Connect the Dots # 4
These dots examines the tales of human exploration and how it has destroyed something original and genuine.
The lumps of white coral shone round the dark mound like a chaplet of bleached skulls, and everything around was so quiet that when I stood still all sound and all movement in the world seemed to come to an end. It was a great peace as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too—who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off? Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
 |
| Source: Wikipedia |
The first dot examines the article by Michiko Kakutani, the American literary critic and the former chief book critic of the New York Times. Her article on the life of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett is titled as ‘An Explorer Drawn to, and eventually Swallowed by, the Amazon’. Colonel Percy made a series of adventurous excursions into the remote parts of the Amazon. His adventures are the subject matter of the book “The Lost City of Z”. Colonel Percy faced hostile tribesman armed with blow darts and poison arrows and encountered crocodiles, jaguars, piranhas, vampire bats, giant anacondas, and every pestilent insect imaginable, from cyanide-squirting millipedes to ‘sauba ants’ that could reduce a man’s clothes to threads in a single night to ‘eye lickers’ that invade the pupils. But Fawcett and his two companions on a 1925 expedition, his 21-year-old son, Jack and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell, never returned from that trip. In 1953, nearly three decades after his mysterious disappearance, The London Geographical Journal declared: Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest. Fawcett’s adventures are said to have helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, “The Lost World” in which explorers “disappear into the unknown” of South America and find a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction, as well as “Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils,” one of the novels spun off from popular “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie.
 |
| Source: NYT |
The second dot is about the 82-year-old Indian anthropologist, T.N Pandit, who has worked with the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Andamans. The article about Mr Pandit appeared in the NYT on May 5, 2017 – ‘A Season of Regret for an Aging Tribal Expert in India’. Pandit wrote the only book on the Andaman tribals, The Sentinelese, which is sadly out of print today. He has made contact with some of the world’s most isolated people. It took Mr Pandit and his colleagues more than two decades to persuade the tribes known as the Jarawa and Sentinelese to lay down their bows and arrows and mingle peacefully with the Indian settlers who surrounded them. The process was very slow, involving trips into the remote jungles areas to leave gifts for people who would not show themselves. He discovered that there is a tribe that lived in isolation on a 20-square-mile island called North Sentinel and had barely seen at all. In the end, Mr Pandit agrees that the Jarawa were hurt by putting down their bows and arrows. “The negative impact of close contact is inescapable, but it is sad,” he said. What an amazing community but it has been diluted in its outlook, its self-confidence, its sense of purpose, its sense of survival. Now they take it easy. They beg for things” Mr Pandit doesn’t harbour any hope when he says, “In the course of time, these communities will disappear, he said. “Their cultures will be lost”.
 |
| Source: Indian Coast Guard |
The third story/dot is about the widely discussed news article about the American who tried making contact with the Sentinelese people and how they killed him using their bow and arrows. There are different versions emerging about this accident. Some news channels call him as an ‘adventurist’, others as an ‘evangelist’. The Sentinelese, an ancient people believed to be part of the earliest migratory wave out of Africa to Asia, have violently resisted intrusions. Following the devastating 2004 tsunami, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter surveying the island for survivors encountered tribals trying to bring it down with spears and arrows. In 2006, two Indian fishermen were axed by the tribals after their boat accidentally drifted near the island.
Should we leave the uncontacted and untouched in their own turf? What rights do we have to disturb their indigenous existence?
The following articles were used as references to prepare this blog:
No comments:
Post a Comment