixed on the viewer. In addition to an exquisite blue and yellow turban, she dons a large, tear-shaped pearl earring.

While, on the surface, this depiction seems to have the classic characteristics of a portrait, it is actually known as a tronie. Popular during the Dutch Golden Age, a tronie is a painting of an individual intended as a study. Often, artists opted to portray these figures in “exotic” garments, as rendering opulent fabric allowed them to show off their advanced painting techniques.

Vermeer is known for his ability to create contours and forms using light rather than line. This distinctive approach to modeling is particularly evident in the figure’s face, which Vermeer rendered in planes of light and shadow. To achieve this aesthetic, Vermeer followed a meticulous four-step technique popular with 17th-century artists.

First, he would “invent,” or create an initial drawing on the canvas. Then, he crafted a monochromatic underpainting—a technique known as “dead-coloring.” Next, he added color. And, finally, in order to make the piece exceptionally luminous, he would apply a thin layer of glaze to certain parts of the painting. A recent restoration has revealed that he glazed two areas of Girl with a Pearl Earring: the blue section of her turban and the entire background (which, originally, would have been an opalescent green).

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The Starry Night is an oil on canvas painting by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.

In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.

During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait from September, 1889, in the Musée d’Orsay. The Starry Night was painted mid-June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to his brother Theo to say he had a new study of a starry sky.

In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially. 

He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.

Van Gogh’s art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to be his first masterpiece, “Potato Eaters.” Theo, who by this time living in Paris, believed the painting would not be well-received in the French capital, where Impressionism had become the trend.

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Bruno Munari was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

Bruno Munari joined the ‘Second’ Italian Futurist movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the late 1920s. During this period, Munari contributed collages to Italian magazines, some of them highly propagandist, and created sculptural works which would unfold in the coming decades including his useless machines, and his abstract-geometrical works. After World War II Munari disassociated himself with Italian Futurism because of its proto-Fascist connotations.

In his later life, Munari, worried by the incorrect perception of his artistic work, which is still confused with the other genres of his activity (didactics, design, graphics), selected art historian Miroslava Hajek as curator of a selection of his most important works in 1969. This collection, structured chronologically, shows his continuous creativity, thematic coherence and the evolution of his aesthetic philosophy throughout his artistic life.

Munari was also a significant contributor in the field of children’s books and toys, later in his life, though he had been producing books for children since the 1930s. He used textured, tactile surfaces and cut-outs to create books that teach about touch, movement, and colour through kinesthetic learning.

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Ganga Devi was an Indian painter, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Madhubani painting tradition. She is credited with popularizing the Madhubani painting outside India. She was born in 1928 in Mithila in the Indian state of Bihar in a Kayastha family and took to the traditional painting craft, specialising in the kachni (line drawing) style. She traveled abroad with her art and was a part of the Festival of India in the United States, which yielded a number of paintings under the title, America series, including Moscow Hotel, Festival of American Folk Life, and Ride in a Roller Coaster. The Government of India awarded her the National Master Craftsman Award[3] and followed it up with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri in 1984.

When Ganga Devi was still a child, she was handed her first brush by her mother, which was made of rice straw and a few threads drawn from the hem of her sari. Ganga Devi took soot scraped from the bottom of a cooking pot, or from the chimney of a hurricane lantern and used it as ink. It was a common practice to mix the soot with cattle urine, gum arabic dissolved in water, or sometimes even goat’s milk. She learnt this from her cousin sisters and aunts, their mothers and grandmothers. Due to lack of paper in the village, she used to practice on a canvas made from the pages of her school notebook that were often glued onto cloth.

Ganga Devi got selected for the “Festival of India in US”. She represented Indian art from in Russia and Japan. She narrated all her experiences through paintings, after which she was honored with the a National Award for Crafts by the Indian Government.

When Ganga Devi was detected with cancer, in the 1980s, she could not go back to Mithila as she was prescribed regular Chemotherapy.

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Amrita Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called “one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century” and a “pioneer” in modern Indian art. Drawn to painting from an early age, Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons in the art, at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil painting titled Young Girls (1932).

In 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living at Shimla at the time. In 1924, when he returned to Italy, she too moved there along with Amrita and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an art school at Florence. Though Amrita didn’t stay at this school for long and returned to India in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters.

At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon (where she met Boris Taslitzky) and later at the École des Beaux-Arts (1930–34). She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Tazlitsky. While in Paris, she is said to have painted with a conviction and maturity rarely seen in a 16-year old.

In 1931, Sher-Gil was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, but rumors spread that she was also having an affair with her first cousin and later husband Viktor Egan. Her letters reveal same-sex affairs.

Looking at the Indian art with a fresh eye, Amrita Sher-Gil became excited by the Indian miniature traditions as well as the Mughal and Ajanta paintings. While traveling to the southern parts of India, she became deeply moved by the plight of the unprivileged people she met along the way. This propelled a dramatic shift in her visual language and subject matter. She started using a palette saturated with intense reds, ochres, browns, yellows and greens and depicting her land and its people, giving voice and validity to their experiences.

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The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened to the public in July 1997, eleven years after the death of our namesake artist. A visit to the O’Keeffe Museum offers insight not only into the artist’s paintings, but also her creative process and the light and landscape that inspired her. In addition to the main Museum campus in Santa Fe, the O’Keeffe Museum maintains O’Keeffe’s two homes and studios in northern New Mexico, a research center and library, and a variety of collections relating to O’Keeffe and modern art.

The Museum’s collections of over 3,000 works comprises 140 O’Keeffe oil paintings, nearly 700 drawings, and hundreds of additional works dating from 1901 to 1984, the year failing eyesight forced O’Keeffe into retirement. Throughout the year, visitors can see a changing selection of these works. In addition, the Museum presents exhibitions that are either devoted entirely to O’Keeffe’s work or combine examples of her art with works by her American modernist contemporaries.

In 2006, the Museum took responsibility for the care and preservation of O’Keeffe’s home and studio along the Chama River in Abiquiu, New Mexico, about an hour north of Santa Fe.  A national historic landmark and one of the most important artistic sites in the United States, the home where the artist lived and worked is open for tours by appointment. O’Keeffe’s first home in New Mexico, about 30 minutes northwest of Abiquiu at the Ghost Ranch is also cared for by the Museum though it is not currently open to the public.

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Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh’s North Side), but lived much of her adult life in France where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.

Cassatt grew up in an environment that viewed travel as integral to education; she spent five years in Europe and visited many of the capitals, including London, Paris, and Berlin. While abroad she learned German and French and had her first lessons in drawing and music. It is likely that her first exposure to French artists Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet was at the Paris World’s Fair of 1855. Also in the exhibition were Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, both of whom were later her colleagues and mentors.

Cassatt traveled to Chicago to try her luck, but lost some of her early paintings in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Shortly afterward, her work attracted the attention of Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Domenec of Pittsburgh, who commissioned her to paint two copies of paintings by Correggio in Parma, Italy, advancing her enough money to cover her travel expenses and part of her stay. In her excitement she wrote, “O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers farely itch & my eyes water to see a fine picture again”. With Emily Sartain, a fellow artist from a well-regarded artistic family from Philadelphia, Cassatt set out for Europe again.

Cassatt saw that works by female artists were often dismissed with contempt unless the artist had a friend or protector on the jury, and she would not flirt with jurors to curry favor. Her cynicism grew when one of the two pictures she submitted in 1875 was refused by the jury, only to be accepted the following year after she darkened the background. She had quarrels with Sartain, who thought Cassatt too outspoken and self-centered, and eventually they parted. Out of her distress and self-criticism, Cassatt decided that she needed to move away from genre paintings and onto more fashionable subjects, in order to attract portrait commissions from American socialites abroad, but that attempt bore little fruit at first.

In 1877, both her entries were rejected, and for the first time in seven years she had no works in the Salon. At this low point in her career she was invited by Edgar Degas to show her works with the Impressionists, a group that had begun their own series of independent exhibitions in 1874 with much attendant notoriety. The Impressionists (also known as the “Independents” or “Intransigents”) had no formal manifesto and varied considerably in subject matter and technique. They tended to prefer plein air painting and the application of vibrant color in separate strokes with little pre-mixing, which allows the eye to merge the results in an “impressionistic” manner. The Impressionists had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years. Henry Bacon, a friend of the Cassatts, thought that the Impressionists were so radical that they were “afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye”. They already had one female member, artist Berthe Morisot, who became Cassatt’s friend and colleague.

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Artist Frida Kahlo was one of Mexico’s greatest artists who painted mostly self-portraits after she was severely injured in a bus accident in 1925. During her recovery from the accident, Kahlo began her painting career. Kahlo later became politically active, fighting for the rights of the working class and poor people, and the rights of women. She exhibited her paintings in Paris and Mexico before her death in 1954.

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico.

Kahlo’s father, Wilhelm (also called Guillermo), was a German photographer who had immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. She had two older sisters, Matilde and Adriana, and her younger sister, Cristina, was born the year after Kahlo.

Around the age of six, Kahlo contracted polio, which caused her to be bedridden for nine months. While she recovered from the illness, she limped when she walked because the disease had damaged her right leg and foot. Her father encouraged her to play soccer, go swimming, and even wrestle — highly unusual moves for a girl at the time — to help aid in her recovery.

In 1922, Kahlo enrolled at the renowned National Preparatory School. She was one of the few female students to attend the school, and she became known for her jovial spirit and her love of colorful, traditional clothes and jewelry.

While at school, Kahlo hung out with a group of politically and intellectually like-minded students. Becoming more politically active, Kahlo joined the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party.

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Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots’. Yayoi Kusama tells the story of how when she was a little girl she had a hallucination that freaked her out. She was in a field of flowers when they all started talking to her! The heads of flowers were like dots that went on as far as she could see, and she felt as if she was disappearing or as she calls it ‘self-obliterating’ – into this field of endless dots. This weird experience influenced most of her later work.

Yayoi was born in Japan in 1929. She loved drawing and painting and although her parents didn’t want her to be an artist, she was determined. When her mum tore up her drawings, she made more. When she could not afford to buy art materials, she used mud and old sacks to make art. This is a drawing she made of her mum when she was 10-years-old.

Eventually Yayoi Kusama persuaded her parents to let her go to art school and study painting.

In the late 1950s she moved to New York as lots of the most exciting art seemed to be happening there. It must have been a bit frightening arriving in a big city with such a different culture from what she knew. But she was determined to conquer New York. She later wrote about her feisty attitude: ‘I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot’.

She had the first of many exhibitions there in 1959. She met and inspired important artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, and her art was a part of exciting art developments such as pop art and minimalism. She was also one of the first artists to experiment with performance and action art.

As well as being an art pioneer, Yayoi Kusama put her creativity into other things including music, design, writing and fashion.

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Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, USA. He was the sixth of seven children born to John Clemens, a lawyer, and his wife Jane, although three of Samuel’s siblings died in childhood.

When Samuel was four, the family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River. Samuel loved to watch the riverboats and dreamed of being a riverboat pilot. Many of his stories were inspired by his adventures in Hannibal.

When Samuel was 11, his father died. To support his family, Samuel became a printer’s apprentice at the Missouri Courier. He learnt a lot about writing and used public libraries in the evenings to educate himself. Later, Samuel worked as a typesetter for the Western Union, his brother Orion’s newspaper. Samuel created articles and sketches for the paper, and became known for his humour.

At 17, Samuel left Hannibal and found print work in St Louis, New York, Philadelphia and Cincinnati. Then in 1857, he returned to study for two years to become a riverboat pilot.

But 1861 saw the end of Samuel’s river days once the Civil War started. He moved west to join the Confederate Army, although he left before fighting began. After working briefly as a miner, he became a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and began writing short stories under the name Mark Twain. These funny tales were full of adventure.

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For most people, the name “Mark Twain” is virtually synonymous with the life along the Mississippi River immortalized in the author’s writing. Clemens first signed his writing with the name in February 1863, as a newspaper reporter in Nevada. “Mark Twain” (meaning “Mark number two”) was a Mississippi River term: the second mark on the line that measured depth signified two fathoms, or twelve feet—safe depth for the steamboat. In 1857, at the age of twenty-one, he became a “cub” steamboat pilot. The Civil War ended that career four years later by halting all river traffic. Although Clemens never again lived in the Mississippi valley, he returned to the river in his writing throughout his life. And he visited a number of times, most notably in 1882 as he prepared to write Life on the Mississippi, his fullest and most autobiographical account of the region and its inhabitants, and again in 1902 when he made his final visit to the scenes of his childhood.

