Maclagan Edition 4

VOL. 4 | JUNE 2021

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Only One Earth

By Divya Dhananjayan

The sky is a deep red colour, it's not the brink of a beautiful sunset. It’s a forest fire. It's burning the city down.

The ocean is inked with a deep red colour. It’s the blood of severed marine animals mixed with the massive oil spillage.

The lands are barren and uprooted, rare animals face extinction and the number of mass murders soar.

Sounds like a colossal damage, a story far from fiction.

June 5th, 1974- the UN marked the celebration of the World’s first Environment Day with a very apt theme “Only One Earth”. Every year, a day to remind people to eliminate the catastrophes and slowly built up disasters, hoping to prolong the effect of allegiance to the earth through the year and repeating the cycle all over.

OVERVIEW: Only One Earth Queer Main Characters of Color in YA Fiction Book Review : Veronika Decides To Die Central Vista : An Apparent 'Essential' Magic Behind The Magic

It's been developed into a global platform for raising awareness and taking action on urgent issues from marine pollution and global warming to sustainable consumption and wildlife crime. 47 years later, 2021 emblazoned with ‘Ecosystem Restoration’ , but what really were the changes across almost 5 decades? How far has this sagacious event come about?

In 2020, 14 major world leaders set a new global goal to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030 to preserve biodiversity. 2018 saw the ban of single use plastic in India, curbing 70% of marine litter. 2015 saw the establishment of the Paris Climate Agreement, which took an oath to limit the global rise in temperature to below 2°C. 50,000 trees planted in Rio De Janeiro in 2011.

Of course, a lot of acts happen without the public's attention. A lot that deserves appreciation and an almost compensate worthy amount of vile acts that occur under the hood.

It’s not smart to say we still have time to make this a better planet, a quote copied off the internet 8 years ago. Maybe, we shouldn’t wait for June 5th to come by and enlighten us. Turn the world environment day into a month awareness campaign and then into a 365 days critical acts session. Until we scrub the dirt we splattered, we need to amend and learn.

Or simply put, as 1986 would quote, ‘Plant a tree’.

Perhaps with urgency, when 1999 screamed ‘Our Earth – Our Future – Just Save It!’

Misheard Lyrics - Saachi Talwar

OR IS THIS JUST FANTASEA?

Cultural Comment

Queer Main Characters of Color in YA Fiction

By Arushi Aggarwal

Ever since the conception of LGBTQ YA literature back in 1969, a steady pattern of predominantly white love interests has graced the pages of YA books. While the presence of queer characters of colours from different ethnicity, backgrounds and religion has slowly transitioned from "next to none" to "well at least there were two", it's clear that LGBTQIA+ characters of colour can't hold a torch to the prevalence and reach of their white counterparts.

Through the battles of positive representation and a steady rise in bringing more queer stories to the book world, people of colour are sidelined at best and entirely erased at worst.

However, in recent years, there's been attempts to inject stories of LGBTQIA+ people of colour in a genre that, otherwise consistently features, white casts and storylines. To one's assumption, this would be a stride in the right direction. Instead of reading two white people fall in love, the text - and therefore by extension, the story - is surely made more inclusive and representative of the masses by this choice?

What seems to be an unquestionable - and, dare I say, unproblematic - solution to QPOC invisibility is actually far more complex than white authors seem to believe.

When it comes to authors trying their hand at writing about an ethnicity foreign to them, there are two schools of thoughts.One sect firmly believes that given the publishing industry's not-so-subtle preference towards the stories white authors want to tell, queer people of colour shouldn't have to wait until a change is bought about for their own stories to be represented and see themselves in the pages of the books they read. On the opposite end of the spectrum, many argue that by letting white authors write stories about lives they have no idea about and consequently, have never lived, they risk misrepresenting and hurting the sentiments of many people of colour. There must be space for QPOC stories narrated by QPOC authors without it being taken over by the assumptive works by the white authors. Queer characters of color are not interchangeable with white queer characters and the lack of nuance that often accompanies their inclusion makes the haphazard attempt at “diversity” almost insulting.

