AAW #162

Coolest events of this week are here to beat the unbearable heat. The 162nd Ahmedabad Art Weekly begins with a  one of a kind book shopping festival brought by The Bookchor Warehouse Sale. Lock The Box event is a boon for bibliophiles as it is allowing visitors to reasonably purchase different boxes, which can contain up to 30 books at the same time.

It’s raining theatricals in the city with an exciting musical thriller Raashi Man at the newly built 079 Stories art cafe-theatre and an experimental play at Ouroboros, which is a dramatic adaptation from Padma Shree Gyan Chaturvedi’s novel ‘Narak Yatra’. The visual art exhibitions also offer something new this week. Kalptaru art show at the iconic Sanskar Kendra will impress you, and the Impressive Impressions will showcase drawings and prints by young duo of Bharat Dodiya and Gopal Parmar. This art show promises to bring forth ideas of environmental degeneration and the need for human societies sensitivity towards other species. Talking about conserving nature, intellectuals can drop at AMA to listen how can we make the urban environment greener. Comedian Jeeveshu Ahluwalia is coming to your town to make you chuckle with his humour, but if you are looking for a serious discussion then do not miss out on Life is Awesome Yara talk show, which will focus on suicidal tendencies and how to avoid them. The culture enthusiast should go for this particular heritage walk to Sarkhej Roza, which will focus on its Indo-Saracenic architecture. And families with children have the choice of enjoying at KiddoZone 2018 flea market.

Ahmedabad Art Weekly 162 is dedicating its creative inspiration to London born Gujarati language scholar Alexander Kinloch Forbes, who learnt Gujarati from poet Dalpatram Travadi. The British judge of Ahmedabad and Surat befriended Dalpatram and it was he who inspired him to write Laxmi Natak in 1849, which was the first Gujarati drama inspired from Greek play Plutus. He established the first literary society in Ahmedabad called the Gujarat Vernacular Society, which initiated the first public library, first girls school, first periodical, first newspaper and first literary magazine of Gujarat state. He arranged multiple gatherings in Idar for Gujarati poets and Dalptram’s Farbesvilas was a story of these gatherings. He established Andrews Library in Surat, Gujarati Sabha in Bombay (Now Mumbai), and authored Râs Mâlâ: Hindoo Annals of the Province of Goozerat, in Western India a two-volume history document of folk literature in Gujarat from 8th century till the British arrived. As a translator, Forbes paraphrased Dalpatram’s Bhoot Nibandh in English as ‘Demonology and Popular Superstitions of Gujarat’