SAJAforum

INTERVIEW: Fareed Zakaria on receiving India's Padma Bhushan award

Editor's note: Omar Kasrawi is a freelance journalist and a production assistant on "Fareed Zakaria GPS." SAJAforum asked him to chat with his boss (and one of our most influential members) for us. Please post your comments below.

By now you have no doubt heard about Fareed Zakaria returning the ADL's Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Award. But earlier this year he was honored as one of the recipients of the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest recognition awarded to civilians by the Indian government.

Earlier this month, a small reception was held to honor Zakaria for receiving the award. Indian Ambassador to the United States Meera Shankar made the journey up from D.C and explained to the crowd what the award means. (Her full remarks can be found here as a PDF)

I had the chance to speak with Zakaria recently on what this recognition means to him, his move to Time  and more.

First of all, congratulations on receiving the Padma Bhushan.

You’ve been called a lot of things in the press. An academic, journalist, foreign affairs analyst, a future candidate for Secretary of State and so forth. The night you were honored for receiving the award you joked, quoting Churchill, that from now on, “Your Excellency will do.”  But you seemed genuinely humbled, if not embarrassed, at the attention bestowed upon you that evening. What does this award mean to you?

Fareed Zakaria: Well for me it’s sort of humbling because my father was a politician in India, so I grew up quite aware of this award. Quite aware of the enormous debates that used to take place about who should get it. Whether or not it was appropriate for somebody to get it. And I always assumed my father would get it, and in one of the strange ironies of life was that he ended up, for the last ten years of his life, being on the panel that determines who gets these awards.

So he was automatically ruled out because of the conflict of interest. I think that I have sort of mixed feelings about it. Honestly there’s a part of me that feels like that Grouch Marx line, “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.” And so I feel like it can’t be that important of an award if they give it to me.

EDUCATION: UPenn's Lauder Institute Adds India Focus to MBA Offerings

An unusual announcement regarding MBA classes at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania:

The Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania announced today that they will add Hindi to their roster of programs in international business and culture. The Hindi Program, focused on doing business in India, will become the ninth Language and Culture offering at the Lauder Institute, a unique two-year, joint-degree course of study that combines a Wharton MBA with a Master of Arts in International Studies from the School of Arts & Sciences. Students undergo intensive, advanced-level language training and take courses aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the economic, political, and cultural context in which business takes place. They also spend several weeks at different locations around the world engaged in a rigorous experiential and action-oriented academic program of activities. The new Hindi Program will prepare MBA students for successful managerial careers in and with India, a region of increasing business and economic significance.

Full press release below. Post your comments, please.

CRIME: Gopi Podila among three professors killed in University of Alabama shootings

HELP US COVER THIS STORY WITH MORE INFO, LINKS, ETC, IN THE COMMENTS SECTION. IF YOU HAVE A BETTER PHOTO AND DETAILS, PLEASE E-MAIL SAJA[at]COLUMBIA.EDU

UPDATE (Feb. 14, 2010): Added details below about Amy Bishop's 1986 shooting of her brother and her being a suspect in a 1993 bombing plot - see below.

An Indian-American professor was among the three professors killed during a Friday afternoon shooting on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Professor Gopi K. Podila, chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, were killed. Three others were also injured in the incident.

A biology professor, Amy Bishop, has been reportedly taken into custody in connection with the incident. It is alleged that she was denied tenure. A Harvard-trained biologist, she was considered a "research star" in the department.

You can follow the story here at Google News.

Details about Alabama governor's response and much more in these stories in the Kolkata Telegraph by SAJAer K.P. Nayar: Feb. 13 and Feb. 16.

UPDATE: In 1986, Amy Bishop shot her brother to death in what was then called an accident. A new investigation is going to take place. 

In 1993, she and her husband were suspects in a bomb plot to kill a Harvard Medical School professor.

And then there's this:

During a search of Bishop's computer, authorities found a draft of a novel that Bishop was writing about a female scientist who had killed her brother and was hoping to make amends by becoming a great scientist, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation and spoke to the Globe on the condition of anonymity.

Excellent coverage at Boston.com, now with a new special section (thanks to Boston Globe's David Beard for the alert).

Podila's site has been taken off line, but the cached version is below.

In April 2007, we covered the shooting death of Prof. G.V. Loganathan in the Virginia Tech shootings; in Jan. 2008, we covered the shooting  death of Duke PhD student Abhijit Mahato; in Dec. 2007, we covered the shooting deaths of Louisiana State University PhD students Chandrasekhar Reddy Kommaand Kiran Kumar Allam.

