SAJAforum

FELLOWSHIPS: New! Charles Pick South Asian Fellowship for unpublished writers

We just got an email from the administrator of a new fellowship in the UK that's open to South Asians from everywhere:

I am writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, about a new writing fellowship we are currently accepting submissions for. The Charles Pick South Asian Fellowship is an
award specifically for new and unpublished writers of South Asian descent, to allow them the time to work on their writing. I thought it may be something of real interest to your mailing lists and contacts, and any help you can give me in helping to publicise this would be greatly appreciated as, as we want to make sure as many writers as possible have a chance to apply for this. I have included below some copy about the fellowship and details on application, and wondered if it would be possible to post this in the ‘Fellowships’ section of the SAJA Forum on my behalf?

We love it when people read SAJAforum closely enough to know specific sections, so the answer is, clearly, yes (though we would have posted this anyway!).

The Charles Pick Fellowship is a six-month residential creative writing fellowship with an award of £10,000. The fellowship will begin October 1st 2012.

The Charles Pick South Asian Fellowship seeks to encouragement by giving support to the work of a new and, as yet, unpublished writer of fictional or non-fictional prose based in South
Asia. The writer should be from South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Burma/Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan,Uzbekistan), but does not need to be domiciled there.

Application forms must be submitted with an original typescript of 2,500 words. All applicants must provide a reference from an editor, agent or accredited teacher of creative writing.

All application forms and full details are available at www.uea.ac.uk/lit/fellowships/charles-pick-fellowship

Contact: charlespickfellowship at uea.ac.uk

UK: BBC Asian Network on the Chopping Block?

When the BBC Asian Network was launched back in 2002 as a nationwide digital radio station throughout Britain, the BBC's then-radio director, Jenny Abramsky, called it "one of the most important things the BBC has ever done."  Since then, the Asian Network has developed a loyal following, both in Britain and, via the internet, around the world.

[Because of immigration patterns, "Asian" is the UK word for South Asians.]

Today, however, the Asian Network's future is very much in doubt. On the eve of British general elections, a strategy review by BBC management proposes major changes in the BBC's operations -- including the closure of the Asian Network (and another network, BBC 6 Music) altogether.

ISLAM: Anti-terrorism fatwa to be issued in London

Salman Ahmad, the lead singer of Pakistan rock band Junoon and author of "Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star's Revolution," sent along this alert about a potentially big development. Please take a look.

Asked for a comment, Ahmad told SAJAforum: "The fatwa against suicide bombing, terrorism is long overdue and should be widely highlighted by both the Muslim community and the global media. It's about time the terrorists are (religiously) held accountable for their unholy deeds and made clear that Islam condemns their violence in letter and in spirit."

[His book hits some of these same themes. You can read about the book and see interviews with him at http://bit.ly/sajarrj ]

There's contact info below for Quilliam, Britain's first counter-extremism think tank and which sent out the press release. Post your thoughts and updates/news items in the comments section below.

Press Release: Anti-terrorism fatwa launch in London today

WEBCAST: Jay Sean, chart-topping singer/songwriter/producer

Listen to the recording: hit the play button above! - - -

SAMMA, South Asians in Media, Marketing and Entertainment and SAJA, South Asian Journalists Association, present the latest in their series of high-profile webcasts with some of the leading South Asian achievers in global media and entertainment...

A conversation with UK-born Jay Sean, chart-topping singer/songwriter/producer and first solo male artist of Indian origin to top the Billboard Top 100 at #1 with "Down" (featuring Lil Wayne).  Along with Jay Sean's management and partners, Jeremy Skaller and Anjula Acharia-Bath, CEO/co-founder, Desi Hits!

You can watch the "Down" video on YouTube; read about him in the SAJAforum post on his hitting #1; read his official site; and read his Wikipedia entry. (PHOTO: Jay Mandal/On Assignment).

Friday, Jan. 15, 2010
Noon-1 pm, New York time
5-6 pm, London time (where he's calling in from)
See local time around the world: http://timeanddate.com/s/1j40

==> Listen live, or later to a recording:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2010/01/15/music-jay-sean-who-hit-1-on-the-billboard-charts-w
(you can set an e-mail reminder for yourself at that link)

Or call-in to listen and/or talk to him at +1-347-324-5991.

Send your questions/comments via e-mail to saja[at]columbia.edu (subject = webcast) of via Twitter  @sajahq. You can also use the chatroom that will be open at the link above to ask live questions. You can also post your questions in the comments section below.

===> As always, you are welcome to quote from anything said during the FREE, WORLDWIDE webcasts (50+) at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja

DOWNLOAD TO iTUNES: These audio webcasts are also available as downloadable MP3 files for your personal collection and on-the-go listening. If you want to subscribe to these as podcasts on iTunes, go to "Advanced" within iTunes, then select "Subscribe to podcast" and type in http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/feed and hit OK.

RECENT SAJA MUSIC WEBCASTS:

• A.R. Rahman, music maestro
  http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/12/webcast-ar-rahman.html
• George Mathew, classical music conductor and philanthropist
  http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/12/music-george-mathew-.html

MUSIC: Jay Sean hits #1 on the Billboard 100

[CATCH THE SAJA/SAMMA WEBCAST WITH JAY SEAN on  Friday, October 15, 2010: http://bit.ly/sajammajay ]

This is an unusual post for two reasons:

1. I am going to do some self-plagiarizing and re-use a lot of content I used in a previous post.
2. And much more importantly, it's about a South Asian who's hit the top of the U.S. music charts.

