‘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

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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

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- 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)

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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

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Inquiries: india.pen@gmail.com

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.

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ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS MEETING IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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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

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

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ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS EVENT IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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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

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

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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

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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.

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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

invite you, with your friends, to

Keeping Tibet Alive!

A Talk by THE VENERABLE LHAKDOR-LA

The distinguished speaker will address the crisis of a culture in exile: its literature, art, and the institutions that keep them alive, including the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, and the Men-Tsee-Khang or Tibetan Medical Institute. Cultural activist and Secretary of the Dharma Rain Centre, ASPI MISTRY will chair the session.

Date: 14 December 2009 (Monday)
Time: 6.15 pm
Place: Theosophy Hall (3rd Floor)
40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, Mumbai 400 020

ENTRY IS FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME!

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The Ven. Lhakdor-la, Geshe Lhakdor, has served His Holiness The Dalai Lama as his translator and religious assistant since 1989, accompanying him to numerous conferences and forums throughout the world. He has translated many important works from English to Tibetan and from Tibetan to English, and offers rare insight into the cultural and philosophical issues surrounding contemporary Buddhism. Reflecting the elite scholarly training tradition of his lineage, the title “Geshe” is the equivalent of a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy. Geshe Lhakdor has also been involved in the growing academic and institutional interest in Buddhism in the West. He is a trustee of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility, and Director of the Central Archive of the Dalai Lama. He currently serves as Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India.

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

We look forward to seeing you at PEN@Prithvi this December, where we present

A Reading by TSIPPY LEVIN BYRON

The author will read from her three collections of poetry, as well as new work. Novelist and actor VIVEK TANDON will introduce and engage the author in conversation.

Date: 12 December 2009 (Saturday)
Time: 6.30 pm
Place: Prithvi House (1st Floor)
Opp. Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu, Mumbai 400 049

ENTRY IS FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME!

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Tsippy Levin Byron (born Tel Aviv, 1955) has published four books of poetry in Hebrew with Israel’s leading publishing house. She has received grants and awards from some of the most respected Israeli foundations, and her work as been warmly received by critics in the newspapers, television and radio, both in Israel and India. Levin Byron is at work on a PhD in Comparative Literature, addressing Natalia Ginsburg and Clara Sereni, who, she argues, were “central voices in the writing of Italian secular Jewish women”. While other scholars have emphasised the feminist and socialist affiliations of these writers, Levin Byron draws attention to their secular Jewish identity. Her thesis proposal was awarded a prize by the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism. Levin Byron is a frequent visitor to India.

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

Arjun Chandramohan Bali (born in Jodhpur, 1968) describes himself as:
Storyteller | Filmmaker | Wandering Poet

Nargarh

eyes reduced to slits
a storm hovers on
a sentinel I stand
fingers spread
into the wind electric
sparks fly off their tips, rain
approaches Jaipur

Arundhathi Subramaniam (born in Bombay, 1967) is the author of three books of poetry: On Cleaning Bookshelves (Allied, India, 2001); Where I Live (Allied, India, 2005); and Where I Live: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Publishers, UK, 2009). She has co-edited an anthology of Indian love poems in English (Confronting Love, Penguin, 2005) and is the author of a prose work, The Book of Buddha (Penguin India, 2005). She has since 2004 been the Editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web. http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=12079

Recycled

Driving through the Trossachs I see
the picture I drew as a five-year-old
in Bombay – a rectangle
with two square windows,
isosceles roof, smoking chimney,
and girl with yellow hair
standing in the driveway,
flanked by two flower pots.

And there is comfort in knowing
what we are so often told,
that fancy has wings
and dreams come true,
even if it takes them years
to take root
in some corner
of a foreign land
that is forever India.

From Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Publishers, UK, 2009

Malavika Sangghvi was once described by the New York Times as ‘a chronicler of social mores’. She has written for international publications such as the Sunday Times Magazine (UK), the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and Harpers and Queen. In 1996 after many years as a columnist and journalist with the Times of India, Mid-day, the India Today Group and the Sunday Observer, she rejoined full time journalism, first editing Bombay Times and then the Sunday Review. Malavika is best remembered for the popular column she used to pen in the Sunday Mid-Day through the early nineties, called ‘Mixed Media’ – a satirical take on current affairs; and later her column in the Bombay Times – ‘Salaam Mumbai’. She is the editor of the book – ‘The Making of Samovar’, on the iconic arts café in Bombay’s Kala Ghoda district. She has written two books, one on Mumbai’s dynamic women and the other a book of poetry.

Notes to a Wine Connoisseur

Peach, plum, honey, pewter
Toffee, lychee, black currant, murder
Nose, sniff, sip, mouth
Swallow
Fields wither, evaporating terroir

Pluck, crush, transfer, ferment
In guts, in vats, in oak-smoked barrels
His woman diminishes
Every sip he takes

The juice drips, the seeds scatter
The weather turns uncertain
A terrible silence rises
From a long stemmed glass
Blood on its rim

Mustansir Dalvi (born in Bombay, 1969) teaches architecture in the city of his birth, and has India’s west coast for a muse. His poems are published in The Brown Critique, Poiesis, Poetry India: Emerging Voices, Mind Mutations and several e-journals. His recent translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s ‘Shikwa’ and ‘Jawab-e-Shikwa’ is both contemporary and immediate, bringing Iqbal’s words and ideas to the scrutiny of a multicultural millennium.

Sunset at Bardem

Jesus the fisherman walks
half a mile west in open water,
works nets at day’s end, appraises
a catch much reduced. Nipponese
trawlers now carpet fish high seas
outside Goa. He doubts
even his Father will arrange
for the meagre sardines and mandeli
to be divided amongst the congregation.
Southwards, the apprehension
of an incoming grey line
that might make him lose even this.

Two hundred feet above the shallows,
Christ ascends the high altar of St. Diego’s.
His plaster of paris finger follows the storm,
beyond his iterative flock kicking
a football outside the narthex.
Fra. Aubreau keeps goal as assiduously
as he tends to his laity. He pushes hair
from his face, spies the moving finger
and rubs his eyes as it points to the sky.

This vindication of his faith fleetingly
overcomes his skills as a keeper: he misses
the penalty and takes the ball full frontally
on his crotch. Belief systems are compelled
momentarily onto an entirely different focus.
Aubreau suffers the extreme barbs of piety,
as he rolls in the dust like a supplicant.

Above the belfry, the squall slows.
The sun brings absolution, lighting
at the last instant palm fronds
that line the beach all the way
to Sinquerim, revealing a gleam
of His heavenly kingdom.
Christ postpones resurrection
to keep the rain at bay, enough to convey
the fishermen and footballers of Bardem to vespers.
A Bodhisatva, the messiah has a job to do
and pits compassion over destiny every time.

Rohinton Daruwala (born in Mumbai, 1979) has lived in Mumbai most of his life. A software engineer, he works in Pune and commutes between the two cities. Spending half his time in each, he finds that both cities infect his poems. He counts an A E Van Vogt story he read when he was 12 as the origin of his continuing addiction to science fiction. He blogs at http://steelpetunias.blogspot.com/

Duck

Out from the mouth
Of an inter-city bus, I
Emerge gingerly from the mist
Of early morning sleepiness.

A small forgettable stop,
Like so many others where always
The same cup of tea bubbles up,
As if from a shared reservoir.

On a grassy patch a duck
Squats half-asleep, its neck
Turned backwards, bill buried
In the feathers of its back.

As the bus leaves, it stirs briefly,
Tastes the morning air, full of the
Danger of lonely departure, and sinks
Gratefully back into soft feathery sleep.

