SAAN 2007 Conference

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I just wanted to remind you students out there, particularly those who live in the Midwest, that you can still sign up for the SAAN 2007 Conference at the University of Michigan on the January 26-28th weekend. I spoke at last year’s conference (along with current guest blogger Preston Merchant) and re-capped the fabulousness of it all here.

SAAN’s primary function is to establish an annual South Asian conference for South Asian and non-South Asian students alike. SAAN 2007: Reveal, Rethink, Realize will be the fifth annual holding of this conference, and we hope to continue setting a precedent that all future SAAN conferences will follow. SAAN 2007 will be held January 26-28th at the University of Michigan Union. [Link]

For those of you who are wondering, SAAN is like the anti-SASA. No crazy partying, no SWAT teams, no drunken fights. Just good people, good learning, and great networking. Here is this year’s line-up. I am sure you will recognize many of the names on the list. Among them is Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi, the biographer and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. Some of the workshops look pretty interesting also. These two stand out (for me at least):

Do Nice Guys Finish Last? – Does leading an ethical life limit your ambitions? As we climb the ladder, should we hush our ethical voice for personal gain? For instance, if you see your boss engaging in sexual harassment, will you stay silent? Will you be totally honest on your resume? Or will you start a pseudo-student group just so you can add another leadership position on your resume? This workshop will examine the interplay between ethics and ambition in our lives…

Mohammad, Vishnu, and Darwin – We always hear about the conflict between the Bible and evolution. But how do South Asian religions reconcile religious and scientific beliefs?… [Link]

Don’t be lazy. Sign up here. It’s cheap and if you don’t like your experience you can totally rip me a new one in the comments section without being banned. I’m that confident in my recommendation.

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DJ Rekha Rocks CES

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Last week, the never ending drumbeat of biz travel took me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The show was, to put it mildy, a zoo – even by Vegas standards. If you aren’t a fan of the teeming throngs of humanity (over 150K in this case), then CES probably isn’t your schtick. First, take the surrealness that’s Vegas any other time of the year. Then, crank it up by putting a substantial portion of the export sales of East Asia on the line. Sprinkle in “kick off the year” business frenzy and you end up with the pomp and circumstance that’s CES.

While the show itself borders on obscene with the high end electronics, walls o’ plasmas, booth babes, audio equipment, cars, cellphones, computers and so on…. the real craziness happens after convention hours. There, Fortune 100 companies revert to playground one-upsmanship but on a multi-million dollar scale with dinner banquets, parties, concerts and the sorts of gala’s you can only have in Las Vegas. Like many things related to biz travel, it sounds like it might be sorta fun — and it is, at first — but the whole thing becomes a little numbing after a while.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogposts, my company is heavily involved in the nascent “mobile broadcast” space — put simply, it’s where television and mobile phones intersect. And the CES-highlight for our space was Verizon’s announcment that their MobileTV service will launch in late 1Q / 2007.

To celebrate this & a few other announcements, Verizon rented out the world famous Nobu restaurant at the Hard Rock. Their party was first class all the way with Nobu’s reknowned sushi chefs taking guests’ orders in realtime and hand filling them on the spot — ensuring no more than a few precious seconds from when the roll is expertly patted closed to landing in your convention starved mouth.

So, in the midst of all this mass market, Vegas-kitsch tinged, first-class-ness, imagine how cool it was to discover they had hired DJ Rekha to lay down the beat in the main tent…

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To the Mountaintop

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I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment [December 1964] when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award in behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.

I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. …

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time — the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, December 10, 1964 Continue reading →

Ascension

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alice.jpgSwamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda, who passed away on Friday in Los Angeles, was a working-class, African-American daughter of Detroit who embraced her spiritual calling nearly 40 years ago:

During the end of 1968, Swamini, directed by God, entered a most significant period of isolation. The Supreme Lord provided wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and instruction consonant with and essential to her designated lifeÂ’s tenure… Swamini received her initiation into the renounced order of sannyas directly from the Supreme Lord. … Swamini took mantra initiation with Swami Satchidananda.

It was a time of great cultural turmoil and motion in American society, and Swamini had found herself at the heart of it. Known to the secular world as Alice McCleod Coltrane, she met John Coltrane in 1962, married him in 1965, and joined his band, playing piano and other instruments, in 1966. After his death of liver disease in the summer of 1967, she continued on both tracks of the path they had traveled together: the musical and the spiritual. Journey in Satchidananda, the album she released in 1970 featuring among others Rashied Ali, Charlie Haden and Pharoah Sanders, is an early document of her progress and the depth of her research and dedication. It still listens well today, one of the strongest surviving documents of the sincere fascination the creative music scene had with both Indian music and Hindu spirituality at that time, a far cry from the more superficial flirtations of the Beatles or the ephemeral Haight-Ashbury philosopher-kings.

For the rest of her life Alice was considered a recluse, recording at a limited pace and rarely appearing in concert; her vow of sanyas and commitment to the spiritual life meant that she spent most of her time at home with her family, at the ashram she founded in the Santa Monica Hills, or traveling to India to worship with Sri Satya Sai Baba.

