Caferati’s 2009 Celebrating Shakti Bhatt Workshops

Caferati’s 2009 Celebrating Shakti Bhatt Workshops will be a part of the Celebrate Bandra Festival this year. The workshops are (links are to Facebook event pages):Tomorrow’s Authors, Scripted and PENtathlon (Note: the Facebook pages are to help spread the word. To register, you must pay up in advance at The Hub office.)

Please join the Celebrate Bandra Festival - Literature on Facebook to get updates on other events as well.

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Caferati’s 2009 Celebrating Shakti Bhatt Workshops

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About Shakti Bhatt:
Shakti Bhatt was a writer, a publisher, and a friend to Caferati. She was a constant support through many of our endeavours and gave generously of her time, her presence and her advice for the little time we knew her. Sadly, she died in March 2007.
In her memory, Caferati runs an annual workshop to help writers hone their craft, to grow, and to test fresh literary waters.

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Here are the details.

Workshop costs: Rs 300 per participant per workshop (Rs 150 per participant for the kids' workshop)

The workshop are over two days, 11am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Participants will be served a light lunch.

For queries,
Email: bombay.hub@unltdindia.org, editors@caferati.com
Phone number: 022 3222 0475 (The Hub)

To register, you must pay up in advance, at The Hub office.
The Hub
UnLtd India, 4th Floor, Candelar Building, 26 St John Baptist Road, Near Mount Mary Steps, Bandra (W), Mumbai 400 050, India.

Participants must bring their own writing materials.

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Tomorrow’s Authors

A writing workshop for kids (10 - 16 years - maximum 20 participants) led by Anshumani Ruddra.

Saturday, 14 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00
Sunday, 15 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00

This workshop will look into the act of writing: structuring, editing, plotting and characterisation. Though the focus will be on short fiction the lessons learnt will be applicable towards other forms of writing - long fiction, poetry and narrative non-fiction.

Each individual will work on one piece during the two day period of the workshop and the group as a whole will be responsible for critiquing each other's work. The workshop's aim is to develop young writers who can look objectively at their own work as well as the work of others.
Traditional and modern forms and structures of a story will be discussed and then promptly forgotten to enable discovery of new ones. This will lead to a set of exercises that introduces writing as an improvisational and group activity. The group as a whole will be responsible for generating ideas, working and reworking them and finally committing them to paper - always evolving the story as they go along.

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About Anshumani Ruddra
Anshumani Ruddra is an author and screenwriter based in Mumbai. He predominantly writes in the speculative fiction genre. His short stories have appeared in various anthologies and he is currently putting finishing touches to his first novel for adults. He also conducts workshops for children and college students in the areas of writing, speculative fiction, scriptwriting and comic books. Visit http://ruddra.net

for more details. The Enemy of My Enemy is the first in a series of interactive gamebooks for children written by him. It has been published by Scholastic. Banana Republic, its sequel, is expected to come out in January 2010. His short stories have appeared in the following collections by Scholastic: Seven Science Fiction Stories, The Moustache Maharishi and Other Unlikely Stories, Superhero, Spooky Stories

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PENtathlon

Five Exercises for Fiction Writers (beginners, 17 years +, maximum 20 participants) by Annie Zaidi and Manisha LakheAn intense workshop targeted at kick-starting the writing process for those who want to try their hand at fiction, or those who have tried already but want to find a way around that object of ill repute: writer’s block.

Saturday, 21 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00
Sunday, 22 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00

There will be a set of five exercises, in an ideate-and-discuss format, which will take you through the whole process of putting together a short story or even a novella, if you work really, really hard. One the first say, the workshop leaders will tell you how to build characters, find appropriate settings, how to make the narrative move from one point to another. Participants will be well into their story by the end of the first day and will be expected to come up with more ideas or a fleshier story when they return the next morning.
Workshop leaders will help you find resolutions, in case you have not found them already, and share some basic techniques for cracking the walls you come up against.

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About Annie Zaidi and Manisha Lakhe
Annie Zaidi writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, blog posts, reports, reviews and (in a dark, distant past) recipes she never actually tried.
If gun laws weren't so strict, Manisha Lakhe would be out there shooting at every dangling participle and lynching incorrect users of grammar. Alas, she is reduced to venting poetry on unsuspecting audience and writing reviews of movies, books and other kinds of fiction.

