Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 17

Bus ladies

A few months ago, I had the good
fortune of being invited to the Women of the World Festival, held in
Brisbane this year.



Because it focusses on women – as
artists, creators, activists, change-makers, musicians, amateur
wall-climbers – it also hires mainly women. It is no longer
unusual, of course, to see women hosting and organising events,
marketing and managing ticketing counters and so on

With gratitude, some good news

A script I wrote recently, Untitled 1, has won The Hindu Playwright Award for 2018. I am glad and grateful and feel very lucky. 



Here is the announcement of the prize: 



https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper...



And here is an interview with some detail about themes and characters in the play:



https://

Or, how I learnt to think

My grandfather was once in jail.

As a kid, I’d pronounce this with a little flush of pride. My grandpa! Way back in 1939.

As a young man, my maternal grandfather became involved with student politics and wrote rousing poems, neither of which the British government cared for. A warrant was issued. He went underground, but was eventually arrested.

I know nothing of his jail stint except that

One pedal man

There was something odd about the way
he wore the rubber slipper on his right foot. It was half off all the
while he kept his foot pressed to the pedal.




The other odd thing was the way he
pedalled the cycle rickshaw. He would pedal only with his right foot.
The left foot was balanced on the pedal but it did not move and so,
the strain of pushing the rickshaw forward came in half cycles,

Why novels and printed books exist in the age of Netflix

Consider the difference between watching a film in a foreign language and trying to read a book in that language. The film will still give away a lot, but the book will give you nothing unless you’re willing to work hard to interpret the words. It is you who bring words to life.

A book is an extraordinary intellectual and emotional pact between writer and reader. Cinema can seek a response,

A button jab worth of equality

One of my favourite
experiences while traveling in more developed nations is the button
you can press whenever pedestrians want to cross the road.




I love those buttons affixed
to poles at every crossing. They makes a pedestrian feel like she's
something too. Something resembling a human citizen rather than a
scurrying insect trying to get out of the way of unseeing,
unstopabble metal

The making of a river goddess

Somewhere in the Haryanvi village of Mughwali, there is a little acquifer. That is to say, there is a hole in the earth, bricked around, and a circlet of still water. There's a frog paddling in it. Nothing about this image suggests “river”. As farmer Jarnail Singh points out, a river is that which flows; this is groundwater. Others disagree. This water, they insist, is the same river Saraswati,

On trolling and rape culture

To call it filth is to dress it up. To call it a disgrace is to lend it grace. Let us call it what it is. It is the manifestation of minds so steeped in rape that it is rape that drips from the tips of their fingers onto the screens of their smart phones. The meaning of rape is a not-yes. It is not waiting, not listening, not looking for a shade of nuance between yes and no, or

On literary loans and Bollywood

When does a borrowing turn into a theft?
The answer is obvious – ask before borrowing, and do not go about saying that the goods are your own property. There’s no way of returning borrowed words. The most we can do to avoid insinuations of robbery or mal-intent is to publicly credit the source. With creative artists, credit is not a straight business. We respond to poems with fresh verses, and

Nikki and the Post Truth Juggernaut

One can’t help it. One feels good
about an Indian (well, okay Indian origin) girl growing up to do big
things. Nikki – probably a pet name that her family lovingly used,
a word that in Punjabi actually means ‘little one’ – has grown
up into one of the biggest, most powerful positions in the world. She
is an ambassador of one of the most powerful, most heavily
militarized nations in the world,