Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein, Yeh Khayal Aata Hai...

Con or Bust: ATTACK OF THE ALIEN ROBOTS edition

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:56:50 GMT

So.... remember I was saying something about further awesomeness from Comic Con? Well, it all went down something like this:

thedilettante: What ho, shall we go get pretty things from the Blaft stall to auction on Con or Bust, since their Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction seems to be doing well?

Me: Er, sure. You will have to buy, though, since I have already spent everyone else's money.

thedilettante: ::eyes me dubiously::

Me: People gave me some extra dosh to cover shipping for the books I got signed from the Jai Lit Fest for Con or Bust and I went and spent it on MOAR BOOKS, because how could I have foreseen that Comic Con would strike before the auction closed?

thedilettante: Er. Yes. Well, I shall irresponsibly encourage you to use your Rs. 40 Campfire voucher to buy EVEN MOAR BOOKS.

Me: You are a horrible human being. Shall we to the Blaftness?

thedilettante: Ahoy. Incidentally one of the Blaft publishers was wearing a Batman sari yesterday.

Me: I. Whut. I think my heart just grew three sizes at the thought of there being a Batsari in this our fallen and degenerate world.

thedilettante: We are in accord about this. What ho Rakesh (one half of Blaft)! Deepa, explain it all to them.

Me: Well, um. There's this thing... con_or_bust. For, um, people of colour. Which you could be too, if you wanted, even if you're being brown in brownlandia and not calling yourselves 'of colour'. For the purposes of con-attendage, I mean. Um.

thedilettante: Let me clarify. We want your books. To sell on the internet.

Rakesh: Sure! You want Kumari Loves A Monster? Signed by Rashmi, AKA other half of Blaft AKA Batsari Lady?

Us: Yes!

Rakesh: She's not here now to sign 'em, but you can pick them up tomorrow at our bookstore event where we will probably show up without any books since they will have all sold out here at Comic Con. Meanwhile, do you want more stuff?

Us: ... Like what?

Rakesh: Oh, hmmm, well, we had these master artist wrought one-of-a-kind engravings of robots on palm leaves lying around...

Us: ::jaws drop (possibly also some drool)::

Rakesh: Cool, you can have it for free, hope your auction works out!

thedilettante: (sotto voce) Yeah, remember what I told you about them being terribly sweet people who keep giving things away and therefore aren't in the best place as a business?

Me: idontcareomgicanteven ANCIENT INVADING ROBOTS ONNA PALM LEAF!!1111!

thedilettante: You do remember that you have to give it away, right? You can't actually hang it in your bedroom with a diya and an agarbatti in front of it and garland it with paper flowers and tell everyone you are doing pooja to the Maateshwari Jahaj as I can clearly see you planning to.

Me:... Well, I could argue that letting something like this leave the shores of our beloved motherland in exchange for filthy lucre is like that jerk who handed over the Kohinoor. And also the Peacock Throne.

thedilettante: Show it to everyone else while we are waiting for our momos so that they will prevent you from Stealing From Charity.

Collective Bong Contingent, in one voice: D'AWWWW ROBO POTO CHITRO!

And so, my friends, we have up for auction, only till this Sunday:

One (1) Yantra-Purusha Tala Pattachitra (machine-man palm-leaf engraving),
Two (2) autographed copies of Kumari Loves a Monster, and
Twelve (12) Indian comic books and graphic novels, some autographed.

I haven't read any of them yet, but here's my one-line reason for buying them:

Odayan - Kalaripayattu-fighting anti hero vigilante in Kathakali face-paint!
Daksha - Dystopic underworld meets Kalidas's mythology!
The Treasured Thief - Adventure in ancient Egypt with Sachin Nagar doing Disney-meets-Avatar the Last Airbender art!
In Defence of the Realm - Story set in ancient Harappa by an Indian archeologist!
Auto Pilot - Yama has to take an auto, the autowallah has to take Yama!
Whose Development - journalism via comics via grassroots activists!
Parallel Lines - social justice narratives through pretty line art!
Chairman Meow and the Protectors of the Proletariat - Bright colours + satire by Abhijeet Kini!
Uud Bilaw Manus - An Otter Man fights crime in Beehar while speaking Fauxpuri!
Widhwa Ma Andhi Behen - The Widowed Mom and Blind Sister take on Bechdel testing!
Retrograde - Dystopian future fic written by desis, peopled with desis!
Milk & Quickies - Short shorts by the guy who dreamed up Angry Moushi!

Also still up for grabs:
One (1) autographed copy of Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh.
One (1) set of 3 (Three!) autographed books comprising the GameWorld trilogy by Samit Basu.
and ~~a partridge inna pear tree~~ a blog post by me.

con_or_bust is hovering at around $5,000 right now, folks, and the target is $12,000.

I'd like to be able to link some of the fans I've been meeting at Comic Con India and Jaipur Lit Fest to it, actually, and hopefully there will be enough funds to help at least one Indian fan get to some international convention. Because it's always nicer when people can move across borders the way books have.

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Some Notes From the Comic Bazaar

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:18:31 GMT

So then, I met the whole entire world at Comic Con. No, really. Meeting swatkat and thedilettante was planned, even though it involved me going there yesterday again after Saturday's exhaustive recce. But we kept bumping into more odd and sundry people we knew, because I suppose the only thing better than a weekend at Dilli Haat is a weekend with Dilli Haat with Amar Chitra Katha. I also met not one, but two former neighbours, thus proving that no matter how far we may roam, the haat is where our heart is.

**

The cosplayers were, to a superhero, adorable. I'm so used to keeping my fannishness online and physically invisible that it gave me a moment's cognitive dissonance to see people so openly out. Poison Ivy turned out to be the classmate of my brother's classmate, and apparently I was only the second person that day to recognise her. Someone had the temerity to call her Tinkerbell. What is this world coming to when Disney's franchise steamroller crushes one of the most brilliant (and femmeslashy! Pam/Harley OTP!) Bat villains into obscurity?

There was also a baby Batman. At some point baby Batman was being dandled on the lap of an indulgent Uncle Two-Face, which is just crying out for the elseworld in which Harvey raises Bruce after the Alley Incident and thus grows up to be a well-adjusted tights-shunning young man whose nascent man pain shrivelled up and died in the faces of his coin-flipping faux father.

**

Of course, there was slightly creepy Superman. I mean, I am of the opinion that Superman inherently as a concept is creepy and bland at the same time, but this was a slightly different weirdness.

For a start, he had forgotten to wear the red outer underpants. As the evening became colder, it quickly became apparent that he had seemingly forgotten to wear any inner underpants. This was something that inevitably became somewhat of a talking point as we ran into people we vaguely knew.

It really didn't help that Superbulge was going around chatting up young women. "Have you seen Superman's crotch?" followed by "How can I avoid it?" was the new small talk while sitting at tables in the food stalls that put one right at lap level. I took the opportunity to provide An Educational Moment regarding dance belts and support thereof.