Twain lived far from the Mississippi (in Connecticut) when The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876. But, that novel, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884 in the United Kingdom and in 1885 in the United States, were so infused with images of the Mississippi River that it seems fitting that Clemens would use a pen name that so closely tied him to the river. As he navigated the rocky path of his literary career (he was beset with financial problems through much of his life), it’s fitting that he would choose a moniker that defined the very method riverboat captains used to safely navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of the mighty Mississippi.

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Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Before Clemens became well known as a writer, he held a variety of odd jobs including piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River. He was licensed as a steamboat pilot in 1859 and worked on the river until fighting there during the Civil War ended traffic traveling from north to south. His experiences along the river helped him come up with his pen name. 

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people. 

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh. 

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter’s night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly. 

The Clemens family “now became almost destitute,” wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

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Atal Bihari Vajpayee (25 December 1924 – 16 August 2018) was an Indian statesman who served three terms as the Prime Minister of India, first for a term of 13 days in 1996, then for a period of 13 months from 1998 to 1999, followed by a full term from 1999 to 2004. A member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he was the first Indian prime minister not of the Indian National Congress to serve a full term in office. He was also noted as a poet and a writer.

He was a member of the Indian Parliament for over five decades, having been elected ten times to the Lok Sabha, the lower house, and twice to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house. He served as the Member of Parliament for Lucknow, retiring from active politics in 2009 due to health concerns. He was among the founding members of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), of which he was president from 1968 to 1972. The BJS merged with several other parties to form the Janata Party, which won the 1977 general election. In March 1977, Vajpayee became the Minister of External Affairs in the cabinet of Prime Minister Morarji Desai. He resigned in 1979, and the Janata alliance collapsed soon after. Former members of the BJS formed the BJP in 1980, with Vajpayee its first president.

Vajpayee’s oratorial skills won him the reputation of being the most eloquent defender of the Jana Sangh’s policies. After the death of Deendayal Upadhyaya, the leadership of the Jana Sangh passed to Vajpayee. He became the national president of the Jana Sangh in 1968, running the party along with Nanaji Deshmukh, Balraj Madhok, and L. K. Advani.

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Jai Jawaan Jai Kisaan was a slogan of the second Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965 at a public gathering at Ramlila Maidan, Delhi.

Soon after Shastri took over the prime ministership of India after Nehru’s death, India was attacked by Pakistan. At the same time there was scarcity of food grains in the country. Shastri gave the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan to enthuse the soldiers to defend India and simultaneously cheering farmers to do their best to increase the production of food grains to reduce dependence on import. It became a very popular slogan.

The former PM strongly believed that soldiers and farmers are the backbones of Indian society and the nation needs to respect them and take care of their issues.

Lal Bahadur Shastri joined the Kashi Vidya Peeth in Varanasi, one of the many national institutions set up in defiance of the British rule. There, he came under the influence of the greatest intellectuals, and nationalists of the country. ‘Shastri’ was the bachelor’s degree awarded to him by the Vidya Peeth but has stuck in the minds of the people as part of his name.

In 1927, he got married. His wife, Lalita Devi, came from Mirzapur, near his home town. The wedding was traditional in all senses but one. A spinning wheel and a few yards of handspun cloth was the entire dowry. The bridegroom would accept nothing more.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi marched to the sea beach at Dandi and broke the imperial salt law. The symbolic gesture set the whole country ablaze. Lal Bahadur Shastri threw himself into the struggle for freedom with feverish energy. He led many defiant campaigns and spent a total of seven years in British jails. It was in the fire of this struggle that his steel was tempered and he grew into maturity.

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Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the 9th Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996. He is often referred to as the “Father of Indian Economic Reforms”. Future prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh continued the economic reform policies pioneered by Rao’s government. He employed Dr. Manmohan Singh as his Finance Minister to embark on historic economic transition.

Former Indian Foreign Minister Inder Kumar Gujral says Mr. Rao will be remembered as the father of India’s economic reforms. He says when Mr. Rao became the prime minister the Indian economy was in bad shape. It was very difficult at the time to introduce new ideas, new philosophies, and to convince people to support him on something untested. The Indian public and politicians at the time did not believe that they could try something new and get out of the mess but Mr. Rao persisted and persevered. Mr. Gujral adds Mr. Rao will always be remembered for pioneering far-reaching economic changes in India, which took India on a new economic path.

Mr. Rao is credited with launching free market reforms that opened up India’s stagnant, socialist economy. The shift turned the bankrupt nation into a regional economic powerhouse. According to government figures, India’s economy has posted an average growth rate of six percent since 1990 and poverty rates have fallen by 10 percent.

Prime Minister Rao was the first Indian leader outside the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to complete a full five-year term. However, his term was not free from controversy. In 1992 Hindu zealots demolished the 500-year-old Babri mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The destruction of the mosque triggered widespread Hindu-Muslim violence that claimed thousands of lives.

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Chaudhary Charan Singh (23 December 1902 – 29 May 1987) served as the 5th Prime Minister of India between 28 July 1979 and 14 January 1980. Historians and people alike frequently refer to him as the ‘champion of India’s peasants.’

In his cameo as prime minister, two-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and union home and finance minister, Chaudhary Charan Singh became the face of farmers and their needs. In his tenure, he introduced various policies to improve the lives and conditions of the farmers. The principal architect of the UP Zamindari Abolition Act, Singh has also authored books on zamindari abolition, land reforms and the establishment of an economically self-sufficient peasantry in UP.

To relieve the farmers of moneylenders, he introduced the Debt Redemption Bill in 1939 in the state assembly. Land Utilisation Bill, drafted by Singh in April 1939, aimed to “transfer the proprietary interest in agricultural holdings of UP to such of the tenants or actual tillers of the soil who chose to deposit an amount equivalent to ten times the annual rent in the government treasury to the account of the landlord”.

Rooting for a rural democracy, Singh opposed a resolution of joint, co-operative farming passed in 1959 by Congress — a party he defected from only to form the largest “most successful agrarian party in modern Indian politics, the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD), which later, under different names, also became the core of the opposition”.

Owing to the leader’s contribution to India’s agrarian concerns, Singh’s memorial in New Delhi is named Kisan Ghat.

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The BJP, which registered a historic win in 2014 by emerging as the first party in three decades to secure a majority on its own, again scripted its name in history after the results threw a stronger number for its existing government.

After this win, PM Modi has become the first non-Congress full majority prime minister to get re-elected with a stronger majority.

In the first general election held in 1951-52, Nehru won a massive mandate of 364 out of 489 seats. In the second general elections held in 1957, the Congress won 371 seats out of the 494. Securing another landslide victory in his third and final election campaign, the Indian National Congress in 1962 won 361 out of the 494 seats.

The BJP under Atal Bihari Vajpayee had registered another historic victory in 1999 general election when it became the first ever non-Congress government to complete its full tenure in power. 

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Manmohan Singh (born 26 September 1932) is an Indian economist, academic, and politician who served as the 13th Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014. The first Sikh in office, Singh was also the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term.

Manmohan Singh is a graduate of Panjab University, Chandigarh, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford. After serving as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India, Singh was appointed as the Union Minister of Finance in 1991 by then-Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. During his tenure as the Finance Minister, Singh was widely credited for carrying out economic reforms in India in 1991 which resulted in the end of the infamous Licence Raj system.

After completing his D.Phil, Singh worked for UNCTAD (1966–1969). During the 1970s, he taught at the University of Delhi and worked for the Ministry of Foreign Trade with the Cabinet Minister for Foreign Trade Lalit Narayan Mishra and for Finance Ministry of India. In 1982, he was appointed the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and held the post until 1985. He went on to become the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India from 1985 to 1987.

Singh was first elected to the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, in 1991 and was re-elected in 2001 and 2007. From 1998 to 2004, while the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power, Singh was the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. In 1999, he ran for the Lok Sabha from South Delhi but was unable to win the seat.

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Indra Kumar Gujral (4 December 1919 – 30 November 2012) was an Indian politician and freedom activist who served as the 12th Prime Minister of India from April 1997 to March 1998.

Born in British India, he was influenced by nationalistic ideas as a student, and joined the All India Students Federation and the Communist Party of India. He was imprisoned for taking part in the Quit India movement. After independence, he joined the Indian National Congress party in 1964, and became a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha.

He was the Minister of Information and Broadcasting during the emergency. In 1976, he was appointed as the Ambassador of India to the Soviet Union. In 1996, he became the Minister of External Affairs in the Deve Gowda ministry, and developed the Gujral doctrine during this period. He was appointed as the 12th Prime Minister of India in 1997. His tenure lasted for less than a year.

Shri Gujral belongs to a family of freedom fighters: both his parents participated in the freedom struggle in Punjab. At the young age of eleven, he himself actively participated in the freedom struggle in 1931 and was arrested and severely beaten by the police for organising movement of young children in the Jhelum town. In 1942, he was jailed during the Quit India Movement.

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Morarji Ranchhodji Desai (29 February 1896 – 10 April 1995) was an Indian independence activist and served between 1977 and 1979 as the 4th Prime Minister of India and led the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India.

He is the oldest person to hold the office of prime minister, at the age of 81, in the history of Indian politics. He subsequently retired from all political posts, but continued to campaign for the Janata Party in 1980. He was conferred with India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna. He died at the age of 99 in 1995.

Morarji Desai was born into a Gujarati Anavil Brahmin family. His father name is Ranchhodji Nagarji Desai and his mother name is Vajiaben Desai. He was born in Bhadeli village, Bulsar district, Bombay Presidency, British India (present-day Valsad district, Gujarat, India) on 29 February 1896, the eldest of eight children. His father was a school teacher.

Desai then joined the freedom struggle under Mahatma Gandhi and joined the civil disobedience movement against British rule in India. He spent many years in jail during the freedom struggle and owing to his sharp leadership skills and tough spirit, he became a favourite amongst freedom-fighters and an important leader of the Indian National Congress in the Gujarat region. When provincial elections were held in 1934 and 1937, Desai was elected and served as the Revenue Minister and Home Minister of the Bombay Presidency.

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Jawaharlal Nehru, byname Pandit (Hindi: “Pundit” or “Teacher”) Nehru, (born November 14, 1889, Allahabad, India—died May 27, 1964, New Delhi), first prime minister of independent India (1947–64), who established parliamentary government and became noted for his neutralist (nonaligned) policies in foreign affairs.

Pt. Nehru became the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee in September 1923. He toured Italy, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Germany and Russia in 1926. In Belgium, he attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels as an official delegate of the Indian National Congress. He also attended the tenth anniversary celebrations of the October Socialist Revolution in Moscow in 1927. Earlier, in 1926, at the Madras Congress, Nehru had been instrumental in committing the Congress to the goal of Independence. While leading a procession against the Simon commission, he was lathi-charged in Lucknow in 1928. On August 29, 1928 he attended the All-Party Congress and was one of the signatories to the Nehru Report on Indian Constitutional Reform, named after his father Shri Motilal Nehru. The same year, he also founded the ‘Independence for India League’, which advocated complete severance of the British connection with India, and became its General Secretary.

In 1929, Pt. Nehru was elected President of the Lahore Session of the Indian National Congress, where complete independence for the country was adopted as the goal. He was imprisoned several times during 1930-35 in connection with the Salt Satyagraha and other movements launched by the Congress. He completed his ‘Autobiography’ in Almora Jail on February 14, 1935. After release, he flew to Switzerland to see his ailing wife and visited London in February-March, 1936. He also visited Spain in July 1938, when the country was in the throes of Civil War. Just before the court-break of the Second World War, he visited China too.

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Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi Nehru; 19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was an Indian politician and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and, to date, only female Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She served as prime minister from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, making her the second longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.

Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru into a Kashmiri Pandit family on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a leading figure in India’s political struggle for independence from British rule, and became the first Prime Minister of the Dominion (and later Republic) of India. She was the only child (a younger brother died young), and grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large family estate in Allahabad. She had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Her father was often away, directing political activities or incarcerated, while her mother was frequently bedridden with illness, and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis. She had limited contact with her father, mostly through letters.

She had been Minister for Information and Broadcasting (1964- 1966). Then she held the highest office as the Prime Minister of India from January 1966 to March 1977. Concurrently, she was the Minister for Atomic Energy from September 1967 to March 1977. She also held the additional charge of the Ministry of External Affairs from September 5, 1967 to February 14, 1969. Smt. Gandhi headed the Ministry of Home Affairs from June 1970 to November 1973 and Minister for Space from June 1972 to March 1977. From January 1980 she was Chairperson, Planning Commission. She again chaired the prime Minister’s Office from January 14, 1980.

