Most institutions and organisations come out with themed calendars for a new year. While some are educative, others look at an artistic complication of varied elements.
The city has some creative calendar creators to its credit.
Babu Ajaz, a provision store owner from Whitefield, has created a calendar, keeping the pandemic in mind.
It features old pictures of hospitals and medical institutions like Victoria Hospital, Vani Vilas Hospital, Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, St Philomena’s Hospital, and Sathya Sai General Hospital.
He says, “The calendar is named ‘Hope’, and symbolises positive beginnings and reminds one to be hopeful about what lies ahead.”
He has been creating calendars since 2016. For the past five years, Babu who is a part of a Facebook group ‘Bangalore – Photos from a Bygone Era’, has been using nostalgic photos from the group to make the calendars.
The photographs posted on the group are sourced from old albums, and photo collections by photographers.
Babu says, “I first created a personal calendar with my children’s photographs. It was after that I thought of making calendars from pictures shared in the group. I started with a calendar on heritage buildings in Whitefield. For 2020, I made one with bygone theatres like Opera House, Plaza, and Paramount.”
He uses the FaceSwap application to create the calendars.
Download: Join Facebook group ‘Bangalore – Photos from a Bygone Era’.
Focus on healthy foods
City-based organisation Sahaja Samrudha along with National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has come out with a calendar that focuses on forgotten traditional food.
G Krishna Prasad, founder of Sahaja Samrudha, who conceptualised the calendar, says that his organisation has brought out a variety of calendars in the past, some on desi cotton and millets.
“The fear of Covid-19 has led to a focus on healthy food eating habits. We have created the calendar to remind one of the food diversity around, which is medicinal and healthier,” he says.
Meenakshi Boopathi, owner of Forgotten Foods Facebook page, and editor of the calendar, says, “I have documented native varieties of beans and foods which have been forgotten on my FB page. The calendar uses that information and aims to spread the idea of a new dimension of eating
and create awareness of foods.”
Download: www.bit.ly/forgottenfoods2021
Other interesting calendars
Income Tax Department named its 2021 calendar, ‘Honoring The Honest’, which highlights the various innovative initiatives aimed at making taxes, untaxing.
Download: www.tinyurl.com/y2vdho2b
The ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’ published by Nehru Museum of Science & Technology and IIT Kharagpur, mentions the Saptarishi, and subjects like Sanskrit, Mathematics and Geometry, Economics, Chemical Sciences, with quotes from the likes of scholars like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, James Grant Duff, among others.
Download: www.bit.ly/388NNU5
‘Yoga for Immunity’, a calendar brought out by Moraji Desai National Institute of Yoga, New Delhi, focuses on different body stretches and movements which will help build immunity, like the shoulder rotation, ‘Sutra Neti’, ‘Tadasana’ and ‘UttanaMandukasana’.
Download: Go to Facebook page of MDNIY, New Delhi.
Among other interesting calendars is the one by the Reserve Bank of India, which showcased various punch-marked coins, coins from Early medieval North and South, Provincial Sultanate and Vijayanagar, Mysore Sultanate and
Wodeyars, and Delhi Sultanate.
Virtual Sangeet Ashram came out with a calendar, which carried photographs of the musical greats like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Padma Vibhushan Kishori Amonkar, Shahenshah-E-Ghazal Mehedi Hassan, Jagjit Singh, in action, among others.