Raising the creative benchmark

Toto Funds the the Arts presented awards to young creative minds, recognising their passion

Set up in memory of Toto ‘Angirus’ Vellani, the Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) Awards has endeavoured to promote exceptional young talent for close to a decade. This year eight youngsters below age 30 were awarded at the Alliance Francaise, hosted by Swetanshu Bora and Vivek Madan, with award-winning poet, writer and critic Arundhathi Subramaniam as chief guest .

The ceremony opened with the displaying of the images of the shortlisted candidates for photography. Meghna Sirish Iyer’s searing black-and-white images of women in labour, titled Nine, Sutirtha Chatterjee’s Sixth Sense Kekhri ZhaZo Miachieo’s Cycle of Street Life , Indranil Banerjee’s devastating, yet sensitive images of the flyover mishap in Kolkata and Cyril Lucido Kuhn’s picturesque landscape images Into the Darkness were shown. The winners were Sutirtha Chatterjee who won for his six powerful images of a school for the blind in Kolkata and Kekhriezhazo Miachieo for his heart-rending photos of children abusing drugs.

The shortlist for the English writing award were announced next. Aravind Jayan’s short story

Love in a Small Town was

read out by Nakul Bhalla. Sohini Basak read out her stunning poems of visual images, Ila Ananya read from her poetic short story

Amma , and Mantra Mukim read out his unique and humorous work, poems

Amaltas ,

Parijat ,

Champa ,

Ghantaghar , and short story,

Directions . The winners were Aravind Jayan and Sohini Basak. For the Kannada writing awards, the shortlisted candidates were Prateek Mukunda, who presented an excerpt from his short story

Amway, Praveen Kumar G. who read out a portion from his unusual short story,

Ede and Rajashekara C.

who read out his poem,

Prison . Rajashekara C. was announced the winner and the jury stated that he is a talent to watch out for.

For music, Disco Puppet’s (Shoumik Biswas)

Nomo Junk , Nowhere to run by the band Opposite Sex and Die, Die, Die by Kalab aka Ujjwal Agarwal were the shortlisted entries. Shoumik Biswas of Disco Puppet was declared the winner.

The shortlisted films were Ek Kahaani Aise Bhi by Himanshu Prajapati, Daali by Medini Kelamane, Time Vampires , a collaboration by six filmmakers, and Dive by Archana Chandrashekar. The winners were Archana Chandrashekar and Medini Kelamane. The 2017 TFA Awards thus, yet again, raised the creative benchmark for not just youngsters but all artistes.