Shahzad Roy is a South Asian Singer and runs Zindagi Trust in Karachi which pays money to poor children for attending school. His website is http://www.shehzad-roy.com/ and the Zindagi Trust is http://www.zindagitrust.org/
The song is about the state of crisis Pakistan is in.
By Maureen Dowd
Talk about being teed off.
The economy is croaking and bankers are still partying at a golf tournament here on our dime.
It’s a good argument for nationalization, or better yet, internationalization. Outsource the jobs of these perfidious, oblivious bank executives to Bangalore; Bollywood bashes have to cost less than Hollywood ones.
The entertainment Web site TMZ broke the story Tuesday that Northern Trust of Chicago, which got $1.5 billion in bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags.
“A rep from the PGA told us Northern Trust wrote one big, fat check in order to sponsor the event,” TMZ reported.
Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.
In the ignoble tradition of rockers who sing for huge sums to sketchy people when we’re not looking, Crow — in her stint as a federal employee — warbled these lyrics to the oblivious revelers:
“Slow down, you’re gonna crash,
Baby, you’re a-screaming it’s a blast, blast, blast
Look out babe, you’ve got your blinders on …
But there’s a new cat in town
He’s got high payin’ friends
Thinks he’s gonna change history.”
Northern Untrustworthy even offered junketeers the chance to attend a seminar on the credit crunch where they could no doubt learn that the U.S. government is just the latest way to finance your deals and keep your office swathed in $87,000 area rugs.
In what is now an established idiotic ritual of rationalization, the bank put out a letter noting that it “did not seek the government’s investment” even though it took it, and that it had raised $3 million for the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce Charity Foundation and other nonprofits. They riposted that they have a contract to do it every year for five years; but this isn’t every year.
The bank cloaks itself in a philanthropic glow while wasting our money, acting like the American Cancer Society when in fact it’s a cancer on American society.
It asserted that it earned an operating net income of $641 million last year and acted as though it did Americans a favor by taking federal cash.
I would ask Northern No Trust: If you’re totally solvent, why are you taking my tax dollars? If you’re not totally solvent, why are you giving my tax dollars to Sheryl Crow?
Coming in a moment when skeptical and angry Americans watched A.I.G., Citigroup, General Motors and Chrysler — firms that had already been given a federal steroid injection — get back in line for more billions, the golf scandal was just one more sign that the bailed-out rich are different from you and me: their appetites are unquenchable and their culture is uneducable.
President Obama served them notice on Tuesday night in his Congressional address, saying: “This time, C.E.O.’s won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.”
But will they notice?
ScienceDaily — Doodling while listening can help with remembering details, rather than implying that the mind is wandering as is the common perception. According to a study published today in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts.
40 members of the research panel of the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge were asked to listen to a two and a half minute tape giving several names of people and places, and were told to write down only the names of people going to a party. 20 of the participants were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper at the same time, but paying no attention to neatness. Participants were not asked to doodle naturally so that they would not become self-conscious. None of the participants were told it was a memory test.
After the tape had finished, all participants in the study were asked to recall the eight names of the party-goers which they were asked to write down, as well as eight additional place names which were included as incidental information. The doodlers recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by the non-doodlers.
“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” said study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth. “Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”
“In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process. If that process is important for the main cognitive task then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade,” added Andrade. “This study suggests that in everyday life doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing.”
By Susan Jacoby
NEARLY everyone now takes for granted the wisdom, constitutionality and inevitability of some form of federal financing for community social services run by religious groups. Who anymore can imagine that the United States managed to exist for over 200 years without the government providing any direct aid to faith and its works?
It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton started down the slippery slope toward a constitutionally questionable form of faith-based aid when he signed a welfare reform bill that included a “charitable choice” provision allowing religious groups to compete for grants. Under President George W. Bush, a separate White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was established — a significant expansion of “charitable choice.” Mr. Bush, who instituted his faith-based program through executive orders rather than trying to get a bill establishing the office through Congress, quickly put the money to political use.
