august
07 programmes
friday
3rd august
7
pm ‘Akkarmashi’ – ‘The Bastard’
a solo performance in Hindi by Lokesh Jain
Based on the autobiography of Sharan Kumar Limbale,
the Dalit writer from Mahahrashtra, this
is a first-person account of his struggle
against poverty, deprivation, discrimination and
violence. It captures the dehumanizing impact of
caste oppression in Hindu society. A powerful narrative
touching story of an illegitimate child, born out
of an unconventional and socially immoral relationship.
The writer tries to establish his identity by questioning
the entire social system which perpetuates oppression
and discrimination.
The
autobiography with a beautiful interplay of emotions
and reality, of self-struggle, traumatic contradictions,
anti establishment terrorized psyche and social uncertainty
is portrayed by Lokesh Jain to bring out the suppressed
anger, inferiority complex and anguish of the illegitimate
child in the context of the present social set up
and caste system.
Lokesh
Jain is a theatre artist with 17 years of intensive
experience with diverse theatre forms having completed
an advanced diploma course in acting under Ebrahim
Alkazi. He has worked on scripting, designing and
directing plays. His solo pieces have been showcased
in NSDs National theatre festival. He is a founder
member and creative director of Jamghat an organization
of and for street children.
saturday
4th august
7
pm The Kothas of Lucknow: courtesans
from the time of Wajid Ali Shah to the time of Mayawati
a talk & recreation by Veena Oldenburg
The dancing and singing girls of Lucknow
in the mid 1800s were the largest tax payers in the
city of Lucknow.
They owned property houses, orchards, manufacturing
and retail establishments and even in the 1970s and
80s were still powerful. alluring, independent, bold
and even wild. In conversations with Veena these
extraordinary women unveiled the secrets of
the kotha, sharing with her their clandestine,
devious, and intimate ploys for survival and economic
independence, challenging the very respectability
of societys central pillarmarriage. Like the Geishas
of Japan, they could speak keenly about
contemporary politics, the law, and had connections
among the local power elite and were equally well
informed about
the history of their city. However in their
proven
involvement in the siege of Lucknow
and the rising against colonial rule in 1857, these
women, though patently non-combatants, were penalized
for their clandestine instigation of and pecuniary
assistance to the rebels. The British had deliberately
muddied the truth about
their kothas in order to denigrate nawabi
culture, and to gobble up Awadh.
Their
decline was irreversible both in British India and
specially with the inherited Victorian morality of
independent . Their
salons for instruction in etiquette, the art of conversation,
appreciation
of Urdu poetry, and even the finer points of love-making
disappeared. They had been the recognized preservers
and performers of the high culture of the court and
actively shaped the developments in Hindustani music
and Kathak dance styles. Their style of entertainment
was widely imitated in other Indian court cities,
and their more recent influence on the Hindi films
is all too patent. The popularity of Indian films
rests chiefly on the songs and dances in them. The
very notion of the romantic musical owes its inspiration
to the style of entertainment at the kotha, and several
tawaifs and their daughters, including Jaddan Bai
and her later famous daughter Nargis, found work in
Bombay
in the budding film industry.
Veena Talwar Oldenburg grew up tramping around in
the alleys of Lucknow
trying to capture the ineffable essence of this multi-layered
city. She is the author of the book Lifestyle
as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow
in Contesting Power. She tries to recreate this
evening, not only with words of which she is a master
but with music, a little kathak, some poetry, lots
of imagination, the atmosphere and the mood of a bygone
era. The audience is encouraged to come in Lakhnavi
chikan kurtas, dupattas and any traces of Awadhi culture
that they can get.
My bio is simple - Native of Lucknow,
Professor of History at City University of New York.
Taught at Columbia
U and Sarah Lawrence. And books - the Making of Colonial
Lucknow, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural
Crime. Now an anthology on Lucknow
"Shaame-e-Awadh".
Will be in bookstores within weeks. Work in progress:
"The Making of the Oriental Debauch: Musings
on the Politics of Decadence in the age of Empire
building."
friday 10th august
7
pm Steidl presents ‘Bombay Jadoo’ by Betsy
Karel – Book release, talk and slide presentation
Inspired by contemporary Indian authors, Betsy Karel
went to Bombay
to find visual equivalents of the humanity, humor,
mystery and psychological energy of these writers'
stories. Unlike many photographers who are drawn to
the cacophony of urban , she focused, often in an
intensely personal way, on individuals going about
their everyday street lives in this singular city.