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Scripted

A workshop for beginners on writing for stage and screen (beginners, 17 years +, maximum 20 participants) by Anuvab Pal

Saturday, 28 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00
Sunday, 29 November 2009 11:00 - 16:00

They say writing for the stage or writing drama is the oldest profession in the world, beating even prostitution.
Have you ever wanted to write a play? Have you ever written a play and abandoned it? If you've ever wondered what it would be like to make a live audience react to things you've got to say, you probably want to join politics or write for the stage. This workshop is for the latter.
Writing for the stage in Bandra is the same as writing for the stage anywhere else, so we'll go through the basics of plot, structure, characters, conflict, intentions and ideas.
And then together, we'll try to tell some stories that for reasons you'll discover and tell us about, is best told on a stage.

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About Anuvab Pal:
Anuvab Pal is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays include The President Is Coming, Chaos Theory and 1-888-Dial-India. His movies include Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President Is Coming.

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Bandra Slam - a poetry performance contest

Caferati is organsing some of the literature events at the Celebrate Bandra fesstival this year. There are workshops and contests, amongst them, our own spin on a slam.

Contest description:

Hosted by Mocha Mojo. Organised by Caferati. Prizes courtesy Mocha Mojo.

* Theme for performers:

2 poems on Bandra, 2 on the environment, the theme of this year's festival. Performers can interpret these themes in any way they choose. The poems must be written by the performers. Each poem must take not more than two minutes to perform. Poems can be in English, Hindi or Marathi. Or Bambaiya.

* To sign up:

You must send in one poem, on either theme, to *editors at caferati dot com* with the subject line "Celebrate Bandra Poetry Slam."
Deadline: 18th 20th November, midnight.

If there are more than 15 contestants, Caferati's editors will use the submitted poem as a criteria for selecting the top 15.

The top 15 poets will be invited to the slam by email. They must respond to the invitation latest by 20th November, midnight.

* On the contest day.

- Poets must come prepared with four original poems, two on each of the themes.
- You must register with the organisers by 19.30
- There will be four rounds, by theme of poem. In each round, poets will be called up in random order, and will perform one poem each. They will have a time limit: not more than two minutes each. A buzzer or bell will sound at the end of two minutes. There will be NO time extensions allowed.
- As each performer ends, they will be rated by a jury. This jury will be three invited city poets (the experts), and three randomly selected members of the audience (whose role it will be to vote on behalf of the audience) who will change with each round.
- Poets will be judged on both the quality of the poetry and the performance.
- At the end of the round, we will take a break to tally scores. Performers and audience can get themselves refreshments.
- Scoring will be cumulative. (Those who survive each round will carry their points with them. Elimination in each round will be based on total scores up to that point.)
- The lowest scoring poets --- six in the first round, three each in subsequent rounds --- will be eliminated, and the next round will start.
- The top three at the end of four rounds will win prizes.

* Prizes (Vouchers from Mocha Mojo)

1st Prize Rs 3000
2nd Prize Rs 2000
3rd Prize Rs 1000

* Conditions

- The poems must be your own work. By entering the Slam, you are guaranteeing that this is true.
- Participants selected for the Slam can, on stage, read from a sheet of paper or electronic device or recite from memor.
- No costumes (and no nudity), no musical instruments, no visual aids
- Your poems and your performance remain your intellectual property. However, you give Celebrate Bandra, Fountainhead and Caferati permission to record your performance on audio or video or photographs and share them on their websites with correctly attributed copyright information.

