Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi held a "Literary Miscellany" today at the UT Guest House, bringing together three different types of events: an academic lecture, two book launches and a presentation on Script-writing.
The main speaker of the day was Prof Dieter Riemenschneider, visiting from Germany. He spoke on the Aesthetics of Raja Rao, bringing together literature, landscape, the printed text and the visual world together with a power point presentation. Prof Schneider is not new to Chandigarh. In fact he has taught at the German Department of Panjab University, almost four decades ago. Since then he has made several trips to India as visiting professor to various universities. He is passionate about the work of Raja Rao, one of the BIG Three in Indian writing in English, along with RK Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand.
The function also saw the launch of two books by city writers. Amarjit Sidhu, whose book "No Way Home" was launched today, has spent his growing years in Chandigarh and is an alumnus of PanjabUniversity. He has been writing poetry since his college days. After his postgraduation he moved to Canada but for the last few decades he has been dividing his time between Chandigarh and Toronto. Amarjit was introduced by Prof Meera Malik who spoke about his work before the author read an excerpt from his book.
Madhav Kaushik, the other writer who was given the platform today, is the Secretary of Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi. in this capacity he has been instrumental in the promotion of of local talent, organizing book launches and meetings with writers. Today, his contribution to literature was acknowledged by the chairperson, Prof Manju Jaidka, who spoke of the twenty-one books that Kaushik has penned and the numerous honours and awards he has received, including the recent Maha Kavi Surdas Samman by the Haryana Sahitya Akademi. Kaushik also read portions from his work.
The final item in the Miscellany today was a talk-cum-presentation on Script-writing by Dr Indubala Singh who teaches English in Govt Colllege and also has expertise in cinema studies, having done her PhD on cinematic adaptations of literary texts. Dr Indubala has been in the news for having made a few feature films and documentaries, including a very moving feature on the handicapped girl Gudiya who, despite all hurdles, insists on living a self-supporting life with dignity. Indubala showed clips from her recent works.
