Saint Patrick's Day and no Slemish

In serious Mourning for St Paddy's

We are in mourning for St Paddy's! Especially me! There were a couple of local visitors in the Apartment tonight and we were showing them images of home - amongst those images were the Slemish pics of a few years in a row. Toraigh and Dara were asking if they could go up the next time - unfortunately that will have to be 2008. No Irish Stew, Guinness, music, honey roasted ham... Aidan Short falling out of his wheel chair and Sheamy Murph talking the leg off the table - Marty Max doing Ti Chee, and Micheal and Vinny talking real sense. Ah man! What I would give for the prospect of a St Paddy's hangover! Anyhow, I hope the sun shines and the uisce beatha flows in equal measure. Hope to hear how it all went

Hello Sheamey, good to see you are still out there. I have decided not to use a Ghandi quote as it is too easy. Beyond that, Ghandi is not very popular in Bengal and Kolkatta. A legacy of the whole partition issues with Bangladesh former East Pakistan. I am using the Bobby Sands quote, 'Our victory will be the laughter of our children'. It will be written in English and Bengali. I will accompany this with a quote from a local Bengali poet possibly Rabinandrath Tagore. Have not decided which quote to use yet but I will let you know.

Beyond that bring me back a rock from the top of Slemish or I'll put a curse on yous that'll make the potato famine look like a Sunday Regatta.

The images are of the clay base on the double helix sculpture, with the first faces being sculpted. Also a craftsman at work plus a wee boy who wants to be on TV.

There has been a city wide strike over here after the police shot dead 15 farm workers and wounded loads more. The entire city came to a complete stop in protest. The Naxalits (could be spelt wrong) a Maoist group attacked a police station in central India and shot dead at least 50 police men in a completely unconnected incident. They don't mess around in this place. Will be in touch soon. Good luck , Raymie.

A big sculpture in a medieval workshop

(click on images to enlarge)
Hello any one.. Despite everything I am working full speed ahead on my DNA Double Helix God! This first pic shows Aloke Paul, middle, and Gorum, two of the Durga craftsmen that I am working alongside. It is Aloke's workshop, about 6 ft wide and 30ft or more long and dark. These people work in circumstances that feel like they have not changed in a thousand years. Aloke and his family live in this workshop in basic conditions. They cook over an amazing primitive open fire set up half way up the workshop. On my first day I asked where the toilet was which created a ripple of amusement. Since meeting them all I can say is that they are great. Anyhow after a few days of meetings, talks and work on designs and models, and gathering raw materials (through and interpreter) we began the real hands on work a few days ago. Tomorrow (Sun) after work I am invited for dinner; I know chicken was mentioned, really looking forward to it. In this place there is no fridge and there is only one way to keep meat fresh until it is required.

Gorum comes to assist with certain elements of the work - his main speciality is the construction of the skeletal bamboo and rice straw interior of the Durga models. So he was key in the initial stages of building the strands of the Helix shape (see next image). Above we are sitting on the base. It will be completed last - Does any one know a quote from Ghandi about treasuring children? I will be inscribing quotes with those sentiments on the base.

The sculpture will be ten feet high and will be finished with clay and painted. As we work I am getting a great insight into how they construct the Gods for the Pooja (holy festivals) and what all the rituals are. My plan was to utilise the same construction methods but make something totally different and slitghly subversive - I am thankful that Aloke seems to totally get the goals of the project. Although I must say that the work is getting some curious attention from his fellow craftsmen in adjoining workshops.

The next main challenges are.. well you judge.


It has to be made.

After that I plan to get the young people at Loreto Sealdah to make artistic images to decorate the links between the strands of the Helix. Images that tie in with the theme.

I plan to sculpt the clay of the strands into faces of children and children's games.
After the whole thing is sculpted it will then be colourfullypainted.

Then it will go to the Nehru Children's Museum for a number of days and be decorated.

After this the final fling will be to take it to a tributary of the Ganges for a ceremonial immersion (as this is what happens to the Idols). The ones pictured here a fairly small scale and unpainted. When completed they will have black hair and be extremely colourful. The main God is Shiva (I think) with ten arms - nine of them will be finished carrying weapons and the tenth hand gives a blessing!

Oh yea, I forgot one other thing, I am trying to get three white fellas, to help me pull the finished sculpture through a number of street of Kolkata (Calcutta for Rajaphiles) on one of the traditional carts that seem to keep this city running. We will all be wearing 'longies', Aloke is wearing one in the first pic. It is the dress of the labouring classes.