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Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) was an Indian fiction writer in Bengali and a socio-political activist. Her notable literary works include Hajar Churashir Maa, Rudali, and Aranyer Adhikar. She was a self-recognised communist and worked for the rights and empowerment of the tribal people (Lodha and Shabar) of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. She was honoured with various literary awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award (in Bengali), Jnanpith Award and Ramon Magsaysay Award along with India’s civilian awards Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan.

Devi wrote over 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories primarily written in Bengali but often translated to other languages. Her first novel, titled Jhansir Rani, based on a biography of the Rani of Jhansi was published in 1956. She had toured the Jhansi region to record information and folk songs from the local people for the novel.

Mahasweta Devi’s specialisation lied in the studies of Adivasi, Dalit and Marginalized citizens with a focus on their women. They were associated as protestor in the face of the oppressive British rule, the Mahajanas and upper class corruption and injustice. She lived in the Adivasi villages in West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh years afer years, befriending them and learning from them. She has embodied their struggles and sacrifices in her words and characters. She had claimed that her stories aren’t her creation, they are the stories of the people of her country. Such an example is her work ” Chotti Mundi Ebong Tar Tir”

In 1964, she began teaching at Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). In those days Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College was an institution for working-class women students. During that period she also worked—as a journalist and as a creative writer. She studied the Lodhas and Shabars, the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits. In her elaborate Bengali fiction, she often depicted the brutal oppression on the tribal people and untouchables by the powerful authoritarian upper-caste landlords, money-lenders, and venal government officials. She wrote of the source of her inspiration:Postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has translated Devi’s short stories into English and published three books Imaginary Maps (1995, Routledge), Old Woman (1997, Seagull), The Breast Stories (1997, Seagull).

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Aurobindo Ghose was one of India’s prominent freedom fighters, who spearheaded several struggles for our nation to break free from the shackles of bondage from the British. He was born on August 15, 1872 and pursued his schooling in England. The writing of P.B. Shelley and his romantic idealization of the French evolution influenced his thinking early on in his life.

Subsequently he enrolled in King’s College, Cambridge, where he was drawn to lrish nationalistic beliefs, and saw their relevance to the Indian situation. He was particularly attracted to Charles Stewart Parnell’s ideology, which made him perceive India as an enslaved nation, a “mother in chains”.

On his return to India in 1893, he threw himself into the Indian struggle for Independence. He expounded on its importance for achieving the goals of universal brotherhood and equality among all beings. He was just 21 years old at the time!

As a nationalist revolutionary, he was charged with ‘conspiracy to wage war against the ‘Emperor’ for his involvement in the Alipore Bombing case in 1908. It was an offence punishable with death by hanging, and he was accused of it along with his brother Barin Ghosh. Even before this case, Aurobindo was acquitted, while his brother was found quality. During the trial, the brothers were held in police custody illegally and had to endure much torture. When he walked out of jail, he was a spiritually transformed man, he swore of violence and politics, and quietly moved to Poundicherry, to begin a new life and embark on a spiritual quest. There, he practiced Yoga in seclusion for four continuous years, and slowly developed his philosophy of ‘Integral Yoga’.

He was 75 years old when our country attained Independence. This was the dream he had envisioned for his motherland, since he was a teenager. His philosophy still lives in the hearts of millions of Indians all over the world even today.

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Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom. She was the daughter of a wealthy American stockbroker, who died when she was only eleven, years old. Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age.

When she was 16, she went to finishing school, in Paris to study singing and piano. In 1914, at age 24, she married, Colonel, Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. White he went away to war, she worked as a nurse and wrote her first novel, ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (1920), which wasn’t published until four years later. After her husband came back from the war, they had a daughter. However, in 1928, she divorced him and married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist. She travelled, with him to various digs and several of her novels were set in the Middle East. Most of her other novels, though, were set in a fictionalised, Devon.

Christie and her characters, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, have become icons of “whodunnit” detective fiction. She is said to be the best-selling novelist of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, with her novels exceeding 2 billion copies by way of sales and having been translated into more than a hundred different languages.

Many of her works have been adapted to film, most notably “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974). Her short stories, plays, and novels have also been adapted to television, radio, and at least one video game (“And Then There Were None”, 2005). In addition, Christie boasts the Longest running play in the world: ‘The Mousetrap”, which she originally wrote as a birthday gift for Queen Mary. Christie received numerous honours during her Lifetime, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, (1955) and, the order of Dame Commander of the British Empire (1971).

She is credited with developing the “vintage style” of mystery, which became popular and, ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction in England, in the 1920s and ’30s, an age of which she is considered to have been Queen. In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays. She also wrote a series of romantic novels under the pen name Mary Westmarott, Indeed, she is still considered by many as one of the most popular mystery writers of all time.

This writer grew up reading those edge-of-the-seat mysteries that were solved by Christie’s fictional sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and hopes that you too will enjoy following their adventures!

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Growing up in the United States, Chloe Ardelia Wofford and her family struggled with racial prejudice. Her father was forced to flee his hometown on account of widespread lynchings of the members of the African-American community. A few years later, a landlord set fire to their house in Lorain, Ohio, because they could not pay the rent. While in college, she witnessed segregation in restaurants and buses. Wofford, who later changed her name to Toni Morrison, wrote about his African-American experience, particularly from a female perspective and became known as the champion of oppressed communities.

Her 1977 novel ‘Song of Solomon’ is one of her major novels. The book not only won the National Books Critics Award, but was also cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her novel ‘Beloved’ inspired by the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner was a critical success. The novel was later adapted into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel ‘Beloved’ in 1988.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novels “which characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University, in 1958. They had two sons and later divorced in 1964. Her son, Slade Morrison, worked with her on several books and literary projects.

Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, at the age of 45.

Toni Morrison died of pneumonia on 5 August 2019, at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, at the age of 88.

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Stephen King’s name is synonymous with horror and suspense writing. His books are used as textbooks on how to write. And yet, King’s first novel, “Carrie”, which went onto to become a cult classic, was rejected by 30 publishers! King was about to give up and threw the manuscript in the trash. His wife, Tabitha retrieved it and urged King to resubmit it. The rest is history. King has since then published more than 80 books, many of which became bestsellers.

His mother did so many odd jobs to raise them and she even worked as a care taker in a nursery to meet the financial requirements of the family. The hardships faced by his mother left a strong impression on his mind which can be seen on his novels. In 1970’s, when he was working as a teacher at Hampden Academy, he became addicted to alcohol and his lifestyle changed. Though he was writing stories, his personal life was affected and his health condition too became worst.

Suffering like this for ten years, he finally gave up drinking and concentrated on his career. On 19th June 1999, he was involved in an accident and his situation became critical. Multiple fractures and the lung injuries forced him to take rest for more than three months and it took more than six months for him to become normal. He wanted to announce retirement during this period but the support from his family made him recover quickly and his successful writing career is still continuing.

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Pratchett was born in April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, the U.K. He had numerous speech impediments, which distorted his voice and made him the target of bullies at school. His condition made it difficult for him to read or write properly. In 2007, aged 59, Pratchett announced that he had a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s called posterior cortical atrophy. In his later years, Pratchett wrote by dictating to his assistant, Rob Wilkins, or by using speech recognition software. He wrote seven novels through the haze of Alzheimer’s. “Snuff’ is the third novel Pratchett wrote using voice-recognition technology rather than a keyboard; he was unable to touch type, although he could prod words out letter by letter.

He always made time for his readers, taking his guidance from his own childhood fan letter to JRR Tolkein. He attended fan events and stirred things up on the newly-forming internet, taking on marathon book signings all over the world. These events sometimes ran to more than six hours and stores would often have to send out for frozen peas to soothe his signing wrist.

He was appointed OBE in 1998 and was knighted for services to literature in 2009. He won many awards for his novels but perhaps his most prized was the Carnegie Medal, won in 2001 for The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. He also received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010.

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R.K. Narayan, the man who brought this fantasy world to life, who inspired many endless quests to track down the town and its inhabitants, failed his English exam. He loathed physics and chemistry. Surprisingly, he cleared those two subjects, but failed in English, his favourite. Even then, he did not give up! Assuring his father that he would attempt the exam again, he spent the next year at home, reading and writing in earnest. Subsequently, he passed the exam in 1926. Few years later, unable to find a publisher for his first novel “Swami and Friends”, Narayan told his friend to throw the manuscript into the Thames river. Instead, the friend took it to Graham Greece, English novelist, who was so impressed that he recommended it to his publisher.

He has published numerous novels, five collections of short stories – A Horse and Two Goats, An Astrologer’s Day, Lawley Road, Malgudi Days, and The Grandmother’s Tale, four collections of essays – Next Sunday, Reluctant Guru, A Writer’s Nightmare, and A Story-Teller’s World, a memoir – My Days, collection of legends drawn from the Mahabharata and the Puranas titled Gods, Demons and Others, two travel books – My Dateless Diary and The Emerald Route (about Mysore state which had sketches by his younger brother, R K Laxman, the famous cartoonist). 

Swami and Friends and Malgudi Days were made into a highly successful television series in the eighties by the late Kannada film-maker Shankar Nag. Another of Narayan’s popular novel, The Guide, was made into a successful Hindi film by Dev Anand’s Navketan Films in 1962. 

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Anne Frank spent over two years hiding in a secret annexe during the World War II. The 13-year-old poured her thoughts into her diary, which has become a symbol of hope and resilience. Despite fearing persecution by the Nazis, she wrote about forgiveness. “It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by a grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem to absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” reads her diary. The last entry is dated August 1, 1944. All the family members were arrested and sent to concentration camps. A few months
later, Anne and her sister, Margot died of exhaustion while on their way to a camp in Auschwitz. Anne’s father Otto was the only survivor, who published her diaries.

The Franks enjoyed the freedom and acceptance they found in Amsterdam. Anne attended Amsterdam’s Sixth Montessori School, where she was a bright and inquisitive student with many friends of various backgrounds and faiths, according to “Anne Frank: The Biography” by Melissa Muller (Picador, 2014). Otto Frank founded a food ingredient wholesale company in Amsterdam.

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The Midway Atoll is a territory of the U.S. that is roughly equidistant from both North America and Asia. The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument includes 10 islands and atolls and is a World Heritage-listed U.S. National Monument.

Sylvia Earle is an American oceanographer whose work concerns marine biology mainly. (Oceanographers, as the name suggests, study oceans. The science of oceanography, however, covers a wide range of topics, which includes, but is not limited to, marine life and ecosystems, plate tectonics and geology of the sea floor, ocean circulation, and physical and chemical properties of the ocean.)

Her 2012 photos show her talking to a Laysan albatross amidst marine debris that has drifted into the Midway Atoll and observing another Laysan albatross named Wisdom.

Why are they important?

Earle, who was born on August 30, 1935, was the first woman to become chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her first oceanographic expedition was in 1964 and there’s been no turning back ever since.

Wisdom, the albatross, is not just the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world, but is also the oldest banded bird in the world. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she is “a world renowned symbol of hope for all species that depend upon the health of the ocean to survive”. While it is impossible to know precisely, we can say for certain that she has laid nearly 40 eggs during the course of her lifetime, which around 70 years now.

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Sarla Thakral was India’s first ever woman to take to the skies. She got an ‘A’ grade license after 1,000 hours of flying, making history as she was the first one to do so. 

Married at the tender age of 16, Sarla Thakral was mother to a 4 year old when she created history. In pre -partition times, the young woman took off in the two-seater plane in 1936 in Lahore. 

Sarla Thakral turned out to be a natural pilot. After only eight hours and ten minutes of training, her instructor deemed her ready to fly solo! Sarla, clad in a sari, climbed into the cockpit of a Gypsy Moth plane. She proceeded to climb to the required altitude and managed to land the plane on her own, passing her first solo with flying colours. She then underwent intensive training and successfully earned her “A” license after accumulating more than 1,000 hours of flying, becoming the first Indian woman to ever do so, that too at the age of 21.

When India gained Independence in the year 1947, Sarla was still living in Lahore, which was now in Pakistani territory- because of the Partition of India, which had created the two independent states of Pakistan and India. Thakral’s neighbour, worried about her safety because she was a Hindu, warned her of potential threats and advised her to leave Lahore with her daughters. Soon, Sarla and her daughters got on a train headed to Delhi and came back to the city where she was born.

