Hyd Lit Fest 2012 Schedule

And we're back!

There's lots of stuff to blog about, but it will have to wait until after the Hyd Lit Fest, which begins on Monday, 16th and ends on Wednesday, 18th Jan.

All events at the Taramati Baradari. Everything is free and open to all. Do come, register and listen to lots of wonderful people.

There's a schedule up on the HLF site, but some sessions have been moved around or have been cancelled for various reasons. Here's the latest - and hopefully final - schedule.

Please note: I'm in conversation with Adil Jussawalla on the 17th of Jan from 11am to noon.

Hope to see some of you there!

Mon 16 Jan	Venue 1	Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11	Inaugural Pavan K Varma, Gulzar
11- 12	Romancing Hyderabad Bilkeez Latif, Aminuddin Khan, Narendra Luther (Moderator)	Salaam Hyderabad Vamsee Juluri, Harimohan Paruvu, Krishna Sastry, Meena Alexander (Moderator)	Celebrating Creativity - Contests for College students Sujatha Gopal, Student Coordinators
12 - 1	In Conversation Kiran Nagarkar with Hemant Divate & Sachin Ketkar	Readings (English) Hoshang Merchant, Robert Bohm, Nabina Das, Mohan Ramanan (Chair)	- do -

  1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	In Conversation Urs Widmer and Christopher Kloeble with Charanjeet Kaur & Amita Desai	Translating Bharat Sachidananda Mohanty, Hemang Desai, N Gopi, UN Singh (Moderator), Jeelani Bano	Celebrating Creativity - Contests for College students
3 - 4	Past Continuous Amish Tripathi, Indu Sundaresan, Jaishree Misra T Vijay Kumar (Moderator)	Readings (Poetry) Mamta Sagar (Chair), Arathi HN, Sridala Swami, Arjun Choudhury,	- do -

4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5	Muse India Awards – Adil Jussawalla, to give away the Awards. UN Singh, Sachidananda Mohanty, GSP Rao
5 – 6	Guftagu with Gulzar Sukrita Paul Kumar
6.30 – 7.00  - Launch of Pavan Varma’s book ‘When Loss is Gain’ 7.00 – 8.30  - Cultural Event – German Music Band - Triotonos
Tue 17 Jan		Venue 1		Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11		In Conversation Saeed Mirza with Indraganti Mohan Krishna & T Vijay Kumar		Readings (Poetry) Angshuman Kar (Chair), Mandakranta Sen, Anindita Sengupta, Santosh Alex	Gulzar’s interaction with Students
11 - 12		In Conversation Adil Jussawalla with Sridala Swami		Readings (Poetry) Hemant Divate (Chair), Sachin Ketkar, Anitha Thampi, UN Singh	- do -
12 - 1		The Agony & Ecstasy of India Mark Tully & Pavan K Varma

1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	Translating Classics, Cultures Constance Borde, Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Gillian Wright, Madhu Benoit (Moderator)	Readings (Telugu Poetry) Chennaiah V (Doraveti), Raja Hussain, Sailaja Mithra, N Gopi (Chair)	Celebrating Creativity  – Contests for College  Students Sujatha Gopal, Student Coordinators
3 - 4	Development and its Discontents Rahul Pandita, C  Rammanohar Reddy, G Haragopal (Moderator)	Readings (Telugu Fiction) Abburi Chhaya Devi, Khadeer Babu, Saleem, Atreya Sarma U C Mrunalini (Chair)	German Movie                 (120 mts)

4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5		Book Launch – Sagarika Chakraborty
5 – 6		S Rayaprol Prize Function – Meena Alexander, Aparna Rayaprol, Aditi Rao, Sachidananda Mohanty