My personal thoughts, as a professor at an American University for the last 17 years:

TECHNOLOGY: Shree Nayar's big idea in a small camera

My name is Sree and I am not an engineer. But I play one on TV and pretend to be a technologist at Columbia University. This is a post about another "Sree" at Columbia, someone I have described, for 15 years, as "the more famous, REAL technologist named Sree at Columbia University." Shree Nayar, who heads the Columbia computer science department and one of the the world's most innovative tech minds when it comes to cameras, has invented a new kind of digital camera. From the press release:

Columbia University professor Shree Nayar has blended technology, innovation and art into a new digital camera designed to teach science to children around the world. The camera, called the Bigshot, comes as a kit of parts which kids as young as eight years old can assemble by themselves. In the process, they learn basic concepts of physics and engineering. Free, after-school programs for children to assemble and use the cameras are being scheduled now in New York.

Though the camera is simple to build, it features sophisticated technology, including an LED flash and three lenses: standard, panoramic and 3-D. Its color palette is inspired by M&Ms candies, a hand crank provides power even when there are no batteries, and a transparent back panel shows the camera’s inner workings.

Full press release below. Post your comments, please.

Media contact:  Anna Kuchment, 212-854-6581, aml15[at]columbia.edu

AWARDS: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shares chemistry Nobel + list of other South Asian winners

UPDATE, 9/7/2009, 2:52 pm ET: *** A SAJA member tells us that a journalist colleague who spoke to Ramakrishnan confirms he is a U.S. citizen.

UPDATE: 9/7/2009, 11 am ET: There was some confusion about Ramakrishnan's citizenship. The NYT says he's a U.S. citizen, as does Wikipedia. But as the screengrabs below, the Nobel folks say he's British. They also changed his photo thrice (going live with no photo at first - all the pix below). Use the comments section or sree[at]sree.net.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a Cambridge professor who is a US citizen who was born in Tamil Nadu, India, wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Thomas Steitz, an American citizen at Yale and Ada E. Yonathan, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. From the Yale press release: All three used a technology called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome. The knowledge of the ribosome has created targets for a new generation of antibiotics. The instruction manual for the creation of proteins is DNA, but the ribosome is the machine which takes information transcribed onto messenger RNA and turns it into proteins. Read details at NobelPrize.org. More here throughout the day.

COVERAGE: Sify | NYT

The Nobel Lectures in Chemistry will be held on Tuesday, 8 December 2009, at the Aula Magna, Stockholm University. The lectures will be published on this site after that.

Here is the latest screengrab from NobelPrize.org (scroll down to see the previous two versions):

From the SAJA Stylebook for Covering South Asia and the Diaspora:

Several people associated with South Asia have won Nobel Prizes. In chronological order: Ronald Ross (Medicine, 1902); Rudyard Kipling (Literature, 1907); Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1913); Sir C.V. Raman (Physics, 1930); Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine, 1968); Abdus Salam (Physics, 1979); Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979); Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983); Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (Peace, 1989); Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998); V.S. Naipaul (Literature, 2001); Dr. Mohammed Yunus (Peace, 2006); Rajendra K. Pachauri received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which he leads), sharing it with Al Gore. Interestingly, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Reuters reported in early 1998 that the reason for not selecting the leader of India's struggle for independence was Norway's friendship with Britain after World War II. Hundreds of documents in a basement safe at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, made available to Reuters after a 50-year secrecy rule, showed that Gandhi was nominated but did not win in 1937, 1947 and 1948. Historians say the five-man jury in the 1930s and '40s was pro-British and had a patronizing attitude to candidates from the developing world. "If I were to guess, one factor which made it difficult to give the prize to Gandhi was the very strong pro-British orientation in Norway 's foreign policy," said Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute.

If you have comments to share, please post them below.

These are screengrabs of the Nobel site, in chronological order:

SPELLING BEE: Fourteen Indian semifinalists

I haven't been paying attention to the Spelling Bee yet, but with the semis and final round coming up tomorrow, I thought I'd take a look at the Semifinalists list online. As I scrolled down through all the faces, I got that sinking feeling: Where are all the desi kids?? How will they maintain their hegemony?? I had to scroll past five kids of varying hues before I finally came to the first, Ramya Auroprem, an 8th grader from San Jose ("Ramya is fascinated by linguistics and is eager to learn new languages."). Out of 41 semifinalists, I counted 14 Indian kids - a goodly percentage, but they'd best not let that kind of scare happen again.

