On 21st December 2011, a Delhi based rock band performed a co-concert with the in-house talent at Tihar Jail in Delhi for over two hours. This was the result of a workshop at Tihar with members of the band, Menwhopause and the musical talent of the inmates. This was a first for both Tihar and rock bands in India.Yahoo in an email conversation with members of the band on what has been a life-affirming experience. Here's a look.

Transcript of email Q & A with Menwhopause

Q: So what's is the  music room in Tihar like?

MWP : There are instruments. And there's a curtain to hide the bars.

Q: Tell us a bit about the in-house talent you found in Tihar?

MWP: They are people like us. People with ideas and songs. People with nothing left to lose.

Q: So we take it, you'd gone in to perform there and out came the idea to work with the inmates? How did that happen?

MWP: Tihar officials have been super supportive. They let us go about it however we wanted it to. Singing our songs would have been

What made Dr Bhupen Hazarika special in the post-independence set of folksy greats? Seeing the overwhelming numbers that poured in to see Asom's Jajabor (traveler) one last time at Guwahati, the state government had to postpone the cremation. Who were these people and what does Bhupenda mean to them? Here are some voices from Guwahati, of those who made his many songs their own — without experts, reviews or, often, even the written word.

This is Assam's own heart unplugged.

"Bhupenda had a song for every occasion"

- Gayatri, teacher at Asian Institute of Mass Communication

Einstein had said of Mahatma Gandhi that "generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as he ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." My feelings for Bhupenda are the same. Never had I imagined that he was so deeply embedded in my psyche until he passed away.

I learned to be proud of Assam, right from the days I understood music hearing the

Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Laureate for literature, 2011. A Swedish poet born to a teacher-journalist couple in 1931, here are ten things you and I may not know about TT. Well known in literary circles to walk the word mile from being deeply alive to nature's hisses and human misses, via the Swedish landscape. Onto a darker void of questioning, a vertigo of 'unsentimental cool'th . Widely traveled, turn of the century man whose first published collection, at the age of 23, was a Swedish hit. He went on to use his academic training as a psychologist, working at a juvenile prison. And write. Meanwhile jugaadu Indians have suitably discovered a connection. (Did you read the one about Steve Job's Apple logo being inspired by an Uttarakhandi baba who gave apples for prasad?) Right.

Opinions on his body of work and the award vary from private ecstasy of well known contemporary poets writing in English to wait-a-minute-WHO-is-this? Always fun to hear the Nobels go to the Europeans too

(Or a  dummy guide  on why the Delhi  powers that be cannot hear the common man in Manipur, 2005, 2010, 2011 )

(Petrol selling in mineral water bottles on the black market)

Some 2011 prices may be inconsistent with daily variances in official rate lists in both capital cities . But probably not as inconsistent as  the willful opening of the three highway entry points  that Manipur depends on. Manipur has no state transportation network to speak of, so reliance on private vehicles is heavy and be it petrol, kerosene, etc., it's been a jerrycan life.

(How people protect themselves on these burning highways)

A final word from a Manipuri many Indians will be familiar with.

"A litre of petrol at Rs.200 in the black market and a cooking gas cylinder for Rs.1,500 or more... After two months of a blockade in Manipur, world boxing champion Mary Kom says she's at her wits end trying to balance training for the Olympics with the slow process

What makes earthquakes happen?

Can you feel one?

The panic in the second question has no answer. (The answer to the first, though, is embedded in the question.)

In the one that hit Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet, tremors were also felt in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chandigarh and Delhi.

(Yes, increasingly, our worlds are being cracked open by the earth’s activity, conjoining in ever hopeful grief.)

Photo: Shonar JoshiEven though I’m from Delhi and have traveled to all of the above places except Tripura and Tibet, Sikkim singes as a very particular kind of emotional aftershock. Maybe because some of my growing up years were spent in the mountains, one knows what makes hill folk hardy (drinkers?), energy-conserving-genteel but an idiosyncrasy-tolerant lot and, most of all, perennially hugged by an over-the-shoulder peek at a peak. Anytime of the night you can find it here.

(Like the rivers that were fairly perennial until we perennially started testing this.)

Sikkim

But to know Sikkim

This piece should really be called mera something hain Japani? After all, what is that talking point that runs off, just skirting our headline radar in a heavily mediated world? Something that often eavesdrops on our collective cynicism with its quieter can-do-ness. Leaving one with an exasperated wow from the confines of a busy day. Or reminding the journalists that a human interest story often begins with one  human, struggling to be so.

The September 11 date, with its spate of  quiet and graphic remembrances, converged on another more recent anniversary. 6 months since Japan's March 11 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear situation. While the media megamart chronicled it with a powerful sense of the phenomenal from ground zero (remember  NYT's before and after satellite imagery), I turned my distant empathy from Indian shores to a different sense of the interactive soon enough. Japanese voices that spoke compellingly of their own tribulations through these six months.

There was a Osakan vegan