6.00 – 6.30 6.30 – 7.30 7.30 – 8.30	Book Launch – Vidya Rao’s books Vidya Rao (Hindustani Vocal) Ananda Shankar (Dance)
Wed 18 Jan	Venue 1	Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11	In Conversation Suniti Namjoshi with C Vijayasree		Spl Programs for School Students – Cheryl Rao, Vandna Mathur
11- 12	Art of the Matter Alekhya Punjala, Vidya Rao, Pritham Chakravarthy, M Nagabhushana Sarma (Moderator)	Adopting / Adapting to India Gillian Wright, Mark Tully, Robert Bohm, Meitim Connolly Jean-Manuel Duhaut (Moderator)	- do -
12 - 1	Readings (English) Navkirat Sodhi, Kazim Ali, Prageeta Sharma, Meena Alexander (Chair)	Readings (Fiction-English) K Srilata Rao, Swati Chawla, Sagarika Chakraborty, Sudha Balagopal (Chair)	- do -

1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	“’Death, be not proud’: Tributes to Vaclav Havel, Indira Goswami and Arun Kolatkar” Readings by The Little Theatre. Shankar Melkote and team	Readings (Urdu nazms) Ashraf Rafi, Hasan Farrukh, Mushaf Iqbal Tausifi (Chair), Masood Jafri
3 - 4	Readings (English Poetry) – Charanjeet Kaur (Chair), M K Ajay , Amrita Nair, Semeen Ali, Sushmita Sadhu	Readings (Hindi Poetry) Rishabha Deo Sharma (Ch), Ahilya Misra, Shashi Narayan Swadeen, Kishori Lal Vyas

                     4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5.30	Urdu-Hindi Mushaira Muztar Majaaz, Sardar Saleem, Jagjeevan Asthana, Tasneem Johar, Elizabeth Kurian Mona, Syed Khalid (Chair), Narendra Rai
5.30 – 6	Valedictory GSP Rao, T Vijay Kumar, Amita Desai

The Poet is In & Bhagat's toys are Taken Away

Mainly because I refuse to use the word 'random' to describe my posts, even though that is precisely what this is:

1. Approaching the question of poems and ownership from a completely different place, this post. Holly S. Morrison sits at a Farmer's Market (with a sign that says The Poet is In, as if she were in a Peanuts comic) and writes custom poems that people buy from her. And yet:

I browsed the honey and beeswax candles at a neighboring table while Holly began clacking away on her manual typewriter. And I found myself reflecting on her smiling response to the final question I had asked her: she doesn’t keep copies of the poems for herself. I found myself feeling an unexpected pang of jealousy at this detachment, this acceptance of letting poems go, as if I had encountered a monk making a sand mandala, or the street sax player in Joni Mitchell’s classic song, “For Free.”

Though I write for free and Holly writes for money, I only give away the writing of the poem; she relinquishes the right to keep the poem. Many contemporary poets might feel that selling poems devalues our art. But it seems to me that Holly’s approach to poetry also participates in the sublime economy Lewis Hyde describes in The Gift, the classic book that helped so many artists better understand their art and taught me, in my twenties, how to survive as a poet.

According to Hyde, the function of art is to participate in a sacred gift economy that links giver, receiver, and the spiritual world. Art’s gift offers contemporary humans an essential alternative to the deadening commercial system. But in practice, it’s not so simple for a poet to give away the gift of poetry nowadays. Those who receive our gifts tend to be limited to critics, students, or other poets; the gifts of a “professional” poet get tangled up in names, reputations, career obligations, and previous bodies of work.

By selling one-of-a-kind poems and not even keeping a copy, Holly moves poetry out of the literary economy in which so many contemporary poems are enmeshed. Instead, she moves it along into the lush marketplace of daily life where all of us can meet on a human footing, helping each other satisfy our needs for life’s irreplaceable gifts of food and beauty and meaning.

2. So there was the ToI Lit Carnival held recently in Bombay. Wish I'd been at the Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Chetan Bhagat session (I'd have been happy to have taken everyone else but Hanif out of the picture but hey - I'm sure I'm not the only one). It seems to have been pretty hilarious:

You know what? I can't quote anything specific from it. It is full of deliciousness, so go read.

Hint: Bhagat's toys are taken away.