FYI, the Semifinals are on ESPN on Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern time, and the Finals start on Thursday at 8 pm on ABC.

A onetime competitor, Ahalya Nava, wrote to me today, pointing out this little Fun Fact posted on the Scripps website:

"In 1985 Balu Natarajan of Chicago, Illinois, became the first Indian-American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Since 1985 six additional Indian-Americans have won the championship: Rageshree Ramachandran (1987), Nupur Lala (1999), George Thampy (2000), Pratyush Buddiga (2002), Sai Gunturi (2003), Anurag Kashyap (2005) and Sameer Mishra (2008)."

So I asked her to share some more of her thoughts on the contest, since she was in it:

Things have certainly changed since the 1980’s.  I remember back in 1986, perhaps only a handful of us South Asians at the National Spelling Bee, and being surprised at seeing even 3 or 5.  We were a shy group, in awe and full of gratitude for the opportunity to represent our schools and our states, and to have the opportunity to meet and shake hands with President Reagan.  I don’t think any major news channel might have even carried our stories or the competition.

Fast forward 23 years, and there are at least 32 South Asians represented in the National Spelling Bee of approximately 293 total competitors – that’s approximately 10% of the entire competitor base. 

BOOKS: Shalini Shankar's "Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class and Success in Silicon Valley"

Shalini Shankar, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, came out with "Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class and Success in Silicon Valley" (Duke Univ. Press) several months ago. Since there's still a relatively small body of academic work on South Asian Americans, we asked her to tell us a little about her research - which involved considerable hanging-out in high schools - and share some of her findings. At the end, she's provided a very useful list of texts that deal with South Asian youth and the diaspora.

By the way, if you're an academic and have a new book with somewhat broad appeal, let us know. All we ask is that you cut down on the academese, ie., keep it simple.

Researching and writing "Desi Land," by Shalini Shankar

What does it mean to be a successful Desi? "Desi Land" is my ethnographic account of South Asian American youth culture during and after the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. I examine how Desis define and manage what it means to be successful individuals and community members, and how teenagers orient themselves to their diverse high schools and consider their lives afterwards. I conducted the majority of my research between 1999-2001, when the high tech industry peaked. I did fieldwork with Desi teens in their diverse, over-enrolled public high schools, as well as in their large, bustling communities organized along linguistic, ethnic, and religious lines. I was interested in understanding their concerns in schools and communities, and how these overlapped.

When I began research in the fall of 1999, I didn’t realize how perfect my timing was, and that I would catch the height of the dot-com boom and witness its gut-wrenching collapse in Silicon Valley. I was most interested in how families of different immigration histories and class backgrounds had migrated to Silicon Valley, and the diverse trajectories that brought them there. For instance, were they first generation immigrants from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh who were drawn to opportunities in the high-tech field? Were they third generation immigrants from Punjab who were looking for less back-breaking work than the agricultural jobs their families had held in other regions of California? Had they moved from the UK, Africa, Fiji, or some other location in the South Asian diaspora? All of these paths interested me, because I wanted to understand how this diverse range of experiences could differently shape what it means to be “Desi” for the diverse range of teens who are grouped under this heading, and why the “Land” of Silicon Valley provided a unique and distinctive location in which to examine these questions. 

Keeping up with the Kapoors

The concept “Desi community” is often used in public discourse, but what does that really look like in particular places? Over the past few decades, the surge in high-tech jobs has made Silicon Valley an attractive place for families in search of lucrative careers as well as steady, well-paying non-skilled labor positions. I sought to understand how Desi communities in Silicon Valley have grown from small, often socially isolated sets of families to dynamic, visible entities. I describe how middle-class and upper-middle-class Desis organize themselves into communities based on shared religion, language, nationality, class status, geographical proximity, and sometimes caste. From building places of religious worship to supporting one another in business, politics, and social endeavors, these Desi community networks are especially invaluable during times of economic, political, and social instability. Not surprisingly, they are also a hotbed of gossip that spans school and community settings. While class is not an openly discussed topic, I could see that it fundamentally shaped the experiences of youth and wanted to understand how this was happening. The majority of studies focus on upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile Desi youth, but I wanted to understand processes of class formation from a wide range of cases. Do Desi teens of different class backgrounds have varying academic and social experiences in school? Do differences in their parents’ occupational and educational status affect their participation in school life? How does it shape their thoughts about college and work after high school? High school, as it turned out, was a perfect place to study these things.

