To participate, mail me at sandeep[dot]shande[at]gmail[dot]com

Route Map:
View Larger Map

Main agenda:
- Capturing the festive season specialties at Gandhibazaar Market.
- Visit to Bull Temple.
- Getting atop Bugle Rock.
- Breakfast at Vidyarthi Bhavan.

TFA is looking for entries in contemporary music from all parts of India (bands or individuals). The list of genres extends from rock, jazz, heavy metal, trance, house, instrumental, folk, to any genre which is yet to be “born”. The award is open to music in any language.

Over the past five years, the TFA music award has grown as a concept and has become an event that all young musicians look forward to. It’s an opportunity to see where you stand among many other Indian musicians, and to get your music heard and judged by veterans in the field. Entries will be judged by a panel of three independent jurors, both on your music and your potential as an artist/band. Professional recording quality is not a requirement.

Past judges have ranged from Luke Kenny (VJ, Actor), Vishal Dadlani (Pentagram, Vishal-Shekhar), to Raghu Dixit (Music Director and vocalist) and Arjun Sankalia (GM, International Repertoire, Sony BMG). Over the years, we’ve seen this award been presented to bands such as Myndsnare (2005), Demonic Resurrection (2006), Lounge Piranha (2007), and the newest addition to the list, Shefali Alvares (2008).

Eligibility:

• <The award is open to all Indian nationals resident in India (no NRIs please)

• You must NOT be over 30 as on January 1, 2009

• The spirit of the TFA Awards is to identify and encourage young talent. Therefore, do not submit an entry if your music has received a commercial contract

• Entries can be in any language<

• <Submissions should be 100% original

Deadline: 7 October, 2008

Application package should include the following:

• 2 CD copies of the music (audio or .wav formats – no MP3). Please label each CD with the name of the artist/band and a contact no. Please also include track names. You can send in between 3-5 tracks.

• A signed statement confirming: (i) the applicants’ date of birth (ii) the names of any previously released singles/CDs (iii) that the submitted work is original.

• Applicant’s contact information, including telephone and cell number, email and postal address.

Applications should be submitted to:

<TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS, H 301 Adarsh Gardens, 8th Block, 47th Cross, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560 082, Phone: 080-26548139

If you have any queries, please contact: counterculture@oml.inOR radha@oml.in

The Fine Print:

• Submitted material will not be returned.

• The decision of the TFA jury is final and cannot be contested in any forum.

• The submissions should be 100% original. Copyright issues are the responsibility of the applicant, not TFA.

Please note: We reserve the right to use your submitted music (if necessary) to publicise the awards either on our website or in any in-house materials. Otherwise, the copyright rests with the musicians and your submission will be put to no other use without your express permission.

TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS (TFA) is a not-for-profit public charitable trust set up in memory of Angirus ‘Toto’ Vellani who was intensely passionate about music, literature and films.

Counter Culture Records is an independent music label that actively pursues new sounds and new music and is dedicated to providing a platform for talented artists and bands to release their music, enabling them to reach wider audiences.

The Onstage Foundation (www.onstagefoundation.org) is an initiative set up by “Onstage Music” to improve the infrastructure in the Indie music scene in India, by setting up a fund of one million INR to seed projects by musicians and people interested in being a part of this ever-growing endeavour.

To participate mail Karthik S at skthewimp [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Route Details

View Larger Map
As usual, this is going to be on the last Sunday of the month – 27th of July 2008. We begin at 8 am as usual, though this is a bit of a long-ish route. We might take about two and a half hours for this – as opposed to the usual two, so you are encouraged to have breakfast before the walk. You might want to know that there is an Adigas fairly close to the starting point.

We meet in front of Alankar Plaza on K G Road. This was perhaps the first mall in Bangalore (or maybe Safina Plaza came earlier) but it has never been known as one. It is supposed to be a good place to shop for cheap clothes, but I’m not sure if anything will be open on a Sunday morning. Anyways, that is not the reason we are going there.

