The Region Seminar which I mentioned earlier, in our university got over this Sunday.

Meeting old friends, sharing gossip lines, welcoming new babies who accompanied their parents….

::Tea break is when you catch up with many stories::

But the papers…..Oh!yes, the papers.
There were quite a number of interesting papers. RohitP’s attempt to understand the controversy around hydroelectric project at Silent Valley not as a conflict between nature and development, but as on between science and region is one that comes to mind immediately. I found that argument quite interesting. Then, there were various ways of addressing the idea of region. Some went above my head, some I found interesting. But I would write here about one of the many interesting points I found. What interested me most during the three days of seminar, is the way many of the papers addressed the idea of “city” as a way of arriving at the idea of region.

To quote a few:
Probal Dasgupta in an interesting talk looked at the two categories Province and the Metropolis. It was interesting to realize that Vijayanagaram and Fatepur Sikri mark metroplis as a space of “victory” and in turn the province as the space one would like to leave behind in order to succeed in life. He went on with the idea of communities as cultural spaces where “staging” is possible, but I lost my way over there. Sheela Prasad also dealt with cities, but insisted on locating them on the regions where they are placed and thus asserting the use of “city-region”. Anil Kumar P V looked at cities from a different angle. I feel terrible that I couldn’t listen to his paper, but the abstract tells me that he dealt with Kerala’s encounter with the urban space. Looking at some of the modern Malayalam novels, he reaches the conclusion that by their nostalgia for mythical regions [I guess by this he mean countryside, wish I could hear him] these novels fail to “gauge the opportunities that city offered to a Dalit like K R Narayanan. Interesting point! P Thirumal also evoked city in his paper, where he searched for a definition for region [with special reference to Karnataka] beyond language, history and territory.

::The Speakers. Coudn’t get a better snap::

City is something I had written about earlier also in this blog. I also think city is ultimately a space aspired for, be it for the anonymity it gives, or the lifestyle or social mobility. With all the nostalgia, purity and attached with the country side, I would find it extremely difficult to spent a lifetime there. How else can we explain the large trend of migration to cities, be it software professionals or daily labourer? I wouldn’t call it exactly a case of “victory”, but more than the material comforts, city provides a sense of relief.

There are many more papers. But I wouldnt turn here to be a seminar rapporteur.