SAJAforum

BOOKS: Sohrab Homi Fracis, author of "A Man of the World"

The following is a guest post by SAJAer T DAVAR, a writer and expert on all things Parsi.

Author Sohrab Homi Fracis just finished a November 3 reading in Manhattan, celebrating Slice Magazine’s Fall “Fear” issue.        

 

Florida-based Fracis was the first South Asian author (and the first Asian, he thinks) to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, juried via the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2001, his short story collection, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, won the Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press.

 

Slice is a lively, theme-centered literary magazine whose featured authors have included Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz, among others.

 

The story Fracis read, "Distant Vision," is from his upcoming novel, A Man of the World.  The story, about an Indian Parsi Zoroastrian boy’s damaged eyesight, and the harm that damaged perspective can cause, is a theme central to his in-progress novel. Another excerpt, "Country Roads," will be in the South Asian Review’s next fiction issue.

 

This reading, at the Center for Fiction in midtown, featured Fracis and other Slice Fall 2009 contributors Sara Lippmann, Anthony Carelli, Matthew Lansburgh, Charity Shumway, and Claire Dunnington.

GUEST POST: Professor Ravi Shankar's unlawful arrest

It's not often, thankfully, that a SAJA friend and host of one of our webcasts gets arrested by the New York Police Department. Here's a guest post by Prof. Ravi Shankar, who teaches English at Central Connecticut State University, and hosted a SAJA webcast in March 2009 South Asian poetry.

Nearly a month ago in midtown Manhattan, I was detained and then arrested by
the NYPD on an erroneous warrant, an encounter with explicit racial overtones. My experience is described in fuller detail here:
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-commentaryshankar0802.artaug02,0,1479.story
and I speak about it on radio here:
http://www.wtic.com/Mornings-with-Ray-Archive/3848567

My very perception of time changed when I spent nearly 36 hours locked up
unjustly.

That this happened in an environment still buzzing with what happened with
Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and in the aftermath of institutional
policies like those in the Patriot Act that target those of Asian and Arab
descent is less revealing than the fact that my experience is not uncommon.
An unscientific survey of the nearly 99% of the people I met in Central
Booking found them to be Hispanic, Asian or African-American, many of them
incarcerated for charges such as loitering, trespassing or open container. A
much more scientific study was done by the Rand Corporation
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR534/ and it found that 89% of
all traffic stops by the NYPD in 2006 were of non-whites. Nearly 90%! In the
Big Apple. It's mind boggling.

I've even read conspiracy theorists postulate that this movement is to get
all brown and black people "in the system," have their identities and
fingerprints fixed for cross-index. Perhaps that's reaching, but it's clear
that on top of being shabby police work, racial profiling also violates the
4th Amendment which states authorities require probable cause prior to a
search and the 14th Amendment which ensures equal protection for everyone
regardless of race. I'm not prone to political agitation generally but in
this case, I feel compelled to advocate on behalf of all those whom I met
that weekend who have no platform and because I don't want Obama's election
and the idea of a post-racial America to obscure what's happening right in
front of our eyes.

Let me know what you think. And what you think I should do.

Ravi Shankar
Associate Professor, Central Connecticut State University
Editor of Drunkenboat.com, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry
from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008)

Please post your comments below.

MUMBAI ATTACKS: DC teachers respond

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

A guest post from DC-based writer/filmmaker and Indophile Alexandra Viets (scriptwriter for Merchant-Ivory's "Cotton Mary," among others).

Three Washington, DC, Teachers Remember Mumbai and the Taj

Rita Adhikari
Rita Adhikari lived and worked in Mumbai for a number of years and spent her sabbatical year 2006-2007 in Mumbai where her husband was working. She teaches History and Geography in Washington International School in WDC.

When I first saw the images of the Taj burning I  was so shocked that I could only think of the fact that it could have been any one of my family or my very close friends. We went there so often to celebrate so many events. Last year when I was on my sabbatical , I spent the whole year in Mumbai and twice a week my husband and I went to the trident ( Oberoi) for coffee. My colleagues from Washington International School‹Steve Hoare and Josee Band visited me and I took them to the Taj for a meal and spent enjoying the view from the sea lounge. A part of me will always be around the gateway of
India.