**

I must also give props to the young lady who was a character from Naruto. I couldn't see any manga distributers in the stalls. I know quite a lot of anime gets aired on Cartoon Network and Pogo and whatever other kids channels are out there, but I'm not sure how much manga gets released as a tie-in product.

There was one guy who was selling 'the first Indian manga'. I felt it was not the appropriate time to have a discussion about the oxymoronic nature of that term, and how, really, were we then going to give Hollywood the permission to make 'the first American Bollywood movie'?

There was, however, a Real Life Mangaka at the con. Blaft launched Yukichi Yamamatsu's Stupid Guy Goes To India, translated into English by Kumar Sivasubramanian. The mangaka sat next to Blaft publisher Rakesh Khanna, and at various intervals, Rakesh would stand up and read along (in hesitantly accented Hindi) a little announcement about having come from Japan and being a comic maker, while Yukichi San nodded along. It looked like a zen master had built a robot to do his bidding.

Of course I would not be surprised to find robots at the Blaft stall, given their stated avowal to obliterate literary fiction entirely from the face of the earth, by way of 'encouraging people to read comics about extraterrestrial robots, bleeding lizards, exploding donkeys, and defecating cyclopses'.

**

Actually, my second encounter with the Blaft phenomenon was even more surreal than the first. I've had a crush on the publishing house since I saw their cover for the first Tamil Pulp Fiction Anthology, and every succeeding thing they've put out has only heightened my admiration for their design and aesthetic sense, all without having read a single book of theirs. Yes, I am shallow, I fall for publishers based on their covers.

On Sunday, since I was accompanying thedilettante, who had a bright idea related to con_or_bust, things got much more strange and wonderful. (Including an communication via proxy with thirdworldghettovampire for which I am pre-emptively sorry for, Kuzhali!) But I shall speak of more about this anon, when I have pictures. Er, of things. Pretty, shiny things. (Not people, because I don't do the people pictures on the internets things, and would very much appreciate the courtesy being returned.)

**

Speaking of pictures, I think I managed to hit every stall, and couldn't find a single female artist. And I don't think I saw any female writers, either. Which is double weird, because two of the better known Indian graphic novels are written and drawn by women-- Parismita Singh's The Hotel at the End of the World and amrutapatil's wonderful Kari. (Which Harper Collins seems to have allowed to go out of print. WHY?!)

So instead I asked at every table where freebies were being handed out for something featuring the women characters. The pickings were unsurprisingly slim. I got a poster of a Princess Lunestra, from a forthcoming animated series called The Legends of Aveon 9. She's blonde in my poster, but was brunette in the stall's display. I asked one of the dudes at the stall and he muttered something about the vagaries of screen printing. On the website she's dark haired, though, so I might have to get a marker and recolour her hair for my own satisfaction.

Chetan Sharma, the director of Tripura, actually said that there was no scope for women characters in the film because he was trying to stick to the original source. Which, whatever dude, but OMG THE ART! ::flails:: It's so pretty! Check out Shiva getting down with his badass Pashupati self!

So the film apparently airs at random, unannounced times on Cartoon Network, but the DVD is being held up to be released along with the graphic novel, which was supposed to be out in Jan, but has been delayed till October. Chetan said the graphic novel will be closer to his artistic vision than the film, and I am all for delays if they mean taking time over lovingly crafted artwork. It really is stunning. Hurrah for pauranic retellings that are not the Ramayan or Mahabharat!

**

On the other hand Ari Jayaprakash apologised for running out of prints of his women characters, and said he'd send me one. I'm interested in reading The Kuru Chronicles, which wasn't actually launched since it wasn't ready, but which again, had gorgeous, starkly vivid art on display. Plus it has a female protag called Dakini from Sonagachi taking on dystopian Kolkata, written by (lady author!) anishasridhar. It's going to be self-published, which seemed to be a pretty popular option given the number of independent comic makers with a stall to sell their single title. These ranged from the print version of the webcomic Sufi Comics to Aakash Anand's abstract comic. On the one hand, this means that artists can ensure that the paper quality is exactly what they need for their precious babies; on the other hand, they may not always be able to do quality control for the vagaries of the printing process. Which leads to things like the first volume of a series being printed with blurry lettering.

**

Speaking of said series -- Ravanayan has one more issue to go, so I thought I'd wait to read it. The art was decent, with a sort of punk rock meets Gotham vibe, but I have to say, all these Ravan takes are disappointing me. They trot out the old Shiv-bhakt, Indra-conquerer anti-hero shtick, but they never actually transgress the Valmiki version. And this when there are alternatives canons where he wins Sita. And how about maybe unpacking some of that Aryan-Dravidian toxic demonisation thing? And also, noble but ultimately tragically self-defeating Ravana is three shades fairer than your ordinary rakshasa (who is always dark skinned) but never as fair as Rama (who is never dark skinned).

Krishna wept, people. What is it going to take to get us some actual raincloud coloured avatars around here? Dark-skinned topless men are pretty, just check out the mighty fine nubile gents on your local fishing boat. And considering how many comic publishers are operating out of Chennai and Bengaluru, there is really no excuse for this blatant colourism to continue, ACK be damned.

**

Ravana: Roar of the Demon King was the other one. Lush, fluid art that looked like manga meets Raja Ravi Verma. It was at the Campfire stall, which was a bit of a revelation for me.

See normally, I grew up looking at adaptations of classics with a jaundiced eye. Rewriting Little Women to fit a 30 page picture book format was my idea of blasphemy. I learned really early on to spot the dread words 'abridged' on the copyright page and put the mutilated thing away. But somewhere along the line fandom taught me to appreciate adaptations (especially cinematic ones) as one does an AU fic. Love it or leave it, the original is still there unsullied.

And so when I saw Campfire's graphic novel retellings of Kim and The Jungle Book, I was deeply amused. I think it's kind of cute that an author like Kipling gets reworked by Indian artists, who turn the end of Kim into a straight up Bodhisattva tale. And their artwork and production values are all uniformly top notch. I became an especial fan of the chameleon artistry of Sachin Nagar, who went from the Ravan book to a Disney-pop style for The Treasured Thief and then to the gritty sketches of Photo Booth.

**

Outside the Campfire stall a young lady was offering a lucky dip, with monopoly money type discount coupons. When I closed my eyes and looked away and pulled out a Rs. 20 coupon, she immedietly frowned sympathetically and told me to try again. So I did, nobly resisting the temptation to cheat and pick up the folded Rs. 50 coupon which a staffer had just tossed back into the box to be reused. thedilettante and I both ended up with Rs. 40, which, alas, they did not allow us to combine on one book.

I suspect that my sneaky plan to amass Rs. 100 discount vouchers from the inkfruit stall by way of asking my brother and his friends to go and retrieve them will similarly fail. Woe. For I saw a remarkable number of covetable T shirts. It seems (whodaa thunk?) that graphic designers are close kin to animators and artists and various drawing-wallahs, and so there was all sorts of delectable merchandising on display, from a kolaveri t shirt so that you can continue to annoy everyone, to a Super Kudi mug.

