Kodaikanal Gandhi Prize: The Awards

The Kodaikanal Gandhi Prize: The Awards

Out of Print was in Kodaikanal at the end of February to participate in the award ceremony for the first edition of the Kodaikanal Gandhi Prize. The ceremony took place at the Kodaikanal International School. What a privilege it was to be on their campus with its charming architecture and glorious old trees and meet the many school children who had sent in their work for the prize.

The prize, that was initiated by Radha Kumar and instituted jointly by the Gandhi Peace Foundation, the Kodaikanal Fellowship Library and Out of Print, was open to school children in grades 10, 11 and 12 who had to submit either a written or multimedia presentation in English or Tamil on one or more of the following themes:

 

·      Are Gandhi's thoughts and actions relevant today? If yes, in which ways?  If not, why not?

·      Gandhi said non-violence is a weapon of the strong. Many say it is a weapon of the weak. What do you think, and why?

·      Gandhi’s philosophy of truth in practice led to India's motto, Satyameva Jayate. What meaning does it have in an era of fake news?

The students were provided with selected readings from Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj and The Story of My Experiments with Truth and encouraged to engage in their own research as well.

There were close to 200 registrations and approximately 115 submissions.

The first prize was secured by Ishita Pandey from the Kodaikanal International School for her essay ‘Gandhiji’s Philosophies in Today’s World’

Two second prizes were awarded. Mansur Ali Jurabi of Bhavan School received a prize for his multimedia presentation and B. Archana of St. Xavier’s School for her essay in Tamil.

Out of Print is privileged to have the opportunity to publish the prize winners in English on the Out of Print blog.

The Prize-winning Works:

First Prize: Ishita Pandey, ‘Gandhiji’s Philosophies in Today’s World’, essay

Second Prize: Mansur Ali Jurabi, The Mahathma, multimedia presentation

Interviews:

In late October 2019, Out of Print had the opportunity to ask Radha Kumar who initiated the prize a few questions about her motivation behind setting it up. Here is the link to that conversation.

The Hindu, Tamil edition announces the prizewinners

The Hindu, English edition announces the prizewinners

Awards: Out of Print Author and Guest Editor, Annie Zaidi, Awarded

Annie Zaidi has won the US $100,000 Nine Dots Prize for 2019-2020.

The intention of the prize is to encourage innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues and Zaidi’s entry ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’ explores concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India. A book she will develop, based on her Nine Dots Prize-winning essay will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2020. The book will examine how a citizen’s sense of ‘home’ might collapse, or be recovered. Themes it will address include:

·     The politics and economics of death in India, and how the physical performance of last rites for the dead can lead to a sense of dislocation and the unmooring of living citizens

·     How industrial townships are created on the back of a series of dislocations, and what this means for citizens’ relationships to the land

·     The crossing of caste and religious lines in marriage, and the abuse of political power to violently disrupt or prevent the mixing of bloodlines

·     The Partition of India as a great cultural and emotional sundering, ultimately triggering an aggressive nationalism that seeks a negative self-definition rather than a positive one

·     The struggle to belong to a city when it changes in all recognisable forms, even down to its name, and when it is stripped of all the original springs of cultural affinity

Zaidi has been part of the Out of Print family, published stories in Out of Print and worked as a guest editor on the special Urdu edition of the magazine, and we wanted to take a moment to congratulate her on this exciting achievement. 

When we reached out to her, she was kind enough to send us a beautiful poem, a sonnet, that explores the meaning of roads that lead … to home, to Rome. So, in celebration, we share this with our readers. 

Sonnet 4: R/h/ome.

All the roads that lead to Rome
started out wanting to twist away
from any place that smelled like home
or any face that bade them stay.

All roads bleed out of arms
wrenched free of cradle nights,
taped down with screaming tar
and fringed about with fairy lights.

All the roads that led to you 
were paved with shards of broken sleep.
You were walking barefoot too:
How's it you failed to bleed?

Ah, twisted wends, yet twisting home.
All these roads besieging Rome.

(C) Annie Zaidi

Links to Zaidi's stories and to the special Urdu edition she edited with Out of Print:

Sujatha in Out of Print 5, 2011.

The story follows a young woman confronted with violence who will go to all lengths to survive.

Inverter in Out of Print 16, 2014

The protagonist establishes a silent connection with a person who lives across the street, a delicious, seductive connection. Layers of social norms come in to play as the narrative weaves in and out of the darkness of summer power outages in Kanpur.

Out of Print 28, 2017

Short story writing in Urdu, called 'afsana-nigari', is just over a century old. The literary cannon in this genre includes names like Premchand, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Qurratulain Hyder, Krishan Chander, Naiyer Masud, and of course, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai. 

The 28th issue of Out of Print, devoted to Urdu short fiction translated into English, features a selection of fine stories chosen by Zaidi.