On Tuesday evening (Feb 5), the tables got turned. Up on stage at the David Sassoon Library, discussing travel writing, were four people: Naresh Fernandes (editor of Time Out Mumbai) moderating, Sarayu Ahuja, Hartosh Bal and me.

Naresh got the wagon rolling with excerpts from various ancient travellers/writers, mainly focussing their keen eyes on the chiquitas. Then he asked the three of us to read bits of our writing, to give our audience a flavour.

About now, a scrawny kitten climbed the stairs leading to the stage, but stopped at the last step.

Sarayu read first, a bit from a book she wrote with Dom Moraes, about the travels of a British writer. Hartosh had earlier confessed to me that he was a product of my college, BITS Pilani, where he studied Mechanical Engineering. He was at Pilani a few years after I graduated. His reading was from a book in progress, about a journey around the Narmada river. Mine was a short piece about a tiny place that touched my heart, Cayce in Kentucky. (Click here to read the whole post)

After Kiran Nagarkar, Saeed Mirza. Mirza’s new book, Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, is out from Tranquebar Press. On Monday night, an hour after her conversation with Nagarkar, Nilanjana Roy sat on stage with Mirza to talk about Ammi. And Rahul Bose read several passages from the book.

Nilanjana said that when the manuscript came to her (as Tranquebar’s editor), she figured it would take her a week to read it. Instead, she sat up one night and finished it, and knew right away that she had to make it Tranquebar’s first book.

That was introduction enough.

Mirza began by telling us that his mother came from a “tradition of inclusion”, and had a “largeness of spirit.” These were values, he said, that are disappearing today, leaving only a chauvinism and a lack of the generosity he knew in his mother. Rahul Bose echoed that theme. He said of the book that it speaks of a world we all know; it is a lament for this country, a mixture of longing, love, unslaked thirst and a sense of loss. Books like these, people like Mirza, he said, are the “bits of chewing gum” that keep us together.

(Click here to read the whole post)

(Apologies for the technological incompetence that resulted in this being empty when I first put it up).

I’ve never read Kiran Nagarkar, but after Monday evening when he spent an hour in conversation with Nilanjana Roy, I resolved to fix that lacuna in my life. Not so much because of the samples of his writing we heard or heard described, but because of the man. If that makes sense.

For one thing, his sense of humour. It was there in the first bit of reading he did. This wasn’t a passage from any of his books, but three short fictional biographical blurbs about himself that he wrote for what he said was a short-lived website he had once. “Take your pick”, he said of the three, and it was hard. In one, he claimed to be the most prolific writer in history, having written works now claimed by such luminaries as Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Shobhaa De and the various apostles who put together that book known as the Bible. In another, he claimed to be the inspiration behind the crimes of Idi Amin, Osama, Mugabe and others. It wasn’t just that these outlandish claims were funny by themselves; it was the way he made them, and the way he read them out to us, that had the audience chuckling.

And it was apparent in the rest of his conversation too. Something about the way this man spoke with and to his audience hinted at an alert, vibrant mind, always a good substrate for humour, and so always on the lookout for humour. Not the laugh-out-loud slap-you-on-the-back humour of a Bollywood-style Johnny Lever, yes, but a subtle, self-deprecating kind that grows and builds with that twinkle in his eye. It brought to mind Davy Barry, or Groucho Marx, or perhaps someone even subtler, like Art Buchwald or PL Deshpande.

But there were other things about Nagarkar. (Click here to read the whole post)

The PenTathalon sounded like fun. And unnerving given its ‘Five Exercises for Fiction Writers’ description. What does a fiction writer look like, one wondered. I found out on the morning of Saturday, 3rd February.

Kavita Bhanot, the workshop leader, turned out to be a charming, soft-spoken young lady with a clipped British accent and an eye (and ear) for detail. There were fifteen participants from various backgrounds - a journalist, a business consultant, an animation script-writer, an accountant, a former magazine editor and an advertising professional to name a few.

The five exercises were actually discussions on five aspects of fiction writing: Openings, Description , Characterization, Dialogue and Point of View. Kavita started with,

You all probably read a lot of books and enjoy them. There are actually several techniques employed by fiction writers that you would not have noticed so far because you aren’t familiar with them. In this workshop we will look at some of them and how you can use them in writing.

