SAJAforum

PAKISTAN: Umar Cheema discusses press freedom in Pakistan [AUDIO]

On Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011, Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema (@umarcheema1) won an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (you can read his acceptance speech here). He was honored for his bravery after being kidnapped and beaten in September 2010 by unknown assailants. Instead of staying silent as he had been ordered to do, he spoke out about the culture of fear that journalists face in Pakistan. [The photo on the right was taken after his attack.]

The day after the awards ceremony, SAJA and CPJ hosted a conversation about the state of press freedom in Pakistan with Cheema and Bob Dietz, CPJ's Asia director. You can listen to the conversation below.

Listen to internet radio with SAJA HQ on Blog Talk Radio

Speaking of press freedom, below is a press release from Reporters Without Borders about an ongoing story in Pakistan.

- - -

Reporters Without Borders / Reporters sans frontières
Press release / Communiqué de presse

11-24-2011

ENG: http://en.rsf.org/pakistan-journalist-receives-death-threat-24-11-2011,41463.html

FRA: http://fr.rsf.org/pakistan-un-journaliste-menace-apres-avoir-24-11-2011,41461.html

PAKISTAN

Journalist receives death threat after "memogate" stories

Reporters Without Borders is concerned by a telephone death threat received three days ago by Mohammad Malick, editor of the Pakistani daily The News International, from a blocked number.

AWARDS: MIT's Negis Mavalvala wins MacArthur "Genius" award

A note from India-West's Sunita Sohrabji points out that we didn't note a major award. From her piece in the California weekly:

MIT quantum astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala was announced Sept. 28 as one of 23 winners of the coveted 2010 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a genius grant, and will receive a $500,000 “no strings attached” award over the next five years.

“I had always known of the MacArthur fellowship and all the wonderful scientists, historians and artists who had won it in the past, but I never, ever in my wildest dreams thought that I would be one of them,” Mavalvala, the first-known Parsi to receive the award, told India-West.

“I am incredibly humbled and so grateful to my colleagues and everyone who has supported my work,” she said from her office at MIT on the afternoon the winners were announced.

In 2006, there were two South Asian winners of the MacArthur: Atul Gawande, physician and writer; Shazia Sikander, painter. Have any desis won since then?  Think you might be a genius? See the FAQ.

Back in 1996, we put together a list of past South Asian winners (or, in the case of Jhabvala, South Asian connections). Anyone missing? The award was first given out in 1981.

• 2006 - Atul Gawande, physician
• 2006 - Shazia Sikander, painter
• 2005 - Fazal Sheikh - photographer
• 2004 - Dr. Vamsi Mootha, clinical molecular biologist
• 2002 - Sendhil Mullainathan - MIT economist
• 1998 - Ayesha Jalal - historian
• 1991 - Ali Akbar Khan - classical Indian music performer
• 1984 - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - novelist and screenwriter
• 1983 - A. K. Ramanujan - poet, translator and literary scholar
• 1982 - Ved Mehta, author

Post your comments below.

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.

AWARDS: Multiple South Asian connections to the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes

It's Pulitzer Prize-time and this year, there are multiple South Asian connections to the 2010 Pulitzers (see full list of winners and finalists here).

* The Pulitzer winner for History:

For a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,” by Liaquat Ahamed (The Penguin Press), a compelling account of how four powerful bankers played crucial roles in triggering the Great Depression and ultimately transforming the United States into the world’s financial leader.

Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for >twenty-five years.He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group; a director of Aspen Insurance Co.; and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. Ahamed has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.

This is the first South Asian winner or finalist in this category.

* In the Fiction category, there's a South Asian finalist:

“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W.W. Norton & Company), a collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

Listen to Feb 2010 SAJAforum webcast with Mueenuddin, conducted by SAJA's Vibhuti Patel.

This is the category that Jhumpa Lahiri won in 2000, for "The Interpreter of Maladies."

* In the Drama category, there's a South Asian finalist for the first time:

“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” by Rajiv Joseph, a play about the chaotic Iraq war that uses a network of characters, including a caged tiger, to ponder violent, senseless death, blending social commentary with tragicomic mayhem

* The Washington Post won four Pulitzers this year and the co-managing editor of the paper is Raju Narisetti. Two of the prizes were for the Post Magazine (Gene Weingarten for Feature Writing) and Style (Sarah Kaufman for Criticism), both sections headed by Narisetti.

* Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, has had yet another successful Pulitzer year. Here's what his imprint did this time:

- Winner in Biography or Autobiography: "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” by T.J Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf); finalists: “Cheever: A Life,” by Blake Bailey (Alfred A. Knopf); “Woodrow Wilson: A Biography,” by John Milton Cooper Jr. (Alfred A. Knopf).

