Food For Thought: Riz MC’s “Sour Times”

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Via Pickled Politics, a music video for a Brit-Asian rapper named Riz MC (Riz Ahmed):

And here is the little blurb about the video on YouTube:

New Riz Music Video for ‘Sour Times’, created by a montage of clips of other people mouthing the lyrics. Collaborators include rappers Plan B, Scroobius Pip, actors Jim Sturgess, Tom Hardy, and musician Nitin Sawhney.

(Wait, who are all those people? I’d never heard of any of them besides Nitin Sawhney!)

I don’t say that I agree 100% with the message in the song; I’m posting it as food for thought, rather than as an endorsement. But I do think he makes good points regarding the new tendency to brand terrorist attacks by date (7/7, 26/11, etc); there’s also a provocative push-back on the news-media’s obsession with catching Al-Qaeda “supervillains.” It is basically just an action-movie fantasy to think that they really matter.

The part where I’m not sure I’m with Riz MC in “Sour Times” is the arguably sympathetic psychologizing of what drives people to commit terrorist acts. When you say “people do this because they’re marginalized by the system,” it’s a kind of justification (even if you take pains to point out, as Riz MC does, that it’s still wrong). Some people who’ve committed, or attempted to commit, acts of terrorism in western countries fit the profile of the angry immigrant screwed over by the system, but others do not.

Still, it’s a complex song — with a lot of different ideas. It probably deserves some attention. Continue reading →

The Arc of Religious Freedom in France

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capt.photo_1247495450439-1-0.jpg The Indian presence at yesterday’s Bastille Day events in Paris commemorated the sacrifices of Indian soldiers who fought and died in World War I and symbolized the current economic, military and political ties between the two nations. But the images of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as chief guest and the Indian troops who marched in the annual military parade, including a group pictured to the right led by a Sikh officer, also brought to mind the French law that continues to keep Sikhs out of public schools and prevents them from getting drivers licenses or serving in the military or public office.

Overlooked back in 2004 when France enacted the so-called French headscarf ban forbidding any conspicuous religious symbols in state schools or government offices, the tiny Sikh community of France has been fighting the law in and out of the courts since then (previous SM coverage). Continue reading →

Q&A with Minal Hajratwala, author of “Leaving India”

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As someone whose own family is dispersed over several continents (my husband often jokes that we can’t visit any new country without discovering that some distant relative lives there), I’ve often asked myself many of the questions that Minal Hajratwala did: How were choices made? What were the journeys like? How do they reflect the diasporic experience? That’s what I loved about “Leaving India” (soon to be reviewed here at SM by our very own Cicatrix). I thought it would be interesting to speak with the author about how she tackled the mammoth task of “deftly exploring … the unprecedented late 20th-century dispersal of Indians to every corner of the globe and their rapid rise in the places they landed” (see Washington Post review). MinalGlassesWeb.jpg

Q. You write in your introduction that you wrote this book to “find whatever fragments remain here, to trace the shape of our past and learn how it shadows or illuminates our present.” Was there an experience, an event, or some defining moment when you knew that an interest of yours had to become 7 years of your working life?

A. Not at all, it was a slowly growing awareness that somewhere in the midst of my dozens of cousins spread over nine countries was an untold story. The vague ideas swirling in my brain about migration, family, and the new visibility of Indianness in popular culture crystallized when I took a book proposal class with Sam Freedman at Columbia University, who gave me amazing guidance and editing, and asked a lot of smart questions. As I shaped it into a narrative spanning a hundred years, I became more and more curious about how all this happened, and then the questions themselves shaped my journey.

I was also naive; I thought I could research the book in a year and write it in another year. If I had thought it would be a seven-year process, I might have gotten cold feet at the beginning.

The rest of the Q&A follows below the fold. Continue reading →

The snack is sacred but the idiocy divine

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It seems that Burger King decided that Carl’s Jr had a good thing going using (Padma) Lakshmi to advertise hamburgers, so they ran an ad in Spain using Padma Lakshmi to advertise … Ham Burgers with the tag line “The Snack is Sacred.”

I don’t know about you, but even as a non-Hindu I found this pretty offensive. Lakshmi is the Goddess of wealth and learning, and they’re using her image in an ignorant way to promote a pretty cheap foodstuff. I mean, if you’re going to be offensive and use a Hindu Goddess to sell a meat product, why not go all the way and get your forbidden foodstuffs right? Hindus are most offended by beef and Muslims are most offended by pork. It’s like they couldn’t even be bothered to tell their non-Christian religions apart, even though Spain was ruled by Muslims for hundreds of years.