The administration provided large grants for projects favored by the Christian right, like Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries and Teen Challenge, a drug rehabilitation program that openly pushed religious conversion (even using the phrase “completed Jews” to describe teenage converts from Judaism) as a way of overcoming addiction. John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of Mr. Bush’s faith-based office, resigned after only eight months and later complained about the politicization of the program.
Throughout Mr. Bush’s second term, the Democratic Party’s “religious left” maintained that the party needed to shed its secular image to attract more religious voters. As far as these Democrats were concerned, the only problem with faith-based programs was that most of the money was going to religious and political conservatives.
Enter Barack Obama, who spoke the language of both faith and secularism — and who promised during the campaign to expand faith-based aid while, at the same time, prohibiting proselytizing and religious hiring discrimination in federally financed programs. Yet earlier this month when the president announced his new faith-based team, headed by a Pentecostal minister, Josh DuBois, Mr. Obama left the Bush orders in place and Mr. DuBois later announced that hiring practices would be vetted by the Justice Department “case by case.”
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Oxford University’s former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, is one of the world’s staunchest defenders of the theory of evolution. He is the author of The Selfish Gene and a well known atheist tract, The God Delusion. So how does he assess Darwin’s ideas on the 200th anniversary of his birth?
The BBC World Service’s Owen Bennett Jones spoke to Professor Dawkins.
RD: “Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.”
OBJ: “Did he make any mistakes in your view?”
RD: “Yes he made some mistakes. He lived in the middle of the 19th Century, and, obviously, we know a lot more now than he knew. In particular, he got genetics all wrong. Nobody in the 19th Century knew much about genetics, and so naturally Darwin got that wrong. But given that, it’s remarkable how much he got right.”
OBJ: “But people say modern discoveries in genetics, actually confirm what Darwin was saying…?”
RD: “Very much so, yes, and it’s amazing how far ahead of his time he was.”
Dear Friends,
It should be amazing festival. I’m teaching and reading. Hope to see you there.
Bushra
The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective presents:
Stranger Love: SAWCC’s 6th Annual Literary Festival
March 6–7, 2009
A two-day series of readings, panel discussions, and writing workshops featuring South Asian writing that explores love between strangers and love that is strange.
This year’s festival, Stranger Love, calls to mind accidental encounters and provocative attractions that defy the boundaries of social expectation. From guerilla movements in Sri Lanka to the suburbs of New Jersey, South Asian women examine journey and memory, war and conflict, and race and sexuality, spanning the genres of poetry, memoir, travelogue, and fiction.
Friday, March 6th, 7pm
Reading and Conversation
Featuring Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf 2008), with author V.V. Ganeshananthan (Love Marriage, Random House 2008).
Tickets are $15 and must be purchased in advance at http://sawcc.org/events. No door sales.
at Wollman Hall
The New School
65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY
Saturday, March 7th, 10am–5:30pm
Panel Discussions and Writing Workshops
Day-long series of panel discussions with Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Meena Alexander, Abha Dawesar, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Pooja Makhijani, Suketu Mehta, Chandra Prasad, Zohra Saed, and Svati Shah. See http://sawcc.org/events for full schedule.
Writing workshops include a poetry workshop with Purvi Shah and fiction writing with Bushra Rehman. See http://sawcc.org/events for sign-up information.
at The New School
6 East 16th Street (at 5th Ave), 9th Floor
New York, NY
Saturday, March 7th, 7pm
Closing Night Reading
From dating on Craigslist to undiscovered family histories, South Asian women share their own writing on the theme of “stranger love,” featuring Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Meena Alexander, Abha Dawesar, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Yesha Naik, Amy Paul, Bushra Rehman, Zohra Saed, and Purvi Shah.
at Bar 13
35 East 13th Street
New York, NY
$5 at the door
For full schedule and detailed ticket/venue information, visit http://sawcc.org/events
Questions? Email litfest@sawcc.org
Stranger Love is cosponsored by the New School’s South Asia Forum, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Sholay Productions. This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and by the New York Council for the Humanities.
Here is BUshra Rehman’s website http://www.bushrarehman.com/
Here is a hilarious piece by her on lotas or the containers used in toilets by many people to clean themselves after the daily nature-ritual is done—that is, watering your own garden.
