Firstly, let us remember the victims of 9/11. Let us wish that the world leaders gather enough sense and courage to fight the root cause of terrorism, and not just resort to paranoiac ways like “racial profiling”. Like they say do not attribute malice to that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity. We are living in interestingly stupid times. Stupidity is addictive. So is paranoia. We should fight both. Unsurprisingly, there are posts on 9/11. Satish Kumar writes about his experiences on that fateful morning. It was a picture perfect day and he was working in his office 5 miles away from the Pentagon. Well, and then, a lot has happened in the world. In America. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. Everywhere. On a side note, it is interesting that hardly anybody talks about the other historically important thing that happened on 9/11, exactly a hundred years ago: The birth of Satyagraha. Jeevishivu offers a lot of losely knit, yet very insightful, views on his reading of a short story anthology by the young Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag. The anthology is called “mattobbana samsaara” (literally, Another Man's Family). He is specially concerned with the questions that one of the stories – “saravana services” – raises in him. He says the story explores the bigger relationship of an “India” with a “modern world”, by engaging the reader to seemingly ordinary contemporary incidents and interpersonal relationships. Although this is not novel in the Kannada (or any other) short story tradition, the story is outstanding due to its completeness in depicting the writer's intent. Since I have also read the anthology a couple of months ago, I can say Shivu is making a lot of sense. An important “young” Kannada poet turns er.. old. Well, his age. B R Lakshmanarao turned 60. It does seem quite a wonder to Sriram, like it seems to many others. He is known as a romantic poet, a naughty poet, a popular poet, an evergreen poet, a “cassette” poet – a lot of his poems are fairly popular songs, and it is said he mainly writes to quickly convert his poetry to cassettes. An important poet nonetheless. Sudarshan has an interaction with the renowned Kannada short story writer Raghavendra Patil in Patil's house in Malladihalli, a small village in Chitradurga district, central Karnataka. He, along with Chandrashekhar Talya, a well known poet, talks about many a thing. For example, “why did Allama come to Sharana Movement?”. Patil says this: “The Indian cultural history has an ongoing process of a dialectic that constrains any argument, say material vs metaphysical, from reigning on extremes. Therefore, in order to bring in a philosophical radiance to the Sharana movement, which under the leadership of Basavanna, could have turned merely a social struggle, Allama had to join the movement.” (translated) Allama and Basavanna are two of the important vachanakaras who lived in the 16th centure CE. A vachana (or vacana) is a lyric that imbibed timeless philosophical/social concerns and expressed them in layman terms. Vachanakaras helped in unleashing and disseminating knowledge, which was until then mainly confined to Sanskrit or “non-layman” Kannada. Allama was perhaps the most important of them. A brief bio of Allama and a few of his translated vachanas. I wish Allama is extensively translated and read. They also talk about the unhappy situation of the drift between the fields of literature (arts, for that matter) and technology. Also about post modernist concerns in Patil's works and the new Kannada poetry. Patil won the Central Sahitya Academy award for his novel Teru (literally, The Holy Chariot). Incidentally, he is my uncle and Malladihalli is one of my homes. So there. Dr. K. Ayyappa Panicker died recently, on 23rd August 2006. He was a Malayalam poet, critic, and a scholar of great repute. Dr. U R Ananthamurthy writes a memoir to Ayyappa Panicker with who he shared a very special friendship. His article gives not just a his personal view of his relationship with Dr. Panicker, but also the flow of creativity and thoughts across Bhasha writers (regional language writers). The likes of O V Vijayan, Panicker, Govindan, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Ananthamurthy belonged to the “creative monority” non-community. Noteworhty is another English post with a provocative title, India of the Rich & Bharat of the Poor. An excerpt below. A lot of scope for debate here. These days in expensive private schools the children of the rich don't have an opportunity to expand their experience by coming to know of the rich life and culture of the poor of this country. This will create two countries, the India of the rich and the Bharath of the Poor.