Of course, when news got out, a holy ruckus was raised, and BK issued a rare apology:

“We are apologising because it wasn’t our intent to offend anyone,” said spokeswoman Denise T Wilson. “Burger King Corporation values and respects all of its guests as well as the communities we serve. This in-store advertisement was running to support only local promotion for three restaurants in Spain and was not intended to offend anyone. “Out of respect for the Hindu community, the limited-time advertisement has been removed from the restaurants,” she added. [link]

At BK, we offend you our way.

Continue reading →

“Philanthrokid”: Bilaal Rajan

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You could call Bilaal Rajan of Richmond Hill, Ontario, a philanthrokid. That’s a term used in this article to describe kids who go beyond collecting coins for charity to become pre-teen fundraising phenomenons raising millions of dollars for charitable causes. As a fourth-grader Rajan raised thousands for victims of Hurricane Jeanne in Haiti. He continued fundraising following the 2004 Tsunami, coming to the attention of UNICEF, who made him a children’s ambassador and had him speak at schools to his peers about making a difference. He travels around the world to meet with children, including a trip last month to South Africa where he also met humanitarian luminaries Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

b.rajan.jpgAccording to Rajan, his philanthropic career started at age 4, when his dad read him a story about the 2001 Gujarat earthquake that inspired him to go door to door, accompanied by an adult, selling clementines to raise funds for earthquake victims.

I first heard about him in connection with the Barefoot Challenge, which seems to be more about raising awareness than about raising money. Rajan and those who participated in his challenge a few months ago spent a week barefoot to raise awareness of children living in poverty. Chronicling the events of that week, which included being kicked off a sports team and advised against attending a field trip in addition to fielding dozens of media interviews and being trailed by a photographer, Rajan explains the connection. Continue reading →

The new face of Air India (UPDATE)

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There’s something awkward about Air India trying to be hip, sort of like the uncle with the hennaed hair who knows all of the hottest club dance moves. The last time I flew Air India, I was on a 30 year old used Korean plane with an Italian flight crew and Indian flight attendants. Homey, yes. Fashionable and cutting-edge? Hardly.

So when I saw the images from Air India’s award-winning new campaign, I was a bit taken aback. I was used to the fusty maharaja, retro in a very unhip way, a character that was probably dated from its very inception. What was I to make of this mixed race family, desi female sitting openly in her white husband’s lap? (There’s another shot with a desi man, a white woman and a hadesi child)

The Maharaja was from an era of arranged marriages, when nobody spoke of dating, let alone across the colour line. I’ll bet he never looked once at a non-desi air hostess, no matter how flirtatious.

The new Air India, on the other hand, simply says “look, we’re just happy that you’re married and that you’ve given us a gorgeous grandkid! Now please visit more often.” (Yes, the campaign was created in India) It’s not really stylish, but it is most definitely contemporary. Maybe AI isn’t so dated after all. Now if only they could do something about their service, I’d really sit up and take notice.

UPDATE A few comments (thanks El Nino and Rishi ) have argued that these ads were designed just to win awards and haven’t (and wont) actually be used. People also pointed out that the idea is a straight lift from an earlier (proposed?) Air France campaign.

Continue reading →

“Victory Becomes the Defeat of the Good”: Ram Narayan Kumar

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I recently learned of the death of Ram Narayan Kumar, an Indian human rights activist, in Nepal. Kumar, who died of natural causes, is well known in the Sikh community as the staunchest non-Sikh advocate of human rights in Punjab. What drove Mr. Kumar, as far as I can tell, was a pure, principled belief in human rights and democracy, not self-interest or any sense of loyalty to the Sikh community. After 20 years of investigating primary sources and personally documenting thousands of human rights violations in Punjab, in the past few years Kumar shifted his focus to India’s northeast — places like Nagaland and Assam — where human rights intervention may be most urgently needed now.

I got to see Ram Narayan Kumar speak in New York several years ago, and was impressed by how methodical and dispassionate he was as he spoke about his attempt to document extrajudicial killings and cremations of prisoners during the peak of the Punjab militancy period in the 1980s. Many Sikhs have taken up this cause over the years (indeed, activists still show up at local Gurdwaras every June to lecture about it), but too often emotion takes over from empirical evidence and the need to provide rock-solid documentation. Ram Narayan Kumar focused on the latter, not because he advocated any political cause, but because he had faith in the idea of Indian democracy, and demanded that the system he believed in be truthful, accountable, and transparent.

Though he wrote several books, Mr. Kumar’s greatest legacy may be his rigorous documentation efforts of extrajudicial killings by the Punjab Police, which are partially collected in the massive book, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. For those who are interested, that book has been posted in its entirety here (PDF, 4.9 MB). I would particularly recommend the documentation section, starting around page 205.

