january 2013
Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (10 January, 2013)
October 2012
September 2012
Pao - The Anthology of Comics 1
(Contributors: Ambarish Satwik * Amitabh Kumar * Ikroop Sandhu * Iram Ghufran * Jacob Weinstein * Lakshmi Indrasimhan * Mitoo Das * Orijit Sen * Parismita Singh * Pia Alize Hazarika * Priya Kuriyan * Salil Chaturvedi * Samit Basu * Sanjay Ghosh * Sarnath Banerjee * Shohei Emura * Vidyun Sabhaney * Vishwajyoti Ghosh)
The Pao Anthology, a collection of twelve previously unpublished graphic fiction and published by Penguin Books, India, was launched at Max Mueller Bhavan on 7 September.
The sudden rain did delay the evening's proceedings but in no way dampen the enthusiam of a large crowd that gathered at the lawns of Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi to hear the contributors reminisce about how the Collective came into being from way back in 2007. There was music, live drawing, banter, and more with the crowd queuing up to get their heavily discounted copy signed by the contributors.
Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (10 January, 2013)
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| Book launch of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanisthan 1839-42 by William Dalrymple |
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| Amit Chaudhuri and other writers/editors at "The Tibor Jones South Asia Prize" announced on 10 January. Among the six shortlisted candidates, Avni Doshi won the prize for Girl in White Cotton |
October 2012
TH E H AR PE R C OLLI NS B OOK OF E NGLI S H POE TR Y
EDITED BY SUDEEP SEN
Launch at British Council, New Delhi, India
October 2012
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| Poets reading at the launch at British Council, New Delhi. Photo by Shekhar Das |
September 2012
Pao - The Anthology of Comics 1
(Contributors: Ambarish Satwik * Amitabh Kumar * Ikroop Sandhu * Iram Ghufran * Jacob Weinstein * Lakshmi Indrasimhan * Mitoo Das * Orijit Sen * Parismita Singh * Pia Alize Hazarika * Priya Kuriyan * Salil Chaturvedi * Samit Basu * Sanjay Ghosh * Sarnath Banerjee * Shohei Emura * Vidyun Sabhaney * Vishwajyoti Ghosh)
The Pao Anthology, a collection of twelve previously unpublished graphic fiction and published by Penguin Books, India, was launched at Max Mueller Bhavan on 7 September.
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| The Pao Collective launch at Max Mulluer (Music by Ish S-sound Reasons) |
July 2012
Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis makes its way to the 2012 on Man Booker Prize Long-list
Jeet Thayil, noted Kerala-born poet and novelist, has been long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel Narcopolis, built around the opium and heroin dens of Mumbai.
Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in New Delhi.
April 2012
It’s all beautiful
Deborshi Brahmachari
Deborshi Brahmachari
Beautiful people, beautiful lives
The high heel candy and the smart, smart ties.
The pink fat moon, always smiles
Splashing colours across the skies.
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful.
The war is over, the child has died
Forests are empty, earth is dry
The sky is too dirty, birds can’t fly
This song is hollow, makes me cry
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful.
Seasons go and seasons come
Untold stories burn under the sun
still those savvy sunglasses never shun
The “generation next”- on the run
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful. Happy people, happy lives
Happy TV and happy lies
The pink fat moon always shines,
Splashing colours across the skies.
It’s so beautiful.
Yeah, It’s all beautiful.
The high heel candy and the smart, smart ties.
The pink fat moon, always smiles
Splashing colours across the skies.
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful.
The war is over, the child has died
Forests are empty, earth is dry
The sky is too dirty, birds can’t fly
This song is hollow, makes me cry
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful.
Seasons go and seasons come
Untold stories burn under the sun
still those savvy sunglasses never shun
The “generation next”- on the run
It’s so beautiful.
It’s all beautiful. Happy people, happy lives
Happy TV and happy lies
The pink fat moon always shines,
Splashing colours across the skies.
It’s so beautiful.