**

On the first day, we tried to track down the comic where the awesome superaunty in the giant banner greeting us on the entrance was from. We failed; it turns out she's Super Mummy, and only exists on a coffee mug with a washing line of superundies flapping valiantly behind her.

Then I managed to get confused by another aunty, compounded by the fact that the artist was responsible for the crowd illustrations in the background of the aforementioned poster. His Aunty was scowling and visible only on coasters and magnets. But he gave me her backstory - she's called Angry Moushi, because her last name is Angre.

"Heh, I bet she lives in a chawl in Khar," I said.

"Yeah! Why, are you from Khar?" he asked.

"No... but one of my cousins lives there..."

Obviously, it turns out Abhijeet Kini is friends with my cousin. The arm of the Mumbaikar is long and many tentacled.

(koyal and noldo, I have told Abhijeet that Angry Moushi needs her own comic book, or Someone Will Have To Answer For It. JAI AUNTISTAN!)

**

The Comic Con was apparently presented 'in association with' (read: funded by) Disney and The Avengers. And yet I barely registered their presence. There was one double stall dedicated to a flat screen TV repeating the Avengers trailer over and over again, all 1 minute 30 seconds of it, and since I've been avoiding the fandom, it took staring at the cut out for me to realise that the Marvel behemoth has managed to make a multi-superhero movie featuring six white dudes and one white lady who was the only one to not get a movie of her own first.

Meanwhile thedilettante had a righteous rant about Disney getting rid of the lady from the title of Burrough's A Princess of Mars. The John Carter stall kept running a bunch of contests, and one of them involved holding a sword straight out parallel to the ground for five minutes. A petite young mom was competing as we passed by, and everyone was just staring silently at her. So of course we took it upon ourselves to cheer mightily for her, and were duly pleased that though her arm was trembling by the end of it, she won.

Actually, I wonder if Disney missed the memo. One single stall focussing on a Hollywood blockbuster when they have characters like the Princess brigade and the Mouse to pimp out and redefine copyright laws over? Looks like they were thinking this was supposed to be a knock-off version of the San Diego Comicon, or some other adult-fanboy oriented affair. I am meanly pleased that all the kiddies will go back clutching Chacha Choudhary and The Adventures of Timpa instead.

**

I think choosing to host it at Dilli Haat was a cool idea. No, it's not a convention, but why should it be? I like the idea of not going down the geek subculture hotel ballroom route, and instead turning cosplay into part of a semi-public mela. People bring their 4 year old to Dilli Haat regardless of her complete disinterest in Ikat saris and Madhubani lampshades; why not apply the same inclusive bazaar aesthetic to comic book marketing.

There's one sentence I agree with in this article:

The graphic novel market in India is a niche one and the real challenge for creators and publishers is to devise ways to expand the reader base. One of the pitfalls that the industry would do well to avoid is the easy construction of the intended reader as a comic addict and the super hero-mythology fanboy, and of comic-reading as a groovy sub-cultural activity.

I think smooshing together all the various kinds of sequential art into a haat is a great idea. I missed seeing Navayana's titles there, and Tara Books' exquisite picture books. I think there's a space for them at this kind of Comic Con, where you can bring your kids, and the graphic nudity is as commonplace and unfetishised as any aghori baba at a kumbh mela.

And I think it's kind of emblematic that one of swatkat's friends ended up spending all her money on a really pretty tussar sari from one of the regular Dilli Haat stalls instead. Like most of the stuff on display at Comic Con, the Dilli Haat shoppables are expensive, pretty things made by Indian artists, which you can admire over a plate of momos and kesar kaava from the wazwan stall.

Even superheroes are best served up hot with easy access to momos.

**

Apparently there was also a whole programming track with phrang comic BNFs and all. There were TOO MANY PEOPLE for me to notice. The kids were the worst; you'd be swimming through the ocean of humanity and feel them lurking underwater ready to mumble at your calves like baby sharks.

I did overhear one set of gentlemen who were doing a powerpoint presentation on RPGs though. Full marks for effort, dudes! May you be blessed with many new fanboys and girls to game with.

The final quote is courtesy thedilettante,who reports:

A Girl, in front of a superhero: Those aren't man boobs! ::poke, poke:: Those are synthetic!

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Pre-Mela Day 7: Books Are For The Reader (Melawale: the Book Bloggers)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:32:26 GMT

Seven posts in seven days! \o/ I am not a complete and total and not-a-single-example-to-prove-otherwise failure! It is nice to have proof of this sometime.

People have been asking for recs, and I have been cringing from those comments and ignoring them ::waves guiltily to y'all::

Back when I was doing the features writer gig and selling my soul writing about sunglasses shops and British pop stars, I swore to myself never to do reviews. For dance and theatre, I managed mostly; I covered the event, but walked a line that was probably visible only to me on this side of critiquing it. With books, I did write a couple for the kids' page but on the whole I steered clear. Because reviewing, to me, is Taking A Stance. And having enough confidence in one's opinion to state it publicly. In print, which means it's there forever, because ain't no editor going to agree to print a retraction to the effect of "In regards to review printed three years and two days ago, the reviewer wishes to change their opinion of the book based on blog posts from the author that indicate the sexism was, indeed, intentional".

I am not, however, the sort of open-minded person who manages to not have opinions about things until she is educated enough for them to be well-informed. I have Thoughts and Feelings about everything, and with vehemence and caps-lock! So I enjoy talking about books a lot; I just don't know where and how to go about it.

Because I am, for the most part, a terrible reviewer. I can write critiques of books I loathe, on the principle that everyone should be warned off reading them, and people will read spoilers of bad books without caring. When it comes to good books though, I am a spoiler fanatic, so my advice mostly consists of "This book, you must read it! It has a thing, which you will like, and I also really liked some other stuff, which we can talk about after you have finished it!" I suspect this autocratic and high-handed attitude came from having younger brothers who listened to mY "read this now" or "you won't get it yet, wait a bit" fiats with a meekness that I almost certainly did not deserve.

Books I am not certain about are the worst; I wish to warn people about their flaws, but what if I scare someone away from a book they would like, and the world is denied a Book Being Read which is sort of like not clapping your hands even though you believe in fairies.

I much prefer to talk about books to people after they have read them, so that we can squee over the good parts and yell at the bad ones, and my smart friends can dig up blog posts that explain what happened in that plot line that I could not understand.

So talking about books with friends is fun. But taking on the responsibility of reviewing or reccing is scary. And doubly and triply so when the recs are cross-cultural. Apart from my defensiveness about what the book and the rec might say about the culture, and how the reader might interpret the book, and if this is the One Book they are going to base their opinion of Indian women, or children, or elephants on, then what am I doing, flail, etc... there is also the problem of me really, really not wanting to be considered any sort of authority to be reccing in the first place.

Two nights ago I was having a pre-Jaimela get-together with some smashing lady-people, and I found myself asking Who or What Is That of every second reference to a book, author, event or song. I vastly enjoy being in the company of people who know better and more than me, since I find learning to be a lot more fun than teaching. Which is the reason I expect I will have a good time at this mela. As one friend said, it will be four days of practising active listening.

