Nilanjana Roy, who made several appearances on the Literature stage, in Business Standard, on The lure of the local litfest:

Many of us here — writers, publishers and readers — have come to Kala Ghoda post-Jaipur, and we find ourselves easing into the more laidback space, not lamenting the absence of the big-name international stars in the street-circus atmosphere over here. Chetan Bhagat causes a brief flurry and a slight swell in crowds when he makes a pitch in favour of writing that is accessible and that doesn’t intimidate the first-time or insecure reader. But even the Big Bhagat isn’t mobbed the way he was in Jaipur. Which leads Peter Griffin, one of the friends of the festival, to ask: “Will there still be space for festivals like Kala Ghoda.”

I ask local writer Amit Varma, fresh from his Galle Literary Festival experience, what he thinks. “Big festivals can feel a little rushed,” he says, thinking back to his visit to Jaipur as a blogger and reader some years ago. “This is a charming local festival that needn’t aspire to be a JLF: it works for local readers, local writers and serves a different purpose. At the smaller festivals, everyone is drawn together for the love of books and reading. I don’t think it needs to be either/or: why not more Kala Ghodas? Why not a Kanpur festival, or a Vizag festival?”

Spread over nine days, what Kala Ghoda offers is a chance to drop in and pick up on a reading or writing conversation at any time; and it also offers an odd kind of continuity. Three years ago, the poet Adil Jussawalla spoke with passion about the changing ethos of Mumbai; the year after him, Kiran Nagarkar picked up the thread by commenting on the rising culture of intolerance in his city, an intolerance that he felt was alien to the spirit of the city. This year, MS Sathyu departs briefly from his tribute to the late Habib Tanvir to make a point: “This is my Mumbai too. I’m Kannadiga, but I lived here and worked here for years. Cities can never belong to only one section of people.” This is the kind of continuing conversation — or heated debate — you could only have at a city festival, not at a more international festival.

Read the whole article here.

Saturday, 06 February 2010
20:00 - 21:00
David Sassoon Library Gardens, Kala Ghoda

What did India and the world read between 2000 and 2010? Boy wizards and vampires may have dominated the bestseller lists, but this was also the decade of Roberto Bolano, the return of the short story and the reworked spy thriller, the graphic novel and the forensic thriller. India’s translators discovered a new readership; pulp fiction in languages apart from English found countrywide fans. Though celebrity memoirs dominated the headlines, three surprising topics–climate change, food ethics and evolutionary biology–held sway over the charts. By the end of the decade, we were also debating how we would read and how reading would change, as ebook readers made an entrance.

A brief presentation celebrating and analysing the Decade of Books will be followed by a discussion between Ms Roy and critics Anita Roy and Sanjay Sipahimalani.

Nilanjana S Roy is a book reviewer, food writer and literary columnist with the Business Standard, and has worked extensively in the worlds of media and publishing. As chief editor from 2007-2009, she was part of the team that started up Tranquebar, a Chennai-and-Delhi based publishing house. She edited A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book Of Indian Food Writing; some of her short stories have appeared in the Scholastic anthologies of science fiction, horror and fantasy writing for children. Her journalism has appeared in publications from Outlook to Biblio to The Hindu and Le Monde, and can be found online at Akhond of Swat.

Sunday, 07 February 2010
18:30 - 19:30
David Sassoon Library Garden
M G Road, Kala Ghoda

The Kala Ghoda Lecture seeks to set the tone of the festival, to focus on the opportunities and challenges ahead of the community that loves books and reading. The inaugural Lecture was delivered in 2009, by Urvashi Butalia, founder of Zubaan Books.

This year, the very popular author Chetan Bhagat will speak about Reaching Out To New Readers.

Mr Bhagat’s first three books, Five Point Someone (2004), One Night @ the Call Center (2005) and The 3 Mistakes of life (2008), have done just that. They have each sold in the neighbourhood of 700,000 copies, redefining the idea of a bestseller in English. While they continue to fly off the shelves, his latest, 2 States (2009), aims to do even better.

From his website:

Chetan also writes op-ed columns for leading English and Hindi newspapers, focusing on youth and national development based issues. Many of the issues raised by Chetan’s columns have been discussed in Parliament and among the top leadership of the country.
Chetan quit his international investment banking career in 2009, to devote his entire time to writing and make change happen in the country. He lives in Mumbai with his wife Anusha, an ex-classmate from IIMA and his twin boys Shyam and Ishaan.

BNHS  Auditorium

Saturday, 13th February,  16:30 - 19:30

The quiz is organised and conducted by the Bombay Quiz Club.

The Literature Quiz is an open quiz, which means anyone can participate, in teams of two members each. No prior registration is necessary.

