Just saw the video of Walter Cronkite announcing the death of JFK. News gathering, it is apparent, was harder those days. The death of the president is not confirmed for over half an hour after its occurence. But what stuck me was the sanity that prevails in the coverage. The number of times that Cronkite makes it clear that the news is not confirmed. The way he stays so unflappable. He doesn’t, contrary to most TV news coverage in India these days, drive anyone hysterical. No wonder he is remembered in this fashion.
The CEOs are back in the institute which gave them the license to fulfill their dreams. And now, they are determined to give back to the nation where they build their private empires. The alumni of the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are forming a think-tank which will regularly bring out policy papers on key issues affecting the country such as affirmative action, rural entrepreneurship and technical education. (more…)
When Tamil literary giant P Singaram wrote ‘Puyalile Oru Thoni’ in the late 1970s, the manuscript struggled to find a home. The book, first published in condensed form, as no publisher would touch it, is now acknowledged as a classic. But today, publishers — big, small, alternative or mainstream — are struggling to find contributors, marking a reversal in the trend of writers running pillar to post to get a publisher. (more…)
The Marina had some unusual visitors on Sunday. Over a hundred poets from across the state had gathered, under a makeshift tent near the Gandhi Statue, to protest against the war in Sri Lanka and the killing of Tamils there. Curious passers-by heard resonant, emotional poems filled with the imagery of the war and the “ethnic cleansing of innocent Tamils.” (more…)
I began blogging a couple of years ago with the impression that it is a loser’s past-time. Instead of the night-out at Satyam Cinemas or a disco like my friends, I sat by the computer, hour after hour, making sentences up. Only the pleasure of misusing my office computer kept me going. I began, rather clandestinely I imagined, writing for anybody who cared to read. (more…)
(A version of this appeared in The Times Of India ages ago)
Twenty-six-year-old ChandrachoodanGopalakrishnan is in a dilemma. The next Chennai Photowalk, which has been organised by him on the second Sunday of every month, falls on June 8, but Chandru has to be in Coorg for a shoot. So for the first time since November 2007, when he and a group of photowalkers went from Mylapore to Fort St George shooting everything and anything that they saw, he is rescheduling the monthly photowalk. (more…)
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whose realistic movies spawned a whole new movement in film-making in Malayalam, just like Satyajit Ray’s ventures on celluloid, now has the “honour of having a book on him in Tamil.”
At an event to mark the book’s launch in the city, Adoor – whose speech in English was laced with ironic humour – said he would not speak in Tamil out of respect for the language. Of Akbar Kakkatil, who interviewed Adoor over five days for the book Idam Porul Kalai , Adoor said he was initially hesitant to sit with the writer. (more…)
The Tamil magazine Kalachuvadu celebrated its landmark hundredth issue, a rare achievement for an alternative magazine publishing in the language, with daylong events on Saturday.
Launched by the late writer Sundara Ramaswamy, popularly called SuRa, in 1988, Kalachuvadu began life as a quarterly magazine publishing quality literature. But SuRa’s dreams remained unfulfilled. The magazine stopped in 1991 with an annual issue. (more…)
