[Bone chilling stories of the horrifying Yeti have been
synonymous to the Himalayas for centuries with local people and some of the
world's greatest mountaineers including legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner,
who became the first man to climb Everest without oxygen, claiming to have had
a terrifying encounter with a large hairy, ape-like creature.]
By Kounteya Sinha
 |
| An illustration of a Yeti |
Hair samples from what is believed to be that of the Yeti have been found to genetically match that of an ancient polar bear dating back 120,000 years.
Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, conducted the research.
Dr Sykes has over many years assembled substantial physical evidence, which he has subjected to the most sophisticated DNA tests available, to answer scientifically the mystery of Bigfoot.
The professor said "This is an exciting and completely unexpected result".
Dr Sykes however said the finding does not mean ancient polar bears are still wandering around the Himalayas.
"But it could mean there is a sub species of brown bear in the high Himalayas which descended from the bear that was the ancestor of the polar bear. Or it could mean there has been more recent hybridisation between the brown bear and the descendent of the ancient polar bear," Dr Sykes said.
Bone chilling stories of the horrifying Yeti have been synonymous to the Himalayas for centuries with local people and some of the world's greatest mountaineers including legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who became the first man to climb Everest without oxygen, claiming to have had a terrifying encounter with a large hairy, ape-like creature.
Himalayan folk lore is rife with tales of an elusive beast that have hardly been photographed.
Professor Sykes has collected and tested hair samples of several animals found in the Himalayas.
He tested two ancient hair samples which locals of high Himalayan villages claimed were that of the Yeti. One of the samples was that of an animal found in Ladakh (India) and the other from Bhutan, 800 miles away.
The DNA tests then compared the results to other animals' genomes stored on the GenBank database. Professor Sykes to his amazement found a 100% match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, that dates back at least 40,000 years - and probably around 120,000 years.
This has made professor Sykes believe that the most likely explanation is that the Yeti is actually a hybrid between polar bears and brown bears.
A Yeti footprint on the base of Mount Everest taken by British climber Eric Shipton sparked a global interest in the abominable snowman post 1951.
*
SEX TRAFFICKING IN INDIA
[India’s own sex trade is booming. The New York Times recently reported on widespread human trafficking of young girls in the state of Jharkhand and on the trafficking of impoverished girls into India from neighboring Nepal. Girls are also exported from India and other South Asian countries to the Gulf and Southeast Asia.]
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
Although a brutal gang rape in Delhi last
December grabbed national headlines and caused a public outcry, sex trafficking
in India has not provoked the same degree of outrage. It is hard to know how
many women and girls are trafficked in India, but the United States State
Department, the United Nations and India’s Human Rights Commission have all
identified India as a major hub in the international sex trade, a global
phenomenon that may involve upwards of 27 million people.
In March, in the wake of the rape, India’s
Parliament passed a bill amending laws concerning sexual violence and making
sex trafficking a criminal offense. But the gap between enactment and
enforcement remains unacceptably wide.
Parliament acted in response to the
recommendations of a judicial committee led by the late Justice Jagdish Sharan
Verma. In addition to urging tougher laws protecting women and children from
abuse, the Verma Report recommended stiffer penalties for sex-related crimes as
well as swifter justice for the perpetrators.
India’s own sex trade is booming. The New
York Times recently reported on widespread human trafficking of young girls in
the state of Jharkhand and on the trafficking of impoverished girls into India
from neighboring Nepal. Girls are also exported from India and other South
Asian countries to the Gulf and Southeast Asia.
Persistent poverty is a major factor. Many
vulnerable women and girls are lured by promises of employment, and some
parents are desperate enough to sell their daughters to traffickers. Rapid
urbanization and the migration of large numbers of men into India’s growing
cities creates a market for commercial sex, as does a gender imbalance
resulting from sex-selective abortion practices that has created a generation
of young men who have little hope of finding female partners. India’s affluence
is also a factor, luring European women into India’s sex trade. The caste
system compounds the problem. Victims of sex trafficking disproportionately come
from disadvantaged segments of Indian society.
