Zac O'Yeah, Anjum Hasan to toast the bond between Bengaluru and its people

About a fortnight ago in Bengaluru, Anita Nair, author, sat in front of a small audience, telling them about the time she went around visiting the city’s police stations, reportedly drinking the same kind of tea and eating the same brand of cake. 
 
The tea-and-cake story was from the time Nair was doing groundwork for her Inspector Gowda detective series, Cut Like Wound and Chain of Custody. Nair shared the anecdote during a conversation with children’s book author Radhika Chadha. This talk was part of a series, “Speaking of the City”.
 
The series is curated by writer couple Anjum Hasan and Zac O’Yeah. “The general idea is to have a regular talk where people can come together and listen to interesting city-based creative people talking about their relationship to Bengaluru,” says O’Yeah, creator of the Hari Majestic detective series.

 

(With Majestic being a central bus and train station in Bengaluru, O’Yeah’s crime fiction books featuring Hari are based in Bengaluru too. Zac O’Yeah is the author’s pen name: the name on his passport remains shrouded in mystery.)
 
“So many people continue to pour into Bangalore (Bengaluru) but we don’t have enough thought and work on the city,” says Hasan. A poet, novelist and writer of short stories, Hasan has roots in Shillong, but Bengaluru is now her home, much like it is in O’Yeah’s case.
 
The series itself is an extension of “Bangalore’s World-Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Program,” a course designed to hone creative writing skills conceptualised by the couple. The writing course has found a home at Shoonya, an arts and theatre centre on Lalbagh Road. Since the time the talk series kicked off last July, a majority of the talks have also been held at Shoonya.

 
One of the first speakers, Ramachandra Guha remembers talking with an intimate audience partly about his writing and partly about his relationship with the city. “I am a fourth generation Bengalurean. I spoke about how sometimes there’s a question of whether you belong to a city if you don’t have the same mother tongue as other inhabitants, like maybe Gujarati or Parsi-speakers in Mumbai,” says Guha.
 
His relationship continues to be marked by a mention of his favourite haunts, like Koshy’s Parade Café, bookshops that have long shut shop, and a fierce loyalty to the Karnataka cricket team.

 
“Any literary event by a writer who writes about the city he or she has an affinity with immortalises the city,” says Nair. Though the series did start out by conversations with writers including Vivek Shanbhag (of the fascinating Ghachar Ghochar), and Maya Jayapal (a historian too), among others, the plan is to rope in people from different walks of life.
 
“Writers have told us about their remarkably creative relationships to this city and how they view it, how it inspires them, how it affects their writing. Historians have talked about their research into the city’s past and how that is entangled with their own pasts,” says O’Yeah. “We’re also planning to bring in architects and actors, designers and chefs, and anybody who can help listeners understand the city better.”

 
Scheduled to be a monthly feature, barring a period of the summer break, the talks have freewheeling formats. They are presently funded by the curators and are free for the audience.
 
“We are sort of struggling to manage and market. But it is worth it,” says O’Yeah.
 
The talks are recorded.  In due time, they will form an online archive of podcasts that people can go to in the future if they are looking for perspectives of Bengaluru. “I don’t think we can cover all aspects of the city,” says Hasan, but what this series can do is contribute to the narrative of the city. “Contribution is important too,” she says. Zac O’Yeah will be in conversation with journalist Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed on March 18. For event details, write to info@shoonyaspace.com