Shall be back soon and blogging over the weekend. Meanwhile the big news is that Black Light is nearly ready to go to press, and should have done so before I get back. We ought therefore to make our publication deadline of 31 July and get copies to bookshops by the middle of August. This is in spite of dodgy broadband, gouging phone rates and the bloody World Cup. Yay! Oh, and conferences, those great cold fronts of creativity.
I’m going to be in Oxford and London till the 9th of July, so blogging will be irregular, or at any rate without pictures for now.
I will be launching Tuhin A. Sinha’s Of Love and Politics on 25 June at Oxford Bookstore.
Kolkata launch of Of Love and Politics
Not many people know that the Indian Copyright Act of 1957 amended 1994 is under review again. Kapil Sibal has introduced a Bill to amend it, which is at present with a Rajya Sabha Standing Committee headed by Oscar Fernandes. Citizens were asked to give their feedback from May 20 to May 30, but lots of people said that was too short a time so opinions are still being taken. It took me a lot of hunting on the net to find the text of the new bill. It’s in the form of a commentary ont he old bill, so I’m posting them both here so you can compare them
Indian Copyright Act 1957 (annotated with amendments till 1994)
Indian Copyright Amendment Bill 2010
A publisher mailed me to say they were worried because this Bill will remove territoriality. Territoriality is where the government preferentially taxes or regulates books from abroad to protect local business. Cheaper foreign books means more competition for Indian publishers, and may or may not be a good thing. I looked through the Bill but couldn’t find any provision that bears on this issue. I’m no legal eagle but I’m guessing it would have to be an amendment to section 40 as that deals with copyright in foreign works. If anyone can make sense of this please tell me.
On 5 June 2010 we lost Anjan Ghosh to cancer. Anjan was my colleague at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences where he was the one everyone went to when they had problems. He was an easygoing, lovable, endearingly lazy person who loved to spend hours in the canteen feeding Parthada lines to make him tell his wonderful stories about the pecadilloes of senior academics. Every year he would show us a slide show of the pictures and videos of Calcutta’s Durga Puja that he had taken as part of a project he was working on with other Centre faculty on how the Puja had changed over the years. I had lost touch a bit after joining JU as class hours don’t make it easy to attend the 3pm seminars at the centre, but I would meet him here and there. Sometimes he would come to JU because his daughter Ragini was studying with us.
He was diagnosed suddenly; I spoke to him on the phone when he was in hospital after his first chemo. He was optimistic. I cautioned him to be careful as his immunity would drop. Then, a few days later, he succumbed to a lung infection.
He’s going to be missed.
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