The Missing Caption

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

The b-quoted report was published here on May 30, 2006. I am now astonished to find that the caption is missing. Hence I am entering its caption as ‘The Missing Caption’.

Come June 05, the World Environment Day, Discovery Channel will telecast Climate’’s First Orphans, a documentary produced by Orissa’s Nila Madhab Panda under the Environment Film Fellowship, 2005 of the United Kingdom Creating Tomorrow Programme, revealed Panda at Bhubaneswar on May29.

It is an attempt to look through the lens at the plight of Orissa’s coastal people, suffering as they have been from rise of the sea level due to global warming, as Panda has conceived and as subject matter specialists have informed him during interviews. During last five years only, around 20,000 people in coastal Orissa have been rendered homeless, it is estimated.

The Documentary that carries first hand description of how habitats have submerged under the sea from affected people vis-à-vis the views of scientists is a 22-minute exposure of a continuous calamity. It has already been invited to the Wildscreen Film Festival (Green Oscar) in the UK and the Planet in Focus Film Festival in Toronto.

“For the first time, we will see a film that touches the subject at the most humane level, with real victims accepting their defeat at the hands of Mother Nature,” Panda claimed.

This reminds, however, of Saswat Pattanayak’’s in-depth on-the-spot reports in Asian Age during super cyclone 1999, which are compiled under the first ever documented book on the subject – “Fall and the Rise” – wherein he has stressed that though devastated by the sea, people of Orissa have never accepted defeat, but have arose again and again in their peculiar manner of matching with the Nature.

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