Sarla Thakral passed away on March 15, 2008, at the age of 94, leaving a glorious legacy behind. Juggling the roles of a wife, a mother, a pilot and eventually a successful businesswoman, she not only inspired other women to navigate the skies, but also became an epitome of perseverance and resilience.

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Savitribai was the first female teacher of the first women’s school in India and also considered as the pioneer of modern Marathi poetry. In 1852 she opened a school for Untouchable girls.

Savitribai was born in Naigaon village in Satara district to her mother LaxmiBai and father Khandoji Navse Patil, who was the village chief. Savitribai was just nine years old when she was married to JyotiRao Phule (age thirteen) in the year 1840.

SavitriBai had been given a book by a Christian missionary before her marriage which she brought with her to her in-laws house. This shows the attraction she had for words and books despite being uneducated. SavitriBai set up a school for SagunaAau on 1st May 1847 in a backward community. This was their first school.

However, apart from all these oppositions, Savitribai yet continued to teach the girls. Whenever Savitribai went out of her house, groups of orthodox men would follow her and abuse her in obscene language. They would throw rotten eggs, cow dung, tomatoes and stones at her. She would walk meekly and arrive at her school. Fed up with the treatment meted out to her, she decided to give up. But it was because of her husband that she continued with her efforts. He told Savitribai that Jyotirao, who was working for women’s education, had started the first girls’ school and required women teachers to assist him.

Jyotirao and Savitribai opposed idolatry and championed the cause of peasants and workers. Both faced social isolation and vicious attacks from the people whom they questioned. Savitribai’s letters give us a good idea about the experiences of women during this social movement. On her death anniversary, a postage stamp was released by the Department of Post and Telegraph.

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After defeating Columbia’s Valencia Victoria 5-0 at the World Women’s Boxing Championship on Wednesday, MC Mary Kom added an unprecedented eighth World Cup medal to her tally. Mary has 6 gold medals and a silver in the 48 kg category but this will be her first in the 51 kg category. Apart from 7 world cup medals, the southpaw from Manipur also secured an Olympic bronze medal in 2012, five Asian titles, besides other international honours in the Commonwealth games.

Kom was accompanied to London by her mother. Kom’s coach Charles Atkinson could not join her at the Olympic Village as he didn’t possess an International Boxing Association (AIBA) 3 Star Certification, which is mandatory for accreditation. She had all her luggage and passport stolen on the way to the selection camp in Bangkok, Thailand for her first Asian Women’s Boxing Championships. The first Olympic round was held on 5 August 2012, with Kom defeating Karolina Michalczuk of Poland 19–14 in the third women’s boxing match ever to be fought at the Olympics. In the quarter-final, the following day, she defeated Maroua Rahali of Tunisia with a score of 15–6. She faced Nicola Adams of UK in the semi-final on 8 August 2012 and lost the bout 6 points to 11. However, she stood third in the competition and garnered an Olympic bronze medal. In recognition, the Manipur Government awarded her Rs 50 lakhs and two acres of land in a cabinet meeting held on 9 August 2012.

Mary Kom set a new standard in amateur boxing without ever competing in professional boxing. In 2015, Kom became the first amateur to surpass several professional athletes in India in earnings, endorsements and awards. She is the first amateur athlete to win the Padma Bhushan.

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The reason Arati is famous is because back in 1959, she became the first Asian woman to swim across the English Channel. She was just 19 at the time. Of course while that is the highlight of her career, there is more to her than just crossing the water body. Her story is one of courage, perseverance and of course endurance. 

She was born into a middle class family in 1940 in Kolkata. Her father was in the armed forces and she lost her mother when she was a toddler. At the age of 4 she used to go with her uncle to Champatala Ghat to bathe and that was where she learned to swim. Her father recognised her interest in swimming and started getting her trained.

Arati’s specialties were 100m freestyle, 100m breast stroke and 200m breast stroke. She dominated the nationals in 1948 and at the 1951 West Bengal state meet, she clocked 1 minute 37.6 seconds in 100m breast stroke to set an all-India record which was previously held by Dolly Nazir. 

She was the toast of the nation and later that year she married her manager Dr. Arun Gupta. A Padma Shri was awarded to her in 1960 and she had also joined Bengal Nagpur Railway.

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In 1953, India’s Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, pictured at UN Headquarters alongside the then Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, was elected as the 8th and first woman President.

Vijaya Lakshmi’s father, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), a wealthy barrister who belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community, served twice as President of the Indian National Congress during the Independence Struggle. Her mother, Swaruprani Thussu (1868–1938), who came from a well-known Kashmiri Pandit family settled in Lahore, was Motilal’s second wife, the first having died in child birth. She was the second of three children; Jawaharlal was eleven years her senior (b. 1889), while her younger sister Krishna Hutheesing (b. 1907-1967) became a noted writer and authored several books on their brother.

In India, she served as Governor of Maharashtra from 1962 to 1964, after which she was elected to the Indian parliament’s lower house, Lok Sabha, from Phulpur, her brother’s former constituency from 1964 to 1968. Pandit was a harsh critic of Indira Gandhi’s years as Prime Minister especially after her niece had declared the emergency.

Pandit retired from active politics after relations between them soured. On retiring, she moved to Dehradun in the Doon Valley in the Himalayan foothills. She came out of retirement in 1977 to campaign against Indira Gandhi and helped the Janata Party win the 1977 election. She was reported to have considered running for the presidency, but Neelam Sanjiva Reddy eventually ran and won the election unopposed.

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 Williams launched with the crew of STS-116 on December 9, 2006, docking with the International Space Station on December 11, 2006.  As a member of the Expedition 14 crew, Williams served as Flight Engineer.  While onboard, she established a world record for females with four spacewalks totaling 29 hours and 17 minutes.

Williams launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, along with Russian Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, on July 14, 2012. They were welcomed on the International Space Station on July 17, 2012, by NASA Flight Engineer Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonauts, Expedition 32 commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin. Williams spent four months conducting research and exploration aboard the orbiting laboratory. She landed in Kazakhstan on November 18, 2012, after spending 127 days in space. During their Expedition, Williams and Hoshide performed three spacewalks to replace a component that relays power from the space station’s solar arrays to its systems, and repair an ammonia leak on a station radiator. With 50 hours and 40 minutes, Williams once again held the record for total cumulative spacewalk time by a female astronaut (has since been overtaken by Peggy Whitson with 10 spacewalks). In addition, Williams, who has spent a total of 322 days in space on two missions, now ranks sixth on the all-time U.S. endurance list, and second all-time for a female astronaut.

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Sucheta Kripalani became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1963.  Born in 1908 in present-day Haryana’s Ambala, Kripalani completed her education from Delhi’s Indraprastha College, before moving on to teach Constitutional History at Banaras Hindu University. Kripalani also established the women’s wing of the Congress party in 1940.

Her role in shaping the contours of an independent India is notable, for she was a member of the Constituent Assembly tasked with formulating the seminal document that would be governing the newly-independent country. She took over as the chief minister of UP from Chandra Bhanu Gupta and occupied the top post till 1967.

Sucheta was married to prominent freedom fighter and politician, Acharya JB Kripalani.

Interestingly, while Acharya became a prominent opponent of Congress and even established a party called Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP), Sucheta (apart from a short stint with KMPP) continued to be loyal to the Congress.

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Sub-lieutenant Shivangi became the first woman pilot for the Indian Navy on Monday. Shivangi was born in the city of Muzaffarpur in Bihar.

Shivangi was commissioned into the Indian Navy last year after her initial training. Shivangi joined operational duties at the Kochi naval base today.

She will be flying the Dornier surveillance aircraft of the Indian Navy.

Shivangi Singh was born on 15 March 1994 in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar, India to school teacher Hari Bhushan Singh and house wife Priyanka Singh. Shivangi hails from a humble agricultural background. During her childhood, she was captivated by the sight of seeing a politician using a helicopter to attend a political gathering in her native village, which inspired her to become a pilot. Hari Bhushan Singh, her father, is now the principal of a girls-only government school constructed on land donated by Shivangi’s great grandfather, who donated it to enable people to overcome the conservative abhorrence of educating girls. Her mother Priyanka is a housewife.

She obtained a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical engineering from Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology and subsequently studied at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology for her Master’s degree.

She is aged 24 (as of 2019) and does not keep a surname.

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In a major feat of mountaineering, 18-year-old Malvath Poorna from Telangana scaled Mt Vinson Massif, the highest mountain peak in Antarctica. Mt Vinson Massif is 4,987 metres above sea level.

With this, Poorna has become the first and youngest tribal woman in the world to set foot on six tallest mountain peaks in six continents. Poorna now aims to become the first and youngest tribal woman to scale the seven tallest summits located in seven continents.

Poorna is an undergraduate in the state’s Social Welfare Residential College for women and is currently a fellow at the Minnesota State University as part of the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program, USA.

Poorna is now gearing up to scale Mount Denali, North America’s highest mountain peak), to achieve her goal of scaling the seven tallest summits located in seven continents.

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The founder of the Hawn Foundation, which works for the underprivileged children, is Goldie Jeanne Hawn, an American actress who is also a producer and a singer. Goldie Hawn had been one of the reliable stars of the latter part of the twentieth century.

Goldie’s first major film role in ‘Cactus Flower’ in 1969 brought her the Golden Globe as well as the Academy Award for the Best Supporting Actress. Her Academy Award catapulted her into the club of successful actors with comedies like There’s a Girl in My Soup and Butterflies are Free.

Goldie proved herself to be a versatile actor excelling not only in comedy but also in drama. Pictures such as The Girl from Petrovka, The Sugarland Express (which incidentally, was Steven Spielberg’s directorial debut) and Shampoo are proof enough.

She also received the Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year Award in 1999. This is an award given by the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Society at Harvard University.

Goldie, with author Wendy Holden, wrote her autobiography A Lotus Grows in the Mud in 2005.

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U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins his seventh gold medal at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Spitz swam the fly leg of the 400-meter medley relay, and his team set a new world-record time of 3 minutes, 48.16 seconds. Remarkably, Spitz also established new world records in the six other events in which he won the gold. At the time, no other athlete had won so many gold medals at a single Olympiad. The record would stand until Michael Phelps took home eight gold medals at the Beijing Games in 2008.

Having set 10 world records by the time of the 1968 Summer Olympics, the 18-year-old Spitz brazenly predicted that he would take home six gold medals from the Mexico City Olympic Games. Actually, he won just two gold medals, both in team relay events, and took home a silver in the 100-meter butterfly and a bronze in the 100-meter freestyle.

 He lost his amateur status and rarely swam in competition after 1972. In 1992, at age 42, he launched a comeback bid but failed to qualify for the Barcelona Olympics. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1977 and was a member of the first class of inductees into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983.

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Hima Das nicknamed the Dhing Express, is an Indian sprinter from the state of Assam. Dhing is a town in Nagaon district in the state of Assam; that is the reason she is called “Dhing Express”. She became the first Indian woman — indeed the first ever Indian athlete — to win a gold medal in any format of a global track event at IAAF World U20 Championships when she clocked a speed of 51.46 seconds. Born on January 9, 2000, to rice farmers in Dhing village of Assam’s Nagaon district, Das won five back-to-back gold medals in about a month in Czech Republic in July 2019.  

Das mainly takes part in women’s 400-metre, 200-metre and 4×400-metre relays. At Asian Games in 2018, she won a silver medal in the 4×400-metre mixed relay. She also set an Indian U20 record of 51.32 seconds to finish sixth in the Commonwealth Games 400m final in Gold Coast in April 2018. In September 2018, Adidas signed an endorsement deal with Hima Das. She was also conferred with Arjuna Award by the President of India on September 25, 2018.

Das mainly takes part in women’s 400-metre, 200-metre and 4×400-metre relays. At Asian Games in 2018, she won a silver medal in the 4×400-metre mixed relay. She also set an Indian U20 record of 51.32 seconds to finish sixth in the Commonwealth Games 400m final in Gold Coast in April 2018. In September 2018, Adidas signed an endorsement deal with Hima Das. She was also conferred with Arjuna Award by the President of India on September 25, 2018.

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The Wright brothers—Orville (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912)—were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful motor-operated airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, 4 mi (6 km) south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1904–05, the brothers developed their flying machine to make longer-running and more aerodynamic flights with the Wright Flyer II, followed by the first truly practical fixed-wing aircraft, the Wright Flyer III. The Wright brothers were also the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.

The brothers gained the mechanical skills essential to their success by working for years in their Dayton, Ohio-based shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery. Their work with bicycles, in particular, influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle such as a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. From 1900 until their first powered flights in late 1903, they conducted extensive glider tests that also developed their skills as pilots. Their shop employee Charlie Taylor became an important part of the team, building their first airplane engine in close collaboration with the brothers.

