august 28, 2005 Shewrite is a film about four women who refuse to buckle down to societal pressures of propriety and write poetry that is provocative and bold, says Mala Kumar.

[...] «We read about the attack on these women by lyricists in Tamil Nadu and were keen to document the stand taken by these women,» says Dr Anjali Monteiro, Professor and Head, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.

...Says Malathy Maitri, a Pondicherry-based Dalit and Marxist activist and founder member of Anangu, «We were upset that people who use double entendre and bad language to attract people should call our poetry 'vulgar'.»
[...]

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/aug282005/finearts636212005827.asp

Artist, lives and works in Bangalore, India

I’m Sureshkumar [in short: Suresh]. I was trained in sculpture. I am used to dealing with structures and installations with mixed media. Currently, most of my projects are into public art, kind of happenings. I do performances also, in the sense of a physical act. I work as a teacher at an art college and I do my art projects.

Artist, lives and works in Bangalore, India

I’m Surekha. My work was that of a painter. I started off with paper and created objects. Then I continued with photography and video. And now, most of my works are installations with objects, photography and video.

Artist/Teacher, lives and works in Bangalore, India

The last few years have been very intensive and interesting, as my work has been going through a much-awaited shift! I feel that I went through a full circle but of course when I have reached the other end of the circle I have gained a lot more. As many artists I started off as a painter, interested in the act of image making and discovering images rather that creating them with a preconception. My work dealt with issues related to industrial and communal violence. My participation in the group installation projects later, dealing with issues like territory, consumerism, communalism and identity enhanced my interest and gave me an opportunity to study these issues in depth. My involvement in workshops with people from different backgrounds and communities like ‘backward’ and ‘tribal’ communities from different parts of India and working on various art forms and performances have broadened my horizon in understanding ‘Indian-ness’. It has also exposed me to the issues of consumerism and the politics of culture and understanding the reality behind the so-called development of society in particular and nation on the whole. Born and brought up in a relatively conventional society and exposed to the strong regional culture that forms an important part of one’s psyche, I have attempted to distance myself and analyze it and understand it better through interactions with artists from India and abroad.
For the last few years I have been able to travel and participate in residency programs and that has helped me to explore my ideas further both in terms of contents and form. I have been working with installation and video as my main medium and tried to push the line as much as possible. The shift from painting to installation to video and later back to painting (!) has been gradual.
I have taken part in a few International artists workshops and I like to connect to the place where I am working responding to both environment and work accordingly… I would like to call such work place specific.

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Freelance cameraman/painter, lives and works in Bangalore, India

The endeavour in these works is to portray the clear life style of Baiga tribe through a 19th century printing technique i.e. Gum bichromate process.

Gum bichromate process
This process is based upon the discovery that the potassium bichromate with a colloid (gum Arabic) and a water-soluble pigment forms a light sensitive emulsion that can be brushed onto a paper substratum (or on any suitable surface), exposed through a negative to sun light, and developed in plain water. Where light strikes, the emulsion hardens and remains. Unexposed areas do not harden, and so during development they are washed off, and only the hardened image remains on the surface, after a series of delicate water washes.

These Gum bichromate prints are the result of the preliminary study undertaken during the course of research for a documentary on Baiga in Chattisgarh, India.

Baiga
The Baigas are the second largest group of indigenous people in Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. They have lived in the forest areas of khana (‘Dandakaranya’ of the great epic Ramayana), the districts of Mandla, Balaghat, Bilaspur and Rajnandgaon since immemorial.time. According to local legends the very first Baiga was born to the Mother goddess on the Hill of Elephants and was named ‘Nanga Baiga’. Since then they have always been referred to as 'Sons and Daughters of Mother Earth'.

The Baigas are gentle and peaceful tribes who have mostly preferred to retreat to remote and sometimes rather inhospitable terranes, rather than being engulfed with modern ways of life. [...]

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Graphic designer, lives and works in Bangalore, India

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april 24, 2005 [...] Bangalore is situated in the Southwest of India, is the technological capital of India and is the capital of the delocation or occidental technological offshoring.

According to the director of the Indian Institute of Computer Technology of Bangalore, Dr. Sadagopan: the key for the current success of India was the investment that the Indian State did in research and higher education.

...The investment in education, the accomplishment of good infrastructures and the support to the creation and development of technological companies is right have favored its current positioning in the market of the telecommunications. [...]

http://k-government-en.blogspot.com/2005/04/bangalore-it-capital-of-india.html