This is the first and inaugural meeting of a Sangam and Agora, a new forum of poets, philosophers, scholars, and autodidacts.

In this first meeting, Vinyay Lal provides an overview of this enterprise and what animated it, and this is followed by a reading of his poems by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, a Gdansk-based poet and lead singer of the rock group Trupa Trupa with who is a co-founder of this initiative. He is followed by Sabah Carrim, a poet and scholar of genocide who reads from a literary essay by Robert Tally and excerpts from a work of fiction. This is followed by a brief discussion and then readings of their poetry by Luis Francia, a celebrated Filipino American poet, playwright, and scholar, and Russell Leong, a very accomplished poet, scholar, and artist who divides his time between Los Angeles and New York, and who is the founding editor of Amerasia, the leading journal of Asian American Studies, and more recently of CUNY Forum. The meeting concludes with a discussion and brief comments by Vinay Lal.