Saturday 31 January 2015

On Writing an Effective Assignment..:

PC: hartwigenglish
Dear Students, 
After having discussed with you in class today on the nuances and the dynamics involved in writing a good, effective and persuasive academic assignment, I thought it would be of immense help to you if you could read a couple of articles we (KG & SR) had written on the subject in the past. Kindly click on the link HERE
With all best wishes, 
Rufus

Friday 30 January 2015

MIDS SEMINAR SERIES - February 2015

Topic
Occupational Segregation, Wage and Job Discrimination 
against Women in the Indian Labor Market: 1983-2012


Speakers
P. Duraisamy
Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan National Fellow of ICSSR, MIDS
and
Malathy Duraisamy
Professor of Economics, IIT-M

Chairperson
Shashanka Bhide
Director, MIDS

Date & Time
 Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 03.30 p.m.

Venue
Adiseshiah Auditorium, MIDS

Thursday 29 January 2015

Laugh OK Please at Phoenix...!

Touted to be one of the best comedy festivals in Chennai, Laugh OK Please features the best of Indian stand-up talent.

The three day fiesta starts on 30 January 2015, at Phoenix Market City, Velacherry, from 7.30 pm onwards, and has performances by Jeeveshu Ahluwalia - 'the Salman Khan of the fat world', Aditi Mittal, Sorabh Pant, Karthik Kumar, Naveen Richards, etc

Tickets are priced between Rs.300 and Rs.600/- and can be bought at bookmyshow.com

Monday 26 January 2015

Scholarships/Internships on Offer..:

Scholarships: Inlaks International Scholarships are given annually to support young talented people in any field of study, to broaden their vision overseas and improve their skills to operate in society. 

Scholarships are granted at top American, European and U.K. institutions. Candidates should be below 30 years of age. Scholarship covers tuition fees, living expenses and one-way travel.
Deadline for application: April 15, 2015. For details, http://inlaksfoundation.org/inlaks-scholarship.aspx

Internships: Freelance Online Cricket Writing at Sportskeeda, from the comfort of your home.
Category: Content Writing/Journalism
A Stipend of Rs.1000 to Rs.5000 per month will be provided.
Website: http://www.sportskeeda.com/writing-for-sportskeeda

Sunday 25 January 2015

Acting Workshop (Part-time)

Mirage Film Institute, T.Nagar, is conducting a month-long film acting workshop from 26 January 2015. Classes will be held on weekdays in the evenings, from 7 pm to 9 pm.

Students will be initiated into the various nuances of film acting, through exercises, games, visualisation techniques, scene improvisation, method acting, character building and acting for camera. 

There will also be a video shoot to prepare the student to face the camera.

Acting coach Jack Prabhu will be the resource person. Only limited seats available.

To register, call 99520 99040

[PC: Walnut Street Theatre]

Saturday 24 January 2015

Congrats to Poet Arundhathi Subramaniam!

Noted poet Arundhathi Subramaniam has won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry for her work When God is a Traveller.

The winner was announced at a prize ceremony at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2015. The award carries a cash prize of Rs.2 lakhs, and it was established by Suhel Seth in memory of the late Khushwant Singh and is open to Indian poets writing in English or Indian language translation.

Our congratulations to the poet! 

Arundhathi was here with us at the Department of English, Madras Christian College, to read out from her collection of poetry on 17 December 2012, as part of our annual 'Poetry with Prakriti' festivities.

We wish you many many more laurels in the years to come! 

Arundhathi @ MCC HERE

Sunday 18 January 2015

Software and More for the Visually Challenged..!

One interesting stall that caught the attention of many an inquisitive visitor at the Chennai Book Fair was Stall 48 S, that highlighted the various software available for the visually impaired. Volunteers who manned the stall, explained the various electronic facilities available for the visually challenged in the Digital Era. The Karna Vidya Technology Centre, with the patronage of the Rotaract Club of Drishti, gives counselling for free to all those who visit its stall. 

They give a demonstration on the DAISY software, [Digitally Accessible Information System] where voice and words synchronise, port, and read aloud in the best and easily accessible way, is a very interactive software for the visually challenged. Apart from this, there are thousands of Digital EBooks available exclusively for the visually challenged, and the availability of Talkback software for androids and tablets, and learning devices like Math pads, Braille pads, etc. 