The Wright brothers always presented a unified image to the public, sharing equally in the credit for their invention. Biographers note that Wilbur took the initiative in 1899–1900, writing of “my” machine and “my” plans before Orville became deeply involved when the first person singular became the plural “we” and “our”. Author James Tobin asserts, “It is impossible to imagine Orville, bright as he was, supplying the driving force that started their work and kept it going from the back room of a store in Ohio to conferences with capitalists, presidents, and kings. Will did that. He was the leader, from the beginning to the end.”

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Sanna Mirella Marin is a Finnish politician who has been Prime Minister of Finland since 10 December 2019. A member of the Social Democratic Party, she has been a member of the Parliament of Finland since 2015, and served as the Minister of Transport and Communications from 6 June to 10 December 2019. After Antti Rinne’s resignation in the wake of the 2019 postal strike, Marin became prime minister on 8 December 2019. At 34, she is the second-youngest serving state leader, the youngest female state leader, and Finland’s youngest-ever prime minister.

Marin was elected second deputy chairperson of the Social Democratic Party in 2014. In 2015, she was elected to the Finnish Parliament as an MP from the electoral district of Pirkanmaa. Four years later, she was re-elected. On 6 June 2019, she became the Minister of Transport and Communications.

In December 2019, Marin was nominated by the Social Democratic Party to succeed Antti Rinne as the Prime Minister of Finland, but Rinne formally remained party leader until June 2020. In a narrow vote, Marin prevailed over Antti Lindtman.

Marin describes herself as coming from a “rainbow family” as she was raised by same-sex parents. She was also the first person in her family to attend university.

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Mahatma Gandhi, the pioneer of India’s freedom struggle, and Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second Prime Minister of India, were born on October 2. They coined popular national slogans that resonated with masses.

October 2 is of great national importance for the country as on this day, two great leaders were born on the Indian soil. Mahatma Gandhi, the pioneer of India’s freedom struggle, and Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second Prime Minister of India, with their selfless service to the nation, continue to inspire everyone.

When Lal Bahadur Shastri took over the prime ministership of India after Jawahar Lal Nehru’s death in 1964, India was attacked by Pakistan. During that time, India was reeling under scarcity of food grains. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s call for “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” inspired the soldiers and the farmers to save the country at the border and from hunger strike. 

“Do or die” became a very popular slogan during India’s fight for freedom against the British. Mahatma Gandhi had coined the slogan during a meeting of the All India Congress Committee which took place on August 7, 1942. 

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Buzz Aldrin, original name Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr., (born January 20, 1930, Montclair, New Jersey, U.S.), American astronaut who was the second person to set foot on the Moon. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York (1951), Aldrin became an air force pilot. He flew 66 combat missions during the Korean War, where he flew F-86 “Sabre” aircraft as part of the 51st Fighter Wing in Seoul and shot down two MiG-15 jets. Aldrin later served in West Germany. In 1963 he wrote a dissertation on orbital mechanics to earn a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Later that year he was chosen as an astronaut.

Aldrin’s initial application to join the astronaut corps when NASA’s Astronaut Group 2 was selected in 1962 was rejected on the grounds that he was not a test pilot. He was aware of the requirement and asked for it to be waived, but the request was turned down. On May 15, 1963, NASA announced another round of selections, this time with the requirement that applicants had either test pilot experience or 1,000 hours of flying time in jet aircraft. Aldrin had over 2,500 hours of flying time, of which 2,200 was in jets. His selection as one of fourteen members of NASA’s Astronaut Group 3 was announced on October 18, 1963. This made him the first astronaut with a doctoral degree which, combined with his expertise in orbital mechanics, earned him the nickname “Dr. Rendezvous” from his fellow astronauts. Aldrin was aware it was not always intended as a compliment. Upon completion of initial training, each new astronaut was assigned a field of expertise – in Aldrin’s case, it was mission planning, trajectory analysis and flight plans.

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Any discussion about India’s greatest ever cricket captain is incomplete without the name Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi being mentioned.

Known famously as Tiger Pataudi, he became captain of the Indian team when he was just 21 years old and in many ways revolutionised his team’s approach towards the game. He instilled a winning mentality in his teammates and led India to their first overseas Test victory in 1967.

Long after his playing days were over, Pataudi appeared for an interview on a show called Anmol Ratan. The video of the interview, shared by a YouTube channel called Broadcast Imaging, shows the legendary cricketer opening up on an array of topics, including how he got the Indian team’s captaincy at such a young age and the accident that damaged his eye.

Pataudi was arrested in October 2005 over poaching of a blackbuck and two hares . He was subsequently released on bail. The case went on for 9 years, and in January 2015, six people were convicted. Mr. Pataudi had died in August 2011 and was thus not part of the accused anymore. Note that this is unrelated to the other blackbuck poaching case of Salman Khan that his son Saif Ali Khan Pataudi was involved in.

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“The Country of the Blind” is a short story written by H. G. Wells. It was first published in the April 1904 issue of The Strand Magazine and included in a 1911 collection of Wells’s short stories, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. It is one of Wells’s best known short stories, and features prominently in literature dealing with blindness.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the “father of science fiction”, along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback.

One of the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and sketches. One common location for these was the endpapers and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries and his current romantic interests. During his marriage to Amy Catherine, whom he nicknamed Jane, he drew a considerable number of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage. During this period, he called these pictures “picshuas”. These picshuas have been the topic of study by Wells scholars for many years, and in 2006, a book was published on the subject.

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homes were slowly inundated with colourful prints of deities and mythological figures — many of which could be traced back to the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma. Encouraged by the British to use western artistic techniques to reinterpret Indian mythology, Varma set in motion the creation of an Indian aesthetic that exists till date.

Varma was eager to paint from a young age, and his uncle encouraged this artistic inclination, persuading the Maharaja of Travancore to let him stay in the palace and learn from famous artists who visited the court. 

Art historian Geeta Kapur describes Varma as both a traditionalist and modernist. He grew up studying Sanskrit and orthodox scriptures, but took pleasure in experimenting with European drawing styles, exploring realism and using his scientific knowledge of perspective in landscapes and portraits.

His work in realism began as a portrait artist of mostly aristocratic women. He then delved into mythological paintings inspired by Puranic texts, and later narrative paintings after being influenced by Parsi and Marathi theatre in Bombay.

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Many anniversaries occasioned the volume of Paniker, published by Artworld in 2016 – the fortieth death anniversary of KCS Paniker, a widely influential painter, the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publishing house and Chennai’s oldest gallery Artworld, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of Cholamandal Artists’ Village – the Chennai landmark that Paniker helped found.

Paniker was born in Coimbatore in 1911 and spent his childhood in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. He studied art at the Government School of Arts, Madras, and was appointed as a teacher there after graduation. By 1944 he had established the Progressive Painters’ Association, that enabled artists to exhibit all over India, and later, London.

Before he retired, Paniker made a contribution to the Chennai cultural scene which he will forever be remembered for – he founded the the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, a 10-acre plot of land composed of studios, permanent collections, workshops, and guesthouses for visiting artists, all built by artists themselves.

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Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Laxman or as we call him RK Laxman was born on this day in Mysore in 1921. An Indian cartoonist and illustrator who took most of his inspiration from the common man’s life and aspirations, his works are appreciated by people belonging to each age group.
His cartoons and caricatures have become synonymous as the means to define the Indian landscape in simple terms. His first job as a cartoonist was for The Free Press Journal in Mumbai. Later in 1951, he joined The Times of India and worked there for nearly five decades. Best remembered for his creation of ‘The Common Man’ and the daily cartoon strip ‘You Said It’, his witty style has made him occupy a special place in our memories.

For his remarkable contributions in his field, he has been conferred with the Padma Bhushan in 1973, Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1984 and Padma Vibhushan in 2005. He received the honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism by CNN-IBN TV18 in 2008.
Although the maestro passed away in 2015, his bespectacled dhoti-clad protagonist continues to represent India and its many idiosyncrasies.

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India’s greatest painter of modern times, the snowy-haired and bearded, barefoot Maqbool Fida Husain — who died in self-exile in London four years ago – is a forgotten figure on his birth centenary 

Renowned equally for his artistry and eccentricities, the internationally acclaimed artist is credited with catapulting Indian art to the world arena — though he was hounded by a spate of controversies virtually all his life.

Once hailed as India’s ‘Pablo Picasso’ by the Forbes magazine, Husain is largely remembered among the Indian masses for his paintings depicting prancing horses, women subjects, historical figures and nude paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses, besides other events.

His portrayal of horses with their “tremendous lines and the majestic way that the horses held their heads high” – as Sotheby’s specialist in South Asian modern and contemporary art Priyanka Mathew once said – were held amongst his most sought after and highly-priced collections.

It was way back in the 1930s that the tall, young Husain rejected a prospective job as a tailor’s assistant to paint cinema hoardings in Mumbai for a paltry 25-35 paise per square foot — and this ultimately proved to be his art school, college and university.

Earning recognition quickly, he joined, in 1948, the famous artist F.N. Souza’s Progress Artists Group, a conglomeration of aspiring young painters with a desire to create an Indian version of modernist art in those struggling days of India as a newly-independent country.

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Debi Prasad Roy Choudhury MBE (1899–1975) was an Indian sculptor, painter and the founder chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi. He was known for his bronze sculptures, including Triumph of Labour and Martyr’s Memorial, and is rated by many as one among the major artists of modern Indian art.

Roy Choudhury was born on 15 June 1899 at Tejhat, in Rangpur in the undivided Bengal of the British India (presently in Bangladesh), and did his academic studies from home. He learnt painting from Abanindranath Tagore, the renowned Bengali painter, and his earlier paintings showed influence of his teacher. Turning to sculpting, he initially trained under Hiromony Choudhury, and later, moved to Italy for further training. It was during this period, his works started to gather western influences. Returning to India, he joined the Bengal School of Art for further studies. In 1928, he moved to Chennai to join the Government College of Fine Arts, first as a student and then worked there as the Head of the Department, vice principal and the principal till his retirement in 1958. 

In 1958, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, the third highest Indian civilian honour. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 1962 and, six years later, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, honoured him with DLitt (honoris causa), in 1968. Choudhury, who was married to Dolly, died on 15 October 1975, aged 76.

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The original Constitution of India, adopted on 26 January 1950, was not a printed document. It was entirely handcrafted by the artists of Shantiniketan under the guidance of Acharya Nandalal Bose, with the calligraphy texts done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in Delhi. 

His genius and original style were recognized by famous artists and art critics like Gaganendranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy and O. C. Ganguli. These lovers of art felt that objective criticism was necessary for the development of painting and founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art.

He became principal of the Kala Bhavana (College of Arts) at Tagore’s International University Santiniketan in 1922.

He was also famously asked by Jawaharlal Nehru to sketch the emblems for the Government of India’s awards, including the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri. Along with his disciple Rammanohar, Nandalal Bose took up the historic task of beautifying/decorating the original manuscript of the Constitution of India.

He died on 16 April 1966 in Calcutta.

Today, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi holds 7000 of his works in its collection, including a 1930 black and white linocut of the Dandi March depicting Mahatma Gandhi, and a set of seven posters he later made at the request of Mahatma Gandhi for the 1938 Haripura Session of the Indian National Congress.

In 1956, he became the second artist to be elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s National Academy of Art. In 1954, Nandalal Bose was awarded the Padma Vibhushan.

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Anjolie Ela Menon (born 1940) is one of India’s leading contemporary artists. Her paintings are in several major collections. In 2006 her work “Yatra” was acquired by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, California. Her preferred medium is oil on masonite, though she has also worked in other media, including glass and water colour. She is a well known muralist. She was awarded the Padma Shree in 2000. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Being a well-known muralist, Anjolie Ela Menon has done over 35 solo shows and many group shows in India and abroad and in 1968, 1972 & 1975 she performed along with I, II, III International Triennale by Lalit Kala Akademi, with Paris Biennale, France in 1980 and in 1980 at New York & Washington D.C.

In the year 2000, Government of India conferred Anjolie Ela Menon with the most prestigious Padma Shri Award. She is on the board of trustees in IGNCA             (Gandhi National Centre for the Arts). In 2002, her work was shown in a major exhibition event at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai which eventually toured other towns including Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi. Her life and work has been featured in several publications and films made for CNN and Doordarshan Channels.

