BLF 2018 Reports Day 1 - Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF)

BLF 2018 Reports Day 1

Editor’s Cut: Road to 2019

As the evening set in, the bards, visionaries and activists came out of their hibernation in Bangalore Literature Festival. Maybe it was the general air of intoxication around- a sense of utopia, an acute awareness of affecting the possibilities or …

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Cityscape: Transforming Public Spaces

If you love to take a stroll around cities, neighbourhoods and colonies, chances are you have closely tried to establish a relationship with public spaces that cities have to offer. We all, in fact, do share a known/ unknown relationship …

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Fashion: The seamly and the unseemly

The panel of ladies: Manjima Bhattacharya author of ‘Mannequin-Working women in India’s glamour industry’. Shvetha Jaishankar, former beauty pageant titleholder of Femina Miss India, entrepreneur, now the author of ‘Gorgeous- Eat well, Look great’ along with Susan Thomas discussed fashion …

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The Business of Sex

Modern India is very forward when it comes to debating and coming to a resolution on any topics that might have raised a few eyebrows before. Not so much when it comes to the business of sex. The taboo around …

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Populism, Liberalism et al

Populism, Liberalism et al had Ashutosh Varshney and Narayan Ramachandran in session. Ashutosh Varshney is a professor of International Studies at Brown University. His ideas on populism, follies of liberalism; his political inclination and the difference between Indian and American …

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Ujjivan: Small loans that transformed lives

Samit Ghosh is the founder and managing director of Ujjivan Financial Services Limited. He was accompanied by Subir Roy, a writer. We have large commercial banks on one hand and microservices banks on the other hand. They are blooming slowly …

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The Diary of a Political Idiot

Shoma Chaudhury, who moderated the session introduced the author Jasmina Tesanovic who is a journalist, feminist, political activist, and filmmaker. On Serbia bombing in 1999, Jasmina started the conversation saying that she believed it could happen to anyone, anywhere and …

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Unfolding the Goddess Within

Yogini Shambhavi Chopra is the Co-director of American Institute of Vedic Studies and she calls herself as an ‘Anubhavi’.Sharing her experiences she says the outer world experience is like an unsettling woman but the inner self is peaceful and not …

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Listen to Me: A Memoir

 

As the title suggests, this session was about listening to Shashi Deshpande, an eminent English writer who has recently penned down her memoir recollecting all her good old and bad days. This session was specifically interesting because it contained …

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Outback Tales: Stories from Oz

Rajith Savanadasa started the session at ‘Adjust Maadi’ venue by asking the audience how many of them had been to Australia to unpack the idea of Australia and there were quite a few.

He asked Roanna Gonsalves who grew up …

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Who owns that song?

In a country such as India that is replete with diversity in its social milieu, it should not be surprising that some things get missed to the extent of becoming obscure. This is one such story that spun out of …

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Agatha Christie, Poirot and Me

Weird serendipity. That is how Sophie Hannah got the approval from the Christie family and began writing Poirot novels. Sophie’s maverick literary agent sowed these ideas into the mind of a HarperCollins editor, who immediately rejected the idea. A thorough …

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Is There an Indian Road to Equality?

Author of recently published Gandhi: The Years that Changed the world, from cricket to history to political science, he has worn all kinds of hat. In this session, Ramachandra Guha premiered about a topic with which he has not engaged …

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sahapedia.org

Sudha Gopalakrishnan who is a co-founder of sahapedia.org and a former founder director (2003-07) at National Mission for Manuscripts, started the session by speaking about the manuscript mission and said, at the manuscript mission, it was an arduous task to …

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Winning on #377

This September, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgement of decriminalizing homosexual relationships between consenting individuals. It struck down on the IPC section 377 after a 17-year long legal battle. The Bangalore Literature Festival had Anjali Gopalan who …

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Pencils Drawn: Cartooning in Trying Times

Ponnappa and Ravi Shankar, the renowned cartoon artists of our country took out all their mind out and sketched out artistically the current political and cultural stature. As Ponnappa quotes “ I never take up religion , that is the …

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The Aryavarta Chronicles

The session Aryavarta Chronicles allowed the audience to have a discussion with Krishna Udayasankar, the author of The Aryavarta Chronicles (Govinda, Kaurava and Kurukshetra), a bestselling series of mytho-historical novels that have been acquired by Ms Sonam Kapoor. Her novel, …

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The Descent of Man

In a short and crisp session on ‘The Descent of Man’ at the ‘Naale Baa’ venue, poet, essayist, and critic Vijay Seshadri was in conversation with author Ranjit Hoskote. The dialogue hovered over and went into the contours of poetry …

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Crime, Corruption, Cronyism & More

If you are a person with a keen interest in political business then these books might fill your belly with a lot of interesting anecdotes. The world of politics not lying far away from business and eventually flowing into the …

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