Algomantra 2005 is a go... I first ran into Rohit Gupta during THE GREAT MAHAKALI WRITE-A-THALON back in May last year. It was an inspired piece of madness that in retrospect was a lot of fun. During the actual weekend I was chewing glass, hallucinating and cursing his name. I'm kind of dreading the event's sequel in a couple of months but at least I knew that it was only once a year. But simply repeating stuff isn't good enough for Rohit. At the tail-end of last year he invited me over to The Global TranceWriting Festival 2005 which is like last year's event but with special features. Before I could get my head around that I found myself a part of something called Algomantra: AlgoMantra is an open source festival. This means that you can download the document which tells you how to hold it in your neighbourhood or city or country, anywhere in the world. Without spending any money, or needing any sponsors, you can hold this festival with your own flavor. What happens in this festival? On a Friday night at 7PM (date to be announced) all the participants of the festival, anywhere on the globe, take a vow of silence for 58 hours, that is till Sunday night 9PM. During these 58 hours, they play three games.... You can read a whole lot more about the thing here. And Rohit certainly knows how to apply the pressure: Besides, with Visible Monsters' Mike Sizemore on your side, you can be sure it's the coolest gig happening on the freakin' planet. So we've been talking this over a little and I've had time to come up with some ideas. I'm especially excited about the Yatra side of things as it will give me the chance to put some of the ideas that Paul Auster explored in City of Glass into practice. Some of this I'll be doing solo and other parts require assistance so I'll be finally using all the dirt that I've dished up on people so that they aid me in some of this adventure. Others will want to get involved anyway simply because what the hell else are you going to do with your time? I'll update more details as they appear or occur to me but now the cat has clawed out of the bag I'm sure it'll be clawing its way onto a few other sites between now and the opening vow of silence. And won't that be a blast? I'll be spending the first 58 hours with a notepad around my neck like Holly Hunter in THE PIANO or mumbling incoherently like Harvey Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT. Note: He doesn't just live to talk me into pure madness, although it seems like that sometimes. Aside from all the above (and a fistful of short stories and non fiction columns and a graphic novel) Rohit was off helping people with the SEA EAT blog and for a while there it seemed that if there was a link on Boing Boing or anywhere else that pointed to a Tsunami resource then Rohit's name was attached. He's one of the good guys. Mike is writing to Frank Zappa