From dak at sarai.net Sun Sep 3 23:08:10 2006 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 23:08:10 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] SEPTEMBER 2006 Message-ID: ************************************************************************ ******* **************** SARAI NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER 2006 *************** ************************************************************************ ******* Dear All, This September we feature three new experimental documentaries, "temporary loss of consiousness" by Monica Bhasin, " Saacha" by Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar, and "July Boys" by Gautam Sonti. There will be two seminars - Carol Upadhaya on identity in the new software economy, and a round-table leading up to the India Social Forum 2006. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Julia Milberger present a mixed media installation-performance "On the Move" on the Calcutta Railway station. We hope many of you will be able to make your way to Sarai and share an evening with us! Warmly Aarti ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[CONTENTS]] EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS 1. Seminars @ Sarai: Reinventing India in the New Global Economy: Negotiation of Identity in the Software Outsourcing Industry + Screening of "July Boys", Carol Upadhya 2. Media, Politics and Solidarity: Leading up to the India Social Forum 2006: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Seema Mustafa, Umesh Anand, Aditya Nigam and Mukul Sharma 3. Artists Presentations @ Sarai : "On the Move" mixed media installation and performance, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Julia Milberger FILM SCREENINGS & DISCUSSIONS 4. Films @ Sarai: temporary loss of consiousness [Monica Bhasin] + Saacha [Anajali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar] RESOURCES 5. Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence CONVERSATIONS 6. Report on Independent Fellowship Workshop, August 2006 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS]] ================================= Artists Presentation @ Sarai: On the Move ================================= On the Move A mixed-media performance-installation Budhaditya Chattopadyay and Julia Milberger 6:00 P.M, Tuesday, 5 September 2006 Interface Zone, Sarai-CSDS One the Move is a mixed-media installation-performance of black and white photographs shot at the Calcutta railway station, a video loop and live sound. By juxtaposing three related but distinct formal registers, the artists create an immersive sound and video environment, and open up a range of associational possibilities for the viewer. ================================================ Seminar @ Sarai: Urban Cultures and Politics Seminar Series ================================================ Reinventing India in the new global economy: Negotiation of identity in the software outsourcing industry a talk by Carol Upadhya National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore and screening of film July Boys: New Global Players by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upadhya 4:30 P.M. Wednesday, 6 September 2006 Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room Drawing on research carried out over the last two years on the IT industry in Bangalore and on IT workers, the presentation focuses on questions of identity formation, subjectivity, and construction of the self among this category of global ‘knowledge workers’. Actors in the outsourcing industry occupy a range of positions in the workplace and in the global economy, which appear to be central in the shaping and structuring of their identities and sense of self – especially as cultural categories such as ‘Indian’ and ‘global’ are being reformulated and deployed in these new corporate workplaces. The presentation draws on software engineers’ narratives about their work experiences, and their feelings of belonging, alienation, and cultural identity, to point to the contradictory and multiple ways in which social identities are being restructured in this context. This theme will be illustrated by the film, ‘July Boys’. July Boys: New Global Players (part of the film series ‘Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry’) by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upadhya The Indian software outsourcing industry has emerged as a key node of the global economy and the leading edge of globalisation in India. The series of films, ‘Coding Culture’, explores the culture of outsourced work and the moulding of a new workforce to cater to this global high-tech services industry. July Boys focuses on a small ‘startup’ company in Bangalore that designs and produces software products for cellular service providers in Europe and the U.S. Turning the tables on the usual outsourcing story, July Systems has leveraged U.S.-based venture capital and Indian technical expertise to break into the latest high-tech markets. The film explores the creation of a Silicon Valley-style work culture within this ‘cross-border’ company that has one leg in Bangalore and the other in Santa Clara, California. It also highlights the emergence of new kinds of identities (global, transnational, cosmopolitan) that incorporate and transcend pre-existing identities such as the national (Indian) and the regional (Tamil). But the narratives of the film’s characters reveal a tension between their assumed global subjectivity and their nationalist pride in July’s achievements as a company founded and run by Indians that makes ‘cutting edge products’ for the global market. [Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and is currently a Fellow in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore (NIAS). For more than three years she has been researching various aspects of the IT industry and IT workforce in Bangalore.] ==================================================== Media, Politics and Solidarity: Leading up to the India Social Forum ==================================================== Media, Politics and Solidarity : Leading up to the India Social Forum 2006 (In Collaboration with the Media and Communications Group - ISF 2006) 2:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., Tuesday 12 September 2006, Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room Sarai-CSDS is hosting a panel discussion on Media, Politics and Solidarity as part of the discursive process leading up to the Indian Social Forum 2006. The India Social Forum is a regional event of the World Social Forum process. The