To treat people of color and their experiences with gender and sexuality in the same manner as white people erases the intersection between race and LGBTQIA+. Queerness does not operate the same way for white LGBTQ+ and LGBTQ+ people of color. The identity is, and always will be, intertwined, if not by the self, then by society. Despite being a substantial experience in the lives of many QPOC, the struggle of merging culture and/or religion with queer identity — for example, the pain of being rejected by queer groups due to racism and of being rejected by cultural/ethnic groups due to homo/trans/various -phobias — hardly makes a dent in the narrative for the Queer Love Interest of Color.

The issues faced twofold by QPOC barely receive on-page acknowledgment.

Despite this, any queer reader of color would recognize that the Queer Love Interest of Color has experienced some level of this, simply by existing (because that is the nature of oppression, especially racism. It finds you the moment you manifest in the world, and sometimes even sooner).

The Queer Love Interest of Color is not a character that is meant for the queer audience of color. It is a character meant for the white gaze.

But these experiences are erased and minimized, sidelined by the narrative’s focus on the internal strife and character development of the white lead, whose struggles — by virtue of being the lead — are de-facto portrayed as the most important in the narrative.

The relationship between the white lead and the Queer Love Interest of Color rarely delves into the topic of interracial dating, let alone the nuance of interracial queer dating, which compounds further stigma and bias on top of the already tumultuous nature of cisgender, heterosexual, alloromantic interracial dating.

Because of this, the perceived “inclusivity” of the Queer Love Interest of Color only stretches as far as the white author feels comfortable portraying. Very rarely does this inclusivity stray from the overarching white lens of the narrative. The Queer Love Interest of Color is a character of color shaped and molded by the wants of the white audience and the white creator.

Harmful representation can go beyond in-text racism. It expands to include erasure; it expands to include using identities as little more than aesthetics.

Pride Month Reads Fiction

Non-Fiction

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Taylor Jenkins Reid Johnson The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali by Sabina Fairest by Meredith Talusan Khan Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri Tomorrow Will be Different by Sarah McBride Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver We Have Always Been Here by Cemetry Boys by Aiden Thomas Samra Habib

Book Review

Veronika Decides to Die

By Piyush Gulati

While the lockdown has left an impeding emotional void in many, and people have been forced to contemplate their way of living and life decisions, here’s a book that can prove to be a calming ground and set some priorities straight.

"Veronika decides to die" is an English novel by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, originally written in Portuguese. The book is a psychological fiction and was published first in 1998.

The protagonist of the novel is Veronika, a twenty-four-year-old Slovenian girl who decides to end her life, even though she has everything an average person desires.

The novel is set in Ljubljana, a small town in Slovenia.

The plot of the story revolves around Veronika deciding to take her life, her past and why she was prompted to take this dire decision, the consequences of her decision, following which she finds herself in Villette, mental hospital, her experiences in Villette, and the ultimate decision with which she is faced by then.

If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to.

The novel is an emotional rollercoaster and has moments of intense earnestness coupled with seemingly imperceptible but relatable situations. The power of the novel lies in the author’s ability to intertwine the psychological aspects behind a person’s way of living with philosophy and then presenting it to the readers in a grounded tone. This ability also stems from Coelho’s experiences in various mental institutions, where he has observed a lot of people and has an understanding of why people do what they do, something which he has put in the novel beautifully.

The novel certainly requires the correct emotional capacity to be fully understood in its essence, with parts that will leave you heavy-hearted, but is surely recommended to have a new outlook on things and life in general, and is an impactful read.

Cultural Comment

Central Vista: An Apparent “Essential”

By Kalash Jain

We return to yet another, and probably one of the largest examples of the government explicitly deeming itself to be an elected autocracy with this Centra Vista Project.

The project involves demolishing and rebuilding several government buildings, including iconic landmarks, and constructing a new Parliament at a total cost of Rs 20,000 crore. Now the question arises as to why we need a new parliament in the first place. The answer dwindles around the notion that it’s old and the amenities have deteriorated.

Though “seemingly” a legitimate answer, the fact check on this indicates that no report backing the sustainability of the current Parliament has been provided and as usual the “hearsay” by the government is expected to be enough to take actions which very well impact the general public.

Cloaked in a veil of secrecy, the project sailed through mandatory approvals and now even the tender for construction has been awarded with a swiftness that is seldom seen in government work. The government, as usual, felt it owed no explanation to the public for the process followed while no exhibition of the proposed buildings was held, no data revealed so that citizens may comprehend the full scope of such a monumental change.

