[Sarai Newsletter] SEPTEMBER 2005

[The Sarai Programme]

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***************************************** SARAI NEWSLETTER AUGUST 2005 
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Dear All,

August has been a busy and exciting month at Sarai with the Independent 
Fellowship and Student Stipendship workshops. Short reports on both are 
included in the newsletter.

September sees the launch of three new publications from Sarai, an event 
in JNU around the broadsheet, and the This Year This City public 
conversation on the year that was in Delhi. From this month on we are 
beginning a series of collaborative events in the city. These include 
conversations around the broadsheet and the readers. They also include 
film screenings at Khoj Studios. We hope to see many of you here in 
Sarai and at the 'city events' in JNU and Khoj.

Aarti Sethi
[Outreach]

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[[CONTENTS]]

EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS

1. Seminars @ Sarai: Tracking a Tramjatra, Mick Douglas

2. Conversations over a Broadsheet

3. This Year, This City


FILM

4. Film @ Sarai: Remembering The Bomb


RESOURCES

5. Resources @ Sarai: Bolnagari CD

6. Publications @ Sarai: Sarai Reader 05 + Deewan-e-Sarai + Medianagar 02


CONVERSATIONS

7. Reports on Independent Fellowship and Student Stipendship workshops.



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[[EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS]]

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Seminar @ Sarai: Urban Cultures and Politics Seminar Series
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Tracking a Tramjatra
presentation by Mick Douglas
Thursday, 15 September 3:30 pm, Sarai seminar room

Tramjatra is an ongoing project which since 1996 has brought together 
artists and the tramways communities of Melbourne (Australia) & Kolkata 
(Calcutta, India) to explore their cities through the medium of 
tramways. In the context of rising environmentalism and debates about 
the impacts of globalisation, tramjatra has demonstrated how new 
linkages can be made through a public arts practice of inter-cultural 
collaboration. Through a time where Kolkata’s struggling tramways have 
faced a persistent threat of closure and the operation of Melbourne’s 
tramways has been privatised and automated, the tramjatra project has 
sought to provoke a broader, global engagement in the culturally 
enriching and environmentally sustaining contribution that tramways can 
make to these cities.
Mick Douglas will present the Tramjatra project and speak of his new 
book 'Tramjatra: Imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by Tramways'.

(Mick Douglas is an artist working in the public realm and senior 
lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, 
Melbourne. He is the editor of 'Tramjatra: Imagining Melbourne & Kolkata 
by Tramways' (Yoda Press Delhi and RMIT Univ Press). His current 
research work explores 'transports' crossing between two key concerns: 
creative vehicles of cultural change and sustainable modes of 
transportation.)
http://www.tramtactic.net <http://www.tramtactic.net/>


====================
This Year, This City
====================

This Year, This City
17 September 2005
3:30 pm Interface Zone, Sarai


Shifts, transmissions, anxieties, exhilarations, public secrets, 
street-corner intimacies – what did the city say to you this year? For 
the past five years, Sarai has played host to a public conversation on 
the year that was, in this our city. This year too we extend to you an 
invitation to come and participate in a conversation on how different 
people have witnessed and experienced Delhi in 2004 – 2005.


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Conversations over A Broadsheet
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Jawaharlal Nehru University
8 September 2005
Outside Ganga Dhaba
6:30 pm

Through what registers can we try to articulate the matrices of anxiety 
that are part of everyday living in cities? How do movement, space, 
design change because of fear, uncertainty, anxiety? Join us for a 
discussion around Sarai.txt 2.3 'The State You Are In'.

Over the next few months we are meeting for informal discussions around 
the themes and ideas expressed in the Sarai.txt issues. To invite the 
broadsheet collective to share your experiences and reflections, and for 
more information on upcoming events, write to broadsheet at sarai.net


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[[FILM]]

 From this September, we are happy to announce that film screenings 
curated by the Sarai programme will also be screened at the Khoj artists 
collective. This marks a collaborative initiative between Sarai and 
Khoj. This new series of screenings will run on Thursdays at Khoj at 
6:00 pm and on Fridays at Sarai-CSDS at the usual time, 4:30 pm.