Yeah, It’s all beautiful.
june 25, 2011
("It's all beautiful" - lyrics and music by Deborshi Brahmachari It's also sung by him.)
Read Deborshi's poem "India Shining" in the March 2012 issue.
2011
The 'Save Sharmila Campaign,' formed with the initiative of several civil societies’ organizations, held a candle light vigil at Raj Ghat on 25 June. It has been 11 years since Irom Sharmila has been fasting demanding the dracorian Indian law, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA*), be repealed. The Delhi police were not going to allow the 300 campaingners to even cross the street toward Raj Ghat because they 'did not have permission.' But there will be more protests in the future until there is a resolution to this.
*The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) is one of the more draconian legislations that the Indian Parliament has passed in its 45 years of Parliamentary history. Under this Act, all security forces are given unrestricted and unaccounted power to carry out their operations, once an area is declared disturbed. Even a non-commissioned officer is granted the right to shoot to kill based on mere suspicion that it is necessary to do so in order to "maintain the public order". (For more on this read: South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre)
Here are some moments from the evening...
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| This one is for you, Menghaobi (The Fair One) |
Please also read: Spot the Difference: Hazare vs Irom Sharmila
1.
MARY FITZGERALD profiles Binayak Sen, an Indian activist who has been given a life sentence for sedition
(The Irish Times - Friday, December 31, 2010)
(http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1231/1224286545160.html)
LAST FRIDAY the man some in India call the barefoot doctor stood in the dock of a courtroom in the remote state of Chhattisgarh to hear that he had been handed a life sentence for sedition.
Prosecutors accused Binayak Sen, a paediatrician and human rights activist who had devoted his life to providing healthcare to the rural poor, of aiding Maoist rebels. Sen, who denies all charges, was convicted on two counts of sedition and conspiracy. He was found not guilty of a third charge of waging war against the state, a crime punishable by death.
The judgment, which Sen’s supporters say was based on planted evidence and concocted testimonies, and sentence have caused uproar in India. Some of the country’s most eminent figures have expressed outrage. “To turn the dedicated service of someone who drops everything to serve the cause of neglected people into a story of the seditious use of something . . . the whole thing seems a ridiculous use of the laws of democratic India,” said economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
“[Sen] has explicitly condemned Maoist violence, and even said of the armed revolutionaries that theirs is an invalid and unsustainable movement,” noted historian Ramachandra Guha. “His conviction will . . . be challenged.”
Soli Sorabjee, a former attorney general, described the sentence as “shocking” and said the evidence against Sen appeared flimsy.
The case has further inflamed an already bitter debate over what fuels the Maoist insurgency sweeping some of the most impoverished pockets of central and eastern India, and how it should be tackled. Many in India point out that the Maoists gained momentum during the same decade that witnessed India’s economy growing to unprecedented, and very lopsided, levels.
I met Binayak Sen while reporting on the Maoists’ rise in Chhattisgarh in September.
The rebels, often called Naxalites after the village where their predecessors staged an uprising in 1967, now have a presence throughout 20 of India’s 28 states. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly declared the Maoists the country’s greatest internal security threat.
The conflict claimed the lives of almost 900 people this year, many of whom were civilians.
Of all the states that form India’s so-called Red Corridor, Chhattisgarh has borne the brunt of the fighting. To counter Maoist influence there, a state-sponsored militia known as Salwa Judum emerged in 2005. What resulted was a spiral of revenge attacks, dividing villages and communities. In his capacity as vice-president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties rights group, Sen helped document atrocities carried out by the Salwa Judum. This did not endear him to local authorities.
Sen was also an outspoken critic of development strategies in Chhattisgarh, home to massive untapped resources including one-fifth of India’s iron ore, and India more generally.
When I met him at his modest book-lined apartment, Sen spoke passionately about the plight of tribals displaced to make way for mining and industrialisation. He also railed against what he sees as India’s creeping retreat from democratic ideals and the poverty and hunger that stalks his country. He knew he was not alone in his views.
