Arizona State University students interact with Kalam youngsters at their office on Haji Mohsin Road. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Talking stories, that’s what students of Arizona State University (ASU) and the English department of Jadavpur University were busy doing on January 11. In India, as a part of the Kalam initiative of Daywalka Foundation, Melissa Pritchard and her students from the creative writing department at ASU delved into the stumbling blocks of fiction writing in India and the world over. The foundation has been working with underprivileged children associated with city NGOs to provide them with a platform to express their creativity.

Rimi B. Chatterjee, who is the coordinator of the Writing in Practice course at the Department of English, JU, spoke of the sense of violation in putting one’s writing for judgment before a readership that is quick to criticise. Pritchard referred to the scenario in the US where political forces often silence stories. Deemed as one of the many ways in which the creative voice is being muted, students also spoke on the traditional marginalisation of women writers. Bollywood came under discussion as an arena where melodrama is considered a valid expression of creativity.

The financial hurdles before people who take up fiction writing as career was brought to the fore by Subhadeep Paul, a final-year MPhil student of JU. He spoke on the difficulty of balancing the dual roles of academic and writer. Rimi B. Chatterjee, a published author herself, agreed, saying “writers have to survive in India by hiding deep under the cover of an academic”.

Responding to a student’s comment about being unable to write after reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Pritchard stressed the need to find one’s voice: “The best way to read is to unpack the writer’s work to find out what you like about him — read like a taxonomist! You can’t let yourself silence yourself.”

Many from the morning session came together that afternoon again at Caffeine on Elgin Road to read out their works.

On January 12, Pritchard’s crew participated in another creative writing workshop with youngsters from Kalam. A magazine, Khola Baksho, put together by them will be released in February with contributions from underprivileged children of NGOs Sanlaap, Diksha and Development Action Society.

During the workshop youngsters Nargis and Reshma Khatun asked how identities of characters from real-life incidents can be protected in narratives and how best to handle sexuality in fiction. Michael Green, an ASU student responded: “Poets have to be courageous. They are the ones meant to break the barriers of complacency. If you want to talk about sexuality, go ahead and talk about it.”

Romila Saha

Happening here ’n’ there

Heave-ho: A participant in the sack race at the annual sports meet of Shri Shikshayatan School. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Ground reality

The annual strategy summit of the ICFAI Business School (IBS), Calcutta, held on January 18 was not about finance and business management. Instead issues like ‘creativity, innovation and transformation in management’ and social projects came under discussion.

The institute believes that not enough innovation and creativity gets reflected in extant courses. So more exposure is needed for the students. “Management schools are increasingly becoming elite institutions. So exposure to the less privileged is essential,” said Santanu Ray, director, IBS, Calcutta.

A centre set up by the business school to involve students in social activity recently ran a project in Unsani village of Howrah. The project in association with the Garment Manufacturers Association of Howrah provided accounting and marketing training to 60 tailors. The centre with support from NGO Sanlaap, got students of the business school to coach teenaged children of sex workers. They come to the campus twice a week for three months.“We are now planning to provide vocational training to them,” informed Ray.

Toon tale

Celebrate Republic Day with Indian mythology on television as Krishna: Makhan Chor premieres on Cartoon Network at noon and at 7.30 pm. The second of a four-part Krishna series, this 1 hour 17 minute 2D piece takes the count of local animations acquired by Cartoon Network to 13. The series narrating the endearing pranks and heroic exploits of Lord Krishna has been produced by Hyderabad-based Green Gold Animation Studio.

only connect

Abhijit Gupta

Contrast reads

This instalment of Only Connect is about two books. One was printed in 1455, in a print run of 180 copies, no two of which were exactly alike. The other was published in 1992, in two limited editions, deluxe and small. Both books were set in double columns with exactly 42 lines in each column. Of the 180 copies of the earlier book, about 40 were printed on vellum and the rest on paper. The latter book was accompanied by a floppy disk which self-erased or “ate itself” after it was read.

No marks for guessing the first — Johannes Gutenberg’s two-volume Bible, the first-ever book to be printed with movable type, in the tiny German city of Mainz. The second book is the work of William Gibson, inventor of cyberpunk, a sub-genre of modern science fiction. In 1984, the year of George Orwell’s Big Brother, Gibson wrote the extraordinary Neuromancer which tells the story of Case, a computer hacker who is able to jack himself into cyberspace till his irate employers destroy his central nervous system with a military mycotoxin. Down and out in a dystopic Tokyo of the future, Case begins to trawl the world of biomedical engineering and cybernetic impulses in an attempt for cure…

If Gutenberg produced perhaps the most beautifully produced book of all time, how do we make sense of Gibson’s attempt to both celebrate and destroy the book at the same time? Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) comes in a heavy case designed to look like a buried relic and includes pages of DNA sequences, as well as copperplate aquatint etchings by the artist Dennis Ashbaugh. No two copies of this extremely limited-edition (number of copies unknown) book are exactly alike.

The accompanying diskette, on the other hand, contains a poem by Gibson, on the broad theme of memory. This is what the admirable Wikipedia has to say of it: “The poem is a detailed description of several objects, including a photo album and the camera that took the pictures in it, and is essentially about the nostalgia that the speaker, presumably Gibson himself, feels towards the details of his family’s history: the painstaking descriptions of the houses they lived in, the cars they drove, and even their pets.” After the poem is read, the text slowly erases itself from the screen, leaving the reader only with a memory of what she has read.

Those interested in this strange and haunting work may visit The Agrippa Files at http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/, a scholarly site maintained by the English department of the University of Santa Barbara. For those who prefer their reading material to be less transient, the best starting point is the digital Gutenberg project at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/gutenberg/.