[Reader-list] [Announcements] Launch of Trickster City

[Mitoo Das]

*The launch of Trickster City
at CSDS Lawns, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi on 12th February, 2010, at 4.15 PM*
The authors and the translator will introduce the book.

(The book is available at the Penguin Stall at the World Book Fair, Delhi)

*TRICKSTER CITY *(Penguin, India, 2010)

*Authors *
Azra Tabassum, Jaanu Nagar, Lakhmi Chand Kohli, Rakesh Khairalia, 
Yashoda Singh, Kiran Verma, Suraj Rai, Neelofar, Kulwinder Kaur, 
Shamsher Ali, Babli Rai, Ankur Kumar, Dilip Kumar, Love Anand, Nasreen, 
Rabiya Quraishy, Sunita Nishad, Saifuddin, Arish Qureshi, Tripan Kumar

*Translated by Shveta Sarda*

Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on the city of 
Delhi. They were written over a period of two years by a group of twenty 
young people who live in different places in the city of Delhi, and who 
have, over the last several years, sustained among themselves and with 
others around them, a relationship of writing and conversing about the 
city.

This book chronicles the difficult period of loss of home and livelihood 
in the city through urban eviction, encounters with the agencies of the 
state, love stories gone awry, the fragility of relationships, and the 
sustained effort to build life in anticipation of beauty and pleasure.

The writers draw from experiences, events and biographies, part fictive, 
part documentary, to inscribe an image of the city that is rarely 
available. There is a yearning in their writings for the expression of 
the poetic and allegorical alongside the harshness of everyday existence.

Trickster City is an aphoristic and playful meander by writers in search of
a new language that expresses the profound uncertainties and delicately 
realised joys of life in the city.

All the writers are are in their twenties, and live in neighbourhoods 
across the city, including LNJP colony in Central Delhi, Dakshinpuri in 
South Delhi and Sawda-Ghevra, a new resettlement colony at the northern 
frontier of the city. They have been associated for different durations 
with the Cybermohalla labs set by up Ankur Society for Alternatives in 
Education and Sarai--CSDS in different neighbourhoods in Delhi.

The translator Shveta Sarda works in Sarai-CSDS since 2001.

*ADVANCE PRAISE for Trickster City*
Trickster City is a groundbreaking collection of writings about the 
South Asian city, its authors so free in their intelligence and 
imagination that they put conventional, pious analysis to shame---and 
demonstrate, ultimately, that even the most pressing material 
circumstances can never constrain the kind of intelligence that lives in 
them.
---*Rana Dasgupta*

The thumbnail sketches, vignettes, stories and testimonies here invoke 
an urban landscape that is only partly outside us. The chaos, 
uncertainties and contradictions are us, as we negotiate the city as an 
overwhelming, inescapable inner reality in twenty-first century India. 
The Trickster City may well be a lovable but impossible part of our selves.
---*Ashis Nandy*

Trickster City is the gentle, compassionate anti-dote to the mass of 
mail-fisted representations of the 'under-class' that has become so 
popular these days. The writers that make up this collection are almost 
amazing in their restraint, their ability to distil that perfect moment 
that conjures up the times they live in. Story after story evokes the 
ways in which people keep love alive while a kind of terror, the terror 
of being poor in a cruel city, lurks offstage, just a midnight knock away.
If you put your ear to this book you will be able to hear people 
breathing, if you touch it, you will be able to feel their fragile, but 
furious pulse. If you read this book, you will be greatly rewarded.
---*Arundhati Roy*

This book is a reflection of the experiences, thoughts, ideas and 
aspirations of the underbelly of the metropolis. These writings have 
precision of thought and an optimistic determination, which looks at the 
future with hope, courage and patience. The portrayal of modest 
experience is matter of fact and the insights have a wisdom that only 
experience can bring and no amount of education or knowledge can impart.
---*Krishna Sobti*

*Trickster City can be bought online: *
http://www.indiaplaza.in/books/9780670083329.htm

*See also:*
http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/public-dialogue/books/trickster-city

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