Tomorrow, Sunday 7th November, we will not have a regular TGP Sessions.
Instead we’re doing an Open House, a TGP informal meet, partly to mark the festive season and hang out together, and partly to discuss plans ahead for TGP, and hear what you — old TGP hands, new members — would like to suggest.
Please join us? Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrfuisqTMpHdfsrdBIR_X3KhIAVbny8GoJ
Bring yourself and whatever you’re eating and/or drinking.

We’re open. Join in!

Puja Mitra is a conservation / social entrepreneur with an MSc in biodiversity, conservation & management from the University of Oxford and a Commonwealth Scholar. She is the recipient of Sanctuary Nature Foundation’s Wildlife Service Award and currently lives and works in Goa, where, in 2017, she co-founded Terra Conscious, a conservation-oriented social enterprise focusing on responsible travel and marine conservation outreach. Terra Conscious has been awarded a runners up prize in the Best Wildlife & Tourism Initiative category by the prestigious TOFTigers Awards, and listed among 50 Champions for Sustainable Travel in India by Conde Nast Traveller.

Gilbert Soyus (representing Save Mollem) is a wildlife and environmental conservationist with experience in research and environmentalist communities focussed on wildlife and habitat studies, mapping and conservation, and community outreach initiatives to educate people about human-wildlife relationships, implement a conservation mindset, and build low-cost green technologies . He is one of the group of people at the core of the #SaveMollem movement.

Register: Register: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrfuisqTMpHdfsrdBIR_X3KhIAVbny8GoJ

We’re starting. Join in!

Aside from our regular interactive events, The Goa Project has also endeavoured to be a platform for creative people to share their work, and for our community to sit back — or lean forward — and enjoy art for its own sake. With the online TGP Sessions, we haven’t done enough of that.
And so, to correct that balance a little, this Sunday we have a dedicated Showcase event. Four creators — five actually, because one of the presenters is a duo — bringing you a taste of their work. As ever, our aim is that these sessions be a starting point for more interaction within the community.
Do join us. Bring friends (TGP Sessions are free and open to all.)

[bios in next message]

David Desouza started out as a biochemist, but a second-hand camera in 1977 seemed to have an alternative destiny for him; he merely succumbed. Since then the camera has led him to meet interesting and wonderful people across the world. He has always been interested in books, photobooks, and mythology. He has produced over 22 books, many of them monographs. Moving to Goa has been a blessing in many ways. The diversity of subjects makes it hard to choose what next to concentrate on.

Aniruddha Sen Gupta, a.k.a. Annie, has worked for over three decades as a journalist, writer, editor and designer. He has had books published by Scholastic and Sage Publications, as well as a number of short works in anthologies from Penguin, HarperCollins, and other publishers. He has written Our Toxic World, a graphic guidebook on environmental issues illustrated by Priya Kuriyan, and several other comics, including Second Nature, a monthly column in Brainwave magazine, brought out by ACK Media, a story in DOGS! An Anthology, published by Captain Bijli Comics; and short comics in various magazines. He has also been guest editor of an issue of Marg magazine dedicated to Indian comics. He is one of the editors of Comixense, a quarterly comics magazine.

Thomas Louis has been a practising potter for 24 years. After studying ceramic design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, he set up studios in Bangalore, Bombay and Pune before settling in Goa, where he has been working for the last 10 years. He has exhibited in galleries across India, done projects with museums, restaurants, hotels and private residences, and worked extensively with traditional potters in Kutch, Meghalaya, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Goa. He also teaches various courses in NID, Ahmedabad and at his studio in Goa. He recently opened his gallery Thomas the Potter in Panjim, where his ceramics, drawings and other weird objects that he conjures up are on display, along with a studio and art space. Between studio practice, teaching, industry projects and the craft sector, his fingers are in the dirt all the time.

Neelav Bose and Ronen Bose are a father-son duo and they go by the name The Prism. They cover other artists and also do their own original numbers. They perform in English, Bengali and Hindi and while their preferred genre is rock, they also love folk.

Register (free) here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrfuisqTMpHdfsrdBIR_X3KhIAVbny8GoJ

DO join us. We meet in just under an hour.

Starting shortly.

Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrfuisqTMpHdfsrdBIR_X3KhIAVbny8GoJ

We thought we would bring our year to an end with a look-back-and-look-ahead session, to which we invite all of you to come participate.
When 2020 ended, we were allowing ourselves to be optimistic. Surely, after the long months that we’d stayed at home, worked from home, celebrated from home, did every darn thing from home, 2021 would see us return to some semblance of normalcy. Vaccines for all, we’d heard, were around the corner. Our governments were cautiously permitting us to open up, and not a moment too soon, some of us said: the economy needed this.
Except, well, 2021.
For many of us, the so-called second wave was even worse. We know nobody who didn’t lose a family member, a friend, a colleague to the virus. Other losses happened as medical infrastructure was overburdened in many places. It seems now that we are over the worst of it, but we really don’t know. Never has the entire planet been so uncertain of the future.
Still, the long stretches of time we all got to reflect on our lives did see many of us reconsidering our priorities, reorganising our lives, even striking out and making bold life choices we may not have even thought of in the Before Times.
So, this Sunday, we invite all of you to come share with us your learning from this year that’s about to end and how it changed you. Consider these questions, and let us know if you would like to speak on either or both?
• Did 2021 prompt you to reevaluate your life on a fundamental level, accept that things needed to change, even take that actual big step?
• Looking forward, how do you think the world has changed permanently?
Write to us at thetgpsessions at gmail dot com with “TGP Sessions” as the subject line and give us an idea of what you would like to say. You will get two minutes, and if there is time after everyone has had a chance to take the microphone, we may come back to some of the things that come up.
We’ll likely go on beyond the one hour that we usually spend at TGP Sessions.

Looking forward to chatting with and learning from all of you. Do come.

n our open house on the 19th December, we asked those coming in to tell us about their learnings from 2021 and their plans for 2022. It was a lovely session, and we talked well over the planned hour, and still didn’t really cover the second bit, the look ahead. So, this Sunday, it’s another open house, and this time a focus only on the year we just began.
Come share with us how you are going forth into 2022.
If we have time, we’re also open to talk about anything else those of you attending suggest.
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrfuisqTMpHdfsrdBIR_X3KhIAVbny8GoJ

Apologies to any of you who tried to sign up for the meeting earlier today. We had forgotten to extend the meeting dates into 2022. All fixed now.

To those of you who are in Bangalore or who plan to be there in two weeks:

We have a hybrid TGP planned, on 16th January.
That is, we will do an in-person TGP on the terrace of the Hasgeek office in Indiranagar, which will also be webcast live so that TGP members in other places can be part of it.
The agenda will include hangout time (bring your own beverages of choice) after the presentations. The venue can take up to 30 people, and given that there will be some seats reserved — the presenters, the organising team — we’ll cap attendees at 20 for now, and let you know if we can take more closer to the date.
Please write to thetgpsessions@gmail.com to reserve your place, first come first served.

(Much depends on the Covid-19 situation which, as you all know, is changing rapidly. We’ll take a call on whether to go ahead closer to the date, and yes, we’ll err on the side of conservatism.)