Celebrate Bandra Souvenir - shortlisted submisisons

The submissions that made the short-list for the Celebrate Bandra Souvenir are:

Frenchita – A window into Bandra's Past (Short Story)
Jane Bhandari – A Candle for a Stranger (Short Story)
Jane Bhandari – Bandra on a Sunday (Poem)
K K Puri – Romancing My Girl In Old Bandra (Short Story)
Kankana Basu – NRI (Poem)
Krishnakumar Sankaran –To the Pearl Mother (Poem)
Mira Desai – 115 Carter Road (Short Story)
Rupa Gulab – A Simple Desultory Memoir (Essay)
Natasha Ramarathnam – The 8:57 local (Short Story)
Sulagana Biswas – Bandra Queen (Poem)
Sumana Roy – Untitled (Essay)
Udayan Chakrabarti – Untitled (Essay)
Vasundhara Prakash – Carter Road (Photo)
Vidyavati Chandan – Moods Of Mount Mary (Photo)

Poetry Masterclass

POETRY WORKSHOP MASTER CLASS
Friday, October 9 - Wednesday, October 14, '09, 2.30pm to 6.30pm,
at Open Space

Open Space invites participation in a 6-day workshop which will help participants deepen their understanding of the techniques and art of poetry writing and reading.The workshop will be conducted by poet and novelist Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Her publications include the novels Generation 14 (Penguin-Zubaan, 2008) and The Other Garden (Rupa&Co, 1995), poetry collections Not Springtime Yet (HarperCollins, 2008) and Dialogue and Other Poems (Indian Academy of Literature, 2005, reprint 2006). The anthologies All Poetry is Protest (2006) and 50 Poets 50Poems (2007) are edited by her. She is currently translating the hymns of 8th century Tamil poet, Aandaal. A seminar-cum-utsav The Image of the Writer in Literature was curated by her in 2007 for the Indian Academy of Literature and more recently, she curated for them the literary salon, The Self and Its Translations. Priya Sarukkai Chabria has collaborated with artists from classical dance, film and painting. Her work is published in various journals and websites in Europe, the US and India. She was invited to participate in the writers' salon, Worlds 2009: The Creative Writer by the New Writing Partnership, UEA, UK. Aim:

This is conceived as a demanding and challenging workshop for both teacher and student. Rather than settle for a how-to-write-a-good-poem workshop that offers notes on types of poems and operates largely on students passively receiving inputs from the teacher, this is primarily meant to be a conduit to the student’s creativity, encouraging him/her to take creative leaps across restricting boundaries.
The aim is to facilitate students to know how their minds work on creative problems, how to tackle the exploration of their subject, arrive at ideas and work towards a form.
The workshop will cover five days during which:
Participants will be introduced to the poetry of different cultures and poets to examine the techniques and methods of idea exploration and elaboration.
Rather than how-to reading, participants will be encouraged to read actively and ask creative questions that should feed into their own writing.
The workshop will be a space in which participants experiment and innovate, debate and discuss, free of market pressures so that their innate creativity can be encouraged to flow freely.
Students will be encouraged to interact with each other as well as spend time by themselves, taking writing exercises that will later be discussed in class.
Students will, over the days of the workshop, be encouraged to work on their own poem that will periodically be reviewed.
Each participant will be given some individual time by the teacher where their work is discussed.

Structure:
Rather than a fixed structure that will operate as per a timetable, it is advantageous for participants to follow a more fluid model. Therefore, the workshop is conceived as an interactive mode of dialogue, discussion, critiquing and writing exercises which should lead to the near completion of a poem by every participant as well as enabling each one to think about poetic ideas and constructions.Sessions will be in a creative mode. However, on each day there should be a period allocated to:
mandatory reading of a select poem
a teaching session
a group discussion on critiquing poems
working on writing exercises (this will be a substantial part of each day)
working by oneself on his/her poem
articulation and presentation

The theme of the poetry workshop is Relationships: Social, environmental, interpersonal, with one’s self, with language et al.

Application Criteria:
Those who have faith that something will emerge from the play of language and sound and are prepared to experiment with words and are passionate about writing are invited to apply.
Participants should be emerging poets who will be selected on the basis of the poems they send in prior to the workshop. All applications (CVs) must be accompanied by four original poems by the applicant and mailed to Priya Sarukkai Chabria at surpriya34@gmail.com and cced to events@openspaceindia.org with the subject: Poetry workshop master class. All applications should be mailed before Wednesday, September 30th, 09.
Participants short-listed for the workshop are required to pay a fee of Rs 2000/- at Open Space by October 4th, ’09 anytime between 11am and 5.30pm. The workshop fee includes a membership for the applicant to the Open Space library for a period of one year from the date of registration. The library offers over 2,000 books, 400 documentaries and 200 world cinema classics (an additional deposit amount of Rs 500 is payable for library membership but this is refundable at any time).

