Born May 11, 1912 in Samrala, Punjab, Manto arrived in Mumbai in the 1940s and spent four to five years here. Though not much is officially known about it, his writings provide adequate hints of his sojourn here.

He lived in small, dark buildings spread across the congested Grant Road, Byculla, Nagpada areas of southcentral parts of the city.

A series of events has been lined up now to mark his birth centenary Friday, including one by the Mumbai Press Club, and another by the socio-cultural organisation Urdu Markaz.

Senior film journalist, researcher and writer Rafique Baghdadi said: “Manto’s contribution to Urdu literature is remarkable.”

Zubair Ansari of Urdu Markaz said, “The legendary writer merits a befitting tribute on his birth centenary”.

In his short life spanning barely 43 years, Manto left a legacy of some of the most profound and popular contribution to Urdu literature.

A short story writer, film and radio script writer and journalist, in a professional career of less than two decades, Manto bequeathed 22 collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of personal sketches.

Over the years, he was catapulted to fame with works “Boo”, “Khol Do”, “Thanda Gosht”, and his magnum opus, “Toba Tek Singh”.

And Mumbai figured in his works.

In the biographical sketch of Nur Jehan, Manto writes: “I think I arrived in Bombay on Aug 7, 1940, and my first meeting with Shaukat (Syed Shaukar Hasan Rizvi) took place on 17 Adelphi Chambers, Clare Road, which served both as office and his residence.”

His ever-popular story, “A Question of Honour” described in great detail the places with which he was associated in the city, the places he lived in, ate, visited during his few years here.

In “A Question of Honour”, Manto mentions Mumbai’s famous Arab Gully: “Another street in the area was called Arab Gully, with 20-25 Arabs living there, all apparently in the pearl trade. Others were Punjabis and Rampurias. I was in Arab Gally that I had rented a room, which was so dark that the light has to be kept on at all times. The monthly rent was exactly nine rupees, eight annas….”

Despite an early struggle, Manto was fortunate that the film studios of that era recognised his gift for storytelling and he landed with several scripts which later became movies.

They include “Keechad”, “Apni Nagariya”, “Begum”, “Naukar”, “Chal Chal Re Naujawaan”, “Kisaan Kanya”, “Ghamandi”, “Beli”, “Mujhe Paapi Kaho”, “Doosri Kothi”, “Shikaar”, “Aath Din”, “Aagosh” and “Mirza Ghalib”.

He has also acted in a couple of films – “Eight Days” and “Chal Chal Re Naujawan”.

Considered one of the best Urdu short story writers of the 20th century, Manto also developed a reputation for being the most controversial.

Known for penning topics which were considered social taboo in the Indian and Pakistan society of those days, Manto was reviled and revered in equal measure and often compared with D.H. Lawrence of English literature.

Manto’s focus of writings ranged from the grim socio-economic injustices prevailing in the pre-and-post-colonial subcontinent, to the more controversial topics of love, sex, incest, prostitution and the typical hypocrisy of a traditional subcontinental male.

Long before the renowned artist M.F. Hussain came on the scene, Manto was tried for obscenity half-a-dozen times, thrice in the undivided British-ruled India and thrice after 1947 in the post-Partition Pakistan. However, he escaped being convicted or exiled for his bold thoughts and daring to espouse creative freedom in that conservative era.

He was opposed and deeply pained by the Indian partition. He died Jan 18, 1955, in Lahore, Pakistan. Only 42 years old, Manto was survived by his wife Safiyah and three daughters, but the literary void he left behind was difficult to fill.

MY feet slip on the cold metal table. I brace myself, this has to be done fast – we’ve somehow talked our way into the morgue at AIIMS, to photograph the body of a young woman murdered by her husband. I have only a few minutes, this will be evidence.

She is beautiful, severely bruised. The long vertical suture on a body still full of promise. I do not have to close my eyes to see it, even now, thirty years later.

There is little hope of justice. The husband, the in-laws, the police as well as the doctors are in collusion.

Her mother begins to haunt me. She wants these photos. I believe she should not see her daughter in this form, I refuse. She comes to Saheli, finds her way to my studio in Jangpura, calls me again and again.

I tell her the photos are with the lawyer, that I do not have them, that the negatives are also in the case file. She will not take no for an answer. She is obsessed with the photograph of her dead daughter, she wants to see it, just once.

Despite everything, I never show them to her.

Years later, I find that the negatives have disappeared.

THE shutter clicks, an efficient, attuned rhythm. Absorbed, very concentrated, I turn the spool, and the roll has finished! The familiar hazards of using cheap, re-spooled bulk film… I am precariously perched on a barricade, squeezed between two policemen, facing the demonstration as it approaches.

A press photographer close to me silently hands me two rolls of hi-speed, expensive TRI X, in unusual professional solidarity. Equally silently, I load the film and carry on. Shortly after, to his surprise, I jump over the barricade and join the demonstration shouting slogans.

It’s 1981, the height of the anti-dowry campaign. More and more women join, the demonstrations swell, the rage and refusal to accept the killing of women for dowry is implacable.

SIX years later, I infiltrate the Rani Sati celebration procession in the guise of a Press photographer. My spying is useful, a tiny group of us manage to intercept this annual valorisation of Sati and briefly disrupt the ritual.

The bewildered women see me join the ‘troublemakers’.

The following year we return, in full force. The procession is more elaborate, grand with elephants, brass bands and tableaux. Women in bridal finery sit above cardboard flames while the cry of “Rani Sati ki jai!” is shouted on the megaphone. Suddenly, on the same megaphone, we hear the same voice calling out anti-dowry slogans! Each float carries a banner declaring anti-dowry sentiments.

The first taste of what will be a series of appropriations of the movement…

BIDYA suddenly bursts into the ’80’s feminist song “Tod tod ke bandhano ko…”, as Bharti’s body is carried to the crematorium. She stops short – and the chant of “Lal Salaam, Comrade” takes over, to be replaced a while later by “Nari Shakti Zindabad!”, a curious contrapuntal between the autonomous women’s movement and the independent Left, between urban feminist community-based health workers and rural activists from the land rights struggle.

We sing songs from both movements, holding alliances, affiliations, autonomies in a productive tension, as she did, over more than thirty years of dedicated activism.

Just a week ago Bharti was at the Free Binayak Sen sit in, at our now designated protest site, Jantar Mantar. Less than a year ago, I photographed her in her wheelchair at the same place, this time at the barricades on International Women’s Day, 2010.

An almost forgotten self rises and I call out the chant – flushed with the energy, the weight, the warmth and the power of singing together, chanting together. What I took for granted in the ’80s’s and ’90s’s, becomes rare and precious in 2011.

(Excerpted from ‘Making A Difference: Memoirs From The Women’s Movement InIndia’, Edited by Ritu Menon; Published by: Women Unlimited, 2011; Pp: 386; Price (Softback): Rs 350.)

(© Women’s Feature Service)

The Ram Hanuman temple opposite the Achnera railway station, about 25 km from Agra, has become a major centre of attraction for locals and those visiting the town. The recital of the holy book since 1994 is a feat every resident of this town is proud of.

The ‘akhand paath’ or continuous recital started Oct 21, 1994, and since then the Ramayana has been recited more than 3,440 times, the temple priest claims. The temple is located on the Uttar Pradesh-Rajasthan border.

He says there has never been a shortage of ‘pathaks’ or readers. “They consider it a privilege to volunteer their services…there is some invisible force that sustains the enthusiasm of people.”

What surprises the devotees is how without a system or an institutional arrangement, the uninterrupted recital of the Hindu epic has been going on.

A tea shop owner outside the temple told IANS, “The Akhand Paath programme started way back in 1980 when the metre guage railway station at Achnera was a centre of hectic activity. But there were several breaks after the railways decided to change the guage from metre to broad. The railway staff moved over to Jaipur.

“But now with the opening of the Divisional Railway Manager’s (DRM) office in Agra, and the Agra-Jaipur route becoming alive with more trains running, the flavour of the past has returned and the number of devouts has increased.”

The temple is small, without resources and pomp. People walk in, drop a few coins, pay their obeisance and return. Like temples in the small towns of India, this too has idols of Ram, Sita, Hanuman and a Shivling. Outside the temple hangs a wall clock and a small board which records the number of times the Ramayana has been read.

The lone priest on the wooden platform recites couplets from the holy book. Since there are no set rules, anyone can take turns over the mike and relieve the other. The loudspeaker, when there is electricity, breaks the monotony of the area.

Vishnu Dayal Sharma, a retired postmaster with a flowing beard, who has read the Ramayana here, told IANS, “How long this will continue only Ramji knows. My children are studying, and I am spending my retired life in the service of Ramayana. After two hours, another person will come, then another and so on. The process will continue.”

Nestled in the higher Himalayas, near the Milam glacier, is Johaar valley — home to the Shaukas. Before the India-China war of 1962, the Shaukas, then numbering a mere 5,000, were engaged in Indo-Tibetan trade, a tradition dating back to the 3rd or 4th century BC.

Traversing treacherous valleys and high mountain passes in what is today Uttarakhand, the Shaukas traded with the Tibetans until war forced them to abandon their pristine land for mainstream occupations — a fate shared by many communities which lived lives that took no note of political boundaries.

Their fate could have been worse but for a visionary in their midst. Babu Ram Singh helped the community survive and make a transition to modernity. Also, the orally handed down traditions of the Shaukas have been chronicled, thanks to him. This book tells his inspiring story.

Babu Ram Singh wanted the community to be prepared for any calamity and showed them the way – for instance, he tasted, at great personal risk, almost every wild leaf and fruit around to ascertain which was fit for human consumption. He recorded his findings, helping his people survive adversities such as famine.

He was prescient enough to have seen that the Tibetan trade could become unviable or cease altogether due to unforeseen circumstances. As a Gandhian and a freedom fighter, he propagated the idea of producing and trading in swadeshi goods.

Babu Ram Singh was a reformer as well. He spoke against social evils and, to foster change, he launched a local newspaper and built organisations tasked with empowering women and promoting agriculture. He also set up cooperatives for swadeshi goods and started schools. But his greatest contribution to the community and to the history of Uttarakhand is his documentation of the Shauka story.

There was hardly any written history of the community and Babu Ram Singh — who preferred to be called ‘Johaar Kinkar’, or one who serves Johaar — took upon himself the work of meticulously recording the oral history of the Shaukas and to prepare genealogical charts. Most of the known history of the Shaukas would have been lost but for him.

For a man without formal education, the work that Babu Ram Singh did in his lifetime makes him a historian, social activist, freedom fighter, writer, poet, agri-scientist, journalist, social entrepreneur — all rolled into one. Thanks to this book by Gajendra Singh Pangti, a former CEO of Nepal Life Insurance, the life and times of this unsung legend have now been documented for posterity.

The book is rich in biographical detail, but also goes beyond Babu Ram Singh to give a tantalising glimpse of the life of the Shaukas – who now number around 25,000 — their struggle against the vagaries of time and nature, and their fragile and harshly beautiful land.

It is tough today to imagine the times when the Shaukas had to walk all the way from Johaar to the Himalayan foothills and proceed to cities like Delhi, Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai) for trade. Even now, Babu Ram Singh’s village, Milam, the largest in the valley, is a three-day trek from the nearest roadhead.

The third edition of the Mountain Echoes festival, a literary collaboration between the India-Bhutan Foundation and Siyahi, a non-profit organisation, will open at the Tarayana Centre in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan May 21-24.

“We are fortunate to have South Asia in Bhutan this year with writers from India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. It is a continuum of cultural and linguistic identities across political borders,” Namita Gokhale, director of the festival, told IANS.

She said “linguistic and cultural borders are completely different from the political borders”.

“For example, Bangladesh and West Bengal share a common heritage and a common language though they are separate political entities,” she said.

The festival in Bhutan will be an arc across cultures and languages like Urdu, English and Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, to build common ground, Gokhale said.

Gokhale, an acclaimed writer from the Kumaon hills in Uttarakhand, said the festival was also an ode to the passion for mountains and mountain-writing. “I have a long association with Bhutan. I have been going to Bhutan for the last 15 years. It is a privilege to do a festival in Bhutan,” the writer said.

The festival in Bhutan, together with similar initiatives in Nepal and India, were part of a new Asian culture chain, she said.

The festival to be inaugurated by Gokhale will host writer-envoy Pavan Varma and Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk at the opening session.

The subsequent sessions will feature acclaimed Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, emerging Sri Lankan writer Ashok Ferrey, Bangladeshi writer Shazia Omar, Pakistani writer Ali Sethi and British writers Patrick French and William Dalrymple.

The star attraction of the festival is poet-novelist Vikram Seth, actor-writer Stephen Alter, who has written extensively on the mountains, and poet Gulzar.

Throwing light on the trends in Bhutanese writing, Gokhale said Bhutanese literature had a lot of “classical and Buddhist religious traditions drawing from ancient cultures and roles”.

“But at the same time, contemporary literature is carving its niche with urban writers and a tribe of young bloggers like any other country in Asia. The emergence of good Bhutanese writing has imbued new confidence in the Bhutanese writers. The exchange of ideas is helping them,” Gokhale said.

Some Bhutanese writers and artists to watch out for at the festival include actor Kelly Dorje, noted Buddhist scholar Karma Phuntsho, Kuenga Tenzin and story-teller Siok Sian Dorji, who form the contingent of a dozen talented voices in Bhutanese culture.

Mita Kapur of Siyahi, an organisation that promotes literature in India, says the festival has been designed as a social and holistic cultural exchange between the two countries with rich heritage and political legacies.

“We have tried to offer a bit of everything…literature, culture, food, textiles, Himalayas and cinema with representatives from fledgling Bhutanese movie industry and Bollywood. But have kept the participation small and intimate this year,” Kapur said.

She described two conversations and a live demonstration woven around food and a brainstorming roundtable on “media and democracy” as the new highlights of the festival.

In a written statement, the signatories from the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) said: “We believe the increasing illogical behaviour of the administration is inspired from the very top, by the impetuous and ill-considered statements and actions of the chief minister on every matter that falls within her gaze: crimes against women, the poor oversight of medical facilities or the deteriorating in the quality of civic services.”

Some of the protesters included Irfan Habib, Teesta Setalvad, Mridula Mukherjee, Astad Deboo, Saeed Mirza and M.K. Raina.

“The West Bengal state government order issued late in March, laying down in minute detail the newspapers public libraries could subscribe to, was an unwarranted intrusion into the right of the people to seek information from any source of their choosing,” said the statement.

The signatories alleged that the circular issued by Banerjee left out two most popular English language dailies and all English newspapers.

The arrest of Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra “after he was roughed up by the political cadre of the ruling party – for circulating a subtle joke about Mamata Banerjee’s style of leadership, must rank among the gravest violations of free speech by an elected government in recent times,” said the statement.

The signatories said “they were shocked at the continuing incarceration of Partho Sarothi Ray, an internationally-renowned biologist, for attending a peaceful protest against the eviction of slum dwellers”.

The exhibition on the concentration camp will remain on long-term display at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM), reported Xinhua citing museum curator Chen Jian.

Co-organised by the SJRM and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the exhibition has a total of 30 display boards illustrating the process of establishing the camp as well as acts of brutality committed by Nazi soldiers, said Chen.

Video records and recreated camp items, such as prisoners’ uniforms and cages where prisoners were kept and abused, have also been included in the exhibition, he said, adding that it is the first time such items have been shown outside the camp.

The Auschwitz concentration camp, a network of concentration and extermination camps located in Poland, was the largest such camp constructed by the Nazis. Over one million people, 90 percent of them Jewish, were killed there.

Thursday marked the 69th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or the Jewish resistance.

On April 19, 1943, several hundreds of young Jews decided to take up arms against the occupying Germans, resolving to fight rather than face near-certain death in the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, a plan to exterminate the Jewish people.

The artist’s “to-do” list suggests it also meant to remind the Italian painter, sculptor, scientist, and anatomist to have his anatomy books bound, obtain a skull and describe a crocodile’s jaw.

His note, from about 1510, also mentions items he needs to get for a journey, including paper, charcoal and chalk, The Sun reported.

The previously unseen page will be exhibited with 80 others from his notebooks.

Curator Martin Clayton said: “Like anyone going on a trip, Leonardo listed things to take, but beside shirts and stockings he has forceps, a scalpel and bone-saw.

“His list may have been drawn up before a journey to Pavia medical school in Italy, where he dissected corpses.”

The papers, probably bought by King Charles II, have been in the Royal Collection since 1690.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has provided funds to the university’s Institute of Integrated Himalayan Studies to start the course from 2012-13, the institute’s director S.P. Bansal told IANS.

He said the course has 35 seats and a student who is a graduate and has creativity and talent will be eligible for the course.

The state-run Himachal Handicraft and Handloom Corp is also conducting special training for artisans in the art of embroidery on the Chamba ‘rumal’ (handkerchief), Chamba and Kangra schools of miniature paintings, metal artefacts and leather products, mainly Chamba chappals.

In a signed statement, Ram Rahman, Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram and Indira Chandrasekhar of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust said they were “shocked to learn that the exhibition of photographs by Sunil Gupta was shut down shortly and they wanted the Alliance Francaise to publicly clarify if they were ordered to shut down the exhibition”.

The show which opened March 23 was inaugurated by activist Aruna Roy. The photographs on display included a new series on gay love, Sun City, which was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2011 as part of an exhibition of Indian Contemporary Art.

“Apparently, the Delhi Police arrived at the venue on the complaint of an individual that there were nude images on display. There is nothing obscene about these photographs, many of which have been published in Indian newspapers and art magazines before and are in the public realm,” the statement said.

The organisation wanted the Alliance Francaise to clarify on what ground the exhibition was forced to shut down.

“If major institutions like them cannot stand up against complaints made by a single individual and support the work of an artist they have invited to exhibit, they do not deserve the respect or patronage of the art community. It is specially ironic that a French institution would buckle under so easily. We hope the Alliance will clarify the circumstances which have led to yet another instance of moral policing against the freedom of expression,” the statement said.

A source at the Alliance Francaise said the “police arrived late in the night after some people objected to the show and told us to shut down”.

The exhibition is yet to resume. The director of the Alliance Francaise was not available for comment.

Instances of opposition to alternative, explicit and erotic art are not uncommon in India in the post-modern milieu.

In the 1990s, artist M.F. Husain courted the anger of right wing Hindu groups for his allegedly controversial depiction of Indian deities. The artist was forced to leave the country on a sef-imposed exile to Dubai and acquired Qatari citizenship. Husain passed away last year.

The other two who received the prestigious award were former Uttar Pradesh governor T.V. Rajeshwar and renowned orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Kantilal Hastimal Sancheti.

Among those who received the Padma Bhushan include painter Jatin Das, artist Anish Kapoor, filmmaker Mira Nair, former diplomat Ronen Sen and heart specialist Dr Devi Prasad Shetty.

Among those who were awarded the Padma Shri were homeopath Dr Mukesh Batra, music composer Vanraj Bhatia, classical singers Ramakant and Umakant Gundecha, singer Anup Jalota, theatre personality Joy Michael, journalist Vijay Dutt Shridhar and social worker Binny Yanga.

President Patil honoured the awardees at a glittering ceremony in the magnificent Durbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan here.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Home Minister P. Chidamabaram were among those who attended the ceremony.

In all, around 55 people were to be conferred the awards, announced on the eve of Republic Day (Jan 26), 2012 under the three categories but two were absent.

Padma Vibhushan is awarded for exceptional and distinguished service, Padma Bhushan for distinguished service of high order and Padma Shri is awarded for distinguished service in any field.

A total of 109 people were named for the award this year. This included five recipients of the Padma Vibhushan, 29 of the Padma Bhushan and 77 Padma Shris.

“We have strong and substantial research collaboration beyond academic projects. Yesterday, I visited the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research where a group of physicists are collaborating with physicists in Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (in Kolkata) on neutrinono – an elementary sub-atomic particle,” Hamilton told IANS here.

“It is a very exciting study and the scientists plan to fire neutrinos through the core of the earth from Oxford to India to test its strength,” Hamilton said.

The vice chancellor, who is in India to celebrate 100 years of Oxford University Press in the country, said much collaborative research was taking place between Oxford and India “and he was trying to meet the collaborators to strengthen them”.

The Oxford University is also collaborating with 12 research centres across India, including the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, about the “causes and development of therapies for cancer,” Hamilton said.

“It is a significant and growing problem in India. Our purpose is to properly strengthen and expand the research to find out if there is genetic disposition in certain population groups in India towards certain cancers – and study the origin,” Hamilton said.

“The Oxford University Press in India was committed to ensure that the publishing output was relevant to the 21st century India tailored for local, regional and national readership across cultures.”

“The relationship between Oxford and India has been strong for more than 400 years in 1579, when the first recorded evidence of an Englishman to arrive on the Indian shore was that of Father Thomas Stephens. He was an Oxford man,” Hamilton said.

In 1832, Oxford University set up the first chair in Sanskrit and in 1871, the first Indian student came to study in Oxford, he said.

“Over the years Oxford has educated several Indian leaders including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,” he said.

“Three hundred and fifty Indian students are studying in Oxford today, Hamilton added

Observers, curators and gallerists in India feel that “it is just a one-off disappointment”. It may have been brought on by the mood of the buyers and the immediate environment of the sale, but does not indicate any growing caution about overpricing of Indian art works in the international market, experts said.

The work, an early impressionistic masterpiece by Raza, was priced at Rs.12.5 crore and was hyped by the auction house as a key work by an Indian master. The oil painting was part of the collection of John D. Rockfeller III and wife Blanchette, one of the early promoters of the Indian progressive artists in US.

The fact that Raza’s work, “Saurashtra”, created a price record at an auction in Christie’s in 2010 when it sold for Rs.16.42 crore making him one of the most expensive contemporary artists from the 1947 Progressive Artists’ Group, had raised expectations that the 1968 painting would surpass the pre-sale estimate.

“It is not tantamount to the fact that any artists’ value has retrograded. It is just by chance that Raza’s work did not sell. Raza is equitable to Husain. Raza does not paint any more, his hands shake. The number of his works in the market is dwindling and in a few years’ time, there will be few of his works in the market and probably no new work,” gallerist and auctioneer Narendra Jain, co-director of the Art Mall, told IANS.

Jain, who manages one of the biggest gallery space and art education centres in the capital, said “the work should have been priced more as it was one of the early works by the artist which is rare”.

He said the “art market had seen similar fluctuations before”.

“I was disappointed, but I was not surprised. It could have been the mood of the moment,” art curator and writer Ina Puri told IANS.

Puri said “one of the reasons could be that Raza’s works are abundant in the market, but ‘Village by Church’ was an exceptional work because it was painted in the post-partition period when he was still painting semi-figurative compositions”.

According to a senior art market observer, “after the slide of the art market in the wake of the meltdown in 2008, the market had seen a price correction because of the inflated prices of art works, some of which were blown nearly 10 times over because of repeated sale and media hype…”.

During the Kabir Festival held at Prithvi House in Mumbai last month, the trio staged a unique and thought-provoking presentation on the great poet-weaver, entitled ‘Ankath Kahani’, which translates as ‘Unsaid Story’. The Kabir festival is a voluntary effort by people from different walks of life, drawn together by their passion for the poetry of Kabir and the music of folk singers.

The performance of the sisters threaded story, song and dance into a unique “word-sound and movement” dramatisation, punctuated by personal sharing, excerpts from Kabir’s work and dance movements for selected couplets. But the pivot on which ‘Akath Kahani’ rested was a song which they sang as an impassioned plea to the great weaver-poet, to evoke a sense of Kabir, the sensitive, sensible and spiritual being that is present in all of us.