Our Little Secrets
By Bushra Rehman
We were in the kitchen, my mother and I, when she turned to me and said, “Did you know Amreekans keep medicine in the bathroom?”
I waited, not quite sure where she was going with this. She looked at me as if I was slow and then continued, “They keep it in the bathroom, and then they eat it.” There was triumph in her voice when she added, “And they say we’re dirty.”
I was surprised, not by the information, or that my mother had just found this out after living in the United States for 30 years. I was surprised that she, a proud woman who spent most of her time with people in our Pakistani community, had internalized the stereotype that we immigrants, Pakistanis, were considered dirty.
It was this conversation with my mother that I remembered when my sister Sa’dia, a visual artist, and I were discussing ideas for an art installation in the bathroom of the Queens Museum of Art in New York. Sa’dia was writing a proposal for an upcoming show and had just discovered that one of the only places left for an emerging artist like herself to exhibit was the bathroom.
In her last exhibition, “More Milk, Lighter Skin, Better Wife,” at the Gallery ArtsIndia in Manhattan, Sa’dia had created an installation using teacups. Each cup was handmade and branded with comments like: “You’ll look beautiful in gold,” or “First comes marriage then comes love.” They were the kind of remarks made by aunties to young women over tea.
Sa’dia realized, however, that teacups were not going to work in the bathroom. I suggested that instead of teacups, she use lotahs. Sa’dia laughed, thinking I was making another one of my bad jokes, but when I spoke to her again, she had developed the idea into the installation “Lotah Stories.” Both of us had no clue at the time that we were about to discover an underground world.
Hiding From Roommates, Even Lovers
A Hindustani word, lotahs are water containers used to clean yourself after using the toilet. They look like teapots without covers and are made of metal or plastic. With one hand, you pour the water and with the other, you wash yourself clean. Lotahs are commonplace throughout South Asia, and in many Muslim countries they are used for cleansing yourself before prayer. However, once South Asian and Muslim immigrants come to the United States, the pressure to assimilate forces many of us to make the transition from lotah to toilet paper. But there are some South Asians who refuse to cross over. Instead, they find themselves living double lives, using lotahs-in-disguise.
Women’s Day is an important celebration for the achievements and gains made by women around the world and is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.
To mark this day, South Asian Women in Media (SAWM) in association with Lahore Film and Literary Club (LFLC) invite you to the screening of film:
“Search for freedom” directed by Munizae Jehangir
Followed by panel discussion by the director
Search for Freedom portrays how the conflicts of Afghanistan affected the lives of four Afghan women, from the 1920’s to the present day. The film was amongst sixteen films chosen from around the world to be screened at Amnesty International’s USA film festivals around the US.
Munizae Jehangir is a documentary filmmaker and the country correspondent for India’s NDTV (New Delhi TV) in Pakistan. She has produced and directed a number of films including, Search for Freedom and Baloch Battlefield.
Date: Friday, 6th March 2009
Time: 6 pm
Venue: South Asian Media Centre, 177-A, Shadman2.
Phone# (011-92-42) 7555621-8
For details contact:
From outside Pakistan call
Sarah Tareen: 011-92-21-300-459-1184
Zebunissa Burki: 011-92-21-303-444-5165
Bushra Sultana: 011-92-21-3008430333
From within Pakistan call
Sarah Tareen:03004591184
Zebunissa Burki:03034445165
Bushra Sultana:03008430333
Ms Sarah Tareen
Coordinator
Lahore Film and Literary Club
177-A, Shadman-2, Lahore, Pakistan
South Asian Media Centre.
(011-92-42) 7555621-8
By Benjamin Dangl
Reviewed: Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, 356 Pages, City Lights Publishers, (January, 2009).
Carlos Slim, the second richest man in the world, calls Mexico home, as do millions of impoverished citizens. From Spanish colonization to today’s state and corporate repression, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, is written from the street barricades, against the Slims of the world, and alongside “the underdogs and rebels” of an unconquered country. The book offers a gripping account of the ongoing attempts to colonize Mexico, and the hopeful grassroots movements that have resisted this conquest.