If you don’t have a quizzing partner, land up solo, and the BQC team will hook you up with someone.

Format
There will be a written preliminary round followed by a final round.
Questions will draw from literature from all parts of the world, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, the history of writing and writers, criticism, and other topics for which we haven’t found names yet. The quiz will feature a healthy dose of audio-visual content - pictures, music, video - pertaining to, or drawn from, the world of literature.

Prizes: Rs 3000, Rs 2000, Rs 1000, sponsored by the Kala Ghoda Association.

This is an attempt to give performance poetry a bit of a push, to bring some new voices out into the open, to put a little more audience participation into poetry, and, not least, to have a little fun.The slam made its debut at Kala Ghoda in 2007 (the first in India, actually) to much enjoyment from the audience and the participants, and has returned in 2008 and 2009 to just as much enthusiasm and support.

Themes
There are no required themes. Since it’s St. Valentine’s Day, we suggest you bring at least one love poem.

We’re proponents of free speech, but please understand (1) that we must abide by the laws of the land, and (2) that there may be children present in the audience. Please don’t bring poems that could get the Festival in trouble with the law.

Date and Venue
6:00 p.m., Sunday, 14th February, 2010, at the David Sassoon Library Garden

Deadlines
For initial submission via email: midnight 10th February, 2010. (We may extend this deadline, but don’t count on it.)
To respond to the invitation to the Slam: noon, 13 February, 2010.
On the day of the Slam, 14th February 2010: report to the sound console at the David Sasson Library, Kala Ghoda, by 5.30 p.m, and ask to speak to one of the Literature volunteers. Please show all five of your poems to the contest organisers present.

How our Poetry Slam works
Even if you know how a conventional Slam works, please read this section. There are more than a few tweaks.

Before the Slam:

Each poet must have ready at least five poems.

To be invited to compete in the Slam, you must submit one poem via email. (See address at the bottom of this post.)

The organisers/judges will short-list poets from the entries. Selection criteria will be the quality of the writing and how well, in the judges’ opinion, those poems lend themselves to performance.

The selected poets will be informed of their selection only via email. Their participation will be confirmed only once they reply to that email and commit to performing at the Slam on the 14th February and that they will come prepared to perform five of their poems.

At the event:

Participants in each round will perform in random order.

After each round, the judges will vote, and the competitors with the lowest points in that round will be eliminated, until we have a winner. The exact number that will be eliminated in each round will be decided depending on the number of participants selected to compete in the Slam, and will be announced before the performances start.

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. In case of a tie, the totals from that specific round will be used as a tie-breaker.

Rules and Conditions

Submit only one poem via email.

The contest is open to anyone, anywhere, with the exception of the jury or their family members. No, to make it absolutely clear, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been published or not, whether you’ve performed before or not.Since the main event is live on stage, selected participants must be prepared to travel to the venue (at their own expense), from wherever they are, to perform their work.

Each poem must take no longer than two minutes to perform. Time on stage will be kept strictly, and you will be cut off if you exceed the limit.

Entries must be in English.

Entries must be your own, original work.

Participants selected for the Slam can, on stage, read, recite, declaim, shout, or sing their words. They can stand still, gesture, pace, even jump and up and down. They will be judged on both the quality of the words they perform and the performance itself.

No costumes, musical accompaniment, or audio visual aids allowed.

There is no entry fee.Submissions remain the intellectual property of the entrants, but by submitting an entry, you give the the Kala Ghoda Association, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and its Sponsors, and Caferati permission to use your entry, with acknowledgement, but with no payment to you, in their websites, as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet or CD featuring the best of the Festival.

The decisions of the jury are final and binding, and no correspondence will be entertained regarding the jury’s decisions.

Judges

Caferati’s editors will evaluate initial submissions.

On the event day, there will be a panel of 6 judges.

The expert panel:

(to be announced)

The Audience Panel:

Three randomly chosen members of the audience will join the experts to help judge each round.

Prizes

Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000, Rs 2000, and Rs 1000 to be won.

Winners will be announced at the end of the contest, on the evening of 14th February, 2010, at the David Sassoon Library Garden.

How to enter
Email editors AT caferati DOT com with the subject line “Kala Ghoda Poetry Slam 2010“

February’s coming up, which means the festival’s around the corner. The dates this year: 6th to 14th February.

As usual, this blog will bring you reports, reviews, opinions, sidelights, photographs, maybe video and audio files as well (no promises on that).

We’re looking forward to it. We hope you are too!

‘Finalists’ in the links below refers to the entries with the top 10 scores after the second round of judging, in random order.
‘Scores’ are for both round 1 and round 2.
Clicking on the Entry ID number in the Scores page shows you the full entry and its scores in the both rounds (if it got through to round 2, that is), plus remarks (if any).
‘Winners’ shows you all the prize-winners, their names, the scores they got on both rounds, and remarks, if any.