Archana danced to Kumar Gandharva’s ‘Ud jaaega hans akela…’ even as Bindhumalini’s singing took audiences to a level where being is “just to be there”. The beautiful interpretation of the song, in dance form, mesmerised the 100-plus listeners as they chanted Kabir’s couplets with the sisters. Soon there seemed to be no difference between the performers and the audience – both entities had merged in the bliss of Kabir’s verse.

How did the women choose Kabir? It was Jaya who first took the plunge when she wrote a book on him seven years ago. She says, “Kabir was a fortuitous encounter, a life enhancing one for me.” Describing this journey she reveals that it was Linda Hess’s translations of Kabir’s work that first opened her eyes to the poet. “I was so enraptured by the man’s courage, vision and well – insanity – and the fact that there was so much drama around him, that I decided to record my responses to him as a play.”

She then wrote a short skit with just two characters – a warp and a weft – with her sister Bindhumalini and herself playing the two roles. The play was shot through with Kabir’s couplets, his ideals and anxieties; not as his admirers and protégés saw them but as an outsider who loved Kabir. The warp and weft became many things in the play:Hindu-Muslim,India-Pakistan, Mullah-Pundit – but never was Kabir evoked in his entirety. Looking back Jaya confesses, “I think he was still had shades of grey in my mind then.”

At that point Jaya realised that she knew only two things about Kabir: One, that he was a poet, and, two, that he was a weaver. “The poet I seemed to know, the other I didn’t. So I took up weaving classes,” she laughs. That experience changed her view of the poet. As she puts it, “Frankly, it is the loom that showed me a glimpse of Kabir, and taught me creative introspection. It is the ‘thakli’, the dye, the loom, the warp and the weft, which spoke of the image of the poet for me. I married the weaver and poet as the warp and weft to draw a fuller picture of Kabir. I really believed, like the much loved Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar (also a weaver), Kabir’s ‘dohas’, or couplets, were born out of the material at hand and his vocation. This may be the reason why the loom features so strongly in my book. It is as if it bears witness to his bursts of poetry,” she elaborates.

It was not just Jaya’s work that got influenced by Kabir, her life changed, too. “For a while I even did drastic things like trying to fit all my needs into a small bag and living out of it. I wanted to distinguish between needs and wants. I began reducing my needs, meditating regularly, walking to my destination, and so on. The man does that to you. Unlike other Bhakti poets we know, this man wants to take you along. He wants to share his truths with you,” reveals Jaya.

But how did her sisters get roped in? Says Bindhumalini, who is also a trained singer in Carnatic and Hindustani music, “What attracted me was that Kabir touches every aspect of life. Happiness, bliss, renunciation. He becomes the ultimate being, the guru, the formless one that speaks. And his special poems, called ‘Ulat Bansi’, really made me fall in love with him. He is abstract no doubt, but somewhere something will catch you and the insight hits hard.”

As for Archana, a trained Bharatanatyam dancer with an M.Phil in French, she discovered Kabir through the French language! “That was the catalyst. I got attracted to him when I started translating Jaya’s book into French. Later, I started to dance to Kumar Gandharva’s music on Kabir,” says Archana with a twinkle in her eyes.

Explaining their unique style of presentation – they just sit, read, sing and dance – the sisters say almost in unison, “Kabir, we felt, could be reached only through simplicity and with no pretension. He is someone you cannot claim to know. But we know ourselves and we know how we are impacted by Kabir. The lesser the distractions in the presentation, the better the focus.”  In other words, the less the audience looks towards the performers, the more they look inwards so there is nothing visually distracting about the presentation.

What are their favourite Kabir couplets? Archana says, a touch philosophically, “My favourite is ‘Maya Maha Thugni Hum Jaani’ (Maya is the biggest thug, I have come to understand the power of illusion to be a great thug). It perfectly suits my life. Everything is bound in ‘maya’, illusion. I totally believe that.” Jaya finds solace in ‘Dheere dheere re mana/Dheere sab kuch hoi/Mali seenche sau gade/Ritu aaye phal hoye (Slowly, slowly O mind/Everything happens at its own pace/The gardener may water with a hundred buckets/fruit arrives only in its season). “We are leading such fast lives and want everything to happen immediately, but we don’t realise everything has its own time,” says Jaya.

Humming the couplet, Bindhumalini indicates her choice: “Haman hein ishk mastana/Haman ko hoshiyari kya/Rahe aazad yeh jag se/ Haman duniya se yaari kya” (I am bursting with love/ Why do I need to be careful?/Being free in the world). Says she, “This is a beautiful poem in which Kabir talks about the blissful state of absolute love, supreme and unconditional love towards oneself and the world. Here, when everything becomes one, there is no waiting. When the lover is within oneself, why befriend anyone else? And so on. It talks of a happy state and the happiness in this song makes these seemingly difficult concepts or experiences really possible. When we are blissfully happy, don’t we lose ourselves as we merge with the world?”

The sisters now hope to keep sharing Kabir with more and more people. Says Jaya in conclusion, “We have kept our performance simple so that it fits all contexts. It is entirely up to the listeners on how they should interpret it. We are ready and willing to go anywhere. We operate within the spirit of sharing. We have performed in drawing rooms, conference halls, balconies and, well, now Prithvi House, too! It is Kabir and the listeners that matter to us. As long as the sharing continues, the journey will materialise on its own.”

(© Women’s Feature Service)

]]> http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/india-three-sisters-and-kabir-%e2%80%98the-weaver-poet%e2%80%99-kamayani-bali-mahabal/feed/ 0 http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/assam-ties-up-with-us-varsity-to-document-traditional-practices/ http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/assam-ties-up-with-us-varsity-to-document-traditional-practices/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:12:57 +0000 India Current Affairs http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/?p=112842 Assam has tied up with the Stanford University in the US for documenting the rich culture, traditional knowledge, customs and indigenous practices of various communities in the state, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said Monday while inaugurating the Institute of Research & Documentation of Indigenous Studies (IRDIS) at the International Convention Centre of Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra here.

“The institute has been conceived to carry out research and documentation on indigenous practices of ethnic and indigenous communities in the state,” he said, adding that the tribal and indigenous communities of Assam are very rich in culture, customs, traditional knowledge and practices.

“All this needs to be researched and documented for posterity of the communities and the IRDIS will go into multidisciplinary research in collaboration with Stanford University on documentation of the diverse ethnic and indigenous communities of the state, which will, in turn, empower the communities socially, economically and culturally,” Gogoi said.

The chief minister also emphasized on the need for sticking to traditional roots in the march for development and said: “We cannot ignore our roots and have to be firmly entrenched in it. For this it is important to link up the traditional system with the modern system and apply those for the all round progress of the ethnic and indigenous communities.”

The IRDIS and the Stanford University would work in close partnership for designing and implementing multidisciplinary research and documentation projects for the empowerment of the communities, and also for preservation of their traditional and indigenous knowledge and practices.

Both the IRDIS and the Stanford University are expected to carry out intensive studies in the way of life of the tribal and indigenous communities including their food habits, their healthy lifestyles, way of traditional treatment, their colourful attires and their traditional judicial system.

Founder president of IRDIS Deepa Dutt explained that research and documentation initiatives would be in a wide range of areas such as indigenous culture, indigenous and traditional knowledge and practices, socio-economic studies, health, education, and population numbers.

“The knowledge resource that will be evolved from such research work will be stored in a database for developing a modern data archive on indigenous studies based on latest technology,” she added.

Director of Sotheby’s in India, Maithili Parekh, said the oil painting on canvas in 1958 was purchased by the Rockfellers from the Graham Gallery in New York in an exhibition, “Trends in Contemporary Painting in India” in 1958-1959.

“It remained in their collection till 1994. Rockefeller and his wife befriended Raza in the early 1960s while he was at Berkeley as a visiting professor at the University of California, following which he was invited to NYC as a recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship,” Parekh said.

She added that John and his wife Blanchette were two of the earliest champions of modern Indian paintings in US. “Their patronage and support were key to introducing the work of the Progressive Artist’s Group in US, of which ‘Village with Church’ is a significant example,” she said.

Former representative of the Rockfeller Foundation, Thomas Keehn, who lived in India and befriended many artists from the Progressive Group, went on to organise “8 Painters”, an exhibition of their work held in Delhi in 1956, which included “Village With Church”.

This exhibition later expanded to “Trends In Contemporary Painting In India” and became the first such exhibition ever mounted in US.

Faseeh Salim, a Pakistani textile designer-turned artist, uses textiles, fibres, knits, embroidery and mannequins as mediums to make installations and visuals that are fashion on the surface but works of art with deep meaning on the broad canvas.

“They are journeys in self-expression with a political, social and cultural message,” Lahore-based Salim, who was in India for a residency programme, told IANS.

Salim knits body-like sculptures with matex fibre which shrinks when exposed to heat in combination with stainless steel fibre. The sculptures are knitted on industrial knitting machines, “ones on which they knit sweaters”, and moulded to show the “fluid body statistics in the world of fashion and its relation with clothes that have to fit”, the artist said.

One of his sculptures, 36″26″36″, made in India, experiments with shop mannequins as a reference point for articles of clothings in which the body becomes a slave to the fibres that drape it.

The earthy colours and ethnic art of India are at the core of young Taiwanese artist Andy Wen’s digitally printed “art clothes”.

“I am from an arts background, but I am moving to fashion. I am trying to create digitally-printed India-style clothes for women. The Indian prints are accessible and different…Art and fashion meet at many points,” Yen told IANS.

The artist, who was in India recently, created a range of 12 fusion Chinese-Indian clothes in cotton and silk painted with Indian motifs.

The art of copying, traditional fashion drawings and installation art meet in Mumbai-based artist Archana Hande’s new mixed media work, “Copy Master ji”.

Hande often uses textile printing technology on solid mediums like wood blocks to transform traditional Indian art into modern decorative designs that comment on urbanisation and globalisation.

“Everything is art. Art and fashion are two different mediums, but they both express. If I can design a costume that looks good on you, it is art,” Hande told IANS.

Norwegian Julie Skarland, a fashion designer, moved to Delhi six years ago to make a career in conceptual art and fashion.

“My exposure to art and fashion helps me explore both the mediums in my work,” Skarland told IANS. The artist, who trained in art and architecture in Norway, has studied dress making and fashion design in Paris.

“The Collection”, a new installation by Skarland, is a set of open matchboxes on which Skarland reproduces a spring-summer women’s wear collection in miniature drawings combining Norwegian progressiveness with Parisian chic on an essentially Indian medium.

“I use recycled material like old fabrics and table cloths for my clothes and it inspires me to recycle objects for my installation. I usually work towards developing a concept,” the artist said.

Kolkata-based artist Paula Sengupta falls back on the nostalgia of the Bengal partition and human suffering with elements of fashion and textiles in her visual art narratives while Delhi-based artist-cum-fashion designer Varun Sardana “believes in fashion as a form of visual art”.

Sardana used “music, theatre and performance art in his shows to express ideas”.

“Fashion is personalised art. The connect between the two is the thought process. I try to create narratives,” Sardana told IANS. One of his rare mixed media installations, “On My Passing Away”, brought clothes, fashion, social commentary and his persona under one roof in a bare room.

“Using auto portraits of me in my skin and work from my recent collection of clothes, I have tried to explore the duality of my existence,” Sardana said.

All information on the same platform – arts, fashion and marketing – overlap, says gallerist Peter Nagi. “The next bridge is politics with which art, fashion and design have to connect.

“Politics has to be more creative,” Nagi said, predicting a trend for the future.

Roles have reversed, says graphic novelist and designer Sarnath Banerjee. “Fashion people are working with narrative concepts and art is becoming decorative like fashion,” Banerjee said.

History says art and fashion have been coming closer since the beginning of the 20th century when leading European and American fashion designers became collectors of haute art – allowing their art works to influence their clothes.

Returning to India two months after he was stopped from attending the Jaipur Literary Festival, Rushdie spoke at the concluding dinner at the two-day India Today Conclave at the Taj Palace Hotel here.

The event was marked by tight security presence but devoid of the kind of protests that had marred the Jaipur event by radical Muslim groups protesting his visit.

Rushdie, who was happy at the “lack of interest and protest in my visit” this time around to his land of birth, was, however, severe on politicians of the subcontinent, both in India and Pakistan, who pandered to “religious fanaticism” and indulged in “political opportunism”, an allusion to those who cancelled their speaking engagements at the conclave because of his presence.

Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, as well as Pakistani opposition leader Imran Khan, stayed away citing “other engagements”.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf leader said he could not come to the same venue as Rushdie who had done “immeasurable hurt to Muslims” with his allegedly blasphemous references in “Satanic Verses”.

Rushdie said “Deobandi bigotry” and “kneeling to mullahs” had not worked for the Congress, alluding to their recent loss in the state elections during which the party was accused was trying to win over Muslims in Uttar Pradesh with inducements of job quotas and other blandishments.

Rushdie, who addressed a packed hall that greeted him with frequent applause, spoke out strongly against “public apathy”, against violence and intolerance of cultural freedom, saying: “Freedom is not absolute, if you don’t defend it, you lose it….
If you give in to the threat of violence, there won’t be less violence, there will be more.”

Rushdie began by joking at being “promoted” as the keynote speaker at the closing gala dinner after Imran Khan dropped out. But he then proceeded to target Imran with his verbal barbs, describing him as a “dictator in waiting”, a person who is not very well read (“during his playboy days in London he was known as ‘Im the Dim’”) and also one who lied about not knowing that he would be here as the organisers had told him about his presence as far back as last month.

Rushdie said “immeasurable harm” was caused to Islam by terrorists who attacked India, by Osama bin Laden who had taken refuge in Pakistan and by fanatics like those who killed former Punjab governor Salmar Taseer, whose son, writer Aatish Taseer sat on the dias with Rushdie and was in conversation with him.

Rushdie said common people were more sensible than their leaders and 95 percent Muslims in India were not in favour of the violence and the things being said in their name.

“India always had a long and hoary cultural and religious tradition of accepting free speech. Everyday, there is a price for hooliganism by bigots,” he said, taking a dig at the “disgraceful votebank politics taking place in India”.

Rushdie said the customs ban on the import of “The Satanic Verses” in the age of the internet was absurd and said there was apparently no bar on his controversial book being published in India.

He said his notion of freedom was the freedom to propagate ideas, even though it might offend a particular individual or group, as long as it was done in a civil manner, without threat of violence.

“A writer is the adversary of power, but power is so scared of the writer that it ends up strengthening the writer,” Rushdie said.

Asked whether India matched Pakistan in intolerance, Rushdie responded: “However bad things get in India, they will be worse in Pakistan.”

Faseeh Salim, a Pakistani textile designer-turned artist, uses textiles, fibres, knits, embroidery and mannequins as mediums to make installations and visuals that are fashion on the surface but works of art with deep meaning on the broad canvas.

“They are journeys in self-expression with a political, social and cultural message,” Lahore-based Salim, who was in India for a residency programme, told IANS.

Salim knits body-like sculptures with matex fibre which shrinks when exposed to heat in combination with stainless steel fibre. The sculptures are knitted on industrial knitting machines, “ones on which they knit sweaters”, and moulded to show the “fluid body statistics in the world of fashion and its relation with clothes that have to fit”, the artist said.

One of his sculptures, 36″26″36″, made in India, experiments with shop mannequins as a reference point for articles of clothings in which the body becomes a slave to the fibres that drape it.

The earthy colours and ethnic art of India are at the core of young Taiwanese artist Andy Wen’s digitally printed “art clothes”.

“I am from an arts background, but I am moving to fashion. I am trying to create digitally-printed India-style clothes for women. The Indian prints are accessible and different…Art and fashion meet at many points,” Yen told IANS.

The artist, who was in India recently, created a range of 12 fusion Chinese-Indian clothes in cotton and silk painted with Indian motifs.

The art of copying, traditional fashion drawings and installation art meet in Mumbai-based artist Archana Hande’s new mixed media work, “Copy Master ji”.

Hande often uses textile printing technology on solid mediums like wood blocks to transform traditional Indian art into modern decorative designs that comment on urbanisation and globalisation.

“Everything is art. Art and fashion are two different mediums, but they both express. If I can design a costume that looks good on you, it is art,” Hande told IANS.

Norwegian Julie Skarland, a fashion designer, moved to Delhi six years ago to make a career in conceptual art and fashion.

“My exposure to art and fashion helps me explore both the mediums in my work,” Skarland told IANS. The artist, who trained in art and architecture in Norway, has studied dress making and fashion design in Paris.

“The Collection”, a new installation by Skarland, is a set of open matchboxes on which Skarland reproduces a spring-summer women’s wear collection in miniature drawings combining Norwegian progressiveness with Parisian chic on an essentially Indian medium.

“I use recycled material like old fabrics and table cloths for my clothes and it inspires me to recycle objects for my installation. I usually work towards developing a concept,” the artist said.

Kolkata-based artist Paula Sengupta falls back on the nostalgia of the Bengal partition and human suffering with elements of fashion and textiles in her visual art narratives while Delhi-based artist-cum-fashion designer Varun Sardana “believes in fashion as a form of visual art”.

Sardana used “music, theatre and performance art in his shows to express ideas”.

“Fashion is personalised art. The connect between the two is the thought process. I try to create narratives,” Sardana told IANS. One of his rare mixed media installations, “On My Passing Away”, brought clothes, fashion, social commentary and his persona under one roof in a bare room.

“Using auto portraits of me in my skin and work from my recent collection of clothes, I have tried to explore the duality of my existence,” Sardana said.

All information on the same platform – arts, fashion and marketing – overlap, says gallerist Peter Nagi. “The next bridge is politics with which art, fashion and design have to connect.

“Politics has to be more creative,” Nagi said, predicting a trend for the future.

Roles have reversed, says graphic novelist and designer Sarnath Banerjee. “Fashion people are working with narrative concepts and art is becoming decorative like fashion,” Banerjee said.

History says art and fashion have been coming closer since the beginning of the 20th century when leading European and American fashion designers became collectors of haute art – allowing their art works to influence their clothes.

Returning to India two months after he was stopped from attending the Jaipur Literary Festival, Rushdie spoke at the concluding dinner at the two-day India Today Conclave at the Taj Palace Hotel here.

The event was marked by tight security presence but devoid of the kind of protests that had marred the Jaipur event by radical Muslim groups protesting his visit.

Rushdie, who was happy at the “lack of interest and protest in my visit” this time around to his land of birth, was, however, severe on politicians of the subcontinent, both in India and Pakistan, who pandered to “religious fanaticism” and indulged in “political opportunism”, an allusion to those who cancelled their speaking engagements at the conclave because of his presence.

Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, as well as Pakistani opposition leader Imran Khan, stayed away citing “other engagements”.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf leader said he could not come to the same venue as Rushdie who had done “immeasurable hurt to Muslims” with his allegedly blasphemous references in “Satanic Verses”.

Rushdie said “Deobandi bigotry” and “kneeling to mullahs” had not worked for the Congress, alluding to their recent loss in the state elections during which the party was accused was trying to win over Muslims in Uttar Pradesh with inducements of job quotas and other blandishments.

Rushdie, who addressed a packed hall that greeted him with frequent applause, spoke out strongly against “public apathy”, against violence and intolerance of cultural freedom, saying: “Freedom is not absolute, if you don’t defend it, you lose it….
If you give in to the threat of violence, there won’t be less violence, there will be more.”

Rushdie began by joking at being “promoted” as the keynote speaker at the closing gala dinner after Imran Khan dropped out. But he then proceeded to target Imran with his verbal barbs, describing him as a “dictator in waiting”, a person who is not very well read (“during his playboy days in London he was known as ‘Im the Dim’”) and also one who lied about not knowing that he would be here as the organisers had told him about his presence as far back as last month.

Rushdie said “immeasurable harm” was caused to Islam by terrorists who attacked India, by Osama bin Laden who had taken refuge in Pakistan and by fanatics like those who killed former Punjab governor Salmar Taseer, whose son, writer Aatish Taseer sat on the dias with Rushdie and was in conversation with him.

Rushdie said common people were more sensible than their leaders and 95 percent Muslims in India were not in favour of the violence and the things being said in their name.

“India always had a long and hoary cultural and religious tradition of accepting free speech. Everyday, there is a price for hooliganism by bigots,” he said, taking a dig at the “disgraceful votebank politics taking place in India”.

Rushdie said the customs ban on the import of “The Satanic Verses” in the age of the internet was absurd and said there was apparently no bar on his controversial book being published in India.

He said his notion of freedom was the freedom to propagate ideas, even though it might offend a particular individual or group, as long as it was done in a civil manner, without threat of violence.

“A writer is the adversary of power, but power is so scared of the writer that it ends up strengthening the writer,” Rushdie said.

Asked whether India matched Pakistan in intolerance, Rushdie responded: “However bad things get in India, they will be worse in Pakistan.”

The historic turning point was also an important indicator of seismic shifts in the wider global economy, said the report titled “The International Art Market in 2011″.

The study was released by the European Fine Art Foundation, organisers of the European Fine Art Fair, Xinhua reported.

China’s share of the global art market rose from 23 percent in 2010 to 30 percent last year, pushing the US to second place with a share of 29 percent, it said.

The British art market, which was overtaken by China in 2010, was third with a 22-percent market share while France was a distant fourth with a share of six percent.

Sales of art and antiques at auctions in China saw a dramatic rise of 177 percent in 2010 and a further 64 percent increase in 2011. The modern and contemporary sectors accounted for nearly 70 percent of the market.

With strong growth seen in China, the global art market continued to recover last year.

Sales revenue grew seven percent year-on-year, but was 63 percent higher than in the crisis-hit 2009.

“The dominance of the Chinese market has been driven by expanding wealth, strong domestic supply and the investive drive of Chinese art buyers,” said Clare McAndrew, a cultural economist specialising in the fine and decorative art market.

Such nuggets of information have been brought out in a book published by the ministry of civil aviation to commemorate 100 years of civil aviation in India.

The coffee table book, “100 years of Civil Aviation in India”, released at India Aviation 2012 here, catches the evolution of India’s civil aviation sector from the first commercial flight Feb 18, 1911 to its emergence as the ninth largest market in the world today.

The 200-page book with photographs and illustrations gives a gripping account of the sector’s journey from pre-independence era to nationalisation of the sector after independence and its transformation under the ‘open skies’ policy of 1990.

The book takes one back to the times when cities like Karachi, Bhuj, Ahmedabad, Bombay, Goa, Bellary, Cannanore, Trivandrum, Trichinopoly, Colombo, Dacca, Rangoon, Madras, Hyderabad, Indore, Bhopal, Gwalior and Delhi were all on the route map of different airlines.

While it was Feb 18, 1911 that French pilot Henri Pequet flew a Humber Bi-plane from Allahabad to Nain, a distance of six miles, it was only in 1932 that J.R.D. Tata, who was the first to get a pilot license, started the first domestic airline Tata Sons.

It started weekly air services between Karachi and Madras, touching Ahmedabad, Bombay and Bellary en route, connecting with the weekly Imperial Airways flight from London to Karachi.

Operating with two second hand De Havilland Puss Moths, Tata Sons accumulated a profit of Rs.10,000 in the first year. The next year saw airlines like Indian Trans Continental Airways (ITCA), Madras Air Taxi Services and Indian National Airways (INA) commencing their operations.

INA started a weekly service between Calcutta and Rangoon and between Calcutta and Dacca for carriage of passengers, mail and freight. Hindustan Aircraft Ltd was set up in Bangalore while Nizam’s State Railway, Tata Sons and the public jointly floated Deccan Airways in Hyderabad.

Himalayan Air Transport Company in 1935 introduced a flight between Hardwar and Gaucher, a pastureland along the river Alaknanda. It was the first pilgrimage air link in India.

Tata Airlines converted into a public company and re-named Air India Ltd in 1946. Air India International was incorporated in 1948 and it inaugurated a weekly flight between Bombay and London, via Cairo and Geneva.