All of which is to bring me to the last Melawalas and Walis. People who do talk about books, and do it with a craftsmanship I can only admire from afar. Because while fests like this do tend to revolve around The Author, I much prefer centring The Reader's experience. And I'm very happy to find Indian readers talking about Indian books in places where I can find them.

Some of them, like Chandrahas Choudhury have published novels of their own (which I haven't read, so I ignore, and anyway, my fond memories of his reviews are the pre-novel Ultra Brown blogging days). A LOT of them are now professional reviewers for mainstream media. And that brings its own elements of collusive circle-jerking to it. Socialising in person with authors and publishers (and other reviewers) doesn't always 'taint the purity' of reviews, but I do find that sometimes passion gets diluted by prudence.

And I certainly don't agree with all their opinions and politics. Nor do I uniformly think that they are qualified appropriately for every subject they talk about.

But they do talk. And write. And do it regularly, and with skill, and with a love for reading and readers, and with a knowledgeable discernment of books.

Nilanjana at akhondofswat and kitabkhana
Supriya at roswitha and LiveMint
Aishwarya at Practically Marzipan and bluelullaby
Chandrahas at middlestage

These are the people on my RSS feed reader who'll be there at jailitfest, some on panels, some running around chasing interviews in between attending them. I believe they are all on twitter, so those of you into that new-fangled instant discourse system, can probably get vicarious mela-baazi from their tweets. (If I had the power, I would deem the official hashtag for the fest to be #jaimela, for the dual pun of jhamela and jaimala, but alas, I am a voiceless prole.) You can also go through their posts, get some recs if you like.

Meanwhile, I am offline for the next week, in the company of people more bookish, opinionated and verbose than me, which shall be a nice change from quotidian existence. Inshallah I shall arrive at the correct ISBT to catch my bus, since I am not 100% sure if it's the Kashmiri Gate one or the Sarai Kale Khan one, and no one is answering the phones. But of course, why should they? Travel is meant to be an adventure, interspersed with anxiety and surprise.

If you never hear from me again, assume I have been kidnapped by a flying camel, and am off in some haveli somewhere, swathed in leheriya dupattas and being fed Bikaneri bhujia and kachauris every day. No need to send books, because after these four days, I shall probably need a break from them. Send Afghanistani singers instead, equipped with Khusraw bandishes.

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Pre-Mela Day 6: Sadvachan; speaking truth IS power (Melawali: Dayamani Barla)

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:28:46 GMT

I am more attracted to fiction. I am more moved by non-fiction.

There is this distinction between the two; while both can be educational, the escapism possible in fiction carries a different flavour in non-fiction. I have met news-channel addicts whom I would say have not been any more improved by the content of their attention than were it romance novels or murder mysteries. But in an unexpected, sudden confrontation with the world around you, it is knowledge that most equips you to deal with it, and non-fiction, in idealistic theory, carries truth pure as cocaine to infuse your veins with.

The craft of a journalist; that non-fiction writer in the trenches, is so often a crude and impatient means to an end. The event is all; what matter if the town crier has gone hoarse from the repetitive telling of it, or if the messenger has spewed you in spit?

Of course, it does matter, and so we have the attractive news anchors and the personable opinion-makers and the media conglomerates that command respect because of the number of dead trees they can move on the backsides of strategically naked female bodies. We've all seen the Times of India go from a decently proof-read purveyor of actual news to a rumourmongering pimp whoring its columns out to the most desperate to be talked about. By no means is it alone in its shoddy standards or sell-outedness, and mainstream media, by definition, tends to gravitate to the cause of the dominant.

And then, there's people like Dayamani Barla. Or dayamani-barla, as I should say, because the lady has had a blog since 2009, posting both her own pieces and articles about her.

Barla is a journalist out of passion. She spends her own money on the travel and expenses required to get a story; money she earns as the proprietor of a chai adda--something she chose because she thinks of them as hubs for discussion of social issues. She is an adivasi who has watched big business strip her family of their land and rights, and she has educated herself in order to call out the wrongs being done. She writes in Hindi for papers like Prabhat Khabhar, having conciously chosen to stay local despite the higher profile jobs that are no doubt available to her thanks to the awards and recognition she has won.

"The corporate houses are simply ignorant of the concept of the subsistence economy of a tribal society that is rooted in agriculture and forest produce. The natural resources to us are not merely means of livelihood, but our identity, dignity, autonomy and culture have been built on them for generations. These communities will not survive if they are alienated from the natural resources. How is it possible to rehabilitate or compensate us?" (Source)

We are not anti-development, we are just demanding sustainable development. Development of our land on our terms. The government says that it will rehabilitate the villages and give us good compensation. But we say you can neither rehabilitate our history, our identity, our rivers, our mountains nor can you compensate the loss of our environment with your money. We are saying this development should include development of our culture, language, history, identity, rivers, mountains and the development of our people. We want development of our indigenous people living in their native lands. (Source)

There's a lot of hue and cry made about every impotently violence-filled threat raised against celebrity writers like Salman Rushdie. And I firmly believe that even the writers of badly-characterised, ahistorical, religiously-offensive fiction deserve the bodily freedom to do it in. But the disparity in a mass response seems stark especially on a day like today when the English speaking online world has decided to make it clear to all of us how very important U.S.-centric threats to online freedom are, in comparison to the many other issues of other nations which receive no such urgent, vehement response.
One of the mails I got yesterday on a social issues list I'm on was a petition asking for endorsement:

On 14th January, in the evening, a Police Mobile Van of Chutya Thana (Ranchi) landed at her hotel on Club Road, Ranchi, and started to harass her staff asking about her links with anti-social elements. The Sub-Inspector making the 'enquiries' had neither no written permission or order. The following day, when Ms. Barla, met SSP Ranchi, Mr. Saket Kumar at his residence to ask why she was being harassed in this manner, his response was that the allegations were being made on the basis of an complaint and the fact that she participated in the "Free Jiten Marandi Convention”, in which Varavara Rao was also present.

It's the kind of thing she lives with. And while I hope that coming to Jaipur will be a nice break for her, and that the festival has funded her attendance so that she can relax and bask in some well-deserved appreciation and bonhomie with kindred spirits, she is not the sort of journalist who ventures out 'into the wild' for a story and then returns to an urbane, cosmopolitan life of comfort. It is not poverty porn she peddles, but a nuanced, persistent outrage that comes from being a gadfly long accustomed to the flicks and flinches from discomforted asses of the hominid persuasion.

The reason why I got into journalism… [was] to get the voice of the people out. If you're thinking of change, you have to deal with these issues and not run away.[...]"You have to give away comforts in life as a woman journalist. [...] The pen is the way to fight against exploitation nowadays. It's my way to fight. (Source)

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Pre-Mela Day 5: Those Also Serve Who Edit the Copy (Melawali: Urvashi Butalia)

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:32:34 GMT

Overdue because my day has been... a roller coaster. And while the good parts were exceedingly good, the tiresome parts were horrid.