“The world should understand that there is a very wide spectrum of opposition [in India] to what has been happening,” Sen said. “But the government wants to simplify the picture.”
Sen, who had been released on bail after two years in detention, weighed his words carefully. “We must have a process by which the people’s voices can be heard in the processes of development,” he told me. “We can never be at peace if such large sections of the population are being ground underfoot.”
The general mood in Chhattisgarh was very tense when I visited. Many spoke of a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia, in which anyone who questioned the current development narrative ran the risk of being branded a Maoist sympathiser. My movements were tracked by security forces. Authorities asked why I was so keen to meet Sen. An earlier international campaign for his release, supported by more than 20 Nobel laureates, had rankled with officials.
During his detention Sen received the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for his efforts to reduce infant mortality rates and deaths from diarrhoea. This week another global response began to take shape. A statement signed by Noam Chomsky and dozens of Indian academics condemned a sentence “whose savagery is unbelievable”. Amnesty International said the judgment was politically motivated.
In his last statement, Sen talked of persecution. “I am being made an example of . . . as a warning to others not to expose the patent trampling of human rights taking place in the state.”
Many in India would agree.
2.
Nikesh Shukla's top 10 Anglo-Asian books
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/22/nikesh-shukla-top-10-anglo-asian-books)
From Hanif Kureishi to Helen Walsh, the novelist celebrates books that find room for naked raves and Bruce Springsteen as well as wrangles over arranged marriages
Nikesh Shukla is a writer, performance poet and filmmaker. His writing has appeared on radio and television and his film The Great Identity Swindle, co-directed with Videowallah, won best short film at the Satyajit Ray Foundation awards in 2009. He lives in north London. His first novel, Coconut Unlimited, is shortlisted for this year's Costa first novel award.
Coconut Unlimited
by Nikesh Shukla
"If we've been told anything ever in our lives ever, it's that Anglo-Asian books will cross swords with themes of cultural identity and dual heritage, repressed marriages and there will be at least one mystical encounter in a mangrove swamp. Probably with mist. Anglo-Asian books are more than these stereotypes.
"Writing my own debut meant doing the entire opposite of all those things, throwing them out and doing a Hornby, or a Coe, filling the soundtrack with Public Enemy and steeping the drama in suburban nausea. These books deal with the diversity of Anglo-Asian themes and take us to communes, squats, concerts, Mumbai, even Tunbridge Wells. Not a banyan tree in sight. And it's not just the brown boys and girls getting involved. Multiculturalism is so embedded in our culture that writers like William Sutcliffe are considering themes of racism and spiritualism. Anglo-Asian books are beyond being about Asians in England. They're about the marrying of cultures, about understanding of the world we live in and its changing boundaries.
1. Hanif Kureishi - The Black Album (Faber)
While The Buddha of Suburbia is a masterfully comic tale of rise and fall that loves its characters, there's something a lot more sinister about The Black Album, making it the oddball in his output. It seems to foreshadow works like Four Lions, City of Tiny Lights and even the forthcoming Ours Are the Streets by decades, and is written with the energy and exuberance of Kureishi's early work, embodied by the raw funk of Prince's eponymous album, and the dizzying chemical overload of the ectasy that fills the rave scenes. It charts clean-cut Shahid's trip into hedonism and flirtations with fundamentalism with eerie prescience, and its take on the classic Anglo-Asian identity crisis tale throws a cleancut, sheltered lad in at the deep end of a naked rave party.
2. Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions (Penguin)
Hari Kunzru takes a break from technology-obsessed India and colonial India to deliver a bittersweet tale of the realities that befall an activist commune, and the secrets and regrets that haunt them well into their dotage. The slow-burn reveal of how all the empassioned polemics and free love fell out is beautifully explored, from the impetuousness of their adolescent smugness into the 20-20 hindsight of guilt and regret. Refreshingly un-brown, which is a rare allowance by a publisher for an "ethnic" author.
