fouzia dastango

'Bagh-o-Bahaar'-- a poetry performance by Dr Rakhshanda Jalil, Kasturika Mishra, and fouzia dastango was a treat to the audience at Times LitFest 2023, which was held in Delhi recently.

The first edition of three-day Udaipur Tales Festival kicked off Friday in Gulab Bagh here.

The legendary Urdu-Persian poet Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) must be smiling from heaven. Immensely talented and widely popular, Ghalib never took himself seriously. He saw the world as a bazeecha-e-atfal (children's playground) where tamasha (play of life) was enacted every day.

Through the Courtesan Project, artistes Manjari Chaturvedi, fouzia dastango and Neesha Singh are telling the lost stories of the tawaifs, who weren’t ‘sex workers’ or ‘nachnewalis’ as they are popularly misconstrued to be, but celebrated artistes, ‘feminists and liberals of their time’

Last week, a 90-minute performance called Uff Malka Jaan and The Velvet Courtesans brought alive the stories of courtesans on a Gurgaon stage.

On Sunday, Gurugrammers got together and took a stand against violence and said no to hatred through a #NotInMyName protest at the Leisure Valley Ground.

The country is locked down due to the pandemic, but some initiatives to keep people engaged and positive are coming up one of which is a two-day Virtual Literature Festival being organised on Instagram by Anurag Chauhan, a literary and arts impresario.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s (before he achieved fame), Jack Kerouac would frequent the jazz bars of Harlem, New York. These haunts were no-go areas for white folks, but the rhythms coming out of them held Kerouac spellbound.