In 2004, Alice Coltrane released a spectacular album called Translinear Light. It features sons Ravi and Oran on saxophones, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and once again Charlie Haden — a veteran of the final Coltrane bands and a deep humanist, in addition to a master of his instrument — on bass. (The group conducted a rare tour last fall, and I am sad that I missed their October gig at NJPAC in Newark. It’s a reminder that one must never miss an opportunity to see a great master perform as you never know when she will be taken from us.)

The passing of Alice Coltrane is a sad moment for jazz. It is also an chance for those of us who live at the intersection of American and South Asian cultures to honor someone who embraced that conversation at a very deep, creative level. On the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., who learned so much from Gandhiji, it’s another fitting reminder that the conversation has a rich history, and that its potential is far from exhausted. Continue reading →

An Afternoon With Yahya

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The middle of an academic’s winter break is the perfect time to be saddled with irritating errands. In this case, I had been commissioned to stay home on a Friday afternoon so a SatTV (fake name) technician could fix the problems we’ve been having with our Hindi-language channels.

SatTV is essentially a hive of incompetent technicians. A previous technician had come a month earlier. He spent five minutes looking around, cursed the installation guy that had preceded him, and declared there was nothing he could do. Though Yahya too would also accomplish nothing in the three hours he spent in my house, he was at least more interesting to talk to.

When he told me his name, I said, “oh, like the famous Pakistani general” (fortunately, I did not say “dictator”). He was impressed, it seemed, by my knowledge of history, and it started us on a good footing. He said he was from Sialkot, and industrial town in a Punjabi speaking area. Yahya himself was Punjabi, though to my relief he seemed perfectly happy to speak in English — his English was confident and effective, though lacking in the grammatical niceties that come with years of English-medium schooling. To begin with, he came to the U.S. fifteen years ago, to work as a chef. Yes, a chef: he said he had studied at a culinary institute in Lahore, and then worked as an executive chef at a “five star hotel” there before coming to Philadelphia with his wife. Continue reading →

Literary Festival Saps Tsunami Aid…Is that Bad?

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Hello again, my Sepia friends! I’m delighted to say our mutinous overlords invited me back as a part-timer here at the bunker, and I promise not to abuse the privilege. (But did you feel that shudder? Those were standards being dropped.)

leyn baan st.jpg

So as I cast about for something to write about besides boys and terrorist envoys, I found this item in the news tab (thanks Gujulicious): Sri Lanka hosted a literary festival this weekend in Galle, a beautiful city on the Southern coast with a uniquely Dutch heritage.

Attended by non other than the freshly minted Booker winner, Kiran Desai, The Galle Literary Festival billed itself as “Sri Lanka’s first literary festival” and announced noble goals:

Our objectives are to raise the awareness of the increasing depth and diversity of Sri Lankan writings in English, to give Sri Lankan writers an equal platform to their international colleagues, to encourage the use of English among young people and to attract visitors from overseas to visit Galle and the Southern Province.link

But Sri Lanka already has a National Literary Festival, as bureaucratic and stodgy as it may be. And the founder of this Galle festival appears to be an Anglo-Australian hotelier, Geoffrey Dobbs, who has a vested interested in drawing affluent tourists to his Galle hotels and resorts. And this same Geoffrey Dobbs also founded a a tsunami relief organization, Continue reading →

Emerald City Burning

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When the topic of Iraq comes up in conversations with my friends and acquaintances these days (which is sadly increasingly rare) I generally encounter one of two types of attitudes. The first one, from people on the political left and center, is one of utter exasperation and hopelessness. Not only have we lost, we’ve failed so badly that we may as well leave the stadium and get to our cars as fast as possible to avoid the traffic jam and the inevitable rowdiness soon to be displayed by the opposition. The second attitude, from those who still inexplicably cling to the right-of-center view on Iraq, is one that features mindless tu quoque utterances: “Well, at least it is better than Saddam.” What I fear, however, is that both sides are so frustrated that they no longer care what is going on over there. Even as Bush’s poll numbers plummet, more American soldiers die, and death squads roam Baghdad’s streets (something that even laymen easily predicted two full years ago), the conflict is ever evolving. It is imperative that we recognize that evolution and not think that it is simply business as usual over there. It is in fact getting far worse every day, and in historically predictable ways.

Three articles published on Sunday collectively do a fine job of bringing us all up to speed on where things stand at the present and why adding 20,000 additional troops is nothing but the final desperate maneuver of a man who was always ten steps behind. The first article comes to us from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City. In it he describes how the Bush administration is rounding up all the people that it originally thought didn’t understand the situation in Iraq, and is now asking them to salvage what little they can of the mess.

Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn’t fazed by chaos. He’d been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia’s civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, “was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them.”

