7th Bangalore Literature Festival to feature discussion on #MeToo, more programmes for children

Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), Bengaluru city’s flagship literary event, is all set for a spectacular 2018 seventh edition on October 27th and 28th at the breezy green lawns of Hotel LaLiT Ashok in Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru.

The tentative schedule:

Day 1 | Sat | 27 Oct

#blrlitfest Venues
Venue 1 Venue 2 The Red Couch Malgudi Narnia
10:00 am
Benares: Ancient Customs, Contemporary Politics
Aatish Taseer with Manu Pillai
10:15 am
Mythology, History, Science: Conspiracy Sells
Ashwin Sanghi with Madhavi S Mahadevan
10:30 am
Are Women Stories Only for Women?
Andaleeb Wajid and Rhea Saran
10:30 am
Four
Greystroke and Poile Sengupta
10:30 am
I Want to Pee: Designing a Character
Meenal Singh and Erik Egerup
10:45 am
Rules for Radicals: Setting Knowledge Free
Carl Malamud with Supriya Sankaran
11:00 am
Lest We Forget: Descendents of Indenture
Athol WIlliams, Deirdre Jonklaas Cadiramen, Simit Bhagat with Janet Steele
11:00 am
All The Things I Do
Vijay Seshadri
11:15 am
The Chronicler of Crime
S Hussain Zaidi with Sandeep Unnithan
11:15 am
Pitara: Storytelling Board Game
11:15 am
Into the Poetic World
Santhini Govindan
11:30 am
The Cows of Bangalore
Shoba Narayan with Rashmi Menon
11:45 am
Yellamma and Other Stories
Urban Folk Project
12 noon
Quo Vadis Pakistan: Decoding our Neighbour
Alyssa Ayres, Farzana Shaikh, Srinath Raghavan with Neena Gopal
12 noon
The Aryavarta Chronicles
Krishna Udayasankar
12 noon
Happy Fox: Illustration Time
Aušra Kiudulaitė and Evelina Daciūte
12 noon
Teen Blues
Poile Sengupta
12:30 pm
How I Became a Hindu: My Discovery of Vedic Dharma
David Frawley
12:30 pm
Ujjivan: Small Loans That Transformed Lives
Samit Ghosh and Subir Roy
12:30 pm
Like A Girl: Changing the World
Aparna Jain, Poorna Malavath and Sharda Ugra
12:45 pm
Outback Tales: Stories from Oz
Philip McLaren and Roanna Gonsalves with Rajith Savanadasa
1:00 pm
Questioning the Foundations of the Indian Republic
Anand Teltumbde with Chandan Gowda
1:00 pm
In Search of Wacky Female Characters
Sujata Parashar with Nandita Bose
1:00 pm
Padma Goes to Space
Swetha Ragunathan
1:15 pm
Crime, Corruption, Cronyism & More
James Crabtree and Milan Vaishnav with Ashutosh Varshney
1:30 pm
Building Blocks from Life: On Narrative Non-Fiction
Bachi Karkaria, Manu Pillai, Sandeep Unnithan, Shoba Narayan with VK Karthika
1:30 pm
Unfolding the Goddess Within
Yogini Shambhavi Chopra
1:30 pm
Clowning with the clowner
Harish Bhuvan
1:30 pm
Musical Notes
Saskia Rao de Haas
2:00 pm
The Business of Sex
Nalini Jameela and Nora Bossong with Reshma Bharadwaj
2:00 pm
Translating Classics
Velcheru Naryana Rao
2:00 pm
Fun with the Clouds
Santhini Govindan
2:00 pm
Creating Comic Strips
Cilre
2:15 pm
State-of-the-Heart Novels: Heartbreak in Families
Geetanjali Shree and KR Meera
2:30 pm
