May you always have dreams to chase
Enough to eat, weather that's fine
May your year enthrall and amaze
Just don't make it too much better than mine

All the best for 2010, y'all.

I'm a Bhopali

We Are All Bhopalis

On September 12th, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani wrote in Le Monde:

“In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin. Indeed, just as in the gravest moments of our own history, how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity?”

The previous day, 2,974 had people died in New York, Washington and Shanksville. And we all felt as Colombani did, our hearts going out to those innocent victims of terrorism and their bereaved families.

**

On December 3rd, 1984, in Bhopal, India, a leak from a methyl isocyanate gas tank in a Union Carbide plant sent out a dense poisonous cloud that killed 23,000 people — many of them that night, others soon after. Another 30,000 people have been affected since, by chemicals leaking from the abandoned factory, poisoning the water supply.

It has been described as the world’s worst industrial disaster. (Bhopal.org has many descriptions and recollections of the disaster and its aftermath.)

25 years later, the survivors still do not have justice. Such compensation as has been offered has been paltry. And, of course, chemicals continue to leak, continue to poison Bhopalis, continue to result in disease, birth defects, and more suffering.

We would like you help in bringing the world’s attention back to Bhopal. We would like to invite you to declare, loud and strong, that you are a Bhopali too.

(We do not want any financial support; this WordPress sub-domain is free, and if we do move to our own website, we’re happy to pay for the domain and the hosting. If you want to help financially, please use the ‘donate’ buttons on the Bhopal.org site or any other organisations that will use your money to help the survivors in Bhopal.)

So we should all stop linking to Newscorp stuff?

"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether... but we'll take that slowly."
Rupert Murdoch, in The Guardian.

The (Twitter) Gospel according to St Peter

Remember Follow Fridays and keep them holy.

As ye tweet, thus shall ye be retweeted.

Thou shalt not stalk thy neighbour's followers in the hope that they follow ye.

Thou shalt not plug thy status updates into Facebook, that barren land of nonbelievers & quiz-takers.

Thou shalt not bear false witness. That includes tweeting stuff you only actually saw on TV.

Honour thy father and thy mother. What happens at home shalt not be tweeted.
(Unless, of course, thy parents tweeted first)
(You *really* shouldn't have got them on to Twitter, y'know.)

Thou shalt not sledge @stephenfry. He has earned his moods.
@shashitharoor is, however, fair game.

Thou shalt get back to work, hm?

#Thou #shalt #use #hashtags #judiciously.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ass. Well, okay, maybe if s/he's really callipygous.

If ye seek to be retweeted, ye shall ensure that thy tweets have enough characters left over to permit it.

Thou shalt casually mention @gulpanag in thy tweets, as if you're, like, friends and all.

Thou shalt quit while thou art ahead.

Thou shalt not relentlessly pimp thy blog. (These tweets archived at http://bit.ly/nvenr)

RT @zigzackly Thou shalt not relentlessly pimp thy blog. (These tweets archived at http://bit.ly/nvenr)

Retweeting yourself - or RTing what others tweet to you - is bad form. Only SEOs do that.

RT @zigzackly The Gospel according to St Peter: Retweeting yourself - or RTing what others tweet to you - is bad form. Only SEOs do that.

Celebrate Bandra Festival Souvenir - Call for Submissions

(Original post here.)

The Celebrate Bandra Festival happens once every two years in Bandra. This year, the festival will be in November. I'm helping curate the literature section. More about past festivals at celebratebandra.net (the site won't be updated with this year's schedule for a little while yet).

Here's the brief.

"You're My Home": you live in Bandra, so what makes it home? (If you don't live in Bandra, imagine it). The trees, the birds, the air, your nosy neighbours, your generous and helpful neighbours, their culture and yours, the sea, the waves, the aromas, the convenience, the excitement. It's home, so like every home, it has ups, it has downs. But what is it about the environment of Bandra, seen as broadly as you can, that makes it home for you?

You can submit anything that can appear in print (without spending enormous amounts of money): essays, short fiction, poetry, play scripts, illustrations, photographs.