And I must sleep, so very briefly -

Publishers of small presses, who write the solicitation letters, and the forewords, and the press releases to get mainstream media to cover the books. And who act as gatekeepers. Or corporations, I tend to find them selfish and evil. As community businesses and non-profits; they are one of the most passionate, tireless advocates of ideology. Both good and bad, but one of the nicest things about being back in India is that the moral side I choose tends to have better covers.

Melawali is Urvashi Butalia, for getting together with Ritu Menon back in 1984 to set up Kali For Women - an Indian feminist press that has so many fantastic and important publications to their name that looking at their catalogue is like getting a capsule of second-wave South Asian feminism.

The two ladies split up a while ago, and went on to launch their own independent imprints. Butalia's is Zubaan. I have to say, this functional breakup and continued productivity makes me happy as a success story in a world where women are so often portrayed as unable to achieve anything due to infighting.

I'm not always in complete agreement with Butalia, especially when she theorises as a historian, but I just give major, major props for the mentoring and championing she does of women's voices.

Some years ago I published a book on Partition (The Other Side of Silence, Penguin India, 1998). At the time, I argued that it was important for us to remember our past, and not to pretend that it did not exist. While I still hold firmly to this belief, I am now concerned with another question: how do we remember our past? Or, how do we talk about a violent past in such a way that we do not further increase and exacerbate the cycle of violence?

To take a more concrete example, if we were to think seriously about attempting to include a more realistic history of Partition in our textbooks, to teach the young about Partition, how could we do it in a way that would remain true to the ‘facts’ – which include some very violent histories – while ensuring that the violence was neither legitimised, sanitized, nor passed on? Another way of putting it would be: how can we write non violent histories of Partition while ensuring that the violence is not glossed over? While I have asked myself these questions for considerable time, I have no easy answers to them.

(Source)

It's a wonderful thing when publishers cease to be gatekeepers protecting the profits of an obscenely rich conglomerate, and are allowed to be guides to authors finding their way to a public audience.

A few more pieces by Urvashi Butalia
Mona's Story in Granta
It's a Man's War in The Little Magazine

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Pre-Mela Day 4: Homelands and Heartlands (Mela-walla: Girish Karnad)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:59:46 GMT

Wow, how do people produce long, link-researched blogs every day? Just four continuous days of blathering here is knocking me out cold for anything else. Although I did go out and get the zips to various things fixed. Yay! No more five rupee coins falling out of my pouch because it is upside down and thus losing me my bus fare.

Straight into the melawalla today because he puts into practise so many of the ideals I can only preach at myself so far.

But first, I will get this out of the way.

I have a cinematic crush on him. In my defence, I didn't realise the dude was 73 until I googled him for this post. This is because, when I was wee and impressionable, I watched Manthan, not realising it had actually been made before I was even born. Listening to that title track with the 'made by 500,000 farmers' credit still gives me goosebumps. I defy anyone to come out of that viewing experience not having a crush on Girish Karnad's Face of Earnestness and Smita Patil's Eyes. Which does make developing a thing for Prateik Babbar's eyes slightly messy, but that is the magic of cinematic crushes! You can have them on anyone, even dead guys, and not feel skanky or necrophilic.

Anyway! So Girish Karnad, this awesome, lovely man, is an actor of no mean talent. He's still around; he did a great job as the pragmatically corrupt cricket coach in Iqbal. But let's talk about how he became a writer. And not just any writer, but a Konkani lad writing in Kannada. And then going on to translate his own stuff into English. In the gentleman's own words, from this piece on him:

I wanted to be a poet, the greatest ambition in my life. At the age of 22, I realized I would not be a poet, but only a playwright. Then I almost wept. When I was about twenty I got a scholarship to go abroad. I was the first member of the family to go abroad and although the present generation won’t understand it and I am sure many of you who have been through it will also not understand how difficult it was to come from a traditional family and to go abroad because although everyone was thrilled that I was going to England, it involved lots of decisions. Will one come back? Will one stay abroad? Will one get married to a foreign woman and other problems like that.[...] I was very tense and I found ultimately and suddenly on the eve of my leaving for England, that I had started writing and writing a play rather than a poem and it surprised me for three reasons. One thing that it was a play, because I just said I wanted to be a poet. The second thing that surprised me was that I wrote in Kannada because I spent all my teenage years preparing to be an English poet. I wanted to go abroad and be in England, the country where Auden and Eliot lived and shine there etc. and it seemed to me there was nothing to do in India and, therefore, I trained myself to be an English writer. But when it really came to expressing one’s tensions it came off in Kannada and I suddenly realized that I wasted some years of my life practising writing. The third thing that surprised me was that it was a play about a myth, Yayati, from the Mahabharata. All these three things came as a surprise because I had just said, “one thought one was modern alienated from one’s background from one’s language.

And you know, so then he wrote Yayati (which unfortunately I've only read in English translation, never seen performed), and its really clear that he's taking this Greek Drama aesthetic and mashing it up with every single yagshagana he'd grown up seeing.

And after that he wrote Tuglaq. Which, ok, so I've been talking about the Aryan-Dravidian divide. And there's thing thing, right, where colonising languages like English go out and have stories written in them about people who don't speak it. But the more local languages are generally limited to the local landscape. So here was Karnad, writing about Muhammad bin Tughluq (that nutso, visionary ruler) who ruled North India with Farsi and Arabic and Turkish. Karnad started out using the historical research written by Ishwari Prasad, who was writing in English. And he wrote the play in Kannada.

And of course, Tuglaq would go on to be directed with historic success by Ebrahim Alkazi--staged at Purana Qila and translated to Hindi in what would seem its most organic setting. But Vijay Tendulkar did it in Marathi--and considering way religious rhetoric has shaped the Muslim Mughal North vs Hindu Maratha Shivaji and Peshwas et al, this bringing into the fold through translation a play that could only have been created with a pan-Indian cross-cultural syncretism says a lot about how art can sometimes serve as the best way to claim complex identities. It's something that's a characteristic of the navya literary movement in Kannada writing--where writers like Ramachandra Sharma have stories about Black Nigerians and White British characters told to a Brown Indian audience in Kannada. As someone who thinks in both Hindi and Marathi, favouring one over the other unevenly depending on topic and time, the choices he has made about language inspire me.

One of the other reasons I admire the man so much is that he went abroad (as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, if you please), and came back. Salman Rushdie went to England and stayed there even before the fatwa made returning difficult for him. Amitav Ghosh teaches in New York City. Vikram Seth has a house in England. Anita Desai also in the US, Rohinton Mistry in Canada. These are all good, even great writers, who can write a book set in India and make it work well. But they are writing in English, and working with international publishing rates. I don't know how many of their books ever make it into a Telugu translation. But Karnad's plays do.

BR: This is my question as a fellow translator. You write your plays in Kannada and then take them into English. While translating, you take liberties with the originals and change a few expressions in English. But I don’t have to do that when I translate from Kannada into Telugu.