We start from Alankar Plaza to the end of K G Road where it splits into two and we take the right path – the one that all buses headed to Majestic take. This is called Subedar Chatram road and most of the morning will be spent walking on that. We walk under the flyover at Anand Rao Circle, and then under a railway line a couple of hundred metres later. We will also be passing by a large number of old movie halls.

After a while, we reach what is popularly called as “Swastik Junction” and we take a left turn (no, I don’t mean that in the Prakash Karat sense). We turn right quickly enough, into Sirur Park road which we will follow till it ends. We then do a couple of quick adjustments and reach Malleswaram Circle which signals the end of the walk. An underpass was recently opened at this junction.

Toto Funds the Arts (TFA), Bangalore, is holding a 3-day creative writing workshop from
July 25 to 27 (Friday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm). Renowned poet, playwright and publisher Keki Daruwalla from New Delhi and poet and novelist Anjum Hasan from Bangalore will conduct the workshop. Those under 35 but over 18 may apply by sending in a maximum of three poems and/or a short story of no more than 3,500 words. Please note that the workshop will cover both poetry and fiction. The last date for submissions is July 15.

The workshop will include discussions on the two genres, discussion of work submitted, as well as on-the-spot assignments.

Venue:  Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, 466, 9^th Cross, Jayanagar  1st Block, Bangalore 560011

Dates and Timing: 25–27 July, 10 am to 5 pm

Fee: Rs 1,400, inclusive of lunch, tea and snacks

Note:  All submissions will be screened by the facilitators before acceptance. A maximum of 10–12 participants will be chosen. Outstation applicants will have to make their own travel and lodging arrangements. For further information please write to tfaindia@yahoo.com or call 09880623357 between 10 am and 5 pm, Monday to Saturday.

Date: 29th June 2008, Sunday
Time: 8 am to 10 am
Starting point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.
Ending point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.
Route:

View Larger Map

To participate mail at skthewimp [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Route in detail
We start off by moving up along residency road, in the general direction of Mayo Hall. On the way, we take photographs of the nice Opera building, and also the large number of modern buildings that have come up in this stretch. Once we reach Mayo Hall, we do a couple of pradakshinas to the place while taking photographs. We then pay homage to the deceased Victoria Hotel, and take snaps of the ugly Bangalore Central.

Next, we move on to commissariat road, and along with some police quarters, there are a couple of nice buildings before we hit Garuda Mall. We continue walking on, and there are a lot more interesting things to photograph here, until we hit Richmond Road, near Lifestyle. We walk along Richmond Road towards Shoolay Circle, and on the way there is the Sacred Hearts Church and some school. This ends the deterministic portion of the walk.

The next part of the walk (random as of now) will be in the inner lanes of Richmond Town. Just to throw around a few names, the roads we will cover will be Pulliyar Koil street, Markham Road, Castle street, Wood street, etc. Of course, this is all probabilistic. We will be walking extensively here if we have the time. Not at all if we don’t.

We hope to emerge out of the inner lanes of Richmond town somewhere on Museum Road, and we will use that to return to Residency Road. Once back on Residency Road, we will pay homage to the non-existent Imperial cinema hall, and then walk up another hundred meters, and we will end up where we started off. I’ll conclude by telling you all the story again – I’d have told it to you right at the beginning. Maybe if people have the enthu, we could even shoot a small video.

The newspaper claims itself to be ‘for Young Minds’ through provocative hoarding ads depicting a lady with news printed on her back. I guess majority would have bothered to see company behind this, for obvious reasons. In case by mistake an onlooker puts on a thinking cap, what really could he/she interpret from the ad ? We know palm-reading, mind reading etc but this ad is trying to project a new concept – ‘back-reading’.

According to me, the ad tries to convey the following …

• if you’re looking for the ‘front page hot news’, there’s no need to point that out to you.
• if you’re looking for the bulls and bears of the business news, you can see that its there in the highs and lows.
• sports is out there in the unkempt jet-black hair.
• fashion and page 3 news needs no mention. (and if you’re gonna read fashion this way, you’ll probably disagree with the cliched statement that beauty is skin-deep).
• the hands don’t carry any news obviously due to lack of space; (does it point out that this newspaper comes with ‘no strings attached’ as it is ‘hands free’ ?)