Jay Sean, a 28-year-old British singer/rapper/hip-hopper, whose real name is Kamaljit Singh Jhooti, has moved up one spot to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (the listing of the most popular songs in the US, as measured by radio play, sales and online streaming).

His infectious song, called "Down" (featuring a big name in the world of hip-hop, Lil Wayne), is #1 on the chart that was released today. He replaced the Black-eyed Peas and is ahead of other major mainstream names, such as Miley Cyrus at #2 and Jay-Z, Rihanna and Kanye West at #3.

[That's Jay Sean at the Aug. 2009 India Day parade in NYC, photographed by another Jay, photojournalist Jay Mandal/On Assignment: jay[at]jaymandal.com if you want the high-rez version.]

The numbers in gray next to the #1 are last week's position (2); weeks on the Hot 100 (14); peak position (1). The song is also #1 on the Pop Songs and Radio Songs charts and #3 on Digital Songs and #6 on Ringtones and #4 on the Canadian Hot 100.

Asked by SAJAforum for a comment, SAJAer Nusrat Durrani, head of MTV World and an influential music executive, wrote: "Jay Sean hitting number 1 on the Billboard charts is great news and it was inevitable. He a class act and can compare with the very best global talent. MTV has been supporting him for many years. We are thrilled for Jay and MTV Iggy recently spoke to him at the Video Music Awards."

You can watch the Jay Sean video on YouTube, read about him on his official site; and read his Wikipedia entry.

Some more background on the song's achievements, from Billboard:

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:

MUSIC: Jay Sean hits #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart

UPDATE: THE FOLLOWING WEEK, JAY SEAN HIT #1.
SEE THE DETAILS.

An e-mail I received this evening had a subject line that was partially cut-off by my e-mail reader:

I thought this was about a musical milestone I had been meaning to blog about but hadn't got around to.Turns out the full headline was "India's rare achievement in rocket technology." [And if you don't know about Ram Narayanan's famous mailing list, read all about it in this SAJAforum piece by Arun Venugopal from three years ago, "ACTIVISM: Ram Narayanan, Bilateral Booster."]

But the note did remind me that we should note here the musical milestone I was thinking of: a solo South Asian act hits #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (the listing of the most popular songs in the US, as measured by radio play, sales and online streaming).

Jay Sean, a 28-year-old British singer/rapper/hip-hopper, whose real name is Kamaljit Singh Jhooti, has lit up the charts with an infectious song called "Down" (featuring a big name in the world of hip-hop, Lil Wayne). As of the week of Oct. 10, the song has been on the chart for 13 weeks (including six in the top 10).

The numbers in gray are last week's position (3); weeks on the Hot 100 (13); peak position (2).

There have been other acts with South Asian connections that have made it to the top of the U.S. charts: Norah Jones; M.I.A., Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen; Tony Kanal, bassist for No Doubt; Cliff Richard, who was born in Lucknow, India; Engelbert Humperdinck, who was born in Madras, India; Kim Thayil's band, Soundgarden, hit #30 on the Hot 100 with "Blackhole Sun," but was #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart for seven weeks. (anyone else I missed?)

You can watch the Jay Sean video on YouTube, read about him on his official site; and read his Wikipedia entry.

Post your comments below.

LISTS: Angela Jain on the MediaGuardian 100 for 2009

So-called "power lists" are always interesting to read and most American ones show a Yankee bias, of course. So I was glad to see the Guardian's MediaGuardian 100 list, which brings its British bias, even though Google's Sergei Brin and Larry Page are #1 on the list. Looking at the list with my Desi-spotting lens, I found only one South Asian on the list (would have expected more, actually).

96. Angela Jain

As head of E4 and Big Brother commissioner, Angela Jain has built a channel that punches above its weight – and carved a place in the MediaGuardian 100

Job: head of E4, commissioning editor responsible for Big Brother, Channel 4
Age: 40
Industry: broadcasting
Annual programme budget: £60m
Staff: 7
New entry

See the full entry on Jain here.

See other SAJAforum posts on the UK, including a posting about Baron Waheed Alli, who was at #65 in the Guardian 2008 list, but seems to have dropped off this year.

Post your comments below.

NEPAL: Britain's new decision on Gurkhas causes controversy

Nepalese Gurkha soldiers' dealings with the British government have taken a new turn.

The British Home Office has said that it would allow 4,300 more Gurkha veterans, who served the British Army before 1997, to settle in the United Kingdom. But the Gurkha Justice Campaign says that the actual number would only be 100 who would meet the residency requirement criteria.

According to the Telegraph, the five requirements for the Gurkha veterans to settle in the U.K. are:

• Three years continuous residence in the UK during or after their service
• Close family in the UK
• A level 1-3 bravery award (including the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross)
• Service of 20 years or more in the Gurkha brigade
• A chronic or long-term medical condition caused by, or aggravated by, service in the brigade

In addition, Gurkhas will normally be allowed to settle in the U.K. if they meet two or more of the following criteria:

BOOKS: Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 announces longlist

Spotting some South Asian writers, including SAJA board member (and former VP) V.V. Ganeshananthan, in the Orange Prize of Fiction's 2009 longlist. First, an explanation of the award:

The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2009 longlist. Now in its fourteenth year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.

V.V. Ganeshananthan

Love Marriage

Weidenfeld & Nicolson

American

1st Novel

Michelle de Kretser

The Lost Dog

Chatto & Windus

Australian

3rd Novel

Preeta Samarasan

Evening is the Whole Day

Fourth Estate

Malaysian

1st Novel

Kamila Shamsie

Burnt Shadows

Bloomsbury

Pakistani/British

5th Novel

They are in some pretty fine company, including Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Here's the formal press release: