자유게시판

Why humans need animals

Shalini Umachandran

Coexistence is hard—like the new documentary The Beatles: Get Back, in which we reviewed the show—but not impossible, as our cover story points out. After moving from Mumbai to Kodaikanal a few years ago and noticing the increasing elephant movement in her backyard, the writer asked one question: Is it possible to live with elephants? In her moving and beautifully written piece, she explains why there is no single, simple answer to this question of how humans and animals can coexist.

On one level, it is our relationship with animals, and our desire to imbue them with human characteristics that helps us understand the world. Writers from the anonymous narrators of the Jataka tales to John Berger (Why Look at Animals?) to George Orwell (Animal Farm) have shown us this to naturalists such as Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. They live in cities and rarely see fantastical beasts, but the books children read are full of animal characters who teach, preach, befriend and entertain. Researchers point out that our obsession with animal reels on Instagram is actually about implicit anthropomorphism. We are fascinated by animals that look like humans, even though they are very different from us, and somewhere they help us understand the human experience. Or they just make us laugh. Either way, a world without animals is a very dark world, and it is a world that we need to address, like all other relationships.

Working together to get through crises is something the food and beverage industry has become accustomed to in the past 20 months, and one of our stories traces the boom of small food businesses and how technology has empowered them. It's not just Swiggy and Zomato; a host of smaller new platforms have emerged during the pandemic that tailor to the needs of micro-food entrepreneurs and finicky customers. It's also a story of coexistence and survival.

Write to Lounge Editor shalini.umachandran @ htlive.com @ shalinimb

A Sensory Experience of Coffee and Cotton A visually appealing installation celebrating two crops misses the mark when it comes to the history and politics of their cultivation