Patiently waiting amidst the bustle of Chor Bazaar
Bombay, home to
more people than the entire
continent of , she captures a poignant lyricism in
the familiar. As individuals transform public spaces
into private places, forging islands of intimacy,
she encounters the truejadoo (magic) of Bombay
and its people. To accompany the photographs, the
globally acclaimed author Suketu Mehta has written
a companion piece about his boyhood in Bombay.
The book also includes an excerpt from Ardashir Vakils
Beach Boy.Betsy
Karel, born in New York City in 1946, now lives in
Washington,
DC. She
worked as a photojournalist in the 1970s and early
80s, winning awards. In 1998, after an absence of
15 years, she returned to photography to participate
in The Way Home, a book and national exhibition on
homelessness in .
During the past nine years, Karel has made numerous
trips to Mumbai, creating the images in Bombay Jadoo.
Her photographs are in the permanent collections of
the Museum
of Fine Arts,
Houston, Yale
University
Art Gallery,
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the John F. Kennedy
Library.
'Research.Design.Events.Publicity Jackfruit
Research & Design Pvt. Ltd'.
www.steidlville.com
Exploring
Personalities
The
human mind always needs to put people into boxes
and categories. But most people refuse to fit
in just one category and by the very nature
of what they do, refuse to be boxed. The aim
of this series is to explore the wonderful multi
faceted personalities who contribute in many
different ways to make their work, their lives
and the lives around them richer and more meaningful.
One such personality is
Sagari Chhabra often described as a film maker
due to the 15 documentary films that she has
made but equally a poet, a journalist, a writer
and a passionately committed human being writing
on the issues of communal violence, hunger,
human and womens rights. We
explore her work over the next few months. This
month as a film maker with her documentar
z y film Asli Azaadi. Next month as a passionate
poet and then an exploration of her work as
a fiction film maker and writer.
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monday 13th august
7
pm ‘ASLI AZAADI’ (True Freedom) (45 minutes)
Documentary film written, directed and presented by
Sagari Chhabra
Instead of the state celebrations that will take place
marking the occasion of s
60th anniversary as a free nation on August
15th, see this moving oral history of some
of the women who participated in this struggle. The
film is infused with the music of the times and is
shot at some of the sites famous for their association
with this history. Meet some of the 1,500 volunteers
of the Rani Jhansi regiment, the first all-womens
military wing in the world. Defend until the last
man and the last bullet was Netaji s evocation to
his troops and the stories related by surviving members
of this regiment speak of their courage and tenacity
through battle, bombing raids and interrogations.
Meet also some of the volunteers who participated
in Mahatma Gandhi s satyagraha, described in his own
words as the vindication of truth not by infliction
of suffering on the opponents but on ones self. If
it is to be blood that is shed, let it be our own.
Meet also the women of the Bengal famine, Partition
and the womens movement in contemporary .
The
film will be followed by a discussion with the director.
Sagari
Chhabra is a writer, poet & film-director. She
has written and directed fifteen documentary films
and one fiction film, winning five national and international
awards. Her work primarily centres around social issues;
Global Warming (United Nations World Food
Day award) Now I Will Speak (on violence against women
- awarded by the International Association of Women
In Radio & Television & NIFA awards of excellence
in production & direction)Tatva (Essence) (a fiction
film about a woman in search for her identity in contemporary
India, awarded a National award & selection in
Indian Panorama) Hunger In The Time Of Plenty (starvation
deaths at the time of food surplus), The Word and
the World on Indian writers and several others. The
films have been screened at festivals in Oslo,
Copenhagen, Miami,
Melbourne, Perth,
Adelaide, Kuala
Lumpur and several other places
across the world.
thursday 16th august
7
pm “Eruption of a Volcano: Spectacle of Nature
and Human Catastrophe”: a power point presentation
& talk by Prof. Stephen Sparks
The
Eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano on
the island
of Montserrat
in the Eastern Caribbean started in 1995 and still
continues over 12 years later. The eruption was the
first since the island was colonized in 1632 and has
been intensively studied as a consequence. Two-thirds
of the island is now uninhabitable and over 8000 of
the original population of 12000 has had to leave.
