SAJAforum

The New Blog On The Block: 'The Aerogram' carves out South Asian-American niche

Perhaps it is the Valentine’s Day gift that will mend the broken hearts of Sepia Mutiny fans around the country. The Aerogram, a website created by three former ‘Mutineers’, launched on February 14 in hopes of re-energizing the South Asian American community.

Strategically, co-founders, SAJA member Lakshmi Gandhi, Kishwer Vikaas and Pavani Yalamanchili, created a Twitter and Facebook page prior to launching the site.

“That really showed us that there was a need for a site like ours,” Pavani said. Currently they have more than 400 Twitter followers, and more than 150 Facebook page ‘likes’.

“We really wanted people to familiarize themselves with our voice and the topics that we were interested in before we rolled out the website.” Gandhi said.

Their blog posts aren’t small potatoes either-- since the site’s launch The Aerogram has written several widely-shared posts about various South Asian topics. The writing is punchy and energetic, and shows a newfound sense of what it means to cover the South Asian-American experience.

Monday’s blog post about HBO ‘Girls’ star Lena Dunham’s visit to India and her sympathy for all the stray dogs rather than the “poverty-stricken people,” brought a lot of eyeballs to the website. And after a black and white photo of rapper Kanye West posing with comedian Aziz Ansari and his family surfaced around on the interwebs, The Aerogram posted a delightful breakdown of who’s who in the photograph.

We talked to the founders of The Aerogram shortly after the site launched, to learn about how they came up with this new blog, and their thoughts on blogging about South Asian Americans in a ‘post-Mutiny’ blogosphere.

 

Q: How did the site come together?

Kishwer: We were all writing together for Sepia Munity and we had all kept in touch. In December I met up with Lakshmi at the Asian American Writers Workshop and we talked about how much we missed writing for SM and how we really wanted to carve out a space on the web.

Pavani: I was really excited to hear from them, because I really missed contributing to SM, especially when I came across interesting and South Asian things from television and film.

Q: How did you all come up with the name ‘The Aerogram’?

Lakshmi: We were all trying to find something that we could all identify with as South Asian Americans. Kishwer eventually came up with the name 'The Aerogram'. We all remember getting the blue aerogram envelope in the mail from India and your relatives filling in every inch of space. So we thought this is like that, in that you are getting all your news in one tiny space.

Kishwer: For me, I remember we would send these letters back and forth from here to Pakistan. And we all remembered those little blue envelopes--and we thought that would translate really well with our audience.

Pavani: I remember my entire family would all write on the one envelope and my mom would let me write a line in the letter to my aunt. It’s funny because I looked it up on Wikipedia and in late 2006 the postal service got rid of the areogram letter/envelopes-- so now this is a little bit of a nostalgic thing that everyone can relate to.

Q: Was there a hesitation to start a South Asian American site like this especially after the end of Sepia Mutiny?

Pavani: My first thought was, ‘Yes, there are other South Asian focused publications out there and there is a place for them, so why not us?’ A lot of the sites that are out there right now are segmented. I’m Indian-American, but I’m interested in other South Asian Americans in the U.S. So we make it a point to be focused on the broader South Asian community.

Kishwer: I felt like there needs to be a website that really reflects the diversity of the South Asian-American culture. What you see now--everything is so boxed up-- you have India Ink, India Real Time. As a Pakistani-American I didn’t feel like I fit into any of those boxes and I felt like something was missing. In the last seven months alone, you've had a mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Sunando Sen pushed off a subway platform in New York City and the Philadelphia Mummers parade, where one group marched in 'Indianface.' While some of these incidents were hotly debated on Twitter and Facebook timelines, not all of the media coverage included a South Asian perspective. Enter The Aerogram. A space to facilitate, curate and archive these discussions.

Lakshmi: It's tricky because Sepia Mutiny had it's own distinct identity and we all came onto Sepia Mutiny towards the tail of its time. So none of us were part of those bloggers on SM that people really identified with. So we all wanted to create our own identities in that respect. I mean the good thing is, is that Sepia Mutiny taught me how to be a blogger. It was probably the biggest audience I’ve ever written for as a blogger. So it got me attuned to the issues that people really care about. In that way Sepia Mutiny helped shape this site to some degree.

 

If you have a blog post idea for The Aerogram, send pitches to editors@theaerogram.com

CONV: Q&A With Carla Spartos, NY Post Food Writer

Food writing was almost unavoidable for Carla Spartos, the New York Post's food writer and editor. Her father was a restaurateur in New York--serving classic continental dishes to the masses like steaks, chops and everyday Italian fare. Spartos spent her hours after school sipping Shirley Temples and eyeing the kitchen's cook line. And as a precocious middle-schooler, she even wrote an expose on cafeteria meat. Spartos left her mark at the Village Voice, Zagat and New York Magazine. Now, at the New York Post, Spartos covers every aspect of the food and restaurant industry. In 2009 she made some major waves in the food world with an editorial calling out snobbery in the modern food movement. SAJAForum's Shefali Kulkarni checked in with Spartos ahead of this year's SAJA convention, where she will speak about how she turned her love of food into a career.