Amending India’s laws is a good step, but
a law is only as good as its enforcement. Trafficking is profitable and
corruption is widespread. It is all too easy for traffickers to buy off police
and other law-enforcement agents. The police must face strong disciplinary
consequences for turning a blind eye, and those who commit sex crimes must know
that they risk speedy prosecution and stiff sentences.
Meanwhile, India’s government should
address historic patterns of discrimination and focus increased resources on
educating disadvantaged girls. Until attitudes in India toward women change and
poor children gain the skills they need to take control of their futures, sex
trafficking and the damage it inflicts will continue.
INDIAN ARTIST EXPLORES ABSENCE THROUGH PRESENCE
[That process is also on display at the Frieze Art Fair in London, which opens Thursday and where the Mumbai gallery Project 88, which has represented Ms. Choksi since 2008, is showing prints from the artist’s “Houseplant and Sun Quotation” series. The prints were made by placing leafy plants near paper that had been photochemically treated with palladium salts. As the sun’s rays fell on the vegetation and paper, shadows were captured as pale shapes, making a negative impression of the plants.]
By Sei Chong
“How do you
form nothing? How do you perform absence?” Ms. Choksi, 39, said in an interview
at her home in Mumbai. “These are all repeating questions.”
To address
these questions in “Echo of the Inside (Column Cube I),” shown at
the Frieze
London Sculpture Park in
2011, Ms. Choksi first cast a 50-centimeter, or 20-inch, cube in cement grout
and built a single mold around it with latex and cheesecloth. The mold was then
cut, yanked off the cube in pieces and reassembled. This process was repeated
until the bits of the mold could not be put together again, for a total of
seven cubes stacked on top of one another.
“I actually am
valuing presence through acts of erasure and absenting,” said Ms. Choksi, who
works mainly with sculptures and video. “To make the sculpture, I had to
somehow dematerialize the mold. That double tension between making something
and diminishing something — that exists in most of my work.”
That process is
also on display at the Frieze Art Fair in London, which opens Thursday and
where the Mumbai gallery Project 88, which has represented Ms. Choksi since
2008, is showing prints from the artist’s “Houseplant and Sun Quotation”
series. The prints were made by placing leafy plants near paper that had been
photochemically treated with palladium salts. As the sun’s rays fell on the
vegetation and paper, shadows were captured as pale shapes, making a negative
impression of the plants.
Ms. Choksi’s
work, which has been bought by the Kiran Nadar Museum of
Art in New Delhi and
the University of Southampton in England, among others, does not leave those
collectors unmoved. “The emotive force in her work, the way she uses images,
draws you very much closer,” said Roobina Karode, curator of the Kiran Nadar
Museum of Art, who acquired Ms. Choksi’s short film “Leaf Fall” after seeing it
at the India Art Summit in Delhi in 2009. “Even though her images are about
erasure and absence and loss, they make you think about renewal.”
To demonstrate
absence in her art, Ms. Choksi remains very much present. In the name of her
work, she has lost consciousness, fallen silent for 10 days and submerged
herself in a lake.
“What struck me
most about her practice is the risk she takes and the vulnerable positions she
often forces herself into,” Vikki McInnes, director of the Margaret Lawrence
Gallery in Melbourne, said in an e-mail. As part of a recent exhibition, the
gallery showed Ms. Choksi’s short film “Minds to Lose,” for which the artist
had herself anesthetized.
Ms. Choksi’s
interest in absence and erasure does not stem from a minimalist impulse. “It’s
simply a desire to clarify life in materialist terms,” she said. “The business
of living is the business of dying, and how do you make sense of all that? I
guess this is my way of making sense of it, this grappling with materials,
stuff, even with the quick of life.”