There are quite a few ties. We follow a simple system when that happens: we drop the next prize, and the tied contestants share the prize money for both places.
For example: a two-way tie in first place - no second place, and the tied entrants share equally the prize money for first and second place;
Another example: a three-way tie for first place - no second or third prize, and the tied entrants get an equal share of the prize money for 1st + 2nd + 3rd; and so on.
For a tie in third place, since we only have prizes for the top three, the tied winners simply share prize money for third place.

Now then.

Literature Quiz
1st place, Mahesh and Bala
2nd place, Anand & Ajith
3rd place, Girish & Aniruddha.
(ISix teams made it through the written elims into the final round. We’ll ask our quizmaster if he’d be willing to share the scores in the elims and the finals with us)

SMS Poetry
Scores - Finalists - Winners
1st place (tied): Sandeep Shete, Kanika Parab, Anitha Murthy

55-word Stories
Scores - Finalists - Winners
1st place, Nina
2nd place, Krishnakumar Sankaran
3rd place (tied), B S Keshav, Dilip D’Souza, Sandeep Shete

Flash Drama
Scores - Finalists - Winners
1st place (tied), Sandeep Shete, Chandrima Pal
3rd place, Menaka Raman

Lyric writing
Scores - Finalists - Winners
1st place (tied), Amrita Chatwal, patrick,
3rd place (tied), sheela jaywant, Raamesh Gowri Raghavan, Joshua C. Love

Poetry Slam
Finalists - Arjun Kariyal, priya shah, upasana vikram mukherjee, Ahmed Karim, Virendra Gupta, Dr. Taher Kagalwala, Swayamprava Panda, Raamesh Gowri Raghavan, Mukul Chadda, Nithya Subramanian, devesh sharma, Abhishek Kumar, patrick (Arjun Kariyal’s entry, though an edited version of his own work, was not submitted by him, which we very nicely told us. Ahmed Karim and patrick did not respond to our invitation to participate in the Slam.)
Winners -
1st place, Mukul Chadda,
2nd place, Raamesh Raghavan,
3rd place, Devesh Sharma

In two parts (so you can’t register for just one)
Saturday,7th Feb (session 1) 1:30-3:30pm
Sunday, 8th Feb, (session 2) 1:30-3:30pm
Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) auditorium

Open to beginner and intermediate level writers

Maximum Number of Participants: 20

Language: English

Conducted By: Urvashi Butalia and Anita Roy

(Click here to read the whole post)

Here’s a little map:

Click through to see a larger version on Google Maps

A new contest! Are you the kind of writer who likes to have your words performed, not read on a page? You’ll like this one.

Theme

Truce

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 8th 10th February, 2009

(Click here to read the whole post)

A new contest! Do you think you can write a better song than all that stuff on the music channels? Come prove it.

Theme

Red

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 8th 10th February, 2009

(Click here to read the whole post)

Flash Fiction (also called micro-fiction or short-shorts) presents a simple challenge: tell a story with all the classical elements: a beginning, middle and end, a conflict and resolution, a credible protagonist.. but do so in a very limited number of words. Fire up your favourite web search engine. There are plenty of tutorials and guidelines available online, as well as excellent examples of the genre.

Flash Fiction is now in its fourth year at the Kala Ghoda contests, though previous contests have allowed longer submissions.

Theme

Cheating.

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 8th February, 2009.

(Click here to read the whole post)

SMS Poetry has one simple guideline: The entire poem must be short enough to fit into a single 160-character SMS.

This contest is now in its fifth year at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival.

Theme

Murder

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 8th February, 2009

(Click here to read the whole post)

This is an attempt to give performance poetry a bit of a push, to bring some new voices out into the open, to put a little more audience participation into poetry, and, not least, to have a little fun.The slam made its debut at Kala Ghoda in 2007 (the first in India, actually) to much enjoyment from the audience and the participants, and returned in 2008 to just as much enthusiasm and support.

Themes

There are three themes:
Rock
Paper
Scissors
You must also have one more poem—your choice of theme—which we’ll call the ‘Free Poem.’

Date and Venue

6:10 p.m., 15th February, 2009, at the David Sassoon Library Garden

Deadlines

For initial submission via the web link: Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 8th February, 2009.

To respond to the invitation to the Slam: noon, 13 February, 2008.

On the day of the Slam, 15th February 2008: report to the Open Desk at the David Sasson Library, Kala Ghoda, by 5.30 p.m.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Sunday, 15th February, 6pm-7pm
BNHS Auditorium

For children aged 9-12

Maximum Number of Participants: 25

Language: English

Conducted by Aniruddha Sengupta

(Click here to read the whole post)