An ad which sets the though process going …nice enough! But will this create loyal subscribers ? I managed to get an invitation copy while traveling in a BMTC -Vajra (Volvo) bus.(Ads of the newspaper are in side windows of the some Volvo buses). In the first impression, the newspaper looks like a hybrid of regular daily newspaper and a tabloid. Other than this there is nothing special in the newspaper to be called “made for Young Minds”. The print quality is very bad and as a result many photographs even though coloured look abysmal. From the layout perspective, the only thing I liked was the page header section which has some easy read news in the briefs. There’s also the supplement ‘Chronicle Bengaluru’ that has nothing special to mention about.

It’s too early to comment about contents in general. but I can’t resist myself mentioning about the the editorial section because it is just disappointing, there is nothing worthwhile to read in it.
[with inputs from Sudhir]

Getting there
We were taken in a A/C bus from Chinnaswamy stadium. The actual plan was to travel by BMTC’s Vayu Vajra, but somehow it didn’t materialized. We took the usual NH-7 and approached the airport by switching from the highway using almost complete trumpet interchange. A 5 km ride from the interchange took us to the terminal building.

First impression


Lookwise from outside the airport is not really an architecture marvel but it is way better than current HAL airport. As explained by one of the member of architect team, the flooring is completely done using granite slabs and efforts have been put to give a good impression to tourists.

Interiors
The architect team seems to have got the basics right. According to a design guideline it is better to have a nice ceiling inside rather than external grandeur, so that millions of people experience it. This guideline is addressed by unique curved ceiling with panels in between. These panels brings sufficient amount of natural light inside the terminals. The other major observation was that it was very pleasant inside even though AC was off, courtesy cooling effect of granite slabs.

Future Expansion Plans

Kiran of BIAL communication team briefed us about the future expansion using the proposed complete model of the airport. He explained that a new terminal will be constructed in the south which would be a mirror image of the one in the north, with a parallel runway. This upcoming runway will be operational with the current one simultaneously, unlike many multiple runways airports in India. This briefing session was followed by a Q&A session in which Kiran answered many queries.

Departure terminal

The departure terminal consists of 53 check-in counters. Operationally these check-in counters will not be dedicated to a particular airline, instead they will be allocated dynamically. The baggages will undergo 5 level of security check after check-in, so there will be no task of getting a security seal before check-in procedure. One observation is that the counters are very close to each other, I hope there are no issues when all counters are operational simultaneously. Other than regular counters there will be self service kiosks in the terminal where a person with only cabin bag can avail a boarding pass. This facility will be common for all airlines (at HAL airport only Jet airways has this facility).

Departure Gates

There are escalators to take passengers from level-0 to the departure lounge located in level-1. This area will have retails such as shoppers stop, crosswords etc. From the lounge the passengers will get on board through the 8 aerobridges or 9 bus bays.

Emergency services

For fire emergency BIAL has procured fire engine vehicles supplied by Rosenbauer. We were given a functional demonstration of this monster vehicle.

Arrival terminal
The most important part of the arrival section are the baggage belts. In the airport there are seven baggage belts 3 for domestic, 2 for international and 2 in swing area. The modularity of the airport facilitates to have more belts to be allocated to domestic passengers in daytime and international passenger nighttime. To start off BIAL is planning to follow the same schedule as that of HAL.

Transportation.
This is the important issue for this absurdly far airport. According to BIAL’s handout the transportation options will be

• MeruCabs and Easycabs for taxi services (fare Rs. 15 per km)
• Hertz and Akbar Travels for luxury transport services
• BMTC Vayu Vajra A/C Volvo buses (min fare Rs. 70, max fare Rs. 200)
• BMTC Suvarna non A/C buses (min fare Rs. 20, max fare Rs. 90)

Other than these there will be to and fro airport shuttles between passenger terminal and the trumpet interchange every 5 minutes.