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Sayed Haider Raza (22 February 1922 – 23 July 2016) was an Indian painter who lived and worked in France since 1950, while maintaining strong ties with India. He was born in Babaria, Central Provinces, British India, which is now present-day Madhya Pradesh.

He was a renowned Indian artist. He was awarded the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Academi in 1981, Padma Bhushan in 2007 and Padma Vibhushan in 2013. He was conferred with the Commandeur de la Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honour) on July 14, 2015.

His work evolved from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 1940s, he moved toward a more expressive language, painting landscapes of the mind.

In 1962, he became a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Raza was initially enamored of the bucolic countryside of rural France. Eglise is part of a series which captures the rolling terrain and quaint village architecture of this region. Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.

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Renowned Gond tribal painter Bhajju Shyam who was honoured with Padma Shri this year, recalls an incident with a laughter, which proved a turning point in his life.

Bhajju Shyam is a Gond artist who was born in the village of Patangarh, Madhya Pradesh. While looking for work in Bhopal, Bhajju was encouraged to take up art by his uncle, Jangarh. His internationally acclaimed book, ‘London Jungle Book,’ is a Gond artist’s reflections on the cultural experience in the city of London. A renowned illustrator, he was awarded the Italian Bologna Ragazzi for his work on ‘The Night Life of Trees,’ along with Durgabai Vyam. He has also been conferred with the Padmashri – the fourth highest civilian honour in India – in 2018, for his contribution to the arts.

For his book The Life of Trees Night (2006) he was awarded the 2008 Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Bhajju Shyam lives in Bhopal, India. He was awarded India’s fourth highest civilian award the Padma Shri in 2018.

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Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called “one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century” and a “pioneer” in modern Indian art. 

She painted women going to the market, women at a wedding, women at home. Sometimes she showed women bonding with other women. At times the works seemed to convey a sense of silent resolve. It was a rendering rarely seen in depictions of Indian women at the time, when portrayals tended to cast them as happy and obedient.

Her 1932 painting “Young Girls” received a gold medal in 1933 at the Paris Salon, the renowned art show. It depicts her sister, Indira, wearing European clothing and a look of confidence while sitting with a partially undressed friend, Denise Proutaux, whose face is obscured by her hair — one woman bold and daring and another reserved and hidden. The painting reflects the different aspects of Sher-Gil’s personality — outgoing and sociable, as she was known among those who encountered her at Parisian parties, or tucked away and painting vigorously.

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Somewhere deep inside the Peruvian jungles of the mighty Amazon, Ed Stafford found a purpose to his life. Facing gun-toting tribes and predators, he became the first man to walk the 6,400 km length of the river.

A strong desire to discover his true self pushed Stafford towards the extreme adventure. Leaving behind a potentially lucrative career as a stockbroker in England, he delved deep into the darkness of the Amazon and emerged as one of the bravest explorers of the 21st century.

Here’s a brief account of his life and his hair-rising adventures:

Off the beaten track

When a young Stafford attended career counseling sessions at his school, he was told that a career as a logistics manager suited him best. And so, Stafford spent the rest of his life proving them wrong.

He liked the outdoors and joined the British Army. After retirement, he planned to become a stockbroker, like most of his colleagues.

On a whim, he joined an organization conducting expeditions and volunteering programmes for young people.

Thrilled with the experience, Stafford decided never to go back to work in London and instead, set out looking for more adventures.

He was eager to go on a kayaking expedition but everything seemed to have already been done. No one, however, had ever attempted to walk the length of the Amazon.

The Amazon rainforest

Along with his friend, Luke Collyer, Stafford began his expedition on April 2, 2008. The journey took 860 days, much of it hacking through the jungle with a machete and surviving on geckos, insects and fish. Stafford blogged and filmed his deadly journey.

Halfway through, his partner abandoned him and Stafford ran out of money (his sponsors pulled out due to recession). He appealed to his viewers to fund the rest of his expedition and help poured in.

Left on his own, Stafford stoically trod through the jungle without any maps or even a Global Positioning System (GPS) – he had carried a GPS device but it stopped working. Close encounters with jungle predators, flesh-eating maggots and poisonous snakes tested his survival skills. Once, he was arrested for alleged murder by the Shipebo tribe. They had mistaken him for someone else, and refused to consider his passport as an identity proof. They insisted that it was fake as it was not ‘personally signed by the Queen.’

The two-year-long journey, which finally came to an end in August 2010, helped Stafford find his passion.

A way of life

But Stafford’s thirst for adventure was not yet quenched. His subsequent adventures included surviving on an uninhabited Fijian island. For 60 days, he lived without food, water or survival equipment of any sort. The resulting series aired on Discovery Channel in 2013. Two follow-up series saw him marooned in a different location each episode – from the Gobi desert to the jungles of Borneo. In 2015, he explored the Danakali Desert in Ethiopia, the hottest place on Earth.

In 2019, Stafford went on another epic adventure, this time with his fellow adventurer and wife, Laura Bingham, and their two-year-old toddler in a remote island in Indonesia.

Recognition

His intrepid adventures earned Stafford the European Adventurer of the Year award in 2011 and the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in recognition of outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge through exploration. Following this, the Guinness World Records formally recognized Stafford’s achievement in walking the length of the Amazon. He appears in the 2012 Guinness Book of Records.

Wanting to encourage other explorers, Stafford is now a trustee of the Transglobe Expedition Trust, a body that gives grants to expedition leaders. He is also an ambassador for the Scouts and a patron of the British Exploring Society.

Oh Really?

• Stafford has written a book, Expeditions Unpacked, that reveals what great explorers such as Captain Scott and Roald Amundsen took with them on their journeys into the unknown.
• He meditates frequently. Even in a life-threatening situation. Stafford finds that closing his eyes for a few seconds and clearing his mind, helps him in responding to the emergency.

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Writer Kavitha Mandana was born in Mysore (now Mysuru), and her schooling was part in Mysore and part in the Nilgiris. She began writing when she joined advertising. “It’s a great discipline where deadlines are always ‘yesterday’. So, after four or five years there, when I had a baby, writing seemed a natural thing to pursue. It’s also when I gathered the courage to begin illustrating,” she says. When her daughter was two, in the days before Indian publishing took off, Kavitha began writing and illustrating for the kids’ supplement of the Karnataka-based newspaper “Deccan Herald”. And there began a fascinating journey into stories.

Writing like Kavitha Mandana

• Read a lot…the more you read, the better you’ll write. Also you’ll discover which genre you prefer to write in.
• Most of us who write, want our work to be read. So look out for those in your peer group (classmates, bus-buddies, cousins, grandparents, etc.) you could share your first stories or reports with. If you find even two others like yourself, read each others’ work and share what it is that you like about the work and what you might like changed (all politely done, of course!).
• A good exercise is to look t a piece of writing that you did for a school assignment, like an essay on your holidays. That would have been written with your teacher as your ‘audience’; which means you would use language appropriate to her age (not yours) and the point of the writing would also be to score marks. Now imagine writing about your holidays – for your friend. The age group changes; things you couldn’t mention in a school essay could be mentioned here, and in this case, you’re not interested in marks, but in entertaining or making things interesting for your friend. Compare the two pieces about the same holiday and you’ll learn a lot about how to write for different audiences.

The writer’s routine

“What inspires me is real life, mostly,” says Kavitha About her novel “No. 9 on the Shade Card”, she says, “It happened just by watching what was playing out in my, at that time, teenaged daughter’s life. She is very outdoorsy, athletic and generally played any game she got a chance to. But when trying to build relay teams or throwball teams, she realized that often even very talented girls weren’t permitted to play outdoors because of safety concerns or the parential worry of girls ‘turning dark’.”

In fact, a lot of her short stories are based on her childhood growing up in the Nilgiri hills, in boarding school, at her grandparents’ place in Coorg, and more. In fact, her first novel for middle-graders, “Bando, the Dog Who Led a Double Life” was really a combination of the goofy Labradors she had at home when growing up. “Of course, none of them could cartoon, like Bando could, in any book!” she laughs.

Kavitha confesses though that she has no process or pattern to her writing time. “I’M a very fits-and—starts kind of person. Besides, I have a full-time job that pays the bills! So writing is fun,” she reasons.

Kavitha Mandana’s books

• Trapped
• No. 9 on the Shade Card
• The Emperor Who Vanished: Strange Facts from Indian History
• The Sixth Grade Wedding Planners

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Books and films regale us with stories of multi-millionaires leading a double life. They often don capes like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, or plunge into adventure like Lara Croft. But in the case of Victor Vescovo, the truth is stranger than fiction.

The Dallas-based multimillionaire, who flies his own jet and helicopter, believes in living life to its fullest. So, the 53-year-old former naval officer has climbed the highest mountains on each of the seven contients and skied to both poles, becoming the 38th person ever to conquer the so-called Explorer’s Grand Slam.

And last year, he did the unthinkable: he conquered the oceans. Vescovo became the first person to dive into the deepest point in every ocean – Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Ocean.

Exploring the deep was a dream of Vescovo’s ever since he was a little boy reading about the great adventures of 20th century explorers.

Using a state-of-the-art submersible called Limiting Factor, he plunged into the depths of the Challenger Deep, the Puerto Rico Trench, the Java Trench, the South Sandwich Trench and the Molloy Deep – in a short span of one year.

Some of these trenches had never been reached by humans before. On others, Vescovo created new records. He also discovered four new marine species in the process. Here’s an account of his dives and what he found down there:

From the trenches

The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean contains the deepest known points on Earth. And at its bottom lies the Challenger Deep.

A gap between tectonic plates, it is the deepest spot in the ocean. Its depth is pegged to be around 36,070 feet, that’s 10,994 metres. The world’s highest mountain, Everest is 8,848 metres. And while thousands have successfully scaled Everest, only three have been able to reach the Challenger Deep. More people have walked on the moon!

The first dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench took place in 1960 by US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard. Then in 2012, James Cameroon, the director of Titanic, descended to the bottom of Challenger Deep, briefly reaching 10,898 metres. His sub was irrevocably damaged.

When Vescovo made the deepest manned sea dive ever recorded, at 10,927 m, the pressure at that depth was incredible. It reached to 16,000 pounds per square inch – enough pressure to crush a bulky car within seconds.

Though he descended safely, what he saw was disturbing. No, it was not some mysterious mythological creature, but a plastic bag and candy wrappers! Vescovo’s dive proved just how much damage humans have inflicted on the oceans.

Close encounters with third kind

Located in the Ring of Fire, the Java Trench in the Indian Ocean is one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Shifting tectonic plates regularly generate rattling earthquakes and mega tsunamis. As the submersible ploughed silently through the trench, a jellyfish-like creature became visible. The gelatinous animal had a small, shimmering balloon dangling from its body.

The team was able to capture it on camera. It is thought to be a rare species of stalked Ascidean.

His final dive was on August 24, 2019, into the Molloy Deep, the lowest point in the icy Arctic ocean, situated west of Svalbard, Norway. It marked the first manned dive to reach to the bottom of the abyss.

What’s next?

After scaling the mountains and the oceans, it’s no surprise that Vescovo has now set his sights on going into space. He also plans to conduct further dives in previously unexplored trenches around the Pacific Rim.

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Whether it is an action figure, a hot wheels car or a rosy-cheeked plastic doll, toys are favourite playmates of every child. But what happens when children grow up and the toys get shoved away into a forgotten corner? That’s exactly what the Toy Story franchise, which began 25 years ago, showed us. It explored the secret lives of toys through the adventures of Woody, the spindly toy sheriff; Buzz Lightyear, the space ranger; and Bo Peep, a porcelain shepherdess figurine, who try their best to ensure that their owner Andy doesn’t forget them.

But did you know that Toy Story was the first-ever entirely computer-animated (CGI) film, which ushered in a new era of animation and special effects? Or that it almost did not get made because Disney did not like the main character?

Toy Story was the first major project of Pixar Animation Studios, which was still a relatively unknown company. Started off as the computer division of Lucasfilm, which was founded by the legendary George Lucas, its first product was the Pixar Image Computer that could produce high resolution computer graphics. In 1986, Steve Jobs acquired this division and named it Pixar.

The world got a taste of the young studio’s creativity when they made a short animated film called Luxo Jr, using the Pixar Image Computer. The film won the Best Animated Short at the 1986 Academy Awards.

That’s when the children’s film giant, Disney approached Pixar to make three full-length animated films. Pixar took up the challenge and assembled a team of computer scientists and scriptwriters, which later became famous as ‘the brain trust’.

