Begining on Tuesday night (but staggered depending upon where you live) on PBS, the series P.O.V. will be featuring a must-watch episode titled “No More Tears Sister: Anatomy of Hope and Betrayal.” This one’s a no brainer. You got to Tivo it at least.

If love is the first inspiration of a social revolutionary, as has sometimes been said, no one better exemplified that idea than Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. Love for her people and her newly independent nation, and empathy for the oppressed of Sri Lanka — including women and the poor — led her to risk her middle-class life to join the struggle for equality and justice for all. Love led her to marry across ethnic and class lines. In the face of a brutal government crackdown on her Tamil people, love led her to help the guerrilla Tamil Tigers, the only force seemingly able to defend the people. When she realized the Tigers were more a murderous gang than a revolutionary force, love led her to break with them, publicly and dangerously. Love then led her from a fulfilling professional life in exile back to her hometown of Jaffna and to civil war, during which her human rights advocacy made her a target for everyone with a gun. She was killed on September 21, 1989 at the age of 35. [Link]

You can view a trailer of the episode on the website. I recommend switching it to Quicktime mode as it seems to stream better.

There are a host of interviews on the site including one with the filmmaker, Helene Klodawsky:

I’m very interested in subjects that we don’t hear about often in the normal press. So I was very, very interested in ethnic nationalist war from the point of view of women. We’re always hearing about wars between different factions, different ethnic groups, but rarely do we hear about those wars from the point of view of women. And I was interested in Sri Lanka — it’s one of these wars that have gone on forever and nobody understands it. I knew that Sri Lanka was entering a peace process, so I was curious to see how women would be engaged in that peace process.

Once I started looking at the conflict, someone said, if you really want to understand Sri Lanka and ethnic war, you must look at the work of the University Teachers for Human Rights. [Link]

After you watch this episode come back and leave comments here. I think it could be an interesting discussion. Check your local listings here.

See related posts: All-American girls in Calcutta

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There are many sacrifices that I make in order to do my duty as an SM blogger. I can’t always hang out with my friends when I want to, I can’t always stay for dessert because I have to rush home to blog, and sometimes, like today, I have to really sacrifice my mental well-being and take one for the team. It seems that the second episode in season number four of the Paris Hilton/Nicole Ritchie car-wreck-of-a-show features the ladies living with a Pakistani American family:

Domestic bliss with Nicole

Episode 2: The Ghauri Family
Paris and Nicole trade in their designer dresses for traditional saris when they take over the responsibilities of a traditional Pakistani mom. With the patient help of their “husband” and Americanized fifteen-year-old “son,” the girls manage to dress, speak and dance like conservative Pakistani housewives…or at least their version of it. But things don’t go as well when Paris and Nicole decide to share their experiences, namely how they like to party. [Link]

Yeah, I saw you cringe behind your computer screen just then. Reuters has more:

…here they are with Season 4, on a new network (hullo, E! Bye-bye, Fox), after having struck a unique compromise: They’d do the show, but not at the same time.

The subtitle “‘Til Death Do Us Part” alludes to the celebutantes’ infiltrating families for crash courses in marriage and motherhood. The first episode, which wasn’t supplied for review, finds Paris and Nicole (separately) taking the place of a nine-months-pregnant woman, wearing a suit to duplicate her condition, cleaning house and babysitting a 3-year-old. The second episode, which was provided, has them infiltrating a traditional Pakistani-American family to trivialize their religion, ruin their kitchen and corrupt their very Americanized teenage son. It’s all very contrived but harmless and less offensive than stultifyingly superficial. But then, that pretty much always has been “The Simple Life…” [Link]

Even more painful than this episode is this clip available on the internet where a bunch of women sit around and talk us through it discussing its “finer” points. It’s like The View on crack. This episode will be replaying on E! if you want to watch and get a feel for how painful the life of a dedicated blogger can be. 🙂

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In March of this year, MTV Canada was relaunched after a failed attempt on digital cable a few years ago. Many rolled their eyes and chose to swear undying allegiance to their beloved Much Music, but I was rather looking forward to the Big Satan taking over Toronto’s Masonic Temple as headquarters. Heck yeah I want to know what those pretty kids on 8th and Ocean are up to. More earth-shattering relationship how to’s on Laguna Beach, s’il vous plait. Most importantly, I wanted to see if they would hire any desi VJs, which they did do in the form of one Aliya-Jasmine Sovani. She doesn’t get much air time while sharing the MTV Live stage with six other VJs and what I have seen has been aptly described as “a woman so perky she makes Kelly Ripa look like Sean Penn in mourning.” Sadly, I don’t gel too well with perk peddlers on TV.

Sovani used to produce for Much Music and switched over to MTV to work in front of the camera. This left me wondering why Much wasn’t adding any brown to the VJ payroll. After all, they hired my supremely cool childhood idol, Monika Deol, in the late 1980s. My mum was never as horrified at my solitary whinin’ to Shabba Ranks videos if Monika announced them. Oh Monika, you were everything and everything was you. A Canadian music channel is nothing without proper Canadian representation. Continue reading →

The following post is brought to you by the good folks over at rubbish TV. Sandwiched between such mullet-tastic gems as Full House (Uncle Jesse = hot, just sayinÂ’) and Roseanne there was born a shiny new talent. A Great Brown Hope, if you will. Ladies and ladas, I present to you Rubi Nicholas, AmericaÂ’s Funniest Mom:

Rubi Nicholas’s mouthful of a life became her comedy routine. She’s a Pakistani Muslim with a Greek Orthodox, stay-at-home husband who converted to Islam. They live in a Denver suburb with their daughters. They fit in just fine. “Except,” she says in her stand-up routine, “every time my daughter leaves her Barbie Jeep in someone else’s driveway they call the bomb squad.”. [Link]

The Nickelodeon show consisted of six weeks of Apprentice-style comedy challenges set in a New York City penthouse. Episodes are available on the Nickelodeon website.

When she was a child she enjoyed calling her school and pretending to be her mother with excuses for absences, she says in her routine. She grew up in Pottsville, Pa., a coal region in the central part of the state. “Calling to let you know that Rubi will not be in school today. For today we celebrate the holy festival of the blind goat,” Ms. Nicholas says in a heavy Pakistani accent. And did somebody mention airports? “So a little bit about me,” Ms. Nicholas said in the final show. “I married a white guy to improve my airport cred. Yeah, and he had to become a Muslim to marry me, and he had to marry me because you know what they say. Once you go Pak … that’s right, you’ll never eat pork again.”

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