For more details, you may contact: 
K. Raghuraman
Karna Vidya Technology Centre
RR Toweres III, Thiru-Vi-Ka Industrial Estate
Guindy, Chennai – 600 032
Mobile: 9840018012/9840667984
Email: kvtc.chennai@gmail.com

Saturday 17 January 2015

Chennai Book Fair 2015

The previous edition of the Chennai Book Fair was way better at crowd and parking management, if the 4 ‘P’s [parking lots/pollution control/public toilets//police presence] statistics were taken as an indication. 

A quick look to the right of this blog would give a snap of the parking lot last year, which was managed effectively by the police personnel who manned the entire parking bays. This year, since the parking bay had by now been turned into a playing court, parking was more chaotic than last year! Adding to the woes, the pathways and the stall venues, especially the food courts, were filled with pollution (both air and land!!!), and very little was done to keep pollution under check, as was done in the previous editions of the Fair.

Crowd management wasn’t that effective too, as police personnel were thinly deployed, compared to last year! Rising number of food courts is testimony to the fact that, people come to the fair for a sort of comprehensive package – food for the mind as well as for the body!

Cleaning equipment, designed by some dynamic novices, [maybe as part of their project work in final year engineering], was up for sale, and the equipment, the size of a huge pen, could be fitted in any used MNC Cola drinks pet bottles! Many who passed by these equipments, had more of a smile on their faces on the novel find, than wanting to go for it!

Indeed, right from Arabian nuts to soap bubble toys, you have them all there!

Friday 16 January 2015

“When my cousin Indira was the Prime Minister, I had to step out, especially during the Emergency"

Well, yes... Yet another glorious chapter in literature unfolded today at 9.40 am at Harrington Road, Chetpet, Chennai. 

Nayantara Sahgal, one of the most venerated and renowned post-Independence Novelists in English -inaugurated the fifth edition of The Hindu Lit for Life 2015.

Speaking on the occasion, Nayantara gave out a strongly-worded message in support of freedom of expression - 

“Let me just endorse what Nirmala has just said. If this kind of intimidation and bullying goes on there will be no more literary festivals of this caliber

Firstly I would like to see the formation of a union  or  common platform for writers and concerned citizens to come together to speak in support of writers who are in danger and have been intimidated by fringe groups, as in the recent case of Murugan Perumal”.

Eleanor Catton, Winner of the Booker in conversation...
The first session of the fest saw Eleanor Catton, the youngest recipient of the Booker Prize in conversation with Parvathi Nayar.

Introducing Eleanor as an outstanding writer who weaves complex, divergent and experimental themes in every strand of her writing, Parvathi Nayar set the ball rolling by asking her about how life had changed after becoming an acknowledged celebrity author, and how she felt being catapulted to the limelight all of a sudden, and what’s really changed after the Booker. 

Eleanor said -

“Well, it was indeed a curious thing to suddenly be in the public eye for which I was unprepared for!”

Reading out a passage from her first novel The Rehearsal, the youngest Booker Prize winner said that, 

“The novel is thoroughly experimental by nature, and as someone who’s working on the fringes, dealing with the extraordinary was something I thoroughly enjoyed!” 

Narrating the birth of the novel, and how it was originally meant out to be a play, she said that, it started as a monologue for a saxophone player, a friend of hers, and later, as life got in the way, she thought it would be much interesting as a piece of fiction than as a play. 

The feminist performance theory that makes up the gamut of the novel was something she came across as a result of her first introduction to feminism in University. She said -

Nayantara Sahgal in conversation 

“After I finished the book I could see that, the book became a kinda theatre of its own. Moreover, issues dealt with, in the book, are concerns that affected me as an individual.” 

“For example, when you reach puberty, you become your own audience, self-conscious, and the experience of being a teen was absolutely enigmatic. I always wanted to be somebody outside of my own skin, and always conscious of being watched!”

On being asked if the book was being made into a movie, Eleanor nodded in the affirmative and added, saying -

“One of the curious things about being a writer is that, you grow older, but your book doesn’t. So the distance between you and your book also grows!”

Talking about The Luminaries, (the longest book & the youngest author ever to win the Booker), Eleanor said that, each of the twelve characters in the book is associated with one of the twelve zodiac signs, and yet another set of characters is modelled on one of the heavenly bodies in the solar system. 

In this regard, she said that she discovered a computer programme online wherein, if you enter any date or time of any year, you can see how exactly the skies will look. 

So I keyed in the date when gold was first discovered, watched the sky revolve and took note on it. I sat with all the data, and soon realised that I wanted to write a novel based on it.