The issue that stood out to me in Ram Narayan Kumar’s quest for justice related specifically to the illegal cremation of 2000+ prisoners who were killed in police custody in Punjab in the 1980s. We may never know exactly what happened to these prisoners, or how they died; a Supreme Court ordered CBI investigation has remained sealed, and its contents unknown. But cremation records were at least kept, and provide an unmistakable record. As a result of the efforts of Kumar and others, in 2006, the Indian government’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued monetary awards to the families of 1245 prisoners who were cremated in the mid-1980s. Below is a brief excerpt from one of Kumar’s more recent books outlining what happened over the decade of legal proceedings that led to a final resolution (albeit a somewhat unsatisfying one) in October, 2006. Continue reading →

A Blip on No One’s Radar: Tanveer Ahmad

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The New York Times has a story on Tanveer Ahmad, a blip on no one’s radar. Nothing terrible or violent happened to him — he died of a heart attack in a prison in New Jersey — but I was moved by the story, and thought it might be worth taking a moment to pay attention to it.

In 2005, a Pakistani man named Tanveer Ahmad died while being held for an immigration offense in Monmouth County Jail in New Jersey. He had been in the U.S. since the early 1990s, when he had come in on a visitor’s visa and stayed. He had married two American women, one in Texas, and another in the Bronx. He had also apparently married a woman back in Pakistan on a visit home in 1999, an event which led to the collapse of the first marriage (he remained legally married to the woman in Pakistan). While working at a frequently-robbed gas station in Texas, he had an incident that came back to haunt him later:

His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery. (link)

I can understand the legality of this — possessing an unlicensed firearm can be big trouble (though it sounds like it wasn’t his firearm, but the one owned by the owner of the business). Still, there is definitely a tragic irony here: Tanveer Ahmad was punished for being robbed. As a result of that misdemeanor involving a handgun, Ahmad was classified a “violent” offender, eligible for immediate detention and deportation irrespective of any mitigating circumstances.

Tanveer Ahmad’s immigration status wasn’t simple. Like thousands of other people, he had tried various options to find a path to a Green Card, but failed. Until he was actually imprisoned in 2005, it didn’t seem like there was any particular pressure on him from the USCIS to return to Pakistan:

Like several million other residents of the United States, Mr. Ahmad occupied the complicated gray zone between illegal and legal immigration. Though he had overstayed his first visa, he had repeatedly been authorized to work while his applications for “adjustment of status” were pending. Twice before 9/11 he had been allowed back into the country after visits to Pakistan.

But the green card application sponsored by his Bronx-born wife, Shanise Farrar, had been officially denied in March 2005, leaving him without a valid visa. Although the couple could have reapplied, by the time he was arrested they had not spoken in more than a year, and Ms. Farrar, who had received a letter threatening a marriage fraud investigation, was unaware of his detention. (link)

So yes, for at least a few months in 2005 he seems to have reached an endpoint in his immigration quest. But Tanveer Ahmad wasn’t a criminal, and he wasn’t taking jobs away from ordinary Americans. He was driving cabs and working the night shift at gas stations in rough neighborhoods. The latter at least is dangerous and undesirable work — work most Americans aren’t willing to do.

It’s also worth mentioning that, once he was detained, Tanveer Ahmad was ready to be deported, and had told his lawyer that he would waive any right to contest his deportation: he had no desire to remain in detention. Continue reading →

Posted in Law

Caught in Carrie’s Web

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Shyamala Moorty by Jen Cleary.jpg If you are in Los Angeles and looking for something to do this weekend, might I suggest getting caught in Carrie’s Web.

Written and performed by Shyamala Moorty [of Post Natyam Collective], directed by D’Lo with video by Sangita Shresthova. Carrie, a body-conscious, high heel-loving spider is spinning out new moves when she inadvertently snares a young human woman who’s dealing with a terrible family secret. A fantastical web of entanglement is woven with classical and contemporary Indian dance and theater.[indiacurrents]

I had the chance to check out the play a few weeks ago and was mesmerized by how a one person play was able to interweave issues of South Asian culture, sexuality, domestic violence and dance expression so eloquently. To develop her script, Shyamala worked closely with the local domestic violence group NISWA. At the show I attended, several young South Asian teen girls from NISWA that Shyamala had worked with on her script were in the audience.

In 1991, NISWA opened a “helpline” to provide counseling support and resource referrals…In addition, NISWA established a shelter for Muslim battered women in 1996. Since then, the shelter has housed many women and their children, providing them with counseling, and job placement.[niswa]

Continue reading →