3. Sarfraz Manzoor - Greetings from Bury Park (Bloomsbury)
The way this book deals with how a song, a band, a movement can transend race and religion, colour and creed is one close to my heart, and reading about Manzoor's tribal bond with first Bruce Springsteen and then rock'n'roll reminds me of how hip-hop helped me to belong to a club where I knew little of the other members. His descriptions of being British and Muslim and being unsure of how to reconcile the two is wonderfully honest, painful, brutal and triumphant, and damn, he's been one of my must-read journalists for years. It pretty much says everything I want to say about dual heritage and about music but better and makes me ... well, feel like I should have given up and he should be writing this list not me.
4. Sathnam Sanghera - The Boy with the Topknot (Penguin)
When successful journalist and materialist Sathnam Sanghera was 24 he discovered his father and sister were both suffering from a severe mental illness he hadn't been aware of. As he researched their conditions and how they had come to be hidden (through ignorance of schizophrenia and guilty family secrets) he started to piece together his history and that of his parents. Each family member is memorable, from his silent father obsessed with BBC Parliament despite his lack of English; his mother, neurotic and obsessed with finding him a wife of equal caste, holding the family together; his brother with his growing obsessions with fashion icons of the times and his two sisters, funny and nasty by turns. The book closes with a letter to his mother, explaining the choices he has made and the secret life of dating white girls and the amount of panic and depression it causes him. But its also warm and funny – especially where he has his hair cut for the first time, a big Sikh no-no.
5. Helen Walsh - Once Upon a Time In England (Canongate)
A story of one moment that changes everything, and leaves a couple desperately in love spending a lifetime passively battling each other for release. Here, it is a brutal act of racism against working man's club singer Robbie's beautiful Tamil wife, Susheela. Set in the north, and featuring plenty of small-town suffocation, dreams fade and hope dims, lives collide and their children grow up in that inbetween world, never quite sure of who they're meant to be and who their parents wish they were. A bittersweet joy to read.
6. Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul (Canongate)
The ultimate coming-of-age novel, tenderly exploring the suffocation of suburbia, in small-town Surrey where Verapen, a half-Tamil, half-Jewish running obsessive reminisces about the girl he has just buried, his love Moon Suzuki. He ascribes rules to what he can handle in his life (not much beyond the running), which is difficult given that his parents, in the midst of their own crises, aren't following the rules set out for him. Govinden's charm, warmth and ability to wring a heart-wrenching tale out of teenage life make this less a retread of culture-clash concerns and more about the perils and pitfalls of being a teenager in the grand tradition of JD Salinger.
7. Anjali Joseph - Saraswati Park (Fourth Estate)
The beauty of the whole diaspora writing thing is seeing how Anglo-Asians write about living here and there, back in the "desh". Another debut of note from this year was Anjali Joseph who manages to write about a startlingly modern India, with slackers and movers and shakers and lovers familiar from contemporary London. It captures the middle classes of Mumbai with still, quiet clarity and tells a tragicomic and tale about modern family life.
8. Gautam Malkani - Londonstani (Fourth Estate)
Grossly mismarketed as highbrow literary fiction, Londonstani works best as a YA novel aimed at showing teenagers how easily they descend into warring tribes. It's a Lord of the Flies for our time, set in a west London tense with Muslim/Hindu/Sikh tensions, wicked mobile phones and the purest of friendships poisoned by the lure of money. As the characters try and escape their urban-suburban existences, external forces seek to use them against others. A poignant and gritty book about the difference between friendship and tribalism.
9. Rajeev Balasubramanyam - In Beautiful Disguises (Bloomsbury)
Balasubramanyam's only book released in the UK has moments of frivolity and fantasy that exploit Bollywood tropes with such imagination and wonder that you can't help but be spirited away. The narrator, burdened with a bullying dad, obedient sister and mute mother, is moments away from the obligatory arranged marriage scenario. Her only escape is the pictures, where she learns to ape Holly Golightly and the other starlets. Escaping to the big bad city she learns that ... well... I'm sure you can guess. But this is a beautifully energetic book that captures the spirit of escapism and its collision with reality superbly.