The Female Gaze
Haravu Spoorthy Gowda, Madhu Rani, Prathibha Nandakumar
2:30 pm
Malayalam Reading
Benyamin and Sangeetha Sreenivasan
2:30 pm
Once upon a rhyme
Meghna Singhee
2:30 pm
Wassup Bangalore
Mirchi RJ Jimmy
2:45 pm
Genes & Destiny: Are We Doomed to Be?
Jahnavi Phalkey and Mukund Thattai
3:00 pm
हिंदी is Cool – Presented by Kalam
Divya Prakash Dubey and Nikhil Sachan
3:00 pm
A Fractured Life
Shabnam Samuel with Prashant Sankaran
3:00 pm
Music Jingles for Popular Stories
Debleena Majumdar
3:15 pm
Pencils Drawn: Cartooning in Trying Times
Ponnappa and Ravi Shankar Etteth with Bachi Karkaria
3:15 pm
The Cloudfarers: How to Run Away from School
Stephen Alter
3:30 pm
Cityscape: Transforming Public Spaces
Appupen, Giulia Ambrogi, Rouble Nagi with Kamya Ramachandran
3:30 pm
Kama: The Riddle of Desire
Gurcharan Das with Shoba Narayan
3:30 pm
Storygami
Nithya J Rao
3:45 pm
The Diary of a Political Idiot
Jasmina Tesanovic with Shoma Chaudhury
3:45 pm
Legend of the Wolf: Writing Workshop
Andaleeb Wajid
4:00 pm
Populism, Liberalism et all
Ashutosh Varshney with Narayan Ramachandran
4:00 pm
The Hunger Game
Be The Miracle
4:15 pm
Listen to Me: A Memoir
Shashi Deshpande with Nancy Batty, Usha KR and Vivek Shanbhag
4:15 pm
The New India Foundation Awards
Ramachandra Guha, Srinath Raghavan and Manish Sabharwal
4:30 pm
Winning on #377
Anjali Gopalan with Alok Prasanna Kumar
4:30 pm
Viewing the Other
Shikhandin RKB
4:30 pm
Busting Fake News: Developing a Scientific Temper
CMCA
4:45 pm
Fashion: The Seamly and the Unseemly
Manjima Bhattacharjya and Shvetha Jaishankar with Susan Thomas
5:00 pm
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning The Next Fifty Years
Bruce Sterling with Samit Basu
5:00 pm
Hungry Gods
Richa Lakhera
5:00 pm
A Very Naughty Bear: Mountain Adventures in Bhutan
Paro Anand
5:15 pm
The Descent of Man
Vijay Seshadri with Ranjit Hoskote
5:15 pm
Calling all Sherlocks: Detective Writing
Anushka Ravishankar
5:30 pm
The Art of Fact Checking
Pratik Sinha
5:30 pm
How to Tell a Story
Stones2Milestones
5:45 pm
Intrepid Travelers: Strangers in a Strange Land
Dan Morrison and Rhea Saran with Aparna Raman
6:00 pm
The Young and the Restless
Rajith Savanadasa, Sangeetha Sreenivasan, Snigdha Poonam with Roanna Gonsalves
6:00 pm
Who Owns That Song
AR Venkatachalapathy
6:00 pm
The Day the Crayons Quit
Jugaad Theatre | Venue: Grand Ballroom
6:15 pm
Is There an Indian Road to Equality?
Ramachandra Guha
6:30 pm
Is India Illiberal?
Chidanand Rajghatta with Naresh Fernandes
6:45 pm
Agatha Christie, Poirot and Me
Sophie Hannah with Madhavi S Mahadevan
7:00 pm
Editor’s Cut: Road to 2019
Mukund Padmanabhan, Nilanjan Mukhopadyay, R Sukumar, Saba Naqvi with Ashutosh Varshney
7:00 pm
Anthology of Asian Short Stories
Monideepa Sahu and others
7:30 pm
Naipaul’s Legacy
Aatish Taseer
8:00 pm
Alchemy of Sounds & Strings
Saskia Rao de Haas (Cello) and Shubhendra Rao (Sitar) with Sapan Anjaria (Tabla)

Day 2 | Sun | 28 Oct

#blrlitfest Venues
Venue 1 Venue 2 The Red Couch Malgudi Narnia
10:00 am
The Paradoxical Prime Minister
Shashi Tharoor
10:00 am
A Goddess for Today
Amar Chitra Katha
10:15 am
Seventy…And to Hell With It
Shobhaa De with Robert Dessaix
10:30 am
Jashn-e-Adab
Divyaprakash Dubey
10:30 am
Rhyme Time : Poetry for the Young
Anushka Ravishankar
10:45 am
Speaking in Rhyme: Poetry Readings
Easterine Kire and Ranjit Hoskote
10:45 am
Where’s the Body? Crime and Detection
Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, Kiran Manral, Philip McLaren, Sophie Hannah with Nilanjan Choudhury
10:45 am
The Other: ‘Otherization’ of Young People
Paro Anand
11:00 am
The Sad State of Indology Today
Francois Gautier and RP Jain
11:00 am
Happy Fox: Illustration Time
Aušra Kiudulaitė and Evelina Daciūte
11:15 am
Child Star to Her Own Woman
Sarika with Sadhana Rao
11:30 am
Crossing to Hampi: A Dramatic Exploration of the Vijayanagara Catastrophe
Girish Karnad, CN Ramachandran with Deepa Ganesh
11:30 am
Polio: The Odyssey of Eradication
Thomas Abraham with Dan Morrison
11:30 am
Ma, I Want to be a Journalist
Barkha Dutt, Mukund Padmanabhan, R. Sukumar with Shruthi Mohan
12 noon
Imran Khan: In the Hot Seat
Farzana Shaikh and Max Rodenbeck
12 noon
The Brahmin
Ravi Shankar Etteth with Ravi Joshi
12 noon
The Bard, The Baker and their Chemistry
Trupti Kalamdani
12:15 pm
An Equal World: Beyond 377
Aatish Taseer, Madhavi Menon, Robert Dessaix, Vasudhendra with Anjali Gopalan
12:15 pm
Green in My Dream
Nagesh Hegde
12:30 pm
Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World
Snigdha Poonam with Shaili Chopra
12:30 pm
Satyajit Ray Sci-Fi
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri
12:30 pm
A Story and A Song
Amar Chitra Katha
12:45 pm
Let’s Plot – Tips on Writing Mystery Stories
Asha Nehemiah
1:00 pm
The Snake and The Lotus: The Many Layers of Graphic Novels
Appupen with VK Karthika
1:00 pm
Kashmir: Women in Conflict Zones
Barkha Dutt, Paro Anand, Rashmi Saksena with Humra Quraishi
1:00 pm
Asia Reborn
Prasenjit Basu with Alex Travelli
1:15 pm
Tales the Traditional Way
Lavanya Prasad
1:30 pm
Life, the Universe and Everything: The Influence of SF on Society
Bruce Sterling, Krishna Udayasankar, Samit Basu with Gautam Shenoy
1:30 pm
sahapedia.org
Sudha Gopalakrishnan
1:30 pm
Moral of the Story: Epics for Children
RP Jain
1:45 pm
ಮೋಹನಸ್ವಾಮಿ – ಕಥನ ವಾಚಕಾಭಿನಯ
Aata Maata
1:45 pm
Moonlight in the Sea
Karthik Shanker
2:00 pm
Shades of Saffron
Saba Naqvi with Narendar Pani
2:00 pm
Curtains Up: Theatre Writing for Teens
Anuja Ghosalkar
2:15 pm
Trumpian Times
Chidanand Rajghatta and Vijay Seshadri
2:30 pm
Outside Looking In: Eyes on India
Alex Traveli, Alyssa Ayres, James Crabtree, Max Rodenback, Prasenjit Basu with R Sukumar
2:30 pm
Catch a Tiger by the Tale
Krithi Karanth and KK Raghava
2:30 pm
Oink Oink: How The Pig Became Dirty
Rahul Kansal
2:45 pm
AG-BLF Book Prize
2:45 pm
Illustrating Children Books
Gujjarappa
3:00 pm
The Escapists of J. Mullick Road
Usha Ananda Krishna with Renuka Chatterjee
3:00 pm
Scribbling a Portrait
Murali Krishna
3:15 pm
Feminist Rani
Shaili Chopra with Kiran Manral
3:15 pm
Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker
Pavan K Varma with Shoma Chaudhury
3:30 pm
Women and War
Jasmina Tesanovic and Rashmi Saksena
3:30 pm
Ha Ha Hour: Life of a Standup Comedian
Karthik Kumar
3:45 pm
Mard Ko Dard Hoga: #MeToo
Sandhya Menon, Sister Jesme with Barkha Dutt
3:45 pm
The Sunshower Song
Vinayak Varma
4:00 pm
Ode to Southern Poets
AR Venkatachalapathy, Mukunda Rao, Velcheru Narayan Rao with Prathibha Nandakumar
4:00 pm
ISRO: A Personal History
Gita Aravamudan and S. Aravamudan
4:15 pm
Hand Puppetry
Poile Sengupta
4:15 pm
The Number Game: Vedic Maths
Dr. Jini Gopinath
4:30 pm
Telling a Story, Shaping the World
Amitabha Bagchi, Easterine Kire, Nora Bossong with Renuka Chattejee
4:30 pm
Absence of the Rule of Law
Harish Narsappa with Ashwin Mahesh
4:45 pm
Lives of Girls and Women
Janice Pariat and Preeti Shenoy with Kiran Manral
4:45 pm
Meet Petu Pumpkin and the Awesome Foursome
Arundhati Venkatesh
4:45 pm
Fast-Forward: Bringing About Change
Aparna Raman
5:00 pm
Chit-Chat on Bofors and Rafale
Chitra Subramaniam with Sreenivasan Jain
5:15 pm
Survive or Sink
Dan Morrison and Naina Lal Kidwai
5:15 pm
My Family and Other Animals
Janaki Lenin, Krithi Karanth, Stephen Alter with Kartik Shanker
5:30 pm
Nautanki Dairies
Dominic Franks
5:30 pm
How BLF Made Me a Writer
Arundhati Nithiyanandhan
5:30 pm
Cyber Hygiene
Aashna Dasgupta
5:45 pm
‘ಬೊಳುವಾರು’ ಜೊತೆ ಮುಸ್ಸಂಜೆ ಮಾತು
Bolwar Mahammed Kunhi with MS Sriram
6:00 pm
Modern Family: Creative Dysfunction
Amitabha Bagchi, Benyamin, Shubhangi Swarup with Geetanjali Shree
6:00 pm
Community Catalyst
Nirmala Govindarajan
6:00 pm
Abracadabra: Time for Some Jadoo
K.S Ramesh with an Opening Musical Act
6:15 pm
Love and Longing in Hindustan
Madhavi Menon and Pavan K Varma
6:30 pm
How to Hold a Grudge
Sophie Hannah
6:45 pm
Whose Lie is it Anyway: #Fakenews
Chitra Subramaniam, Francois Gautier, Mukund Padmanabhan, Naresh Fernandes, Pratik Sinha, Sreenivasan Jain with Nitin Pai
8:00 pm
An Odyssey of Seven Notes
Saxophone Lavanya with Rageshri Dhumal (Keyboard), Shalini Mohan (Bass Guitar), Siddhi Shah (Drums), Soumya Sanathanan (Percussion)