The eruption is typical of the kind of volcanism that
occurs where tectonic plates collide. The magma is
gas-rich and very viscous making it explosive and
unstable. Many people have been saved through the
partnership of scientists from the Montserrat Volcano
Observatory, the UK Government and Montserrat Government.
Dr
Sparks talks about natural disasters with an emphasis
on Montserrat.
He
is a Research Professor and Director of the Centre
for Environmental and Geophysical Flows in the University
of Bristol
and leads their research effort in volcanology and
geological fluid mechanics. His recent publications
are Volcanic Activity: Frontiers and Challenges in
Forecasting, Prediction, and Risk Assessment, Axisymetric
collapses of granular columns. (Journal of Fluid
Mechanics), Forecasting Volcanic Eruptions (Earth
and Planetary Science Letters Frontiers in Earth
Science Series), Periodic behavior in lava dome eruptions
(Earth and Planetary Science Letters).
sunday
19th august
19
August 2007 - VISIBLE MASS: a meghadutam scrapbook
A
video and live performance piece based on Kalidasa's
Meghadutam
Devised by Rehaan Engineer. Featuring Shanaya Rafaat
& Karan Makhija
3
Shows at 3.30 pm, 6.00 pm, 8.00 pm (Duration: 1 hour
approximately
The
performance will constitute a deliberately idiosyncratic
interrogation of the 121 stanzas of Kalidasa's sanskrit
lyric monody of parted lovers.
Within the piece, the classic text's precise triangulation
of "lover / messenger / absent beloved"
will be renegotiated and mapped onto the loose triangle
created by the male performer / the female performer
/ the technology.
Important subsidiary notions that generate the situational
matrix of the original text without being explicitly
addressed by it - notions of selfhood and absence,
of desire and dependence, of the actual v/s imagined
worlds - will be examined through the personal memories
of the participants as well as refracted through a
series of shorter secondary texts freely plundered
from the work of the contemporary American poet Jorie
Graham.
A parallel process of historical excavation and re-imagining
focused around the famous trial of Martin Guerre in
Toulouse in January 1559 might also enter the ambit
of the final performance.
Notes
on writers:
Kalidasa,
dramatist and epic and lyric poet, writer of Meghadutam,
Shakuntala and Ritusamharam; probably
lived and wrote at the close of the first millennium
B.C., though a date later by much as five centuries
has been assigned to him by some scholars.
Jorie
Graham (b. 1950) is the author of eight collections
of poetry including The Dream of the Unified Field,
which won the Pultizer prize. She currently lives
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard
University.
wednesday
22nd august
7
pm ‘Difficult Conversations’ –
a review by Amita Virmani
Difficult
conversations are the ones we dread getting into,
can't get out of, and always turn out badly. This
talk is based on the book "Difficult Conversations:
How to Discuss What Matters Most" by Douglas
Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. The authors working
on the Harvard Negotiation Project say that in fact
there are three conversations going on in every difficult
discussion: the factual or "What Happened?"
conversation; the feeling conversation; and the identity
conversation. The identity and feeling conversation
is a subtext to the overt conversation. It deals with
our unspoken feelings about the topic and the threat
to our sense of self that lurks beneath the surface
This
evening Amita Virmani discusses the authors solutions
to these problems. So if you find you tend to avoid
difficult conversations then listen to how not to
create permanent rifts and have conversations which
result in positive outcomes.
Amita
Virmani has over 25 years of experience as head of
human resources with several organizations and currently
works as a trainer, coach and consultant through her
organization The Individual Team.
She
has a Masters in Psychology from Delhi
University
and an MBA from McGill
University
in Montreal,.
She recently trained as a trainer in Negotiation in
Harvard University
and in Difficult Conversations in the. She coaches
individuals in life challenging situations, career
coaching and cross cultural coaching. She also offers
training in soft skill areas for managers and leaders
in organizations. Amita has worked as a trainer, coach
and HR consultant with several organizations as well
as with individuals from various professions as clients.
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