It was in 1953 that the government formed two nationalised corporations: Indian Airlines Corporation and Air India International.

Eight formerly independent domestic airlines, Deccan Airways, Airways India, Bharat Airways, Himalayan Aviation, Kalinga Airlines, Indian National Airways, Air India and Air Services of India, merged into Indian Airlines Corporation.

The book also highlights the significant milestones like Prema Mathur becoming the world’s first woman commercial pilot with Deccan Airways, Hyderabad in 1951 and the induction of Durba Banerjee as the first woman pilot of Indian Airlines in 1956.

The year 1960 marked a landmark in Air India’s history as it ushered in the commercial jet age by ordering the Boeing 707 jetliner. Air India extended its Bombay-London service to New York.

India’s aviation sector underwent a major transformation in 1990 with the ‘open-skies’ policy. The same year Air India entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest evacuation effort by a single civilian airline. It airlifted 111,711 Indian workers from the Gulf during 59 days by 488 flights during the Gulf war.

In 2003, low-cost carriers came into India, and Air Deccan started its services. Modernisation of airports was taken up and new Greenfield airports came up in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Critics say flowers have been a major theme in the history of global modernism. Sunflowers by Van Gogh, magnolias in a vase by Matisse and calla lilies by Georgia O’Keeffe are virtually immortal images of still life that have inspired artists for more than a century.

But in India, flowers are connected to the cycle of life – in art and in the human canvas – since the dawn of pictorial civilisations in caves.

Artist Manu Parekh, one of India’s finest “flower painters”, began to paint flowers as still life early in his career, but later turned them into symbols of “sexuality and the sun”. In his new large canvases on display at his solo showcase, Faith, in the ArtAlive Gallery, Parekh has taken his floral fixation to create abstract and expressionist compositions.

A series of 16 flower drawings, Flowers from Heaven in acrylic colours painted by the artist in Varanasi, reveals the power of humble flowers like marigold as symbols of birth, fertility, journey, passion and end.

“For me flowers represent a very dramatic journey from the heads of gods to wreaths around the human neck. We want the flowery element on every occasion – it is a very organic element. Flowers are symbols for creativity and fertility for me,” Parekh told IANS.

Arpita Singh, one of India’s leading pioneers of the women’s wave in art, says “flowers are a source of energy”.

“I remember once that I waited for a long time to see a ‘sheuli (a small white seasonal blossom)’ bud unfurl in my garden. It suddenly opened and sent across a burst of energy,” Singh recalled. The artist, whose favourite blossom is the water lily, does not paint flowers as primary icons – but “uses them to define the borders of her art”.

Gopi Gajwani, a veteran abstractionist, honed his skill at drawing with “studies of flowers”.

“In my academic years, I had painted hundreds of flowers. One day, I was sitting in the lawn of my art college and was drawing flowers. I felt there was someone standing behind me and I turned around. It was Sailoz Mukherjee (a modern art legend). He said, Gopi, move over, let me draw the flower for you. I still have the drawing,” Gajwani, a lover of rose, recounted to IANS.

Artist Seema Kohli plays with the idea of “lotus”- one of the most common artistic icons – as the umbilical bond in relationships among human beings and their connect with the cosmos. The surfaces of her art works are layered textures of “minute floral patterns that spread on the canvas like chains”.

Kohli sometimes carves the lotus in metal to make solid forms.

“The way I use the lotus stem is like the umbilical cord – they are like a bunch of umbilical cords joined together in a major source of stored energy. Flowers have been part of India’s evolution of art history – from the temples to contemporary landscape. The blossoming from seed to a flower is the journey of life and creativity,” Kohli told IANS.

One must realise that flowers have an ambivalent lineage in Indian art, said art writer, poet and critic Ashok Vajpeyi.

“One the one hand, it represents the sacred, on the other hand sensuous. They are symbols of abstraction. In Indian art, flowers have an exuberance of expression and erotic connotations that is not always found in the representation of flowers in western art. Flowers can be a confluence of the spiritual and sensuous in the Indian visual space,” Vajpeyi told IANS.

In India, flowers are vital to folk and traditional forms of non-formal art because of its simplistic line forms. Kolam in south India, ‘rangoli’ in northern India, ‘madanae’ in Rajasthan, ‘chowkpurna’ in some Hindi-speaking states, ‘aripana’ in Bihar and ‘alpana’ in Bengal improvise on floral patterns – often with flower extracts as colouring agents.

“I feel as a form literature exists in the written word – let it be here as the raison d’etre why somebody writes. Whenever I read a good book, it never crosses my mind to make a film,” Mirza told IANS in an interview here.

“I feel literature has its own space. I would rather write an original screenplay for my films. I have a compartmentalised mind. I can separate the two – literature and screenplay. I personally would not like to adapt,” Mirza said.

The filmmaker-writer, who was in the capital recently to promote his new book “The Monk, The Moor & Moses Ben Jalloun”, is known for his original screenplays for movies “Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan”, “Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho”, “Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hain”, “Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro”, “Naseem” and popular teleserial “Nukkad”.

The 68-year-old writer is inspired by “all kinds of things” for his screenplays.

“When you take on a subject of law, one must remember that it is the last recourse to an ordinary citizen. That was the idea behind ‘Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho’. In ‘Salim Langde…’, I have tried to look at the lumpenisation of Muslims in the city. A young man tries to break free and he is on a dead-end street,” Mirza said, recalling the inspirations for his screenplays.

The story of ‘Nukkad’ – the popular 1986 teleserial – was conceived on the streets.

“I have spent a lot of time on the streets in schools and college as a student of St. Xavier’s (in Mumbai). It was an incredible learning experience at restaurant and cafes. I spoke to the boot-polish fellows. I learnt so much about people. Street corners are the places where you are yourself – it somehow elevates the human spirit. Once the ideas are in place, it does not take very long,” Mirza said walking down the “Nukkad” memory lane.

Filmmaking does not excite Mirza any more. “I need to get excited about something,” he said.

“By the very nature of cinema, it does not give you enough space to meander which literature does. Literature offers a far more holistic view of the world – cinema is a spotlight, it is concentrated,” Mirza said.

Mirza became a writer with his debut novel, “Ammi – Letter to a Democratic Mother”, in 2008.

“I needed a canvas or vehicle to convey all that was going on in my mind,” he said.

But Mirza does not deny the influence of cinema on the psyche of the nation. “Cinema is a national pastime. It is a part of the nation’s dreams. A lot of India’s psyche and behavioral pattern have been shaped by cinema… But I am very comfortable with writing,” Mirza said.

“Monuments do not have voice, they have us. Europe without memory is Europe without future,” said the main motto of the public awareness campaign that was presented during a press conference in Athens, under the Acropolis hill, Xinhua reported.

Greek archaeologists have sought help of colleagues, scholars and ordinary people in Europe and across the globe while warning that the austerity policies that are implemented in debt-laden Greece over the past two years could be introduced to other countries in future.

According to the released data, in Greece, the funds for cultural heritage never exceeded one percent of the state budget. It was further slashed by some 35 percent on yearly basis in 2011 following the Greek debt crisis and further cuts are on the way.

Despite recent robberies at the National Gallery in Athens and the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games, funding for museum security will be cut 20 percent, said Association of Greek archaeologists’ president Despina Koutsoumbathe.

A rise in illegal digging for looting antiquities has been reported in recent months, she said.

In the last three months of 2010, the 10 percent workforce of the culture ministry was forced to early retirement on reduced pension as part of efforts to slash deficits and overcome the debt crisis.

Since 2010 Greece has kept afloat with international bailout packages in return of painful austerity cuts and reforms that have been met with strong reactions by suffering Greek people.

The move will put an end to more than 244 years of the print edition since it was first published in 1768 in Scotland, the Daily Express reported Wednesday.

A company spokesman said it was ending the print edition in a move towards digital publishing and expanding its range of educational products.

Company president Jorge Cauz said the best year for the printed encyclopaedia was 1990 when 120,000 sets were sold. The number fell to 40,000 in 1996.

After the announcement, social media users began to accuse websites like Wikipedia and Google of killing the print version.

But Cauz said it had nothing to do with Wikipedia or Google.

“This has to do with the fact that now Britannica sells its digital products to a large number of people. The sales of printed encyclopaedias have been negligible for several years,” he said.

“A printed encyclopaedia is obsolete the minute that you print it. Whereas our online edition is updated continuously.”

“There is no reason for India to copy one to one from the West. It has its unique musical culture and if that can be combined with modern technology and instruments, it would be awesome. It is happening, but in a very limited manner. Some more work can be done in that direction,” Mueller, who has spent six years in India working on jingles and has also composed background scores for TV shows like “Magicskool”, told IANS in an interview.

“Music companies don’t really worry about alternatives. They go for the big bucks, which is in Bollywood,” a concerned Mueller said on the sidelines of the Gulmarg Winter Festival that saw various bands and musicians participating from various parts of the country.

But he is impressed with the growth and innovation in the music scene. “It is nice to see that people have started developing their own style. Now you see lot of people making their own music.

“Earlier, bands used to be a copy of European 1980s rock bands. It has come to musicians now developing own flavours. I would love to see much more Indian elements… not just Hindi vocals, but also the rhythm.”

He is happy with the fact that the internet is helping independent musicians reach out to wider audiences.

“With internet, the idea of music distribution has changed. Nobody is really buying music. Now anyone can upload a track and chances are if you are good and people like you, you get exposure.

“You might not be making money but it is a good promotion…you get famous, you get work; so I think that is the future of music distribution,” he said.

“People using old channels of distribution are crying over how much money they are losing. Exorbitant prices are keeping people away from buying music. Earlier, there were vinyl records, then came CDs but they were introduced in the market almost double the actual price,” he added.

Mueller came from Germany to India six years back and started working in Goa but shifted to Mumbai due to financial constraints.

“I wanted to come to India since I was 15. There are different stories that my friends used to tell me when they returned from a trip to India,” he said.

Comparing life in India with Germany, he added: “The nicest thing about India is that you wake up and you don’t know what will happen. You see something funny, something interesting and learn so many things every day.

“In Germany, you wake up and everything is scheduled. You don’t get to experience anything off track; you can predict what will happen. But in India, there is nothing of this sort.”

The novel breaks conventions by probing extra-marital romance as its theme, director of the play Sanjoy K. Roy said.

In 1968, the Guide was adapated into a Broadway play by Harvey Breit and Patricia Rinehart and was staged at Hudson Theatre. The play starred Zia Mohyeddin, a Pakistani actor, in the lead as Raju.

The novel, set in Narayan’s fictional town Malgudi, fetched the writer a Sahitya Akademi award in 1960. It was made also into a hit movie in 1965 starring Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman.

The Indian adaptation, a tribute to Narayan, will commemorate the movie by including four popular tracks from it “with contemporary flavour”. Composer Anil Shrinivasan, a Chennai-based pianist, is setting the music for the play.

“The play is a dramatised version of the book. The movie was a rather romanticised version. We will recreate the authenticity of the what R.K.Narayan wrote… the circumstances that created the situation. We will try to bring out what actually happened between Raju and Rosy and the relationship between man and his ego,” Roy told IANS.

The play also explores protagonist Raju’s journey from a tour guide to a spiritual guide at the point when residents of a village, which Raju visits after his release from jail in a forgery case, look to him for advice and leaves him with no choice “but to join a ceremonial fast with them for rain”.

“The ‘bhakti’ of the villagers changes Raju’s life,” Roy said.

Roy said Shrivastava and the team had started work on the play “two-and-a-half years ago after acquiring the rights to dramatise the play from Narayan’s family foundation”.

“It was beautiful revisiting the book. Everyone must revisit Narayan’s books. He is one of the greatest writers and his story-telling is so simple…,” Roy said.

“I am using four popular tracks from the movie – ‘Aaj phir jeene ki tammana hain’, ‘Gata rahein mera dil’, ‘Tere Mere Sapne…’ and ‘Piya Tose Naina Laage Re’ – with a contemporary flavour,” Anil Shrinivasan told IANS from Chennai.

“The tunes remain the same because we have grown up with the songs,” the composer said.

The actors will lip sync the tracks, which will be play-backed by two vocalists. Shrinivasan has lifted some of the tunes from the movie on piano to compose a theme title track, “Rosy 2″, to run through the play.

The play, produced Ritu Saigal of the Deva Fine Arts Society and Teamworks Production, will be presented by Jaypee Greens. It will be choreographed by Gilles Chuyen.

Non-Fiction

1. “Thinking Fast and Slow”
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: Rs.499

2. “Confessions of a Serial Dieter”
Author: Kalli Purie
Publisher: Harper Collins
Price: Rs.250

3. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”
Author: Katherine Boo
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs.499

4. “Jerusalem: The Biography”
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher: Phoenix
Price: Rs.695

5. “Steve Jobs”
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Hachette
Price: Rs.799

Fiction

1. “The Sins of the Father”
Author: Jeffrey Archer
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Price: Rs.350

2. “Can Love Happen Twice”
Author: Ravinder Singh
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs.125

3. “The Immortals of Meluha”
Author: Amish Tripathi
Publisher: Westland
Price: Rs.195

4. “Empire of the Moghul: Ruler of the World
Author: Alex Rutherford
Publisher: Hachette
Price: Rs.395

5. “The Secret of Nagas”
Author: Amish
Publisher: Westland
Price: Rs.295

The bestseller list compiled by Indian Authors Promotion Association on the basis of data provided by Bahrisons, Delhi (http://www.booksatbahri.com) ; Capital Book Depot, Chandigarh (http://www.capitalbookdepot.com); Spell & Bound Bookshop & Cafe Pvt. Ltd, Delhi (http://spellandbound.com).

“Cultural tightness can prevent the emergence of women leaders because tighter cultures may make a society’s people more resistant to changing the traditionally-held practice that placed men in leadership roles,” said Soo Min Toh, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Cultural tightness is described by Soo, who co-wrote the study with Geoffrey Leonardelli, an associate professor at Rotman, as the “degree to which norms are clear and pervasive,” the Journal of World Business reported.

Tight cultures have a lower tolerance for deviation from cultural norms and may even impose sanctions for doing so. Loose cultures tend to be more open to change and experience higher rates of change than tight cultures, according to a university statement.

Among 32 countries compared, New Zealand, Ukraine and Hungary – all culturally loose countries – showed a high rate of female leadership, while Pakistan, South Korea, and Turkey – considered culturally tight – were low.

“But when it comes to the emergence of women leaders, cultural tightness can have an advantage too. Cultural tightness may also be a helpful instrument because in societies where men and women are treated equally, tightness could more strongly implement and sustain practices that encourage the emergence of women leaders,” said Leonardelli.

Norway is a case in point. While the Scandinavian country is considered culturally tight, it also highly emphasizes gender equality practices and showed a high rate of female leadership.

Researchers used an academically-compiled index of countries’ cultural tightness and a separate index on their treatment of gender equality, and World Bank statistics on the percentage of leadership positions filled by women, such as legislators, senior officials and managers.

Stainless steel – an alloy of iron, chromium and zinc – was born as a medium of contemporary sculpture in India in the 1990s when artists Subodh Gupta and Anish Kapoor used it to create futuristic installations.

Gupta assembled customised stainless steel utensils into sculpted forms like “Spill” (spilling water), “Incubate (floor arrangements)” and “Very Hungry God (skull)” to comment on social realities. Kapoor, on his part, fashioned giant stainless steel public installations like “Cloud Gate” and “Sky Mirror” – giving the household metal a spiritual edge.

“I knew Subodh Gupta for a long time. Subodh knew we were making stainless steel for ‘bartans’ (utensils) which weren’t readily available. He asked me whether my plant (Jindal Steel) could get it done for him,” Deepika Jindal, managing director of JSL Lifestyle Ltd, told IANS.

Her stainless steel lifestyle art firms, “Arttd’inox” and “U”, and her unique art house, the Stainless Gallery in the capital, are trying to push the metal into the core art segment with a designer range sculpted in combination with wood, stone and glass.

“I have been trying to open up the medium because of the perception that stainless steel lacks aesthetics. It was known as a poor man’s back-end material used as cheap kitchen utensils. But over the decades, stainless steel has become a strong medium in terms of art – well accepted and well-respected. Designs in stainless steel have to kept simplistic which challenges artists,” Jindal said.
Stainless steel is in its 100th year worldwide. History says that on October 17, 1912, German engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patented a variety of austenite stainless steel – baptising it ThyssenKrupp Nirosta – after years of experiments with corrosion resistent iron-chromium alloys by various engineering firms.

It was initially used in Sheffield cutlery and as surgical equipment in hospitals because of its anti-bacterial composition.

“But no one knows what actually prompted the improvisation,” Jindal said.

“Arttd’inox” unveiled March 3 a “(p)Roto-type” exhibition of steel sculpture and home art designs at the Stainless Gallery to pay a tribute to the metal in its 100th year.

The showcase is also a collateral event of the ongoing India Design Forum by the Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Arts in the capital March 2-10 which is addressing the importance of new materials in contemporary designs.

“(p)Roto-type”, features innovative steel and mixed media designs by six talented designers: Shristhi Bajaj of Designbait, Siddhartha Chatterjee of Seechange, Bikram Mittra of Trampoline, Prateek Jain and Gautam Seth of Klove and independent designer Mann Singh.

The exhibits show the flexibility of stainless steel as a medium of niche art that can fit into daily life with products like abstract lampshades, decorative art, designer dinner sets, containers and chapati-making contraptions that look like contemporary sculptures.

Curated by architect-artist Vishal K. Dhar, the exhibition plays upon the word prototype, which means “an early model built to test a concept or process”.

“Stainless steel has qualities beyond utilitarian material. It has durability and can be painted, coated and moulded. It is an exciting and a challenging medium to handle because it is an engineered material unlike bronze,” Dhar told IANS.

The steel was mutant in nature originating from a progressive space in modern art, Dhar said.

The “(p)roto-type is a three-year project which will engage with middle class and upper middle classes in an academic exercise to raise awareness about the aesthetic value of metals and create new networks”, Dhar said. The artist has worked with steel in 2008.

“The Stainless Gallery is the only art house in the capital which promotes steel art. In 2007, we hosted ‘Saptarishis’, an exhibition of steel sculptures by leading artists and we followed it up in Dec 2008 with ‘Ashtakanya’, an all-women show of steel art,” said Meetu Kapur of the Stainless Gallery.

Steel solid art lie around in pleasant disorder.

A steel seat, “Lotus” crafted by Seema Kohli; “Dream Machine”, a mechanical bird by Pankaj Panwar; and “Display”, a steel outfit by Hyderabad-based Shanti Swarupini from earlier shows draw the visitor to the nooks of the spacious gallery where they stand witness to the journey of stainless steel.

“Action is easy, it is very easy. Comedy is difficult,” Akshay told IANS in a chat on the sets of Neeraj Pandey’s “Special Chabbis”. After a shot, the 44-year-old relaxed in the balcony of an old-structured house in Connaught Place here.

“You know…you can kick your legs, punch someone very easily and do action. In fact, action can even look great through camerawork. Also, for an emotional scene, you can put glycerine in the eyes and make any artist cry, and the viewers think he is crying, so people also start crying,” said the actor, looking fit and smart in trousers, a shirt and sleeveless sweater.

“But to make someone laugh, you have to work very hard. It’s very difficult to make people laugh. So comedy is tough…the toughest,” he added.

Akshay became the undisputed action star of Hindi films with projects like “Khiladi”, “Sabse Bada Khiladi”, “Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi”, “International Khiladi”, “Waqt Hamara Hai” and “Mohra”.

In 2000, he tried his comic timing in the hit movie “Hera Pheri”. It was followed by others like “Garam Masala”, “Phir Hera Pheri”, “Bhagam Bhaag”, “Welcome”, “Singh Is Kinng”, “Housefull” and “Tees Maar Khan”.

“Nothing has changed about comedy. People enjoy what you give from the heart. Don’t try and go by the trend. Go with your heart and mind…if you do your work with sincerity, it will always work,” said the actor who has done about 100 films in his 25-year-old career.

“The audience only enjoys an entertaining film. See, the black and white film ‘The Artist’ is the talk of the town. Who knew that a black and white silent film would come in 2012 and do so well and take away the Oscar?

“So if you make a film with your head and heart, it will always have a connect with the audience,” said Akshay, who is now awaiting for the sequel of Sajid Khan’s 2010 comic film “Housefull” to hit the theatres April 5.

“Housefull 2″ has been subtitled “The Dirty Dozen”, thanks to the number of artists in it.

Apart from Akshay, it has Riteish Deshmukh, Shreyas Talpade and John Abraham, with Jacqueline Fernandez, Asin Thottumkal, Shazahn Padamsee and Zarine Khan in the cast. They are joined by senior actors like Mithun Chakraborty, Rishi Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor and Boman Irani to complete the dirty dozen.

Unlike most stars who find it cumbersome to work with so many actors, Akshay says the experience was unmatched.

“Multi-starrers are fun to work on. There are so many actors, so many people that you end up laughing and giggling with even during the take. The director gets fed up and says cut, but somebody or the other keeps goofing up or saying something wrong,” he said.

“A director needs to have patience enough to put up with all of this. It’s a very difficult job to do. But Sajid does it well. Sajid is a mad man, and only he can handle this,” he added.

“So far 176 children have been admitted to the hospital with complaints of skin allergy, burning of eyes, giddiness and vomiting,” a duty medical officer from Sion Hospital told IANS.

“More and more cases are coming in since the afternoon. They seem to have played with colours with some chemical elements,” he said.

The incident occurred in Shastrinagar area of the slum in south-central Mumbai when Holi celebrations were in full swing. The affected children were taken to the hospital.

According to hospital officials, some cases were critical on admission but are now stable and responding well to treatment.

Officials also added that they have got calls from a few adults also with similar complaints.

Police are looking into the matter and trying to find out the source of the Holi colours, a police official said.

Soon enough, buckets full of coloured water were squirted through ‘pichkaris’, drenching everyone within range.

In south Delhi’s Katwaria Sarai area, young boys aimed balloons filled with colored water at passers by, especially at girls. Not to be left behind, the girls retaliated in an equally colourful manner.

“I usually don’t play Holi but my friends from college dragged me out of my room and poured two buckets of coloured water on me!” a drenched Rajiv told IANS, before joining his equally drenched friends.

Streets in Delhi were colored in all shades of yellow, red, green, purple. The vibrant colours jostled for prominence as people smeared ‘gulal’ on each other and distributed sweets to celebrate.

Small bands of children, armed with ‘pichkaris’ filled with coloured water, sprayed unwary passersby with coloured water and ran away, shouting ‘Holi hai!’(It’s Holi!).

Abhinav, 11, had tucked his shirt in his knickers and had stuffed the shirt with water-filled balloons. Ruffled hair full of gulal and clothes drenched in pink and purple, he looked the posterboy of Holi.

“I will color everyone with them,” he said when asked about the balloons stuffed in his shirt.

In crowded urban pockets, the celebrations were more robust. Large bands of revellers, armed with coloured water — deep purple, black and silver — smeared anyone they came across with colour.

Sweets, especially the traditional gujiyas, were the order of the day as people exchanged them and greeted each other. The more adventurous downed thandai (cold drink)laced with bhang to add zest to their celebrations.

The festival is associated with the legend of demon king Hiranyakashyapu whose son, Prahlad was a devotee of Vishnu. It symbolises victory of good over evil and is one of the most prominent Hindu festivals.

Delhi Police is also out on streets in large numbers to maintain law and order.

However, the morning commuters faced some hassle as only auto rickshaws plied on roads. The public transport, such as buses and metro wil be shut till around noon.

