Literature
There are many authors and poets living in the Bandra, both older and younger. What the Celebrate Bandra Festival aims at is to showcase some of this array of talent, through readings and discussions. The readings will be multilingual, truly reflecting Bandra's cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism.
DASTANS
| Date: |
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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| Time: |
19:00 - 20:00
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| Location: |
Pioneer Hall
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| Street: |
John the Baptist Road, Bandra
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| Town/City: |
Bombay, India
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An evening of storytelling with magicians, tricksters, seduction and poetry.
Mahmood Farooqui presents Dastangoi, the lost Art of Urdu Storytelling.
Featuring Rasika Duggal and Rakesh Kumar.
Dastangoi, the art of narrating and simultaneously composing long stories known as Dastans, flourished for centuries in India.
Storytellers called Dastangos would narrate, perform, enact and create tales at salons, palaces, coffee houses, street sides and entertain all strata of society.
Freewheeling, fantasising, uninhibited, this was an impossibly perfect fusion of literature and performance.
Some of most ornate, raunchiest, juiciest and high literary passages of Urdu fiction can be found in the Dastans, the fantasies, that these oral storytellers created.
When finally printed at the end of the nineteenth century, these stories ran into a mammoth forty-six volumes, making it the longest fictional narrative series ever printed in India.
Over the last four years Mahmood Farooqui, along with Danish Husain and Anusha Rizvi, has worked to revive and rehabilitate this art form by performing stories from the Dastangoi tradition in most major cities of India as well as in Pakistan and the United States.
You can read more about the art on
http://dastangoi.blogspot.com.
Sat 14 (Part 1) and Sun 15 (Part 2)
11am - 4pm
Host: The Hub
Caferati’s 2009 Celebrating Shakti Bhatt Workshops
Tomorrow’s Authors
A writing workshop for kids (10 - 16 years - maximum 20 participants) led by Anshumani Ruddra.
Venue: The Hub, UnLtd India, 4th Floor, Candelar Building, 26 St John Baptist Road, Near Mount Mary Steps, Bandra (W), Mumbai 400 050, India.
For queries,
Phone number: 022 3222 0475 (The Hub)
To register, you must pay up in advance, at The Hub office.
Participants must bring their own writing materials.
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.
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
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.