The Hindu has announced its MetroPlus Playwright Award for the year 2009. The contest carries a cash prize of Rs. 1 Lakh and calls for writers to submit an original, unpublished English play.

The entry must be a full-length play on any subject of your choice – not less than 60 minutes, and not exceeding 120 minutes of performance time.

The last date for submitting your entry is November 30th, 2008 and requires you to courier your work to their Chennai office. Click here for more details and information.

This was a long time ago. An era of less problems and more life. Yeah, that long ago. It was a rainy evening and the rickety woody tea stall was right next to me, spewing warm steam which immediately diffused into the sheet of rain drops. Or perhaps merged with what was its own, after all.

A few minutes passed, some more rain drops fell, and the tea cups were plonked on the bored aluminium tray, which lay mutely on the wooden plank serving as a makeshift table top. A grey coloured torn and wet cloth lay alongside, seemingly in grief with the tray. Every now and then, spattered drops of water would perk up the tray and the cloth would just stir up, absorb the drop and go back to a lull.

The tea cups were sticky, with unwashed stains of unknown ages. It was sticky not to the extent of being annoying. It was sticky to the point of making one feel comfortable. The tea was sweet. A sweetness which, in any other scenario, would have made one cringe, but here it made one feel glad. Perhaps it was the steam, the rain, the cups, the tray, the cleaning cloth or the tea itself. The gamut of things were just right for a perfect sip. And then, there she was. A little over 5 years old hopping around in a dirty frock which had the word “beautiful” arranged in the front. The letters were broken at places, but the word was conveyed nevertheless. Perhaps it is the character of any child to wade through all veils.

She hopped up, placed her little fingers on the tray and looked at us. Another beggar, the thought sprang up in the head and was doused by another sip of the sweet tea. The evening was too precious to be distorted by a blip such as a beggar usually is. The tea-cup holding hand lay the cup down, went inside the warm jeans pocket, fumbled for a coin, carefully analyzed a two rupee coin against a one rupee coin, and brought the latter out in a serving gesture towards the child.

The child looked at it, didn’t understand what was going on and looked back in earnest. For the first time perhaps, the outstretched hand of a giver was embarrassed, not benevolent. The tea sipping was resumed and the child broke into a smile. It was not an evening of hierarchy. It was an evening of equal right to a wonderful evening.

She looked at the glazed plastic bottle filled half way with toffees. She looked at us and commanded for a chocolate; a gesture that was not supported by pleading or guilt. It was a rightful request, like a child makes to a parent. The tea sippers obliged and the toffee was devoured. With the same hop and skip, she turned around, dropped the wrapper nonchalantly and walked away in the evening. The kettle steamed a bit, whistled a bit and the last sip of the tea was the sweetest.

The New Yorker carries this slideshow on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan:

This summer, the photographer Platon took pictures of hundreds of men and women who volunteered to serve in the military and were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. He followed them on their journey through training and deployment, after demobilization and in hospitals, to compile a portrait of the dedication of the armed services today. Sergeant Tim Johannsen, who lost both legs when he drove over an I.E.D. on his second tour of duty in Iraq, made a point of buying an Army T-shirt to wear in his photograph. Of his sacrifice, he said, “It’s just part of the job. You know what you signed up for.”

Click here to view the pictures

Mahendra Ved writes this article on Gujaratis at The New Straits.

The late Prince Klaus of the Netherlands once said how impressed he was in the 1940s at the way a provision store in front of his house in Africa, run by a Gujarati family, virtually never closed. Every member of the family took turns manning it.

Eighty per cent of all diamonds sold in the world are polished in Surat’s 10,000 diamond units. The only non-Jews in the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem diamond bourse are Gujaratis, who have an impressive presence in Antwerp, the world’s biggest diamond hub. Hence, between 2004-5 and 2007-8, Surat’s middle class doubled in size and its poor reduced by a third.

India’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance, is Gujarati. Forbes says he is the world’s fifth richest man, worth US$43 billion. Azim Premji of IT giant Wipro is Gujarati. He is the world’s 21st richest man, worth US$17 billion.

Ten of the 25 richest Indians are Gujarati.

And this:

South Asia’s two greatest leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, were both Gujaratis from trading communities, one a Bania, the other a Khoja.

Read the complete article here. And er yes, this warranted blogging considering that my roots are in Gujarat and I speak the language. 

Dreams are dreams and reality is, well, reality – in the sense we perceive it. We live in this world and we live to the extent that life permits us to live. To the extent that our responsibilities permit us to live. Sometimes though, just sometimes, we do dream. We dream to the extent that our lives permit us to dream. Dreams are where we wade through comforting waves of emotions, of abilities we never knew existed. And when life returns, those dreams start fading away to the deep annals of our minds, where they wait patiently to surface back when everything else around us switches off.

Mario Ruoppolo is an ordinary man in a non-descript village in Italy. Owing to being sea sick, he is unable to carry on with the fishing profession of his fellow villagers. Being out of a job leads Mario to the village post office where he sees a ‘Help Wanted’ sign. Mario becomes the village postman but his job has a slight quirk to it. He has to deliver mail only to one customer who lives on the outskirts of the village. This customer is Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet who has been exiled from his country due to his communist views.

Seemingly in continuation with the previous post, here is an interview of Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian: Brave New India

It’s quite interesting what’s going on right now, because we are at the cusp where the definition of terrorism is being expanded. Under the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party—that’s the radical Hindu government previously in power—much of the emphasis was on Islamic terrorism. But now Islamic terrorism is not enough to net those that the government wants to net, because the minimum qualification is that you have to be a Muslim. Now, with these huge development projects and these Special Economic Zones that are being created and the massive displacement, the people that are protesting those have to be called terrorists, too. And they can’t be Islamic terrorists, so now we have the Maoists.

On Dalits:

Bant Singh’s young daughter was raped by the upper-caste people in his village. Bant Singh was a member of the CPI (ML), which is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), known as Naxalites, and he filed a case in court. They warned him. They said, “If you don’t drop the case, we will kill you.” He didn’t drop the case, so they caught him and they cut off his arms and his legs.

He was in the hospital in Delhi. I went to see him there. It was a lesson to me about how being a political person saved him. He said, “Do you think I don’t have arms and legs? I do. Because all my comrades are my arms and legs.” He’s a singer, so he sang a song about a young girl’s father getting her dowry ready for her just before her marriage, her trousseau. And she says to him, “I don’t want this sari and these jewels. What will I do with them? Just give me a gun.”

On Gujarat and Democracy:

That pogrom in which between 1,500 to 2,000 Muslims were massacred on the streets, women were gang-raped, 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes and today they live in ghetto conditions, economically and socially ostracized in Gujarat, this was all an election campaign. So I think we really need to question, structurally, what is this democracy? It’s kind of pointless to just demonize Modi, because there are going to be people like Modi, who understand that there is a very organic link between democracy and majoritarianism and between majoritarianism and fascism. As I keep saying, there is fire in the ducts. This has to be what’s going to happen, because what is a politician spawned by this kind of complex society going to do? He’s going to try and forge a majority for himself using the lowest common denominator, which will then be a sort of faithful vote bank.

Read the complete interview here, which covers Nandigram, Narmada and Kashmir amongst other topics.

Excerpts from Rose George’s new book: The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it’s worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners’ house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

Perhaps you would now want to continue to read it.

What do you make of it? Where are we as a modern India? And what are millions of such people doing while we are making our grander plans of life and the universe?