Friday 16 January 2015

Why do children need stories?

Stories help Children make sense of the world: Samina Mishra



Writer and film maker Samina Mishra from Delhi strongly recommended the need for study of literature and art in school curricula in the country, while addressing the Chandigarh Literary Society (CLS) at ‘Meet the Author’ programme here today at the UT Guest House.
Samina, who is a part of Scholastic India’s programme, Storytelling Night, and UNESCO’s Travelling Literature Festival, Ghummakad Narain, shared her work she is doing with the children from lower middle segment of the society around the country.
Stories, she said, are important for the children to make sense of their their homes, their neighbourhood, and their surroundings and learn to express themselves through different media, whether it is images, text or sound.
With the availability of variety of media to the young generation today, they need to be told the stories of both positivies and not so good part of the happenings around them so as to have a better understanding. She shared her experience of working with children in the walled city of Delhi and areas referred to as Muslim ghetto, and conducted art and writing workshop with children there, out of which has emerged soon-to-be-published book, ‘Come, Walk Through Our Streets”.
Having been awarded the Sea Change Residency by the Gaea Foundation of USA for her works, Samina Mishra shared clips from her documentaries on girl child which she shot in Punjab as part of UNICEF project, “Stories of Girlhood”, and “I found My Way to School”.
Large number of writers from the city interacted with her including Vivek Atray, Deputy Commissioner Panchkula,  CLS Secretary Madhav Kaushik, Suparna Saraswati Puri, Saguna Jain, Manju Jaidka, CJ Singh, Hardeep Chandpuri, etc.

Thursday 15 January 2015

An Author Deserves to be Known

In order to create a community of creative people in the literary domain, Chandigarh Literary Society (CLS) has initiated the drive to build a database of authors in Chandigarh, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.


CLS has initiated the process of inviting authors to share information about their published works and their profiles with the readers through facebook, and we do hope to make CLS a more strong platform to encourage interactions and creative writings. 

You as an author are special. You are the one who has gone through the grind of spending hours to pen down your thoughts and opinions and shape the throughts of your readers...and new dimensions and perspective to the world we live in.

So go ahead, and share your profile.  Enter it here: http://goo.gl/forms/xpTBTEqgcq.

The World of Image, Sound and Text

THE WAY OF STORIES: The World of Image, Sound and Text

Meet the prolific writer and documentary maker from Delhi, Samina Mishra. CLS has scheduled an interactive session with her on 16th January at 5:00pm at the UT Guest House.

Samina Mishra, an alumnus of St Stephens College, Delhi University, who did her Mass Communications at the Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

She works as a documentary filmmaker, writer, facilitator/teacher and sound recordist, and has a special interest in media for children.

Her films include Two Lives (2007), The House on Gulmohar Avenue (2005) and Stories of Girlhood (2001). Her short stories The Goat That Got Away, Looking Through Glass and The House At The Corner have appeared in anthologies by Scholastic, The Wisdom Tree and Penguin.

Look forward to meeting you.