From shveta at sarai.net  Thu Feb  4 11:53:25 2010
From: shveta at sarai.net (shveta at sarai.net)
Date: Thu,  4 Feb 2010 11:53:25 +0530
Subject: [cm_public] Launch of Trickster City
Message-ID: <6e24645f0b00c043d48046cb4480e23a@sarai.net>

Dear All,

You are invited to
The launch of "Trickster City"
at CSDS Lawns, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi on 12th February, 2010, at 4.15 PM
The authors and the translator will introduce the book.

(The book is available at the Penguin Stall at the World Book Fair, Delhi)

TRICKSTER CITY: Writings from the Belly of the Metrolpolis (Penguin, India,
2010)

Authors 
Azra Tabassum, Jaanu Nagar, Lakhmi Chand Kohli, Rakesh Khairalia, Yashoda
Singh, Kiran Verma, Suraj Rai, Neelofar, Kulwinder Kaur, Shamsher Ali,
Babli Rai, Ankur Kumar, Dilip Kumar, Love Anand, Nasreen, Rabiya Quraishy,
Sunita Nishad, Saifuddin, Arish Qureshi, Tripan Kumar

Translated by Shveta Sarda

Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on the city of
Delhi. They were written over a period of two years by a group of twenty
young people who live in different places in the city of Delhi, and who
have, over the last several years, sustained among themselves and with
others around them, a relationship of writing and conversing about the city.

This book chronicles the difficult period of loss of home and livelihood in
the city through urban eviction, encounters with the agencies of the state,
love stories gone awry, the fragility of relationships, and the sustained
effort to build life in anticipation of beauty and pleasure.

The writers draw from experiences, events and biographies, part fictive,
part documentary, to inscribe an image of the city that is rarely
available. There is a yearning in their writings for the expression of the
poetic and allegorical alongside the harshness of everyday existence.

Trickster City is an aphoristic and playful meander by writers in search of 
a new language that expresses the profound uncertainties and delicately
realised joys of life in the city.

All the writers are are in their twenties, and live in neighbourhoods
across the city, including LNJP colony in Central Delhi, Dakshinpuri in
South Delhi and Sawda-Ghevra, a new resettlement colony at the northern
frontier of the city. They have been associated for different durations
with the Cybermohalla labs set by up Ankur Society for Alternatives in
Education and Sarai–CSDS in different neighbourhoods in Delhi.

The translator Shveta Sarda works in Sarai-CSDS since 2001. 

ADVANCE PRAISE for Trickster City

Trickster City is a groundbreaking collection of writings about the South
Asian city, its authors so free in their intelligence and imagination that
they put conventional, pious analysis to shame—and demonstrate,
ultimately, that even the most pressing material circumstances can never
constrain the kind of intelligence that lives in them.
—Rana Dasgupta

The thumbnail sketches, vignettes, stories and testimonies here invoke an
urban landscape that is only partly outside us. The chaos, uncertainties
and contradictions are us, as we negotiate the city as an overwhelming,
inescapable inner reality in twenty-first century India. The Trickster City
may well be a lovable but impossible part of our selves.
—Ashis Nandy

Trickster City is the gentle, compassionate anti-dote to the mass of
mail-fisted representations of the 'under-class' that has become so popular
these days. The writers that make up this collection are almost amazing in
their restraint, their ability to distil that perfect moment that conjures
up the times they live in. Story after story evokes the ways in which
people keep love alive while a kind of terror, the terror of being poor in
a cruel city, lurks offstage, just a midnight knock away.
If you put your ear to this book you will be able to hear people breathing,
if you touch it, you will be able to feel their fragile, but furious pulse.
If you read this book, you will be greatly rewarded.
—Arundhati Roy

This book is a reflection of the experiences, thoughts, ideas and
aspirations of the underbelly of the metropolis. These writings have
precision of thought and an optimistic determination, which looks at the
future with hope, courage and patience. The portrayal of modest experience
is matter of fact and the insights have a wisdom that only experience can
bring and no amount of education or knowledge can impart.
—Krishna Sobti

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