Gibler, a Global Exchange Media Fellow, has been reporting from Mexico since 2006. While writing for dozens of media outlets, he has covered events such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, the teachers’ revolt in Oaxaca and other stories of police repression and popular resistance. These reports form the basis for much of the book. (His articles are collected at the Global Exchange website.)
In the prologue, Gibler writes of Mexico Unconquered: “each chapter bleeds into all the others: they all share the same blood.” It’s true: the chapters flow together smoothly, bonded by Gibler’s steady class analysis and excellent story-telling skills. He breathes poetry and anecdotes into the history, and empathy and prose into the reporting, so these stories can be understood and felt, not just read.
Mexico Unconquered starts off with an engaging people’s history of Mexico. Gibler guides the reader through the country’s various presidencies and popular uprisings. From Oaxaca, Gibler offers a first hand account of the incredible teachers’ revolt, with unbelievable reports on police brutality and people’s solidarity. From Chiapas, Gibler provides a concise overview of the Zapatistas’ history, contextualized with background information on indigenous autonomy and reports on the Other Campaign. The book also tells stories from Mexico’s ghost towns, with numerous interviews with families that bear the burden of immigration to the US.
But the book is more than just an account of neoliberal nightmares and grassroots revolts. It cuts to the heart of the problems ravaging Mexico today, dissecting the roots of the country’s corruption, state repression, drug wars and poverty. In this respect, the book’s approach reflects what the late folk singer Utah Phillips once said: “The Earth is not dying it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Well, Gibler offers the names and addresses of the people – and companies and ideologies – that are still trying to conquer Mexico.
By NADIA HIJAB
Watching Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir inevitably reminded me of Eran Riklis’ Cup Final, also an Israeli film about its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
When Cup Final came out in 1992, it made me think that a common future for Israelis and Palestinians was possible. I had expected the same of Waltz. Both films deal with the story of young soldiers during Israel’s horror-filled 1982 war. Both won critical acclaim, though Cup Final won just one award compared to the 10 Waltz scooped up before it hit the Oscars (but lost to another foreign film, Departures).
But there the resemblance ends. By contrast to Waltz, Cup Final gives voice not just to Israeli soldiers but also to the Palestinian guerrillas then based in Southern Lebanon.
It starts with an soldier bemoaning his fate: He has to fight instead of going to watch the World Cup matches in Spain for which he’s got tickets. Serves him right for voting for the rightwing Likud, his friend retorts.
The two soldiers are captured by Palestinian guerrillas, led by the handsome Palestinian actor Muhamad Bacri, and taken from South Lebanon to Beirut so they can be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. On the way, an unlikely friendship develops, rooted in a shared passion for football — and in the Israelis’ growing understanding of what the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is really about.
For me, the funniest — and saddest — moment of the film comes when the Israeli soldier speaks passionately of his love for Jerusalem. One of his Palestinian captors is from Jerusalem and he says how much he longs to see his hometown again. Why, the Israeli wonders, doesn’t he just go back to visit?
Palestinian and Israeli stare at each other for a long, long moment. I could sense the Palestinian character’s thoughts as clearly as if they were my own. Should he start by explaining about the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, which is how his family ended up as refugees in Lebanon in the first place? Should he take a dip in history, back to the founding of Zionism in 1897, or the British promise to hand Palestine over to Zionist Jews in 1917 and the waves of Jewish immigration that followed?
Finally the Palestinian simply says, “It’s a long story.”
It is indeed a long story, but a simple one. That simplicity is captured in all its complexity by Cup Final director Riklis. The ending is tragically inevitable.
Waltz too leaves the viewer shaken. But its absence of context is problematic because it produces not just an incomplete story but also a distorted history. The distortion is deliberately fed by the film’s publicity materials and by the many Israeli and international Zionist organizations that have embraced it, some going so far as to issue a viewer’s guide to the film.
This one sentence from the film’s website — echoed in the viewer’s guide — illustrates the missing context: “In June 1982, the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon after Israel’s northern towns had been bombarded for years from the Lebanese territory.”
No mention is made of the fact that an informal ceasefire between Israel and the PLO had kept the border quiet for nine whole months. Then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon used the excuse of an attack on the Israeli ambassador to London by a renegade Palestinian group — one that was also anti-PLO — to launch his Lebanon invasion.
