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Director sahib, Karnad "IT is good to be offered a job at an age when everyone else is leaving work," comments renowned artiste Girish Karnad with a smile playing on his lips. "My initial reaction was to reject the offer as I was totally out of practise in a job situation. The last job I held was about 25 years ago as Director, Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. Besides, who needs a salaried job at this stage in life?," says the man who has wrote and produced such masterpieces as Tuglaqh, Yayati and Nagamandala and has won the Jnanpith Award for his life-long contribution to literature.
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Another feather in the cap! Nearer home, well-known
educationist Lata Vaidyanathan has bagged the Sibling rivalry To an
"Eyewitness" there is ‘’My Own
Witness. Or is it vice versa? Whatever, the first has
been penned by Ira Pande and the latter by Mrinal Pande.
Daughters of much-respected Hindi writer Gaura Pant
Shivani, the two started to chart out Ira, who is younger to Mrinal, too gave up the cushy life of a bureaucrat’s wife and dabbled in serials and talk-shows. She has now joined an Anglo-American publishing group which is into publishing books on tribal life. She has also come out with a series of books under the title Eyewitness which are accounts of "exotic" cities like Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Shivani, who herself was quite a prolific writer, must be quite happy to have such book-churners in her family. More lite on socialites At a recent party, a socialite told a gentleman that she had recently come across a study which indicated that housewives use on an average only 15,000 words a day while "socially active" women use over 30,000 words a day. She explained that possibly the latter category of women had to use twice as many words as they had to repeat everything that they said. The gentleman looked at her distractedly and said, "What?" — Belu Maheshwari |
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Karnad would be leaving shortly for
England to take up the directorship of the Nehru Centre
in London. Actually, he was offered the job two years
back by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. He was
not very keen and the issue was put on the backburner.
The proposal was revived again last year "and I
thought of the challenge that running the Nehru Centre
would entail and said yes." Karnad is not worried
about problems which his own left-of- Centre leaning may
create vis-a vis the rightist BJP government. "My
position is not political. Although the Nehru Centre
functions as the cultural wing of the Indian High
Commission, I do not report to the government." He
is keen to foster Indo-British cultural ties and
returning to a city in which he spent his Rhodes
scholarship years, 1960-63.
principalship of the prestigious
Modern School, New Delhi. The coveted post was offered to
her in recognition of her outstanding leadership
qualities and her innovative approach to teaching and
learning. Lata was perhaps the youngest Principal of
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chandigarh, where in less than a
decade she made a name for herself. When the Eicher Group
started a school in Parwanoo, she was picked up to head
it. She built it up from scratch and the reputation that
the school enjoys today is largely on account of her hard
work. Says Lata, "Vidya Bhavan gave me a philosophy
of life and Eicher the values to practise it." She
has recently released a series of five books for children
in nursery classes. The books are basically worksheets
aimed at developing linguistic, cognitive and other
skills of young children.
their own individual course after
many years of matrimony. Mrinal joined print journalism
and edited a couple of prestigious publications before
joining the television bandwagon. She quit the
high-profile job when she realised that step-motherly
treatment was reserved for the vernacular press. Her book
on the goings-on in the world of media has become highly
controversial on account of the swipes that she has taken
at some of her colleagues and their attitude towards the
non English media.