Creating Spaces

Pain penetrates
me drop
by drop

~Sappho~


Another week has flown by in Sappho. The Queer conference date is inching closer and the abstracts have come in. While reading through some of them, i was surprised how the many facets of being queer or living queer can be expressed. It was surprising to read about issues like court cases where the wife has been accused of adultery with another woman, or recent queer discussions in the literary circle. India has produced one of its very first queer graphic novel in Amruta Patil's Kari.

The conference which is scheduled to take place on 10th and 11th April is being organised on a grand scale. H L Roy auditorium in Jadavpur University has already been booked for the occasion and now arrangements are being made to fix accommodation and transport for the outstation speakers and the chairpersons. Work is on full swing at Sappho with the conference. What is unique about the conference is also the fact that all the speakers will be from the age range 18-28. This was to ensure that we could look and discuss recent queer theory and development through the eyes of the youth. The old age theorisations suddenly seem to have fallen from grace with the rapid globalization and the growing want to create a new identity that does not ape the West or look back at the medieval course. As such the papers and the speakers chosen will be those who can give shape to the creation of this Indian queer identity and in breaking the silent monolith of MSM and WSW.

P.S: SAPPHO is putting up a play tomorrow at The School of Womens Studies at JU on the occasion of International Woman's Day. (Its being celebrated on 20th of March instead of 8th March due to certain logistical and arrangement issues)

P.P.S: People who are interested to attend the Queer conference on single/both the days are requested to start registering with me at sapphoqueerconference@gmail.com . This will help us to keep count of the anticipated number of people who might turn up and will ensure there is sufficient lunch and snacks for all the participants and attendees.

A Day’s Reflection

(written Feb 13, 2009)

Two weeks ago, I finally gave in to the hype and went to see Slumdog Millionaire with some of my fellow CINI interns. I will not add to the slew of editorials that already exist about the movie, but I will say this. I cannot think of a more fitting way to spend that evening seeing as I had spent the afternoon visiting the field where I will perform my study. I will not presume to compare real life to a fictional story, but I found that my experience of each was heightened by the other.

The area I speak of happens to be one of the minority slum communities of Kolkata. With one of the most experienced field workers as my guide, I spent a few hours in the field meeting mothers and their children and getting a feel for the community itself. Although hidden from the unobservant eye, the maze of narrow and circuitous lanes houses a population of more than 6,000 inhabitants. It has existed for quite some time, and while migration is common, it seems there are a many longstanding members of the community as well. As I walked, through the lanes, I found that the community members were just as curious about me as I was about them. Where was I from? What was my life like and what did I spend my days doing? Interestingly enough, CINI has the same questions of them, which is why I was visiting in the first place.
After climbing a pile of stones to the main road above, I found many thoughts circling around in my head. What I found most comforting at the end of the visit, was the genuine kindness I was shown by people who were essentially perfect strangers. It struck me though, that in a sense I wasn’t a perfect stranger. I was coming on behalf of the CINI community, which had now become part of the field community. A sense of trust and care had been created between CINI and the community, and that was in turn shown towards me on my visit.

Three hours later, as the movie started, I was still thinking about the events of the afternoon. As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but see the faces of the children I had met earlier in the day. Perhaps it was because of the fellow CINI interns sitting beside me, but after some time, it occurred to me that the film was in a sense doubling as a CINI training video. As the vignettes unfolded, one after another they seemed to cover every child protection issue that CINI has included in its mission, from curbing child trafficking to saving children from a life on the streets.
And after watching the film in its entirety, I had fallen victim to my sympathetic tendencies. Still, I found that it wasn’t only because of the film I had just watched, but also because of how it made me reflect on what I had seen earlier in the day. While I know it’s a fictional fairy tale, I found myself wishing that the sense of possibility for children was real, especially for children without money, without homes, and without families, for the CIN of CINI, the children in need.

Now what exactly is this CINI?

(Written Jan 30 2009)

My first month working as an intern at CINI Asha, the urban unit of the Child in Need Institute, has flown by. In the first week, myself and nine other new interns from around the world (India, the Phillipines, Italy, England, Holland, Scotland and the United States) were given a thorough orientation on the projects that the CINI is involved in throughout the greater Kolkata area. Complete strangers that first day, we quickly go to know each other. In a few days time, we had visited many of the rural and urban field areas with community mobilizers that work directly in with our populations. Throughout the week, I came to appreciate that both the “Life Cycle Approach” and the concept of creating child and woman friendly communities, CWFCs, are integral to the work that CINI does. I am still learning how these concepts can be applied effectively, but my initial gut feeling was relief that the ideology on public health seemed to match my own in many ways.