Some revelers, who had played Holi earlier on Wednesday, especially office goers playing in their offices, faced trouble going home as the Metro security guards reportedly denied entry to the more extreme cases. The guards cited safety concerns as the reason.

“It’s difficult to recognise people if they have too much color on their faces. We told such people to either wash their face or leave the premises,” a security guard at Hauz Khas Metro station told IANS Wednesday.

The local five-star hotel has covered up a set of sculptures depicting a nude man and nude woman touching each other after the art installation stirred up great controversy, the Shanghai Daily reported.

Some people criticised the five white statues kept on the hotel’s roof garden as pornographic and harmful to social morality.

Surprised at the criticism, the hotel authorities argued that the sculptures were placed inside the hotel, not at any public place.

But they were told it was easy for children to see the “obscene” sculptures as the hotel in the Pudong New Area is surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings.

The statues vividly depict a robust man and a full-figured woman kissing and hugging in different poses, with the man’s hand even touching the woman’s private parts.

The statues had been up for about half-a-year. But they didn’t arouse much attention until recently when some internet users uploaded the photos.

A week-long festival of music, dance and theatre featuring some of the recipients of the award will begin March 7-13 at Kamani, Meghdoot and Rabindra Bhavan theatres in the capital, the ministry said in a statement.

The award was instituted in 2006 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture. The award is given to performing artists below 40 years of age.

1. Gujiya: These half moon-shaped sweets are a runaway hit on the festival.

Ingredients: A cup of maida, grated coconut, three tablespoons of ghee or oil, sugar as per taste, two cups of milk and khoya, a tablespoon of poppy seeds, chopped almonds, raisins and cardamom powder.

Method: For the outer covering, mix maida and ghee in a bowl, add warm milk to ensure that the dough is smooth.

For the stuffing, mash the khoya and fry it in a pan, add coconut, sugar, milk, chopped almonds, raisins, cardamom powder and poppy seeds.

Let the mixture cool down. In the meantime, take the dough and make flat round pancakes. Add the stuffing in middle and close the corners. Deep fry in ghee until golden brown. Serve cool.

2. Bhang Pakore: These mouth-watering fried snacks pack an intoxicating punch.

Ingredients: Oil, two cups of gram flour (besan), a potato, onion, brinjal, half a cup of cauliflower, spinach, half tablespoon of bhang seed powder, chilli powder, ajwain, a pinch of baking soda, carom seeds, mango powder (amchur), salt to taste and bhang seed powder.

Method: In a bowl, add besan, baking soda, salt, chilli powder and some water to make a thick batter. Wash and peel all the vegetables. Dip them in the batter and deep fry till golden brown. Serve hot with sauce or chutney.

3. Badam Kulfi: A traditional version of the ice cream, it is a perfect way to welcome the warmer days heralded by Holi.

Ingredients: Three litres of milk, sugar to taste, half a cup of roasted and sliced almonds and cardamom powder.

Method: Boil the milk in a thick bottomed vessel till it is reduced to half. Add sugar, badam and cardamom powder and stir well. Pour the mixture into molds and freeze for around six hours. Cut the kulfi into small pieces and garnish with chopped almonds and pistachios.

4. Bhang Thandai: An intoxicant laden drink, for many Holi means drinking glassfuls of it.

Ingredients: A litre of full cream milk, a cup of almonds and pistachios, a tablespoon of black peppercorns, cardamoms, fennel seeds (saunf), soaked khus-khus, sugar to taste, a pinch of salt and half a cup of dried or fresh rose petals.

Method: Soak sugar in half a litre of water. Grind the mixture except the saunf and spices with milk to make a very thick and fine paste. The spices could be roasted, then ground separately and mixed to the paste.

Boil the milk and then add the paste. Whip it for at least 5 minutes to get a creamy frothing texture. Using a muslin strainer, separate the solid particles from the beverage. For better taste, grind the particles again and add to the beverage.

Add sugar syrup to the drink and refrigerate it. Serve the drink chilled, garnished with chopped almonds.

5. Malpua: This is an all-time favourite pancake like sweet, and many prefer it to gujiyas on Holi.

Ingredients: A litre of milk, half a cup maida, suji, some ghee and water.

For the syrup, add a cup of sugar, a few strands of saffron, two tablespoons of milk, and a pinch of cardamom powder to boiling water to make the syrup.

Method: Boil the milk till it reduces to half. Roast the suji till it turns brown and add to the milk along with maida. Make sure there are no lumps. Heat ghee in a pan. Pour the batter over the ghee in circular motions to make small pancakes. Turn over and make sure they remain soft and not crispy.

Soak the fried malpuas in the sugar syrup. Garnish with chopped dry fruits and fresh cream and serve.

The exhibition, inaugurated Monday by the Akademi’s secretary, Sudarshan Sharma, is a collection of paintings and metallic sculptures by painters Kalpana Yuvarraaj, Kamla Ravikumar, P. Saraswati, Sharada and sculptor, Swapna.

The exhibition celebrates women and womanhood, with the artworks portraying woman in her many roles, as a mother, a multitasking home maker, as Sita in a burning pyre or Draupadi calling for Krishna’s help during ‘Chirharan’.

Inaugurating the exhibition, Sharma said: “Clubbed with International Women’s Day, the initiative had a special significance.”

The art works are up for sale, with a Sharada artwork commanding the maximum price at Rs.99000 and a Kamla Ravikumar creation on the other side of the spectrum at Rs.10000 .

Out of the five artists, Yuvarraaj and Ravikumar were present at the inauguratio

The 75-year-old was handed the award which included a citation, a trophy and Rs 2.50 lakh at a function in the city.

Presenting the award, Indian Chamber of Commerce president Srivardhan Goenka paid tributes to Pyne and recalled his versatility as a painter.

Theatre personalities and others in the creative fraternity feel the demonstrations only show India in poor light.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Shiv Sena supporters shouted anti-Pakistan and anti-Osama slogans at the film shoot here last week.

They objected to the film unit using Pakistani flags, Urdu sign boards and other things to recreate Pakistani’s Abbottabad city, where US special forces shot dead the elusive Al Qaeda chief last year.

“They are creating an issue out of nothing. Creativity should be left alone by these elements,” Kuldeep Sharma, director of Tagore Theatre, the city’s only theatre for arts and cultural activities, told IANS.

“If people have come to our country to shoot, they should be left to do it peacefully. If not here, they will pick some other city.

“The protesters should focus on other social issues instead of gaining mileage from such issues,” Sharma said.

Others were equally upset.

“Just because the director is showing ‘Pakistani streets’ is not a fair reason to protest. I don’t know what ideology these people have,” said Zulfiqar Khan, a leading theatre director and actor.

“Whatever Kathryn is shooting will obviously be according to the script. Until the movie is released and we see it, what is the point of creating a fuss about the shooting?” Khan asked.

The Hollywood film crew, which has been in the city since last week, had ironically conducted Hindu prayers before starting work here.

Sudesh Sharma, director of Theatre for Theatre, was equally dismissive of the VHP and Shiv Sena.

“They need to bring some change in their thinking. I suppose only God can do that! Until a movie is ready, how can they question it?”

Satirist-actor Jaspal Bhatti is also upset.

“Creating a scene of Pakistan is part of the script. When ‘Gadar’ was shot, no one created a fuss on its shooting.

“The Pakistan shown in that movie was also made somewhere in India. It is the most illogical thing I have heard. It is an infringement of artistic activities,” Bhatti told IANS.

Educationist and author Neel Kamal Puri agreed: “People need to be more open minded. I do not really see a reason to protest about. Kathryn is just doing her job.”

The administration and police have defended the film unit, saying they have all the permission.

Police officer Rajesh Shukla told IANS: “When the government of India and Chandigarh administration have given the crew permission to shoot, how can we stop them?”

Local traders had also protested against the shooting in the Mani Majra suburb last week saying their business was being hit. The film unit reportedly paid Rs.700,000 to compensate the loss of trade.

Shukla said: “The market welfare association was aware of the shooting.”

“El Gato” arrived Saturday in the South American country from Italy and will occupy a space at the San Cristobal Library Park in Medellin, where Botero was born in 1932.

The gigantic feline, which is 3.9 meters long and 1.5 meters tall, was made in the Italian city of Pietra Santa, where Botero lives for several months each year.

Medellin Mayor Anibal Gaviria plans to welcome the big cat to the San Cristobal Library Park at a ceremony April 2 that is to be attended by Botero.

Botero, considered Colombia’s most famous artist, is known for paintings and sculptures that exaggerate the shape and volume of human figures, animals and objects.

Medellin, which has been home to the artist’s most important sculptures and paintings for some time, is getting a plump cat with a thick tail.

The exhibition, inaugurated Monday by the Akademi’s secretary, Sudarshan Sharma, is a collection of paintings and metallic sculptures by painters Kalpana Yuvarraaj, Kamla Ravikumar, P. Saraswati, Sharada and sculptor, Swapna.

The exhibition celebrates women and womanhood, with the artworks portraying woman in her many roles, as a mother, a multitasking home maker, as Sita in a burning pyre or Draupadi calling for Krishna’s help during ‘Chirharan’.

Inaugurating the exhibition, Sharma said: “Clubbed with International Women’s Day, the initiative had a special significance.”

The art works are up for sale, with a Sharada artwork commanding the maximum price at Rs.99000 and a Kamla Ravikumar creation on the other side of the spectrum at Rs.10000 .

Out of the five artists, Yuvarraaj and Ravikumar were present at the inauguration.

The 75-year-old was handed the award which included a citation, a trophy and Rs 2.50 lakh at a function in the city.

Presenting the award, Indian Chamber of Commerce president Srivardhan Goenka paid tributes to Pyne and recalled his versatility as a painter.

“El Gato” arrived Saturday in the South American country from Italy and will occupy a space at the San Cristobal Library Park in Medellin, where Botero was born in 1932.

The gigantic feline, which is 3.9 meters long and 1.5 meters tall, was made in the Italian city of Pietra Santa, where Botero lives for several months each year.

Medellin Mayor Anibal Gaviria plans to welcome the big cat to the San Cristobal Library Park at a ceremony April 2 that is to be attended by Botero.

Botero, considered Colombia’s most famous artist, is known for paintings and sculptures that exaggerate the shape and volume of human figures, animals and objects.

Medellin, which has been home to the artist’s most important sculptures and paintings for some time, is getting a plump cat with a thick tail.

The organisation, which promotes Indian art and culture around the world, will hold its first programme here in which Iraqi Oud player Rahim Alhaj will perform with sarod players Aman and Ayaan Ali Khan.

“The council address its mandate of cultural diplomacy through a broad range of activities. We would organise regular activities involving regional artists,” regional officer Nityanand Srivastava said.

Later this month, the ICCR may also hold a formal inauguration function in the city in which its president Karan Singh is likely to participate.

Founded by dancing star Rasta Thomas in 2007, the troupe, popularly called BBD, has come to India for the first time.

The group is known for its high energy version of classical western dances such as ballet, often in combination with contemporary music.

Saturday’s performance saw BBD dancing to the tunes of popular artistes such as U2 and Michael Jackson.

Their performance on Jackson’s songs “Billy Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” garnered much applause.

Their tour started with a show in Jaipur on Feb 29. According to Thomas, while the crowds in capital was more experienced and knowledgeable about dance, for the audience at Jaipur, it was a culture shock.

“It was crazy in Jaipur. We had some small kids dancing next to the stage,” an exhilarated Thomas told IANS.

“We have enjoyed ourselves immensely ever since we arrived in India. Right from people, to food, to sights to architecture, everything is so amazing,” he said.

The group will be performing in five more cities including Kolkata and Mumbai.

Thomas went on to claim that their next visit to India might be “more earlier than later.” He said the troupe would try to brush up their skills and dance on Bollywood numbers next time.

BBD also conducted a workshop with Danceworx, a dance academy. Senior students of Danceworx opened the show Saturday with a titillating performace.

“The experience with Danceworx was great. The level of Indian dancers there was amazing,” said Adrienne, a member of the troupe.

The crowds at Siri Fort found BBD performance called ‘Rock the Ballet’ captivating and called for an encore at the end. The artistes were happy to comply.

Even after the performance, people thronged backstage to get autographs.

For Kamakshi, a student of Danceworx, it was a chance to meet her idols.

“My brother, who lives in New Jersey, told me about BBD. They are the reason why I started pursuing dance so seriously,” the 17-year-old told IANS.

“My final exams are going on, but this is something I couldn’t miss,” she added.

For Shalini Khanna, the chiseled dancers were the biggest draw.

“Rasta and Jamal are so hot. I loved them in their youtube videos and they look so much better live,” the 26-year-old banker told IANS.

The event was organized by American Center, the public relations section of American embassy that works for increasing the interaction between Indians and Americans on subjects of common interests.

But it has caught the attention of international experts who are coming to the Sobha Singh Museum in Andretta village near Palampur in Kangra Valley later this month to restore and preserve them.

Two art restorers from Britain will be visiting the museum to critically inspect and restore some of the works, Hriday Paul Singh, general secretary of the Sobha Singh Memorial Art Society and in-charge of the museum, told IANS.

Ian Barrand, a restorer who works at a prestigious museum in Yorkshire, and artist Bhajan Hunjan would assess and advice on what needs to be put in place for future longevity of Sobha Singh’s lifetime works, he added.

According to him, some cracks have appeared in six works which include the portraits of the late Amrita Pritam, a Gorkha soldier, paintings of Guru Teg Bahadur – the ninth Sikh guru, and Lord Krishna.

During their two-week stay, they will carry out some restoration work, he added.

Museum caretakers attributed high rainfall in the region for damage to the artefacts.

“Excessive moisture and exposure to dust ate damaging the paintings,” a caretaker said.

More than 50 classic paintings on various themes like national heroes and freedom fighters, religious figures, romantic tales, portraits and local folk are on display in the gallery, some 250 km from Shimla, where Sobha Singh spent 38 years.

Sobha Singh, who was conferred the Padma Shri in 1983, achieved acclaim for his strikingly beautiful paintings, particularly after he made the portrait of Guru Nanak Dev in 1969.

Sobha Singh, who died in Chandigarh Aug 22, 1986, at the age of 85, left behind more than 2,000 works of his art.

“India to me means languages, music, religions and civilisation and it was with Iraq too. But unfortunately now Iraq has got ruined. The biggest my country has suffered from wars is the ruining of art,” Alhaj told IANS.

The Iraqi artist, who is now a US citizen, says he has grown up listening a lot of music by Indian artists like Pandit Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain, and even watched Bollywood movies.

“Indian music helped me savour the days of turmoil in my country,” said the musician, known for playing the oud, a 12-stringed instrument, played with four fingers. It looks like a mixture of guitar and sarod.

“All my compositions are struggle, sadness and tragedy of children and women of Iraq,” says Alhaj, who was imprisoned for political activism by the Saddam Hussein regime, adding that so far over four million Iraqis have been displaced because of three decades of wars.

Alhaj left Iraq in 1991, and began his life in Jordan and Syria. He shifted base to US in 2000 as a political refugee and has resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico ever since. He became a US citizen Aug 15, 2008.

The 43-year-old was in the City of Lakes to perform with sarod players Amaan and Ayaan Ali as part of the Ancient Sounds concert Sunday.

It is his second visit to India. His maiden trip was in 1989 when he performed with sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan, father of Amaan and Ayaan.

Alhaj and Khan’s CD “Ancient Sounds” was also nominated in 2010 for the Grammy Awards in the Best Traditional World Music category.

This time, their Ancient Sounds concerts was organised by Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR).

Scientists have discovered 24 of the creatures living 500 feet above the South Pacific Ocean around the single plant that had survived on the rock, the Daily Mial reported Friday.

The insect, which is as large as a human hand, had somehow made its camp despite the lack of food and the harsh conditions.

Nobody could say how they got there in the first place – but four have now been taken off and have bred thousands more to ensure their species survives.

The astonishing discovery was made on Ball’s Pyramid which emerged from the sea seven million years ago off the coast of Australia near Lord Howe Island.

On all sides the rock face drops off vertically making it almost impossible for anything to survive – but the insects somehow did.

The six legged ‘tree lobster’ or, Dryococelus australis, was actually presumed extinct since none had been seen on Lord Howe Island since 1920.

The project, ‘I am the tiger’ uses dance, music and poetry to tell the story of a tiger, Taqdeer, and the fight for survival against hunters.

In India, the number of tigers has dwindled to just 1,700 from about 100,000 a century ago.

“The team of performers will be travelling to London and Warsaw where theatre performances will be held at various prestigious centres. Art work done by children will be displayed at the Nehru Centre in London,” said Shivani Wazir Pasrich, whose production team will be travelling to London for the performance.

“It is a collective effort to bring two aspects of life together – endangered species like tigers and feminine energy (motherhood),” Wazir told reporters at an event.

The project, in collaboration with Taj group of hotels, brings together support of artist Anjolie Ela Menon, tiger conservationist Latika Nath Rana, Sunanina Anand of art live gallery, and composer and singer Arianne Gray Hubert among others. The team was flagged off by Wazir here.

“It explores the role of tiger in our lives and the need to preserve this proud species,” Wazir added.

The performance pieces together the story of Taqdeer who is raised in a forest and how the tiger’s family falls to the clutches of hunters and battles for existence with villagers.

“Our effort is not to let the tigers die and contribute towards it. We are going for an awareness programme by creating paintings and pictures by school students,” said Aparajita Gogoi, member of the project and national coordinator of White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood.

Sibal said the book, a collection of poems, was based on his perception of the outside world.

“Everyone perceives the world around them in their own way. This book is based on my perception of the world around me,” he said.

Sibal recited selected poems from his book. He was accompanied by Hindi author and poet Ashok Chakradhar, who had translated Sibal’s earlier books in Hindi.

Some poems shifted to Sibal’s take on spirituality and God.

“When I think of things like terror or what happened in Gujarat, it shakes my belief in God,” he said.

The iconic 1st century BC work was studied during a three-year restoration project of the Venus and other pieces in the Uffizi Gallery Tribunal sponsored the Friend of Florence foundation.

The marble goddess’ golden hair was still visible to 18th century visitors to the Uffizi, according to written accounts, but the recent studies brought to light fresh evidence — also about her red lips and ear holes.

The sketches, which are part of the holdings of the Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum, were deteriorating due to the effects of humidity and the temperature in the gallery, the museum said in a statement.

The four pieces “reveal, on the one hand, the work of one of the best known Mexican artists in the world and, on the other, a key time in history and the socio-political environment of the 1930s”, the museum said.

The works being restored, all of which are on paper, are “El hombre en el cruce de caminos” (sketches a and b), “El agua, origen de la vida” and “El hombre tecnico”.

Restoration work began Jan 23 and is about 60 percent finished, with completion of the project expected April 6.

Bank of America is paying for the works’ restoration via an art conservation programme for Latin America.

“It is an honour to support the restoration of these four pieces which are part of the history of Diego Rivera, of Latin America and of the world,” Bank of America vice president for corporate social responsibility Marcella Lembert said.

About 70 percent of the grant provided by the bank will be used to restore the sketches and the rest of the mony will go toward a project at the Frida Kahlo Museum, Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum director Hilda Trujillo said.

The Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum has an important collection of 17 Rivera sketches, of which 10 have been restored in recent years, as well as sketchbooks and drawings.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), considered one of the icons of Mexican art, was married to fellow artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54).

“What we are seeing now is use of political power (a power struggle), not a clash of civilisations. The entire edifice of the Western civilisation has its roots in all the other civilisations and the powers. The new university in Europe had been translating Arabic texts since the 10th century,” Mirza said.

His new book – part-fiction, part analysis and part discovery – is about the untold glory of the Islamic civilisation.

“The world was positioned both geographically and philosophically in a way where ideas moved from India, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia to Europe, prompting an incredible translation process. When the dark ages started in Europe, it was enlightenment for the rest of the world,” Mirza said.

He said the medieval Islamic world was a flourishing nerve-centre of science and liberal arts, but “it collapsed too soon to make any significant contribution to society”.

Mirza’s book was launched by Mushirul Hasan, the chief of the National Archives of India, and Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyer in the capital late Thursday.

Mirza said “his book was an attempt to regain the dignity of all the civilisations and regain the “essence” of those words like “freedom” and “democracy” which have been usurped and hijacked.

“It is a journey in digging up the distorted past with parallel narratives – four students at the University of Berkeley in 2008 set out to discover the truths because they see how the past affects their life; the tale of Rehana, an Iranian from the 11th century and her teacher Abu Rehan Al Biruni who takes her on a tutorial journey, a place in Andalusia where Arabic texts are being translated to Greek and Spanish; and my soliloquies to put my point of view,” Mirza said.

Mirza has used the “eastern style of writing in small framed, barely 500-word chapters -with a sub-title for each like the ancient narrative Buddhist tales” for younger generations to relate to.

“I always had a deep distaste for ideas that create barriers between people. This sort of ideas work into people’s consciousness and create distorted perceptions of the past. A number of distinguished scholars have helped me unravel the long-hidden secrets in this book,” he said.

Some of them include Maria Rosa Menocal, Abbas Hamdani, Amartya Sen, Martin Bernal, George Saliba, Charles Burnett, Dick Teresi and Hamilton Morgan, he said.

But the conclusions drawn are completely Mirza’s – and he “takes full responsibility for them”.

Mirza cites interesting examples to prove Oriental and Islamic influences in European thinking and literature.

He said Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” was inspired by the myths surrounding Prophet Mohammed’s ascent to heaven.

“Dante was mentored by a Florentine scholar in king Alphonso’s court who had knowledge of Islam. I start with a debate on Dante in US – of Dante being a plagiarist,” Mirza said.

Mirza, known for his movies like “Albert Pinto ko gussa kyon aata hain”, “Mohan Joshi haazir ho”, “Salim langde pe mat ro” and the tele-serial “Nukkad”, is now writing a play which he will talk about later.

He had earlier authored “Ammi: Letters to a Democratic Mother”.

The launch of the “The Monk, The Moor & Moses Ben Jalloun” (Harper-Collins) was an extended event of the ongoing World Book Fair.

The money will be spent on protecting historical sites, construction of conservation facilities and building of museums by 2015, according to Sangpo, director of the region’s Cultural Relics Bureau.

Some of Tibet’s cultural sites include the Potala Palace, Norbu Lingka Palace and Sagya Monastery in Lhasa. It also has 4,277 immovable cultural relics, Xinhua reported.

The region’s tourism revenue last year totalled 9.7 billion yuan, up 35.8 percent year-on-year. Tourism is an important industry for the region.

The show, “Ray of Hope”, a fund-raiser, is a joint initiative by the German Embassy and the Earth Foundation.

The fashion show will also launch the Earth Foundation’s campaign for “One million self-reliant under-privileged girls” and coincides with two decades of its initiatives to improve the quality of life of the girl child.

The fund-raiser will award individuals who have done pioneering work for the girl child and the poor.

Members of the diplomatic community like Naghma Karim, Mahin Karim (Bangladesh), Stewart and Brenda Beck (Canada), Freddy Svane, Anna Svane, Lise Frederiksen (Denmark), Cord Meier Klodt, Gladys Abankwa-Meier-Klodt and Kyra Meier Klodt (Germany), Doulat Kuanyshev and Gulmira Mamytbayeva (Kazakhstan), Raoudha Laouani Azouz (Tunisia) and Diana Alipova (Russian) will be clothed by designers like Ashish Soni, Rohit Gandhi, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Namrata Joshipura, Nida Mahmood, Niki Mahajan, Satya Paul, Anjana Bhargava, Anju Modi, Poonam Bhagat, Pia Fleming, Varun Bahl, Shobhna & Vijay Arora, Ritu Kumar, Sonam Dubal, Rina Dhaka, Anu P.D., Satya Paul, Joseph Ribkoff, Shantanu and Nikhil.