Then on Friday I got the news that a colleague of my husband, Sabina Saigal Saikia  from the Times Of India was at the Taj and was missing and soon found out that she had died in her room at the Taj.
I feel so angry and helpless at this senseless tragedy and violence.

~~~

Kusum Wagle
Kusum Wagle  was a native of Bombay till she moved to Washington DC. She teaches sciences in the middle school at the Washington International School with an emphasis on the environment.

BLOGS: Asma Hasan on the prez race @ Glamocracy

[A guest post from Shefali Kulkarni, a freelancer in Portland, Oregon]

“I’m torn,” says Asma Hasan, a 34-year-old lawyer and author from Denver.

Hasan is an American-Muslim who hopped from the Democrats to the Independents and now, is a registered Republican. But she'll tell you she's politically moderate. She is a pro-choice, pro-immigration reform voter and believes that an Obama presidency would be extraordinary, but she also happens to have a crush on Todd Palin. And so she's - still - undecided.

Hasan is the author of Why I am a Muslim and American Muslims: The New Generation and an upcoming book titled Red, White and Muslim: A Memoir in Belief. But she had never considered herself politically savvy, until now.

She is one of six bloggers with Glamour magazine's blog Glamocracy--a 2008 election blog dedicated to displaying American women from various walks of life, and sharing their perspectives with readers on the upcoming election.

"They could have picked anyone," says Hasan, "a non-Muslim, a writer, so it's a real acknowledgment. And it’s Glamour—they could have asked me to write about car mechanics and I would have said ‘yes.’"

Hasan's blog focus on the McCain campaign, but isn't a Republican blog. She writes about her likes and dislikes of both the McCain and Obama camp and her posts reflect her background as an American-Muslim woman. Her ‘torn’ positions might be what generate as much as 40 comments per post.

ESSAY: Robbie Corey-Boulet on what he learned in India

Above: HT City, a daily supplement in the Hindustan Times, on the racks at the printing press (more photos in slideshow below). PHOTO: Robbie Corey-Boulet

A few months ago, SAJAforum asked for tips for American journalists heading to South Asia for the first time. We got some excellent responses (including some from senior journalists there and here) - please check out the comments and add your own.

The reason for the request was that there were a lot of U.S. journalists and journalism students heading to India this summer, for internships, fellowships, assignments, etc. At Columbia Journalism School, where I teach, we had four graduates heading for internships at The Hindustan Times - and that was just one school.

One of the Columbia interns, Robbie Corey-Boulet, sent us the following essay about his work in New Delhi. Please post your responses below.  We'd love to run similar essays from other first-time-in-South Asia journos, too: saja[at]columbia.edu

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The "Western perspective" and its perils: One summer at a New Delhi daily

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
Robbie Corey-Boulet, a Brown University graduate, is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Manhattan Times, The Orange County Register, Seattle Metropolitan and on various Web sites and wire services, including PBS Washington Week. He plans to return to India in January on a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship awarded by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. 

The 24-story high-rise next to the Hindustan Times office building, located in New Delhi's Connaught Place, houses, on its top floor, a restaurant named Parikrama. In Hindi, "parikrama" means "circumambulation," or "orbit"; the restaurant floor completes one 360-degree turn every 90 minutes or so.

Two weeks into my summer reporting internship at HT, I decided, along with the other interns, to visit Parikrama one night for a drink. After we ordered (I chose the "Manhatton"), we reviewed our first days on the job, discussing our first stories and our attempts to report them; devising a plan to ask the editor for more multimedia equipment; and recapping the set of introductory meetings the company had arranged for us, which spanned three days and culminated in a three-hour trip to the printing press.

Eventually, I lost the thread of the conversation and, while the floor creaked through another revolution, looked out the window to take in the skyline. I discovered, however, that there is no view of the skyline at night in New Delhi. The buildings do not glow like those in Seattle or New York. From high up, the only visible lights, apart from the cars, were fleeting — a burst of fireworks off to the right, or a jet passing through the frame.

In the moment, the view was a disappointment, one that added to a persistent sense of disorientation. As the summer wore on, I found it oddly evocative of my first months in India, a period during which I ran around day after day in pursuit of sources but came away, even as I completed my assignments, with only the tiniest flashes of insight into the country.

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