These screenings have been an integral part of Sarai's programming and 
public profile for five years. The screenings have been a space for 
people from diverse backgrounds - academics and students, practitioners, 
artists and researchers – to converse with each other about the way in 
which films speak to the times that they were made in, and to the times 
we live in.

We hope that with this initiative a new public will find the Sarai 
screenings, and that Sarai will find a new public, bringing new energies 
and approaches into talking and thinking about films. Hoping to see many 
of you, and many good films.

films at khoj – Thursdays, 6.00 pm

films at sarai – Fridays, 4.30 pm


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Film @ Sarai: September – October 2005
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REMEMBERING THE BOMB

This month sees the first of Sarai's forthcoming series of film 
curations on remembering technologies – both iconic and everyday – which 
characterise the 'modernity' we inhabit.

A month after the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, we choose to reflect on 
the nuclear bomb, and how its representation has changed in films over 
the years. The films in this curation include the noir Kiss Me 
Deadly(1955), the landmark Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Dr. 
Strangelove(1964) on the politics of the Cold War, The Hulk (2003) and 
Original Child Bomb on the Hiroshima bombing.



| | Kiss Me Deadly | |

Directed by Robert Aldritch
1955, 106 minutes, fiction

Khoj - 1st September
Sarai - 2nd September

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, 
science-fiction film noir - rich with symbolic allusions, labyrinthine 
and complex plot threads, and Cold War fear and nuclear paranoia about 
the atomic bomb. Based upon pulp fiction writer Mickey Spillane's 1952 
sensationalist detective best-seller of the same name, the film features 
a sleazy private investigator named Mick Hammer whose trademark is 
brutish violence and speed. The tough, ruthless cop's selfish, solitary 
pursuit of
the white-hot apocalyptic object in a mysterious 'Pandora's box' ("the 
great whatzit") leads to nuclear catastrophe and annihilation - although 
there is no explicit mention of the words bomb, atomic, or 
thermo-nuclear in the film. Shot over a one month period in late 1954, 
this low budget film is a masterpiece of cinematography, exhibited in 
the disorienting camera angles and unique and unconventional 
compositions of Ernest Laszlo.




| | Hiroshima Mon Amour | |

Directed by Alain Resnais
1959, 90 minutes, fiction

Khoj - 8th September
Sarai - 9th September
(This film will be introduced by T.P. Sabitha, Department of English, 
Hansraj College)

Made in 1959 , Hiroshima mon amour is one of the most significant films 
of the French New Wave. A French actress Elle is staying in Hiroshima 
for a few days shooting an anti-nuclear film. There she meets a Japanese 
architect named Lui with whom she has a one night stand. Despite the 
fact that both of them are married they find themselves falling love 
with one another. Elle begins to recall the tragedy of her lost first 
love with a German soldier during the occupation of France in World War 
II...

Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras explore the nature of 
forgetting and remembering with regard to human emotions. The film 
posits the very simple question, "How can we forget tragedy?" The beauty 
and the power of the film come primarily from the editing. In the first 
15 minutes Resnais uses a poetic, elliptical editing structure that 
shuffles black and white images of amorous close-ups, newsreel footage, 
and reconstructed war footage together to draw us into the theme of memory.


|| Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 
| |

Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1964, 93 minutes, fiction

Khoj - 15th Septmber
Sarai - 16th September

Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative 
black comedy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics that features an 
accidental, inadvertent, pre-emptive nuclear attack. The film opens with 
a deranged General Ripper declaring a "Code Red", sealing off his 
airforce base, and ordering a nuclear attack on Russia.