Host Gladys Abankwa Meier-Klodt, the stately wife of Acting German Ambassador Cord Meier Klodt, will wear a chiffon sari dress teamed with a matching choli embelleshied with retro motifs for the show. The striking blue of the outfit, designed by Anu P.D. drapes the lean frame of Meier-Klodt, a native of Ghana, in a trim silhouette.

“This is the first time I am wearing a sari in Delhi. I have taken part in diplomatic charity fashion shows before. In fact, I met my husband at a similar fashion show at the Spanish ambassador’s residence in Ghana 25 years ago. Both my parents were diplomats,” Gladys Abankwa Meier-Klodt told IANS.

“I have a complexion that can carry any bright colours… I think the sari is the most elegant garment that exists today. I had worn one in Russia a few years ago,” she said.

Meier-Klodt said the “girl child should be given a chance for a life”. “Little drops do an ocean make,” she said about the initiative.

Naghma Karim, the petite wife of Bangladesh ambassador Ahmad Tariq Karim, will wear a sari designed by Satya Paul. “It is in turquoise silk with lots of embellishments and bling. It is not my style, but it is a Satya Paul archive sari.

“I have walked the ramp before for charity,” Karim told IANS.

“All girls, whether it is the grandmother, mother, wife or the daughter should be spoilt by the family,” Karim said as she hugged her daughter Mahin, who will also walk the ramp.

“I have two sons and a daughter. Both my sons pamper her,” Karim said.

Diana Alipova, wife of the deputy chief of mission of the Russian Embassy, will wear a western style dress by Harmeet Bajaj though she “loves the sari and would like to wear a lehenga”.

Alipova said the Indian women doemstic helps in her home have given her an insight into the “plight of the Indian women from the social margins”.

“When they are pregnant, they pray for a boy. The women are supposed to be strong and take care of their family. But I think every girl child should be given equal opportunity,” Alipova said.

Lise S. Frederiksen, wife of the ambassador of Denamrk, Freddy Svane, will walk in a pink ensemble by designer Namrata Joshipura.

“It is long beautiful dress amd pink I my favourite colour. It symbolises spring. The dress has elements of Denmark and India and I am wearing it to symbolise the friendship between India and Denmark,” Frederiksen said. She will take part in the show as a family – with her husband and daughter.

Frederiksen said she did not know much about the plight of the girlchild in India and if she could something for them, she would love to.

The show will be choreographed by Harmeet Bajaj.

Geeti Bhagat of the Earth Foundation said: “The international community has come forward without hesitation for the project.”

“The money raised from the event will be directed towards Earth Foundation and projects focusing on launching our programme for a million self-reliant girls,” Bhagat added.

“The concept of avant garde is not applicable to India because it is obsolete. Works of successful and celerated artists are often described as avant garde, but they are consumed by the market. It is better known as cutting edge contemporary art which pushes new frontiers of creativity,” Rajinder, editor of the Indian Contemporary Art Journal, told IANS.

The art writer critic and scholar said “avant garde art originally referred to the works of non-mainstream marginal artists like Gustave Courbet, the 19th century French realist, and Salvador Dali who addressed social realism in art”.

Courbet painted subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants and working conditions of the poor.

“In India, new experimental art like those by Subodh Gupta or even by G.R. Iranna are consumed by the market. They are part of the mainstream and hence not avant garde any more,” Rajinder said.

According to critics, the history of avant garde in post-modern Indian art dates back to the 1970s with Vivan Sundaram who created his own language away from the mainstream by using a combined artscape of performance, art, design, European avant garde and Indian socio-cultural references, allowing viewers to participate in his art.

“It is cutting edge art which is going on in the world today. We have been playing safe far too long…The attitude is how do we think conceptually beyond this? If artists are not concerned about saleability and were interested in pushing through the conceptual boundary, it would have been avant garde art,” Daniel Kunitz, writer and former US editor for Art Review, said at a forum on avant garde in emerging Indian contemporary art at the Lalit Kala Akademi this week.

David Ross, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said, “Why art no longer qualifies as avant garde is because of the consuming power of the growing collectors’ class.”

“It has made it possible for artists to sell everything to the mass market,” he said.

“America is a melting pot of several cultures – like Latin American, European, African slave culture, Chinese, Japanese and Asian. All these cultural references came together to make a distinct mix that bent set rules to create something new. In India, when the symbols and values of the great traditional arts heritage collide with the different constructs of neo art, it forms cutting edge avant garde expressions,” Ross told IANS with examples of painters like Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza.

Artist Arpana Caur said: “Every day in my life, when I paint, I think it is avant garde because it is new. I sometimes have blood in my work – and by sticking to my blood, I think it’s avant garde. For most artists who push creative borders, it is the sheer pleasure of painting…the market is never on our thought…”

But Caur is one of India’s highest selling artists.

“If I speak in one language, I should be able to complete the sentence in that language. If I speak in Marathi, I should end in Marathi. But today’s languages are assimilating so many influences,” Palekar said here Wednesday night.

He said languages merge naturally in Indian cinema in a reflection of the new linguistic trends.

“For example Urdu — Hindustani and Urdu are almost one in Hindi cinema. As long as you understand it, the language is Hindustani and the moment you don’t understand it, the language becomes Urdu,” Palekar said.

Palekar released two Urdu books, “Jauhar-e-Adakari” and “Urdu aur Bollywood”, at the World Book Fair here.

The actor, who shot to fame in 1974 with Basu Chatterjee’s “Rajnigandha” and “Chhoti Si Baat”, said: “In our country… in every language we have a tremendous treasure which cannot be compared to any other country.”

One of his directorial ventures, “Paheli”, was based on a Rajasthani folk tale.

“If we look at our literature, we will be empowered intellectually,” he said.

A regular face on the Marathi stage, Palekar began experimental theatre with Satyadev Dubey in the early 1970s.

“In Maharashtra people are born mad — and the madness is for theatre and books,” he said.

“We are talking about 100 years of Indian cinema, but in Maharashtra theatre is more than 160 years old. Out of the 160 years, for more than 90 years people had been flocking to the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Natya Sammnelan. They have a special love for theatre,” Palekar said.

“Traditional Marathi families would often sit together and read plays after work as a literary exercise after work,” he said.

“The Marathis also love books. An old Marathi book, ‘Shyamchi Aai’– considered a classic about a mother’s love — sold more than 100,000 copies in a new edition at the book fair. I am extremely happy to be here,” he said.

According to Palekar, like books, “cinema is part of our lives”.

“Cricket and cinema keep us together,” the actor said.

“Everyone is an expert. How Sachin Tendulkar should play, how SRK should act, how a movie should be made… people pass judgment on everything,” Palekar added.

The manuscript — composed in French and titled “L’Ingratitude” — was found in a Belgian museum, the Musee Royal de Mariemont, by Brussels-based architect Brian Bracken, the Daily Mail reported.

Bronte reportedly wrote the story as homework for a Belgian tutor, who taught her and sister Emily French literature, when they were 25 and 23, respectively, at a boarding house in Brussels.

The tutor, Constantin Heger, is also thought to have been the inspiration behind her novel “Villette”.

Bracken said the unpublished short story was last heard of in 1913, when it was given to a wealthy collector by Heger’s son Paul.

“It was finished a month after Charlotte arrived in Brussels and is the first known devoir (piece of homework) of thirty the sisters would write for Heger,” Bracken wrote in the London Review of Books (LRB).

The story was published on the LRB website Wednesday and will appear in a print edition Thursday.

The tale — dated March 16, 1842 — is about a young rat who runs away from his father in search of adventure and comes to an unhappy end.

It contrasts the selfish behaviour of the “ingrate” son with the devotion of his loving parent.

The museum is being built in the eastern Shandong province, Xinhua reported.

Built at a cost of 500 million yuan (around $79 million), the museum located in Confucius’ hometown of Qufu will cover over 56,000 square metres. A total of 110,000 pieces of cultural relics and 260,000 archive materials about Confucius will be showcased in the museum, to be completed in three years.

Confucius (551-479 B.C.), an educator and philosopher, founded a school of thought called Confucianism that deeply influenced later generations.

He was also the first Chinese to set up private schools and enroll students from all walks of life.

Confucius’ teachings form the foundation of much of subsequent Chinese education of how an individual should live his life and interact with others. The teachings also speak of the forms of society and government in which an individual should participate.

The 10th edition of the three-day festival starts March 2 at Humayun’s Tomb.

“Sufism has evolved from the beginning of this universe. It bridges the gap between the hearts. This festival brings different colours together. This is a message from heart to heart. This is a an effort to create a spiritual context for the common people,” she told reporters at a press conference to announce the date of Jahan-e-Khusrau, a Sufi festival by Rumi foundation.

Parveen, who is from Pakistan, has a huge fan following here and she has been a part of the festival since beginning, but she couldn’t attend the festival last year due to health reasons.

“Tasawuf (a Sufi term that means focusing on one’s relationship with god) is god’s name. We don’t need any language or identity to understand Allah,” added the singer.

Jahan-e-Khusrau 2012 will see performances by Abida Parveen, Ali Zafar, Hans Raj Hans, Andrea Griminelli and will also introduce new faces like Indra Naik, Vidhi Sharma, Rajesh Pandey, Vidhi Lal, and Shivani Varma .

Well-known designer and filmmaker, Muzafar Ali, who is the director of the festival, feels that “Delhi is the city of saints and it calls for the union of souls”.

“We have been organising this festival for the past 10 years and each year we present at least 20-30 new and exclusive poems sung by eminent Sufi singers like Abida Parveen,” he added

After dilly-dallying for over a week, the Kullu’s superintendent of police, who is also the foreigners’ registration officer (FRO), finally registered the name of Alena Adamkova, curator-cum-executive director of the International Roerich Memorial Trust, as there was no violation by her in visa norms.

“Adamkova was summoned to the FRO office Tuesday over some query and she has produced all the travel documents. There was no discrepancy in travel documents,” Superintendent of Police Ashok Kumar told IANS.

Earlier, the police officials were saying her visa had a rider that she could not visit Kullu.

But Kumar Tuesday said they had no communication from the external affairs ministry on her travel restrictions.

Adamkova arrived in Kullu Feb 21 after renewing her employment visa. Last week she visited the FRO office but officials there refused to register her name, citing visa norm violations.

The work visa of Adamkova was extended despite objections from the trust’s Indian members, who said she was allegedly involved in financial irregularities at the trust.

“The (Indian) trustees, who are her employers, were not in favour of granting work visa again to her. Chief Secretary Rajwant Sandhu, who is also a member of the trust, wrote to the foreign secretary not to renew Admakova’s work visa that expired in January,” a trustee said.

“But before the secretary took note of it, Adamkova got it for a year,” the trustee said.

The trust was founded by Roerich’s daughter-in-law, the late film actress Devika Rani. Registered in April 1993, the 13-member trust also has Russian Ambassador to India Alexander M. Kadakin as a trustee, while Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal is the ex-officio president.

The Roerich estate is located in Naggar, 25 km from Kullu town, where Roerich came in 1927 from St. Petersburg and made the tiny village his home for more than 20 years.

Roerich, who died in Naggar Dec 13, 1947, created more than 7,000 paintings in his lifetime.

The Britain-based writer, who is here to release her book (published by Shree Book Centre and Ether Earth) February 29 and attend the World Book Fair in the capital, is an international transformation guru whose life changed after a series of profound spiritual experiences.

“The Sacred Quest” is the last of a trilogy which is being adapted into a movie, likely to be directed by Ridley Scott, the writer said.

Luthienne, a mother of three, threw up her life of affluence and walked out of her unhappy marriage after she claimed “to have connected with a prophet-king from another time through a silver signet ring that she purchased a few years ago.”

“The ring which had inscriptions in an ancient language, Ogham, took me to Ireland, Scotland and to ancient Irish manuscripts, written by a wise king and the Book of Calles, one of the oldest illuminated manuscripts at the Trinity College in Dublin,” Luthienne said.

The Ogham script is connected to Ogma, a pre-Christian Irish king known as the two-hearted demon belonging to a line of sun-worshippers.

“I started getting past life flashes and saw the man who created the script. He was Magus — a wise man for whom I worked as an apprentice, the mage. I was someone else in that life and we were about to perform a pagan ritual together when something tore us apart,” Luthienne said.

It was the beginning of the writer’s journey across lifetimes and a quest to reconnect to Magus. She became Ahqulieah or the alchemist.

The experience drove Luthienne to write. “Once Magus started transmitting his teachings to me, I became a writer. One night, I woke up at 11.11 p.m. and wrote my experiences throughout the night. When I dropped my pen, it was 5.55 a.m.,” she recalled.

That was the beginning of the first of the “Sacred Quest” trilogy in 2007.

Luthienne said the ancient cultures and religions of the Irish and the Scottish people were similar to the pre-Vedic cultures in the Indian subcontinent because “once upon a time, India, Asia, Africa and Europe were part of the same landmass.”

“In Ireland, the pagan faith was almost like the ancient Indian and African religions. India is the beginning and the end of this book — and also of the trilogy. The wisdom of the Magus and his eagle (the emblem which he draws in the visions that I see) can trace their roots to India. Magus could be Indian,” she said.

The writer who has been to Kerala and Auroville near Puducherry has been inspired by the Vedas and kundalini yoga.

“The lesson that I want to impart to readers is to oneself and follow one’s heart and destiny,” the writer said.

The essence of the supernatural romance is captured in two lines with which Luthienne begins the novel, “A man can fly where he will if he rides the back of an eagle.”

“When the government bans your book, then the fundamentalists are enthused. They feel inspired and take you as a soft target. They feel the government will side with them,” Taslima told IANS in an interview over the phone from Delhi.

“The fundamentalists won’t dare to touch a writer if they are not convinced they will go scot-free after such acts. Actually it is the politicians of the Indian subcontinent who have labelled me anti-Islam by banning my books and calling them controversial,” she said.

Taslima’s comment comes less than a month after the Kolkata Book Fair authorities cancelled the release of the seventh volume of her autobiography “Nirbasan” (Exile) – which deals with her life after exile from Kolkata in 2007 – at the scheduled venue following protests by religious fundamentalists.

The publishers then released the book outside their stall.

Protests against her book launch are nothing new for the author, a doctor by profession in the mid-1980s, who was forced to leave her country in 1994 after widespread agitation against the writing on women’s rights and freedom, which a section of the people saw as an assault on Islam.

“In India also the same thing happened. After the Left Front government in West Bengal banned my autobiography ‘Dwikhandito’ in 2004-05, the fundamentalists started issuing fatwas,” she said.

However, Taslima feels the Indian political fraternity on the whole has the grit to stand up against religious fundamentalists.

Since 1994, Taslima had been living in exile in various parts of Europe and America and even got Swedish citizenship. The writer was later granted a renewable temporary residential permit by the Indian government and moved in 2004 to Kolkata, which she called her adopted home as it shares a common tradition and language with Bangladesh.

But the author had to yet again face the ire of Muslim clerics and was finally forced to leave Kolkata after Muslim groups led widespread unrest across the city demanding her exile from the country.

Faced with a riot-like situation, the then Left Front government called in the army but openly advocated her exile from the state.

Taslima, a strong supporter of freedom of expression, has been repeatedly accused of hurting the sentiments of religious-minded people.

But she retorted: “Everybody is concerned about the feelings of fundamentalists; NOBODY is bothered about my feelings. I am not allowed to enter my own country for more than 18 years. I’ve been physically attacked. I have been thrown out of West Bengal. I was forced to live under house arrest and leave the country. My book launch has been banned. Nobody thinks about how I feel after all these atrocities.”

Taslima reasoned that the right of expression also provides a human being with the right to offend: “If I am pro-democracy and human rights and talk about democracy and human rights then a person who is anti-democracy and human rights is bound to get offended. This is the way the society, the world has changed over the years by overcoming religious radicalism and conservative attitude.”

“Nobody has the right to spend their entire life without being offended,” Taslima maintained.

When asked whether she held that feminism is an outdated phenomenon in this twenty-first century as women are claiming equal rights as men, the 49-year-old author said: “Feminism has not really started in the subcontinent till now. So there is no question of it being outdated. In India incidents of female foeticide, rape, dowry deaths are rampant. Girls are denied the right of education in many parts of the country. Women are still treated as sex objects.”

“So just by seeing a fraction of urban women outsmarting men, you can’t say that feminism is outdated.”

In some cases, the condition of women in Bangladesh was better than their counterparts in India, Taslima said. While poverty and laws based on religion may be big issues in Bangladesh, incidents of dowry deaths and female foeticide hardly occur in that country.

However, Taslima praised Indian democracy for being religiously more tolerant than Bangladesh and Pakistan.

“That India has more religious tolerance has been shown in my case. I’ve at least been allowed to live here. If it would have been Bangladesh or Pakistan, I’d have been dead,” Taslima told IANS.

While asserting that uncertainty and fear of being killed and thrown out of a country are “disturbing elements” for a creative person, Nasreen said no radical fundamentalist can gag her creativity.

“I also want a certain life, just like others.”

“While I am writing an autobiography I have to write about everything – from my surroundings to the people around me. When I write about someone’s misdeeds they protest against it. I am least bothered,” Taslima added.

(Pradipta Tapadar can be contacted at pradipta.t@ians.in

Alena Adamkova, associated with the International Roerich Memorial Trust (IRMT) for almost a decade and curator-cum-executive director of the Roerich Museum, is in India on an employment visa.

“This (Monday) evening a notice was served on her to appear in FRO (foreigner registration office) Tuesday morning,” Kullu’s Superintendent of Police Ashok Kumar told IANS.

Government officials said Adamkova was re-issued a visa with a rider that she could not visit Kullu. But she arrived there Feb 21.

“We have given an opportunity to hear her. Any further action, if any, will be decided after that,” Kumar added.

The work visa of Adamkova was extended despite objections from the trust’s Indian members, who said she was allegedly involved in financial irregularities.

“The (Indian) trustees, who are her employers, were not in favour of granting work visa again to her. Chief Secretary Rajwant Sandhu, who is also a member of the trust, wrote to the foreign secretary not to renew Admakova’s work visa that expired in January,” a trustee said.

“But before the secretary took note of it, Adamkova got it for a year,” the trustee said.

On reaching Kullu, she visited FRO but authorities there refused to register her name owing to violations in visa norms.

The trust was founded by Roerich’s daughter-in-law, the late film actress Devika Rani. Registered in April 1993, the 13-member trust also has Russian Ambassador to India Alexander M. Kadakin as a trustee, while Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal is the ex-officio president.

With barely a week left for the exercise to begin, a group of 30 American troops along with their Stryker reconnaissance armoured personnel carriers and support equipment arrived here Monday. The rest will arrive later.

The American troops will participate in the bilateral Yudh Abhyas-2012 war games involving the mechanised forces of the two countries, an army spokesperson said here.

“With Holi falling within the training calendar (on March 8), the US troops will also get a colourful experience of this vibrant festival as a part of the cultural exchange between troops,” the spokesperson said.

The troops and their equipment are from the 2nd Squadron of 14th Cavalry Regiment from the 25th Infantry Division of the US Army’s Pacific base in Hawaii. The initial lot of 30 will directly proceed to the exercise area and will be joined by another 170 American army personnel within a few days.

The joint exercise is designed to promote cooperation between the two militaries at the tactical level, while sharing training procedures and building joint operating skills, within the framework of UN peacekeeping operations, the spokesperson said.

During the exercise, troops from both nations will engage in joint planning for a variety of missions including live fire drills, cordon and search operations and search and rescue training.

Scientists from the Universidad de Extremadura, Spain, have turned to Arabic documentary sources from the 9th and 10th centuries (3rd and 4th in the Islamic calendar) to analyse the writings of scholars, historians and diarists in Iraq.

“Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,” said Fernando Dominguez-Castro, who led the study, from Extremadura.

“However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow,” added Dominguez-Castro, according to a university statement.

Baghdad was a centre for trade, commerce and science in the ancient Islamic world. In 891 AD Berber geographer al-Ya’qubi wrote that the city had no rival in the world, with hot summers and cold winters, climatic conditions which favored strong agriculture.

While Baghdad was a cultural and scientific hub, many ancient documents have been lost to a history of invasions and civil strife. However, from the surviving works of writers including al-Tabari (913 AD), Ibn al-Athir (1233 AD) and al-Suyuti (1505 AD) some meteorological information can be rescued.

When collated and analysed the manuscripts revealed an increase of cold events in the first half of the 10th century. This included a significant drop of temperatures during July 920 AD and three separate recordings of snowfall — in 908, 944 and 1007.

In comparison the only record of snow in modern Baghdad was in 2008, a unique experience in the living memories of Iraqis.

“These signs of a sudden cold period confirm suggestions of a temperature drop during the tenth century, immediately before the Medieval Warm Period,” said Dominguez-Castro.

“We believe the drop in July 920 AD may have been linked to a great volcanic eruption but more work would be necessary to confirm this idea,” he added.

The vampirism in the book comes through the gripping emotional journey of a middle-class boy of average IQ and the vampires and predators he fends off along the way till a climax “in a balcony of a penthouse one night” which changes his life, filmmaker-actor Satish Kaushik said at the 20th World Book Fair.

The fatherless boy, Ardhendhu Bose, in the novel becomes a prey of several forces – of American multinationals and ultimately the CIA. In his mission to destroy one (the former), he becomes enchained to another.

The novel also explores the cult of the blood thirsty ogres with a scientific explanation about a “genetic disorder”.

The book is the first in Dhar’s Code Red trilogy that he has signed with Om Books International.

“The Company Red” was launched at the World Book Fair Sunday with a panel discussion, “From Book to Reel” about the adaptation of the book into a movie. The forum was addressed by Satish Kaushik, Javed Akhtar, author Shantanu Dhar and chief editor of Om Books Dipa Chaudhuri.

“I have seen Shantanu grow as a writer. I was taken aback that a person who was so involved in the corporate world had the time to take to pen and paper…the social context in the book is very strong. The emotional journey of a very young boy connects to the heart. It connected to me at a special level,” Kaushik said.

An American multinational company comes to India and “promises to take care of its employees to run an efficient business but turns out to be sinister in its operations… It adds to the social aspect of the book”, Kaushik said.

Kaushik, who has appeared in social comedy movies like “Mr India” and “Ram Lakhan” and as Chanu Ahmed in the cinematic adaptation of the novel “Brick Lane” written by Monica Ali, does not call “The Company Red” a “change of genre”.

“I am a man of all seasons. My roots are in theatre adaptations of American and European plays in Hindi. I have been exposed to literature because of my NSD background. This new genre of social thriller may sound new – non-Satish Kaushik – to my audience but not new to me,” said the filmmaker, who had penned the dialogues for the 1983 Kundan Shah classic “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron”.

Kaushik is yet to find a “script writer to collaborate with”. “It is a big budget production with an Indo-American cast. I have sent the book to several big names in Bollywood like director Farhan Akhtar, Amir Khan and Shahid Kapoor,” Kaushik said.

Pointing to trends in popular literature and Bollywood scripts, lyricist-poet Javed Akhtar said: “India had neglected its literature in its rush to catch up with progress in the last 60 years”.

“But it is a pleasure to see a revival of literature. A book is a lifelong friend,” he said.

Akhtar said Indian readers generally respect “high brow, serious literature bordering on boredom”. “We cannot have people like Agatha Christie or Earl Stanley Gardener (Perry Mason) because we think that genre is inferior. All kinds of thrillers have been neglected. In my childhood, I remember reading an author, Ibne Safi…,” Akhtar said.

He said “Bollywood scripts turn a Nelson’s eye to social issues”.

“What you need now is something for the younger generations,” Satish Kaushik concurred, adding “that the multiplex culture had created a special segment of audience that wanted to watch a special kind of social movies”.

