"Songs Of The New Paradigm: a tale of baby animals and winged messengers"
A collaboration between Indira Lakshmi, Hrishi Dutta, Aliza Bakht with visuals from Ankur Arora.
In a suburb of Delhi, in a quiet middle class locality, there was a small park. In the park lived a squirrel named Pip.
Pip had lived in the park for as long as he could remember, along with his 7 brothers and sisters. They would spend their days jumping from tree to tree, loudly chattering to each other and searching for berries and left over bits of food.
Once upon a time, Pip recalls, the park was laden with lush green grass and well kept flower beds. Now it was mostly dusty and dry, and flooded at least once a year. But that still didn’t stop people from the nearby areas coming to walk their rounds or sit and chat each evening. From dawn until dusk people from all over would come, and the place would be alive with chatter and the thud of footballs and footsteps.
Naturally the animals would stay away from the people. Pip had heard many stories about the human folk. Stories of foolish squirrels would wander too close to the human folk and get squished under their giant rolling machines, nests which would be kicked to pieces by their huge heavy feet and other such terrible things. They frightened Pip. He stayed well away, watching them from the safety of the tall trees.