It is risky to wish anyone a happy new year. Last year, memes egged people to hunt down the person who had first wished them a happy new year. But I am not risk averse, see. So, Happy New Year.
The first week of January, too, saw a flurry of memes. One of them said that 2020 was the closest we had ever come to being around a Ouija board or at a séance. “Can you see me?”“Am I audible?”“We can’t see you!”Perhaps, the new year will give us a respite.
In fact, the current cover story on the Shaolin temple in Zhengzhou, China, was conceived when the world was much more innocent. As the cover story writer Anirudha Karindalam notes in his opening sentence, “It was a different world, a different India and a different China.”Temple officials said that THE WEEK was the first Indian publication to be given official access to the temple—including an interview with Shi Yongxin, the abbot.
Anirudha and Photo Editor Sanjoy Ghosh braved temperatures in the -2°to -6°Celsius range to bring you this story. There is also the small matter that Covid-19 was already hopping hosts in Wuhan, around 500km south of Zhengzhou. Our story covers the temple itself and the training regime, and provides insights into the minds of trainers and students. The monks and students alike embrace the monk Bodhidharma’s Indian roots, something most of us are not aware of.
The package is special in other ways, too. For example, the legendary Phillip Zarrilli wrote one of his last pieces for this issue. A director, writer, actor-trainer and professor of performance practice, Zarrilli is the first person to receive a doctorate in kalarippayat. I was especially intrigued by how he forged a portmanteau word, bodymind. How else could he describe the effect of martial arts on the human whole and soul?
The story also provided us with hilarious moments, like the time I walked into THE WEEK’s weekly conference to find Anirudha and Sanjoy sitting there drinking coffee. I had asked them to go into quarantine as soon as they had arrived, but they seemed to have thought that I was pulling a fast one on them! They were sent home on a 28-day quarantine and returned only after the government Covid-clinic gave them the all clear.
In fact, that was just the beginning of the Covid protocol in THE WEEK and Malayala Manorama. Soon, the entire team at our editorial office was split from top to bottom. The teams alternated with each other to bring out the magazine. Inter-team socialising is prohibited outside the office, too. The same protocol is in force in all other divisions.
I hope you will love reading the Shaolin issue as much as I did and grasp the deeper message. I was particularly moved by an extract from Welsh Art Review sent to me by a colleague, in which Zarrilli’s partner Kaite O’Reilly described his death. He had been battling cancer for 14 years.
O’Reilly wrote: “He rode out on a breath—like so many times in his teaching he spoke of riding the breath to that moment of completion at the end of exhalation—the space in-between at the end of one cycle before the impulse of the next inhalation begins. This time came no inhalation.”
What a way to go, and what choice of words to describe it!