BOOKS: Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History"

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger fills a significant gap: It is a scholarly but mostly accessible book that recounts millennia of South Asian history, as much as possible, through the eyes of non-elites. The book has garnered both praise and sharp criticism, as Doniger’s work often does, and has spawned a feisty but confusing New York Times review by Pankaj Mishra.

Doniger (bio) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. To match her hefty title, Doniger’s curriculum vitae weighs in at 39 pages. For better or for worse, she is one of the most influential American scholars of Indian religion.

Blogging for The Washington Post, Doniger explains her purpose in writing the book:

My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English—imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people. But the texts tell us not just who was the ruler but who got enough to eat and who did not.

The reviews that appeared recently in The Washington Post and The New York Times could not be more different. The former is simple and unsurprising while the latter is convoluted and apparently looking to pick a fight.

Michael Dirda’s review in the WP summarizes the book and argues that it is “probably too scholarly and specialized for readers looking simply for an introduction to Indian philosophy and religion” but still recommends it for people who already know the basics.

In contrast to Dirda’s by-the-book review, Pankaj Mishra wrote a more interpretive piece in the NYT that was destined to be misinterpreted. The first three grafs invoke a hodgepodge of references: the novelist E.M. Forster, the colonial preference for the supposed clarity of Islam over the supposed muddle of Hinduism, and the claim that “the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call ‘Hinduism.’”

DESI SPOTTING: Two South Asians among 2009 Yale World Fellows

From an annnouncement from Yale:

The Yale World Fellows Program is a core element of Yale’s ongoing commitment to global leadership development.  Aiming to build a global network of emerging leaders and to broaden international understanding worldwide, each year the Program invites a select group of highly accomplished mid-career men and women from government, business, the media, and civil society organizations representing countries across the world, for a 4-month leadership program at Yale.

I spotted these two names:

Unmesh Brahme (India)
Senior Vice President, Corporate Sustainability, HSBC India
Brahme, a corporate strategist, promotes socially responsible practices involving communities, stakeholders, and businesses.

Zafar Sobhan (Bangladesh)
Op-Ed Editor and Columnist, The Daily Star
Editor, Forum Magazine
As an opinion shaper in Bangladesh, Sobhan edits and contributes to Bangladesh’s paper of record as well as the nation’s first “think magazine.”

Full press release below.

AUTHORED: Shilpa Agarwal on "Haunting Bombay"

This is our third installment of Authored. The idea of this most venerable series is to look at how writers are marketing and promoting their works. Earlier we looked at "The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook," by Dilara Hafiz and her kids, and Minal Hajratwala's "Leaving India." 

Today we have a first-person piece by Shilpa Agarwal, who is currently on tour in support of her new work of fiction, "Haunting Bombay," from Soho Press. The book went on sale on April 6. We were approached by her publicist, at Mandalan Media. What I found intriguing was Shilpa's use of a movie trailer to promote her book. It uses a real director, real actors, full-fledged post-production - the works. Check it out:

Also listen to this NPR story on how trailers are all the rage among writers these days: "In a World... Where Books are Hyped Like Movies"

As you'll read below, Shilpa had to grapple with issues like whether to market her work as ethnic-literary, ghost story or mystery. For both writing and promoting it, she made ample use of her ArtWallah network in L.A., and has turned to Facebook and other social networking sites these days. Curiously, she thinks there may have been a Slumdog effect on her work and other South Asian fiction. She's also been blogging. The tour dates she refers to at the end of her piece have come and gone, but here are some remaining ones:

• Los Angeles - Saturday April 18th, 4pm @ The Mystery Bookstore
• Los Angeles - Sunday April 19th, 2pm @ Book 'Em Mysteries
• Pittsburgh - Sunday May 3, 1pm @ Waterworks Barnes & Noble
• Washington DC Area - Tuesday May 5, 7pm @ Reston Barnes & Noble
• San Francisco - Friday July 10, 7pm @ Book Passage
• Atlanta - September 4-6 @ The Decatur Book Festival

Writing and Marketing "Haunting Bombay" - by Shilpa Agarwal

Almost ten years have passed since I picked up my pen and wrote the first words of my novel, words that came to me in a dream-like haze: The bluish hue that clung to her body at birth had not yet left her when she died.