GK: It can’t be helped. English is not our language. A few idioms and expressions don’t exist in English. The changes are made to make the English readers understand the spirit. (Source)

Girish Karnad doesn't use any labels like 'post-colonial' about his work; the forms of activism he has been very ardently associated with is that of anti-communalism and support of artistic expression and free speech. But he does say: "I am happy to belong to a generation that had a Dharmaveer Bharti, a Mohan Rakesh, a Vijay Tendulkar and I. Together we can claim that we did create a national theatre for modern India."

And see, here's the thing. The 14th Bharat Rang Mahotsav is going on right now. (Which is all sold out, and thus I have been utterly unable to attend. Woe.) And whether the plays are in Marathi or Bengali or Tamil they are all marked with the Indian flag. And the sold-out audiences who are going to watch them are probably mostly from the communities speaking those languages. But chances are they are also theatre-goers who have also seen a Mahesh Dattani play, a Satyadev Dubey play, a Faisal Alkazi play. They might have seen a Thayyam performance. And that present is the result of the work Karnad and his compatriots did--that building of an idea of national theatre that isn't stripped to some homogeneous national archetype, but instead talks local while thinking global. Taking Brecht and Badal Sarkar to tell a story both from Kathasarilesagara and Thomas Mann. And coming up with Hayavadana. In Kannada. Which he can translate for himself, thankyouvermuch, into English--the language that might be the one he researches and teaches and interviews in, but is still the second, and not the primary language of of his creative heart.

(I would kind of love to be Girish Karnad when I grow up.)

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Pre-Mela Day 3:'Speak Sweet and Eat Sesame' would sound better in Bengali (Melawali: Bama Faustina)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:16:45 GMT

Happy Makar Sankranti!
तिल्गुळ घ्या, गोड गोड बोला। (Thank you mustela_nivalis for fonting me!)

I actually called my dad up yesterday, and was informed that sankrant fell on the 15th this year, because of mumblemutter obscure 'go look at a Kalnirnay calendar' reasons. Wikipedia tells me:

But because of the Earth's tilt of 23.45 degrees and sliding of equinoxes, Ayanamsa occurs. This has caused Makara Sankranti to slide further over the ages. A thousand years ago, Makar Sankranti was on December 31 and is now on January 14. Five thousand years later, it shall be by the end of February, while in 9,000 years it shall come in June.

This extremely amusing 'fact', is of course, marked [citation needed]. (I don't actually like tilgul much, and it was too fucking cold to go downstairs yesterday night to the neighbours' lori, but someday I would like to be in Gujarat for Uttarayan.)

Happy Pongal to you as well! Growing up in Delhi meant that Sankrant was mostly my parents calling up the mothership back in Mumbai-Pune, and Pongal wasn't even mentioned during the school assemblies. But all my Bharatanatyam gurus were TamBrahms so of course, it got talked about in class.

The North-South, Aryan-Dravidian divide really depresses me when it starts veering into the 'inevitability of English' rationalisations. I can't stand the chauvinism and bigotry that gets tossed around in North India, and I sympathise with the resistance to Hindi hegemony. But at the same time, I'm really not convinced about the argument that English is equally alien. It was always way easier to transliterate all the padams and varnams I needed to write down in Devnagri than in Roman, and raga and tala were easy to notate because its not like Hindustani and Carnatic are so wildly divergent. And there are so many familiar words in those padams. Shanmuganan! Vanajaksha! Balgopal!

Let's face it though. While Hindustani music has a syncretic tradition born of Muslim as well as Hindu patronage, the South Indian classical dance and music vocabulary hails from a pretty exlusively Hindu tradition. And all those Sanskritised words come from a high-class and high-caste vocabulary, helped along by the Brahminisation of the arts during the 20th century revival and disassociation from all those fallen women the British turned their noses up at.

I'm fascinated by the linguistic implications of the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan ethnographies, and I need to start collecting recs for readings so that I can inform myself more about the subject. I have a theory that sister languages lend themselves more fluidly to intra-translations, and that even languages with different roots, like Tamil and Bengali, can be considered sisters by virtue of a shared cultural heritage. But when it comes down to constructing some sort of shared Indian cultural commonality that supposedly unites these languages, we run up really quickly against some pretty ugly Hindu upper-caste essentialising rhetoric.

So the test of my theory will be if the subaltern writings in these languages work better in indigenous language translation, rather than in English. I experimented with reading a collection of Mahashweta Devi's stories in Hindi, and the style did, indeed, seem more organic than when I had read her in English.

But so many obstacles to this goal of talking with each other! Foremost is the upward mobility impulse that makes the lingua franca of global superpowers a more practical second language to learn, and thus enabling the one-way traffic of translation INTO English. Meaning there are going to be more people speaking Kannada and English than Kannada and Gujarati. Then, the barriers of economics that prevent native speakers of languages and dialects isolated by poverty and illiteracy from gaining the tools (education, money, time, space, energy, audience) to translate, which is why most often folk stories and oral narratives are found documented by some Oriental Studies academic from abroad.

I need far more knowledge about the history of language wars and their effects on this country before I can find a comfortable position to support in the 'make Hindi the default national language of bilingualism rather than English'. My quest to find South Indian writers translated into Hindi is pretty nascent, since even were the books to exist and I were able to acquire them, I need to read a lot more, and get my Hindi reading skills and vocabulary up to a level to be able to appreciate what I'm reading with as much ease and sophistication as I can bring to English.

But there are certain translations friends have offered to lend me that I've shied away from. They are there in English, but I want to wait. It's sort of like the way I didn't go see Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility in the theatre, because I hadn't read the book yet. And though I watched it later, on a small TV screen, I'm glad I did it after having imprinted on its original medium first. I don't know for sure that reading Aandal in Hindi will be more sublime than reading her in English, but I do know that the Roja and Saathiya songs worked in Hindi where they just didn't in Bombay Dreams.

Today's Melawali, therfore, is a lady whose novels I have yet to read, but whose work I desperately want to exist in Kashmiri and Assamese and Maithili translations, so that those agitating for land rights and water rights and forest rights and the right to human dignity can read her in the language of their mothers. Bama Faustina (born as Faustina Mary Fatima Rani) in Puthupatti, is a Tamil Dalit Christian who gave up a job teaching in a convent school, and ended up writing what are by all accounts fierce, feminist novels. In a 2003 interview with The Hindu she says:

"Karukku" was radical because I have used the local dialect of the people and not the formalised text. This is a departure in Tamil literature.[...]I don't think of it as a burden already in Tamil literary world this has been categorised as Dalit literature and I don't mind. [...] Dalit people welcome me. They are curious to read my writings and for the younger generations, specially women I am a role model. But there are many who don't like me because I am writing about discrimination, oppression. This is a kind of fighting through literature and they don't like it.
I identify myself as a Dalit woman writer...There are many writers available to write about other issues but few for Dalits and there are many issues that have to be tackled. If and when Dalits are respected and treated as equal human beings then only can I write about other things.

I'm reading a short story of hers now; Scorn, by Bama Faustina, translated into English from the Tamil story ‘Ellakaaram’ by Sarsa Rajagopal and Antara Dev Sen. I am really looking forward to seeing her at the jailitfest.