Breaking ground

At that time, technology for producing full-length animated films did not exist. So Edward Catmull, who was executive producer of Toy Story, created a whole new digital-animation programme RenderMan which eventually made the film possible. Catmull went on to win an Oscar for his contribution.

RenderMan allowed the animators, without much engineering background, to control the movement of their own characters. Though the programme was path-breaking, it had its limits. For instance, it made all animated objects look like plastic. As the team tried to find a way out, Jon Lasseter, co-founder and chief creative officer of Pixar, came up with a simple solution. Why not have the main characters that are made of plastic?

That’s how the team decided to make a film about toys. In 1988, Lasseter had directed an Oscar winning short film Tin Toy. Having toys as characters lent itself well to the software. Humans were by far the most difficult to create, so the story was told from the toy’s point of view. But the team was worried whether the concept might be too juvenile for older kids and adults. After a lot of research, they chose toys that everyone could relate to. That’s how Woody, Buzz, Mr. Potato Head and Bo Peep were born.

Story first

Another challenge in front of the team was whether to focus on the technology or the story? Sure technology and special effects were bound make the film visually appealing, but would it be enough? After studying classics such as Star Wars, Wizard of Oz and Snow White, the team was convinced that white technology was important, the story played a much bigger role. The story is what the viewers will take back with them so it was given priority.

Andrew Stanton got working on the screenplay. Though the film was commissioned by Disney, Pixar did not want it to be a fairytale or a musical. No prince or princesses were included. In fact, the writers did not even want the main character to be likeable.

Put on hold

But Disney, which enjoys a reputation for making fairytale films such as Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, did not approve. It refused to fund the project till the main character was rewritten. Production was put on hold and the film seemed to be doomed until Jobs decided to fund it. However, Disney came back on board soon after the team agreed to make some changes in the original storyline.

Along came Joss Wheadon, who took over the writing and made the film into what it is today. Woody’s character was made more likeable and the conversations more lively and engaging. Randy Newman’s You’ve Got a Friend in Me was used as the theme song.

Commercial success

When Toy Story finally released on November 22, 1995, it was a litmus test for Pixar. Did they make all the right decisions? Was it a good idea to focus on the story and not the technology? Well, the box office provided the answers. The film was considered a huge success because it made more than $300 million. About four years later, Toy Story 2 was released, which was also a big hit. Then in 2010, Toy Story 3 bagged an Oscar. The other Pixar titles to have won the animated trophy are Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouile, WALLE-E, Up, Brave Inside Out and Coco. Today, Pixar has become a major force in the industry. More than 225 CGI feature films have released since 1995. Over the years, the animation got bigger and better. But remember, it all began with a toy!

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Neither age, nor adversity could stand in the way of Xia Boyu, who climbed the highest mountain in the world at the age of 69, becoming the second double-amputee ever to do so. Overcoming tragedy and official barriers, Boyu proved that resilience and determination can move mountains.

Testing times

Boyu lost his legs on his forst attempt to climb Everest. An avid mountaineer, Boyu was part of the Chinese Mountaineering team to Everest in 1975. At 8,000 metres, not far from the summit, the team was caught in an altitude storm. They were stranded for three nights in the merciles storm in the ‘death zone’ of Everest, where there is so little oxygen that the body starts to die, minute by minute, cell by cell.

Under such extreme circumstances, one of his team mates took ill and Boyu generously lent him his sleeping bag. Exposed to the harsh cold, Boyu’s feet experienced frostbite and had to be amputated.

Before Boyu could even come to terms with his mutilated body, a couple of decades later in 1996, disaster struck again. He was diagnosed with lymphoma. This time, the doctors had to amputate his legs above the knee to prevent the cancer from spreading to other parts of his body.

Grit and determination

In such adverse conditions, it was impossible to think that Boyu would ever be able to climb mountains again. But he was not one to give up. Reaching the summit of Everest was his dream and he was determined to fulfill it.

Wearing advanced sports prosthetics, he trained longer and harder and attempted to climb the mountain again. His gruelling exercise routine involved waking up at 5 a. m. Everyday and doing 1,500 squats holding 10 kg weights, followed by 360 push-ups and 240 sit-ups.

After getting into shape, Boyu returned to Everest in 2014, but this expedition failed too. His second attempt in 2015 was also cancelled following a 7.8 earthquake that shook Nepal and triggered more avalanches on the mountain. On his third attempt in 2016, he had reached within 94 m of the summit, but a blizzard stopped him from going any further.

Race against time

Then, in 2017, Boyu realised that he did not have much time to complete his challenge. The Nepalese government had announced a ban on double amputees along with visually impaired and solo climbers from reaching the summit in an effort to prevent overcrowding and improve safety of climbers.

Had the ban come into place, it would have dashed Boyu’s hopes forever. But as luck may have it, the new rules raised a global outcry.

Hari Budha Magar, a former Royal Gurkha Rifles soldier and a double amputee, launched legal action, citing violation of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of persons with Disabilities.

In response, the Supreme Court put the ban under temporary review on the grounds of being discriminatory.

With a renewed sense of purpose, Boyu decided to give it one last try in this window of time.

Dream comes true

In May 2018, Boyu, with the help of 12 Sherpa guides, reached the summit. While he became the first doube amputee to reach the peak from the Nepal side, New Zealander Mark Inlis, who has also lost both legs to frostbite, conquered Everest in 2006 from China.

For his endurance and sporting spirit, Boyu was awarded the Laureus Sporting Moment 2019.

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Almost every article on Joyce Carol Oates begins with the astounding number of books the veteran writer has written. So far there are about 100 titles, including novels, plays, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. What’s the secret of her success? Her work is ethic. At 81, Oates zealously writes for at least seven hours daily and regularly tweets on social media on issues close to her heart. It’s the love of writing that drives her.

A child prodigy

Born on June 16, 1963, Oates was the first in her family to graduate from high school. Growing up on a small farm outside the town of Millersport in New York, she attended a one-room school, where all the students studied in a single classroom irrespective of their age. Even in such a dismal setting, Oates shone. Recognising her talent, she was transferred to bigger suburban schools. In 1956, she graduated from Williamsville South High School, making her family proud.

Grandmother’s gifts

Oates’ grandmother played a special role in her life. She encouraged her to read from a young age. Oates’ foray into reading was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which was a gift from her grandmother and she considers it one of her childhood treasures. Her love for books blossomed over time and she fervently devoured books by Emily Bronte, William Faulkner and even the complicated tomes of Dostoevsky.

Reading inspired her to try her hand at writing. When she turned 14, her grandmother yet again steered her in the right direction by giving her a typewriter. And there was no looking back after that. She churned out one story after the other and soon, won the Scholastic Art and Writing award.

She later published The Gravedigger’s Daughter based on her grandmother’s life.

Milestones ahead

Oates won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she honed her writing skills further. She was introduced to more complex writers such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and D. H. Lawrence. Her writing improved and she bagged a college short story award at 19.

After becoming a Phi Beta Kappa, the top honours at Syracuse University, she went on to pursue her post-graduation in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctorate from the Rice University. She decided to become a full-time writer.

Fresh out of college, Vanguard Press published Oates’ first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963, and later, her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, when she was 26.

An all-rounder

A multi-talented Oates is lauded for her ability to write across different formats and genres on any topic, from powerful human emotions and inner lives of celebrities to the realities of the working class to semi-biographical works and even a fictional, but unerringly accurate, account of the lives of boxers.

Oates also loves writing for young adults and children because it gives her a chance to write happy endings and positive resolutions. Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread my Wings, and Flew Away, Freaky Green Eyes and Big Mouth & Ugly Girl are some of her popular young adult books dealing with topics such as teenage friendships, loss and addiction, and school violence.

Her writing style is quite unique, a blend of colloquial language and contemporary cultural and political references. In 1998, Oates received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.

The mystery lady

Oates ventured into mystery writing under the veil of anonymity. She wrote several books, mostly suspense novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. However, her cover was blown in the late 1980s when her publisher and agents found out that Rosamond Smith, who wrote Lives of the Twins, a short psychological thriller, was not a first-time author as she claimed.

Disappointed at being found Oates swore not to write under pseudonyms again. But she soon broke her promise, publishing a total of eight books under the Rosamond Smith moniker as well as another three novels as Lauren Kelly. Eventually, it was revelaed that Rosamond Smith wasn’t her first pseudonym. She had also published several stories under the name Rae Jolene Smith.

From writer to publisher

Distressed by the Detroit race riots and the U.S. waging war on Vietnam, Oates took the bold step of moving to Canada. With considerable writing experience under her belt, Oates along with her husband forayed into publishing. In 1974, she founded a literary magazine (as the assisstent editor) called Ontario Review in Canada. The idea was to provide a platform to showcase literature from the U.S. and Canada. Later, the duo set up a publishing house, Ontario Review Books.

A gifted teacher

Oates was also an exceptional teacher. She has taught creative writing at the University of Detroit and at Princeton. She is currently visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction. Countless young writers in the U.S. credit Oates with shaping their writing. Jonathan Safron Foer, the bestselling author of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, who took an introductory writing course with Oates in 1995 is one of them. Oates helped him find his voice as a writer.

Goldmine of stories

It’s no wonder that Oates has been frequently nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and is one of the crowd favourites for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her storytelling has won many awards including the National Book Award and the prestigious O. Henry Award twice. She is also the recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Jerusalem Prize. So if you haven’t read any of her books yet, just grab a copy and start reading.

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“Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.” – Greg Child, mountaineer.

Shrouded in mists and mysteries, the 6,960-meter-high majestic summit of Mount Aconcagua beckons one and all. Only a few dare to answer its siren call. Fewer still are capable of scaling its seemingly infinite peaks. But Kaamya Karthikeyan is no stranger to its heights. On February 1, 2019, she became the youngest in the world to scale the highest peak Argentina, South America.

At 12, the young daredevil has reached the top of Europe – Mount Elbrus (5,642 metres) – and even walked on the roof of Africa – Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895 metres). Here’s an account of how she got started in mountaineering and some of the hair-raising moments from her latest expedition.

The making of a champion

Mountaineering comes naturally to Kaamya. Sitting snugly in her baby sling, she accompanied her parents, Indian Navy Commander S. Karthikeyan and Lavanaya, who is an early childhood teacher, on numerous treks even before she started to walk. By the time she turned three, she was used to basic treks to the Sahyadris in Lonavala; and at seven, she mastered high-altitude Himalayan treks to Chandrashila and Roopkund. Later, she reached the Everest Base Camp in Nepal (5,346 metres) and in 2017, became the youngest mountaineer to conquer Mt. Stok Kangri (6,153 metres) in Ladakh.

Not old enough to enrol in training schools, Kaamya trains with her father, from whom she caught the mountaineering bug. “My father led expeditions for the Navy and used to go away for really long periods. So I wanted to know what there was in the mountains that kept calling him again and again,”Kaamya, who is studying in Class 7 at Navy Children School in Mumbai, tells The Hindu In School.

To build her endurance and stamina, she climbs up the stairs of her 15-storey high-rise building saddled with an eight kilogramme backpack. She does this not once or twice, but at least 16 times. Alternatively, the workouts are mixed with either a 10-km run or 20-km cycling. Weekends are relatively easier, with the family going out for treks.

But the grit and confidence are her own doing. “I admire all mountaineers. Going to the mountains is hard and after you have done it once and then to do it again and again takes a lot of courage. My role model has always been my dad,”she says.

On top of the world

Kaamya’s momentous expedition to Mount Aconcagua got off to a rocky start. She required a special permission from a judge in Mendonza to climb the mountain because of her young age. Despite carrying medical certificates from India, Kaamya was asked to take some more medical examinations and psychological assessments in Argentina. The delay set her back by about 10 days; finally she embarked on her adventure on January 17, 2019.

The sheer height along with extremely cold temperatures makes Aconcagua a challenging ascent even for the most accomplished mountaineers. For Kaamya, who has climbed the mountains of Ladakh, it was familiar territory, but the harsh winds threw her off.

Dressed in a padded jacket, she pushed past the howling winds. She climbed about 400 to 500 metres daily. “No other mountain in the ranges around Aconcagua is taller than 500 metres, so that makes it very windy. There is a traverse of two hours on the way to the summit when we are thrashed by winds,” she adds. “This made the expedition more difficult and challenging from my previous experiences.”

To make matters worse, when she reached close to the summit she was forced to turn back because of the inclement weather. “It was a windy day and my fingers were cold. The guides thought I was showing symptoms of acute mountain sickness. So they decided to turn me around and come back down. That was emotionally challenging and that drained me out a lot,” she recounts.