On quizzed about one of the most debatable points about The Luminaries, - the concept of structure, she said that, structure to her was more of a liberating one than a constraining one! Citing an instance to relate to her point, she added - 

“When, I as a teacher, taught UG Classes in the US to a class of 20 students, at least four or five will be absolutely identical – like using their adjectives, idioms, etc.“ 

“But when I asked them to write a poem from today’s front page of a newspaper, with a ridiculous number of constraints, then their imagination gets fired and they are quite unique”!

Stressing on the importance of reading, which does 90% of the job of a writer’s life, she quipped -

“There’s a beautiful native plant out there in New Zealand that changes its physical dimensions halfway through its life. This is exactly the metaphor for reading! We begin defensively and change towards the end of our lives.

Moreover, Reading shapes our impressions and perceptions of the world, and hence, we should read, more so, for the power of transformation this exercise can give us!” 

she signed off.

A section of the audience

The second session of the day witnessed Nayantara Sahgal in conversation with Geeta Doctor and Ritu Menon.

Sahgal said that the title of her memoir Prison and Chocolate Cake, was suggested by her publisher, and not by her grandmother as misquoted by some! 

“In my childhood, I was taught that going to prison was a privilege.”  

When my father was first arrested, I was two years old. So my mother didn’t want us to be unhappy. So whenever dad went to prison, she would make us chocolate cakes and give us, and that explains the title.

Speaking out, yet again, on the issue of freedom of expression, Nayantara said -

“Ever since Aubrey Menen, whose book happens to be the first book ever to be proscribed in India, there have been rising instances of unrest over artists and their creations

“There’s a definite trend that cannot be ignored. Artists have been threatened. Paintings have been vandalised. Hence, we need a forum where writers and concerned citizens should come together to join in unison against the highhanded moral policing of some of these fringe outfits, who destabilise the right to freedom of expression, and thereby take the law into their own hands!”

On asked, about the political and the personal in her life, Sahgal said - 

“To me, there’s no difference between the two in my life. Politics is not something out there because it intimately connected us in the home”. 

I belonged to a political family. [She is the cousin of Smt. Indira Gandhi, and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit]. So, I had to go to jail, and everything that happened in the country influenced my family and me personally

So it came naturally to me when I began to write that politics is my material and it just became the background in my novels. Hence, almost all my novels are political and they are connected with the atmosphere of the time. I was very much concerned with the making of modern India, and hence, my novels also exhibit this concern in them”.

“Writing makes one to step out of one’s family or even one’s own country. Both in my fiction as well as in my non-fiction I came up heavily against situations which I couldn’t support”. 

“When my cousin Indira was the Prime Minister, I had to step out, especially during the Emergency. When people asked me how can you go against your own family, I said, I’m defending my own family, but Indira was the one who went against the family”. 

“It was very very painful during the Emergency because I had to face a lot of very difficult situations! Like for example, my fifteen years’ of writing for the Sunday Standard was stopped abruptly”. 

“Even a film based on one of my novels was stopped, because the woman who did the film didn’t want to associate with me! Even a publisher of my novel dropped out. So, it was a difficult and painful time. But I had to do it!”

“Because, it was important for me to protest what the government then was doing! When a country was going wrong, its citizens had to put it right!” 

she quipped, to thunderous applause from the audience.

On asked if she could have been a bit more diplomatic, Sahgal said -

“Rather than being more diplomatic, I could have been less confrontational! One does things in the passion of the moment, frankly and without fear, and later when you think about it, you have your own reservations about it! But, I have no regrets for what I wrote or said!.”

Saying that she was the favourite of all the cousins to Indira Gandhi, who was ten years her senior, Sahgal said -

We both got along very well, and hence, it was very painful for me to oppose her! 

But quite soon she added to say that, 

“This is what power does to people! She changed once she came to power! Nehru was not a dynast. He didn’t choose his successor! His party chose! But Indira chose her successor and couldn’t tolerate opposition especially from her own kith and kin!! My sisters and I grew up in Panditji’s house”. 

“He was my third parent. So there was no difference in treatment. We were all one family. Indira was educated in England and Switzerland. So she was away for most of the time. It was only when I began to write political columns, that Indira became very insecure personally, since she was vulnerable to any kind of opposition…!

Here, Ritu Menon, her biographer added that, 

“Not many can live their personal lives politically. The condition itself is predicated on a painful recognition of who you are, and what you want to be! It was Indira Gandhi’s intention to separate the personal from the political that actually, in a way, incensed her about her cousin’s political commentaries!”.

