Ruth Padel, ‘The Tangled Bank’ (PEN & Prithvi, 26 July 2010)

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE & PRITHVI THEATRE

invite you to

‘THE TANGLED BANK’

A reading by RUTH PADEL

Date: 26 July 2010 (Monday)
Time: 7 pm
Place: Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road
Juhu, Bombay 400 049

ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS READING IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

On the last page of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin proposes his famous vision of life-forms co-existing alongside each other: of an entangled bank, clothed with plants of many kinds, birds singing on the bushes, various insects flitting about, worms crawling through the damp earth. These elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us: there is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or one.

A descendant of Darwin, the distinguished British poet and novelist Ruth Padel will read from a bank of her own work, both poetry and prose, drawing parallels between the forms of words on the page and those of natural history, stressing the interconnectedness of poetry and science, theatre and nature. She will read her highly praised poems about Darwin, poems on wildlife and genetics, from her novel Where the Serpent Lives, featuring the Hamadryad or King Cobra in forests of Karnataka and Bengal, and from Tigers in Red Weather, her book on tiger conservation throughout Asia. Padel will also do a rare reading from her work on Greek Tragedy, arguing that from its Western origins, the theatre has been the place that makes visible the unseen.

For more on the author, please see: www.ruthpadel.com

RANJIT HOSKOTE
Hon. Secretary-Treasurer
The PEN All-India Centre

Inquiries: india.pen@gmail.com

*

PEN@Prithvi + Kshitij: International Poetry Festival

PEN@Prithvi & Kshitij Prakashan Sanshodhan Kendra

invite you to

TWO EVENINGS OF INTERNATIONAL POETRY

on Sunday: 7 February & Monday: 8 February 2010

at

Prithvi House
Opp. Prithvi Theatre, 1st Floor,
Janki Kutir, Juhu, Mumbai 400 049

*

- SUNDAY, 7 February 2010
6:30 p.m.
(Poets: Peter Waugh, Maria Elena Blanco, and Enrique Moya)

- MONDAY, 8 February 2010
6:30 p.m.
(Poets: Victoria Slavusky, Dieter Berdel, and Hanane Aad)

*

Peter Waugh, (Austria/ English) Born in Barnet, 1956, Waugh’s poetry has appeared in anthologies and magazines in England, USA, Austria, Slovakia, Macedonia and Croatia.

Dieter Berdel (Austria/German) Born in 1939, Berdel has written poetry, short prose and visual poetry in both High German and Viennese dialect. He has published ten books.

Enrique Moya (Austrian-Venezuelan/English) Born in Caracas, 1958, Moya is a poet, fiction writer, literary translator, publisher, essayist, music and literary critic.

María Elena Blanco (Cuban/Spanish) Blanco is a poet, essayist and translator born in Havana, Cuba. She writes predominantly in her native Spanish.

Victoria Slavuski (Argentinian/Spanish) Slavuski is a poet, novelist and cultural journalist who lives in Europe. She has published a novel.

Hanane Aad (Lebanese/Arabic) Aad is a poet who combines contributions to print media, television and radio. She has published three collections of poetry.

KAMAL VORA
for Kshitij

RANJIT HOSKOTE
for PEN@Prithvi

*

Inquiries: india.pen@gmail.com

Launch of Kalpish Ratna’s The Quarantine Papers

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE & RANGASWAR/CHAVAN CENTRE

invite you to a book reading from The Quarantine Papers

by KALPISH RATNA

The reading will be followed by an interactive session with the authors,
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed

Date: 5 February 2010 (Friday)
Time: 6.00 pm
Place: Cultural Hall, 4th Floor, Chavan Centre
Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021

Please join us for tea at 5.30 pm.

*

ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS MEETING IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

*

The Quarantine Papers is a detective story set across two lifetimes. It brings into focus the great adventures in medical science that took place in Bombay at the turn of the 19th century. The setting is the historic Grant Medical College and Sir JJ Hospital which saw the discoveries and innovations that shaped the medicine of today. The plague epidemic of 1897 is chiefly remembered for the work of Waldemar Haffkine, but the many Indians who shared his discoveries have been long forgotten. This book celebrates these forgotten voices, placing them in their political and cultural milieu, authenticating their stories by drawing on archived documents.

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write together as Kalpish Ratna. Surgeons by profession, and writers by avocation, they write extensively on science, medicine, literature and the arts. Bombay University’s Grant Medical College is their alma mater. They believe that science has and deserves its true place in the arts. Swaminathan lives in Bombay. Syed divides his time between Bombay and Long Beach, Mississippi.

