An Evening of Poetry

With poets –Gagan Gill (Greater Noida); Nivedita (Patna); Arun Seetansh (Arrah); and Priya Varma who will read from their original work

(Collaboration: The Raza Foundation)

Bigwigs of the Baroque                                                                                                                                              

Bach and Handel: Brilliant music, Contrasting lives  

A presentation by Dr Punita Singh who will take us on a journey with the composers, reviewing major milestones of their lives and works.

The year 1685 witnessed the birth of two illustrious composers—Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Handel—universally celebrated for their brilliant musical contributions. Bach’s polyphonic innovations, keyboard works and religious music continue to be relevant today while Handel’s orchestral compositions, operas and the legendary oratorio ‘Messiah’ resonate across the world in concert halls, at fundraisers, and even in commercial advertisements. Despite being born in the same year in the same land, they went on to lead very different lives. Bach remained in the same general region and turned to the church for sponsorship while Handel enjoyed travel and aristocratic support. Bach was a family man and relatively austere while Handel remained single and was more of a gourmand. Though appreciative of each other’s works, the composers apparently never met, yet their end was intriguingly brought on by a common factor. 

Punita is a musicologist, linguist, acoustician, editor and educator based in New Delhi.
 

Raushnaai

By Ashok Lal (Kautilya Books: 2022)

 Release of the book followed by a discussion

 Discussants: Shri Ashok Vajpeyi, poet and former Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi; Shri Subbh Lal, poet; Prof. Apoorvanand, Dept. of Hindi, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi; Dr. Rakhshanda Jalil, literary historian and writer; Shri Azhar Iqbal, poet; and Shri Ashok Lal, poet and author of the book

Thoughts to Music: Narayana Guru

Lesson from an experiment in Carnatic Music

Illustrated presentation by Shri S. Goplakrishnan

The presentation will try to echo the layers of insights while imagining an idea of transforming Sree Narayana Guru's philosophical poems into the Carnatic format as interpreted by T.M. Krishna. The process of selections from a repository of poems in Sanskrit, Malayalam and Tamil, the constant exchange of ideas between the musician and the team involved, the culmination at the concert stage, and the evolution of the songs thereafter. The presentation will include the speaker's own experiences in the process; a recorded interaction with T.M. Krishna on his engagement with philosophical texts vis-à-vis music; basic texts of Guru with their English translations and excerpts from the music concert. 

Shri S. Gopalakrishnan is a Delhi-based writer and broadcaster. He writes on music and culture. He won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for prose. 
 

An Evening of Poetry

With poets – Naval Shukla (Raipur); Meenakshi Misra (Gurugram); Ashutosh Dube (Indore); and Prabhat Milind (Jamalpur) who will read from their original work

Moderator: Ashok Vajpeyi

(Collaboration: The Raza Foundation)
 

Workshop: Looking at me through you: 22 to 24 September 2022

An experiential learning module on Looking at Contemporary Art –Together

Curated by Learning through Arts, Narrative and Discourse (LAND)
Facilitated by Dr. Shobita Punja and Kriti Sood

A three-day module consisting of a 2 hour session each day to introduce an experiential learning programme on ‘Looking at Contemporary Art – Together’. The three interactive sessions over three days focuses on contemporary art from India and the world. Each session introduces a selection of art works that have been curated on themes to address the diversity of culture and community, the shifting political debate around self and environment, the collective representation of different voices and the uniqueness of individuals

Registration is mandatory. Members are requested to please register their participation to the workshop in advance. Kindly please send us an email confirming your participation on iic.programme@gmail.com

For more details of the workshop, kindly please check the IIC website, www.iicdelhi.in
 

"You ain't got a thing, if you don't have that swing . . ." Jazz culture 1900- 1950
Illustrated presentation by Sambudha Sen
 
This lecture will embed jazz (and its progenitor, the blues) in black communities settled in the great American cities especially in New Orleans, New York and Chicago. It will focus on that unique combination of the blue note and swing that is central to both jazz and the blues and show how the radically ambiguous experience of deprivation and joyousness determined a great many characteristics of jazz culture: for example the tension between the self-destructive lifestyles of individual musicians and the incessant collaborations between them and their instruments that drove the evolution of this great musical tradition.
  
Sambudha Sen is professor at Shiv Nadar University where he taught a course called Understanding Jazz

IIC DIAMOND JUBILEE POETRY READINGS – CULTURE AND CREATIVITY – LEGACY AND CHANGE

A YEAR OF POETRY AT IIC
Conceptualised by Gitanjali Surendran

Shahr aur Shaayari: The City in Urdu and Indo-Persian Poetry
An evening of readings, recitations, discussions, and appreciation of a wide range of Urdu and Indo-Persian poetry by the greatest as well as some contemporary poets on the city – cultures of Hindustan – of Delhi, Lucknow, Banaras, Hyderabad and elsewhere. Spanning from the shahr-ashob or the ‘lament or tumult of the city’ traditions to monothematic qat’as, and long poems such as the masnavi on Banaras by Mirza Ghalib

Panelists: Dr. Saif Mahmood, Advocate and author of Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets; Dr. Swapna Liddle, historian, and author of Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi, Chandni Chowk: The Mughal City of Old Delhi, and Delhi: 14 Historic Walks; Dr. Maaz Bin Bilal, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Jindal University and author of Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu; and translator of Mirza Ghalib’s Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras; and Dr. Mohammad Sayeed, Co-Founder Chiragh-e-Dilli: Writing a City, Co-Curator, Smell Assembly: An Exhibition of Smells of Delhi, and Ethnographer of Delhi

Readings

Raúl Zurita and publisher V.K. Karthika release poet and fiction writer, Sharmishtha Mohanty’s Extinctions (Context, an imprint of Westland Books). Mohanty will then read from the work

Readings by Aishwarya Iyer who writes in English. Her first book of poems will be published shortly

Balam Rodrigo, one of the strongest voice in Mexican poetry, accompanied by translator Anna Deeny Morales

Readings 

By S. Anand, founder of Navayana Books and the publisher of Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld, reads from this Marathi poet in English along with audio recordings of Dhasal reciting his work

Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, one of the most extraordinary poets of our times, accompanied by his translator, Anna Deeny Morales