White-breasted waterhens can walk on water !!

White-breasted waterhens are found across south Asia from India and Sri Lanka to south China and Indonesia. They have dark upperparts, white face and underparts, with yellow bill, thin long legs with very long toes. It moves tail feathers up and down. Stepping tenderly from one lotus leaf to another as it forages for food is a sight to watch, seems as if it is walking on water. Its body is adapted for this: long toes helps in distributing its already light frame.

A very common bird found wherever water bodies have thick vegetation cover. Being highly territorial it is a vocal and quarrelsome bird. Their constantly flicking tails and inquisitive suspicious nature make them very interesting birds to observe; highly vigilant they are easily alarmed and run into undergrowth. They nest in a dry location on the ground in marsh vegetation. White-breasted waterhens are often seen out in the open as it feeds on insects, mollusca, small fishes, grain. They have adapted well to human activity and are not endangered. In north India they are called Dawak or Dahak (stamp hereby from Australia).

In this context I thought it would be pertinent to discuss about some great guys from Poland: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885 - 1939) also known as "Witkacy", wrote the play The Waterhen (the reason why he finds himself in this blog!!). When Soviet troops invaded Poland he killed himself as a protest. Witkacy tried to divest the theatre of his time of the bothersome naturalism that he felt was squelching its true nature. He believed in connecting audiences with a communal and individual "metaphysical feeling", that all the great works of art of the past were based upon this principle but that modern creators, as a result of their quest for the perfect reproduction of reality, had lost sight of it. He tried to bring in the pure form that Stanislavsky influenced theatre of the early 20th Century had been trying to keep out.

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) an internationally renowned Polish theatre personality was inspired by Witkacy and stage produced many of his plays including The Waterhen. Kantor was known for experimenting with the juxtaposition of mannequins and live actors. His most renowned work was Dead Class (Andrzej Wajda a renowned Polish director made a movie on it). Czesław Miłosz framed his argument in The Captive Mind around a discussion of Witkiewicz's novel, Insatiability.

The Captive Mind has been described as one of the finest studies of the behavior of intellectuals under a repressive regime. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much. (I like that logic!!!!). One of the basic ideas put forward in Czeslaw Milosz's extraordinary book is that even the best-informed Westerners in reality know nothing about what goes on behind the Iron Curtain. They are fundamentally ignorant, not because of lack of factual data but due to failure of imagination. Milosz (who also happened to be Nobel laureate in literature-1980) writes in “My Intention,” the opening essay of To Begin Where I Am “I have written on various subjects, and not, for the most part, as I would have wished. Nor will I realize my long-standing intention this time. But I am always aware that what I want is impossible to achieve. I would need the ability to communicate my full amazement at “being here” in one unattainable sentence which would simultaneously transmit the smell and texture of my skin, everything stored in my memory, and all I now assent to, dissent from.”

These lines from the poem Child of Europe:

The laughter born of the love of truth

Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.

Gone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock.

The sensible monarch with false courtly phrases.

Stern as befits the servants of a cause,

We will permit ourselves sycophantic humor.

Tight-lipped, guided by reasons only

Cautiously let us step into the era of the unchained fire.