Please email your submissions to celebrate.bandra.festival@gmail.com

Last date for submissions: September 30th, 11:59p.m.

You can make more than one stand-alone submission, but please do so in separate emails, to help the selection process.

For text submissions
• Your submission must be close to, but not over, the 1000 word mark.
• Please paste your text into the body of the email. No attachments, please.
• Please use one of these subject lines: Souvenir Submission - short story, Souvenir Submission - poem, Souvenir Submission - essay, or Souvenir Submission - script.

For photographs, scanned illustrations or computer-generated art
• Please submit only one piece. (A picture being worth a thousand words and all that.)
• You can include a short (not more than 100 words) descriptor or caption in the body of your email.
• If your image is a very large file, please upload it online somewhere* and mail in a link.
• If you think you must submit more than one image as part of the same entry, then please mail in only one, but add a description of what the rest of the series will be like, or upload the additional material elsewhere and send in a link. If we want to see the rest, we'll mail you.
• Please use one of these subject lines: Souvenir Submission - photograph, Souvenir Submission - illustration, or Souvenir Submission - digital art

In one paragraph at the end of your email, please include your name, postal address, email address and a phone number, land or cellular, where you can be reached during the day and in the evenings.

By submitting, you declare that the work is your own, or that you have collaborated in its creation and are authorised to submit on behalf of the collective. Please remember India's laws on libel and obscenity. And for visual art submissions that depict people, especially photographs, please make sure you have your subject's permission. For any form of 'found art,' text or visual, please ensure that you are not infringing India's copyright laws.

Entries will be short-listed by Rahul Goswami. Rahul is an intermittent Bandra resident, and otherwise a researcher working on the links between economic growth, livelihoods and agriculture.

The short-list will then be judged by Dilip D'Souza, writer and journalist, who is the editor of the souvenir, and Joe Campana, and the selected submissions will appear in print. Updates on the lists will be posted to the Caferati blog, and, if it's ready by then, the updated Celebrate Bandra website.

Rewards: the joy of seeing your work in print, and contributing towards the Celebrate Bandra effort. We are trying to get some small prizes for the best entries, but this is very unlikely, so don't count on it. UpdateThe top five entries, across categories, will be marked as such in the souvenir, and, yes, will get small prizes.

Do please pass this on to friends and well-wishers, from Bandra or elsewhere. Feel free to copy this text to your website or blog, and to online forums where you know it will be welcome.

* Possible sites where you can upload your work: Flickr, Photobucket, OurMedia, Picassa.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - 4

One has been most remiss
One whole day one has missed
A godawful host am I, alas
To let a godawful fortnight day pass
Without finding a moment in time
To add to the feast of mediocre rhyme

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - 3

The side-effects of the H1N1 influenza

You know what the worst
Side-effect of this burst
Of this oh so very
Unfortunately-
Named flu is?

It's the amateur wags,
And their lame borrowed gags
Littering the statusphere
Wherever you peer.
Gah.

It's even worse, you will agree
Than godawful poetry.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - 2

I,
I write for you.
You,
You write for me?
We,
We both write?
Okay?

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - Guest Post 1

My humble contribution to this fantastic, much-looked-forward to annual event:

Banished

They dragged me with brute force to the door,
Callously kicked me down the stairs below-
And screeched like the oft quoted Raven, “Nevermore!”

I staggered to my feet and limped my way across the street,
With fumbling fingers groped for my pack of woe,
And struck a match- Ah, even in adversity life can be sweet.

So now I wander lonely spewing dark, belligerent clouds,
That lurk on high o’er the stained cityscape,
And insidiously creep into the lungs of the teeming crowds.

All I ask for is Keats' Grecian urn to tip the ash,
While contributing generously to the city's smog,
It wouldn’t hurt would it, that dead sexy touch of dash?

By Rupa Gulab who, incidentally is not blushing furiously, but rolling on the floor with mirth. Shameless!

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - 1

In a Godawful Mood,
Just not a Godawful Poetry mood.
But as the host, I can't be rude,
So here's my pseud-
o poem.


Godawful Poetry Fortnight