Indian Writing

Here is a comment that was left on my post about Mohammed Yunus who has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Hello to all the people who support Muhamad Yunus. You have an opportunity to learn more about his ideas and help at the same time. Ashoka: Inovators for the Public recently developed a group of films about Social Entrepreneurship, and Yunus is one of the speakers.

Ashoka - just launched an ambitious subtitling project with dotSUB, a new site that lets you translate films line by line. The plan: volunteers translate one video on Muhammad Yunus and one on Ashoka founder Bill Drayton into 100 languages in time for the Nobel ceremony on December 10th. Go on, translate a few lines (www.dotsub.com/nobel) and learn more about what these Social Entrepreneurs have done. You will be giving people all around the world the opportunity to enjoy and learn from these videos…

“General” Narsamma and her team of Dalit women are all set to launch India’s first full-fledged community radio station in Machnoor, Medak District, Andhra Pradesh. According to this report, with

- a studio building made of locally available low cost material
- two 16 and 4 channel mixers and stereo recorders
- two 100-watt FM transmitters with a coverage area of 30 km radius
- and a newly-cleared licence,

the radio station is ready to reach out to the people in its 100 villages of coverage. The report goes on:

Making radio programmes has been a child’s play for these tape-recorder wielding Dalit women, as they have canned 500 hours of them so far. “It’s our radio and we will broadcast programmes made by us for our benefit. We will talk about seeds, crop diversity, organic farming, health, hygiene, women’s problems and sending children to school, virtually everything that touches the community,” said `General’ Narsamma brimming with confidence.

There is expectation that the radio tailored to community needs would not only lend voice to the voiceless marginalised community but revive interest in the dying oral folk traditions like “Bichapola patalu.”

“The very bottom third is what you might think of as land; a body of water occupies the upper two-thirds. That bottom third is a greenish earth-color tone that suggests this landmass to us, and above that we have bluish hues that determine this watery body. You really have a lot of horizontals…

He actually uses only dots, small dots…

He uses the very tip of the brush to create what we just described as a scene, and he does not mix colors, meaning that these small dots, juxtaposed with each other, in a complementary manner, create this effect.”

…and it begins with a cat called Simple Man. Also a feather. And mallards. And decoys…

Read on.

and shot her husband. In what seems like a honour killing in northeast Delhi.