During the blockade of Berlin in 1948, which we survived by being trooped off to a Swedish soup kitchen, my mother decided to take me across the green border, together with another woman with a daughter like me. We had to walk through the forest for five hours without speaking, because “the Soviet army shoots without warning”. I was mortally scared of the Soviet army as we had spent months under its occupation. Nearby, all the young women on the street had been raped. Though, being children, we didn’t know what was happening, my cousin and I could hear the screams in the night. We would feel my mother’s and grandmother’s bodies go stiff when they – children clutched tight – confronted a soldier. Decades later it dawned on me that, in a way, my cousin and I had served as a kind of human shield. Her mother had disappeared in the mines during flight and turned up traumatised after many months. A few years later, mother and daughter emigrated toAmerica. We visited my father in his realm of relative plenty, a village in anorthern province, where he was ‘de-Nazified’ from his SA-membership in order to be able to serve as a minor clerk in the administration again. My mother taught adult education classes, how to recycle old woollens, and also imparted English to people who aimed at migrating to the US or Canada. My grandmother stitched old clothes into new. The blockade and occupation led to the Cold War which culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

My decisive political formation came from the resistance of theWest Berlinpopulation to caving in under threats of blockades and starvation in order to take over their city and made the united East andWest Berlinthe capital of the GDR. A deeply stirring event was the uprising by workers against the Worker’s State, in June 1953, against higher production norms. They marched through the main road where I went to school, onto the Rote Rathaus (the red building of the Eastern Administration), right through the Brandenburg Gate. Onlookers cheered them with cigarettes and foodstuffs, but of course the uprising was extinguished by Soviet tanks. It was in the same year that Stalin died, and his dead body in the black-and-white of the newsreel is etched in my memory forever. I had also seen him decorating ‘deserving mothers’ with twelve children. I somehow believed then that there was less likelihood of war and tyranny now, and that women would be allowed to bear fewer children. The workers’ uprising was an extremely energising ray of hope. Though it was crushed immediately, I happily donated my piggy bank savings to the Hungarian uprising four years later. Our last hope was the students’ revolt of 1968 and the Prague Spring, again crushed by Soviet tanks. Had there been socialist democracy inEastern Europe, had theSoviet Unionnot invadedAfghanistan, had Allende been allowed to stay in power inChile, the world could have looked very different today.

I was deeply inspired at the age of eleven by the diary of Anne Frank who, despite her personal experience, believed in the inherent goodness of human beings. Her dreams of becoming a writer and journalist while watching the chestnut tree blossom in the Prinsengracht (the secret quarters where she and her family were kept in hiding), moved me to tears. It was a fairly gentle and sheltered way to access the history of fascism. In school, we were shown documentaries about concentration camps, fascism, social democracy after World War I, theLeague of Nations– but there were few women in this rendering of history. Somewhere along the way, from an old workers’ song, I realised that there had been a woman called Rosa Luxemburg who, together with Karl Liebknecht, had been shot by the army under social democratic rule between the Wars, their dead bodies thrown into the Landwehr canal. Decades later, I read some of her letters and writings and came across the book by Raya Dunayevskaya, ‘Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Theory of Revolution’. From there, it was a relatively short distance to the debates on women, the ‘last colony’, and the realisation that women were not really the last colony, that internal colonies were all the time recreated by capitalism, consisting of dalits, adivasis, workers in the unorganised sector, impoverished peasants and tribal populations in the north-eastern states of India.

My mother decided to divorce my father about nine years after his return from the War. It was a classic case of the inability to readjust after nearly ten years of a long-distance marriage due to war and imprisonment. Women had survived flight, migration, civil bombardments, and had reorganised life, removing the debris. Men came from the trenches and prisoners’ camps and found it difficult to restore what they had dreamt of as ‘normalcy’. Many families broke up. My mother, who had worked as a typist after ten years of schooling, took adult education classes and passed a teacher’s training examination. My father tried to deny alimony for me, his only child, but the court decided otherwise. He also underwent some adult education and paid up. My mother dinned it into my head that it was crucial to have a good education and a good job. She was not too clear what this might mean, as she herself never had either of these. Her imagination vacillated between a school teacher (with lots of holidays) and perhaps a film star. She sent me to ballet classes, but when she realised that I took them very seriously and contemplated becoming a classical dancer, she was horrified.

(Excerpted from ‘Memoirs From The Women’s Movement In India: Making A Difference’, Edited by Ritu Menon; Women Unlimited, 2011/386 pages/Softback; Rs 350)

(© Women’s Feature Service)

The vampirism in the book comes through the gripping emotional journey of a middle-class boy of average IQ and the vampires and predators he fends off along the way till a climax “in a balcony of a penthouse one night” which changes his life, filmmaker-actor Satish Kaushik said at the 20th World Book Fair.

The fatherless boy, Ardhendhu Bose, in the novel becomes a prey of several forces – of American multinationals and ultimately the CIA. In his mission to destroy one (the former), he becomes enchained to another.

The novel also explores the cult of the blood thirsty ogres with a scientific explanation about a “genetic disorder”.

The book is the first in Dhar’s Code Red trilogy that he has signed with Om Books International.

“The Company Red” was launched at the World Book Fair Sunday with a panel discussion, “From Book to Reel” about the adaptation of the book into a movie. The forum was addressed by Satish Kaushik, Javed Akhtar, author Shantanu Dhar and chief editor of Om Books Dipa Chaudhuri.

“I have seen Shantanu grow as a writer. I was taken aback that a person who was so involved in the corporate world had the time to take to pen and paper…the social context in the book is very strong. The emotional journey of a very young boy connects to the heart. It connected to me at a special level,” Kaushik said.

An American multinational company comes to India and “promises to take care of its employees to run an efficient business but turns out to be sinister in its operations… It adds to the social aspect of the book”, Kaushik said.

Kaushik, who has appeared in social comedy movies like “Mr India” and “Ram Lakhan” and as Chanu Ahmed in the cinematic adaptation of the novel “Brick Lane” written by Monica Ali, does not call “The Company Red” a “change of genre”.

“I am a man of all seasons. My roots are in theatre adaptations of American and European plays in Hindi. I have been exposed to literature because of my NSD background. This new genre of social thriller may sound new – non-Satish Kaushik – to my audience but not new to me,” said the filmmaker, who had penned the dialogues for the 1983 Kundan Shah classic “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron”.

Kaushik is yet to find a “script writer to collaborate with”. “It is a big budget production with an Indo-American cast. I have sent the book to several big names in Bollywood like director Farhan Akhtar, Amir Khan and Shahid Kapoor,” Kaushik said.

Pointing to trends in popular literature and Bollywood scripts, lyricist-poet Javed Akhtar said: “India had neglected its literature in its rush to catch up with progress in the last 60 years”.

“But it is a pleasure to see a revival of literature. A book is a lifelong friend,” he said.

Akhtar said Indian readers generally respect “high brow, serious literature bordering on boredom”. “We cannot have people like Agatha Christie or Earl Stanley Gardener (Perry Mason) because we think that genre is inferior. All kinds of thrillers have been neglected. In my childhood, I remember reading an author, Ibne Safi…,” Akhtar said.

He said “Bollywood scripts turn a Nelson’s eye to social issues”.

“What you need now is something for the younger generations,” Satish Kaushik concurred, adding “that the multiplex culture had created a special segment of audience that wanted to watch a special kind of social movies”.

The work visa of Alena Adamkova, associated with the International Roerich Memorial Trust (IRMT) for almost a decade and curator-cum-executive director of the Roerich Museum, was extended despite objections from the trust’s Indian members, who said she was allegedly involved in financial irregularities.

“The (Indian) trustees, who are her employers, were not in favour of granting work visa again to her. Chief Secretary Rajwant Sandhu, who is also a member of the trust, wrote to the foreign secretary not to renew Admakova’s work visa that expired in January,” a trustee said.

“But before the secretary took note of it, Adamkova got it for a year,” the trustee said.

The visa, however, had a rider that she couldn’t visit Kullu, said officials. But she arrived there Feb 21.

“She came here for registration in FRO (foreigners’ registration office) a few days ago but we refused to register her name as we found violations in visa norms,” Kullu’s Superintendent of Police (SP) Ashok Kumar told IANS.

Another senior official said the state government, acting on the complaint of the members of the trust, has directed the local police to tell Adamkova leave Kullu as soon as possible.

“She is now being issued a notice in a day or two to leave Kullu town immediately,” the official, requesting anonymity, said.

The trust was founded by Roerich’s daughter-in-law, the late film actress Devika Rani. Registered April 1993, the 13-member trust also has Russian Ambassador to India Alexander M. Kadakin as trustee, while Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal is the ex-officio president.

Besides the Russian envoy, another foreign trustee is the director-general of Moscow-based International Roerich Centre.

The Roerich estate is located in Naggar, 25 km from Kullu town, where Roerich came in 1927 from St. Petersburg and made the tiny village his home for more than 20 years.

After settling down, he started a world movement to protect cultural monuments, later embodied in the International Roerich Pact signed in 1954 by more than 60 countries.

Roerich’s wife Helena, a famous writer, and sons Yuri, a prominent Oriental scholar, and Svyatoslav, a well-known painter, and Svyatoslav’s wife Devika Rani all stayed with him in Naggar.

Roerich, who died in Naggar Dec 13, 1947, created more than 7,000 paintings in his lifetime.

His estate comprises the premises of the Indian-Russian Memorial Complex, the Gallery of N.K. Roerich, Helena Roerich Arts College and exhibition halls in the buildings of the Urusvati Himalayan Folk Art Museum.

The state government in February last year ordered a probe into allegations of financial irregularities and mismanagement in the Roerich trust.

The government action came after trust’s life member Shakti Singh Chandel shot off a letter to Dhumal Sep 28, 2010, raising serious issues ranging from financial irregularities to mismanagement.

“For the past 10 years, the trust has become an arena of squabbles. I have also tried to bring many issues to the notice of IRMT Vice President Alexander M. Kadakin, but unfortunately there has been no response,” Chandel claimed.

In October last year Chandel again wrote a letter to the chief secretary, alleging that the “store stocktaking or verification (of the Roerich Museum) has not taken place for the past 10 years”.

“We do not know as to what all is there in our inventory,” said Chandel, a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, who settled here, said.

“I was in Moscow in September and the Russians expressed apprehension that many things have disappeared from the IRMT.”

“Information is useless without knowledge and books give knowledge while digital media provides information,” Barelvi said at a seminar titled ‘Future of paper books in the light of fast approaching digital books in the context of Urdu language’ at the World Book Fair.

The National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL)
has tied up with C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) for digitising Urdu literature. C-DAC will convert 10 lakh pages of selected literature into the digital format over one year.

Shakeel Hassan Shamsi, editor of prominent Urdu daily Inquilab, believed the future of books was in digital formats.

“The next generation will certainly be more digitally oriented than the present generation and NCPUL’s digitisation program is a step in the right direction,” claimed Shamsi.

Basharat Ahmed, the media controller at Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts, claimed that the discussion didn’t focus on the real issue of the lack of Urdu usage.

“When the Urdu language itself is at risk, there is no point in discussing the threat to printed Urdu books from the rise of ebooks,” he claimed.

“The books will always remain an important tool. The change from print to digital formats is just a change in the medium,” Ahmed added.

Asad Raza, editor of Urdu daily Rashtriya Sahara, agreed that the digital format was just another medium for books, but claimed that the discussion was relevant only in the metropolitan areas, since most of the rural areas didn’t have access to the latest technology required for the digital format.

The debate over the superiority of cinema and literature in the world of adaptations is now passe, speakers at a forum “Filming Fiction” hosted by the Oxford University Press at the 20th World Book Fair in the capital said Saturday evening.

The forum marked the release of an anthology of critical essays, “Filming Fiction” to commemorate 100 years of Oxford University Press in India.

“The last 100 years have seen a growing body of films and people still complain of lack of good scripts. Very few people have turned to novels to adapt them into cinema. Young people often write their own scripts but they don’t have the wealth of experience,” film critic and writer Aruna Vasudev said at the forum.

She recalled the successful adaptations of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories and novellas by Bengali maestro Satyajit Ray in his movies, “Ghare Baire”, “Charulata” and “Teen Kanya”.

She said filmmakers sometimes make the mistake of adapting novels that cannot be transposed liberally into a film.

“The question of comparing a book and a film is wrong. They are two different mediums. We have to get out of the fidelity fixation – the idea of the betrayal of the fidelity which in this case is the original text. If a film is an interpretation of a book, then it is not right to talk of fidelity. In the 1999 romantic comedy ‘Mansfield Park’ by Patricia Rozema loosely based on Jane Austen’s eponymous novel, it is said a lot of what was revealed was hidden in the novel…,” filmmaker Sohini Ghosh, a professor of film studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, said.

It adds a lot of worth to novels being represented outside their own territory, she added.

Film critics look for what is cinematic from the cinema’s point of view – even in an adaptation.

“I am interested in the adaptation of books that have the potential for cinema,” Ghosh added.

“Adaptations forge relationship with cinema rather than proclaiming itself independent of it,” Ghosh said, adding “that Internet was opening up many new possibilities in adaptations and it was to the filmmakers and script writers to make full use of it.”

According to Ira Bhaskar, a professor of English, cinema cannot be handmade into literature but the two must have a positive, creative and interpretative relationship with cinema.

The relationship between literature and cinema had been parasitical in the first phase, said professor Anuradha Ghosh, who has co-edited an anthology, “Filming Fiction” with M. Asaduddin, a professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia.

“This (parasitical relationship) had occasioned the disdain of several writers like D.H. Lawrence, who considered it (cinema) a vulgar medium because it homogenized culture, E.M. Forster who had refused permission to film his novels for fear of falsification of the original content and Virginia Woolf who passionately affirmed the power of the figure of speech and uniqueness of literary experience over the limited objective of cinema,” Ghosh said.

The experience of watching a film is different from watching a novel.

While a novel is written by an individual as a vehicle of their subjective vision often with a slow build-up, the film is a mass and collaborative medium catering to the needs of a vast section of the audience thus entailing speed, visual impacts and economies of scale, the speakers said.

“For example, in the novels ‘Gone With The Wind’ and ‘Pather Panchali’, novelists Margaret Mitchell and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay respectively had to devote more than 100 pages to introduce the locale and characters, but the directors Victor Fleming and Satyajit Ray respectively had to wrap that up in 15 minutes,” Anuradha Ghosh said, pointing out the differences.

Lending weight to the initiative of building new synergy between literature and cinema Saturday, Union Human Resource Minister Kapil Sibal released three braille books on cinema for the blind, “Cinema of Satyajit Ray”, “Balraj, My Friend” and “Dada Saheb Phalke” at the book fair.

After working non-stop for more than two years, she now wants to take a break.

“I am close to saying yes to a film which will not start for another three months. So I really think I need that break because for the past two-and-a-half-years I have been busy with my films. So now I do need that time off to soak everything in. Then I will probably do some dirty dancing,” the 33-year-old talented actor told IANS.

An unofficial biopic of southern sex siren Silk Smitha, “The Dirty Picture” saw Vidya shedding all inhibitions to get under the skin of the character and said: “I have become unapologetic about being myself. Probably others think that I don’t breathe the same air (laughs). I just take that as a compliment, but I have a long way to go but yes god has been kind.”

“I was hoping the film would do well, but I had no idea that the film would do so well. I feel blessed and I am looking for new words for blessed, humbled and overwhelmed.”

Unwilling to get typecast or repeat same roles, Vidya will soon be seen stepping out of the sex icon image by playing a pregnant woman in director Sujoy Ghosh’s “Kahaani”, a thriller that will show what all her character goes through when she flies down to Kolkata to find her missing husband.

“I can’t do the same thing again and again. When I am getting variety, then why will I not take that advantage? This woman (in ‘Kahaani’) is a vulnerable woman who is searching for her husband, but she has not lost her sense of humour. She is a woman of today.”

Vidya has been extremely choosy with scripts, but clarifies that it doesn’t mean she is narrowing down her options.

“The proposition of success has been humongous, thankfully. But even after ‘Paa’, ‘Ishqiya’ and ‘No One Killed Jessica’, people said what next? Are your options narrowing down? I don’t think about these things. If god has brought me so far, he will take me further.

“I am here to act. I am not saying I will do only solo heroine projects or like that. I want to do different genres of films,” she said.

Ghosh was shouldering the burden of two flops – “Aladin” and “Home Delivery ” – when he approached Vidya, but she was not sceptical about the director and took the plunge.

“When Balki came to me with ‘Paa’, I had a ‘Kismat Konnection’ and ‘Heyy Babyy’ behind me. And when Sujoy came to me, my films were doing well. But he is an intelligent man he is one of the most intelligent men I have met. Two of his films didn’t work, but he has put things together this time around. I am hoping it will work out. But I think the intention is right,” she said.

An offshoot of Eagle Home Entertainment, Reado retails its audio books from over 200 stores across India which includes online retailing through Flipkart.com and leading books stores like Crossword, Landmark, Reliance Time Out, Om Book Shop, Media Mart and WHSmith.

Some of popular audio book titles available for download in the fiction segment includes “The Immortals of Meluha” by Amish, “Losing My Virginity and Other Dumb Ideas” by Madhuri Banerjee’ and “God Save the Dork” by Sidin Vadukut.

Reado’s CEO and co-founder, Sumit Suneja said: “We believe the future of reading is listening. Therefore, in addition to the audio books on CDs, we are providing convenient direct digital downloads. We are providing a retail platform for not just our in-house productions but also to other external productions, starting with audio books by international audio book giants Gildan Media and Brilliance Audio.”

One of the partners of Reado, Ankit Nagori, vice president (categories), Flipkart.com said: “Reado has certainly kick-started the audio books business here in India and the market has an immense potential to evolve.”

Content delivery from world-class narrators via a simple user interface would become the pillars for Reado’s success in time to come, he said.

“We love the Reado productions of our books. The team at Reado understands the audio books market and is very professional,” said Ananth Padmanabhan, vice president, sales, Penguin Books India.

The audio books are available in various formats like directly mobile phone downloads, MP3 downloads, IPAD, Iphone, Android and other tablet devices, making listening easier.

He inaugurated the nine-day book fair, being held Feb 25-March 4, at the Hamsadhwani open air theatre at the Pragati Maidan.

The minister said the government would try to host the fair every year given its increasing popularity and growing status as one of the most important book-related events in the Afro-Asian region.

The National Book Trust which hosts the fair has been trying to persuade the government to make the fair an annual event for several years.

Addressing the gathering, Sibal said: “India is the third largest publisher of English books after the US and UK.”

Citing figures, Sibal said the country published at least 100,000 books in different languages annually. He said children in India should have access to information free of cost.

“My dream is to see that every child in this country has an Akash tablet computer,” he said.

He said: “One of the reasons for keeping the price of the tablet computer reasonable (Rs.2,500) was to ensure that it reached everyone.” The minister praised the efforts of the NBT in “making the fair on par with the best in the region”.

National Book Trust director M.A. Sikander said: “The trust has been more professional in the management of the fair this year with several foreign partnerships from countries like Germany and France.”

More than a dozen non-profit organisations are supporting the events along with government-aided film organisations, universities and trade bodies.

The fair which is celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema is themed on the relationship between literature and cinema. In a message, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: “The focus on cinema will help us look back at the wonderful traditions that continue to influence society.”

The fair is hosting 1,300 exhibitors in 2,500 kiosks in 10 of the 12 halls at Pragati Maidan spread over 45,000 square metres.

Addressing the media after the inauguration, the director of the National Book Trust said: “We are trying to lure the local population of the capital to the holistic world of books which also includes culture and cuisine.”

“For those who don’t like books, there are cultural programmes and a sprawling food court,” Sikander said. An information counter, armed with writers’ profiles, bibliographies and catalogues, is helping buyers and visitors locate the books they are looking for on the basis of the names of the authors.

A fleet of three-wheeled mechanised rickshaws is ferrying tourists around the fair.

“I expect the number of footfalls to go up by nearly 30 per cent,” Sikander said. According to rough estimates by fair officials, the last edition of the World Book Fair in 2010 drew nearly 50,000 visitors.

New York, 1939. Tom Bradshaw is arrested for first degree murder. He stands accused of killing his brother. When Sefton Jelks, a top Manhattan lawyer, offers his services for nothing, penniless Tom has little choice but to accept his assurance of a lighter sentence. After Tom is tried, found guilty and sentenced, Jelks disappears, and the only way for him to prove his innocence would be to reveal his true identity – something that he has sworn never to do to protect a woman. The young woman in question travels to New York, leaving their son behind in England, having decided she’ll do whatever it takes to find the man she was to marry.

2. “Business Etiquette: A Guide for the Indian Professional”, Published by Harper Collins India; Written by Shital Kakkar Mehra; Priced Rs.250

The first interview. Handling a difficult boss. The power of words. Networking. Small talk. Dressing for a cocktail dinner. Holding chopsticks. Drinking wine. Twitter etiquette. Sexual harassment in office. Remembering names. Receiving compliments. Women travelling alone. Thank you notes. The opportunities created by a fast-globalising world have led to executives jet-setting across the globe wining and dining, negotiating, and networking for business. Business Etiquette shows us the art of creating a positive impression through the ABC of good manners, appearance, behaviour, and communication.

3. “City of Gold”; Written by Len Deighton; Published by Harper Collins for India; Priced Rs.325

This new reissue includes a foreword from the cover designer, Oscar-winning filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman, and a brand new introduction by Len Deighton, which offers a fascinating insight into the writing of the story. The year is 1942. Rommel’s seemingly invincible Afrika Korps is at the gates of Egypt and perhaps will soon threaten Cairo itself. And Rommel has a spy in the city, a source so well-informed that the German commander knows in advance every movement of the allied forces. Among the teeming streets and bazaars, the British, led by Major Albert Cutler, must find him. But Cairo is a city of fool’s gold, where nothing and nobody, not even Cutler, can be taken at face value.

4. “King of Lanka”; Written by David Hare; Published by Penguin-India; Priced Rs.250

For four teenagers, the Ramayana is not just a tale. It is their fate! In every life they have ever lived, Vikram, Amanjit, Rasita and Deepika have been persecuted and killed by Ravindra, who aspires to the throne of Ravana the Demon-King. Now Rasita is a captive of Ravindra, and demonic beings thought to be mythical are rallying to him. His triumph seems inevitable. Vikram and Amanjit must rescue her. This time, if Ravindra wins, it will be forever. But slowly, pieces are falling into place. Why are they reliving the Ramayana? Who was Ravana? Where is the real Lanka? Age-old mysteries are uncovered as the quest to end the tyranny of Ravindra moves towards a finale.

5.”When a Lawyer Falls in Love”; Written by Amrita Suresh; Published by Wisdom Tree; Priced Rs.100

Ankur Palekar, a third-year law student believes that his life is quite sorted. Except that he does not want to become a lawyer, has a family history of lunacy and has actually fallen in love. Vyas, Ankur’s roommate and best friend, has no such problems – only a girlfriend who emerges from the graveyard of all places and insists on visiting him in the boys’ hostel. Add to it, a Malayalee friend whose car never starts and vocal chords never stop, a law festival that is not completely legal and an arranged marriage which is more deranged than arranged. Funny, pacey, yet it has its moments, When a Lawyer Falls in Love is the kind of book that will make you laugh out loud at places and ponder in silence at some, while it takes you through an unforgettable journey called college life

Considered the next level of the arts movement in countries where art is used as a tool of social change, it engages people in aesthetic dialogue on issues with a combination of performance, body language, music, narrative, discussions and conventional visual art.

“Performance art forms a good bridge between literate and non-literate people because the performer uses his body, offering viewers direct access to art. It opens up cultural conversations because it is direct. You learn about a particular artist’s attitude. It is a rich vehicle to put ideas across,” Roselee Goldberg, a US-based performance arts pioneer, critic and art historian, told IANS.

