Archive for September 2010
Some matters of fact
Last Saturday, I went to watch the season opener for the Florida Gators at the magnificent, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium here at Gainesville, Florida. It was an amazing experience.. cleary, “Go Gators” is a way of life here, one that I am more than willing to subscribe to, at least for the next couple of years. 90,000 fans, packed into an arena, chanting the name of the local football team, led on by the “Pride of the Sunshine” complete with a repetoire of moves, crafted over the years to keep the audience glued for the full duration of a game – it is just complete entertainment. And when the Gators take the field for the first time, under their entrance video, with AC/DC blaring in the background, welcomed by an arena full of fans screaming fans, it’s enough to make one’s hair stand on end. The Ben hill Griffin Stadium has sold out every single game since 1989.
“This is the Swamp, home of the Florida Gators”. Greetings, Gator bait! We won the game 34-12. A random comment from my room mate, Sidhartha drew my attention to the large number of African-American players on the field, which in turn reminded me of a story I came across in school. In 1949, Johnny Bright became the first person of African American descent to play college football for Drake University. He was there on a sports scholarship. College rules saw him make his first appearance for the side only in his sophmore year, and he very quickly established himself as the leader of the Drake charge. He remained in this role throughout his college football career and indeed, much of his professional career. In his junior year, 1951, he played in an infamous contest against Oklahoma State University where a Caucasian player, Wilbanks Smith of the opposing team, knocked him unconscious three times before shattering his jaw in a fourth tackle of what was eventually confessed to be a racially motivated attack on the quarterback. John Robinson and Don Ultang, of “Des Moines Register” present at the scene captured and published 6 photos of the incident, and ran a story on the incident in the newspaper showing to the nation, and the world, the shocking brutality of the events and the ugly underbelly of racism running through the USA at the time. They won the Pulitzer prize for the piece that year. Decades later Bright , in an interview remarked “There’s no way the incident was not racially motivated”, an opinion corroborated by some of the players of the Oklahoma State teaminterviewed for the article. They spoke of how Smith and their coach had specifically targeted Bright based on his race.
A lot of the players taking the field on the 4th of September, 2010 were looking to fill in the shoes of legendary Gators teams of the recent past . Their grandfathers grew up in a world where until 1958, they would not even have been allowed to study at UF, and for whom stepping on to a football field was basically an open invitation to grave physical injury for no reason better than the colour of their skin.
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My apartment here in Gainesville, Florida is in the middle of a whole bunch of trees and bushes and other nondescript shrubbery and looking out of my window each morning (or wandering down the path to the supermarket, or strolling to well, anywhere else), I usually spot a host of birds of all sizes and colors that I do not recognize. The Americas separated from Asia, Africa and Europe about 540 million years ago and the species here have had plenty of time to evolve independent of their old world counterparts. So virtually all the species I see here are completely different from what I am used to seeing in India. And the other day that really started pissing me off, due in no small part to the apparent lack of academic activity (an opinion that has since been corrected). So I went to the Science Library and pulled out a copy of a field guide to the birds of Florida, and amidst cardinals and hummingbirds and a distant relatives of the darter and other utterly unfamiliar species of birds, I spotted the Common Mynah. Amd then the Hill Mynah. and then the Collared Dove and the Roseringed Parakeet and Redwhiskered Bulbul, all species that are quite commonly found in peninsular India. This came as quite a surprise as these were birds native to areas of land half the globe away. The huge migratory paths of birds notwithstanding, this was a very unusual occurance. A little more digging revealed that in the ’60s. these birds had been introduced in captivity to the Miami area from where they had escaped and established wild, breeding populations and had had varying amounts of success breeding and spreading. They are today recognized as part of the wild birds of Florida. Hmm. Interesting.
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As a child I was fortunate in having had a lot of books around me to read, including volumes of Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, R.K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond, The Hardy Boys, Satyajit Ray and a host of other authors, famous and obscure. Today, a fairly large personal selection of those books remain, in my bookshelf at home. They’ve turned into a little collection that I’m quite proud of. It makes me smile to think of them, sometimes. Imagine my delight when, the other day, wandering through UF’s campus, I discovered that the University’s Smather’s library has one of the world’s largest collection of children’s books including an edition of Aesop’s fables dating back to the 1700s and a first edition of Alice in Wonderland. They have even had an exhibition dedicated to Alice, and today UF offers a fellowship to librarians specifically oriented towards children’s literature in English. The university has also helped pioneer the study of Children’s literature in an academic setting. I haven’t yet been there but just looking at their website leaves me awestruck. Imagine posessing books from the 1800′s where the illustrations were actually hand painted on to each page. Or pop up books that were cut out with a pair of scissors. It takes a lot to rewind oneself to age 6 and write a book that a child would love. Each of these would truly have been works of art. I must go there soon.