I have now been working in the Health Unit of CINI Asha for three weeks. As each day passes, I am introduced to new facets of the work that the Health Unit performs. With six extremely populous fields under their charge, it is no wonder that the office is often buzzing with conversation about the next project. In my time as an intern, I will be involved in many aspects of the HU work, including running a study of the health and nutrition status of the mothers and under five children in the population of one of our most afflicted target areas. In this first month, I have been working out the details of that study. It has been a much more involved than I expected, including developing and editing time and again, the questions that the research will cover, the list of eligible participants, enlisting the help of a Hindi-speaking community mobilizer to conduct the survey, and familiarizing myself with the work that health workers in the field perform on a regular basis.

The health unit has been providing services to the community for many years. Still, it is rare that it has the extra manpower to assess the quality of the work it is performing in the community. Our hope is that the results of this study will give us a better understanding of one of the communities where we work and will thereby allow us to improve the services the CINI Asha provides. While there are always challenges when joining a new working environment, I feel that CINI Asha will be a wonderful place to intern for the coming months. Slowly I am learning the many languages being thrown around in the office and the best part is discovering new smiling faces every day when I wind the stairs of Amader Bari. It has been a whirlwind of a beginning, but I am looking forward to the ride ahead.

Hi Everyone!!!

I'm Sarmistha and a new Choice intern. This is the first time I'm posting a blog and I'm happy that it starts here at Choice.

I'm interning at an NGO called Bakul Foundation in Bhubaneswar. Well its not exactly an NGO, I mean it falls into a slightly different category,as in, it doesn't have employees running around doing its work, but instead volunteers, happy to spend their time doing something meaningful than to while away their time at some coffee shop. That is how I got hooked with Bakul. The entire concept of volunteerism and people actually working without any financial motivators was very intriguing as well as exciting.

Now let me introduce you to Bakul properly. Bakul Foundation is a movement for volunteerism in Orissa. Acting on the belief that substantial change is possible when thousands get together, Bakul attempts to pool together the small individual energies of the people who want to bring about change in the society. Hence, Bakul seeks to harness the huge and largely untapped volunteerism of students, retired persons, homemakers, working people and non-resident Indians for social and environmental development.

As its first initiative, Bakul mobilized more than a thousand individuals to contribute in small ways to set up a Children's Library in Bhubaneswar. The entire library has been built and is running with small individual contributions of ordinary people without any corporate or institutional funding so far.

Bakul is also into Arts, in January 2009 Bakul, in collaboration with 'Art and Deal' magazine, New Delhi, organized the 'BAKUL ART FEST 2009' and got tremendous response from artists and public alike. I got the opportunity to co-ordinate the Art Fest. The theme of the art fest was, 'TOWARDS A NEW VIEWERSHIP/AUDIENCE' and I think to a great extent it was able to spread its message. The main focus was to reach out to people (the first time viewers) who've never had an opportunity to get introduced to the world of arts. To those who never had a gallery experience it was a new revelation all together.

The Art Fest started on 15 Jan with the preview of the Art Exhibition. Around 36 National as well as Bhubaneswar based artists came together for the first time in Bhubaneswar for this event. There were 3 elements of the Art Fest, the 'ART WALL FOR PEACE' , the 'ART EXHIBITION' and the 'VIDEO EVENINGS'. The 500 feet long 'WALL for PEACE' was painted by 300 odd people from all walks of life. Starting from the artists to art students to school children to rag pickers. There were differently abled children as well from the deaf schools and also from Open Learning System participating with equal enthusiasm. It was a sight to behold, with so many people coming up with such amazing paintings all on the theme of Peace.

The art exhibition attracted even more people as we tried even harder to reach out to people to spread our message. There was a lot of publicity in both English and Oriya newspapers and also through local TV and FM stations. A lot of people turned up by reading our article in the newspapers. We also coordinated with a lot of schools to arrange visits by students to the exhibition. Their response was over exhilarating. More than 1000 people visited the gallery and it was very satisfying to see that people could connect to art in their own various ways and the response of the school children was overwhelming.

The Video Evenings were a success too as it was a relatively new concept among the public here. It was exciting to experience different forms of expression for the first time.

The Art Fest concluded on 28th Jan and it didn't even feel that 2 weeks had passed. It was my first experience coordinating something at such a large scale. Personally I gained a lot from this experience, interactions with the artists gave me a different insight to the paintings and the entire experience also helped me develop my own outlook and approach towards arts.

I'm really happy I got such an opportunity so early on in life by Bakul and Choice.