The two-day event will feature a host of distinguished speakers, authors and artistes including Ramachandra Guha, Shashi Tharoor, William Dalrymple, Aatish Taseer, Girish Karnad, Farzana Shaikh, James Crabtree, Ashwin Sanghi, Easterine Kire, Carl Malamud, Amitabha Bagchi, Pavan K Varma, Shobhaa De, S Hussain Zaidi, Shashi Deshpande, Francois Gautier, Ranjit Hoskote, N. Ponnappa, Naina Lal Kidwai, Arundhati Nag, Pratik Sinha, Shweta Bachchan-Nanda, Sister Jesme, Sarika, Anand Teltumbde, Sandhya Menon, Prasenjit Basu and many others.

Along with senior journalists Bachi Karkaria, Barkha Dutt, Chidanand Rajghatta, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Mukund Padmanabhan, Max Rodenbeck, Neena Gopal, R. Sukumar, Sandeep Unnithan, Naresh Fernandes, Chitra Subramaniam, Ravi Shankar Etteth, Alex Travelli, Sreenivasan Jain and Saba Naqvi.

Bhasha writers include Bolwar Mahamad Kunhi, AR Venkatachalapathy, K R Meera, Geetanjali Shree, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Vasudhendra, Nalini Jameela, Nagesh Hedge, Prathibha Nandakumar and Benyamin.

International authors Alyssa Ayres, Robert Dessaix, Athol Williams, Deirdre Jonklaas Cadiramen and top names in publishing like VK Karthika, Renuka Chatterjee, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri will be at LitMart – the pitch session for aspiring authors.

Voices from young India are Manu Pillai, Janice Pariat, Appupen, Preeti Shenoy, Prayaag Akbar, Snigdha Poonam, Amitabha Bagchi, Shubhangi Swarup, Rajith Savanadasa, Roanna Gonsalves, Samit Basu and Krishna Udayasankar.

The Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) remains among the most sought after and must-attend event for readers and writers from Bangalore, India and the world, with its stimulating panel discussions, interviews and literary sessions. As in the past, this year too the Festival will witness authors engaging the audiences with diverse themes.