In my fantasies, we could have panels with interpreters seamlessly allowing Bama Faustina and Shanti Yadav and Amita Bharathi to talk about Savitribai Phule's poetry. But failing that, at least a chance for some young girl learning her क-ख-ग-घs or alif-beys to be able to read all four women out loud to her mother and aunts and grantparents, who don't have to watch the books that the first generation in their family can read, take that voice away from their tongue.

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Pre-Mela Day 2: Heard in Transliteration (Man of the Mela: Gulzar)

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:30:18 GMT

I once had the opportunity to visit Javed Akhtar's house. (For reasons that you would have to get me very drunk to talk about. And I don't drink.) I noticed a handwritten sign on a door leading to a bedroom; it was something he had put up for his mother. The sign was in Urdu, and during our conversation about it, since I didn't know what it said, he mentioned that he doesn't read Devanagri at all.

Sitting there together, talking in our own languages, we could understand each other. And when I first saw 1942 - A Love Story, those lyrics sang their way straight into my soul. 'Pyaar hua chupke se' is one of the songs I instinctively reach for when I am thinking about that breathless quiet of discovering that you are in love. "Arre O Samba, kitne aadmi the?" is one of the most classic of all Hindi film quotes.

But if you went by the script the dialogues for Sholay were written in, it should by rights be called an Urdu film. And a vast majority of the viewers of Sholay, or Deewar, or Seeta aur Geeta would not be able to read the words in the textual language they were written in, though the oral understanding is perfect.

Of course, a great many people who can appreciate the poetry of lyricists like Javed Akhtar and Gulzar cannot read at all. That's one of the beautiful things regarding the visual arts -- the lyricists and script and screenplay writers can share their literature regardless of literacy.

And in the process, they foster a syncretism that spills over in subtle and profound ways. While Sanskritised Hindi has become the Hindu (and upper caste) language, and Urdu has been stereotyped as the language of Muslim madrasas, every bhagwan-kasam taking hero and sindoor-wearing heroine sing in words that refer to khuda, and ishq, and ibaadat. I heard a Bharatanatyam dancer recently talk about a Mira padam she was going to do, and say, 'some words are just not translatable in English', in reference to the concept of junoon. She later remembered Meera's own word--unmaad, but it was interesting that junoon was the more instinctive choice.

I've found someone to lend me a transliterated copy of Manto's stories, so that I can read Toba Tek Singh in the original before the panel about it. The politics of what gets transliterated and in which direction, and the communal rhetoric surrounding the promotion and imaging of Urdu and Hindi both in India and in Pakistan is complicated and depressing. And Hindi films are as much an example of hegemonic and assimilationist trends as anything else ripe for critique.

But they help language transcend both barriers of script and literacy with such a powerful force; feeding life-blood what seems sometimes to be a linguistic culture under threat. We may not be able to read fluently in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Avadhi, Bhojpuri and Maithili, but khuda ki kasam, we can sing in it when the antakshari demands it of us.

Gulzar is a fine filmmaker and scriptwriter; and his words have a lightness of touch that turn from thoughtful to playful in a heartbeat. He holds the soul of a linguistic culture in the palm of his hands when he writes lyrics-- from the Rajasthan of Rudaali and the Punjab of Maachis to the U.P. heartlands of Omkara and the Mumbai of Kaminey

Every now and then I think of attempting a translation of songs like the ones from Dil Se to try to share some of the magic that has left the words etched on my soul, but its too daunting, to try to find words for the cultures and the religions and the mythologies and metaphors that Gulzar weaves together like a Benarasi sari.

Even a song as simple as the one he did for Bandini, and I can only attempt the sthai:

Take away my body so white
and give me a skin the colour of night
So that I may hide in its dark embrace
and go to meet my heart's delight

Irshad, Gulzar Sahab. Kya baat hai.

ETA: Ahahaha, I attempted a full translation. Over here on forkedtongues

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Pre-Mela Day 1: Mapping Identity (Mela-walli: Ila Arun)

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:01:05 GMT

I am going to try to post every day leading up to the Jaipur Lit Fest, and I am going to try to do the post-colonialism data mining thing. Let's see how it works out.

I spent a LOT of time today ignoring important things on the practical to-do list (stuff like: get phone functional) and instead did repetitive iterations of spreadsheets. Which evolved into a form. I spent a lot of time trying to refine the criteria on that form. Trying to get it to do what it needed (make efficient data input possible) in a way that was informative, and inoffensive.

It makes me appreciate the work statistics gatherers and survey-makers of the people-interacting variety must put into their design process. I think what really made the complexity of trying to find appropriate labels hit home was this quote from the U.N.'s ethnocultural statistic's page:

The specific ethnic and/or national groups of the population which are of interest in each country are dependent upon individual national circumstances. Some of the criteria by which ethnic groups are identified are ethnic nationality (i.e., country or area of origin, as distinct from citizenship or country of legal nationality), race, colour, language, religion, customs of dress or eating, tribe or various combinations of these characteristics. In addition, some of the terms used, such as “race”, “origin” or “tribe”, have a number of different connotations. The definitions and criteria applied by each country investigating ethnic characteristics of the population must, therefore, be determined carefully and with the involvement of or consultation with representatives of the groups which it desires to categorize. By the nature of this topic, these categories and their definitions will vary widely from country to country; therefore, no internationally accepted criteria are possible.

Because of the difficulties of interpretation which may occur, it is important that, where such data are collected, the basic criteria used should be clearly explained so that the meaning of the classification will be readily apparent. It is also suggested that the primary classification consist of only a few broad categories, leaving open the possibility of a more detailed breakdown for important tribal or other groups where these are relevant.

Bold emphasis mine, because of how true this is. ('Race' is so important when talking about US and Australia but is a meaningless term in a South Asian context where half the Indians are likely to call themselves Caucasian.) In some conversations saying Indians vs. NRIs suffices, and in others, saying POC vs White. Because those conversations have already been contextualised by way of geography and linguistic commonality and agreed upon definitions and previous shared knowledge of the underlying complexities we are choosing to set aside.

But in a conversation that people from across the globe are invited to, textual short-cuts end up becoming detours into 'but what does that even mean' debates. And arguing about where the boundaries exist takes over the goal of discussing why those boundaries need to be talked about.

My inability to satisfy my own standards, much less anyone else's, led to me self-pityingly wailing to a friend in chat:
1) is the idea of demographically breaking down the jaipur lit fest stupid?
2) is it stupid to think the sourcelander vs hyphenate desi dynamic is relevant to this analysis?
3) is it stupid to want some way of separating out white people from globetrotting multi-culti POC from regional language writing indians
4) is it stupid that after 5 fucking hours I am unable to find a language to do it by?!

My friend gave me a lot of good advice, but we were still unable to find a good solution. So ultimately, I let it go, and will qualify my form with a personal meditation.