Not one to give up, she repeated the long and arduous, 19-hour-long steep climb again. “The company we climbed with was very helpful. They gave us a personal guide to climb the mountain second time,” she adds.

As she made her way to the top, everything else became a blur. She reached the highest point on the mountain and unfurled the Indian Tricolour. It took her about 18 days to complete the expedition.

“When you reach the top, you don’t feel like you have conquered something great. Instead, when you look at how big and majestic the mountains are it only makes you more humble. That’s what I have learnt from mountaineering,” says the gritty traveller.

Mountaineering has also helped her overcome her deep-rooted fear of the dark. “After all my expeditions, I have learnt that if there is dark then light will follow. And it has helped me overcome my fear. Apart from that there is no other fear,” she adds.

Kaamya aspires to become a forest officer. For now, she has set forest officer. For now, she has set her eyes on completing the Explorer’s Grand Slam, which involves climbing the highest mountains in all the seven continents – she has only three more to go – and skiing to the north and south pole. Stay tuned for her next adventure.

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It was 1996 when this then aspiring author sent a story to the Annual All India Tinkle Short Story Competition for adult writers of children’s fiction. That won her the first prize, but for the next seven years she won the first prize for her stories. And though the protagonist of the first story was named Butterfingers, Khyrunnisa didn’t let any opportunity slip through her fingers! With her 13-years-old protagonist Amar Kishan aka Butterfingers, she has created a smashing seven-book series, including one on the way.

The Thiruvananthapuram based author who was born and brought up in that city, says she started writing quite by chance. “I’m a chronic reader and a huge lover of books and English literature, but it had never been my ambition to become a writer, although, when it happened, I was delighted and am totally enjoying it now,” she says.

The making of a writer

Khyrunnisa confesses that the story of how she began writing is a rather long one. The author and her husband used to subscribe to the Mumbai-based magazine “Tinkle” for their son. The magazine had announced a competition for adult writers of children’s fiction and on a whim, she decided to send an entry. The story she wrote was “Butterfingers. “It won the second prize and I was very pleased. My story as a writer would have ended there had it not been for a visit to my house by two strangers – a lady and her husband. The lady was Prabha Nair, the then assistant editor of ‘Tinkle’. She had come to Trivandrum from Mumbai on a personal trip and when the staff at ‘Tinkle’ got to know about this, they had given her my address and asked her to look me up to find out if I was as bubbly as my story. I don’t know what she found out, but I was pretty thrilled to have an editor visit me on the basis of one story,” she laughs.

When Prabha Nair asked her if she was sending an entry for the following year’s competition and Khyrunnisa replied in the negative claiming she had already won a prize, the former suggested she send an entry since she wrote very well. Happy with this encouragement, Khyrunnisa did send in an entry that went on to win the first prize. That winning streak continued for seven consecutive years. “The writing bug bit me and very soon I was writing for other publications, had a column in ‘The New Indian Express’, won the 2007 Unisun Children’s Fiction Award, and got several other prizes. And when I was asked by ‘Tinkle’ to create a regular character for the magazine, I brought back Butterfingers. It was just a matter of time before the ‘Butterfingers’ series of books was published by Penguin Random House,” says the prolific writer.

Khyrunnisa loves humour writing, and is sure it must be the influence of her favourite writer, P.G. Wodehouse.

Writing like Khyrunnisa A.

Reading is quintessential to writing, says Khyrunnisa, listing out her tips for budding writers.

1. Be a reader first. Writing happens on the solid foundation of reading. Read extensively, both fiction and non-fiction, for that familiarises you with different kinds of books, plots, characters, ideas and writing styles. Meanwhile, keep writing, but don’t aim to be a published author the moment you start writing. The more you read, the better your writing style gets, for you keep revising what you have written.

2. Have a notebook where you jot down ideas that you get at odd places, or exciting incidents you read or hear about and wonderful sentences that come to your mind suddenly and then disappear.

3. Writing is hard work; be persistent. Don’t allow rejection to lead to dejection. Find the genre you are comfortable writing and eventually you will attain your goal of becoming a published author.

Khyrunnisa’s books

• Lost in Ooty and other Adventure Stories
• Howzzat Butterfingers!
• Goal, Butterfingers!
• Clean Bowled, Butterfingers!
• The Misadventures of Butterfingers
• Run, It’s Butterfingers Again!
• Of course It’s Butterfingers!
• The Lizard of Oz and Other Stories
• “Smash It, Butterfingers!”, the seventh book in the “Butterfingers” series, is due later this year and is going to be a badminton-based novel

The writer’s routine

“I am not a disciplined writer who puts in a certain numbers of words every day nor am I too organised in my writing,” she confesses, adding that almost all her writing has been deadline writing – whether it is the Butterfingers stories for “Tinkle” or the stories for other magazines or the regular columns in “The New Indian Express” or articles for other publications. “My ‘Butterfingers’ books have all been written against contracts. So I am always conscious of the deadline and plan my writing accordingly. I am most inspired and write at a frenetic pace when the deadline approaches; that’s also when I write best,” she says.

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Himanjali Sankar was only five when she wrote a poem called “Rain”. Her mother loved it so much that she insisted on reading it aloud to family and friends. “She might have lost a few friends over that but it was the start of a writing career for me,” laughs Himanjali, the author of my favourite young adult (YA) books – “Talking of Muskaan” and “The Lives We Tell”. The author was born in Kolkata, or rather Calcutta, which is what the city was called the she studied English Literature at JNU, New Delhi, and taught English at the University of Indianpolis in the U.S.

Himanjali is a master storyteller who traverses the world of homosexuality and mental health in her young adult books with as much ease as she does fantasy-scifi-humour for Middle readers.

Among her favourite authors for children are Roald Dahl, Peggy Parish, Roddy Doyle and Cornelia Funke – some of whom she read only as an adult. “I read a lot of Enid Blyton as a child and was sad that my children never liked her books!” she rues. Among Indian writers in English for children, she loves the work of her contemporaries, Anushka Ravishankar and Asha Nehemiah.

Books by the author

• The Stupendous Timetelling Superdog (Middle readers)
• Missing: A Magnificent Superdog (Middle readers)
• Talking of Muskaan (YA)
• The Lies We Tell (YA)
• Mrs C Remembers (for adults)

The writer’s routine

Himanjali prefers not to follow a set for writing. She says, “I write when I can – at night, in the mornings, more on weekends when I don’t have to go to office. I don’t write every day at all. And sometimes I write only in my head when driving on taking a walk in the park!”

Writing like Himanjali Sankar

Himanjali is an editor as well as an author, so she multitasks writing looks, and editing and publishing them. Sometimes everyday writing takes a backseat. “While I no longer write every day, but I think when you are younger it is important if you maintain a schedule for writing if you wish to become an author some day,” she says. Here are her tips for budding writers.

Definitely maintain a daily schedule with daily targets for you to write towards.
Keeping a diary. It is always a good idea – write about your day, include unusual details, and definitely, observations about your friends and family.
Writing is supposed to be fun and pleasurable activity. It should help clarify your thoughts and understand the world a little better. So you must certainly not do it if you are not in the mood or even if you see it as a chore that has to be done.

Bet you didn’t know that she loves putting blue nail polish or her toes because she looks down she feels like she is getting a peek at a hidden ocean somewhere under her feet!

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Anita Vachharajani was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and has lived here all her life. She considers herself a Bombay girl to the core. “I think I first started in Class III, trying to put together a story with illustrations. My writing was poor, which didn’t matter to me. But the fact that I had not been able to draw well upset me!” reminisces the writer. You see, she was surrounded by the most gorgeous Russian picture books her mother used to buy her from roadside stalls on her way to work. “My standards for visuals were clearly high. I think I wrote my first poems in Class VI, and luckily, I have very faint recollections of my work from those days,” she laughs.

In fact, she confesses she fought being a writer – due to a lack of confidence – for the longest time. At 29, when she was at home for health reasons, she began thinking of children’s books, and had her first book published at the age of 31.

Anita’s inspiration

Anita says she is inspired by a great deal of sources. “If I had to name two, it would be Russian picture books (published in the former Soviet Union, and translated into English and other languages) and ‘Target’, a wonderful children’s magazine that was edited by Rosalind Wilson, a British educationist in India. The magazine’s delightful illustrations and its humanistic values have stayed with me.” Naming some of the remarkable contributors to “Target”, she says, “One of my favourite writers was Sigrun Srivatsava, and Atanu Roy, Jayanto and Ajit Ninan were the most memorable illustrations for me.”

The writer’s routine

Anita loves researching and nose-diving into projects. She likes to do a lot thinking and research before the actual writing process begins. “That is fun but it tends to become an obsession. So, often, I have to pull myself out of the rabbit-holes of research,” she adds.

A writer’s life is not easy. Anita confesses that it takes her a long time to warm up to work, and she’s easily distracted as well. See, it’s not only students who get distracted! “It doesn’t help, though, because my process is slow to begin with – ideas have to rattle around in my head for really long, and then suddenly, something good, something small yet solid will pop up one day,” says Anita.

But Anita is happy to celebrate her ‘slowness’. “It’s hard to explain this to family and friends, and I’ve decided that after years of being ashamed of my slow pace, I am now going to celebrate it. Any creative work needs the luxury of time and space to grow. We need to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves time for creative growth.”

Writing like Anita Vachharajani

Write, simply write, is what Anita has to say to all you budding writers out there. “Writing is a muscle, like art, Maths or spelling. The more you use the muscle, the more it – and you – will grow. If you can, write in a journey every day,” she adds.

“Young writers often feel impatient writing for no audience, like if the story or paragraph you’re writing now is not meant to be submitted (to a school magazine or a creative writing class), then if there is any point in doing it.” But she insists that the idea behind writing regularly is to write for the sake of writing. To simply put pen to paper. “When you practise Maths or spellings, for example, there’s no point asking, “But who will see this?’ You practise because doing sums or spellings often will make you better at them. Writing regularly is the same, but it’s definitely challenging to find the discipline to do so,” she explains.

If you do write a journal, but are worried about siblings, parents or friends taking a peek, you can always blog, she suggests, adding, however, that writing long-hand – with pen and paper – is a great tool and has huge cognitive and mental-health benefits.

Anita says, “I believe that only aimless creativity can lead to productive creativity. You need to write to lots of fun stuff, lots of rubbish, all for yourself, till you reach a point where you feel that finally you’re saying what you want to say how you want to say it. That’s why writers have drafts and more drafts!”

But apart from building the writing muscle, writers need to have skills such as observation, empathy and a decent vocabulary. “So it makes sense to ride buses, to observe all sorts of people and wonder about them, to read lots of books and to be kind – to oneself and to the world!” she says.

Bet you did not know that Anita loves cities and forests. She loves walking around and exploring places, she loves trivia, she loves black coffee, and she feels that if she ever went back to school, she’d hope to pay more attention to her science education, instead of just chomping through literature and history.

Anita’s Vachharajani’s books

• Amrita Sher-Gil Rebel with a Paintbrush
• Amazing India – A State-by-State Guide
• Tara Tambe, Forest Friend!
• The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories

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               George Washington is called the founder of the United States of America. He is revered by all Americans as the father of the nation. He had a quality which was much more vital than any other gifts and that was his strength of character. A man of conviction, he was a fearless and determined person who believed in carrying out his duty. And thus his fellow Americans considered him their leader. After his death it was said of him that ‘he was first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen’.

               George Washington was born on 22nd February, 1732. His father Augustine Washington was a naval captain who died when George was only 12 years old. He did not receive much education during his childhood. In the Virginian society of those days it was considered more important to learn riding well and to acquire knowledge of farming and estate management. He learned enough arithmetic for his routine work to manage the estate, which he inherited from his father.

               Physically strong and already trained in riding, shooting etc; Washington was made a Lieutenant Colonel in the Virginia militia and sent on an expedition against the French, who were building forts on the Chio River. Later, when General Braddock was sent to fight the French, George was made his aide. Unfortunately Braddock was killed, George, however, showed great courage during the fighting and at the age of twenty three he was made Commander-in-Chief of all the Virginia forces.

               Washington was willing to sacrifice anything for the cause of American defence. When war broke out in 1776 Washington was elected unanimously to lead the army of the 13 colonies to fight the British. The war continued for several years. In 1781 the British surrendered. This was the greatest achievement of Washington.

               In 1789 Washington was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States. The new capital of USA was named after the first President — George Washington. He served two terms as President and refused a third term.

               He died on 14th December in 1799. His birthday is a National holiday in USA.