For further information on any of these programs call Openspace at 25457371
Open Space encourages debate and action on rights, justice and sustainable development.Open Space is an initiative of the Centre for Communication & Development Studies (CCDS) aimed at strengthening civil society and mobilising citizen’s action.

Celebrate Bandra Festival Souvenir - Call for Submissions

The Celebrate Bandra Festival happens once every two years in Bandra. This year, the festival will be in November. I'm helping curate the literature section. More about past festivals at celebratebandra.net (the site won't be updated with this year's schedule for a little while yet).

Here's the brief.

"You're My Home": you live in Bandra, so what makes it home? (If you don't live in Bandra, imagine it). The trees, the birds, the air, your nosy neighbours, your generous and helpful neighbours, their culture and yours, the sea, the waves, the aromas, the convenience, the excitement. It's home, so like every home, it has ups, it has downs. But what is it about the environment of Bandra, seen as broadly as you can, that makes it home for you?

You can submit anything that can appear in print (without spending enormous amounts of money): essays, short fiction, poetry, play scripts, illustrations, photographs.

Please email your submissions to celebrate.bandra.festival@gmail.com

Last date for submissions: September 30th, 11:59p.m. October 4th, 11:59p.m.

You can make more than one stand-alone submission, but please do so in separate emails, to help the selection process.

For text submissions
• Your submission must be close to, but not over, the 1000 word mark.
• Please paste your text into the body of the email. No attachments, please.
• Please use one of these subject lines: Souvenir Submission - short story, Souvenir Submission - poem, Souvenir Submission - essay, or Souvenir Submission - script.

For photographs, scanned illustrations or computer-generated art
• Please submit only one piece. (A picture being worth a thousand words and all that.)
• You can include a short (not more than 100 words) descriptor or caption in the body of your email.
• If your image is a very large file, please upload it online somewhere* and mail in a link.
• If you think you must submit more than one image as part of the same entry, then please mail in only one, but add a description of what the rest of the series will be like, or upload the additional material elsewhere and send in a link. If we want to see the rest, we'll mail you.
• Please use one of these subject lines: Souvenir Submission - photograph, Souvenir Submission - illustration, or Souvenir Submission - digital art

In one paragraph at the end of your email, please include your name, postal address, email address and a phone number, land or cellular, where you can be reached during the day and in the evenings.

By submitting, you declare that the work is your own, or that you have collaborated in its creation and are authorised to submit on behalf of the collective. Please remember India's laws on libel and obscenity. And for visual art submissions that depict people, especially photographs, please make sure you have your subject's permission. For any form of 'found art,' text or visual, please ensure that you are not infringing India's copyright laws.

Entries will be short-listed by Rahul Goswami. Rahul is an intermittent Bandra resident, and otherwise a researcher working on the links between economic growth, livelihoods and agriculture.

The short-list will then be judged by Dilip D'Souza, writer and journalist, who is the editor of the souvenir, and Joe Campana, and the selected submissions will appear in print. Updates on the lists will be posted to this blog, and, if it's ready by then, the updated Celebrate Bandra website.

Rewards: the joy of seeing your work in print, and contributing towards the Celebrate Bandra effort. We are trying to get some small prizes for the best entries, but this is very unlikely, so don't count on it. Update: The top five entries, across categories, will be marked as such in the souvenir, and, yes, will get small prizes.

Do please pass this on to friends and well-wishers, from Bandra or elsewhere. Feel free to copy this text to your website or blog, and to online forums where you know it will be welcome.

* Possible sites where you can upload your work: Flickr, Photobucket, OurMedia, Picassa.

Son of Godawful Poetry Fortnight - 19th - 31st August

We launched the first Godawful Poetry Fortnight here last year. (You can read all our contributions here, and this was a brief article in the TOI about the Fortnight.)

Cut to the chase: it's that time of the year again!

The essentials:

• Godawful Poetry Fortnight runs from the 19th to the 31st August.

• Our Patron Saint is William Wordsworth.

