The Animation Workshop is starting to attract attention from students of Centurion University, Bhubaneshwar.  They didn't know what to expect, when they began to hear whispers about this animation thing going on in the Autocad Lab.  The students shyly approached us in the corridors and their eyes were shining: they were interested in joining our project, they said.    I promised them animation film screenings every evening -  if they could only make it across to room no 6, in the main building at around 5pm.  Today we saw a few classics; and indeed, some of them, such as those by Norman McClaren over 60 years ago, were quite in the 'ancient' category as far as the students were concerned.  They had never imagined that a chair could come to life with such skill and character, as in "The Chairy Tale", it was pure magic.  The theme of this screening were films with  some familiar flavour of Indian design, They laughed with enjoyment at  message of "Love Thy Neighbour".  Ishu Patel's folktale "How Death Came to Earth" made in 1971, was followed with the last screening of the day, "Manjoor Jhali, the Creation of the Peacock" - the first story in the "Tales of the Tribes" series that the film makers, who were present,  are working to complete.

Reading from The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography (1998: 100), with the students of Architectural Planning at the University, Monday afternoon:

A Delhi news-magazine recently referred to me as ‘that freakish Englishman, the brilliance of whose eccentricities even Oxford could not dim’, though it admitted that I had ‘been able to discover poetry and art in strange places.’  I do not resent this curious judgement, for there is nothing very discreditable in being eccentric, but I wonder whether it is really true.  Is it eccentric to live in beautiful scenery in the hills among some of the most charming people in the country, even though they may be ignorant and poor? I would have thought that on other standards it was far more eccentric to live in the noise, the dirt and disturbances of a town, to waste ones time in clubs, playing silly games with cards or knocking little balls about on tennis court or golf course. To go to a village to find a cause that is worth living for, to escape from the infantile gossip and the tedious recreations of civilization may be unusual , but I do not think there is anything specially eccentric about it.