Regards..
me...

The Surprise Package

In my last post I had spoken about how I wanted to give more time to developing theatre sessions for children. Funnily enough, I have now been put in charge of coordinating a project involving a mainstream school. So not only will I have to supervise the project and give regular reports to Sanved, I will also get the chance to work intensively with children and conceptualize a programme involving them. Needless to say, I am very excited about this. I’ve been looking up some books on doing theatre for children and have also talked in depth with my co-trainers at Sanved regarding formulating sessions. A couple of months ago they had been enrolled in a 14-day course in dance movement therapy and one of the areas of focus was working with children. As a result, their own expertise in planning sessions for children has increased and all of us (who are involved in the project) are looking forward to working together.

But going back to the project in question. A few months ago, one of my all-time favourite school teachers, Anjana Saha, had contacted me and asked me if I was interested in doing drama classes for a new school she had become the principal of. The school in question was Shaw Public School and is located in Behala. I told her about my commitments to Sanved and The Cambridge School and, to cut a long story short, she became very interested in the work I was doing with Sanved. She asked me if Sanved would be able to conduct classes at her school – classes which could bring together dance, movement and theatre components. Sohini di (Sohini Chakraborty, the director of Sanved) and I met her a few weeks ago and starting from March 16th, we will be taking regular classes at her school. Our immediate project will be choreographing a performance involving the whole school (nearly 600 children!) for their Founder’s Day programme in early April. Apart from me, there are 3 other trainers from Sanved; we have met the children and come up with a concept for the programme. In the next week, I will have to develop a costume design and also a tentative stage design plan. I’ve never worked with so many children before, but somehow, I feel that many of the questions I had regarding conceptualizing theatre classes with children will be answered in this process.

Visiting Shaw Public School was in itself a wonderful experience. The school has large, child-friendly grounds, the classrooms are very airy and well-planned. It’s incredibly heartening to see so many new schools coming up in the city that are in tune to children’s needs. When I was growing up, there were only a handful of “reputed schools”. But now, thanks to the mushrooming of several new schools that offer excellent infrastructure and teachers, parents have many more choices. So the traditionally deemed “good schools” have a number of equally good, if not better, counterparts. I think that’s one thing Calcutta can be proud of (!).

All in all, the past couple of months have seen my internship take an unexpected but perhaps even more exciting turn. When I joined Sanved I thought I’d be working largely with disadvantaged young girls and women (which I was doing and will continue to do so). I did not think I’d also work with mainstream children and feel equally challenged and engaged, even if it's a different kind of engagement and the needs that should be addressed are different. But, undoubtedly, the best part of this is that even if I'm eight months into my internship, I can still hope to enter territories untouched upon so far. There really is no greater pleasure (for me, at any rate).

ANJALI

This is my second internship with CHOICE, and this time, I am absolutely thrilled to be working with ANJALI on an independent project.

"Anjali works towards making people with psychosocial disability aware of their rights, and to make the government and civil society make the necessary shifts in attitude and practice to make these rights a reality: the right to health care and support in institutions, the right to care and support at home, the right to education and training, the right to work and earn an income; and most of all, the right to be treated with dignity as human beings, both in the institutional and social spaces." - Ratnaboli Ray, Founder.

When I started work in Feb, I was a little nervous, to say the *least*. 

But over the last two months Ratna has been endlessly supportive, and we have revamped the entire project. 

Initially, the idea was to hold an exhibition. The theme being relationships, between the user and the family, the institution and the family. Woven together through a narrative. However, we debated on how much impact such an exhibition could have. How much awareness could it raise? How many people can it actually effect? 

Over the last 2months we have *completely* revamped the project. 

So we decided to use the exhibits to design workshops around them. 

We briefly considered photo therapy. When people look at art or photos they themselves created, and review the themes, messages, and emotional content unknowingly embedded in these, they are able to learn more about their own unconscious inner life. In communicating more directly with the unconscious, visual symbols permit the natural bypassing of verbal "filters" (and accompanying rationalizations, excuses, and similar protective defenses) that automatically limit clients' direct connection with powerful feelings, thoughts, and memories.

However, this would necessarily require for users to take the photos themselves. 

The exhibition or workshops came later. 

So we have settled on the idea of the users turning photographers. Since Photo Therapy is about photography-as-communication rather than photography-as-art, no prior experience with cameras or the photographic arts is required for effective therapeutic use.

Photo Therapy involves people interacting with their own unique visual constructions of reality (using photography more as an activating verb than as a passive/reflective noun), these techniques can be particularly successful with people for whom verbal communication is physically, mentally, or emotionally limited, socio-culturally marginalized.

