Oriya theatre festival

Annapurna Theatre to stage a marathon drama festival Friday, October 27, 2006 Source: The Pioneer

Cuttack: Annapurna Theatre (B Group), Cuttack, is going to stage a marathon drama festival consisting of six plays on October 29. These plays will be staged one after another without any break or screen drop and by the same number of artists. This epoch making venture will be first in the history of theatre. Nowhere in the world such marathon drama festival has been staged till date, said Himanshu Parija (Chandi), noted director of Ollywood and a former theatre actor at a Press conference on Wednesday.

The plays, which have been staged in the last six months have been directed by Umesh Dash (Tania). Each drama consists of 13 actors, two actresses and two child artistes (one boy and one girl). The drama festival will begin at 5 pm and will continue till midnight. This adventurous mission of Annapurna Theatre has been intimated to the office of Limca Book Of Records and response from their side is awaited said, Jugaprakash Kanungo, president of the theatre. The dramas to be staged in this festival are Baimana Ho, Eti Eka Jugara, Daktar Babu, Asha -The Family Pension; Mahapap- Murder in the Dark and Kataka- End is the Beginning. A medical team along with an ambulance will remain alert for any contingency arising on the day. Inspite of adversity and financial scarcity the organisers have not dithered from their path.

Their belief is not unfounded as it is the theatre, which gives the initial grooming in acting and actors from this stage later have made it big in Ollywood and television said, Umesh Dash the director. The 17 actors who are participating in this unique venture are Sandip Pani, Kabula Mohanty, Dillip Choubey, Hemant Dash, Sunil Nayak, Yogesh Acharjya, Saroj Samal, Kailash Kar, D Prakash Rao, Tapan Samal, Ajay, Amar, Rajesh women actress are Sasmita Singh and Angurbala Nayak. The two child artists are Kanha and Nikita.

We are a noisy species

Greeting Chitra Raman Thursday, October 19, 2006: I know what you are thinking. Who needs another blog? Not you. As you read this, your mind is a scrolling marquee of things to do next, truncated conversation fragments, leapfrogging ideas, an obsessively recurrent tune. With a slight movement of your finger, you can launch yourself back into the noiseless din of intersecting URLs. Perhaps what we all need is a space where we can take a break from listening to what we hear, and start listening to what we know. This is my place to do just that.

We are a noisy species. We crave validation and agreement. And so, we prefer the company of like-minded people. I am no different; but as I prepare to pour my ideas into the void, I prepare myself also to welcome all fellow travelers, whether kind or critical. So get up and pour yourself your favorite beverage, and stay awhile. I cannot promise to always deliver a spa experience; but I do promise to try not to bore you. Posted by Chitra at 12:50 PM 10 comments

Without any affectation or sense of alienation

I.K. Sharma seeks to present O.P. Bhatnagar as “a critic with a rare generosity of understanding,” to quote Prema Nandakumar (from her letter to him). In the first essay, Bhatnagar convinces us that poets such as Toru Dutt, Aru Dutt, Romesh Chander Dutt and Manmohan Ghose wrote with Indian history and culture wedded into their medium. Tagore and Sri Aurobindo were keen about their poetic content rather than the medium, and without any affectation or sense of alienation, “exile or worked-up nostalgia for the country or language or loss of identity” noticed in Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasarathy or A.K. Ramanujan. Poets such as Kamala Das, I.K. Sharma, Narsingh Srivastava and Jayanta Mahapatra write with a sense of “participation in the creative act” rather than demonstration of “western attitudes”, mode or style of expression. posted by R.K.SINGH: INDIAN ENGLISH POET at 11:39 PM

Right and Wrong

In his forthcoming book, "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" (Ecco), and in other recent papers, Hauser suggests we may have a moral "faculty" in our brains that acts as a sort of in-house philosopher-parsing situations quickly, before emotion or conscious reason come into play. Hauser compares this faculty to the mental quality that allows human beings to acquire and use language naturally and effortlessly.

It's a suggestive analogy, inviting questions about just how far the similarities run. Is human morality, like language, largely universal (gratuitous killing is bad) but with plenty of room for local variation (in some cultures, killing your daughter if she loses her virginity before marriage is not considered gratuitous)? Is it easy for children to adapt to these local differences, depending on where and how they are raised, but difficult for adults-just as it's hard to learn French at 40?

Whether the analogy to language is "airtight" or "useful because it allows you to ask good questions" is an open issue, Hauser says. But scholars think the answers to these questions are of more than academic interest. "My hope is that by better understanding how we think," Greene writes on his personal website, "we can teach ourselves to think better." Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net Globe Newspaper Company