A view from outside my new home for the next lot of weeks. That's my interpreter taking it easy. So for now, Shubar Rattri. (Good night in Bengali)

So what next for each of us

Shona's update, projects I have planned for India:

1. Setting up a Youth Leadership programme with Seagull
2. Helping to focus the Seagull Peaceworks project across schools in India
3. Presentation of my work in NI with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation
4. Heading to Singapore to work with Kentake, my Nesta co-fellow

Project 1: The Nesta placement at Seagull with Naveen Kishore. My work is always harder to explain than Raymie's but here goes. I spend my time between two of the Seagull Foundation centres. One is a publishing house where they publish an amazing selection of books, beautifully produced and on all kinds of subject matter, from art, poetry and literature to film, history, social science and politics. A fascinating range of people come through the place to discuss book projects, films, animations and there is a great creative energy. Books are edited and designed from this space so I can see the whole process. The team have made me more than welcome and there's always a great supply of coffee and chocolate. The project that I am developing with Naveen and the team in this space is a youth leadership programme. India, like everywhere else in the world right now, puts an enormous pressure on school going young people to achieve. Don't forget there are still mind boggling statistics of young people without access to any education. Parental pressure to achieve and work your way to a good paying corporate job is enormous.

So I am tasked with developing a programme that gives young graduates and post graduates a chance to pursue other options before they make their minds up about their futures. Seagull have come up with an idea called Choice funded by the Ford Foundation and I am developing it as a programme to place graduate students into internships of anything between 3 months and one year, all of the placements will be with organisations who are in some way working in the development sector to create better quality of lives for their fellow human beings.

Right now I am meeting with NGOs, organisations working in health, disability, child poverty, trafficking, women's rights, education, arts, and more to get a sense of what kind of young person, with what kind of skills, working on what kind of project, would be of benefit to them. Later I will do a call for young people (18-25 yr olds) who are interested in interning, and the real task will be to ensure the right fit so that both the hosting organisations and the young people going to work with them have a mutually beneficial experience. Ultimately it may even result in some of the brightest young people setting up their own social enterprises...
It is a great project to be working on and much needed to develop new young leaders for India's future, but much is still to be done so it's a busy time.

Project 2: I spend the other half of my time at another of Seagull's Centres. An Arts and Media resource centre with an excellent archive of books, films, music, photographs and artworks. It also houses a gallery with a new exhibition each month. From here the team run arts and education programmes in schools. One of their major initiatives called Peaceworks arose as a response to the Gujarat genocide in 2002, where almost 3,000 Muslim people were murdered by Hindu nationalists. India prides itself on being a secular society and the shock of what happened in Gujarat provoked many into a proactive response. At Seagull they embarked on an ambitious programme to try and raise awareness and interactive activities that underline the core values of living in peace in schools across the subcontinent. Many interesting initiatives and resources have been developed through this programme with artists, theatre groups, film-makers working with young people in schools. They have published a book of young people's peace poems, embarked on major kites for peace project, conducted visits to Pakistan and now a call for peace stories for a new publication.

With continuing conflicts on many of its internal borders, as well as the ongoing violent conflict with Pakistan, and secularism in India under constant threat, this is a vitally important project.
As with any risk-taking project with such a huge ambition Peaceworks has had its successes, but also been fraught with difficulties in terms of its reach and impact.
It has a great team and excellent resources and my task is to work with them to develop a long-term and developmental plan for the project that can be delivered in the short and long-term. No small task, but we begin in earnest this Monday by coming together as a team to start to map out a plan. It has a long way to go, but from humble beginnings.......

Project 3:
One of the things I do at home, along with business partner Frances Macklin through our company Rubyblue, is find good projects for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to fund. Over the last 4 years we have supported many excellent projects in rural and urban areas that give young people the chance to develop through innovative arts activities. This week I had the real privilege of seeing presentations on all the work that the Paul Hamlyn Foundation fund in India, from improving the rights of rag pickers in Delhi to supporting the impoverished children of migrant workers and prosititutes; women's empowerment programmes in Rajasthan and peace building programmes in Gujarat. In turn I presented on PHF's work in NI with young people in a post-conflict society. Although the context and focus is different, it was really interesting to see how many of the same issues emerge. A struggle for governmental recognition for this kind of voluntary sector work, always a battle for funding, uncertainties about the future, concerns about whether any of it really makes a difference.
The Paul Hamlyn Foundation have asked me to carry out research for them during my time here so I will be involved in an ongoing exchange with organisations across India looking at creative approaches to helping young people who are excluded from access to basic human rights. You can only be humbled by both the dedication and the scale of the difficulties people working in this area face here in India, I have no doubt that I have more to learn than offer. It will be a real challenge to draw together useful research in a short time frame but I am passionate about the task, will encounter amazing people and projects along the way.........