themes to be discussed are : 'Rich Media/Poor Democracy', 'Towards an Alternative Media', 'Truth, Market Forces and Media' and 'Towards India Social Forum - Another Media Culture is Possible'. Speakers will include, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Seema Mustafa, Umesh Anand (journalists), Aditya Nigam (CSDS) and Mukul Sharma (ISF 2006). The discussion will be moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[FILM]] temporary loss of consciousness 35 mins, Colour, India, 2005 A film by Monica Bhasin 6:00 P.M, Friday, 15 September 2006 Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room ‘temporary loss of consciousness’ alludes to the recurring displacement of populations in the Indian subcontinent from the time of Partition (1947) to the present. The film explores the ideas of borders, boundaries, limits and forbidden spaces that generate vast expanses of wastelands of human emotion and action. Treated as a poetic essay the film traces these ideas through the voices of those that live in exile in the Indian subcontinent. It has been shot in New Delhi apart from the borders of India - Pakistan and India and Bangladesh. Falling in the genre of Experimental Documentary, the film constructs meaning through juxtaposition of several elements like found footage of Independence/Partition, constructed narratives spoken in the respective languages of the affected populace and abstractions of abandoned spaces or spaces of refuge. Characters from ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, are woven into the structure and the spoken narratives are poetic in character, speaking of longing and belonging, home and honour, loss and betrayal, boundaries and crossings. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Monica Bhasin, the director of the film. [Monica Bhasin is a filmmaker/editor who graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2004. She is previously a graduate of the Mass Communication Research Center, Jamia Millia Islamia University (1992) New Delhi, India. For many years she worked as an editor for documentary films in Delhi and she recently completed her first non-fiction film called temporary loss of consciousness. The film has screened at the Indo American Art Council Film Festival 2005, New York as well as at the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentaries, Shorts and Animation, 2006, Mumbai.] ******************************************* Saacha (The Loom) 49 Mins, English and Marathi versions, 2001 A film by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro 7:00 P.M., Friday, 15 September 2006 Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room Second Prize, New Delhi Video Forum, 2001 Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis. The screening will be followed with a discussion with the directors, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar. [Anjali Monteiro is Professor, and K.P. Jayasankar is Professor and Chair, Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Monteiro has a Masters degree in Economics and a Ph.D. in Sociology. Jayasankar has an M.A. in German language and a Ph.D. in Humanities and Social Sciences. Both of them are involved in media production, teaching and research. Jointly they have won thirteen national and international awards for their films. A presiding thematic of much of their work has been problematising of notions of self and the other, of normality and deviance, of the local and the global, through the exploration of diverse narratives and rituals. They have several papers in the area of media and cultural studies and have contributed to scholarly journals such as Cultural Studies.] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[RESOURCES]] Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence Sarai Reader 06 uses 'Turbulence' as a conceptual vantage point from which to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seek to examine 'turbulence' as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a 'political' map of the world. It wants to see areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, to investigate the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally'. At an early stage in its gestation this year, the Sarai Reader was invited to participate in a community of publications - a project called 'the documenta 12 magazines' Documenta 12 Magazines is a process and a discursive community that brings together more than 80 print and online periodicals throughout the world. "These journals and magazines will discuss the main themes and theories behind documenta 12 with particular emphasis being placed on reflecting the interests and specific knowledge of the respective local contexts entering into a dialogue with documenta 12. These debates will be compiled and published in a series of publications. This 'journal of journals', so to speak, will represent a forum for the contemporary aesthetic discourse. This platform will in turn also form part of the documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel." This year, Documenta 12 Magazines addresses the issue of 'Modernity?'. Sarai Reader 06 interprets this issue with an emphasis on the question mark that follows the abstract noun of this marker of temporality. We see our time, the one that sits in on Modernity's wake, as an opportunity for interrogation and questioning, for admitting to radical uncertainties, and looking askance at the claims of truth and beauty. We are happy that this Sarai Reader marks a diffuse, dispersed engagement with discourses in contemporary art, by featuring a large number of contributions by artists, curators and critics, and by paying a degree of focused attention on the perils of practice in contemporary art and literature. Like all Sarai publications, Sarai Reader 06 is available for free download in pdf format at: http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader_06.html To order copies of the book, write to: publications at sarai.net or aftab at sarai.net ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[CONVERSATIONS]] ==================================== Sarai Independent Fellowship workshop 2006 ==================================== This August saw the return of the Independent Fellows to Sarai for their final presentations. This year there were almost 50 presentations over a hectic four days of intense and lively debate and discussion. Projects presented were extremely varied, both in terms of areas of research, as also modes of rendition. Projects ranged from an examination of the ways in which mobile