News Piece - Anna Hazare

     Anna Hazare, is the face of India’s fight against corruption. He has taken this fight from a mere local level and given it the importance that it demands. He has challenged the highest orders of power in his hope to form a country dominated by truth and compassion. Not only does he garner support from common folk but from intelligentsia as well. Among many of the previous battles he has fought, the Anti-Corruption Bill, or the Jan Lokpal Bill, is his latest.

   It is important to point out some of Hazare’s previous projects. He is the pioneer of the Watershed Development revolution that spread across India, as well as the Movement to pass the Right to Information Act. However, it is through the Model Village Project that Hazare feels that he has succeeded. His fight against Corruption was an inevitable one. Constantly in a situation where, he has had to face corrupt Government officials, he finally brought this to the notice of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. He was forced to do this right after he began his, Model Village Project in Maharashtra because of the amount of corruption he had to bear during his struggle.

  He fought first against corruption that was blocking growth in rural India. His organization was the Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Andolan (People's movement against Corruption). His tool of protest -hunger strikes. And his prime target - politicians. When he asked for the setting up of an inquiry, due to the great public support, the Chief Minister conceded. When Anna Hazare was charged with ‘defamation’ he readily went to jail. This act reminded the people of India of Gandhi’s actions, only to strengthen their resolve. He was eventually released, because the government did not want to anger the public. Later, two other officials were found guilty of corruption, and were promptly removed. While others would consider this a victory and believe that the fight was over, Hazare thought differently. He believed that by attacking merely two officials, corruption could not be eradicated. Putting great pressure on the Government by fasting for four days- to pass the Jan Lokpal Bill which has failed to pass for 42 years- he finally emerged victorious when the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, stated that the Bill would be introduced once again in the Monsoon Session of the Parliament.

    Gandhi and Vivekananda as his influences, it is inevitable that Anna Hazare’s goal in life is to ‘serve fellow human being.’ Having served in the Indian Army for a while, his fight is undying, yet mostly harmless and nonviolent. Despite his methods being termed as ‘blackmail’ by politicians, Hazare, from Maharashtra, never hopes to give up fight against evils of modern human society.

-Subhalakshmi Gooptu

Book Review of The Borrowers

THE BORROWERS - Mary Norton

It’s an experience everyone has isn’t it? You drop something on the floor – an eraser, a pen cap, a scrap of paper- and decide to pick it up later. But when you look for it, it’s disappeared! I’ve always wondered what happens to those things. Where do they go? They practically vanish into thin air! Or do they…?

Mrs. May tells little Kate the story of how her little brother once met a borrower. Off on a holiday in his great aunt’s house in the country, Mrs. May’s brother chanced upon Arrietty Clock –the little girl who introduced him to The Borrowers who believed that human beings existed simply to help them sustain themselves.

The Borrowers are little people who lived in the cozy nooks and corners that large old houses developed with time -the hole behind the clock, the attic, the niche above the mantel piece. They survived by borrowing (not stealing mind you!) things from the “Human beans”. They had to be very careful to move about the house unseen and pick up things that wouldn’t be easily missed; like fish bones for needles, blotting paper for a carpet or even the odd pen cap!

Their greatest fear is that one day a ‘Human Bean’ will see them. But when the boy meets Arrietty Clock, things do not turn out quite as they were expected to.

The book tells of the life of Arrietty Clock and her family. It keeps its reader interested with little fascinating details that set your imagination wild. The flow is slow and easy, the vocabulary is simple, the plot uncomplicated and yet gripping.

People tend not to believe in such things…but I would. I think it’s the best explanation for what happened to that pencil I dropped five minutes ago!

-Kavita Joseph

Movie Review of The Borrowers

Movie Review- The Borrowers

“I know a funny little man,
As quiet as a mouse,
Who does the mischief that is done
In everybody’s house.”

- Walter de la Mare

I remember reading a blog post about a sock-gobbling monster in the writer’s washing machine that left him with a dozen odd socks whose pairs were missing! We’ve all had that experience and we all make up a host of different house ghouls to account for the little things that go missing without any explanation.  

“We don’t steal, we borrow.”