And he gets this signal honour for saying that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Way too many aspiring poets have rallied behind that banner, too few going so far as recollecting those emotions in tranquillity, let alone reading the rest of the preface to Lyrical Ballads (which can be found on Bartleby, for those interested).

• To join in, all you have to do is post on your blog* a godawful poem you have written, with—all totally optional—a brief note about GPF, a bit about what godawful poetry means to you, and a link to this post.

• Post godawful poems as often as you like during the Fortnight. (The True Believers Challenge: post thirteen godawful poems, one on each day of the Fortnight.) Squeeze your muse like a boil. Get it all out. Pester your friends to post too. Once GPF is done, you will write good poetry for the rest of the year, yes?

• Please use this Technorati tag on your post: Godawful Poetry Fortnight. Here's the HTML for the tag: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Godawful+Poetry+Fortnight" rel="tag">Godawful Poetry Fortnight</a>

• To those who feel the need to point out this Fortnight lasts only thirteen days, we draw our cape around us, and say, in a marked manner, "Poetic license."

* If you don't have a blog, you're welcome to either use the comment space here or the Godawful Poetry Fortnight thread over at Caferati.

Cross-posted

Man Asian Literary Prize 2009 - short list

(Note that these are unpublished books)

Gopilal Acharya , With a Stone in My Heart
Omair Ahmad , Jimmy the Terrorist
Siddharth Chowdhury, Day Scholar
Kishwar Desai , Witness the Night
Samuel Ferrer , The Last Gods of Indochine
Eric Gamalinda , The Descar tes Highlands
Ram Govardhan, Rough with the Smooth
Kanishka Gupta, History of Hate
Kameroon Rasheed Ismeer , Memoirs of a Terrorist
Ratika Kapur , Overwinter
Mariam Karim, The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins
Sriram Karri , The Autobiography of a Mad Nation
Nitasha Kaul , Residue
R . Zamora Linmark , Leche
Mario I. Miclat, Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions
Clarissa V. Militante, Different Countries
Varuna Mohite, Omigod
Dipika Mukherjee, Thunder Demons
Hena Pillai , Blackland
Roan Ching-Yueh, Lin Xiu-Tzi and her Family
Edgar Calabia Samar, Eight Muses of the Fall
K. Srilata, Table for Four
Su Tong, The Redemption Boat
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, Shadow of the Red Star

For pictures of the authors, see this post on the Man Asian Literary Prize siie

Crossword Book Awards 2008 Winners

English Fiction
Tied between:
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh(Penguin Books India )
&
Past Continuous, by Neel Mukherjee (Picador India)

English Non-Fiction
Curfewed Night, by Basharat Peer (Random House India)

Indian Language Fiction in English Translation
T'Ta Professor, by Manohar Shyam Joshi, translated by Ira Pande(Penguin Books India)

Popular Award
Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, by Pallavi Aiyar(HarperCollins India)

(See the shortlisted books here)

Global Voices Book Challenge - Read Your Way Around the World!

To mark UNESCO World Book Day (23rd April), Global Voices has a fun challenge up.

1) Read a book during the next month from a country whose literature you have never read anything of before.
2) Write a blog post about it during the week of April 23.

Full details here.

Caferati @ Prithvi Open Mic - March 09

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Prithvi Theatre Cafe
20 Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road, Juhu
Bombay, India

Entry Free

The rules:
- Works performed can be in English, Hindi or Marathi.
- You must perform only your own writing.
- You can perform one piece for a maximum of two minutes.
- Only solo or duo performances; no groups please. Duos can only perform collaborative works authored by both performers.
- Your name will be called once. If you don’t get to the microphone in 10 seconds, you lose your slot.
- Your time starts the moment you come to the microphone
- You can recite, declaim, shout, even sing (if you can hold a tune); you can sit, stand or lie down; you can dance, turn a cartwheel, play a musical instrument, or scratch your back while standing on your head, as long as you perform your words.
- You get the use of a microphone, and two minutes. No other arrangements will be made for your performance. If you want to carry a prop, or a musical instrument, please do so. Note that any set-up time counts towards your two-minute limit.
- A gong will be struck—loud!—at the end of the two-minute period and you must leave the microphone immediately.
- Genres: No restriction. Poetry, scripts, stories, songs, it’s all good.
- Prohibited: Foul language, explicit sexual imagery, slander, anything that flouts the laws of India.
- Dress code: No nudity. Yes, you can use costumes and make-up if you like.

