“Jayasankar is an artist, his forte is visualisation”, She says. He cuts in: “One of is us a left brain and the other is a right brain”. They laugh heartily, and Monteiro continues. “I do a lot of the interviews and the writing, the people management”. He adds, “We’ve spent so many years together, there’s no difference between personal life and work at all”.

SheWrite meets four of these poets Salma, Malathy Maitri, Kuttirevathi and Sukirtharani, each distinct in personal history and style, yet each with a heard-before story of oppression and eventual resolution. "We were very excited by the powerful work coming out of a grassroots context", says Monteiro. The filmmakers scripted each of the stories separately instead of mashing them together, so that each woman gets the chance to leave a lasting impression.

The word 'SheWrite' has the same intent and agenda as herstory. Both the words imply that women's experiences and sexual lives have been silenced for decades and need voicing.... Read More....

Can you name the one "object" that has been tirelessly described down the ages in creative writings of all genres ? from ancient epics to the latest film song? Of course, anyone can. After all you need nothing more than plain commonsense to know that it's a woman's body. Used as they may be to this kind of endless "exposure", why do women themselves feel ashamed and even "dirty" about standing in front of a mirror and facing their own bodies? And when a rare woman dares to shed inhibitions and speaks openly about her body and asserts that it is her "own space", why is she instantly dubbed shameless, bad and even a blot on our "pure" culture? These were, quite predictably, the charges hurled when a few Tamil women writers wrote about things forbidden ? their own bodies, their own spaces. Brickbats, interestingly, came from male writers who were famous for their double entendre-loaded lyrics in Tamil films. One of them went to the extent of urging people: "If you see them on the road, slap them....Read Full News....

This time, husband-wife duo Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayasankar have been inspired to capture the downhill journey of life in Mumbai nee Bombay. Called Saacha (for the ‘reality’ behind the ‘looms’ of Mumbai), their film is about a poet, Narayan Surve; a painter, Sudhir Patwardhan; and a city, of course, Mumbai -- exploring the works of Surve and Patwardhan, and their involvement in the Left movement

What started as a project on Mumbai, soon become a passion, for now the duo want to make more films on Mumbai. First in the series, Saacha is about the city’s rapidly changing working class -- which, they feel, in another 10 years will completely vanish. "While it was an obvious choice of subject after staying here for almost two decades, during the course of making the film the loom became a metaphor. And with two strands used in looms to make the fabric come together, we thought of bringing in two individuals," explains Jayasankar, who appreciated Patwardhan’s work as a painter and felt he had the perfect foil for him in Narayan Surve.