Pandemic networks honour the dead and heal the living
The Hindu
By letting people share their grief, these initiatives enable them to find healing as individuals as well as a community
Andrea Jacob, dancer-choreographer-movement therapist, is one of eight siblings, and with numbers on their side, the Jacobs would naturally enjoy the sense of having a huge gathering by just showing up together anywhere. “To be honest, all eight siblings have met together very few times. The two most significant occasions on which we did so were our parents’ funerals (in 2009 and 2011),” discloses Andrea, who lives with her husband and daughter and an extended family of animals, some named and others unnamed, at a seaside home on a section of East Coast Road, near Chennai. With the siblings seeking their fortune in different climes, the gathering of the Jacobs is a remote possibility — that is, if one entirely discounts the possibility of having technology-enabled “remote” meet-ups.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.