Ranjit Hoskote (born in Bombay, 1969) is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator. He has authored 17 books, including five collections of poetry: most recently, Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). Hoskote has also edited Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (New Delhi: Viking, 2002) and collaborated with the artist Atul Dodiya on an artist’s book, Pale Ancestors (Bombay: Bodhi Art, 2008). Hoskote has co-authored, with the novelist Ilija Trojanow, a critical history of cultural confluences between Europe, Asia and North Africa, Kampfabsage (Munich: Random House/ Blessing Verlag, 2007).

The Weatherman in Mehrauli

You don’t hear the growl of hunting dogs, the flutter of wings.
The dome is just an old man’s breath
held briefly in the sun’s fist and allowed to go.

Last night’s rain has shocked this red earth, pouring through the roof,
pooling in the parched grass, dripping down the filigree
of damp stone and fossil branch.

Has the mercury fallen, you ask, is the rain gauge full?
Sun or storm, flood or enemy fire, you go out to hold
the last gate in the world, the gate of truth, against error.

You walk among Turkish slaves who died, grew large in death,
unfurled their sails to become masters of the sky.
New clouds call out to be named.

Let your pauses be jewels on these broken steps,
let your voice brush the scrub with green phrases
and sing to the keymaker whose keys will fit no lock

under this dome. Find a pickaxe. All the doors here
are yesterdays and tomorrow is that wall:
you must break it and craft it again.

A peacock is crying near the tower,
a falcon nests in your book.
You must leave now or you will never go.

Sampurna Chattarji (born in Dessie, Ethiopia, 1970) is a poet, fiction-writer and translator. Her translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray (Penguin/Puffin, 2004) was reissued in 2008 as a Puffin Classic titled Wordygurdyboom! Her books for young people include The Greatest Stories Ever Told (Penguin/Puffin, 2004), Mulla Nasruddin (Penguin/Puffin, 2008), Three Brothers and the Flower of Gold (Scholastic, 2008), The Fried Frog and Other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (Scholastic, 2009). Her most recent publications for adults are her poetry collection Sight May Strike You Blind (Sahitya Akademi, 2007, 2008) and her first novel Rupture (HarperCollins, 2009).

Auspicious Enough
for Ivan

‘… was looking forward to responding but the time was never auspicious enough…’

And when might such a time come?
A time of oil-flame and tika,
red powder dusting the bridge of your nose?
Or a moment of broken coconuts,
white flesh, the spill of water,
the tinkle, perhaps, of a bell?
And later, on a silver plate,
prised free of its hard brown shell,
little bits of sugared coconut,
passed around, and eaten?

No. What you’re waiting for
is a moment of quieter magnitude,
unsignalled, invisible, read quietly
from a chart of astronomical importance.
The aligning of planets, the multitude of stars
telling your priestly eyes now and
not a second sooner. Or, bored,
scorning exactitude, you simply follow
the whimsical path of the moon.

But no. It is numbers you believe in.
Two and four: six, one and seven: eight.
Governed by Saturn your number is one.
You wait for the first of the month.
Every thirty days you will write, perhaps,
governed by the numeral, unnerved
by the fraction of the second when your
faith itself must stand up and be counted,
and say it is now, it is here, it is you

and every moment is right, every word foretold
and luminous in its passage through the night.

First published in India in Chandrabhaga, and in Germany in Wespennest 144.

http://stanzapoetry.org/virtual-festival.php

Mumbai’s edition of ‘Distant Voices’ will unfold on the first floor of Prithvi House, Prithvi Theatre, Juhu. The PEN All-India Centre will present the evening as a PEN@Prithvi Special, a bonus attraction to our regular monthly session at this very venue. Our longstanding partner, Prithvi Theatre – an organization committed to the growth not just of theatre, but all the related arts – is, as always, a generous and welcoming host in a city where space is at a premium! The seven poets who will read their poetry, beginning at ten minutes to ten, Indian Standard Time (4.20 GMT) are Arjun Bali, Sampurna Chattarji, Mustansir Dalvi, Rohinton Daruwala, Ranjit Hoskote, Malavika Sangghvi and Arundhathi Subramaniam.