Project 4:
As part of the Nesta fellowship we are each assigned a co-mentor or fellow. I am delighted to be working with Kentake Chinyelu Hope who has completed her placement at the Science Centre in Singapore. We are all committed to doing a presentation of our findings in the host country once the placement is completed. Kentake is doing hers next week in Singapore, so I'm off on Monday to Singapore for a different adventure and can't wait to hear about the work she has been doing, in an area that is unfamiliar turf for me. So I will come back from that experience with a story to tell......

Holi before and after

The photographs should give you a real sense of what happens at the Holi festival. I know, not pretty, Raymie and the girls definitely decided to target me. Family loyalty eh? Here we are before and after: For a better view you can enlarge any of the pics by clicking on the photo.

Holi Holi Guacamoli

It's Saturday morning 8am the 3rd of March. We're all up and dressed and in our old clothes. Because today is HOLI. It's the Hindu spring festival, a festival of joy and colour. Which in reality means that everybody goes out from 9am and throws colour at each other, it can be chalks, paints, coloured water, any kind of colour, but apparently it gets messy and is not for the faint hearted.
We have been warned that it can get aggressive and foreigners can become a favoured target.

So one of the other parents at the school has invited us to join her family for a bit of Indian hospitality and to play HOLI. Us girls have decided that we'd like to see Raymie in pink so we've plotted our plan of colour attack. Our plan is to try and stay off the streets, so we'll be making a sheepish escape from the house and hoping that no colour fanatics spot us in transit. We'll take photos and keep you posted. In the meantime HAPPY HOLI.

to Vinny

Hello Mucker
Have you seen the design of the blog? Bit of a problem. Send me an email and I will reply with password etc. I want to be able to layout the whole way across the blog page but can not figure out how to do it.

Do you reckon you might have te to figure it out?
Good luck
Raymie

Real challenges kicking in...

Hello any one - if any one is still looking at this..
After a bit of a break from blogging we hope to get back to some sort of regular update on these pages.
Well we have settled in now. Apartment organised and school organised, broadband organised andtransport problems largely sorted. We have made connections with a number of locals and met with organizations. Various state and semi state bodies have invited us out to a number of gigs, some of them fairly salubrious. We have gotten to know a number of locals and are acquiring a great social circle, people are very friendly here.

A Hindu and Muslim in Rickshaws



Toraigh and Dara are becoming very well known, many of their classmates are starting to invite them to their homes. Out here you see whole families traveling on 250cc motor bikes through what appears to us to be crazy traffic. Husband driving, wife sitting side saddle and a couple of kids sitting everywhere from the handle bars to the back seat. One parent wants to pick up Toraigh and Dara on her motor bike.. we are not sure who else will be riding pillion?

We traveled to a resort called Puri at the weekend. It is in the next state - Orissa, a state that is even poorer than Bengal and Calcutta. It was great to get out of the smog and noise of Calcutta, I was swimming in the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal, and every day we were basking in the hotel swimming pool. The journey was on an overnight sleeper train, which was an experience! The girls loved it, they were on the top bunks, there were eight people sleeping in our birth, four of whom we did not know. The trains here are about thirty carriages long with every part of them being occupied.

The real challenges are now kicking in.

I am winding up for the production of a sculpture with the assistance of kids from Loreto Sealdah School. I have refocused on the possibilities of using clay as the primary material, with bamboo as a supporting core. I have been trying to make contact with local craftsmen who produce the Durga Pooja models since arriving. I was out yesterday negotiating with one of the craftsmen and his family. The family live in the back of the workshop as most families here do. All I can say is it is an amazing set up and I am looking forward to starting the project on Monday. I will post a few pics after I start. I now seem to have gotten access to material technology and an infrastructure, workshop etc. Nothing here is as easy to organise as it is back home.

The court yard of the school is manic so I will be working in the area where all the Durga model makers work and live - which is a place that I will try to describe at a later date, lets just say that it feels like it has not changes in 1000 years.

We have visited the Nehru children's museum - there is a specific arts rationale to the museum and I have proposed to the director that he might facilitate aspects of the sculpture's production. At some point the sculpture will be located there.