phones inflect women's experiences of space in college, water ecologies in Mumbai, an ethnography of Theyyam from a practitioner's perspective, a search for forms of narrating informal sector construction work, a biographical narrative of the first teacher in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, to explorations of sexuality and space, an examination of the content of braille magazines, women's magazine's in urdu, trading communities in Kutch, an exploration of the modes through which musicians learn Western classical music and the construction of "originality". Researchers ranged from academics situated within the university, to professionals situated in work contexts whose research constituted reflections on the spaces they inhabit (such as Rahul Pandita's graphic novel on life in 24 hour news, and Indu Verma's lively descriptions of the world of Hindi soap-operas), to filmmakers, musicians, graphic designers, television professionals, journalists, architects, programmers, social workers, actors. Researchers experimented with a variety of forms – these ranged from semi-fictionalised narrative accounts, first-person narratives, short films, an audio-essay, a video-cum oral narrative, formal academic papers, graphic novels and comic books. Like last year, this year too saw research rendered as performance- presentations in the evening. Averee Chaurey presented "The Song of the Baul', a spoken word and song performance of written as a first- person narrative. The Independent Fellowship programme is designed such that the end of the fellowship process does not signal and end to the conversation between fellows and their material, or between eachother. Many projects were therefore 'works-in-progress' and researchers saw the presentations as forums from which to gather fresh questions and provocations, find new directionalities in their work. Detailed reports on the recently concluded cycle of fellowships will be made available soon, and do also keep a look out for the call for proposals for the next round. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ END OF NEWSLETTER -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Fri Sep 22 00:13:35 2006 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:43:35 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Call for Applications: A Masterclass on Imaginative Prose Message-ID: <1240.203.101.15.147.1158864215.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Call for Applications: Imaginative Prose A masterclass facilitated by Sharmistha Mohanty 4 November 2006 to 12 December 2006 Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Civil Lines Delhi 110054 This workshop is open to those who wish to have a serious engagement with prose writing, fiction or non-fiction, that is, imaginative prose. Because we are born into language, writing cannot be taught as a craft, like the other arts. We already know the codes, the grammar, how to make sentences, paragraphs, pages. In writing we work at the opposite end from a musician or a dancer who must first learn the basics, we need to refuse the ease with which words come. A first task then is to make a relationship with language, different from the everyday one. For myself, as a prose writer, I see speech as close to thought, writing as close to consciousness. That is why it is often possible in writing to express something unknown even to oneself. More than finding a way to make this relationship with language, we can look at how it can be allowed. This may mean expanding the space of language, not shrinking it by taking on given structures, or having too defined a purpose, or using a kind of language that has been worn out with use. A second task is to ask the question, what is form? In writing, form arises not from an external, not from mere wishes or ideals. Form arises from a real need. This is what must be identified, by everyone, individually, for themselves. Arising from a need and arriving at its shape through a struggle, each found form will have its own rigour and can never be whimsical or random. This also means that we can explore the very borders of prose, where it stands at the edge, perhaps, of poetry. By letting oneself be with these explorations, one can move towards a writing which is able to evoke what is not already known. The basic principle I will work with in conducting the workshop is that writing, because it cannot be “taught,” can only be guided, by a practitioner, and the best form of guidance is to work on the actual writing and take it forward through criticism and dialogue. Each participant will present at least two prose pieces of reasonable length during the course of the workshop. The work will be discussed at the workshop by myself and all the other participants. I will also hold one-on-one sessions with everyone at least once during the course. We will also be doing some reading, in a parallel track, reading which spans a vast array of prose forms. The reading however, will only be ancillary, it is the writing on which we will concentrate. [Sharmistha Mohanty studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the USA. She is the author of two novels, Book One, and the recently published New Life (India Ink/Roli Books.) Her translations of Tagore’s fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories, is due out in early 2007. Mohanty’s work has appeared in journals in the USA, UK, France, and India, as well as the online journal www.inertiamagazine.com. She was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany and has been awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Minsitry of Culture. She has also worked as a scriptwriter, among others with Mani Kaul, for the film Nazar.] The workshop will have limited participants. Applicants should send in a writing sample of imaginative prose, not more than five pages, and a page on why they would like to attend this workshop. The workshop will run from November 4th-December 12th. There will be two sessions a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The sessions will begin at 4:00 p.m. and will run for three hours each time. Applications must be in by October 10th, 2006. Applicants will be informed by October 20th. There is a participant charge of Rs. 1500, payable on confirmation of selection. Applications and queries can be sent to dak at sarai.net, with the subject line "Creative Writing Workshop". Paper applications should be posted to: "Application for Creative Writing Workshop" Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Civil Lines Delhi - 110054