Endorse the Campaign for the HIV/AIDS Bill (India)

From SAATHII:

"The HIV/AIDS Bill, which was drafted after extensive civil society consultations since 2003 and submitted to National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) in August 2006, has been truncated by the Law Ministry. Important chapters like Information, Education and Communication, Strategies for Risk Reduction and Access to Treatment have been completely deleted.

On the contrary, there is an attempt to introduce draconian measures like mandatory testing, identification and tracing of HIV positive people. Such measures violate the rights of people infected and affected by HIV, and undermine the present National AIDS Control Programme that has been formulated on a rights based approach.

The Campaign for the HIV/AIDS Bill demands that the government should reject the Law Ministry's version of the Bill and the original NACO Bill should be tabled in the upcoming session of Parliament."

Read more about the campaign and sign up in support here.

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize

Mohammed Hanif won the inaugural Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his debut novel, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”.

Remember Shakti Bhatt here.

Mumbai attacks on The Daily Show

John Oliver freaking out about what happened in Bombay. Priceless.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

I took to The Daily Show like a fish to sonar (!). It's difficult to miss a day.

Perked up

Have not been very efficient about writing the last few days. Was working on a series of poems that grew stubborn but refused to grow otherwise. Does that happen to you? I tried to sneak up at the poem(s) from different directions, but it didn't budge, and I'd lately been making lame, half-hearted, pretend jabs. Which made me anxious about this whole darn writing thing and which, as you can imagine, did not help at all.

Today, one of the first poems in the series was workshopped and everybody agreed that it seemed to want to grow longer (ah, workshop phraseology). THAT was incredibly helpful. I am always ready to end a poem, get done with it, wrap it up, hurrying. I don't mind revising; taking out that first draft itself scares me a bit. Which is why it is nice to have people who urge me on, or people who are dissatisfied with the first draft. (Though what I read during the workshop today was the second draft: Lesley had kindly been dissatisfied with the first.)

What I think I want to do now is to scrap the series idea and house all my various themes into this one long poem. Because I like its form so far and in the other poems, I'd been struggling with form. Okay, enough! because it is not interesting for you, this abstract talk. But: oh potential long poem, I have to have enough patience with you and trust in you and hopefully enough urgers-on: you intimidate me so. And I must remember that being inefficient is not so bad sometimes.

She said it.

"So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." -Brenda Ueland

More than ever appropriate

My students chose "war" as a topic for a collaboration that had a stunning anti-climax today (when the next class's students and professor walked in on us as we were in the midst of creating a stunning: slideshow of photographs, eye doctor's war chart, illustrations, song-loops, chants, slogans, poem posters, blackboard art, warroom art - or it would have been stunning if we'd had the extra half hour which I believed we did (but since I had forgotten to check the classroom schedule... sigh... I felt foolish)) and we ended up frustrated and will try to somehow wrap it up Wednesday.

But that is not the point. I've been revisiting, and wanted to link to, Poets Against War.

AWP Annual Conference

Kay Ryan, incidentally the first out queer poet to be appointed as the U.S. poet laureate, has admitted to being susceptible to the devil. I dislike jamborees as well. I am not comfortable in them. So why am I excited about going to the 2009 conference in February? I think it's more to do with Chicago. I've fallen for the Windy City like I fell for NYC.

Some post-think

Hotel Taj: icon of whose India? by Gnani Sankaran

As the Terrors Die: The Terror of the Aftermath by Biju Mathew

Update, 2 Dec:

Defeat or victory determined by response by Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh too wants us to stop invoking 9/11. My only quibble with him is that, as Sankaran points out, the attacks were not confined to the "upscale parts of the city". Though the media very well created that impression. When I read online that hospitals had been attacked, I messaged my brother, shaken to the core. Since our television channels were focusing elsewhere, he didn't know this and was shocked.

Update, 13 Dec:

The monster in the mirror by Arundhati Roy