- In 2007 (see SAJAforum coverage), Mehta did even better, with a rare hat-trick of winners: the Fiction prize for "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy; the General  Nonfiction prize for "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright; the History prize for "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff.

[Coincidentally, both Narisetti and Mehta were honored in March at the 2009 India Abroad Awards - Narisetti with the Publisher's Award for Special Excellence (along with NPR executive producer Madhulika Sikka) and Mehta with the India Abroad Award for Lifetime Achievement, complete with a video tribute by Bill Clinton, one of his many authors. Video of Narisetti acceptance speech; video of Mehta acceptance speech - you'll see Suketu Mehta in the video with Sonny; Suketu was a Pulitzer finalist in General Nonfiction in 2005 for "Maximum City: Mumbai Lost & Found".]

* One of this year's jurors was Jai Singh, managing editor of The Huffington Post - one of the few South Asians to have been a Pulitzer juror (Peter Bhatia, editor of the Oregonian, has been a juror four times; anyone else?)

Singh, along with Prof. Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers, will be on an AAJA webcast about the Pulitzers on Wednesday, April14, 3 pm ET. Listen live or a to a recording at this link.

FROM THE SAJA ARCHIVES:

• See SAJA's collection of South Asia and the Pulitzer Prize over the last 60 years until 2008
• In 2008, Adrees Latif won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography
• See SAJAforum's coverage of the 2007 awards ceremony
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AWARDS: Jyoti Thottam wins major Time Inc Award

The last time we saw former SAJA president Jyoti Thottam on SAJAforum, it was in June 2008, when she was preparing to head to Delhi to be Time's South Asian bureau chief (you can catch our webcast with her). Now, she's back for a short visit to collect a major internal prize at Time Inc. She and a colleague won the Henry Luce Award (named for the founder of Time) for reporting for “The Making of a Terrorist,” which looked at the Mumbai attacks of 2008:

Time Asia’s Aryn Baker and Jyoti Thottam burrowed into confidential documents and conducted exclusive interviews in two countries to describe the recruitment and radicalization of the only terrorist who survived.

She collects her prize tonight. See editorial honcho John Huey's note about all the award winners and finalists - impressive list, all from one company.

DESI SPOTTING: Stanford's Devin Banerjee wins WSJ's Daniel Pearl internship

From a news release from Stanford University:

Devin Banerjee, editor in chief of the Stanford Daily, has been awarded the 2010 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship, which will have him working in one of the Wall Street Journal's foreign bureaus this summer.

Banerjee is working toward a degree in management science and engineering, with a concentration in technology and policy. He expects to graduate in 2011.

The internship was established to commemorate the work and ideals of Pearl, a Stanford graduate and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.

In an essay written as part of the application process, Banerjee noted that Pearl rooted his stories in conversations with everyday people, "for it often was their absence from the larger conversation that yielded a nature of misunderstanding – the failure to connect the dots."

Banerjee is from Calabasas, in Southern California, and he has previously held internships at the San Jose Mercury News and the JoongAng Daily in Seoul, Korea.

Pearl, a 1985 graduate of Stanford's Department of Communication, was kidnapped in Karachi on Jan. 23, 2002, while working on a story retracing the steps of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. A month later, on Feb. 21, his captors released a videotape of his slaying. He was 38.

Congrats to Banerjee (it's also nice to see a South Asian running one of the country's biggest college dailies; and thanks to Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, and Stanford alum, for the alert).

See an archive of Banerjee's stories.

Daniel Pearl, when he was working in India and Pakistan, was an active member of SAJA's e-mail lists... Since 2002, we pay tribute each year to his memory by presenting the SAJA Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Coverage of South Asia (watch for this year's call for entries shortly).

MOVIES: "Kavi" gets Oscar nomination for Short Film and "Burma VJ" for Documentary Feature

After last year's Oscar success of "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Smile Pinki" (the OTHER Oscar-winning film about poor children set in India, for Best Documentary), it will be a quiet year for South Asia at this year's Academy Awards.

I've found two South Asia-related nominations (are there others?). One is "Kavi" for Short Film (Live Action). From the movie site:

Did you know slavery still exists? There’s more slavery today than the entire 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Click the photo to see the “Kavi” trailer & learn more. Kavi is a boy in India who wants to play cricket and go to school, but instead he is forced to work in a brick kiln as a modern-day slave. Unsatisfied with his fate, Kavi must either accept what he’s always been told, or fight for a different life even if he’s unsure of the ultimate outcome.

KaviTheMovie.com has more info, including contact information for the director, Gregg Helvey.

The other is "Burma VJ" for Documentary (Feature). From the movie site:

DESI SPOTTING: Nikhil Arora and BTTR Ventures getting attention

Coffee might power red-eyed Americans at 7 a.m., but it’s the leftover waste of java grounds that is driving a young business venture in California.

