{"id":5334,"date":"2008-08-12T18:28:33","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T23:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=5334"},"modified":"2008-08-12T17:48:59","modified_gmt":"2008-08-12T22:48:59","slug":"kal_penn_hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/12\/kal_penn_hearts\/","title":{"rendered":"Kal Penn Hearts Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/a><\/p>\n\n

Yesterday, I attended the ASIAN AMERICANS FOR OBAMA EVENT WITH ACTOR KAL PENN, in Macacaville, VA. No, I’m not shouting at you, I’m just too lazy to reformat what I copied from the press release that uber-Dem Toby Chaudhuri was kind enough to send me. \ud83d\ude09 Like all good desi events, it didn’t start on time, which was highly awesome for those of us who were fighting our way from DC to Farlington<\/a> during rush hour, in the hopes of seeing the biggest brown actor of them all stump for Obama<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

So many<\/em> references were made to a certain<\/a> set of movies with which you are all familiar, that I have resolved to not mention them once (not! once!) in this post; instead, I’m going to give you the highlights of what Kal Penn said, about his favorite contender for the potentially-soon-to-be-not-White House.<\/p>\n\n

Penn got personal, as he speeched at us with tales of his grandfather’s involvement in the struggle for India’s freedom and a more recent influential event in his life– a phone call he received from a good friend, from Texas, asking for advice.* This friend was struggling to finance his education, and he had been offered a job with Satan<\/strike> with Haliburton<\/a>, driving trucks through Iraq for $90,000 a year. It was a tempting, and obviously perilous offer for someone making minimum wage. Penn was deeply affected by the awful situation his friend was in and that’s one of the reasons why he’s taking the time to get involved and motivate people across the country to support Obama; he sincerely believes his man has a plan.<\/p>\n\n

The actor, who is currently starring<\/a> in one of MY favorite shows, “House”, commenced his entertaining remarks with “Happy Macaca day!”. Indeed, it was<\/em> the second anniversary of the infamous event<\/a> which transformed our community in to some monkeys with which to reckon.<\/p>\n\n

The one-hundred plus people in attendance seemed to enjoy his message…and the event itself, which was lively, upbeat and well-stocked with delicious food. Seriously. While I can’t personally vouch for the chicken–which my friend had fourths of– I CAN say that after Penn was hustled in to a waiting (yet fuel-efficient) SUV, I devoured the best samosas I’ve EVER had. Toby and Ruby…who was your caterer??Oh, yeah…there was some more useful stuff I should report. During the brief Q+A, someone mentioned the whole “secret Muslim”-accusation<\/a>, and how that may dissuade people from supporting Bharath<\/a>. Penn referred them to a website set up expressly for this purpose- Fight the Smears.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Many of the speakers emphasized that “grassroots outreach” or speaking to people one-on-one would be the best<\/em> way to hash out these issues; to that end, even Kumar Barve<\/a> mentioned that instead of working precincts in his own MoCo, Maryland, he’d be in battleground-y Virginia, giving his all for Obama. I’m the least-in-love-with-Obama person I know (I’m an independent), but I will type this– every once in a while, I’m surprised at the examples of selflessness he seems to inspire. I’ve rarely seen it in politics, whether it’s new college grads donating their tax refunds to the campaign (instead of Apple<\/a>) or veteran legislators offering to go door-to-door in a state which isn’t even their own; people are giving more of themselves than I would expect. That’s…something, isn’t it?<\/p>\n\n

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*I might have certain details of this story wrong, because I was busy furiously flickr-ing, BrightKiting and tweeting<\/a> about how I was four feet from Kal Penn. All that web 2.0 makes it difficult to take written notes, y’all! But I do<\/em> have a whole album<\/a> of pictures for our favorite<\/a>, semi-literate, Ivy-league teens<\/a> to enjoy, and really, that’s all that matters. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,15,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}