(Click here to read the whole post)

In the one hour I had between the two writing workshops An Introduction To Freelance Writing and The Art Of Translation yesterday, I wandered the corridors of Elphinstone College and its narrow dark staircases that looked as if they belonged to a cold time-forgotten castle more than a college.

I even happened to venture unnoticed into their staff room which has six larger-than-life portraits hung across its walls. And guess what I found!!! One of the portraits was of William Wordsworth (eponymous grandson of the great poet William Wordsworth), who was a principal of the college at one time. Another portrait was that of Peter Peterson, who had been a Professor of Oriental Languages in the college. It might be history to those who know Elphinstone, but it is certainly news to me.

As for The Art Of Translation workshop that followed, it soon regressed into The Craft Of Translation workshop. It is very necessary to have an agenda or at least a purpose which implicitly sets some sort of tacit agenda, especially if the workshop session is going to be as long as three hours. The discussion was often punctuated with silences that hovered in the air of Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall which hosted the poorly attended workshop.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Jeet Thayil is a widely published Indian-American poet. I had seen him read his poems in Jaipur Lit. festival in 2007. When I found out that he will be taking a workshop on Performance poetry during KG, I rushed to enroll.

I was asked to submit a sample of my work AND memorize it by heart. That was a toughie, but managed it somehow. The whole week saw me mumbling my lines.

I reached the venue, NGMA, at 2.15 pm, 15 minutes before time. I ran into the great man himself, being interviewed by some one. A tall man, with a shaved head, he had looked very austere on the stage in Jaipur. Here, with a casual attire he looked more approachable. When he found out I was there for the workshop, he asked me if I had memorized the poem. I said yes, keeping my fingers firmly crossed.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Braving the inclement weather in the morning (I do not do this even for the most important of my college lectures, preferring to amble into the lecture hall only after noon), I managed to reach Elphinstone College well on time. The trains were empty on account of the weekend, and minus the effort that one needs to exercise in the daunting crowds of Bombay locals, the faces of commuters looked sadly careworn and unoccupied.

Held in Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall, Kavitha Rao’s workshop was quite a success - in addition to the twenty people already registered for the event, there were others who dropped by and had to be accommodated. (It would have been that wee bit better if all of them had showed up on time and not trickled in one by one throughout the duration of the workshop.)

A quick note on Kavitha Rao:

Kavitha Rao has lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Tokyo, and reported from Cairo, Beijing, Seoul and various cities in India. She currently lives in Bombay.

I came across her website just a few months back while researching an article on the internet. I think it was her review of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled in South China Morning Post that caught my eye. I remember thinking that it must take a gritty freelancer to sell such a story to SCMP.

And her website is another lesson in making the right first impressions, especially in a profession where first impressions can often also be the last. Though her website is clean, free of frills, and minimalistic, it exudes a quiet authority, is regularly updated and never undersells her strengths as a freelancer. In short, just the sort of online portfolio that can make an editor sit up and take notice.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Sunday, 10th February
Time: 13:30 – 16:30
Venue: Elphinstone College, Seminar Room 2
Conducted by: David Raphael Israel

‘As a poetic form in the English language, serious efforts to practice the ghazal (a form with long and distinguished antecedents in Arabic, Persian and Urdu literatures) represent a fresh development among some contemporary poets.

‘I have been experimenting with ways of approaching ghazal-writing in English for many years now — and I feel these efforts are beginning to bear some fruit worth sharing. In this workshop, I will sketch a brief history of the form in English, and will draw on some of my own English-language ghazals by way of illustrating qualities and requirements and expressive possibilities of the form. As a group, we will approach a ghazal-writing exercise.’

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 9th February
Time: 14:30 – 16:30
Venue: Elphinstone College, Seminar Room 2
Conducted by: Arka Mukhopadhyay

This workshop is intended to serve as an introduction to poetry in performance for young children. It will encourage them to look at poetry as a performance medium, by playing around with the oral and aural aspects of poetry. It will also explore ways of using the body in poetry performance - stamping, stomping,clapping, clucking, moving, dancing and anything in-between! Through all this, the workshop will also explore a number of themes that are of importance to the immediate surroundings of the children, including (but not limited to): countries of the imagination (the title of the workshops is from a Walter de la Mare poem about an imaginary land called Tartary), sights and sounds of the city, heroes and heroines, etc.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 9th February (Session 1), Sunday 10th February (Session 2)
Time: 12:30 – 14:30 (both days)
Venue: Muse Boutique
Conducted by: Sarnath Banerjee and Samit Basu

The graphic form is a new language to tell the most pertinent tales of the time, to manufacture a local and probably work towards an idiom of our own. The workshop will hopefully introduce the form, its scopes and how can one use it. We will also discuss cross discipline practices using the graphic novel.