Therefore Photo therapy can be especially helpful, and usually very empowering, in applications with multicultural, disabled, minority-gender, special-needs, and other similarly-complex or marginalized populations -- as well as beneficial in diversity training, conflict resolution, divorce mediation, and other related fields.

 I'm speaking to the Shukla, Project Manager of the rehabilitation programme run by ANJALI in several mental health hospitals, about how and if cameras will be allowed inside. Since, ANJALI runs various other therapeutic programmes within their rehab group, it shouldn't be too difficult. 

There have been many exhibits, which document the outsider's point of view. But their world from their perspective, is far more intriguing, and gives more scope for working on an awareness exhibition. 

We have also decided to exhibit in public spaces and colleges and Universities. 

My only concern right now is to get the cameras and start the process of taking the pictures, asap. 

But that doesn't seem to be the only roadblock. Shukla,= mentioned that the authorities might frown on the idea. That's putting it mildly. 

Ratna and I have been talking, and we've decided to meet with the authorities and explain the concept to them. With emphasis on therapy. We are visiting Lumbini Park Mental Hospital on the 6th for a show they are holding for the inmates. Hoping for more progress then. 

Seagull Cafe??

Hello…..I have never done this before…well …iv been a choice intern at Seagull for four months now. I actually have been mulling over an idea that I want to throw out there and get feedback on. Shamoni would know all about this…I feel like I have been chasing my own tail so Bishan suggested that I talk bout it here and then I have all your ideas and contributions.

Ok so as I said I have been interning at seagull and I find that the events are attended pretty sparsely. At first I couldn’t figure out why this is. Then I went to Prithvi to perform and it gave me an idea. I feel that while Seagull has some fabulous events and a lot of resources to offer in terms of its collection of art, film, etc it isn’t exactly a ‘hangout’. People who are interested in a particular event attend it and leave. As a result there isn’t a group of regulars who remember what events are on and attend most of them. I thought if we could open a café here at the recourse center. Using the outdoor patio and some of the ground floor. We have quite a large space downstairs in which to hold events in the café at least twice a week. I was thinking film screenings, live music performances (although we will not have the budget to pay musicians) so maybe young musicians who need a place to showcase there talents. Also theater, dramatic monologues, poetry, discussions, if anyone has made a really good student film maybe set up a screening of it. As and when any of the Seagull contacts artists, writers, filmmakers etc are in town have a session with them.

These are my basic ideas so far. The most important thing I need to figure out is food!!....I thought it should be different from what you can get if you walk into any c.c.d. or barista.I was thinking maybe really good chaat made with like clean, hygienic water, which is slightly harder to find…I dunno…this is where you come in…please I need lots of feedback…about food events how viable do you think this idea is??????....ok….bye.

Sappho

"Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me,
This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.
while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song..."
~Sappho~

The above poem is by Sappho the legendary poet from the isle of Lesbos. One of the first documented lesbian women in literary history. Taking cue from her name, we have the Kolkata based organisation Sappho for Equality where i have recently begun my second internship. Sappho primarily works with lesbian women while its other wing which is called SFE (where i am working) allows people irrespective of their gender and sexual preference to join and help in creating the Queer space and identity without the voice being isolated. Its a great space for opening up Queer dialogues with the general heteronormative crowd.

The issue of marginalised sexualities has been plaguing the South Asian diaspora especially India with recurring incidents of homophobia related atrocities in the recent times. Research and study in this field has started a synergistic relationship with the intellectual community. Taking this idea forward Sappho has organised an All India Queer Conference called 'Queer Thoughts'

Queer Thoughts is envisaged as a two-day conference divided into four sessions. Each session would have a distinct key theme and 2/3 papers on each theme will be presented in the sessions.

The four key themes are:

1. Defining queer (how to define the term queer, who is a queer, socio-political and gender-sexual understanding of queer)
2. Living queer (living as a queer in this country, queer experiences, triumph and turbulence of queer existence)
3. Expressing queer (queer as a theme expressed though literature, film, theater, painting, sculpture or any other art form)
4. Politicizing queer (emergence of queer politics, queer as a political identity, queer rights movement and its politics)

My first assignment with Sappho will helping them in the organisation of this Conference. At the moment we are looking at abstracts and scouting for venues. After attending so many conferences this will be the first time i will be behind the scenes and the work looks grueling and interesting. I will post more later. But for now if you are interested to submit an abstract for this seminar do mail it to sappho1999@rediffmail.com or sapphoqueerconference@gmail.com