India’s 67th National Wildlife Week from 2– 8 October, 2021 is focusing on Forest & Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet, thematically. Through the 1950s, this commemoration went from a single day Wildlife Diwas to a whole week. Since then annually, Indians shine a torch on understanding what we have, what we are losing and what is shifting, in the life and times of our flora and fauna. What is shifting? This question, a classic axis which simply and directly makes news and animates the world of journalism.
Openaxis, as a student driven publication spearheaded by Ashoka University’s Media Studies Department, puts students in the editor’s hot seat, as well as experiencing what it takes to train as a journalist. Students often bring the academic lens of their Major-ing subject interest from the Social and Life Sciences and ask a timely question. The process of exploring the contours of the question is then answered through journalistic means. By thinking through practice, students get to reflect real-time on, elements of writing an analyses to commissioning stories on a deadline, from understanding copyright law through attribution and seeking permission for images and albums, to grasping balance and objectivity, from slicing through top-down view on issues to grappling with ground realities and trying to write like real people talk. Journalistic writing, meant to be easy to read for a general reader, makes students get to work on their vocabulary, grammar, interview questions, written or audio/video and get the difference between feature writing in print and online. Each class runs on this mix of thinking and doing, discussion and argument and produces issue after issue over a 13-14 week semester. Academic lens and journalistic values, that’s Open Axis in one line.
This is Issue 13. From this one to Issue 17, readers can expect a series of environmental features which grapple with the same question – what is shifting. Issue 13 focuses on ideas of the wild and captive and what it means for several different but uniquely Indian environmental contexts.
In the Openaxis focus on India’s National Wildlife Week, Derrida bumps into NDA’s National Education Policy, as Ishita Ahuja speaks to university students, teachers and employers in India’s wildlife sector, on whether the NEP is looking at the value of field experience in wildlife education?
Aritro Sarkar takes us through a short history of zoos. His line of inquiry – in the middle of a generational pandemic, can India rethink its zoological park?
Devanshi Daga brings the findings of two recent global studies done on human attitude to bats and field-insights from an Indian bat-researcher. Can the combo of lab and field research communicate scientifically in a pandemic with the public?
Isha Pareek navigates the journey of two urban Indian eco-activists, as they champion causes and communities, contours and blind spots of environmental justice.
To avoid the trap of the National Wildlife Week being reduced to forced anniversary speeches or school quiz trivia around dates, Issue 13 slices through the perfunctory in the debates and celebrates the theme for 2021, as it is being lived. Each of the stories speaks up for the wild in relation to the people who sustain it. As an idea, as government policy, academic research, activist’s cause and as green humour!
A pandemic’s pause is a bit like the yellow traffic light, do stop by and think with us. Look forward to your feedback.
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