Goldberg, who hosts Performa, a performance art biennial in New York, was in India to look for potential performance art practitioners for the 2013 edition of the festival in which she plans to collaborate with Indian artists.

“I was fascinated by Subodh Gupta’s new performance art act, ‘Spirit Eaters’. He brought us into a conversation that was also a narrative,” Goldberg said.

Gupta’s new choreography, “Spirit Eaters” which premiered at the India Art Fair, is an enactment of an ancient tradition of the funeral feast. It recreates the ritual of “feeding a community of Brahmin priests and paying them” after a bereavement in the family in the remote villages of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal.

“It is a common practice in the Hindu religion. The ‘babas’ – a kind of Brahmins – chant mantras and eat in honour of the departed soul. The rite of feeding them and paying them helps appease the spirit of the dead. The show is my new video piece,” Gupta told IANS.

The artist comments on dying traditions and caste hierarchy in the heartland states through his interactive performance art.

The new performance art act of Bangalore-based artist Pushpamala N, “Motherland”, involves viewers in a debate on gender discrimination in ancient Kannada poetry. The act features Mamta Sagar as “Kannada woman poet” Thirumalamba with art, music and narrative.

Pushpamala looks at post-colonialism with the eye of a historian and a feminist.

“The parameters of art are changing to convey realities and historical truths. In my new choreography, I explore women power in Kannada literature. I use the poet as a symbol of Mother India and speak about the captivity of her intellect in a male-dominated society,” Pushpamala said.

Performance artist and composer Suchet Malhotra says he works with groundscapes – usually photographs – texts and nature’s sounds to probe relationships between the urban and nature “to raise awareness about the shrinking green cover and the dying sounds and creatures of nature”.

Noisindia by Abecassis & The Natives, an alternative performance art group, experiments with the diversity of noise in India. They have created art acts around the ship-breaking noises at the Alang shipyard in Gujarat and distorted sounds.

Theatre personality and chairperson of the National School of Drama (NSD) Amal Allana says performance art is a direct offshoot of theatre where the “artist becomes a performer”.

“Theatre is a combination of all arts but performance art is just a part of it. Art has a limited sense of identity in its conventional forms. It cannot flourish in artistic isolation,” Allana told IANS.

Goldberg explains that “the difference between theatre and performance arts is that a definite narrative embarrasses a performance artist”. “An artist does not want things explained… it is built around a concept. There is no resolution of the narrative in the end,” Goldberg said.

The venue places an important part in a performance art show.

Pooja Sood, the director of Khoj International Artists’ Association, which pioneered performance art in India, said: “She has been exploring new edgy spaces like clubs and night spots for performance art shows to connect to new segments of audience and complement the nature of the art.”

“If performance art is the art of the 21st century, then what we should do is to give it a link to historicity so that it becomes avant garde. The bulk of performance art in the country is autobiographical,” performance artist Sonia Khurana said.

Fiction

1. “The Immortals of Meluha”
Author: Amish Tripathi
Publisher: Westland
Price: Rs.195

2.”Narcopolis”
Author: Jeet Thayil
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Price: Rs.499

3.”When Loss Is Gain”
Author: Pavan K.Verma
Publisher: Rupa
Price: Rs.395

4.”Can Love Happen Twice”
Author: Ravinder Singh
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs.125

5.”Revolution 2020″
Author: Chetan Bhagat
Publisher: Rupa
Price: Rs.140

Non-Fiction

1.”Behind the Beautiful Forevers”
Author: Katherine Boo
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs.499

2. “Thinking Fast and Slow”
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: Rs.499

3 “Confessions of a Serial Dieter”
Author: Kalli Purie
Publisher: Harper Collins
Price: Rs.250

4.”Beauty Diet”
Author: Shonali Sabherwal
Publisher: Random House
Price: Rs.250

5. “Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography”
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Hachette
Price: Rs.799

The bestseller list compiled by the Indian Authors Promotion Association on the basis of data provided by Bahrisons, Delhi (http://www.booksatbahri.com); Capital Book Depot, Chandigarh (http://www.capitalbookdepot.com); Spell & Bound Bookshop & Cafe Pvt. Ltd, Delhi (http://spellandbound.com).

It is held before the festival of Holi in haat-bazaars at various places in the two districts.

In the traditional tribal festival, young boys and girls choose their life partners and then elope symbolically. Later, they are accepted as husband and wife as per prescribed traditional social rituals.

As per traditions, a boy smears “Gulal” (coloured powder) on the face of the girl he likes at the haat-bazaar. If the girl also agrees to marry the boy, she also smears Gulal on his face.

It is not necessary that the girl should apply Gulal to the boy’s face immediately even if she is ready to marry him. Sometimes, the boy pursues her and succeeds eventually.

In fact, Bhagoria is not a one-day event, but a series of festivals. These festivals are held at various village haat-bazaars for days. The festival comes after the harvesting of crops and this adds an agrarian colour to it. If the crop yield is good, then the enthusiasm at the festival increases manifold.

“As a Department of the University of Oxford, OUP will celebrate by showcasing its rich history in India through reissues of classics and by launching major new centenary year publication initiatives in 2012,” Manzar Khan, managing director, Oxford University Press, told IANS.

“Rabindranath Tagore: An Illustrated Life” by eminent scholar and critic Uma Das Gupta, slated for release in May, gives a glimpse of the personal life of the bard as also the larger forces that moulded his personality and thoughts.

Das Gupta, former professor of social science in the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, has published two books on Tagore related to his life, besides an edited collection of letters between the litterateur and poet-cum-Wesleyan missionary Edward Thompson.

OUP’s relations with Tagore date back to 1954 when three of his plays – “Muktadhara”, “Natir Puja” and “Chandalika” – were published.

In 2001, the publisher, in collaboration with Vivsa-Bharati – the university founded by Tagore – brought out a selection of his writings, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction in English titled “The Oxford Tagore Translations”.

As part of the centenary celebration, the publishing house – with a presence in more than 50 countries – is launching and re-issuing various books.

A major volume to be launched is a republication of its first book in India on “Essential Psychology” by S. Radhakrishan that hit the book stands in 1912.

A special edition of the Oxford School Atlas first published in 1915 will also be relaunched as well as some unpublished works of conservationist and author Jim Corbett.

In the list of new arrivals this year is a pictorial book by noted photojournalist Steve Raymer. The book through its 200 photographs captures the rich culture of the city from the time it was the capital of British Raj.

The first of its office in India was established in 1912 in Bombay (now Mumbai) followed by Chennai and Kolkata. The Delhi centre was opened in 1972, following which the headquarters of OUP India was shifted here from Mumbai.

In 1922, the OUP published its first English translation of eminent Bengali author Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s “Srikanta”.

The OUP had its origin in the modernisation of the information industry in the late 15th century that saw the transformation from movable type to printing. Its first ever volume in the United Kingdom came out in 1478, only two years after the first printing press was set up in England.

The Indian arm publishes over 400 books annually with schoolbooks occupying the largest volume of their sales.

“An Oxford book has magic, there is sense and there is direction. Being publishers we are not only limited to printing, we have our books available digitally for the knowledge hungry people of India,” said Khan.

“Kolkata is absolutely special. The enthusiasm and passion of buyers is phenomenal, people here are very observant and have a keen passion to improve their knowledge,” he added.

(Souvik Basu can be contacted at souvik.basu2@gmail.com)

Literature knows no boundaries and certainly cannot be confined to a few. You will find hundreds of hidden treasures in the smaller stalls. And if you are lucky, you may also run into a knowledgeable and amenable publisher or bookseller there. And if you are still luckier, a meaningful and fulfilling conversation combined with a cup of tea may make your visit to the book fair really special.

When it comes to literary specials, JLF is certainly the top of the pops. Where else would you find globally acclaimed guru Deepak Chopra standing in a half-a-mile-long queue? Where else would you spot India Today group chief Aroon Purie pleading with guards who are blocking the entrance to a hall, “Please let me go in, my daughter is one of the speakers here”? And where else would you see one of India’s most well-known filmmakers, Shekhar Kapoor, just lazing in the sun, may be secretly hoping that the world will take notice while hardly anyone does.

For those of you who remember my last year’s article “Confessions of a Publisher Who Never Visits Jaipur Lit Fest”, you will probably have guessed by now that I stand converted – converted into a JLF participant.

We launched our book, “Whispers in the Classroom, Voices on the Field”, edited by Richa Jha, at the fest. I turned a bit of a lyricist and penned a song inspired by this book, making it the first Indian book to have an independent song made for it. And I got to soak in the literary jamboree.

JLF is a fascinating place, so fascinating that at times you don’t know what you are doing there. Most of the sessions are engaging, but some have age-old lines like ‘Write from your heart’ thrown at you. What next? ‘Write with your pen’? Or better still, ‘Keyboard’? But attending these sessions is an art by itself. If you want to really sit down and participate in any of the popular ones, you’ve got to be an early bird, or maybe even an angry bird. It reminds you of the erstwhile British or American visa queues where you even thought of taking packed aloo paranthas along. That may have been just the right idea for an Oprah session. Or as I overheard an angry bird telling her children, ‘You got to push your way through; otherwise you will never be able to do anything in life.’ Tiger Mom, eh?

Talking about moms, you could actually see them in huge numbers – of all kinds and with all kinds of accompaniments – spouses, kids, parents, friends or just by themselves. In fact, I think almost 65-70 percent of the visitors to JLF were of the fairer sex kinds. Err, I mean the emotionally intellectual kinds.

At first, I felt it was just me noticing only what I am naturally inclined to notice until I stopped and observed and counted and confirmed. I could see three good-looking women for every ordinary looking man. I am sure, after reading this, some changes in the gender ratio are bound to happen at the next JLF!

It is said that whatever you think of India, the reverse is also true. In this case, the paradox was just a stone’s throw away from the Lit Fest. The ‘Dainik Bhaskar Pustak Mela’ happening in its shadows was an intriguing study in contrasts.

With Hari Om Sharan’s bhajans playing in the background, tables full of scattered books, booksellers sitting in the middle and atop the pile of books and posters screaming “Pick any book for Rs.10″ or ” Limited Stock Rs.99″, it was a joy to find book-lovers in reasonably good numbers there too. And when I found some of the books published by us there as well, I knew I had done my job as a publisher.

Carrying forward last year’s tradition, I must make a confession, which is that I was more at home at the Pustak Mela than at the Lit Fest. May be, I have always secretly dreamed to be that bookseller sitting in the middle of the book pile.

At the New Delhi World Book Fair, if you spot somebody sitting in a similar ambience, do stop by. It will be nice to meet you.

(24-02-2012) Shobit Arya is the founder and publisher of Wisdom Tree. He can be contacted at www.wisdomtreeindia.com and shobit.arya@gmail.com)

A member of the team that found the artifact, Heber Ojeda, estimates the board was used between the 7th and 10th centuries during the Late Classic period of Dzibilnocac.

“It is an esgraffito scoreboard of approximately 50 cm on each side, which was discovered on the floor of the second highest space” in the building denoted A1, the archaeologist said.

Etched into the surface of the board are 58 rectangles of varying sizes and players would have used beans as game tokens, Ojeda said.

One of his colleagues, Judith Gallegos Gomora, said the board was designed for patolli, a game of chance described in Mayan codices and colonial Spanish chronicles.

She added, however, that the board bears a resemblance to the Maya quincunx, a schematic representation of the universe, and would likely also have been used for divination.

Sporting Manmohan Singh’s trademark blue turban, grey beard and spectacles, Sethi walked into the Bangalore Press Club located in a corner of the famous Cubbon Park in white kurta-pyjama and a dark-blue Nehru jacket.

Though Sethi was an hour behind schedule for the briefing on the film, produced and directed by noted TV personality Suhaib Ilyasi, the delay caused more curiosity, as the organisers announced that “the prime minister of India will address the media on the occasion.”

By design or co-incidence, Sethi did not disappoint the waiting crowd, as he maintained a discreet silence throughout the media interaction, reminding everyone of Manmohan Singh’s silent nature.

When coaxed to speak and respond to queries, Sethi, a long-time member of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), smiled much like Singh and mumbled a few words, which were hardly audible though he had a mike in hand.

“I am delighted to be in Bangalore for a cause espoused by the film in which I volunteered to play the prime minister’s role as its script deals with the misuse of the section 498A of the IPC (Indian Penal Code) against married men by their blackmailing wives and in-laws,” Sethi said when asked to repeat a little louder.

Set to be released in the last week of May, the tragic-comedy movie highlights the disastrous consequences of the draconian section 498A of the anti-dowry law, which forced thousands of much-maligned husbands to commit suicide since it was enacted in 1983.

Born in Sheikhupura in Pakistan, Sethi migrated to India during the partition and spent his younger days in Amritsar before shifting to Indore in Madhya Pradesh where he was a businessman providing cold storage for vegetables and fruits.

“Currently, I live in Delhi with my younger son, leading a retired life. I have known Singh even before he became the finance minister during the nineties (1991-96) and the prime minister later (since May 2004). I had campaigned for him in the 1999 mid-term Lok Sabha elections when he contested from the South Delhi constituency and lost,” a bemused Sethi recalled.

Asserting that Singh was an honest and a learned person, Sethi said that he was sad to know that the prime minister was unable to provide the kind of leadership that Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel did for the country during the fifties and sixties.

“The country lacks leadership. We don’t have another Nehru or Patel to lead the country through the crisis we are going through. Majority of the politicians are selfish and corrupt. They are busy minting money than serving the country,” Sethi lamented.

On his acting in the social film, Sethi said as he was approached to play the PM’s role because he resembled Singh and would enable fans to relate him to the latter.

“Though I never acted in films, I agreed to do the role as it was not difficult to act like Singh who has the same demeanour like me,” Sethi quipped.

The nine-day fair will have a theme-based exhibition – Point of View: One Hundred Years of Indian Cinema – to celebrate the relationship between literature and cinema.

The fair will feature 1,300 exhibitors from across the world with 2,500 kiosks and 140 book-related events, said M.A. Sikander, director of the National Book Trust (NBT) that has organised the event.

“The theme of the exhibition will be the unique relationship of cinema and literature with an exhibition of 300 books, literary discussions, book launches and workshops,” he added.

Hosted under the umbrella of the human resource development ministry, the World Book Fair will be inaugurated by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal at the Pragati Maidan.

The ceremony will be presided over by Manoj Das, professor at the Sri Aurobindo University in Pondicherry, and Mridula Mukherjee, professor at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The fair will host at least 30 foreign publishers and delegations from countries like Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Germany, UAE, China, France, Iran and Britain.

The fair will be spread across 45,000 square metres in 10 of the 12 exhibition halls of the Pragati Maidan with separate enclosures for different categories of books.

“We have invited 1,000 children from about 30 schools and hired student volunteers from Delhi University who will guide the children with curated walks at the fair. It will be a part of scholastic assignment for them,” Sikander told the media at the briefing in the capital.

A special priced catalogue of the 300 books collected from various archives will be on sale for buyers to chose from and “then approach the respective publishers to purchase the titles,” Sikander said.

Sibal will release three braille books on cinema for the visually challenged at the inaugural day.

Aslo two special volumes on art of acting and the influence of Urdu on Hindi movies – “Johare Adakari” and “Urdu and Bollywood” – will be released Feb 29.

There will be discussion on literature and cinema, which will be addressed by academics and senior film personalities who are associated in adapting Indian literature into cinema.

A special pavilion will commemorate 100 years of Delhi as the capital of India and a Tagore pavilion will display 150 years of the poet’s life.

“One of the business highlights of the fair is the right’s table for international trade negotiations – ‘Right’s Table: A Forum of Indian Publishers’- to exchange copyrights of books will be convened for the first time. It will be supported by the German Book Office and the French government. Countries like France and Russia, who share cultural similarities with India, are keen to buy rights for Hindi books from us,” Sikander said.

The event will also take the issue of pricing books. NBT official said with writers demanding more royalty sometime as high as 50 percent and print runs decreasing, publishers were finding it difficult to “price books reasonably”.

“The Rights Table will help publishers deal directly with rights, buyers and address issues of piracy, copyrights and pricing,” Sikander said.

Besides, the fair will also discuss e-books and sell digital books.

A two-day national seminar on translation – Indian Literature Tower of Babel: Cross Translation Among Indian Languages will be held March 1-2.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture — the 19th in the Smithsonian Institution — would be located on the National Mall in Washington D.C. adjacent to the Washington Monument. The ceremony took place on the museum’s five-acre site, reported Xinhua.

“I think about my daughters and I think about your children, the millions of visitors who will stand where we stand long after we’re gone,” Obama said at the ceremony. “And I want them to appreciate this museum not just as a record of tragedy, but as a celebration of life.”

“When future generations hear these songs of pain and progress and struggle and sacrifice, I hope they will not think of them as somehow separate from the larger American story. I want them to see it as central — an important part of our shared story,” he added.

The museum will be the country’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to showcasing African American life, art, history and culture.

Construction of the museum will begin in the summer this year and is expected to take three years, costing about $500 million, with half being raised by the museum and the rest provided by Congress.

Their eyes popped out later when they learnt that Goddess Mahalaxmi was ‘wearing’ diamond-studded contact lenses, donated by an eye surgeon, Chandrashekhar Chavan, hailing from the erstwhile princely state of Kolhapur but now living in Mumbai.

The contact lenses, made of tiny glittering diamonds and worth around Rs.80,000, were donated to seek her blessings for a new eye technique developed by Chavan, which he is hoping to patent, said Padmaja Tivale, a member-trustee of the Shri Mahalaxmi Kolhapur Devasthan Management Committee.

“It was his (Chavan’s) wish and desire to donate the diamond contact lenses and we cannot stop any devotee; so we respected his sentiments. However, on account of objections from some quarters, now we shall not display the contact lenses at regular darshans,” Tivale told IANS.

Considered to be over 5,000 years old, the 40-kg idol of Goddess Mahalaxmi here is made of gemstone and is studded with precious stones.

But controversy has erupted among devotees and media which has questioned the limits to which various temples and other religious places can go while accepting devotees’ donations, however expensive they may be.

“When devotees visit a temple, they expect divine radiance from the eyes of the goddess, not the shine emanated by diamonds,” fumed Jayshree Khadilkar-Pande, a prominent Marathi journalist who has strongly criticised Goddess Mahalaxmi’s new ‘look’.

Khadilkar-Pande said the diamond contact lenses actually block the goddess’ divine energies believed to pass through her eyes on to the devotees.

However, temple priest Ajit Thanedar defended the move, saying it added to the beauty of Goddess Mahalaxmi’s idol like the other jewels adorning her.

“Moreover, the diamond contact lenses are temporarily stuck to the eyes of the goddess and later easily removed without damaging it (the idol) in any manner,” he claimed in a television statement.

He argued that just as the precious jewels and other holy articles of the idol are regularly changed, even the diamond contact lenses are a part of her belongings and the decision was taken unanimously by the temple managing committee.

Later, Thanedar conceded that following objections from some devotees, it has been decided to display the diamond contact lenses only in the presence of the donor and not on any other occasion.

The issue has triggered a debate among Goddess Mahalaxmi’s devotees in the state, with many questioning the propriety of various temple trusts accepting whimsical donations simply to fill up their coffers.

“Tomorrow, if somebody offers sunglasses or a mobile phone, will the trusts accept it? Even if it is in the name of devotion or fulfilment of some wishes, the trusts must exercise wisdom before accepting any kind of donation which could hurt the sentiments of devotees,” an angry Megha Patil of Thane, who happened to visit the Kolhapur temple last week, told IANS.

Resting on a stone platform, and facing the west direction, the Mahalaxmi statue has four arms – the lower right hand displays a matulinga fruit, above that a large mace called kaumodak, and in the left lower hand is shown a bowl or panpatra and above that a shield or khetaka.

Goddess Mahalaxmi’s crown comprises a cobra-hood with a Shiv ling and a Yoni around it, with a lion standing behind her – all evidence of her divine ‘shakti.’

Listed among the 108 sites where ‘shakti’ is manifested, the Goddess Mahalaxmi Temple of Kolhapur is one of the Shakti Peetha in Maharashtra and one of the six sites of ‘shakti.’

In what devotees consider a celestial phenomenon, a small window on the western wall allows the rays of the setting sun to fall on the face of the idol only thrice in a year – November, December and January – according to Tivale.

“This is the time when lakhs of devotees throng the temple for a glimpse of the beautiful image of Goddess Mahalaxmi bathing in the golden rays of the setting sun; it’s a truly a magnificent spectacle,” Tivale said.

“The range of his interests and the deep philosophical underpinnings of his literary output, which at a certain level resonates with Vedantic thought, have established him as a literary figure in the footsteps of Vishwa Kavi Rabindranath Tagore,” said Ansari.

Ansari was in the city to participate at a three-day event to mark the birth centenary of the Hindi litterateur popularly known as Ajneya (the incomprehensible).

Ansari said Ajneya had the ability to blend perfectly poetry with politics.

“He believed that poetry on politics was the best use of poetry. Yet, he was careful to draw the distinction and warn that patriotic poetry should not lead to an overemphasis on a religious-spiritual ethic or even religious nationalism. On the other hand, being completely anti-political too was not a solution,” he said.

The Jnanpith awardee, as a pioneer of modern Hindi literature, initiated new and experimental trends in several genres of literary writings including poetry, short stories, criticism, novels, travelogues, essays and drama.

Describing him as a great writer and an inspiration for the youth, Ansari said the centenary celebrations offered an occasion for all to ‘think about the realm of individual possibility, depth of mental capacity and the complexity of linguistic intricacy’.

Born Mar 7, 1911, in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria district, Ajneya went on to become one the most celebrated writers in Hindi winning the Jnanpith in 1978 followed by the Golden Wreath Award for poetry in 1983.

West Bengal Governor M.K. Narayanan and Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim were also present in the function organised by the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, Sahitya Akademi and the Raza Foundation.

The American exponent of percussion instrument mridangam is the late dancer’s son-in-law. And he is now her biographer.

“I didn’t choose her; I was part of her family. My association with several members of Balasaraswati’s family has been at the centre of my musical and personal life since the late 1960s,” Knight told IANS.

Knight’s biography of the dancer, “Balasaraswati: Her Art & Life (Westland)” arrived at bookstores in India last week.

Balasaraswati (1918-1984) was one of the first generation of Bharatanatyam dancers who took the genre out of the confines of the devadasi or temple dancer traditions to put it in the mainstream of Indian culture.

Balasaraswati was known for her sophistication and elegance of style.

Knight’s first encounter with the family dates back to 1971. He “encountered her brother Ranganathan as an undergraduate at the University of Wesleyan (Connecticut) in 1971″.

“Ranga was a Carnatic musician. I decided to follow this practice and when I was a graduate student at the California Institute of Arts, Balasaraswati held a residency there,” Knight said.

The lyricism and beauty of Bharatanatyam drew Knight to India. “I came close to the family, married her daughter and learnt to play the mridangam. I studied the instrument between 1968 and 1981 and accompanied Balasaraswati’s daughter Lakshmi for 25 years,” Knight recalled.

Knight first performed as a drummer with Balasaraswati’s daughter Lakshmi in 1974 and collaborated for the next 25 years.

“We married in 1980 and lived in Balasaraswati’s home in Chennai. Our son Aniruddha absorbed and learned the family styles of music and dance. I watched her teach her daughter Lakshmi and our son,” Knight said.

After wife Lakshmi’s death, Knight has been accompanying Aniruddha, a Bharatanatyam dancer, on the mridangam for the last 15 years. “He carries on in his mother Lakshmi’s and grandmother Balasaraswati’s traditions,” Knight said.

