This week started with a small Preamble Printing event at Lamakaan on the occassion of Ambedkar Jayanthi. Vinay came to Hyderabad a couple of weeks ago and left preamble printing screens here. He parceled Telugu and Urdu screens of preamble as well. We printed about 100 preambles in 3 languages (English, Telugu and Urdu). We were excited to see the Telugu copy of the preamble!
A few friends asked me what the purpose of this printing is. I’ll quote what Swami Vivekananda talked about symbols.
In the polarised climate, I found Constitution as the only symbol to meet people with differing ideologies on a common ground. It is neither necessary nor compulsory. This symbol helped me meet Dr Gogu Shyamala garu, a prominent writer and a Dalit Feminist. Here is she printing her copy of the preamble.
An artist friend who frequents Lamakaan quietly saw our work from the shadows and surprised me with this.
I was with that bent posture throughout the day and hurt my back. So, I laid back and watched a Japanese movie - “Perfect Days”. It is a slice of life movie of an old toilet cleaner in Tokyo. I generally don’t enjoy slice of life movies and neither did I enjoy this. It is slow and tested my patience. But for some reason it stayed with me. I wanted to write what I felt about it and a friend suggested that I can journal it on Letterboxd, built for this purpose. You can read my entry here.
This movie also closely resembles a short story - ఒక రోజు వెళ్ళిపోయింది - in Amaravati Kathalu. Trivikram once spoke about this story.
ఏ తప్పు చెయ్యకుండా బ్రతకడం అంత తేలిక కాదు - త్రివిక్రమ్ శ్రీనివాస్ అమరావతి కథలు
I completed George Orwell’s 1984. It is a very nice read and a good showcasing of Orwell’s principles of clear writing that he wrote in his essay - Politics and the English Language. This is a summary of it:
1984 is Orwell’s imagination of what a totalitarian regime can be. Very relevant today as well. My review on goodreads.