Taking a step in the domain of the city’s heritage, the distinction permitted the demolition and replacement of buildings like Krishi Bhawan, Udyog Bhawan and Rail Bhavan, in addition to the National Museum and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

No debate preceded the decision nor were any impartial committees appointed to assess the damage that would take place due to the construction. The Grade I heritage status, it seems, was meant only for paper.

Lastly, the biggest issue regarding this project, apart from the secrecy and lack of transparency, is the timing and the amount that is spent on it. During trying times of the pandemic, where the healthcare infrastructure was not even remotely equipped to handle the number of people stepping into hospitals, it can be easily argued that this amount, or even a small part of it, could have been used in the stability of the health of our country’s citizens and it’s safe to say that a series of unfortunate fatalities could have been avoided if the government intervention was even remotely at par as it should have been. While not even providing support to help the country through these times, the government was busy throwing IT tantrums and trying to

stop people from helping fellow humans over social media, which is the saddest form of irony to be witnessed.

This sort of gigantism bordering on megalomania seems to be a recurring pattern shown by our government and it seems to solidify the doubts of the reader, about the priorities and the tunnel vision of our current government and more so our Prime Minister, who also stands to gain from this project considering a reasonable sum of the money is sanctioned to build a new lavish home for our honourable PM. Maybe it’ll take a while, but the hope lies in overcoming scripted speeches and theatrics which are in action to sway the citizens into believing they’re part of a hypothetical sense of success which ceases to exist. Now the question at hand becomes, when will we finally decide to look beyond this facade and realise that at this point, we very well may be an accessory to the murder of our own rights as an individual of this country.

Saachi Talwar

Dolsi Varshney

A Look At Literature

Magic Behind The Magic

By Alabh Raj Taru

If we ask someone their favorite novel or book series, there is a high possibility that they will say ‘Harry Potter’. The seemingly crazy thing is that the same answer may come from a kid who’s barely into double digits in terms of age, a wannabe adult teen rebel or even a middle-aged person who has an ever-going existential crisis. It is so popular that it encompasses almost the entire age scale in its hysteria.

As soon as the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, hit the shelves in the summer of 1997, it became an instant hit. Children absolutely loved it. It captured their imaginative minds with such vibrancy and enchantment, that the novel won all the Best Books awards voted by children in 1997 and 1998. Harry Potter was everywhere. It got the British kids to start reading and that in itself can be considered its biggest achievement. There was literal peer pressure among the kids to read the novel and the subsequent ones which were released later.

Obviously, if something became that popular amongst the English kids, it had to be the trend all over the world and especially in our own nation. Though slow at the beginning, it did reach all the corners of the world in different languages and topped everywhere. It travelled through the kids like wildfire and those kids grew up with the entire series and are the current adults, their love, which for many has turned into obsession, has only grown all the while. The fact that Harry Potter at that time and even now is almost everyone’s first novel is a testament of the way it still continues to capture the minds of kids with its magical world.

It might not have reached that high in its popularity had it not been for Warner Bros., who bought the movie rights in 1999. That was probably the biggest factor in propelling the already immensely popular series to its absolute peak. The movies which started coming out sequentially from the late 2001, were impeccable in its adaptation of the novels. They never missed a mark and brought the soul of the novel to life on the big screen with very convincing CGI effects. The fraction of people who did not read Harry Potter, watched it, and loved it.

So even if somebody’s not read them all, they have watched them all. And like with the novels, the watchers grew up with the series making it all the more special for them.

Is it the best book or series to exist? No. There must be some reason for why it has rarely won any award judged by adults or critics. The lovers of Harry Potter may label it intellectual snobbery but that’s just an excuse for being delusional. But that’s also looking at it from a literary point of view.

Is it the most popular series to exist? Yes. This shouldn’t be a debate and is quite simply the fact. It may be not a literal masterpiece and is very well into the overrated area of things, but nothing beats it in the way it has and continues to awe and bewitch both kids and adults.

It’s funny how it reached this high when the only reason it got published was because the 8-year-old daughter of the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing loved the threechapter sample sent by JK Rowling. But now it’s been there for so long and continues to be there. Maybe it’s time to move on, maybe the magic will fade, but for now it’s still as magical as ever. The concept, not the words.

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. the letter we all waited for (yes, even you)

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The English Editorial Board

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