When asked about her own favourites among all her novels, she said -

“I don’t like all my works. I’ve got my favourites too: Rich Like Us, & Mistaken Identity.

On freedom of expression, Sahgal reiterated, saying -

As a new Dark Age descends upon us, it is the collective responsibility of individuals to speak powerfully about the idea of India that we believe in, before it is destroyed before our eyes”!

Justice K. Chandru on Free Speech

The parallel session on “Free Speech in Peril: The Issues at Stake” had the most number of votaries, to a packed audience in the pavilion, where, for want of seats, delegates were even found squatting on the front rows to listen to ardent votaries and champions of freedom of expression. 

The session was moderated by eminent Professor A. R. Venkatachalapathy, and the panelists were: N. Ram, Justice K. Chandru and Sashi Kumar. 

Nirmala Lakshman, [the festival’s curator, and the brain behind the founding of ‘The Hindu’’s Literary Review] deserves special kudos from the blogging fraternity for endorsing, in her welcome address, the extensive coverage of the event by passionate and avid bloggers]. 

Friday 9 January 2015

Workshop on Publishing & Copy Editing: A Report

A Workshop on Copy Editing and Publishing, was organised by Chevalier T. Thomas Elizabeth College for Women, on 09 January 2015. The workshop threw light on the various facets of publishing and copyediting, with interesting inputs by distinguished veterans in the field, Mrs.Nalini Olivannan, Director, Emerald Publications, and Mrs.Nandhini Iyengar, Senior Copy Editor with Oxford University Press. 

Dr. Nalini Olivannan
The various aspects of Publishing starting from Commissioning, where the publisher decides on the need for a particular book and approaches a writer for the same, to the process of Editing, Production, Marketing, Distribution and Sales were touched upon with illustrations from each domain. 

Mrs. Nalini also elaborated on the book-editing process, and stressed upon the need for the writer-editor sync' which is instrumental for the book to see the light of day in the shortest possible time. 

After the publisher sends it to their Editorial team (who are a list of subject experts), to see if the content of the book fits into their publishing programme, it is then sent to the Developmental Edit section, where the content is developed and sifted for errors. From here, it goes on to the Illustrations department, followed by the line-edit, and then the final manuscript is drawn up. 

Wednesday 7 January 2015

A Noble and Laudable Initiative...!

Vehicles – two wheelers and four, of all hues and shades, lined up or rather clogged up the entrance to Hotel Savera, Mylapore, Chennai, on the eventful morning of 07 January 2015. We were a tad late to the programme, and hence we had to squeeze our car in, mustering all the driving skills at our command, to masterfully manoeuvre within the pretty decent car parking lot at our disposal.

Making our way to the first floor of the grand Hotel which houses (or hotels) the Conference Halls we were ushered in by pleasant  and hospitable receptionists who got us our elegantly designed Delegate Badges and professionally made Office files.

It was indeed a packed hall with a beehive of academic activity, with the who’s who of academia being present in full strength.

Symposium in Progress
Teachers, Professors, Headmasters, Principals from various parts of the City and from the State – name them, and they were there. The reason was not hard to seek. They had all come by the dozen to witness and to cheer a noble endeavour from the portals of St. John’s Rajakumar Education and Research Trust: the establishment of a Centre for Teacher Empowerment on St. John’s Public School Campus in order to train inadequate candidates/teachers and empower them with the required skill set, competency and temperament. Academia was there in time (9.30 am) for the Educational Symposium on the theme “Teacher Excellence – School Excellence”.

The programme was divided into two sessions, and the members of the audience were indeed spell-bound by the commitment shown by the visionaries par excellence on the dais, who set paradigms of excellence for the teaching fraternity to emulate and to strive for, in their roles as dispellers of ignorance and nurturers of budding talents.
Dr. Latha Pillai

Rarely does one come across a Centre for Teacher Empowerment, especially in a developing country like India, wherein Teacher Training Institutes have mushroomed in every nook and corner, giving their candidates a richly made up Degree, sans the required skill base. Hence, the real challenge lies, not only in dutifully obtaining a degree in teacher training, but also in the ability to translate competence into performance, or rather, from being competence-based teachers to being performance-driven teachers!

Therein lies the phenomenal success of St. John’s Centre for Teacher Empowerment…!

Thursday 1 January 2015

New Year Greetings..

Dear Students, Colleagues, Friends and Well-wishers,

Wish you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2015.

Best and regards,

Rufus