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Kolkata
SHE'S an American who divides her time between Cairo and Bombay. She holds a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and the no less prestigious Mumbai-based Bharat Natya Kala Manir Insititute where she studied Bharatanatyam.
Her dance troupe opened the Festival of India in New York City and if all this were not enough she's also a film critic of some repute. Now Janet Fine will be Kolkata to launch her book Lazzat un Nisa, The Pleasure of A Woman on June 30 at Oxford Bookstore and Gallery. The book is a translation of the 1850 Urdu text commonly attributed to Haji Mian Abdul Mehdune of Hyderabad.
The launch will be followed by an interactive discussion between Fine and city personalities including film and art critic Chidananda Dasgupta and actress Moon Moon Sen.
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ODEON 2003 a city theatre Festival will be on from June 27 to July 6 and a number of excellent productions will premier at this fest. There's "Class of 1984" by Rahul da Cunha (featuring Shernaz Patel and others), Subarnalata (a Hindi play based on a novel by Ashapurna Devi), The Antigone Project (Hindi) starring Seema Biswas and the Bengali production Samaye Asamaye. A must for theatre buffs
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COMPOSED in the mid-16th Century by renowned Telugu writer Pingali Suranna, "The Sound of the Kiss", or "The Story That Must Never Be Told", is widely believed to be the first novel written in South Asia. Suranna's masterpiece comes from a period of intense creativity in Telugu, when great poets produced strikingly modern innovations. Employing the poetic style known as campu, which mixes verse and prose, Pingali Suranna's work transcends our notions of traditional narrative both in its complex structure as well as its glorious descriptions. It has now been translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman into English thus ensuring that a much wider audience can access this fine work. Oxford Univesity Press launches this book in Kolkata on July 4 at Oxford. The launch will be followed by "Acts of Seduction, Words of Love" in which Katy Lai Roy selects words of love down the ages and directs some of Kolkata's leading theatre performers in an evening's readings of poems, plays and prose pieces to music.
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"I BELIEVE in music" is her motto and Usha Uthup has never been untrue to it. Though music has been her life since she could talk, her professional debut happened as late as 1969. But she hasn't looked back, singing in more than 13 Indian and eight foreign languages and recording six albums in English with HMV. But although accolades pour in from everywhere and she travels the world to sing her songs, Kolkata has a special place in this singer's heart and Kolkatans can never get enough of her. And now they can hear those rich tones once more when she sings in her favourite city on July 5, at the Science City Stadium, at a concert organised by the St Lawrence School Old Boys Association.
ARUNDHATI RAY
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