The screenplay, co-authored by the director (with Terry Southern), was 
based on Peter George's novel Red Alert. The film is also notable for 
its remarkable performances, especially Peter Sellers (as Captain 
Mandrake, as the President of the United States, and as former Nazi 
scientist, Doctor Strangelove), George C. Scott as General 'Buck' 
Turgidson and Slim Pickens as Major Kong.


| |The Hulk| |
Directed by Ang Lee
2003, 138 minutes, fiction

Khoj - 22nd September
Sarai - 23rd September

The Hulk is a comic book character born in the sixties, a mild mannered 
nuclear scientist with traumatic repressed memories who is turned into a 
raging green giant from exposer to the blast of a powerful gamma bomb.

But the movie Hulk is not a consequence of nuclear testing, but of 
genetic experimentation. Scientist Bruce Banner follows unknowingly in 
his father's footsteps as a researcher in genetic technology. A lab 
accident exposes Bruce to what should be a fatal dose of gamma 
radiation. But a mutating gene not only allows him to withstand the 
gammas, the combination serves to kick-start the "monster" within. Now 
when severely angered, the scrambled DNA turns Bruce into the Hulk...

Ang Lee's unparalleled visual style conveys the experience of reading a 
comic book in cinematic terms. The panels on the page become the focus: 
the connection between the images and the way they pull us through the 
story.


| |Original Child Bomb| |

Directed by Cary Schonegevel
2004, 57 minutes, documentary
(This film has been provided courtesy Breakthrough, www.breakthrough.tv 
<http://www.breakthrough.tv/>)

Khoj - 29th September
Sarai - 30th September

Inspired by Thomas Merton's poem, Original Child Bomb shows the human 
cost of nuclear weapons. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 
depicted through declassified footage, photographs, drawings and 
testimonies of mothers, brothers and soldiers. Ordinary people gaze upon 
the nuclear past and its terrifying present. They expose the political 
rhetoric surrounding "security" and "weapons of mass destruction".



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[[RESOURCES]]

Sarai is an active member of the voluntary platform for indic computing 
known as indlinux. The community is involved in comprehensive 
localisation programmes in most Indian languages. Localisation involves 
translating interfaces of the most popular softwares likely to be used 
by a diverse set of users into languages other than English.

If you have tried writing in Indian languages with the default English 
keyboard you must have had to learn a new keymap. This can be a 
frustrating and discouraging exercise. At Sarai we do a lot of work in 
Hindi. From this experience grew our effort to create easy user-friendly 
input systems.
The Bolnagari keyboard is a phonetic keymap for Linux systems. It is a 
hack, but it works. Do note it can be used in an Unicode environment 
only. Unicode is a relatively new encoding system that allow for enough 
space for Indic languages and enables interoperability - that is you can 
write in any Unicode font and see it in another, provided that font is 
also Unicode embedded.


To download Bolnagari for free visit: 
http://www.indlinux.org/downloads/files/bolnagri.tar.gz
A readme file is included in the package which gives clear and lucid 
instructions on how to install and use the software.

To download Unicode fonts, visit: http://devanaagarii.net 
<http://devanaagarii.net/>

Do write to the authors for more information, to report bugs and with 
any questions you might have.

Ravikant ravikant at sarai.net <mailto:ravikant at sarai.net>
Pramod pramodr at gmail.com <mailto:pramodr at gmail.com>
Karunakar karunakar at indlinux.org <mailto:karunakar at indlinux.org>

Also visit www.indlinux.org <http://www.indlinux.org/> for more 
information on localisation activities in India.