He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned…

Desperate for new approaches to stifle the persistent Sunni insurgency and Shiite death squads that are jointly pushing the country toward an all-out civil war, the White House made a striking about-face last week, embracing strategies and people it once opposed or cast aside. [Link]

Now that the Neocons and “swamp drainers” have been discredited, it is time for the pragmatic adults to clean up their mess. These are the same pragmatic adults who were accused of not understanding the real threat of terrorism by the idealogues who lost their reason to fear, post 9/11. Part of the new plan for Baghdad is what the people worth listening to were saying all along. That is what makes the present bloodshed even harder to witness:

The plan unveiled by Bush last week calls for many people who lost their jobs under Bremer’s de-Baathification decree to be rehired. It calls for more Sunnis, who were marginalized under the CPA, to be brought into the government. It calls for state-owned factories to be reopened. It calls for more reconstruction personnel to be stationed outside the Green Zone. It calls for a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes providing security to the civilian population over transferring responsibility to local military forces.

Carney believes such measures could have been effective three years ago. Today, he worries they will be too little, too late. [Link]

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On “Saving” Someone From An Arranged Marriage

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The New York Times Magazine published a Chandra Prasad article (thanks, Tamasha) over the weekend on her quest to save her cousin from an arranged marriage in India. Her solution? Arrange her cousin’s marriage herself. To an Indian American, that is.

Let’s do a play-by-play of Prasad’s reasoning, shall we?

Even among my many pretty female cousins in India, bright and lovely Neet stood out. Like most of my father’s relatives, she lived in Bihar, a volatile region in the northeastern part of the country, and at 23 was sheltered in ways that I, born and bred in the U.S., had trouble comprehending. Neet never left the house alone; she had never even shopped for her own saris. But she had studied rigorously, earned a master’s degree in computer science and was working as a software-development intern. When I asked her by phone if I’d have to start calling her “Dr. Neet” soon — a nod to the possibility of a doctorate — she laughed and said, in her tentative English, “I like the sound of that!” In truth, further educational aspirations were at odds with Neet’s circumstances, and when I learned last year that her parents were considering arranged-marriage options, I felt sorry for her.

Fair enough. Sounds like Neet may risk missing out on enjoying her independence. But then Prasad writes:

A Connecticut-bred Yale grad, IÂ’m not really an advocate of arranged marriage.

Right. Because as we all know, Iowa State is just bursting at the seams with arranged-marriage advocates. Then the article just gets absurd:

But it occurred to me, and to my like-minded father, that we might be able to bring Neet into the U.S. and broaden her opportunities if we could find a suitable Indian husband for her here. With her parentsÂ’ permission, we set to work.

This is where Prasad lost me. What is it exactly that Prasad is trying to do? Is she really trying to “broaden” Neet’s opportunities? Because if that were the case, she wouldn’t try to hastily arrange her marriage, she would encourage her to apply to graduate school and continue her studies in the States. Continue reading →

Off the Market

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600_bolly.jpgWhen the hell did I become a chronicler of Bollywood? I barely know a damn thing about the films. But the pulsating worldwide buzz of matters Ash and Abhishek is so intense right now, it has penetrated even my cortex. I surrender to the glamour and the glory. Consider how our dashing duo have spent the last three days:

Thursday: Star in glamorous, media-frenzied, movie premiere event in Toronto.

Friday: Star in glamorous, media-frenzied, movie premiere event in New York City.

Saturday: Travel, presumably.

Sunday: Oh, I don’t know… how about we get engaged at a private ceremony at Daddyji’s Juhu crib?

A couple of days ago the Indian press was still reading the tealeaves based on Ash and Abhishek’s “hand-in-hand” appearance in Toronto — actually, the pictures show Ash demurely at her gentleman’s elbow —

The buzz about the marriage of Aishwarya and Abhishek has become almost a belief now after Ash has been spotted more frequently in the company of the Bachchans in the recent days thereby adding more fuel to the gossip mills.

Well, mill no more! It’s official. Sorry, Neha and Chick Pea and the rest of you lovely ladies… Thank God we know another superfine Abhishek who might still be available. Having U.S. passport even! Continue reading →

Bait and switch

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“Have you seen Nepal?” Apparently those words appeared at the bottom of a poster hanging on the wall of Royal Nepal Airlines’ offices in Delhi. The poster featured this lovely picture:

“Have you seen Nepal?” Apparently neither has Royal Nepal Airlines.

It took a sharp-eyed tourist from Peru to notice the obvious error and tattle to his countryman before the world was made aware of this sinister plot. To that tourist I can only say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

“The airline … offered apologies to Peru for using the picture of the Machu Picchu Sanctuary on a poster to promote their country and assured that the lamentable error has been corrected,” the statement said.

“As a consequence, the Nepalese airline fired an employee in the rank of a manager … It is concluded that it was an isolated error,” it added. [Link]

I wish this news would have broken a week later! I’ve hiked to Machu Picchu and will be in Delhi next Saturday en route to Kathmandu, Nepal. What a coup it would have been to pose in front of this poster for the entertainment of SM readers (although perhaps “coup” is the wrong word in this context). I’m wondering if I can take a lot of pictures in Nepal and use them in a poster encouraging tourism in North Dakota where SM’s headquarters are based. By the way, do we have any Nepali readers in the house? Should we even consider a meet-up?

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