AAW #152

Here are this week’s most promising creative events that Creative Yatra has exclusively enlisted for you in the 152nd Ahmedabad Art Weekly. This week’s significant features include India’s prominent performing arts festival, Theatre Olympics – Edition Eight featuring plays from international and national dialects; while the city based creators are giving domestically produced plays of Meein Ghas Hoon and Gaur Farmaiye to the audience. The enthusiastic humorists can participate in an open mic stand-up comedy show organised at a city-based cafe, and the ones who want to laugh hard can go to Vipul Goyal and Sumit Anand’s performance. Intriguing talk shows like Musician Daryl Davis coming to the city to talk on racism and exciting movie screenings in town are keeping people’s spirits high. Fans of sublimity can go to Izhaar 6.0 poetry recital or the Prayas 2018 and CeraScape-II art shows to enrich their aesthetic sensibilities.

The inspiration for the 152nd Ahmedabad Art Weekly has been borrowed from Ghazal Samrat (Ghazal Poetry King) Shayda. Formally named as Harji Lavji Damani during his birth in 1892 in Dhandhuka, Shayda‘s first appearance as a poet hailed in 1912 and he began his weekly ‘Be Ghadi Moj’ in 1924. He became the head of the Poetry Recital Programme at All India Radio and later grew as a wordsmith to write poems, novels, short stories, and plays. His write-ups mostly were expressions of religious and communal conflicts, social systems and about historical events. His work has received appreciation from Mahatma Gandhi. His most notable Ghazals are titled as Dipakna Phool, Chita and Gulzare-Shayri-Shayda and most noteworthy novels are named as Maa Te Maa and Moti Bhabhi. Many may not be aware that he is father-in-law of popular gujarati poet ‘Befam’.  Shayda was honoured by the Indian National Theatre by christening a Ghazal Award in his name; its called ‘Shayda Award’.