Highlights include “The Indian Road to Equality”, “Love and Longing in Hindustan”, #MeToo Comes to Town, “Telling a Story, Shaping the World”, “Editor’s Cut: Road to 2019”, “Ode to Southern Poets”, Looking Beyond 377 “Outside Looking In: Eyes on India”, “Questioning the Foundations of the Indian Republic”, “Crossing to Hampi: A Dramatic Exploration of the Vijayanagara Catastrophe” along with conversations on fashion, fake news, feminism, crime, political cartooning, popular science, wildlife, graphic novels, literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, memoirs, poetry and a lot more.

A few firsts that the Bangalore Literature Festival is proud to offer to our city at this edition of the Festival are:

  1. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years with Bruce Sterling – Science fiction writer, net critic, and internationally recognized cyberspace theorist known for his novels that defined the cyberpunk genre.
  2. Agatha Christie, Poirot and Me with Sophie Hannah – Internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction and who writes new Hercule Poirot novels with the blessings of Agatha Christie’s family and estate.
  3. Descent of Man with Vijay Seshadri – Pulitzer Prize winning poet and has been an editor at The New Yorker, as well as an essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and various literary quarterlies.
  4. Child Star to Her Own Woman with Sarika – An acclaimed actor, she started her career at the age of four and has acted in films spanning diverse genres and chosen to go beyond into costume design, sound design and film production, winning critical acclaim and National Awards.

This year the Bangalore Literature Festival has doubled the children’s programming to include two forums – for children (4-10) and young adults (11-15) – on both days of the Festival and an exclusive bookstore for children. Titled ‘Children|Literature|Fun – C|L|F’ this includes writing workshops, RJ’ing, illustration, storytelling, creative games, magic shows all in a carnival atmosphere. Some of the exciting elements of C|L|F this year are sessions with authors including Anushka Ravishankar, Paro Anand, Aparna Jain, Poile Sengupta, Santhini Govindan, Stephen Alter, Anita Vachcharajani, Asha Nehemiah, Kartik Shanker, RJ Jimmy Xavier, music education sessions with Saskia Rao de Haas, Lithuanian illustrator and storyteller duo Evelina Daciūtė and Aušra Kiudulaitė, on being a stand-up comedian with Karthik and a whole host of other fun and exciting programming. Painstakingly curated by Vikram Sridhar, this promises to take not just children but the little kid in every adult too by storm.

The Festival features stellar evening music performances – a sitar-cello duet with Pt. Shubhendra Rao and Saskia Rao de Haas and an all women band led by Saxophone Lavanya.

The Bangalore Literature Festival and Atta Galatta, the city-based bookstore and art-literature space, will also give out the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize to honour the best of English and Kannada writing. There will also be a session in partnership with the The New India Foundation for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for the best non-fiction book on modern / contemporary India.

Festival Director Shinie Antony says, “Bringing you writers from everywhere, the Festival addresses burning issues like #MeToo, fake news, gender equality, Sec 377 this year. Young voices, in particular, are in focus, along with beloved ones we never tire of hearing.”

The Festival will be anchored by the city’s much-loved radio personalities Sriram Sullia and Darius Sunawala.

The Literature Festival is brought to you by Friends of BLF – a group of eminent citizens of Bengaluru, who firmly believe that the city comes alive in its public spaces, in its arts and culture events that foster meaningful dialogue, enriching discussions and healthy debates; a group whose support has laid the foundation for an independent, community-funded literary event that the city can be proud of. Friends of BLF help create – with their generosity, energy and time – this world of words.

The Festival opens at 10 am on October 27 and October 28. Entry is free, open to all and registration is recommended to get festival updates.

For registration, complete schedule of events, participating author bios and other information check www.bangaloreliteraturefestival.org or follow #blrlitfest on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

About Bangalore Literature Festival

The Bangalore Literature Festival celebrates the creative spirit of Bengaluru and commemorates the literary diversity it offers, bringing it in conversation with the best minds in the world of literature. The 2018 edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival is a two-day literary extravaganza that will bring together some of the biggest names in literature – within and outside India.

The objective of the Bangalore Literature Festival is to put together a literary experience that brings writers – both established and aspiring, readers, publishers, students and young professionals and other stakeholders of the city together on a common platform and create a compelling space for engaging and thought-provoking discussions on literature and life.

The Bangalore Literature Festival is a non-profit run by eclectic pro bono team of Shinie Antony, V. Ravichandar, Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Subodh Sankar, Vikram Sridhar, Shrabonti Bagchi, Sadhana Rao and supported by advisors and volunteers.

More information at: www.bangaloreliteraturefestival.org

This is a press note sent by Sridevi Rao, PRO for Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), and published with minimal editing.

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