BENGALURU: Like every year, it is painful to imagine that 2022 will soon be a thing of the past. But this year was an eventful one with various developments making headlines. And it’s time to look back and see what made this year write itself in the history pages.
Green theory
The city hosted multiple climate change events. During COP27, the Museum for United Nations - UN Live, in collaboration with Science Gallery Bengaluru, unveiled a portal at the JN Planetarium to conduct climate discussions with activists from the world over. Various events like the Green Literature Festival, the Wildscreen Panda Awards and the Echoes of Earth Music Festival took place in the city as well.
“Earlier, much of the green attention used to be in cities like Delhi. There has been a shift towards Bengaluru lately because the city became a hotspot for climate conversations. This year the city was affected by floods and other environmental concerns. Bengaluru also has a lot of young climate leaders in the national climate movement” says climate activist Akhilesh Anilkumar, director of Bring Back Green Foundation.
Wordle
The web-based word game started by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle became a global internet phenomenon, following which the New York Times purchased the game. It was moved to their website in February and was free.
Aakriti Sehra, who still plays the game, says, “I found out about Wordle from my roommate, and was soon hooked. My friends started competing on who gets the word first. I continue playing it because it is a great game to kickstart your brain, especially in the morning.”
Dying Melodies
This year bears the cross for witnessing the deaths of famed singers Lata Mangeshkar and KK. The influential singers had lent their voices to songs in various languages, including Kannada.
“Both of them were at different stages of their lives. Mangeshkar’s song Bellane Belagayithu is still remembered. Everyone has grown up listening to her. KK’s demise was unfortunate. He was a brilliant singer and it is a terrible loss to the music community,” says singer MD Pallavi.
Hijab Row
In February, a group of students was denied their right to wear the hijab in their college premises. This gave birth to an incendiary debate on freedom of religious expression as students from other religions weren’t asked to remove their religious attire on educational premises.
The matter was taken to the High Court which upheld the ban saying it wasn’t an essential religious practice in Islam. This was criticised globally, with activists like Malala Yousafzai and Taslima Nasrin, condemning the ban and coming in support of the ban calling the hijab a symbol of oppression respectively.
Meanwhile, artists in Bengaluru also voiced their opinion. City’s Shilo Shiv Suleman started the Haq campaign with her participative storytelling movement - The Fearless Collective.
"Over the last couple of years, we have been focused on Muslim women’s voices in India. I wish I could say the Hijab Row was a singular incident, but it is not. With our campaign, we brought together artists from across the world and put them in partnership with Muslim women who were ‘auctioned on the Bulli Bai app’, for example, and made beautiful, affirmative representations of their bodies to represent their faith and sense of belonging," says Suleman.
Bengaluru in OTT
When the TV series Rocket Boys dropped on Sony Liv on February 4, it quickly became the talk of the town as it involved Homi J Bhabha’s and Vikram Sarabhai’s time in Bengaluru. However, the show received criticism for leaning towards fiction than fact in its retelling of history and the scientific community chastised the show makers for this.
In an earlier CE story, Jahnavi Phalker, a science historian had said, “The show could have been true to history, and could have recognised the great work that was done by the eminent scientists of those times. They didn’t have to glorify anyone or anything.”
Under the Moonlight
News spread like wildfire in the IT world after the Wipro chief, Rishad Premji, fired 300 employees for moonlighting in the second half of the year. Moonlighting means working a second job. Discussions on moonlighting’s acceptability soon started dominating coffee table conversations.
Sandeep Das, an IT expert, says, “When you sign up for a job, you sign a promise. As long as it doesn’t affect your main job, and your line manager is in the loop, there is no problem. It starts when people start moonlighting in grey areas,” says Das. Innovation evangelist Pavan Soni believes the act of moonlighting caught up late because people were working from home.
“The vigilance that is done in an office had gone down. The intent of the employees is not to jeopardise the company’s interest, it is to earn a few extra bucks or utilise their skills in other domains to raise their market value. Many of them moonlight as programmers or developers at startups, who otherwise won’t be able to hire them at their full salary. From an economic perspective, this is good. But from a firm’s perspective, they feel short-changed,” says Soni.