(More about the workshop leaders and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date:Sunday, 10th February
Time: 13:30 – 16:30
Venue: Bombay Natural History Society, Auditorium
Conducted by: Ranjit Hoskote

One of the best ways of preparing for poetry, apart from trusting the senses and sharpening the mind, is to dip into the vast archive of poetic forms and concerns from around the world, which we inherit as contemporary writers. Ranjit Hoskote will discuss the pastoral, which is one of the oldest forms of poetry, and lead a workshop dedicated to its understanding and its practice.

Beginning in Greek and Latin poetry as an evocation of the simplicity and serenity of Arcadia — in a world already made complex by urban life, military intrigue and transnational trade — the pastoral has taken on many avatars. We find its energies in the nostalgic Renaissance poem for the garden, the forest or the meadow, recalled at the heart of court and city. It becomes the nature poem of the Romantics, retrieving waterfall and meadow in a landscape transformed by the Industrial revolution. We encounter it, again, as the dream of instinctual life, closer to the animal world than human psychology; and in the new ecological poem.

Hoskote will speak on the pastoral, its history and possibilities, offering examples that include Marvell, Keats, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, as well as a range of contemporary poets. He will also encourage workshop participants to test out the form, see how they can incorporate it in their own lives and engage with it in their own writing.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 9th February (Session 1), Sunday 10th February (Session 2)
Time: 10:30 – 12:30 (both days)
Venue: Elphinstone College, Seminar Room 2
Conducted by: Neeru Nanda

The premise of this workshop is that all children can cook up great stories (parents, don’t we know that!!) but when it comes to writing them out they flounder. So, on Day 1 we will generate an original story (on a title to be given in the workshop), which the kids will write out at home. On Day 2 we will discuss each child’s story against the background of Creative Writing. The 3 best stories will be posted on the Kala Ghoda Gazette.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 2nd February
Time: 14:30 – 16:30
Venue: National Gallery of Modern Art, Auditorium
Conducted by: Jeet Thayil

This two-hour workshop will deal with the basic technical aspects of performing poetry to an audience. We will talk about voice, music, stance; what to do with your hands, your body, your face. We’ll watch performances by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, and Charles Bukowski, and identify the qualities that make these performances interesting, or not.

We’ll discuss what makes a poem work on the page and what makes it work on the stage and whether it is possible for a poem to do both. And we’ll ask if the skills required for performance are entirely different from those required for writing.

I’d like participants to send poems in before the workshop, and I encourage participants to memorize the poems they want critiqued.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 2nd February (Session 1), Sunday 3rd February (Session 2)
Time: 14:30 – 16:30 (both days)
Venue: Bombay Natural History Society, Auditorium
Conducted by: Jane Bhandari and Marilyn Noronha

The goal here is to teach adults how to translate their ideas, thoughts and feelings into writing that appeals to children. This workshop will primarily be concerned with writing in prose.

Session 1: “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley.”
Introducing the basic elements of good story-telling.
Practical applications: creating credible characters.

Session 2: Weaving the plot.
Creating a story and bringing it to a satisfying conclusion.
Practical applications: working in groups to present a short story.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)

Date: Saturday, 9th February
Time: 13:30 – 16:30
Venue: Bombay Natural History Society, Auditorium
Conducted by: Anita Roy

What Every Writer Should Know About Publishing is intended as an introduction to the book publishing industry for writers who are relatively new to it, or for those who just want to find out what goes in to making a book—from proposal to finished product.
It will offer guidance about how to go about finding the best ‘home’ for your work, and will also deal with some of the professional—rather than just the creative—aspects of writing. We’ll also cover some basics of editing your own work and that of others and what to expect from the editors you encounter along the way. This is aimed at maximizing your chances of getting your proposal or manuscript accepted. The workshop is open to writers of any denomination—fiction, non-fiction, children’s, poets, academics, published or unpublished, Booker prize-winners or absolute beginners.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)
(Click here to read the whole post)