SK: How did you land at the New York Post writing about what you love?

CS: It was sort of a long path. I grew up in restaurants, my dad was a restaurateur so basically every day after school I would hang out in the restaurant kitchen watching the line. After that, I studied at Cornell and originally I thought I might go into science writing, but my first job out of college was at the Village Voice. When I started at the Voice I was covering music and night life and I used to review bars -- that was a pretty great job for someone in their 20s. And then I segweyed into the food aspect. I worked as a web producer for New York Magazine, and I was doing some food articles there and then later at Zagat I was an editor.

It’s funny I wrote these articles for the seventh grade -- an expose on the cafeteria food. There was a quote that ran with it, something like: ‘Today’s hamburger could be tomorrow’s taco’ and it was  about how the cafeteria would recycle food. I think there was always something [about food writing] in the back of my mind -- it was a passion, and it was just a matter of working my way into that role eventually.

SK: Talk a little about the 2009 editorial in the New York Post and some of the reactions that came from that.

CS: I think if we elicit some strong reactions with what we do, then we’ve done our job. If everyone says "Oh that’s what I’ve been thinking," then what are you adding to the dialogue? I do think someone who is cookin at home using a bag of salad or maybe frozen carrots -- I think that also should be encouraged. What’s the alternative?  Maybe they would be eating at McDonald’s. It was also poking a bit of fun at the snobbery that’s maybe a little inherent sometimes.

SK: Where is food writing’s place in today’s media? With lots of food blogs out there, do you see that helping or hurting quality food writing? Is everyone a food critic now?

CS: I think it’s great. I’m an avid food blog reader, I love combing and reading through people’s opinions whether it’s Yelp or City Search or Menu Pages. I just find it interesting and you have to take everything with a grain of salt of course. But ultimately it's a good thing, the more voices you have out there.

SK: What advice would you recommend to young food writers?

CS: The industry itself has gotten a lot tougher to break into over the last say decade. I’m on the [SAJA Convention] panel called "Dream Jobs" and it’s just highly competitive now. Food is now being treated the way music or rock and roll is in a way.

My advice would be to do an internship. I think the other helpful thing is that since blogs are so ubiquitous, it’s great to start your own, so you can already have a body of work all ready to show someone your passion. And try to eat as much and as often as possible or what your budget allows -- try to have your own point of view.

WOMEN'S RIGHTS: "Undesired," a multimedia project that reveals abuses against India's women

MediaStorm, one of the best-known multimedia studios in America, in collaboration with the Alexia Foundation, launched a multimedia project called "Undesired" October 1. The 12-minute piece uses photography, video and audio to show the horrors of gendercide in India, including the burning of women who produce daughters instead of sons.

Agentinian photojournalist Walter Astrada won the Alexia Foundation's Professional Grant to capture images of women and children in India victimized by gendercide. Astrada and the Alexia Foundation then collaborated with MediaStorm to add video and audio content.

Fellow SAJA-member and recent Columbia Journalism School graduate, Shreeya Sinha, is the associate producer for the piece. Sinha, who is interning at MediaStorm, spent two months of the summer in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Vrindavan, Dehradun and Bihar conducting interviews of various widows, mothers, activists and academics. Later, she traveled to the India-Nepal border to find more sources. "I was shooting mostly in the north where the sex ratios are lowest, and snaked my way to the border of Nepal and India, where young girls are being trafficked to be bought and sold as brides," writes Sinha in an e-mail. Altogether, she shot about 25 different interviews and wrote MediaStorm's first text piece. 

Jay Sean to release next album, 'Freeze Time,' in November

[Listen to SAJA's January 2010 webcast with Jay Sean]

By now, Jay Sean needs no introduction. After he hit #1 on the U.S. Billboard charts (something no other solo male South Asian artist has ever done), he hit the ground running.

The 29-year-old reflected on some of the many awe-inspiring moments in his life last year at the Universal Music Group building in Midtown yesterday. Among the many highlights were winning the UK’s Asian Music Award’s Best Album of the Year for "All or Nothing" in March, working with the likes of Lil Wayne and Sean Paul, and, of course, his first U.S. song making it to the top of the charts--the list just goes on.

During interviews with local South Asian media outlets (including AVS TV and CurryBear.com) Sean says he just wants to just freeze time and reflect on how much his life has changed since he was a young student in England damn near becoming another Desi doctor.

And thus the name of his new album expected to drop in November: "Freeze Time."

“I had the best year of my life, you know? Hands down, the best year of my life was last year. Incredible in every aspect. And I just thought, ‘You know, if I could just freeze that moment, freeze that year and just freeze time, so I could just take everything in, just take it in...’ and that was it: Freeze Time, I just knew I had to put it out there.”