I traveled to Kalighat Temple (Thought to be the source of the name Calcutta or Kolkata because the toe of the God Kali was cut off and landed there), the first journey had to be abandoned because of crowds and so called priests who view white people as sources of income. Some times this place can be a bit over bearing, as certain groups here, especially in areas where innocent tourists frequent, have come to view white people as soft touches for real money. The guide who was with me refused to hand me over to the 'care' of the priests, after being bribed he was threatened with physical violence the next time he returns to the shrine. Generally religion here and our European views of its inherent wisdom is just not as clearly cut as it appears while sitting in the comfort of a pub in Belfast or over a cup of tea in Conway Mill.

some images

Top Toraigh and Dara teaching some of the Rainbow kids how to play the tin whistle.

The Hoogly River in late afternoon (a tributary of the Ganges) The Indian rhino

Our first weekend with a car

As this was our first weekend with a car we decided to be the real tourists in Calcutta and get out and see a bit of the city. Raymie and the girls went to the zoo, more of that later from the girls and some great photos too.

Dara took this photo of the Victoria Memorial from the moving car, not bad? She's got an eye for a good shot. We went to Millennium Park which is a beautiful green space right on the edge of Calcutta's Hoogly river. The river is an offshoot of the Ganges and runs right through the city, you can cross it by two huge bridges, one is called the Howrah and they say it is the most used bridge in the world with millions of commuters crossing between Howrah (Calcutta's old industrial centre) and Calcutta every day.

We went to the Children's Museum which has a huge collection of dolls from every country in the world, enough to give you a phobia in fact. It included a couple of barbies but sadly bratz haven't been consigned to history just yet. There was a great project going on in the courtyard outside, where hundreds of children were being supported by artists and teachers to paint different images around the walls. The atmosphere was great and the children were just getting on with it, with confidence, so Dara joined in whilst Raymie and I talked with the organisers. We are going back this week to do some filming. Check out Dara getting stuck in with paint brush, and see if you can see any familiar images amongst the wall murals, 'lions and tigers and bears oh my!' even in Calcutta, 'there's no place like home'.


Hinduism has two great epic stories, The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, like the Odyssey or the Tain Bo Cuailgne full of heroes and Gods and princesses, flying monkies and great battles. I can't help thinking the Wizard of Oz and Lord of the Rings must have taken some inspiration from these. The Mahabharata is 8 times as long as the Odyssey and Illiad put together. The Children's Museum brilliantly abridges the epics and takes us on the journey through miniature sculptured scenes. Here's one monster who got his comeuppence.


We have much more travel planned. At the end of February we hope to go the Sunderbans, a huge area of mangrove covered islands that we will have to travel to by boat. A conservation area known as the 'beautiful forest' it is home to the Royal Bengal tiger, a ferocious man-eater. It is also home to crocodiles, sharks, dolphins and sea turtles. We eventually hope to go to Darjeeling too, tea country and spectacularly located at the foot of the Himalayas with views of Mount Everest. But for now there is much more exploring to do on the streets of Calcutta itself.
That's it until our next post, Shona, Raymie, Toraigh and Dara.

The Maidan and sun burned baldies

Myself and Toraigh journeyed to The Maidan, the Field, in front of the Victoria Memorial that was the heart of the British Raj. It was originally a large cleared space built in front of Fort William to give the 'gunners' a clear shot if under attack from the restless natives. The Maidan is used for various useful things now, grazing goats is one of them. Playing cricket is another - it's as popular as hurling in Ballycastle. As we get to know Kolkata better it is appearing to be a city in transition. There is real evidence of an economic hub and growth alongside the poverty - which unfortunately is still very real is the first thing that strikes visitors like us.

Anyhow the Maidan is a great place to go if you want to get the top of an almost baldy head sun burned. Makes me think of the phrase, 'Mad dogs and English men go out in the mid day sun'. While I may not be an Englander, I think Irelanders have inherited the sentiments of the phrase. Also makes me think that those weather men who say 'we're in for an Indian summer', need to come here for a while! Anyhow, I have a few more pics taken on the low quality digi cam. I hope some one enjoys them. We are organising projects but until there is something real to say, let's just say the groundwork is being prepared.

By the way Dara would really love to hear from her class, or anybody. Either through the blog or my personal email. A pic of Clio would be classy - Bridgeen.

Until the next time, I'll wear a hat at mid day. Good luck Raymie and Clan