Day: 12 September 2013

Elk grove Village, Illinois: Northwest Republican Annual Picnic this year had a very new look. The attendance estimated at over 1200 was twice the usual crowd that gathers every year. This year was unusual as Ex-NRCC Chairman and currently the Chairman of House Rules Committee, Congressman Pete Sessions, made a special trip from Dallas to attend the picnic and secondly, over 400 Indian Americans joined in. Republican party is truly going all out to reach out to the minority and ethnic communities to build a new coalition. The occasion was to launch the campaign of Manju Goel, a first generation Indian American, for U.S. Congress. Chairman Sessions and Shalli Kumar, Chairman of Indian American Advisory Council of House Republican Conference, a Chicago native, are co-chair of Sessions-Kumar project to elect as many as 8-10 Indian Americans to Congress. In introducing Chairman Sessions to the crowd, he said “ Chairman Pete Sessions is no ordinary leader. As head of NRCC in 2009, right after Obama’s big victory, he challenged Nancy Pelosi that we are going to take back the house in 2010….we all know what happened , it was the biggest gain of seats in over 50 years. And then in […]

Gandhinagar, Gujarat state (India): A successful three-day international conference on “Bakhtin in India” held at Gandhinagar, the capital of the Indian state of Gujarat, concluded on August 21, 2013, with the resolution to host a complementary follow-up conference on the relevance of Indian traditions to contemporary global issues. The conference was hosted by Prof. EV Ramakrishnan, Chairperson of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the Central University of Gujarat (CUG), and was jointly organized with Prof. Prafulla Kar, who directs The Balwant Parekh Center for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences and The Forum for Contemporary Theory both based in Baroda (Vadodara, Gujarat). “Bakhtin in India” explored the relevance of the ideas of this famous Russian theorist of the last century on polyphony, dialogue, carnival, etc., towards understanding and reassessing Indian culture. Well more than a hundred, mostly Indian, scholars and enthusiastic students participated and responded to a wide range of papers. Participants came mostly from Depts. of English and Comparative Literature keen on consolidating their understanding of this difficult, problematic, and controversial thinker. They sought to contribute something original to Bakhtinian studies by testing his models and concepts against Indian religious and secular practices both ancient […]