If you want a slot:
- There will be up to 25 slots of up to 2 minutes each.
- You must be physically present at the venue at least 30 minutes before start time to register.
- Slots will be provided immediately, on a first-come first-served basis, and cannot be carried over to the next Open Mic.
- You must show the text of what you plan to perform to the organisers present, and describe your performance. This is not about censorship; it is to guard against infringement of the rules.

Conditions:
There are no prizes, except the opportunity to perform to an audience, and earn its acclaim.
You will not be reimbursed expenses, and will not be paid any fee or honorarium.
You retain ownership of your work, but by submitting it, you give the Prithvi Theatre and Caferati the right to display your work, or photographs or recordings of your performance, at the Prithvi Theatre Cafe, and on their websites, should they so choose, with attribution to you, but with no payment. Should you wish to be excluded from being photographed or recorded, please inform the photographer / cameraperson before the performance. Any photographs or recordings will not be commercial in nature.

Please subscribe to http://groups.google.com/group/Caferati-Prithvi to get notifications of future Caferati @ Prithvi Open Mic evenings.

More about..
Prithvi Theatre: http://www.prithvitheatre.org/
Caferati: http://www.caferati.com/

Email:
prithvitheatre AT prithvitheatre DOT org
editors AT caferati DOT com

On Facebook:
Prithvi Theatre
Caferati

Caferati @ Prithvi Open Mic [February]

Part of Prithvi's Celebrating Poetry festival

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
7:00pm - 8:00pm
Prithvi Theatre Cafe
20 Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road, Juhu, Bombay, India

The rules:
- Works performed can be in English, Hindi or Marathi.
- You must perform only your own writing.
- You can perform one piece for a maximum of two minutes.
- Only solo or duo performances; no groups please. Duos can only perform collaborative works authored by both performers.
- Your name will be called once. If you don’t get to the microphone in 10 seconds, you lose your slot.
- Your time starts the moment you come to the microphone
- You can recite, declaim, shout, even sing (if you can hold a tune); you can sit, stand or lie down; you can dance, turn a cartwheel, play a musical instrument, or scratch your back while standing on your head, as long as you perform your words.
- You get the use of a microphone, and two minutes. No other arrangements will be made for your performance. If you want to carry a prop, or a musical instrument, please do so. Note that any set-up time counts towards your two-minute limit.
- A gong will be struck—loud!—at the end of the two-minute period and you must leave the microphone immediately.
- Genres: No restriction. Poetry, scripts, stories, songs, it’s all good.
- Prohibited: Foul language, explicit sexual imagery, slander, anything that flouts the laws of India.
- Dress code: No nudity. Yes, you can use costumes and make-up if you like.

If you want a slot:
- There will be up to 25 slots of up to 2 minutes each.
- You must be physically present at the venue at least 30 minutes before start time to register.
- Slots will be provided immediately, on a first-come first-served basis, and cannot be carried over to the next Open Mic.
- You must show the text of what you plan to perform to the organisers present, and describe your performance. This is not about censorship; it is to guard against infringement of the rules.

Conditions:
There are no prizes, except the opportunity to perform to an audience, and earn its acclaim.
You will not be reimbursed expenses, and will not be paid any fee or honorarium.
You retain ownership of your work, but by submitting it, you give the Prithvi Theatre and Caferati the right to display your work, or photographs or recordings of your performance, at the Prithvi Theatre Cafe, and on their websites, should they so choose, with attribution to you, but with no payment. Should you wish to be excluded from being photographed or recorded, please inform the photographer / cameraperson before the performance. Any photographs or recordings will not be commercial in nature.

Please subscribe to http://groups.google.com/group/Caferati-Prithvi to get notifications of future Caferati @ Prithvi Open Mic evenings.

* More about..
Prithvi Theatre
Caferati

* On Facebook:
Prithvi Theatre
Caferati

This event on Facebook, here.