From Mediabistro.com

Photographers at UC Berkeley's paper, The Daily Californian, were locked out of the paper after refusing to sign over the copyrights to their work. Read Dirk Halstead's editorial.

Shame on you UC Berkeley!

So, we have all heard of the Rosetta Stone. At least I hope you have. But here comes the Rosetta Project.

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary counterpart of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages.

Thanks to Sarah Grafman and Anu Garg for letting me know of this interesting project.

Notice something different about Tiffinbox today? Under Features, in the right column, you will see a new link to A Word A Day. Come back to Tiffinbox everyday to find a new and interesting word.

A Word A Day is a project conceived by Seattle's Anu Garg. Receiving his daily volley is a thrill. If you love words, as I do, this is the place to get your daily fix. Not only does Garg define the word, he shows you how it can be used in a sentence.

By the way, this week's words have Spanish derivations. Today's word is DUENDE, which means 1) Demon; goblin or 2) Inspiration; fire; spirit; magic; charm; magnetism.

Send AWAD as a gift to those who also love words and their meanings. It's FREE. The premium service, sans advertisements, is only $25 a year.

And, no, I don't get a dime for pitching his site.

Monica Ali's Brick Lane will most likely make it under many Christmas trees this year thanks to the New York Times which just released its short list of “Best Books” for the year. The New York Times' glowing review suggests that the read is somewhat melancholic. More than a mere East versus the West sort of book, this first novel raises questions about fidelity and identity in an alien world.

One of the achievements of this deceptively sophisticated book lies in showing how that destruction could make a group of orthodox Muslims every bit as afraid as the rest of us, albeit for very different reasons.

Support Tiffinbox and buy the book from the list you see in the left column or click on the book's title above.

I am taking some liberty here by departing from my usual posts about writers and photographers. Vijay Iyer, a pianist, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, an alto-saxophonist, are two terrific jazz musicians who are making a name for themselves in New York City. No easy feat. So, I hope you will lend them your support and go out and listen to them.

The duo collaborates under the name Raw Materials and has been peforming around the world since 1996.

When: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13 Sets at 8 and 9:30 pm

Where: INHOUSE PERFORMANCE SPACE , 474 Greenwich Street (NOT Greenwich Ave!) 5th Floor, below Canal Street, NYC.

For more info contact: 212-925-8534, inhouseconcerts@earthlink.net

The Vagriyar tribes in South India are an ubiquitous presence – surprisingly so even in a large metropolitan city like Chennai. They lead a marginalized and eccentric lifestyle. They are hard to miss. Around temples they carry their wares and press them into the hands of visitors, hoping to make a sale. They walk around in small groups foraging for things that you and I would have casually thrown away. I remember once insisting on buying a catapult from one of them camped in Adyar. The white wood came from the trees they slept under, the rubber bands slit from strewn bicycle tires. We were told the gypsies kidnapped children, ate parrots for dinner and lived in filth.

N. Prasanna Kumar, a 24-year old award winning photographer has created a body of work documenting the lives of several of these gypsy tribes and in the process breaks some stereotypes.

I met this quiet and somewhat shy photographer with a couple of his friends at the Alliance Francaise in Chennai. Over a cup of hot lemon tea, a favorite of the locals I was told, we exchanged pleasantries and introduced ourselves. We dove into a body of work that Kumar and his friend Syed had somehow cajoled onto their two-wheeler.

The images from the Vagriyar tribes Kumar is following were the best of the lot. One can clearly see the passion for documenting this misunderstood group of people in each of those images. His images prompted me to gush out the name of another wonderful documentarian, a Magnum photographer, who has photographed gypsies in Europe – Josef Koudelka. A straight comparison of the two styles would be grossly unfair but the themes are similar.

Kumar's printing was interesting too. Some images were forcibly printed yellow or red, striking departures from the ordinary. Kumar called them “experiments.” He is a post graduate student at the College of Arts and Crafts and, presumably, has access to all sorts of nifty ideas and influences.

I have invited Prasanna Kumar to display his series on the Vagriyar tribes here on Tiffinbox. So, I do hope you will all get to see them for yourself.

Photo District News, the trade publication I urge all to subscribe, has this for student photographers:

Attention students: Want to shoot for PDN?

PDNedu is holding its first competition for students, with help from Epson. PDN Edu is looking for your pictures of “people,” “places” and “things” printed on Epson paper. You could win a photo assignment from Photo District News.

Slow connections on the road, a busy schedule meeting relatives and oh yeah getting married in India all contributed to the trickle of blog posts these last few weeks. But I am back.

New Internationalist magazine displays some fascinating photography. Friend and mentor Shahidul Alam promotes the work of photographers “from the majority world” through his column SOUTHERN EXPOSURE in the magazine. This month, Alam highlights Dominic Sansoni from Sri Lanka.

Kataragama, a town in the southeast of Sri Lanka, is probably the most important centre for pilgrimage on the island. Based around a shrine to the god of the same name, this small jungle site is now a
bustling town. It is unique in that there is also a Buddhist temple and a mosque. The main festival time is July or August when pilgrims from across the country, of all denominations, flock to the town for
the big festival. It culminates with firewalking at night and a `water-cutting' ceremony in the Menik Ganga River on the last day.

For many years I have been photographing the way we wrap cloth around our bodies in Asia. A sari, a sarong, a shawl, a versti… Frequently the pictures are details – one series shows only torsos. This is the torso of a man on pilgrimage in classic red and white, the colours for homage at the shrine to Kataragama. Beautiful in its simplicity and great style.

Dominic Sansoni, Sri Lanka

There is good reason why I haven't posted anything for a week. It has taken me that long to shake jet-lag. I am visiting Chennai for a couple of weeks.

Notice anything different about the site? In the right hand column you'll find the new FEATURES section. I have Gerik Parmele at Photocolumn.org and the kind folks at Badmash.org to thank for the links they have provided. I hope you'll visit both sites, and often.

Gerik's site showcases some fine photographers who have also taken the time to pen a few personal thoughts. If you visit Tiffinbox on a regular basis you'll now notice that the image changes on a weekly basis. Click it to be taken to a larger version of the image and an extended caption.

Badmash.org is a fun site – worthy of a weekly laugh. I highly recommend it. It is, to my knowledge, the first site of its kind to address the South Asian lifestyle in the West.

NYTimes reports the publication of a book by seasoned photojournalist Stanley Greene. It's a book on Chechens and their struggle for independence from Russia.

“By using his photographs to draw attention to the suffering that has marked the latest surge in Chechnya's centuries-long struggle for independence from Russia, Mr. Greene says he believes he has at last given something back.”

Eighty one images and journal entries over the period of 20 trips to Chechnya grace the book. The book is about the death and destruction of an area of the world that has received scant attention here in the US.

“Why? Why? Why am I doing this?” Mr. Greene writes in his journal on Jan. 7, 1995. Three days later, he writes: “Grozny is like visions of a Goya painting, `Disasters of War.' There are 70 or 80 corpses in the streets of Grozny. It's wet and cold and I'm here to photograph, but I can't when I see dogs eating the faces of the dead.” On Jan. 11 he asks: “Why are they bombing civilians? Can't they see what they're hitting?”

The article speaks of Greene as a young man who initially lacked focus in life. W. Eugene Smith, the father of the photo essay, apparently lit a fuse in him. It now seems more like a barn fire. Bravo!