10. William Sutcliffe - Are You Experienced? (Penguin)
Ahh levity, my old friend - welcome back, after the heart-wrenching emotiveness of some of the books above, sometimes you just want to read about backpackers trying to find "the real India" - all toilet disasters and sexy gurus and scam artists ahoy as Sutcliffe leads us from Delhi to Goa via recreational sex and drugs, and boy, is it fun. And surprising that the funniest book on this Anglo-Asian list was written by someone more Anglo than Asian.
october 2010
i.
Fragrance of Peace
Irom Sarmila
(Zubaan Books, An Imprint of Kali for Women)
All proceeds from the sale of this book will go toward supporting Sarmila's campaign.
ii.
OPEN editor Manu Joseph bagged the inaugural The Hindu Best Fiction Award 2010 for his debut novel 'Serious Men'. Nayantara Sahgal presented the award in Chennai on November 1, 2010. Gopalkrishna Gandhi was also present at the function.
book news
The Hindu announced the shortlist of 11 books for the The Hindu Best Fiction Award 2010. (The winner of The Hindu Best Fiction Award will be announced at a special literary evening on November 1 in Chennai.) Here's more on this.
The Shortlist
Eunuch Park, Palash Krishna Mehrotra, Penguin India, 2009, p.183, Rs. 250.
Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan, Penguin India, 2009, p.244, Rs.275.
Come, Before Evening Falls, Manjul Bajaj, Hachete, 2009, p.238, Rs. 295.
Saraswati Park, Anjali Joseph, HarperCollins, 2010, p.261, Rs.399.
Serious Men, Manu Joseph, Fourth Estate, 2010, p.326, Rs. 499.
If I Could Tell You, Soumya Bhattacharya, Tranquebar Press, 2009, p.200, Rs. 350.
The Thing About Thugs, Tabish Khair, Fourth Estate, 2010, p.244, Rs. 399.
The To-Let House, Daisy Hasan, Tara Books, 2010, p.227, Rs. 275.
Way to Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Hamish Hamilton, 2010, p.359, Rs.499.
Neti, Neti, Anjum Hasan, India Ink, 2009, p.287, Rs.295.
short film
(In Assamese by Swakkhyar Deka)
Follow the link: http://vad.nmartproject.net/?page_id=91
Abarodh (The Confinement)
The film is in Assamese with English subtitles.
(2008, 14 min 37 secs)
The film tries to show the inner conflict in a person’s mind who finds himself alienated from his surroundings. It’s inspired by the “stream of consciousness” genre in literature. The film deals with a person’s inner conflict and his isolation from the society he is living in. The mental agony, frustration and his so-called to inability to live up to the societal norm- all come together to make him what he is- a rebel. Though he wants to fight the society he is also, to some extent, a timid onlooker. He may be an artist or a poet but his mundane existence is intellectually paralyzing him. The smoke filled room of his, after he butts the nth number of cigarette, becomes symbolic with the vacuum in his life. The books he reads only show his liking for the angry protagonists and tales of depravity. As he walks on the street, he feels like an island in the human sea, adrift and out of company. He reaches an isolated point at the outskirts of the city in the hope of finding himself. He thinks, wonders and also shouts at the top of his voice only to the echo to set his soul free. This may be the same reason why he runs like an insane at night on the sleeping city streets, which seem to challenge him. When he is back in his room, he is tired from his mental wrangle with the city and its people. He finds solace in the bosom of his guitar as he madly plays it to find a musical refuge from his misery. Our protagonist is frustrated- spiritually, aesthetically and yes sexually. His sexual longings make him find comfort in the curves of his guitar that becomes symbolic with a female body and revisits his memory of a night spent with a prostitute. He is disillusioned with the world and he draws on the wall of his room in a burst- images that defy any logic- that may be the only window to the chaos within. The final irony is seen when he picks up the newspaper only to read- It’s Valentines Day tomorrow.