The movie, “The Borrowers”, runs along the same lines, it revolves around the lives of a family of “Borrowers” which are little people who live beneath the floorboards of a family of humans, or “beings” as the Borrowers call them. They borrow the essentials for their survival from their human family. The family, the Lenders, have a ten year old boy who is convinced of the existence of something in the house that steals their things. He sets traps for these creatures, which the Borrowers have to constantly circumvent. The Clocks have two children, Arrietty and Peagreen. The Lenders’ beautiful old house and the existence of the Borrowers is threatened by the villainous Mr. Ocious P. Potter, who tricked the Lenders out of their house and plans to demolish it and build luxury apartment blocks in its place. Arrietty finds out about his devious ploy and attempts to save the house, befriending Pete, the owners’ son along the way. She also meets a fellow borrower, borrower, Spud, an “outie”, who has lived on the streets instead of in a human house and who helps the children to survive in the outside world when they are separated accidentally from their parents.

The movie is a charming explanation for the mysterious disappearances of everyday things. Though the humor is mostly physical and is rather slapstick at places, it is made up for by the endearing characters! It is a sweet, enjoyable family film and a definite must-watch. 
-Sanjana Thomas

Three Poems

Sway

There’s someone’s old attic

Stashed away

At the top of the house,

A little crooked memory

Precariously perched

On somebody else’s daily swept

Freshly aired life

Of unpacking boxes,

Arranging shelves,

Playing records

That they’ve missed

By a decade or few.

But when the windows are opened in the evening,

The ghosts seem to be humming,

Swaying and twisting

In somebody’s arms from long ago.

-Urvashi Bahuguna

Room

she painted herself a room

and walked into it

just like that

and lay down on the rich blue bedspread

and watched the world pass her by.

she

saw as they

lifted her world

into

another.

a room

a room full of rooms

other people’s rooms

with other lonely hearts

dozing on leather couches

staring at bowls of sunflowers

looking out of rainy windows

and watching the watchers go by

she watched

as the dissected rooms

parts of them hidden

to all but those who painted them

were looked at

talked about

pondered upon

she waited

as someone walked up to her room

and stared at her across a red velvet cordon.

and she stared back

until he gave up

and wandered away.

-Radhika Chakraborty

Attic

A shaft of afternoon sun,

A slice of moonlight,

And a lot of dust confetti:

That’s where your childhood is

packed away. In trunks. In boxes

full of tiny dresses. In dolls

with cobwebs in their eyes.

It was a perfect spot, a fairy place

on rainy days:

                “And after I rescued their prince,

                The Queen granted me my wish!”

That’s why you were a fairy for a day,

when you flew to school in purple wings

And a name that rolls like marbles on a wooden floor

Like Lylornia, or Seraphynia.

And on bitter-tasting salty days,

when you didn’t understand why

the whole world had stopped loving you,

no one would find you there, hidden

 behind that musty forlorn smell,

behind grandma’s old parrot cage.

So you never found out what

That trunk contained, the one that sat

in the corner dreaming of old days, the one

that used to be at the bottom of a dark-green sea,

until your brother slew the sea-dragon that hoarded it

and brought it to you. But he never told you.

It contained letters that your dad wrote

To mum when they were young. Pshaw!

                “It contains treasure! Pearls and diamonds

                And scepters with crystal orbs! But there is

 no way of finding out.”

Because a ghoul sits on top of it, rattling its lock,

And he sings of longing on stormy days.

I think you can still hear him,

If you listen.

And if you once again climb the stairs that lead

To that old place, I’m sure he’ll tell that it was you

That he was waiting for, and lead you to the fairies.

                                                                                                                                                                               

-Sohini Basak

A Sloping Roof (Prose piece)

 Wooden eaves and wooden floors. A space under the roof to fill with things; a room for living or a room for remembering?

Sloping roofs change things. They change dimensions and proportions; they change the understanding you have of a space. A flat ceiling is very different from a sloping one.

And she wished her flat roof and high flat ceiling away. She wished away the continuous badly painted whiteness and the white walls that filled the house, dividing it into geometric linear rooms and passages. She wished away the starkness of perpendicular lines, and closed her eyes, and pictured the changes that snow could bring.

