On the wrong side of the country for kulfi?

Don’t fret, my pet- the mutiny has even more ways for you to help donate to the victims of the brown quake (Thanks, Yasmine and Raj). If I were back home on the left coast, there is no doubt about what I’d be doing this Saturday night (after getting two sublime mango lassis from VIK’s, that is):

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BEYOND BORDERS A Benefit for the Survivors of the South Asian Earthquake

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Saturday, November 19th, 7PM
Wheeler Auditorium
University of California Berkeley

100% of the proceeds go towards grassroots earthquake relief efforts in Pakistan and India – specifically, Edhi Foundation (Pakistan), Sungi Development Foundation (Pakistan), & Association for India’s Development’s Jammu and Kashmir Fund (India).

Get your tickets, visuals and other info here. The line-up looks as good as the aforementioned lassi:

Featuring

Farah Shaikh – Kathak Dance
Chhandam-Chitresh Das Dance Company
Shailja Patel – Spoken Word
Arshad Syed – Santoor
Shabi Farooq – Tabla
Rita Sahai – Hindustani Vocal
Vivek Anand & Ferhan Qureshi – Tabla
Kamal Hyder & Nasir Syed – Sitar Duet
Ferhan Qureshi -Tabla
Domestic Crusaders –
Pakistani American Theatre

A night of solid culture and the opportunity to help people who need it, who are the victims of a vicious natural disaster AND donor fatigue? That’s some cocktail of goodness. May you get intoxicated and then donate even more. Continue reading →

Thanks to my neo-luddite lifestyle, I’m a day late (with this post), and 1667 words short (with my, ahem, novel). 😉 That’s how many words I need to average, per day, if I want to hit the magic number of 50,000 by November 30th. This lunacy I blog of can only mean one thing; either my father’s cousin was right about unmarried girls going mad by the age of 30 OR I’m doing NaNoWriMo for the third time. As much as some of you would opine that it’s the former, I assure you, it’s the other one.

Some history about this exhilarating, arduous, exasperating example of folly which requires copious amounts of hope, tenacity and your drug of choice for alertness, via the official site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Everyone who has thought about being a novelist? Really? So that’s like…87% of the people reading this. Dear 87%, there’s no need to fret about your great South Asian American novel, NaNoWriMo is about raw content, not polished prose. The idea of writing without inhibitions is the cliche from which all writing workshop exercises emanate:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Here’s why I’m telling you about this HERE, on the Mutiny:

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and — when the thing is done — the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

Continue reading →