====================
Publications @ Sarai
====================

This September sees the launch of three new publications from Sarai. The 
bboks are available for free download in pdf format on the Sarai website.

||Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts||

The fifth in the Sarai reader Series, Bare Acts looks at 'Acts' - as 
instruments of legislation, as things within the law, and at 'acts' - at 
different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader 
foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority 
and entitlements, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of 
various kinds, with a view to complicate our understandings of the bare 
act of the law and a meta-legal domain of codes, norms and practices 
within which the law is located.

http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader_05.html


||Deewan-e-Sarai 02: Shaharnama||

The second Sarai Hindi Reader focuses on cities past and present, 
especially Delhi, by enabling dialogue between social science and 
literary imaginations in Hindi and Urdu. The collection brings together 
writings by young and emerging writers, revisits older histories and 
inscribes the contemporary in a fresh register.

http://hindi.sarai.net/deewan/deewan01.html


||Medianagar 02||

Medianagar is the annual Hindi publication of the Publics and Practices 
in the History of the Present [PPHP] project in Sarai. Medianagar 02 
explores the dynamic, flexible networks involved in the production, 
distribution and circulation of diverse media forms. It attempts a 
creative analysis and rendering of the modes, trends and representations 
of old and new media in the contemporary city.

http://www.sarai.net/mediacity/filmcity/medianagar02.htm



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[[CONVERSATIONS]]

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Independent Fellowship Workshop
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Report on 'Independent Fellowship Workshop'
24, 25, 26, 27 -August 2005, Sarai-CSDS

August saw the return of the Independent Fellows to Sarai for their 
final presentations. This year there were almost 50 presentations over a 
hectic four days of intense and lively discussion.

Projects presented were extremely varied, both in terms of areas of 
research, as also modes of rendition. Topics ranged from a social 
history of mess houses in 19th Century Bengal, a discussion of 
children's relationship to space in Vijayawada railway station, urban 
water conflicts in Chennai, to a subjective rendering of the experience 
of space and time in Delhi,
Researchers ranged from academics situated within the university system, 
to professionals situated in work contexts whose research constituted 
reflections on the spaces they inhabit (such as Kuldeep Kaur's 
ethnography of the Labour room, and Faraaz Mehmood's lively descriptions 
of work processes in a multi-national bank), to filmmakers, dancers, 
musicians, song-writers, architects, programmers.

Researchers experimented with a variety of forms – these ranged from 
semi-fictionalised accounts, first-person narratives, short films which 
were screened, an audio-essay, a video-cum oral narrative, as well as 
more formal academic papers.

A highlight of the workshop was three performance-presentations. The 
first by Urmila Bhidikar on the production of feminine and masculine 
voice in the figure of Bal Gandharva. Sumangala Damodaran presented an 
analysis of the music of the IPTA through recordings, and Mehmood 
Farooqui performed two sections from the dastan of Amir Hamza.
The Independent Fellowship programme is designed such that the end of 
the fellowship process does not signal and end to the conversation 
between fellows and their material, or between eachother. Many projects 
were therefore 'works-in-progress' and researchers saw the presentations 
as forums from which to gather fresh questions and provocations, find 
new directionalities in their work.

Detailed reports will be made available online soon. Visit 
http://midday.chalomumbai.com/columns/mahmood_farooqui/2005/august/117156.ht 

for Mehmood Farooqui's (Independent Fellow 2005) reflections on the 
fellowship process.

***

Student Stipendship programme
30, 31 August 2005

The Student Stipends programme is structured in a manner which 
facilitates the work of young researchers within the university 
structure. Besides presentations therefore, the workshop also included 
sessions with invited facilitators such as Solomon Benjamin, Asha Ghosh, 
Prabhu Mohapatra, Zainab Bawa and Rupali Gupte on the modes and 
methodologies of research, and open sessions on the process of research.

The workshop was structured over two days. In all about twenty 
researchers presented their work. Presentations included papers on 
Contested citizenship in Nowgong, Saturday markets in Delhi, labour in 
colonial Cochin harbour, dalits in the digital world in Darbhanga, new 
urban masculinities and cinema in colonial Kerala amongst others.

Detailed reports will be available online soon. To know more about the 
programme write to Sadan Jha at sadan at sarai.net


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END OF NEWSLETTER

The Newsletter of the Sarai Programme,
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