Anindita Sengupta

Tomorrow’s reading at Goobe’s Book Republic has been postponed to some time next week. Will publish details soon. Sorry about this.

I will be reading from City of Water at Goobe’s Book Republic on Church Street. This is also called Church Street Inn and is in the same line of shops as KC Das. The reading will be on the terrace.

Place: Goobe’s Book Republic, Church Street

Date: Saturday, July 10.

Time: 5 pm

Do come!

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Also, three poems of mine, ‘Dolls’, ‘The Mouth’ and ‘The Vivid Stream’ were published in Asia Writes. Read them here.

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And Deepa Ganesh’s interview of me in The Hindu

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ps: What dreadful, short posts. What laziness. I’m going to do better soon.

The next TFA reading is tomorrow: Deepika Arwind and Biswamit Dwibedy will be reading from their work at Crossword, Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, at 6.30 pm. Arwind writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in various journals and magazines, and she’s been doing theatre since she was in school. Dwibedy is a poet/artist. He has an MFA in Writing from Bard College, New York. His first volume of poetry, Ozalid, was published by 1913 Press in 2010.

Yesterday, there was a gas cylinder leak in the house. It should have been simpler to solve than it was. There was illness involved and allergies. Allergies can really fuck up your sensory responses. Somebody in the complex has used strong fertilizer. It smells very similar to gas and I was getting both smells. The cylinder is kept in an alcove in the outer wall of the house. The alcove is gated and locked. Panic causes loss of memory. Keys and combinations require memory. I remember rummaging for hammers and torches. Also, shame and anger for being in trouble, then self-pity, then guilt for the self-pity, and an irrational wish that someone else would deal with it so I could go back to my study and write my article. Immediately after, I thought about this blog post. Then, I thought about doing a backup of my work. Also, how being an adult means knowing how to recognise the many smells of death. Also, how people should use less fertilizer, especially for decorative gardens.

More cheerfully, there’s an interesting BFS film fest at Ashirvad on June 4, 5, 6. It’s a retrospective of films by Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar. There are three short films called Irani Cafe Instructions, Breasts and Agreement around poems by Nissim Ezekiel, Kutti Revathi and Salma respectively. There’s also Our Family, which I’ve watched and love. Details here.

This time’s Toto Funds the Arts reading is of Aditya Sudarshan’s new play. It is tomorrow at 6.30 pm at Crossword on Residency Road. Aditya Sudarshan is a fiction writer based in Delhi. He is the author of a detective novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday (Westland Books, 2009) and several published short stories. He is also a scriptwriter for NDTV’s political comedy show, “The Great Indian Tamasha”. Sensible People, his first play, “is set in a middle-class milieu in Central Delhi. It is the story of two well-respected bureaucratic families that are forced to face up to scandal and re-examine the values they live by.” It will be read by Lakshmi Krishnamurty, Priya Rao, Shashank Purushotham, Deepika Arwind , Swetanshu Bora and Neha Miglani.

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I’ve been ill continuously for a while. Which means I want to crawl into a hole and be the opposite of friendly  until it all blows over. This is because of self-pity and the belief that misery when wallowed in will feel like a warm, fluffy pillow. It’s also because of vulnerability which is hitting such a high note these days that my ears want to burst.

And blogging seems to me to be an activity that requires a mix of friendliness and honesty (aka vulnerability) and other leafy-green things.

But somebody mentioned that Jeet Thayil said at a workshop that just as carpenters don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘I’m not in the mood to make furniture today’, poets shouldn’t get up and say ‘I’m not in the mood to make poems’. Since this is much hearsay, I hope he really did say that. (Take it as a very loose quote, practically a non-quote. But I like the thought and it wasn’t mine so I must loosely quote.)

Extending that, can writers of any sort wake up on any day and say ‘I’m not in the mood to be vulnerable today’?

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There’s an interesting series on at Very Like A Whale about poets and technology. And at Poetry Foundation, is there more to life than poetry, like say, laundry? I love doing laundry. Also, cleaning and re-organising and cooking. But sometimes, these can become reasons for procrastination or avoidance. I suppose the trick is to recognise why you’re doing something at a given moment, and always be aiming to do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. How exhausting. I thought about this yesterday after the incident. That if I’d been less reluctant to leave my computer, I might have reacted quicker.

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I’ve added a Library Thing widget to the sidebar, mostly because I like looking at book covers and this seems like a convenient way to have some around. There’s no real order to the books in there though. I’ve added some recent books but I’ll probably go backwards and add some earlier ones, and then whatever I read next. So it’s not a chronicle really, more like a cloud. Also, I’ve moved all links to poems published in journals to the page titled Poetry. Supernally clever idea, yes?

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So, I wore pink. I had planned to wear black but an ironing disaster got in the way. Maybe it was a good thing because the book is black and white and it would have looked like I don’t know any other colours. The launch went as launches go–I read for about half an hour. Then Sridala and I conversed, which means she asked intelligent questions and I tried to answer the questions and I remembered to ask one question back between saying lots of things about my writing, half of which I don’t remember and half of which, I will change my mind about. I’m always envious of people who work out a theory around their writing and seem like they will stick to it forever. I will get very bored if I have to stick to any theory forever. So the writing will come as it comes. And I’ll say different things about it at different times.

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Picture:

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As of now, the books are available at Sahitya Akademi outlets in major cities and in Crossword at Residency Road in Bangalore.

Also, in Bombay, People’s Book House at Fort will apparently source it from SA if you ask. Phone: (022) 22873768 , (022) 24362474. Address: 15, Ground Floor, Meher House, Cawasjit Patel Street, Fort. Landmark: Near Meher House.