Snow will settle in my hair. Weigh down the ends of it, little flakes and then bigger ones, and trickle little drops of wetness into my ears and scalp. Snow will leak into the cracks in the white and fill them with wetness. Snow will weigh down the two ends of the roof, and bend them into a curve, a curve to shelter me.

Looking up, and two lines, receding and converging. A slope, nestling you under it, planting itself firmly above you and littler horizontal planks meeting the vertical ones. Space narrowing off into a point.

here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors…

The sticky warmth of a child’s two hands clasped over the little finger people. Houses that children draw always have sloping roofs. Sloping roofs, with a little circular window, to look into the attic. Or out from it. Houses are meant to have roofs like that. There are meant to be secret corridors, wallpapered baby rooms, and gleaming kitchens. All I want, is what I was meant to.

We are all lacking that space in our minds. Our gleaming, flat white-page-ready-to-be-written-on minds. That work overtime; reflect and bounce off anything the world throws our direction. Flat expanses with ideas stacked into rows one on top of the other, filed into transparent plastic filing cabinets with labels on white paper and black marker. White, sterile white, staining and cleaning itself, never letting anything seep in too deep; marked by infinite pens writing over each other.

A naked bulb hanging from the rafters. Rafters. I am not convinced about what exactly they are. Rafters. Wooden beams. Eaves. Round window. Deep breath. Look around. Wooden smell. Piles of memories. Isn’t that the setting that memories belong in?

Where do we store our memories? I wonder. We do not have rooms in our houses for these things. We shift things around, shove them into cupboards, and wait for moths and rats to consume them. We put expensive things in bank lockers and inexpensive ones under the mattress and in the loft cupboard in the ironing room for lizards to lay eggs on.

Breaking down; reconstruct. Rebuild my house into what I want it to be. Draw it out. From a child’s sketch to a building plan. From a crayoned generic sofa and plant to the bedcover and colourful wall I always dreamed of.
But the ladder, will stay the same.

It has to be a ladder. Leading into a square of space. A broad wooden ladder; with ten rungs. A trapdoor, left slightly open, mustiness seeping down. It is just as you want to picture it. 

With dimness lifting slowly, dust resettling, memories and old things crowded around.

But what things? What will I put there? I am scrabbling around. Vague shapes. A rocking horse turns into a plastic baby potty. A wooden chest is just an old stool, that is maybe not a stool but a sawed up table. What do these things mean? Who put them here?

Sit by the round window and watch it rain. Look out and forget shapes and spaces. Space was never yours to construct. You just try to shrink yourself into whatever you get. 

-Radhika Chakraborty 

Up in the Attic

                                                                         Cartoon by :

News Piece - Wikileaks

Since the launch of Wikileaks, there has been an explosion of classified information being opened up to the public for scrutiny and critique. Much to the dismay of governments of various countries, Wikileaks was launched on 4^th October, 2006 claiming that its database had a collection of top secret articles which were not accessible for the general public. With Julian Assange as the director, Wikileaks based in Sweden, claimed to have been founded by ‘founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.’

Calling it ‘Scientific Journalism,’ Assange points out that the Wikileaks initiates an era when journalism will not necessarily need a to depend on journalists’ interpretation of news by publishing documents directly on the internet allowing them to come to their own conclusions. In April 2010, Wikileaks published footage from the 2007 Baghdad airstrike and then releasing in the same year Afghan War Diary, consisting of thousands of documents about the war. With the release of U.S. diplomacy cables in November, Wikileaks fell into great criticism and legal battle.

Wikileaks received a number of awards applauding its regeneration of the ‘freedom of speech’ of the individual as opposed to the power of a government. However, it also faced a large amount of flak, initially from the U.S. government and now from others such as India, for exposing documents which may apparently lead to a misbalance of ‘international diplomacy.’ Closer to home, the exposure of documents and videos concerning the Indian government and the prevalent corruption and ineffectiveness, has also led to the censure of the website by the Government, especially from the Congress.

Despite the presence of laws with press protections clauses, Julian Assange has been accused by the U.S. under the Espionage Act of stealing documents from the government and is also facing a criminal probe. Assange continues to fight the legal battle and at the same time, managed to raise funds for the website, with great support from the general public.

-Subhalakshmi Gooptu