Anveshi - Research Centre for Women's Studies

This is a conversation which took place a few months ago.  Posting it since there is so much on other websites.  Sort of keeping up!  Hope you enjoy it, and do add.

Subject: A conversation about corruption

I am reproducing here an FAQ about nuclear power that I had written two years ago for Kannabiran and which was probably translated into Telugu.

Frequently Asked Questions about Nuclear Power

Dear Friends,

Ravinder is the senior most member of presently working staff in Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies. As the single male staffer his presence is a relief for all of us, as his services are very useful and necessary. Ravinder personally feels that he has learned a lot of skilled library work from Anveshi founder librarian T.S.S.Lakshmi in the early 1990s and enjoys his work.

In 2007 three students from a German University visited Anveshi and wrote about their experience in India for their University bulletin. The photo reproduced here is an illustration for their write up.

This is the text of a conversation about blasphemy and bigotry that took place a while ago.  I am posting it for further discussion and intervention:

Anveshi’s quiet and self-effacing librarian, L.V. Lakshmi, has a keen interest in computerization of the library system.  She has played a key role in implementing our new on-line catalogue and currently is troubleshooting the new version of the SOUL software.  She is also at work on an M.Phil thesis in Library and Information Science, on an area of vital importance to research in women’s studies, , i.e., unpublished documents, technically referred to as “grey literature.”  She is collating the grey literature in women’s studies available in Hyderabad libraries and will suggest how access to it can be improved.

She has an engaged relationship with her two children for who she is clearly a friend as well as a mother. Both Shyam (14) and daughter, Keerthi (12) are lively presences in their school, and favourites in Anveshi. Both are keenly interested in the arts, especially in theatre.  Shyam has already played a role in a feature film.   Lakshmi’s husband, GLN, is a cinema buff and is one of a handful of experts in Telugu cinema.   Right now the family is looking forward to playing host to a German boy, Amos, who is coming on an exchange visit and will study in Shyam’s class at school.

This is how Lakshmi would like to describe herself:

Srinivas Vellikad is a friend who has been associated with Anveshi since the past several years.  He was instrumental in establishing an early version of the library software.  Since the past year Srinivas has been working pro bono with the Anveshi library catalog and has found a way to put it successfully on line.  He has collaborated with Lakshmi, Adley and Srivats in a fairly complex coordination between the Library software, the web site software, the available freeware on the web to complete this task.  To see the results please click on Library in the menu on the left, and then click on Catalog.

It has been a pleasure to work with Seenu and we hope to continue this association in the future.

Seenu would like to describe himself as follows:

Tracking Telangana…..

Tracking Telangana is an effort to go behind the scenes of the current Telangana movement. Reasons or outcome apart, this movement is extremely fascinating for its mass democratic character. Distinguished by wide ranging and active participation of diverse sections of  population – farmers, lawyers, students, employees, women, Muslims, caste groups, professionals, this a moment in which different kinds of injuries and aspirations are being articulated through the notion of a ‘regional inequality’. One is witnessing the process of ‘Telangana’ itself acquiring a history, identity and cultural integrity. Dalits, a strong presence in several forums, are contending that Telangana’s culture is a ‘Sabbanda culture’ that is predominantly non-Sanskritic or un-Hindu. The Muslimness of Telangana is being rediscovered and rearticulated. Nizam is no longer a pariah, nor the questions of Police action and Muslim repression in this region are. Long suppressed in nationalist and communist histories, Muslims in the movement are demanding that their presence, contribution and rights be acknowledged. Backward caste and Dalit Students of Osmania University, faced with bleak employment scenario of the liberalized/globalized world are asking, what is wrong in loosing a year, when their entire future is at stake!

Tracking Telangana, aimed at English readership, brings forth different voices in the Telangana movement – through pamphlets, interviews, news reports, fact-finding reports, poems, photographs, impressions and so on. This is an open group where people can post their opinions, share other posts and links.
Tracking Telangana has been created as a separate forum under Google Groups to help organize the discussion independently.

Go to Forum

This is a forum for sharing notes about Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) based on a reading of the hypertext resource available at www.hegel.net.  Inevitably, the reading will involve references to his Science of Logic, to Phenomenology, and to commentators like Marx, Lenin, C.L.R.James, Erdmann, Westphal, and others.

It has been set up as a separate Google Group because it is organized as a structure that follows the table of contents of the volume.

Go to forum

Adley Siddiqi is our honorary consultant who has taken charge of the Anveshi website -- very decisively and nicely since the past two years.  The website was designed by him in collaboration with Jayasree Kalathil (in London) and with Vasudha and Lakshmi Kutty (at Anveshi, Hyderabad) who painstakingly put together the write ups and descriptions from different sources.  Adley has the habit of goading us into action on the website -- and that is a good thing, since we tend to sit around on non-top-priority items of the agenda.  This is how Adley would like to describe himself:

Adley is famous for taking Jayasree Kalathil away from Anveshi :)  Has been working in IT for entire working life - which is a long time. Currently running a small web development company called Icreon. Half Pakistani. First got to know India whilst working as a volunteer for 2 years with an NGO in Orissa called Gram Vikas where he met Jayasree. Can usually be found lying in his hammock.