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UK Restores 3 Idols Stolen From Tamil Nadu Temple Back To India

The UK-based collector behind the handover was described as a lover of Indian art and culture

London:

A set of three idols of Lord Rama, Sita and Lakshmana, stolen from a temple in Tamil Nadu decades ago, were restored to the Indian government on Tuesday after a collector voluntarily offered to hand it back on discovering their true history.

The theft dates back to 1978 and led to an investigation by the Idol Wing of the Tamil Nadu Police working along with colleagues in the Metropolitan Police in London.

The unnamed collector, who had acquired the statues in good faith, was informed about their dubious provenance by the Met Police.

After matching them up with archival photographs from the 1950s held at the French School in Pondicherry, it was proved that the idols in his possession were those belonging to the Vijayanagara period and stolen from Sri Rajagopalaswami Temple at Ananthamangalam in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu.

In a ceremony streamed from India House in London in keeping with the limit on gatherings due to the COVID-19 restrictions, priests from Sri Murugan Temple in London conducted a short religious ceremony for their handover to India.

"Today marks the successful completion of the search and rescue operation of these very beautiful idols, which were consecrated and worshipped side by side for years. We wanted to ensure these deities were handled with due reverence and propriety before they are shipped back to India," said Indian High Commissioner to the UK Gaitri Issar Kumar.

"On behalf of the government of India, I hope this will inspire museums and collectors to carefully look and check their collections and help us restore deities that belong to the people of India and have been worshipped for centuries," she said.

The UK-based collector behind the handover, who has chosen to stay anonymous, was described as a lover of Indian art and culture.

Addressing the virtual event, officials from the state government of Tamil Nadu praised his voluntary intervention and expressed the hope that no further action will be taken against him.

"The voluntary handover of these idols highlight two enforcement issues: the need for effective communication and dialogue, and the proper documentation of all cultural heritage, which would not only act as a deterrent to thefts but also help as evidence without which the outcome of this case may have been very different," said Tim Wright, from the Metropolitan Police.

Minister of Culture and Tourism Prahlad Singh Patel, connecting virtually to the event from Delhi, welcomed the repatriation of the statues, which he said was among over 40 "priceless" stolen artefacts restored to India since 2014.

He also revealed that documentation from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and other experts has been collated for the British Museum as part of efforts to seek the repatriation of another idol which belongs in India.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and blogs about the psychology of products at (show all) Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and blogs about the psychology of products at NirAndFar.com. For more insights on using psychology to change customer behavior, join his free newsletter and receive a free workbook.

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Did you know Nir Eyal, the author of this piece, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out their session on ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life’ here.

From comic books and radio programs to TV shows and Atari games, the world has always been full of things that distract us. Today, most of us blame our phones or, more specifically, social media, Words with Friends, or Netflix as the reason we can’t get anything done.

Yet these aren’t the real culprits. Instead, our distraction is usually driven by our desire to escape discomfort, including boredom, fear, and anxiety. When you binge on The Office rather than doing your taxes, watching Michael, Pam, and Dwight is your (understandable) way of avoiding an activity you deem to be a tedious task. The secret to staying focused at times like these is not to abstain from The Office — you’ll just find another distraction — but to change your perspective on the task itself.

Ian Bogost studies fun for a living. A professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has written 10 books, including quirky titles like ‘How to Talk About Videogames, The Geek’s Chihuahua,’ and, most recently, Play Anything. In the latter book, Bogost makes several bold claims that challenge how we think about fun and play. “Fun,” he writes, “turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.”

Huh? Doesn’t fun have to feel good? Not necessarily, Bogost says. By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing our daily activities in a new way. Play can be part of any difficult task, he believes, and though play doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasurable, it can free us from discomfort — which, let’s not forget, is the central ingredient driving distraction.

Given what we know about our propensity for distraction when we’re uncomfortable, reimagining difficult work as fun could prove incredibly empowering. Imagine how powerful you’d feel if you were able to transform the hard, focused work you have to do into something that felt like play.

Is that even possible? Bogost thinks it is, but probably not in the way you think.

Don’t sugarcoat it

We’ve all heard Mary Poppins’s advice to add “a spoonful of sugar” and turn a job into a game. Well, Bogost believes Poppins was wrong. He claims her approach “recommends covering over drudgery.” As he writes, “We fail to have fun because we don’t take things seriously enough, not because we take them so seriously that we’d have to cut their bitter taste with sugar. Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.”

“Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way,” Bogost says. The answer, therefore, is to focus on the task itself. Instead of running away from our pain or using rewards like prizes and treats to help motivate us, the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before. Those new challenges provide the novelty to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction.

TV, social media, and other commercially produced distractions use slot machine-like variable rewards to keep us engaged with a constant stream of newness. Bogost points out that we can use the same techniques to make any task more pleasurable and compelling. He gives the example of mowing his lawn. “It may seem ridiculous to call an activity like this ‘fun,’” he writes, yet he learned to love it.

There is novelty in even the most tedious tasks

“Pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things,” he says. Bogost soaked up as much information as he could about the way grass grows and how to treat it. Then, he created an “imaginary playground” in which the limitations actually helped to produce meaningful experiences. He learned about the constraints he had to operate under, including local weather conditions and what different kinds of equipment can and can’t do. Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun. Finding the optimal path for the mower or beating a record time are other ways to create an imaginary playground.

While learning how to have fun cutting grass may seem like a stretch, people find fun in a wide range of activities that you might not find particularly interesting. Consider my local coffee-obsessed barista who spends a ridiculous amount of time refining the perfect brew, the car buff who toils for countless hours fine-tuning her ride, or the crafter who painstakingly produces intricate sweaters and quilts for everyone he knows. Of course, these people don’t find these activities to be tedious tasks at all; to them, they’re the most fascinating and enthralling things in the entire world. But you can try bringing their mindset — their love of minutiae, their pride in mastery, their eternal yearning to do better — to some of your most dreaded tasks.

For me, I learned to stay focused on the sometimes tedious work of writing books by finding the mystery in it. I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems. To use a popular aphorism, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Today, I write for the fun of it. Of course, it’s also my profession, but by finding the fun, I’m able to do my work without getting as distracted as I once did.

Remember: Finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability. The great thinkers and tinkerers of history made their discoveries because they were obsessed with the intoxicating draw of discovery, the mystery that pulls us in because we want to know more. Whether it’s uncertainty about our ability to do a task better or faster than last time or coming back to question the unknown day after day, the quest to solve these challenges is what can turn the discomfort we seek to escape into an activity we embrace.

This article originally appeared on Nir & Far. Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir blogs at NirAndFar.com. Get a complimentary Indistractable workbook here.

Published September 16, 2020 — 06:30 UTC

Nir Eyal

September 16, 2020 — 06:30 UTC

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UK Restores 3 Idols Stolen From Tamil Nadu Temple Back To India

The theft dates back to 1978 and led to an investigation by the Idol Wing of the Tamil Nadu Police working along with colleagues in the Metropolitan Police in London.

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