Knight said “Balasaraswati’s story was set in a community organised according to matrilineal principles”. It meant that the heads of the households were women.

Balasaraswati was the seventh generation descendant of the musician and dancer Papammal – an 18th century court performer in the Thanjavur court in present-day Tamil Nadu. “The traditions of music and dance flowed continuously within the family since Papammal’s time,” Knight said.

The dancer and her daughter “made extraordinary investments in teaching and nurturing of their knowledge of Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music in the US”, Knight said. “Since Balasaraswati’s brother Viswanathan first visited the US in 1958, eight members of the family have taught and toured North America,” he said.

Balasaraswati’s journey as a professional dancer is also the course that a political and cultural crusade to democratise the dance and put down the anti-nautch movement across India (tradition) mapped out for itself. The anti-nautch groups protested against “tradition or parampara and temple dancing”.

According to Knight, in the early 1930s, the anti-nautch movement came at loggerheads with the new forward-looking perspective of the provisional executive group which had formed the Madras Music Academy in the late 1920s over public performances.

Concurrent with the anti-nautch movement was another movement urging the revival of traditional dance, arguing that “the art could and should be rehabilitated”.

In April 1932, Balasaraswati had performed under the sponsorship of the Indian Cultural Bureau in Chennai. The press reviews revealed the ongoing controversy, Knight said.

During the 1930s, 1940s and the 1950s, Balasaraswati’s art was “the centre of a debate over the appropriateness of the narrative dance theme of human love – Sringara – on the modern stage”.

Knight in his book says, “Bala believed that dancers were afraid to deal with ‘sringara’ because they did not understand or deliver it on the level for which it was intended”.

Knight puts together Balasaraswati’s career as a dancer in seven chapters. He places her life in the bigger context of the evolution of Bharatanatyam as the most popular classical dance form from an ancient temple ritual.

John Guillet, a dance teacher of French or Catalonian origin, arrived in Cuba in July 1800 to work in a theatre under construction in an area where today stands the National Capitol, the seat of government in Cuba until after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and now home to the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

Guillet was the first to establish the rules for classic dance.

Two months later, in September, the first ballet show took place in Cuba. It was the “The Loggers”, a pantomime dance.

The author who says he can remain awake for three days, if necessary, to check over and over again a detail, walks with ease through the 360 pages of the book.

He writes about happy discoveries, like the premiere of the complete version of “Giselle” in 1849 in the former Tacon theatre in Havana.

The book, second of Suri’s English translation of his grandfather’s books, was published by Harper Collins-India. A joint secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs, Suri had earlier translated Nanak Singh’s novel “Pavitra Paapi” as “Saintly Sinner” in 2003.

“Pavitra Paapi” was also made into a movie starring Parikshit Sahni in 1970.

“A Life Incomplete” was released by Minister of State for External Affairs Preneet Kaur Tuesday evening at Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan. Unveiling the book, Kaur said, “Nanak Singh was a leading light of Punjabi literature. He wrote 59 books, including 38 novels and was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi award in 1962.”

Kaur said: “Several of Nanak Singh’s books were prescribed on high school and university syllabus, and I am told many of his novels are in their 20th and 30th reprint.” She said Nanak Singh’s books conveyed several messages pertinent to the times — “religious tolerance and empowerment of women.”

“The translation will carry the novel to new sections of Indian lovers of Punjabi literature and to the Indian diaspora around the world,” Kaur said.

Navdeep Suri calls the book a “tragedy”. The narrative begins with political prisoner Kuldeep Singh’s days in Lahore jail, where the only thoughts that sustain him are those of his beautiful wife Satwant.

Kuldeep is desperate to go home to Peshawar — and mend fences with his wife who suspected him of cheating on her. The lovesick Punjabi prisoner sporting a “brown beard” strikes a unusual friendship with a Pathan jail guard Ahmed Khan.

The friendship is a testimony of inter-faith tolerance at a time when hostility between the Hindus and the Muslims were on the rise, Suri said. But Kuldeep — an autobiographical character, cast in the shade of writer Nanak Singh — returns home to find his wife had died, leaving behind an infant child.

Kuldeep’s world collapses and he is pulled in different directions and finds himself drawn to Prakash — his child’s maid. It now falls upon Ahmed Khan to redeem the star-crossed love and reunite the lovers.

“Two principles guided me in my endeavour. One, was to try and take this work to a wider audience as he was regarded the father of Punjabi novel and a natural writer. Had he written in English or French, he would have been celebrated as a global phenomenon,” Suri told IANS.

The diplomat said: “The readership for Punjabi literature had shrunk after Partition.”

“It is a pity that a writer who produced classic after classic and whose works were made into movies does not have enough translation in English,” Suri said.

“I just wanted to render the original tale faithfully,” he said. The writer said he now try to translate Nanak Singh’s Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel, “Ek Mayan Do Talwar”, a story of a revolution set between 1914 and 1918.

The launch opened with a short documentary on Nanak Singh, who loved to spend his creative time in the hills. Born in 1897 to a Hindu in a village by the Jhelum river, he converted to Sikhism as a child. Poverty denied him education.

“But it did not stop him from writing considering that he was a man of little education not beyond the fourth grade, Nanak Singh addressed almost all the social issues that made headlines in the early 20th century,” added Suri.

A survey on the status of adolescent girls was conducted in two blocks of Odisha – one in the tribal-dominated Tentulikhunti block in Nabarangpur district and another in the coastal Balianta block of Khorda district. The numbers in Tentulikhunti were not good. It was discovered that of the 501 adolescent girls tested there, 281 girls were severely anaemic, with levels below 7 grams. Balianta fared only a little better. It was to meet this challenge that the state rolled out the Adolescent Anaemia Control Programme (AACP) in 2009.

The programme, implemented jointly by the state Departments of Health and Family Welfare and Women and Child Development, has several components, ranging from screening teenagers for moderate and severe anaemia, counselling them on good eating habits, preventing intestinal worm infestations and, most importantly, ensuring the administration of weekly iron-folic acid supplements of 100 mg elemental iron and 500 mg folic acid.

Why is this intervention so important in this neck of tribal Odisha? Take the case of Budei Jani, 20, of Damaguda village in Tentulikhunti block. She got married last year and is now expecting a baby. In 2007, her haemoglobin level was as low as 4.4 grams. Recalls Budei, “I must have been around 16 or 17. My periods were irregular and sometimes I felt so weak that I couldn’t walk properly. The ‘didi’ at the local anganwadi advised hospital care. After that I was given iron and folic acid tablets every week, and I slowly recovered under this treatment.” She can now look forward to having a safe delivery and a healthy baby. Unfortunately inIndia, anaemia in the mother is a major cause of low birth weight in the child.

This is just one story among many in these parts where young women have been given another chance to lead a productive life. In Panaspadar, another village in Tentulikhunti block, Babita Jani, 19, is presently studying for her Plus Two course atNabarangpurCollege. In 2007, her haemoglobin level was 5 grams and chronic fatigue made her constantly skip school. Her parents, small farmers whose rain-fed patch of land could only support the cultivation of ragi and some pulses, were too poor to ensure proper nutrition for their three children. Says Babita, “In our home my father and brother always ate first, and we – my mother, my sister and myself – managed with what was left.” Things started changing once the AACP took off and a rejuvenated Babita began picking up her books again.

The 2011 Census has revealed that there are at least 12.2 crore adolescents inIndia, in the age group of 15-19 years, of which 5.7 crore are estimated to be girls. Of these, 3.2 crore are anaemic. Read this along with data from the National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3), which indicated that 2.3 million of about 3.7 million adolescent girls in Odisha are anaemic. Worse, half of them become mothers at an early age; and 69 per cent of pregnant women in the state are anaemic against the national percentage of 58. Anaemia, which results in the decreased ability of the red blood cells to provide adequate oxygen to body tissues, is one of the primary reasons behind high infant deaths and maternal mortality rates.

But why is anaemia in adolescent girls such a concern? The fact that adolescent girls and boys have a need for extra nutrition as they grow and develop rapidly, and that an inadequate diet can delay or impair healthy development is not well understood. In girls, poor nutrition can delay puberty and lead to the development of a small pelvis. Malnourished anemic adolescent girls who have babies at a young age are more likely to experience, and will be less able to withstand, complications because the body has not yet reached maturity.

Manorama Majhi, the Child Development Project Officer (CPDO) of Tentulikhunti block, explains, “There are many reasons for anaemia among young women in tribal Odisha. Early marriage and childbearing is one. General hygiene is also very poor, with open defecation the norm. This means chances of infections and diseases are very high. Then there are other factors like poor nutrition, faulty eating practices, poverty and the general lack of education and awareness.”

According to Majhi, the AACP uses the direct observational approach, which means that everybody congregates at the anganwadi centre on Saturdays for a meeting, and is given a tablet each. “In this way, all the girls get 52 tablets in a year,” she says.

The programme is embedded in the institution of the Balika Mandal. There are 186 mandals in the 15 panchayats of Tentulikhunti block. Each Balika Mandal brings together 12 to 20 local girls every Saturday in various programmes and activities, including those that focus on building health awareness.

While the programme seems to be working in Tentulikhunti block, other parts of the district don’t show such encouraging results. For instance, Pravati Majhi, 14, of Raighar block says she goes to her local anganwadi centre on Saturdays to get fruit – which she simply loves – but she cannot explain why it is important for her to take her iron pills. “One of our biggest challenges is general illiteracy and lack of information. But we continue trying our best,” admits Kanan Kumari Das, District Welfare Officer, Nabarangpur. Her data indicates that some 47,085 girls – both school going and non-school going – are being covered under this project at the state level.

Although the AACP initially began in nine districts – Mayurbhanj, Koraput, Malkangiri, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Bolangir, Raygada, Nabarangpur and Sonepur – it has recently been extended to 21 districts. According to Anu Garg, Health and Family Welfare Secretary, Government of Odisha, iron and folic acid tablets will be supplied to adolescent girls in all 21 districts, with weekly haemoglobin check ups in both tribal and regular schools run by the School & Mass Education Department of the state.

But the hurdles cannot be overlooked. Arti Ahuja, Secretary-Commissioner, Women & Child Development Department, admits that even if the tablets are supplied, there is no guarantee that they will be consumed. “We need to also monitor the consumption of these tablets if the situation is to improve and back this effort with sound nutrition and health education,” she observes. According to her, high anaemia levels in Odisha are not only due to under-nutrition but also chronic conditions like malaria and hookworm infestations.

But the response from the ground in Tentulikhunti block provides cause for some cautious cheer. Says Garg, “We hope our efforts prove successful and the health profile of our adolescent girls improves.”

 (© Women’s Feature Service)

The hardest hit were Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated annual average of 110,000 and 157,000 deaths, respectively, said Fay Johnston, from Menzies Research Institute, University of Tasmania.

“It’s time to look at deforestation impact on fires, which in turn affect human health,” said Johnston, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives reports.

Johnston and her co-authors specifically assessed the health impacts of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, an important byproduct of landscape fire smoke, according to a statement of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

First, they looked at satellite data to gather information on areas that burned each year during the study period. They further calculated annual mortality during a La Nina period, and an El Nino period.

Worldwide, deaths from fire smoke during those periods were estimated at 262,000 and 532,000, respectively, compared with an estimated 10-year global yearly average of 339,000 deaths.

“Fire emissions are an important contributor to global mortality,” said Johnston. “Adverse health outcomes associated with landscape fire smoke could be substantially reduced by curtailing burning of tropical rainforests, which rarely burn naturally.”

These findings were presented at the 2012 AAAS annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada on Sunday.

“The winner of reality shows like ‘Indian Idol’, who are hyped and for whom audience sends SMS to make them win, could not be remembered after three years. But even such shows have benefited Indian classical music and its artists,” Pandit Jasraj told IANS.

He arrived in the City of Lakes Monday to take part in a private function.

“Such shows have created audience. These audiences want to listen to different things because in reality shows same songs are sung again and again by different singers and audiences get bored. Therefore, they turn to classical music,” Pandit Jasraj added.

The veteran artist said that the Indian classical music has the depth which is missing in other genres.

He said he is using technology to spread awareness about the Indian classical music and added: “I not only use video conference but Skype also to teach students outside the country.”

Recently the music maestro came under sharp criticism because he missed the Bharat Bhavan’s 30th anniversary function. He is the chairman of the multi-cultural centre.

Commenting on his absence, he said: “I think the invitation either missed my eyes or did not reach me.”

Inaugurating the one-day art camp, West Bengal Correctional Administration Minister Shankar Chakrabarty said such initiatives will help reform the inmates and give them a means of livelihood when they return to normal life.

“The correctional administration not only aims to reform the inmates but also seeks to provide them sufficient vocational training so that when they return to the mainstream they are adequately qualified to get jobs and live a dignified life,” he said.

Twelve convicts from the Alipore Correctional Home and six inmates of the Alipore Women Correctional Home participated in the event jointly organised by BITM, NGO Flight to Harmony Foundation, and the government.

Prisons in West Bengal are called correctional homes.

Ashok Mandal, serving life term for murder, said painting was not only a way to do something creative, it also helps in driving away negative and depressing thoughts.

“Since 1999, prison has been my house and will continue to be till my death. Whenever I think this I feel helpless, depressed. But after I took up the brush, I have this feeling that may be someday I will return to my own house,” said Mandal as he kept filling colours in the blank canvas.

“This is the first time the inmates are participating in a workshop outside the prison premises. It is a very good initiative and we hope such projects are undertaken on a regular basis,” Inspector General Correctional Services, Ranvir Kumar said.

The convict artists were also taught some new ideas and techniques of art by the BITM faculty.

The Alipore Correctional Home Saturday also became the country’s first prison to house a permanent art gallery. A computer centre was also inaugurated Feb 14 in the prison along with two other correctional homes in the city.

“Why don’t feminists talk to girls from deprived sections? How can you talk of equality when you cannot break the communication lock in your own cadre so that women of all classes are taken seriously? I have seen women from villages who attend big conclaves participating like dolls…their voices are rarely heard,” Pande told IANS in an interview.

“What needs to change now is the woman’s self-perception,” Pande, who is also the chairperson of Prasar Bharati, the public broadcaster, said.

“In my new book, ‘The Other Country: Dispatches From the Mofussil (Penguin-India)’, I have tried to explore the two tectonic plates – rural and urban – colliding and generating energy,” Pande said.

“We are living in interesting times where history is colliding with modernity in so many ways,” the journalist-writer said.

Advocating reforms in education, language, women’s welfare and better communication between cities and villages, Pande said “the prosperity of urban India cannot be realised unless the rural areas release their resources”.

“Rural India often rises in anger against sharing as the rebellion at Singur and the Naxal unrest have proved. Two different cultures exist cheek by jowl. The resentments are age-old forces at work since the Mahabharata. ‘Sui ki barabar ka zameen nahin doonga (I will not give a needle strip of land)’, king Duryodhan had said in the Mahabharata,” Pande said, referring to the conflicts between development and land.

Pande, the daughter of well known Hindi writer Shivani, observed that “villages are another country”.

“We are in denial about our need to understand changes in rural India. Physical changes are taking place very fast in contrast to changes in human nature,” Pande said.

Pande draws the root of the conflict to the time “when India started displacing people for development”. “Displacement creates a backlash throwing up new leaders,” she said.

“Info-tech is a ray of hope because small towns are getting linked to big city ethos through blogspots and social networking,” she said. And Bollywood is becoming a great Indian leveller by producing a Kolaveri D culture.

“The culture of India has been a cluster of small cultures,” Pande said.

The writer advocates a three-language formula to close the rural-urban-mofussil gap.

“Eminent freedom fighter and educationist Triguna Sen had thrown up a three-language formula. He said children should be taught English, their mother tongue and a northern language in south India and a southern language in north India. While the south was honest (they taught their children Bangla and Hindi), the north cheated by offering Sanskrit, a scoring subject to its students,” Pande said.

“I feel that formula should be revived in government schools and in the states,” Pande said.

Bringing out a duality in education, Pande said “today’s Mandalised leaders insisted on teaching children in their mother tongues”.

“But Laloo Prasad sent all his children to a convent school in Ranchi and Mulayam Singh Yadav sent his son to Australia. The poor were dealt a double whammy by denying them the language that would tip scales in good jobs in their favour. We need to come out of this denial,” she said.

Pande said “neither the parents nor teachers in semi-urban and rural areas have language skills and their children are growing up without language,” Pande said.

“Half of the unrest on the campus is caused by lack of communication between students from cities, rural and semi rural areas; between teachers and students and between the economists and the developmentally deprived sections,” she said.

The “Shiv Sainiks are known to beat up V-day revellers”, she said. “If the Shiv Sainiks are allowed to court girls for 15 days, they would become normal citizens,” Pande said pointing out disparities in communication and awareness among youth.

Pande, the author of five books, translated “1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising” by Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar in 2011. She is now translating a book, “Gadar ke Phool”, a history of Avadh 100 years after the 1857 uprising, by Amritlal Nagar.

Biswas, 70, has been a ‘harbola’ or a mimicker for more than four decades. Coined by Rabindranath Tagore, the term harbola is rooted in the Bengali phrase “Harek rokom buli boley je” (one who speaks all tongues).

“There are not many harbolas these days because where do you go to learn the art? I have been into it for four decades but there is neither any school nor a book on the discipline,” he said.

“How can I let the art, which has given me everything, die? Through my book and my academy, both of which I think are first of their kinds in the country, if not in the world, I hope to revive the waning performing art,” said Biswas.

In his book “Harbola Shiksha O Natyashilper Proyog”, which has an introduction by late Tagore scholar from Japan Kazuo Azuma, Biswas uses diagrams and figures to give in-depth details on how to mimic various sounds.

“You cannot put in words the bark of a dog or the sound of a conch shell. So I have made illustrations to show what portion of the mouth, tongue or the throat is to be used and how,” said the harbola.

Biswas got his training from Robin Bhattacharya, one of the pioneers of the art form in the country.

“Bhattacharya got the title of harbola from Tagore himself after he was fascinated to see a young boy of 10 effortlessly mimicking bird cries in his garden. Blessed by Tagore, he went on to became one of the best known exponents of the art,” said Biswas.

Like his guru, the disciple too is now a well-known mimic, performing all over the globe. In his maiden international performance he won the gold award at the Toyama International Youth Theatre Festival in Japan in 1989.

Talking about his West Bengal Harbola Academy, Biswas said: “I, with my guru (Bhattacharya), had opened it in 1985 but very soon it had to be closed for some unavoidable reasons. Now after a lot of efforts it has been reopened and I hope through this institution I will be able to spread the art among youngsters.”

His shows are mostly comedy-based, but at times he also brings in elements of reality in them.

“Last year I performed a small play in Bangladesh about the devastation caused by the (cyclone) Aila (in 2009). It was about a mother who lost her newly born child in the flood,” he said.

“After the show, an elderly woman came to me and gave a Rs.5 note, saying ‘I had lost my grandson the way you just showed. I am happy because through your show I got my baby back even if it was for a few moments’,” said the harbola, flashing the currency note, with moist eyes.

“It’s a sad story, isn’t it? Let me tell you a funny one,” said Biswas, narrating an incident when he acted like a man bitten by a rabid dog and scared away a bunch of hooligans trying to occupy his seat in a train.

“Everything about me is fake, my heart (uses a pacemaker), my teeth, my black hair (dyed) and you can also say my art. You cannot tell whether the bark you just heard was of a dog or mine!”

The exhibition, titled ‘Jashn – Celebrating Life’ is the brainchild of activist and CADD founder Prince Singhal.

It will showcase the works of renowned artists like Anjolie Ela Menon,
Paresh Maity, Jayshree Burman and Gopi Gajwani, to name only a few.
This apart, Kathak exponent Birju Maharaj, sarod exponent Ayaan Ali Khan and some others have been roped in to especially paint a work for the exhibition.

To be held at the Gallerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise De Delhi in central Delhi, the exhibition is a part of the Artist for CADD programme which supports various CADD activities.

“This art show is happening at a time when we are celebrating 12 years of the CADD movement and my association with many of the artists goes back to the days when we had just started our campaign,” Singhal said.

The paintings at the exhibition will be up for sale starting from Rs.15,000 rupees to bring them within the reach of budget customers.

“Another USP of this art show would be a wide display of artworks in the affordable range,” Singhal said.

“For the first time the day would be celebrated jointly at Akhaura checkpost, near here. The programme is set to strengthen the existing ties between the two countries,” Subhrajit Bhattacharjee, editor of Neharika Little Magazine and the brain behind the event, said Monday.

A cultural programme comprising songs, dance and recitations will be performed at the zero point on the border with artistes from both the countries.

Pabitra Kar, member of the Tripura assembly and a co-organiser, said: “We are separated by the border but have a common culture and language on both the sides and now with the observance of the mother tongue day, the Bengali speaking people of the two nations would be reunited.”

“In 1952, Bangladesh’s language movement martyrs who laid down their lives to establish their right to Bengali as a state language during the Pakistani rule, expected to bring Bangladesh and India closer,” Kar said.

The Tripura government’s information and cultural affairs department is also actively supporting the Tuesday’s programme.

International Mother Language Day, first announced by UNESCO Nov 17, 1999, is observed Feb 21 every year worldwide to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

For the Hindus, better known as Kashmiri Pandits, Shivratri is the biggest festival on the calendar. And a scene that played out repeatedly this year in areas dominated by them was Muslims embracing and wishing their Hindu friends.

Some were overwhelmed by the gesture of Kashmiri Muslims who travelled long distances to meet them in their resettlement township Jagti, on the outskirts of Jammu, in the rain and freezing temperatures.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes that it was Arshad, my childhood friend, who came to meet me on this big day of ours,” said Kuldeep Raina.

“Trust me, I am the happiest person today. It seems nothing has changed between us in all these years,” Kuldeep told IANS.

Both Arshad Hussain and Kuldeep belong to village Akoor, near Mattan in Anantnag district of south Kashmir, some 60 km north of Srinagar. But due to militancy, Kuldeep had to leave for a camp in Jagti years ago.

Arshad said: “I knew Kuldeep was living here and I thought there could be no better day than this festival when I should visit my friend.”

For Kashmiri Hindus, nightlong prayers at home are followed by a visit to the temple on Shivratri. They also host a feast for friends the next day, known as Salam.

Until militancy broke out in 1989, it was common for Kashmiri Pandits to host lunches for their Muslim friends and neighbours. The Muslims used to look forward to delicacies like fish and mutton balls.

But all that changed after community members migrated to Jammu and other parts of the country.

More than 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits had come out of the valley, many of whom are still settled in Jammu. The Pandits have since suffered from a sense of injustice and persecution.

But the anger against militants and their sympathisers whom the Pandits blame for the forced life in exile – as Kashmiri Pandit leaders like Ashwani Churngoo call it – seems to have subsided, going by the sentiment among community members.

For instance, Mushtaq Ahmad waited for a Kashmiri Pandit family outside Ranishewar temple, housing an icon of Lord Shiva, in the rain, just to hug his friends and congratulate them.

Mushtaq, who is a government employee, went to the home of his friend Sushil Kaul in Janipur, but was told by neighbours that the family had gone to the temple. He headed straight for the shrine.

When Sushil and Mushtaq sighted each other, they couldn’t stop embracing. Tears rolled down their cheeks, retelling the story of two friends being back together on this “bor doh” or dig day.

Perhaps what made a difference this year was that many Kashmiri Pandit youths could go back to the valley after being specially recruited under the Prime Minister’s relief and rehabilitation package programme.

Community members surmised that the measure may have gone a long way in helping bring down the walls of mistrust and encouraging the two communities to reverse the clock to their good old days when they shared each other’s joys and sorrows.

Arshad and Kuldeep would certainly testify to that after a meal partaken together Monday afternoon.