World Wood Day: 6 Indian artists crafting everything from artefacts to toys using wood
Dancing deities @ Indian Haathi
Launched in 2021 to support artisans impacted by COVID-19’s first wave, the Hyderabad-based Indian Haathi takes pride in its quirky creations that depict mythical and folk characters: Surabhi, a white cow, Ambhra the elephant, and Dawon the lion, among others.
Their latest collection of dancing deities (upwards of ₹600) is a tribute to the divine, says founder…
Birthday - EF - Elena Iankova
Friday, 3 May .. and all our wishes for a happy birthday
🌹
Yo !
here before time for a very big change .. haha ..
but at work and got a bit of time and BOOM !
got to say the travel from Juhu home to work Marine Drive in 30 mins .. amazing Coastal Road and the Tunnel emerging on Marine Drive , just before its flyover and simply amazing .. !
Super constructed roads, tunnel, neat clean construct .. no traffic jams .. and done ..
Ok just to change the topic .. here is something to know :
Know what is a "mondegreen?'
MONDEGREENS
If you’ve been listening to rock music, you know it’s often hard to make out the lyrics. They sing it their way and we hear it our way.
Jimi Hendrix famously sang the phrase “While I kiss the sky” which was heard by thousands as “While I kissed this guy.”
CCR’s popular song originally said, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” Many heard it as “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
Deep Purple’s still-popular chorus (known for its timeless guitar riff) “Smoke on the water/Fire in the sky” was misheard as “Smoke on the water/Fire engine guy.”
Nirvana’s anthem “Smells like Teen Spirit” had the lines, “Here we are now/Entertain us.” They were misheard as, “Here we are now/In containers.”
When Elvis Presley sang, “Everybody in the whole cell block”, many heard it as” Everybody in a wholesale frock”
There’s actually a word for misheard lyrics like these.
Mondegreen.
Some mondegreens became so famous that even artistes like Hendrix and CCR sang the misheard versions in their live concerts in a spirit of fun and tease.
It’s not just in pop songs that mondegreens occur. The US national anthem begins with the lofty words, “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light.’ Some heard them as “José, can you see…”
Occasionally, mondegreens had an interesting side-effect. Joe Cocker sang of a ‘lovely planet’ which was misheard as ‘lonely planet.’ The latter became the name of a well-known travel guide series of books.
No one knows why we hear the wrong thing although there are theories. It’s akin to the game of Chinese Whispers where the original line gets progressively distorted into some hilarious garbage by the time it reaches the last guy.
Mondegreens are not restricted to English alone. South Indians, with limited knowledge of Hindi, were taught patriotic songs in Hindi by zealous teachers. A popular one had the repeating phrase, “Bara tamata.” School students sang it with great gusto. Years later, some of them realized the actual words were “Bharat Mata.”
A popular line from Qurbani song, “Aap jaisa koi meri/zindagee mein aaye/ toh baat bun jaaye” was understood as “Aap jaisa koi…toh baap bun jaaye.” The defective version made sense to many who saw Zeenat Aman gyrating on those lyrics while gaping at Feroz Khan.
Many who weren’t familiar with the hill station between Bombay and Pune heard the Gulaami song as “Haathi ka andaa la” until they realized it was “Aati kya Khandala”.
I have a friend, her name is Geeta. Her family called her Gitu. Throughout her childhood and youth, she thought Rajesh Khanna was singing for her, when he said, ”Mere sapnon ki raani kab aaye Gitu”.
'Mondegreen' sounds French but isn't. In 1954, a writer at Harper’s Magazine remembered how as a little girl she misheard an old English ballad. The actual words, saluting a dead war hero, were:
The charm of coexistence: how animals act as a metaphor for social decay
Giving a fillip to the abiding charm of the man-animal relationship on celluloid, at least four films, that have made it to the last stage of the 95th Academy Awards, showcase interdependence of species as a metaphor to indicate the perils of the ecological and social decay that are threatening to tear the ecosystem apart. And, along the way, they demolish the anthropocentric biases that have…