Nikhil Arora (pictured at right, above) and his partner Alejandro Velez, both 22, are the founders of BTTR Ventures, an initiative in San Francisco that converts tons of America’s coffee ground waste into gourmet mushrooms. The company was nominated for Business Week’s America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs and BBC’s World Challenge competition (vote for them before the Nov. 13 deadline here).

The two Berkeley alumni were sitting in a business ethics course last December when a lecturer told the class about women in Colombia and Africa who were fighting malnutrition with used coffee. Thinking of America’s strong coffee habit, Velez and Arora decided to partner up and try out the idea themselves – starting off in a fraternity kitchen.

“We spent the last semester knee deep in coffee and experimenting to see if our idea would work,” Arora said.

They worked with Berkeley’s ecology department and received a $5000 grant from the social innovation department. Arora and Velez took their mushrooms door to door for feedback from friends, restaurants and food producers.

Arora was originally going to continue a consulting career before founding BTTR Ventures.

He said his family was surprised, but supportive. Arora’s older brother is also an entrepreneur who started an advertising web site, www.retargeter.com. But he said explaining a green startup to some of the Indian community, and his grandparents, was a little harder.

“I’ve always had this itch to do something of my own,” he said.

BTTR Venture is now supported by franchises such as Whole Foods and Peet’s Coffee & Tea.

The company is expanding their products to include shitake mushrooms and gourmet home gardens that will harvest mushrooms multiple times. Arora said he hopes to also increase the availability of their products to more people.

“That’s one of our biggest things – local fresh food movement has been tailored to wealthy and upper class people, but it should be something that’s open [to everyone].”

Commitment to society is a core principle of the venture. The team donates the used coffee grounds for compost, and helps support a gardening program for high school students.

Arora said he hopes the company will grow to include more social-minded projects and business ventures.

Post your comments below.

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:

AWARDS: Mazhar Abbas of Pakistan wins Missouri Honor Medal

Mazhar Abbas, a veteran Pakistani journalist has won a major prize from the Missouri School of Journalism. From "Seven to Receive the Prestigious Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism":

Columbia, Mo. (Aug. 4, 2009) -- Six prominent media leaders and a pioneering online publication will receive one of the profession's highest honors, the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, from the Missouri School of Journalism.

The 2009 medalists, who will be honored on Tuesday, Oct. 20, on the University of Missouri campus, are:

• Mazhar Abbas, defender of press freedom, Pakistan
• Rance Crain, president of Crain Communications Inc.; editor-in-chief of Advertising Age, Crain's Chicago Business and Crain's New York Business
• Doug Crews, executive director, Missouri Press Association
• Bill Eppridge, photojournalist
• Rod Gelatt, professor emeritus, Missouri School of Journalism
• Deborah Howell, editor and ombudsman
• Slate, a daily online magazine

Medalists will present master classes on topics related to their areas of expertise to Missouri School of Journalism students and other guests during the day of Oct. 20. That evening, the medalists will be recognized at an awards banquet at the Donald W. Reynolds Alumni Center on the MU campus.

Medalists are selected by the faculty of the School on the basis of lifetime or superior achievement in journalism. The Missouri School of Journalism has awarded the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism annually since 1930. More than 425 distinguished journalists, advertising and public relations practitioners, business people, institutions and media organizations from around the world have received this prestigious award.

Excerpt from the description of the winners:

Mazhar Abbas Defender of Press Freedom, Pakistan
Mazhar Abbas is a fearless fighter for press freedom in Pakistan. During his 27-year career as an award-winning journalist, he has endured repeated threats as a result of his tireless work to win and protect an independent voice for citizens. Abbas' indefatigable devotion to the democratic principles of journalism has resulted in more than 2,000 front-page stories on political, social and human rights issues. These have been published in The Star, the leading English-language evening newspaper from Pakistan's economic hub, Karachi, and a member of The DAWN Media Group, the country's largest network of English-language newspapers. He provides analysis of events and policies for other major English-language print and electronic news outlets, including a weekly talk show called "Do-Tok," meaning straight forward in Urdu. Abbas previously hosted other news commentary programs on Pakistan's leading news portal, ARY One World (now ARY News), and one called "Spotlight" for the private channel Hum. He has conducted exclusive interviews with some of the country's most controversial and prominent military and government figures. Abbas was one of only five journalists to receive the coveted 2007 International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. He currently serves as the deputy director of news and reporting for ARY One World. Abbas is active in Pakistan's journalists' unions, serving for four years as secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. He also has been elected to several union positions including three terms as secretary of the Karachi Press Club. Abbas is a frequent speaker on the topics of journalism and freedom of expression on television talk shows as well as at universities and colleges.

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