Ranjit Hoskote
Hon. Secretary-Treasurer
The PEN All-India Centre

Inquiries: india.pen@gmail.com

Kyla Pasha Reading, High Noon and the Body

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE & YODA PRESS

invite you to the launch of High Noon and the Body

a first book of poems by KYLA PASHA

Date: 4 February 2010 (Thursday)
Time: 6.15 pm
Place: Theosophy Hall (3rd floor)
40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, Mumbai 400 020

*

ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS EVENT IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

*

High Noon and the Body (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010) is the first published collection of Pakistani feminist poet and journalist Kyla Pasha’s poems. Ranjit Hoskote writes, “Pasha’s poems move in several directions, unconstrained by doctrinaire notions of what a poem should do and be. She speaks to present, distant or departed interlocutors; meditates on how we lose and find ourselves again through travel; brings news of war to the front lawn, talks crisp commonsense to the robed spectres of Death and Memory.” Pasha, who was born in Islamabad in 1979, graduated from Oberlin College, Ohio, with a BA in history and creative writing, and received an MA in International Studies, with a focus on comparative religion, from the University of Washington, Seattle. She has been a contributing editor for GlobalComment since 2007, and in 2008, founded Chay Magazine, which she edits. She works as assistant professor of liberal arts at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. Pasha blogs at www.kylapasha.com.

Naresh Fernandes
Member, Executive Committee
The PEN All-India Centre

Inquiries: india.pen@gmail.com

John Kampfner, Freedom for Sale

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
& THE PRESS CLUB MUMBAI

invite you to

a talk by JOHN KAMPFNER

on his new book, Freedom for Sale

The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by NARESH FERNANDES, Editor-in-Chief, Time Out Mumbai
Date: 20 January 2010 (Wednesday)
Time: 6.30 pm
Venue: The Press Club, Mumbai,
Glass House, Azad Maidan
Mahapalika Marg, Mumbai 400 001

*
John Paul Kampfner (born 1962) is a British journalist. He was editor of the weekly political magazine, the New Statesman from 2005 to 2008. During that time, he took the magazine’s circulation to a 30-year high, winning a series of awards including Current Affairs Editor of the Year in 2006. Kampfner was a foreign correspondent in Moscow and Berlin for nearly a decade, for Reuters (1984-1999) and the Daily Telegraph (1989-1991). Subsequently he became a political correspondent and commentator for the Financial Times and the BBC, and political editor of the New Statesman before he became editor.
Kampfner became Chief Executive of Index on Censorship in 2008. He is also Chair of Turner Contemporary, the largest visual arts project in the south-east of England outside London, in Margate. Kampfner has also contributed several BBC documentaries: his two-part series on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, The Dirty War, won him the Journalist of the Year and Film of the Year awards from the Foreign Press Association in 2002.
In the context of Freedom for Sale, Kampfner writes: “I’ve come to think of it as the pact, the willingness of intelligent, well-to-do people to trade certain liberties in return for the promise of either prosperity or security. The model is Singapore, the city-state where I was born and a place that never ceases to fascinate me. But the pact’s appeal is now far more widespread and takes in not just the countries you might expect — China, Russia — but plenty you might not. Perhaps even the country you live in. I’m not talking about totalitarian regimes, where fear is the predominant mechanism for ensuring state control, but countries where citizens enjoy extensive private freedoms — to travel, to own property, to conduct their personal lives as they wish and, of course, to make and spend money. As part of their tacit deal with their government, people consciously agree not to cause trouble, nor to engage in excessive criticism of it.”

RANJIT HOSKOTE
Hon. Secretary-Treasurer
The PEN All-India Centre

*

PEN@Prithvi: DESERT WINDS, 9 January 2010

PEN@Prithvi:
DESERT WINDS
Music and words evoking the magic of the Great Rann Of Kutch

RANDHIR KHARE, poet, and MUSA GULAM JAT, a jodiya pawa musician, friends and collaborators for more than a decade, get together to recreate the spirit of the desert through music and words.

Date: 9 January 2010 (Saturday)
Time: 6.30 pm
Place: Prithvi House, 1st Floor (Opp. Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu)

ENTRY IS FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME.

*

Randhir Khare is an award winning poet whose work has been extensively published and performed, inspiring the works of painters, illustrators, photographers, educationists and multi-media producers. He has performed his poetry with a jazz band at the international writer’s festival in Indonesia and with traditional instrumentalists such as santoor, tabla and jodiya pawa players.

Musa Gulam Jat is considered to be the foremost player of the jodiya pawa, or double flute, in Kutch. He learnt to play the instrument from his father when he was fourteen years old and worked at it whilst he herded his cattle at fairs, on feast days, in melas. Then he went on to perform in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Nagpur, Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. It was soon after that he travelled abroad to perform as part of the Festival of India programme.

Sampurna Chattarji
Member, Executive Committee
The PEN All-India Centre