Does any of this sound familiar? In December 2008, Sharon’s political heirs launched a hellish assault on Gaza ostensibly to stop the rockets against Israel’s southern towns. Yet an informal ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that began in June 2008 had brought quiet to those towns — until an Israeli incursion on November 4 killed six Hamas fighters and led to a resumption of rockets, providing the excuse for the assault.
Waltz does not question the reasons for the Lebanon war, or even Israel’s role beyond its “indirect responsibility,” as an Israeli inquiry put it, for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila at the end of the war. But some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed during the 3-month war for which Israel was directly responsible.
By Peerzada Salman
Showering encomiums on Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s poetry is like employing rich epithets to describe William Shakespeare’s tragedies or Salvador Dali’s surrealistic strokes. Ghalib’s couplets are what he is. He is Urdu poetry. That is all you know, that is all you need to know.
Ghalib’s death anniversary falls on Feb 15. Should it be marked? If yes, then why is it important to mark creative individuals’ birthdays and death anniversaries? Perhaps to remember them? If recalling the important days in their lives makes a difference with respect to carrying out research on them, and exploring hitherto unravelled facets to their works and lives, then why not?
But sadly, despite Ghalib’s undisputed stature as a literary colossus, we’ve yet to decide whether he was an Indian or defied geographical boundaries.
In Pakistan we don’t seem to ‘own’ him as we own Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Josh Malihabadi. Yes, scholars have undertaken tasks of ‘understanding’ his works or of Ghalib shanasi (which means getting acquainted with him), but one feels that the vital ‘ownership’ factor is amiss.
So why is Ghalib important to be considered as one of our own? Answers: (1) he enriched the Urdu language by almost exhausting the possibilities of linguistic inventiveness and creative ingenuity; (2) he had the temerity to explore undiscovered lands in the realm of poetry that prior to him weren’t even thought of as plausible literary subjects; (3) he blazed a trail for many a creative man to indulge in ghazal-writing like never before… and the list goes on.
To Ghalib composing poetry wasn’t a leisurely pastime or a part-time job. He was dealing with existence, warts and all. He was just 13 when he got hitched to an 11-year-old girl, Umrao Begum. They had seven children, none of whom survived, and passed away in their infancy. It was but natural that Ghalib was crestfallen. But he never turned bitter or vitriolic. He had seen life eyeball to eyeball. And was an admirer of nature and all that is beautiful.
That is precisely why his verses brim with love for the sensual and the intangible, coupled with the bare truths of being. He knew half-baked measures would make him a run-of-the-mill poet. Yes, he was an iconoclast. Yes, he was alcoholic. Yes, he was a gambler. But these social evils (if they are that) have nothing to do with his extraordinary skill or perceptiveness. He was every inch a poet, top-notch at that. As Intizar Husain enthused about Jaun Elia, Ghalib’s personality had become an extension of his poetry.
T.S. Eliot has given world literature an irrefutable dictum: poetry communicates before it is understood. Ghalib exactly achieved that. Even to those readers for whom Persianised Urdu or intricate phrasing is a tad knotty to comprehend, his couplets appear readily accessible.
For example, every reader of Urdu poetry is familiar with the following two lines:
A worthy picture doesn’t need description/
The paper on which it’s drawn is self-explanatory attire
Yet it is not a simple idea to grasp, but don’t we all love it truly, deeply and madly?
Or for that matter the couplet which is often ascribed to the death of one of his children:
———————–
Ghalib’s verses brim with love for the sensual and the intangible, coupled with the bare truths of being. He knew half-baked measures would make him a run-of-the-mill poet.
———————–
You say we’ll meet on Judgment Day/
Isn’t this gesture apocalyptic in itself?
This is the work of an artisan as well as of a genius. The couplet is fraught with etymological possibilities. It sounds personal. It has a mystic ring to it. It has an air of worldly wisdom about it. And seems easily identifiable.
Even when Ghalib tries to be a bit impish and light-hearted, compromising on contextual weightiness, he wins the reader over by virtue of his brilliant wordplay.
You don’t let me kiss but keep looking at my heart/
You think that having me for free would be a worthy bargain for you
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