Lisa Ray Close to the BONE at Experimenter Ballygunge Kolkata 2019
Lisa Roy Close to the Bone Book Launch at Experimenter Ballygunge Kolkata 2019
The transforming moment in Lisa Ray’s life arrived much before she was diagnosed with a rare disease. She remembers the time she took her European friends for a trip to McLeod Ganj and ended up at a 10-days silent retreat, akin to Vipassana. “It was the most terrifying and horrible thing I had ever done in my life. So what did I do? I went back,” says Lisa with a chuckle. She eventually spent six months amidst the mountains, going in and out of the camp as often as her mind and body would allow.
This 47-year-old woman has had life challenge her in various ways and she has only returned stronger than ever before. In town to talk about her new book Close To The Bone, Lisa was in conversation with author, poet and artist Karuna Ezara Parikh. Delighted to be back in Calcutta and to her “favourite space” in the city, the Experimenter Gallery in Ballygunge, she said, “It is almost like a homecoming for me as well as my book because this is where it all started and that makes me emotional. I am a Shyambazar girl and quintessentially Bengali and I believe this is a city of literary arts that still upholds words.” Her book originates from the story of her parents and traces her life till she was diagnosed with cancer.
She originally wanted to be a writer or an academician — professions that require the least amount of human contact. “Well that didn’t quite work out,” she laughs. She had always been a voracious reader and a poet. Karuna talks about the time she tumbled on to an Instagram page called @protestpoet maintained by a Lisa Rani Ray and she remembers having wondered if this was the same person who has won millions of hearts in India with her glamorous appearances in Bollywood.
Close To The Bone has been in the making for 25 years. She speaks about her natural ability to observe and soak in everything around her and often, physically take notes about what she would see. The journals she maintained over the years came in handy when she finally sat down to write her book. “My way of processing my diagnosis was writing. I remember my doctor telling me that I had a rare, incurable disease with few months to live and he looked so flustered that the first thing I said to him was ‘Would you like some water?’”
It is this humour that really kept her company through her darkest hours. Being able to laugh at everything around her made her stronger. She had withdrawn the manuscript from two different publishers till Harper Collins happened. A six-month-long proof-reading of a ready manuscript turned into eight years and somehow she was just not ready with the final draft.
However, the wait was well worth it. Touching upon feminist issues like people assuming that she used a ghost writer for her book and the idea of a good-looking person being bereft of grey matter, Karuna and Lisa’s discussion managed to touch a chord with the audience. “Having my looks overshadow every other achievement has been very painful,” said Lisa. She admitted to being the kind of person who runs away from her trauma instead of facing it.
Commenting on the constant scrutiny that women have to face these days because of social media, she questions the very idea of beauty. The concept of ‘ideal’ is changing constantly and what was considered beautiful 50 years ago, is no longer considered beautiful now.
Living in a society that glorifies being busy and distracted, it was an easy thing to do. “People don’t want to speak about adversity, especially in India. We are always trying to hide our true self,” she lamented. Self-admittedly, writing about her spiritual journey was one of the most difficult portions that she had to pen. However, being truthful and open about herself and the consequences of her decisions helped immensely. “I am more comfortable inhabiting the truth than telling a lie,” she signed off.
Article Courtesy - The Telegraph
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TM Krishna: Ragam Poorna Shadjam
TM Krishna was the featured artiste at Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata's 10th Anniversary celebrations. The concert, curated and co-produced by First Edition Arts and Experimenter, was the finalé to a wondrous three-day tour of Kolkata with TM Krishna on a variety of platforms and forums.
The second piece that Krishna rendered was the Thyagaraja composition Laavanya Rama Kannul Ara in Ragam Poorna Shadjam, a composition that was familiar to the Bengali audience in Kolkata because there is a similar composition by Rabindranath Tagore that was inspired by this one.
Krishna was accompanied by Akkarai Subhalakshmi on violin, Arunprakash Krishnan on mridangam and Chandrasekara Sharma on ghatam. Tanpura support was provided by Krishna's student Vignesh Krishnamurthy and Ritwick Pal.
TM Krishna: Manodharma III - Part 1
Continuing with the ever popular Manodharma series, Krishna goes back to the basics in this Lec-Dem. The event was held in Kolkata as part of the FEA-curated The Essential TM Krishna tour in collaboration with Experimenter, Kolkata.
In the first video of this all-new series, Krishna talks about Composition, its structure and spirit, the different approaches to music in the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions, and the role of percussion in a performance.
Opening and closing stills courtesy Ram Keshav.
Vivek Agnihotri's Book Launch at Kolkata
The experimenter filmmaker, the courageous orator and the newest author Mr. Vivek Agnihotri is on his nationwide book tour to endorse his book #UrbanNaxals. Mr. Vivek Agnihotri, as a part of his India tour, visited Kolkata and addressed people there.
Stella Santacatterina from Frieze, London, October 2012
On the days of the Frieze Art Fair, Stella Santacatterina made some interviews with a few exhibitors (Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Experimenter Contemporary Art, Kolkata, India; Raucci Santamaria, Naples, Italy) and with the curator Denise Robinson.
This year the fair included a new section, Frieze Masters, featuring over 90 international galleries, from ancient to modern. According to Stella, this section was the real core of the Frieze fair this year. Here were exhibited master pieces of African and Tribal art, beautiful works by, among the others, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Sol LeWitt, Henri Matisse, Giorgio Morandi, Joan Mirò, and even Renaissance art works. The level of the works presented at Frieze Masters was high, the venue was less crowded then the one devoted to contemporary art, and overall it all looked like a museum exhibition.
Jagadish Chandra Bose | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Jagadish Chandra Bose
00:02:33 1 Early life and education
00:06:00 2 Radio research
00:09:29 2.1 Place in radio development
00:11:59 3 Plant research
00:12:41 4 Study of metal fatigue and cell response
00:13:46 5 Science fiction
00:14:18 6 Legacy
00:15:40 7 Honours
00:16:42 8 Publications
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
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Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, CSI, CIE, FRS (; Bengali: জগদীশ চন্দ্র বসু , IPA: [dʒɔɡodiʃ tʃɔndro bosu]; 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937), also spelled Jagdish and Jagadis, was a polymath, physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist, and an early writer of science fiction from British India. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction, and also invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the moon has been named in his honour.Born in Munsiganj, Bengal Presidency (present-day Bangladesh), during British governance of India, Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He went to the University of London to study medicine, but could not pursue studies in medicine because of health problems. Instead, he conducted his research with the Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge and returned to India. He joined the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics. There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made remarkable progress in his research of remote wireless signalling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, instead of trying to gain commercial benefit from this invention, Bose made his inventions public in order to allow others to further develop his research.
Bose subsequently made a number of pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli, and thereby scientifically proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Although Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, his objections to any form of patenting was well known. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as quivering of injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of feeling in plants. His books include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926).
In 2004, Bose was ranked number 7 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time.