Born in New
Jersey, Ms. Choksi moved to Mumbai at the age of 4 but returned to the United
States to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, as an undergraduate
and later Columbia University in New York for a master’s degree. She began
working in Mumbai in 2006, when a friend invited her to help shoot two films
for the first Indian entry for the Venice Architecture Biennale. After
splitting her time between Los Angeles and Mumbai for four years, she moved to
India in 2010.
In Mumbai, she
found a home at Project 88. Sree Banerjee Goswami, owner of the gallery, first
met Ms. Choksi in 2007, when the artist was working on a theatrical exhibition
at the gallery with Rehaan Engineer, an artist based in New Delhi whose
judgment Ms. Goswami trusted.
“What’s
striking about Neha’s work is her persistent and slow engagement with processes
of time and change and consciousness,” Mr. Engineer said in an e-mail.
Impressed by
Ms. Choksi, Ms. Goswami gave her free rein for an installation at Project 88,
and since then the gallery has showcased her works in a number of solo and
group exhibitions. This year is the fourth Frieze London for Project 88 since
2009, and the gallery has shown Ms. Choksi’s work each time.
In 2007, Ms.
Choksi began developing a video trilogy centered on the idea of absence. “It
was a period of time when I felt it was important for me to figure out a way to
perform absence and to delete myself,” she said. “I wasn’t going to obviously
end my life, but how do I approach that sort of sense of ending in a creative
way that allows for a multiplicity of meanings for the onlooker?”
Ms. Choksi
bought two goats, a donkey and a sheep at a market and filmed them at a farm in
Delhi as a veterinarian fed them an anesthetic. She also filmed herself being
anesthetized by a doctor, drawing parallels between her state of
unconsciousness and that of the animals.
“I wanted to
put myself into the category of animal,” she said. “The simplest level of being
that I could think of at that point in time was to have very few needs and
wants and to live in the present and not to have access to grammar and syntax
and what that implies — which is a sense of time and a sense of loss.”
At the 2008
Khoj Live Performance festival in New Delhi, Ms. Choksi took a sedative for her
piece “Petting Zoo,” which left her unconscious on the floor of a tent for two
hours. Milling around her were the same domesticated animals she had bought, as
well as a doctor and veterinarian.
Attendees were
free to touch all the creatures. “Some people tried to tickle me,” Ms. Choksi
said. “Some people petted me, some people tried to wake me up or to get a rise
from me, like trying to get the funny spots where you would automatically jerk,
but of course I didn’t because I was drugged out.”
Footage from
the farm and from “Petting Zoo” was incorporated into “Minds to Lose,” the
first of a video trilogy, which was included in this season’s Artists’ Film Internationalby the Whitechapel
Gallery in London.
Of all Ms.
Choksi’s pieces, “Minds to Lose” might be the one most likely to provoke
anxiety in viewers. It shows the animals taking shaky steps after eating the
sedatives and slumping to the ground, glassy eyed, as the drugs kick in. Ms.
McInnes of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery recalled watching the video with a
visitor who cried, “Is the goat going to be slaughtered?” (For the record, no
animals were harmed.)
In the second
video of the series, “Leaf Fall,” which was acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia for its seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Ms. Choksi had actors strip the leaves off a peepul tree, which is sacred to
Hindus and Buddhists, until a single autumnal sprig was left at the top.
“The only way
to appreciate that particular leaf was through the absence and the elimination
of the other leaves,” Ms. Choksi said.
The final part
of the trilogy, “Iceboat,” is being shown at Project 88 and at the Armory
Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. For that artwork, Ms. Choksi made
a boat out of ice and filmed herself rowing it in an Indian lake for 45 minutes
until the ice melted.
“At some point
I’m actually rowing in circles, which is part of the point,” she said. “Perhaps
it’s a way for me to talk about the joys as well as the exasperations of daily
living, and a way to talk about the body and all the pressures that a body is
succumbing to through this extension of my body, which is this boat.”
