Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The story reading session

On Sunday the teacher's association writers forum (I did not know that it existed!) held its story-reading session. Thanks to a strange sequence of events Dr. Choubey who was organizing it came to know that I too write stories. And therefore invited me to read a story. It was fun, after all it was my first story reading session even if the audience consisted of 10 students and six faculties. (of whom three were reading stories). Susan Viswanathan, who is at the School of Social Sciences, began the session by reading two stories from her book Something Barely Remembered. It is a book I need to now read.
The rest of the readers were Mohammed Janabade (from SLL&CSS) and Devendra Choubey (also from SLL&CSS). Devendra Choubey read a story that he had written in the aftermath of Babri Masjid about how few people in a village grab land from another resident in the pretext of building a dam. Mohammed Janabade's story dealt with the quest of identity. There was also a guest reader but unfortunately I did not catch his name properly. He is a professor of economics from Bareilly and also works on child labour issues. His stories deal with this as the central theme and he read us a story that has now been included in NCERT text books. It was a lovely story even though the ending was predictable.
I read the story that was published long time back in The Bathtub Gin called "Welcome to the World, Baby."
The entire session lasted two and half hours and the only thing that I was little worried was the presence of the Dean from my school. I have no clue how he is going to react to this aspect of me.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dear Author,

Are you sure what you have written in your response is correct!

We are talking of your surprise visits and not the visits done with Vallabh in Uttar Pradesh. From your previous blogs it’s very clear that Vallabh is told in advance and he takes care of logistics.
From your arguments we should conclude that Vallabh has unquestionable integrity and he is transparent and tells everything to all in Asha India and Asha for Education.

How can you trust him? We don’t have any evidence to support his integrity.

Let me give you an example

Many people know in Asha India and Asha for Education that a incident happened at ASV ( Asha Samajik Vidhyalaya) in Lucknow during year 2006. Vallabh was well aware and never ever thought that issue is important to discuss with any one including you! Asha India and Asha for Education came to know of the issue through others who for raising the issue were abused and thrown out of group.

Evidence we have also suggest that Vallabh even did not raised the issue in June 2006 Asha India meeting.

Do you think he was correct? Or its normal for him as such things keep on happening in asha and such minor issues can be ignored.
Sabita was the India Focus Group coordinator and Sirish was the Project Coordinator. I guess both must be aware of the issue as both are very close to Vallabh but both decided issues is not important as both always do such things.

Question: we are talking of your surprise visits and not visits done with Vallabh.
Question: We have evidence to prove where Vallabh stands. How and why you trust him? This brings us to original question how much commission do you take to do the site visits?
Question: Have you ever done surprise site visit for projects in and around Lucknow?

We are surprised by your comment that you know that you raise funds from public. We have not one but countless example of when Asha India and Asha for Education not only refused to answer questions to outsiders but also to chapters and its active volunteers.