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One more picture:

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I was badly prepared for the signing. I had left my pen in my bag so I had to use other people’s pens. And they were not interesting ink colours like pink or green which I generally use at home. I must remember to keep my pens ready next time. I am hoping there will be a next time in another city some time soon.

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The most difficult question Sridala asked me was to do a Kolatkar-style telling of influences. This is Kolatkar’s list:

Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, C, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller … Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.

I had real trouble with this because any list like this has got to be flippant and fun like Kolatkar’s and I wasn’t really in that sort of mood. I named some eclectic things like Ghalib, Bollywood and Neil Gaiman besides various poets–Ramanujan, Rilke, Plath, Kolatkar, D’Souza. In related news, see Aditi’s post on mood boards which I thought was a cool way to keep track of influences. I think it makes more sense than a definitive, immutable list of influences. At the moment, my mood board has Anne Carson, WG Sebald, Selima Hill, Arun Kolatkar, The Single Man (though I thought the movie was just so-so), Edward Said, heat, rain, the smell of fresh dung, Hanuman, various travel stories, a Scottish loch, some sculptures from the Louvre, some scientific concepts. Or at least, these are the things I’m conscious of.

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Toto Funds the Arts
is pleased to invite you
to the launch of Anindita Sengupta’s
first volume of poetry, City of Water, where she will be
‘in conversation’ with poet/writer Sridala Swami

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1
Date and time: Friday, 7 May 2010 at 6.30 pm

Anindita Sengupta’s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing, annually given to two writers under thirty in India. In 2010, she was the Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at University of Kent in England. Sengupta, who lives in Bangalore, is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. Her personal website is at http://aninditasengupta.com.

Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including Chandrabhaga, Pratilipi, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha, Desilit and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work also features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008); in the anthology, Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (Penguin Books, 2009). Her book of poems The Reluctant Survivor was published in 2007.

“City of Water is remarkable for its supple language and tensile strength. Her images are sharp and there is integrity about the core of feeling that propels the poem. One cannot spot any weak moments either in terms of emotion or language….Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision.”

–– Keki Daruwalla in the Preface to City of Water

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Okay, I’ve been lazy and just pasted the official invite but really, would love to see you there. It’s more fun to be nervous in front of people one knows. Even if it’s online. Know what I mean?

So yes, City of Water is out. It’s my first collection of poems and do write to me if you’re interested in a copy. Or you could look for it in the Sahitya Akademi shop in your city. Under the matter-of-fact tone, there’s a swell in my throat. It could be happiness and not the remnants of a sore throat. One can’t be absolutely sure though.

The cover photo is by Sohrab Hura, one of last year’s winners of the Toto Funds the Arts award for photography. I really like his work in general and this photo in particular because it has crows by the water, the ocean to be exact, flying into the wind. Are they a murder? I’m not sure. But they are a certain number of crows in flight and crow flight is a measure of things. Then there’s the thing that they are flying into the wind. Walking into the wind is difficult for us so we may impose a connotation of struggle to the picture. But  for some birds, it’s what helps them fly.

Toto Funds the Arts
in association with

The British Council
& the Association of British Scholars

is delighted to invite you

to Ruth Padel’s reading of her poetry and fiction.

Ruth will also be in conversation with poet-novelist Anjum Hasan.

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1

Date and time: Friday, 8 January 2010 at 7.00 pm

Coffee/tea and refreshments will be served from 6.30 pm onwards

Ruth Padel, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, is a prize-winning British poet. Her seventh poetry collection, Darwin – A Life in Poems, is an intimate verse biography of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, bringing out connections between his personal life and his work. She has written an acclaimed book on tiger conservation, Tigers in Red Weather, for which she explored forests in South East Asia, Sumatra, Russia, China, Bhutan and Nepal as well as India. She is visiting India on a British Council Darwin Now grant, to complete research for her first novel, which will focus on king cobra conservation. She will read from Darwin – A Life in Poems, Tigers in Red Weather, and her forthcoming novel, Where the Serpent Lives. To find out more about Ruth and her work, visit www.ruthpadel.com

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels Neti, Neti (2009) and Lunatic in my Head (2007), and the book of poems Street on the Hill (2006). Her poems, short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals in India and abroad. She is Books Editor, The Caravan.

The next TFA event is a reading by Abhishek Majumdar of his new play An Arrangement of Shoes. Abhishek will be in conversation with Swar Thounaojam after the reading. Audience feedback will be very welcome.

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1

Date and time: Friday, 20 November 2009 at 6.30 pm

Abhishek Majumdar is a playwright, actor and theatre director currently based in Bangalore. His work includes Harlesden High Street, which won the Hindu MetroPlus Playwright’s Award 2008 and The Land of Ups and Downs, which was long-listed for the same award in 2009. In the coming months he will be performing in Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s Creeper and Dancing on Glass, and Manav Kaul’s Park. Abhishek is a founding member of Maayavan and the Indian Ensemble. He is also a member of the Young Vic directors’ network, London.

Swar Thounaojam is a Bangalore-based playwright with a special interest in children’s theatre. She is currently teaching a theatre programme at The Valley School in Bangalore.

UPDATE: The last date for submissions has been extended to November 15, 2009.

Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) invites submissions for the sixth annual arts awards for young photographers, writers, musicians and bands. There are five awards to be won – one for music (Rs 50,000), two for photography (Rs 25,000 each), and two for creative writing (Rs 25,000 each). More details here.