Great Poems to Teach

Compiled by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, this list contains 341 poems submitted by teachers who participated in a workshop organized by TWC. Selected for participation by C. K. Williams, teachers applying to the workshop were asked to supply a list of poems which they had successfully taught in high school English and Language Arts classrooms. Poems on Poets.org
Maya Angelou "Alone" "Still I Rise"
Matthew Arnold "Dover Beach"
W. H. Auden "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" "The Unknown Citizen"
Elizabeth Bishop "Filling Station"
William Blake "The Chimney-Sweeper" "The Lamb"> "A Poison Tree"> --> "The Tyger"
David Bottoms "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump"
Anne Bradstree "The Author to Her Book"
Joseph Brodsky "Odysseus to Telemachus"
Rupert Brooke "The Great Lover"
Gwendolyn Brooks "The Bean Eaters" "the sonnet-ballad" "We Real Cool"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning "How Do I Love Thee?" "My Letters! all dead paper. . . (Sonnet XXVIII)"
Robert Browning "My Last Duchess" "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
Lewis Carroll "Jabberwocky"
Siv Cedering "Hands"
Lucille Clifton "homage to my hips (audio only)" "miss rosie" "wishes for sons"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Kubla Khan" "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Hart Crane "To Brooklyn Bridge"
E. E. Cummings "anyone lived in a pretty how town" "Chansons Innocentes: I"
"i sing of Olaf glad and big"
"maggie and milly and molly and may"
"my father moved through dooms of love"
"Spring is like a perhaps hand"
Emily Dickinson "Because I could not stop for Death (712)" "Fame is a fickle food (1659)" "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)" "I heard a Fly buzz (465)" "I taste a liquor never brewed" "I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)" "There's a certain Slant of light (258)" "To make a prairie (1755)"
John Donne "The Baite"
Denise Duhamel "Buying Stock"
Paul Laurence Dunbar "Sympathy" "We Wear the Mask"
Robert Duncan "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow"
Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Snow Storm"
Robert Frost "Birches" "Home Burial" "Mending Wall" "The Road Not Taken"
Tess Gallagher "Red Poppy"
Thom Gunn "The Man with Night Sweats"
John Haines "If the Owl Calls Again"
Thomas Hardy "The Darkling Thrush"
George Herbert "The Collar"
Oliver Wendell Holmes "The Chambered Nautilus"
Gerard Manley Hopkins "God's Grandeur" "Pied Beauty" "Spring and Fall: To a young child"
Langston Hughes "Dream Variation" "Dreams" "I, Too, Sing America"
James Weldon Johnson "The Creation" "Go Down, Death"
John Keats "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" "Ode on a Grecian Urn" "To Autumn"
Etheridge Knight "The Idea of Ancestry"
Maxine Kumin "Purgatory" "Woodchucks"
Stanley Kunitz "The Portrait"
Edward Lear "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"
Denise Levertov "The Secret"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "Paul Revere's Ride"
Robert Lowell "For the Union Dead"
Archibald MacLeish "Ars Poetica" "You, Andrew Marvell"
Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress"
Edgar Lee Masters "Lucinda Matlock"
Claude McKay "The Tropics of New York"
Sandra McPherson "Poppies"
Edna St. Vincent Millay "Renascence" "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)"

John Milton "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
Marianne Moore "Poetry"
Edgar Allan Poe "Annabel Lee" "The Bells" "Eldorado"
Ezra Pound "In a Station of the Metro" "The River-Merchant's Wife"
Edwin Arlington Robinson "Miniver Cheevy" "Richard Cory"
Carl Sandburg "Fog"
Robert W. Service "The Cremation of Sam McGee"
William Shakespeare "All the World's a Stage" "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)" "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)"
Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"
Charles Simic "Eyes Fastened With Pins" "Watermelons"
Stevie Smith "Not Waving but Drowning"
Gary Snyder "Four Poems for Robin"
May Swenson "Water Picture"
Lord Alfred Tennyson "The Lady of Shalott"
Dylan Thomas "Do not go gentle into that good night"
César Vallejo "To My Brother Miguel in memoriam"
Walt Whitman "I Hear America Singing" "Mannahatta" "O Captain! My Captain!" "Song of Myself, I, II, VI & LII" "To You" "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer"
William Carlos Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow" "Spring and All" "This Is Just To Say"
William Wordsworth "The Daffodils" "My Heart Leaps Up" "We Are Seven" "The world is too much with us; late and soon"
W. B. Yeats "Easter 1916" "Leda and the Swan" "The Second Coming"

Long afterwards - it wells up again from the depths

In a general and almost absolute way, if you truly wish to profit from these readings, as from all of Sri Aurobindo's writings, the best method is this: having gathered your consciousness and focused your attention on what you are reading, you must establish a minimum of mental tranquillity - the best thing would be to obtain perfect silence - and achieve a state of immobility of the mind, immobility of the brain, I might say, so that the attention becomes as still and immobile as a mirror, like the surface of absolutely still water. Then what one has read passes through the surface and penetrates deep into the being where it is received with a minimum of distortion. Afterwards - sometimes long afterwards - it wells up again from the depths and manifests in the brain with its full power of comprehension, not as knowledge acquired from outside, but as a light one carried within. In this way the faculty of understanding is at its highest, whereas if, while you read, the mind remains agitated and tries to understand at once what it is reading, you lose more than three-quarters of the force, the knowledge and the truth contained in the words. And if you are able to refrain from asking questions until this process of absorption and inner awakening is completed, well, then you will find that you have far fewer questions to ask because you will have a better understanding of what you have read.- The Mother [CWMCE, 10:7] posted by deepti 1:05 AM Tuesday, October 24, 2006