Airport Opening
After 30 months of construction and 3 months of testing BIAL could not meet the initial deadline because of several external factors which were beyond their control. Now the AAI will be ready with ATC equipment by May 10th the new official opening date is May 11th. But due to election season there is still an uncertainty. Considering the distance factor, some people are proposing to retain commercial operations at HAL airport. But this proposal has taken a backseat partially after Deccan herald has reported that the travel to current HAL airport is not really an easy task.

Thinking one level above all these it is better to transfer operations from HAL to BIA gradually, especially considering the congestion happened after opening of Bangkok’s new Survanabhumi Airport recently due to many technical/non-technical reasons, because of this some operations have to be shifted back to the old airport. I hope this situation is not repeated in Bangalore.

Tickets priced at Rs.200 are available for sale at RangaShankara, Crossword(Residency Road) and Landmark(Forum).

Tickets can also be blocked at www.evam.in

For details contact 0-98402-22363 / 0-98406-12333.

Four prominent personalities associated with Kannada in Computer/Internet addressed the gathering.

Dr. U.B. Pavajana. Former scientist at Bhaba Atomic Research Center, now editor of world’s first online Kannada magazine Vishwa Kannada. He shared his experiences about his work for the usage of Kannada in computer field. He shared many anecdotes right from Eureka moment when he successfully e-mailed the word namaskara in Kannada script. In later part of the talk he stressed the need for more developments w.r.t to Kannada in the field of information technology. The tools used by major newspaper houses are still not Kannada Unicode complaint. There is a need for development of Kannada in the field of DBMS, natural language processing and in open source software such as gimp, scriber etc. Also there should be a standard vocabulary for translating technical terms from English to Kannada. Finally he concluded the talk by saying that we should all work in cooperative manner leaving behind our ego.

Hariprasad Nadig. Creator of online community sampada.net, has worked a lot for supporting Kannada in open source platform. He is the man behind starting Wikipedia in Kannada. Addressing the audience he mentioned that there is a need for development in Kannada in the following areas – social networking sites like orkut, standard spell checker, online advertisement(Adwords) in Kannada. Even though there are more than 300 Kannada blogs but there is hardly a blog dedicated to scientific and technological articles.

Abdul Rasheed. Creator of kendasampige.com talked about his experience in creating the site. Later he talked about the contents in Kannada blogs. Many Kannada bloggers limit themselves to literary thoughts and stay in comfort zone. Since there are more than 2.5 lakh BSNL broadband subscribers in Karnataka, atleast 50 percent of them will be interested in reading Kannada blogs, so let’s not restrict ourselves literary articles.

The final talk of the day was by S. K. Shyamshankar, editor of thatskannada.com. He shared his experiences of being a journalist in the Kannada internet magzine for 8 years. He also iterated that there are not many readers of Kannada articles because there are no authentic articles based on everyday life which connects to the common man. The future growth of internet in India will be in vernacular languages. Kannada bloggers should break the jinx and come out of kanasugara tag.

In between there was a interactive Q&A session. One of major point put across by noted Kannada writer Ki. Ram Nagaraj. He mentioned that many people speak Kannada but not all of them read and write because of complexity created by too many characters. Why can’t we have simple Kannada with no mahaprana?

To conclude, the event was a good initiative by members of Pranati. In my opinion these kinds of events have to be conducted on a regular basis so that the efforts are channelized and internet reaches to people in all strata of society. One of the positive developments atleast what I would like to see is coming up of more authentic and ‘down to earth’ Kannada posts in blogosphere.

Also read:

All the people who write, read and follow Kannada blogs have planned to meet up as per the above mentioned date, time and venue. In the program Dr. U.B Pavanaja, S. K. Shyamshankar(editor of thatskannada.com) and Hariprasad Nadig(of sampada.net) will be present.

Source:
ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬ್ಲಾಗಿಗಳ ಸಮ್ಮಿಲನ
ಬಾರಿಸುವ ಕನ್ನಡ ಡಿ೦ಡಿಮ…

Please find the route map of the venue here.