Last year thanks to a rather melodramatic argument between William Dalrymple and Hartosh Bal there was a public discussion around what the Hindu, in its overview of the controversy maintained was the basic question: "But has that original idea, to showcase writing in India both in the Bhashas as well as in English, been overtaken by the ambition to make Jaipur the greatest literary show on earth and therefore take the international literary celebrity path while lesser Indian voices go unheard?" So this year, my first of putative attendance, I took a look at the list of speakers. And I saw that of the names I knew only through osmosis, the proportions were skewed towards the celebrities, the White, the Western. It is true that an experience as dense as this is as much about what the participant brings to it, and chooses to make of it.

And that is why I am choosing to make this an experience of questioning. Both of the festival, to see how its stated goals are measuring up, and of myself, and process of reworking the creative landscape around me to centre around identities either more similar to or more disenfranchised than my own. Decolonisation is a part of it, so is scanning the Indian authors section at Teksons and realising how few of those last names are recognisably Dalit, or Harijan. So is sorting out how many opinions I read about Kashmir or Palestine are coming from people still living there. So is struggling reading a Bengali writer in a Hindi translation as well as an English one, to determine if the flaw lies in writer, translator, or the barriers of alien languages. So will be noticing how often the men speak on a panel, in comparison with the women.

Here's my form. Before the 20th, I'd like to be able to have at least basic information about the 260-odd attending speakers entered into it. If you feel like helping me, I would be very grateful, though I understand that not everyone enjoys mindless copy-pasting into boxes the way I do. If you have criticisms or suggestions for future such attempts (since I won't be able to edit the current form), let me know. I'm not expecting any of the speakers themselves to stumble across the backwaters of my blog here, but on the off chance that someone does-- hello, and do accept my apologies if I have misidentified you in any way, I'll fix it as soon as I know my mistake.

I also had thoughts about posting about some of the speakers whose work I am familiar with, but this post is already too long for anything detailed. So today's Mela-wallah (or walli in this case) is, appropriately, a Jaipur girl. Ila Arun is also, as I discovered today from her bio, a dramatist and scriptwriter for stage and screen. For me she is more familiar as a singer and actor; she and Madhuri played no small part in teaching teenage me to appreciate raunchy traditional female sexuality. What makes her Man of the Mela for me though, is Vote For Ghagra, from the eponymous album she produced (I suspect she is one of the main lyricists, though I haven't been able to verify this). Because she's laughing at the stereotypes even as she revels in them. Stereotypes of exoticised vs unsophisticated, of turbanned patriarchal men vs. veiled, coy women, of miniskirts vs. ghagras, of seduction vs. violence... she puts on her goggles and her ghoonghat and says fuck this shit, lets talk about when my ghagra will ghoomo in dilli shahar. And that's the kind of spirit I'd imagine the Chipko movement women fighting with, or the anti-arrack ladies over in Andhra, or the Gulabi gang. Her music and her voice... you know when they say 'voice of the people' I don't think the meaning is a cause or average representation subsuming individuality. I think it's meant to describe an extraordinary personality and vivid character jumping up with the power of tradition and heritage and roots and community behind her to say "yo, we the fucking people".

Words as playful chhedkhani to power. (A fine place for a woman's voice to be kept in, I think. I vote for the nauvvari.)

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Crowdsourcing my schedule

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:00:28 GMT

Words have been hard to find for me lately. Unfortunately, most of the things I need to do require words. As a result, I have spent a great deal of time entering numbers in spreadsheets to catch up on my expense tracker. Unsurprisingly, the resultant depression does not make for a satisfying change from contemplating my utter inability to get words out of my brain and onto some form of communicable medium.

So of course, it seems entirely logical for me to go to Jaipur for the lit fest to check out that exotic specimen - The Writer!

Well, alright, maybe it is not logical, and I will probably have to undergo at least one session of 'woe all writers are either too pompous/irritating/wrong to listen to OR too glorious/intelligent/witty to sustain the presence of my miserable carcass in the same corporeal universe'. In which case I shall have to go sit on the desert sands and commiserate with a camel. (Note to geographically-minded objecters: yes I am aware that there are no sand dunes in Jaipur. I am also aware that the going rate for camel-commiseration, especially during the tourist season, is well beyond my means.)

But speaking of means, the festival itself is free entry, and I have managed to dig up a family relative who is kind enough to let me stay with them, and if I bring enough bananas and santras and glucose biscuits and kurkure with me then I can skip the no-doubt overpriced lunches that the venue will provide.

I have been trying to persuade other friends to come along, but apparently they have either been to previous years or have fruitful productive lives that keep them otherwise engaged. (Being a sporadically-employed vella-useless freelancing-walla can be disruptive to maintaining social face, I have found.) However, my dear friend the Intrepid Book Reporter is going, and though I am sure she will be busy asking Penetrating Questions of Mohammed Hanif and other ~~hotties~~ luminaries, I will not be entirely alone and untalked-to. (And perhaps if I am very nice to her she will let me use her press pass to sneak into the Ustaad Eltaf Hussain Sarahang concert. Hindustani from Afghanistan! I suppose it should be called Afghanistani shastriya sangeet? And look, they spell it 'Amir-Khusrow'! I wonder if he will sing any of the Hindavi bandishes, or just the Farsi ones.)

Anyway! I was trying to think of a motivating Plan of Action so that I make Full Use of the Opportunity. So I started making a list. Also, a Spreadsheet. Because mindless data-entry is an excellent placebo to a concience guilty about being useless.

However, I have not read/heard/watched many many writer-type people who are going to be speaking at this event. And though I had a momentary dream of reading at least a book by each of the authors whose panels I want to attend, it was squished by the practicalities of access (to books) and ability (to read). Then I thought I could do a post each day starting from tomorrow talking about the writers I do know, but besides my aforementioned Lack of Words, there is also the fear that it will just devolve into frivolous gossip about Javed Akhtar's tweets about the kolaveri song.

And my list is rather ideosyncratic and incomplete so far:

I will not heckle Salman Rushdie about (a) his asinine comments about indigenous Indian language writing (b) his dismissal of all Islamic critiques of his work as fundamentalist haters (c) the gender issues in his books (d) how he could possibly write such a Terrible, Awful No-Good Horrible 'sequel' to Haroun.
I will also not take a print-out of every single piece of thoughtful negative reaction post I have read regarding 'tiger mother' and hand it to Amy Chua with a paraphrased xkcd graphic telling her 'The Internet thinks you are Wrong'.
I will (probably) not ask William Dalrymple why he thinks he is the best person to be chairing a discussion on 'The Future of Palestine'. I mean really.
I will Conspicuously Avoid Deepak Chopra and Richard Dawkins on the grounds of 'JFC you make my side look bad'.

So dear corner of the internet wot reads me, please tell me what to do!

Here is the list of attending speakers.
Here are the programmes for the 20th, the 21th, the 22th, the 23th, and the 24th of January.

Tell me which authors I HAVE to read or avoid their panels entirely because of spoilers. Tell me who are pompous windbags who never let any other panellist speak. Tell me which panel you'd like to go to most (and why). Tell me if it's a ridiculous idea to think of asking every non-white person for an off-the-cuff list of 5 books they'd call Postcolonial Fiction.

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