This video participated in
CologneOFF IV - Here We Are!
4th edittion of Cologne Online Film Festival
photographs
Tiziano Fratus
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Homo Radix. A collection of pictures in grayscale taken in Italy, in North America, in Singapore and in France. Rain Trees, Tambuso, Kapok Tree, Sweetgum, Horsechesnut, European Beech, Oaks, Cedar of Lebanon, American Sycamore and much more species of monumental and old trees. The evolution of these masterpieces of Nature is more perfect and incredible than every artistic creation made by Humans.
Homo Radix is part of a project that will produce this exposition of pictures and a book, a guide for Tree Huggers: "Homo Radix. Appunti per un cercatore di alberi" (trad. "Homo Radix. Notes for a tree seeker"), on publishing in a first edition in Italy on october 2010. (Tiziano Fratus)
contributors
Swakkhyar Deka works in the National Rural Health Mission, Assam, as District Media Expert in Dhubri District of Assam. His job requires me to make strategies for effective campaigns to make the people aware about different health schemes initiated by the Assam Government through NRHM.
"Abarodh" was Deka’s first attempt at making a film, especially fiction. The writings of James Joyce and poems of T.S. Eliot are his inspiration. "Abarodh" won the best film award in "Commfest 2008," a media student festival held in Assam University, Silchar, Assam. Deka made a documentary titled "OF LIVES...UNTOLD" in December 2009 about a Karbi Tribal village in the outskirts of Guwahati, where there is still no power, hospital, schools and mobile connectivity. It is an attempt to highlight the plight of these people and also the work done by a Karbi youth to set up schools there.
Tiziano Fratus is an Italian root man. He has published books of poetry in some countries around the nworld. His poetry is link to the idea of an "environmental poetry". He is working on a new project called "Homo radix", connected to his poetry and photography. Here some of Tiziano's photos: www.torinopoesia.org/homoradix.htm
august 2010"Abarodh" was Deka’s first attempt at making a film, especially fiction. The writings of James Joyce and poems of T.S. Eliot are his inspiration. "Abarodh" won the best film award in "Commfest 2008," a media student festival held in Assam University, Silchar, Assam. Deka made a documentary titled "OF LIVES...UNTOLD" in December 2009 about a Karbi Tribal village in the outskirts of Guwahati, where there is still no power, hospital, schools and mobile connectivity. It is an attempt to highlight the plight of these people and also the work done by a Karbi youth to set up schools there.
Tiziano Fratus is an Italian root man. He has published books of poetry in some countries around the nworld. His poetry is link to the idea of an "environmental poetry". He is working on a new project called "Homo radix", connected to his poetry and photography. Here some of Tiziano's photos: www.torinopoesia.org/homoradix.htm
photograph
Anshuman Acharya
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| Kashmir |
Is This Lathyrism?
Prabir Kumar Chatterjee
Oldest affected boy among 4 similar children in a 6 sibling family. The mother is also affected. The father had smallpox 40 years ago, when he was 2 and a half. The boy in the picture's grandmother lives with them. They do eat khesari dal (lathyrus sativus). This is near Bahutoli in Suti I block (Ahiron BPHC) of Murshidabad. Bahutoli is 5 km from Rajgram station (Birbhum).
There has been a polio case on 28th May in Muraroi 2 (Birbhum district). There is another Polio case recently at Dhuliyan (within 40 km).
In 2007 there was a JE vaccination campaign that covered Birbhum. We met a girl in another home in this village who became disabled after encephalopathy. She was educated up to Class 8, but has now discontinued. Her aunt is an ICDS worker.
Contributor
Prabir Chatterjee is a village doctor in North Dinajpur. Visit his blog http://prabirkc1.blogspot.com/.
