Pondering The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Listen up, NPR junkies and literary lovers—check out Fresh Air’s fabulous Terry Gross interviewing Mohsin Hamid on his new book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Mohsin’s second novel (his debut offering being Moth Smoke) focuses entirely on a Pakistani man who tells his story to an American stranger in a Pakistani cafe. Set after the 9/11 attacks, the novel explores, as Hamid puts it, a “conversation” between the West and the Muslim world.

Hamid, who currently lives in London, was born in Pakistan and studied at Princeton, so “there’s a great deal of Americanness inside me.” Some of the most interesting parts of the interview are when Hamid discusses his dual identity:

Check out the interview to hear Hamid talking about his new book, racial profiling and wearing a beard in the West.

Author, MD

Erik Jacobs for the New York Times

The Rhodes Scholar, Harvard/Stanford/Oxford-educated doctor Atul Gawande is busy saving lives as a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

But not SO busy that he can’t also be on faculty at Harvard Medical School, contribute regularly to the New Yorker, be awarded the MacArthur “genius” grant, be a dad, husband, and National Book Award-finalist author.

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance is Gawande’s sophomore-book (remember his first: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science?). It is due out this week.

The New York Times featured Gawande yesterday, giving us insight into the 41-year-old’s upbringing (his parents are both doctors; he was raised in Athens, Ohio) and musical taste (he listens to The Killers in the OR. We forgive him). “This idea that a bright Indian kid is supposed to be a doctor — I resisted that,” he says. “I wanted to be a rock star. I played guitar and wrote songs and even had a couple of club shows. I was just terrible.”

Go here to read the full feature.

Lahiri’s Ex Might Be The Real-Life Gogol Ganguli

The “Gogols” (New York magazine)

You’ve read the book, seen the movie, even blissed-out to the soundtrack.

But do you know the real story behind Mira Nair’s latest hit film The Namesake?

Vishaan Chakrabarti thinks he is the inspiration for the main character Gogol, played by Kal Penn. “Maybe it’s just coincidence that nine-tenths of the book is the same as my life,” he says, “but it was my friends who pointed it out. Anyone who knew me well saw the similarity immediately.”

Chakrabarti used to date author Jhumpa Lahiri but says they just “didn’t hit it off.” He is now married and works in Manhattan.

According to New York magazine the similarties between the real-life and celluloid Gogols don’t end there:

Look Who’s Talking … Hindustani?

Do you know your Hindi from Hindustani? If not, we’ve got a primer for you. Some of our readers have taken issue with Mira Nair’s statement that her family speaks “Hindustani” (rather than “Hindi”) at home. So Nirali asked the experts to get to the heart of the matter.

Turns out, the meaning of the term “Hindustani” has changed over the decades. Dr. Ulrike Stark, Assistant Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, notes that originally, Hindustani was used to refer to Urdu and was the official language chosen by the British for the northwestern provinces in the 19th century. At that time, says Stark, “Urdu was still very much a lingua franca spoken by the educated, whether Hindus or Muslims.” And the decision by the Brits to choose Urdu—with its Persian alphabet and Nastaliq script—meant that anyone who knew that language would have an advantage when applying for positions within the civil service and administration.

Mira Nair has been quoted as saying she speaks “Hindustani.”

But that decision backfired. Those Hindus in the civil service who knew Hindi—that is, the Sanskritized script—wanted in on those jobs. They won a victory in 1900, when Hindi, alongside Urdu, also became an official language of the northern provinces.

Fast forward to the Indian independence movement—and the changing of the meaning of the term “Hindustani.” The Hindu nationalist movement grew, and its members decided to frame sanskritized Hindi as the “mother tongue.” Stark explains: “They stylized Urdu into the foreign language … even though it was the language spoken very much by the elite.” As a result, “Urdu was increasingly identified with Muslim culture and Hindi with Hindu culture,” even though Hindustani/Urdu had been the language of the elite and educated—Hindu and Muslim alike—in the 19th century.

Further complicating matters? During the fight for independence, Gandhi decided to promote his own concept of Hindustani: a sort of “middle-ground spoken language that is neither too Persianized nor too Sanskritized.” Unfortunately, Gandhi decided to leave out the issue of script (the written language) altogether, essentially resolving nothing, since as Stark notes, you have to choose a script. Not to mention that this put him at odds with the Congress Party, which was pushing a Sanskritized Hindi—now known as “High Hindi.”

Now you’ve got the backstory—but what does Hindustani mean today? Read the rest of this entry »

SheWrite Screening

Stills from SheWrite (K.P. Jayasankar)

As part of a series of events planned to help spark discussion about women and gender roles in the South Asian community, Narika’s student group at UC Berkeley screens SheWrite, an award-winning documentary about four female Tamil poets exploring themes of desire and sexuality, on Tuesday, March 20. The film’s directors will be guest speakers. Anjali Monteiro, currently a Fulbright visiting lecturer at Berkeley, and her husband K.P. Jayasankar, Chair of the Centre for Media and Culture Studies at TISS, have made 25 documentaries over the last 15 years. SheWrite recently premiered in the U.S. at the 2007 New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival.

Criticism of the poets in the press for writing “obscenely” caught the attention of the film’s directors. One male writer urged people: “If you see them on the road, slap them.” (The Hindu). A magazine editor asked, “”How can women demand gender freedom after writing such things?” (The Week). Read the rest of this entry »

A-List Akhil

Credit: Village Voice

Granta has come out with (its second-ever) list of best young American novelists .

Among those who made the exclusive cut is Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father (“a powerful debut novel that establishes Sharma as a supreme storyteller with a gift for the macabre”). When the book first came out (2000) it was said to have been in the running for the Booker Prize.

Sharma was born in Delhi, grew up in Edison, New Jersey, attended Princeton and Harvard Law. The former investment banker now lives in the City where he is at work on another novel to be published by W.W. Norton. He is married to Lisa Swanson, a lawyer almost a decade his senior.

More:
An excerpt of Mother and Son
Listen to Sharma read from An Obedient Father
Granta’s first list of best young American novelists (1996)
Sharma interviews Frank Gehry for the WSJ

Prashad Promotes

Photo courtesy of The New Press

Vijay Prashad groupies rejoice!

The author and Trinity College professor will be in NYC tonight, promoting his latest book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.

You can catch Prashad, who also wrote The Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, this evening at the Asian American Writers Workshop (16 West 32nd Street).

Publishers Weekly calls The Darker Nations scholarly but accessible, saying the book “offers a vital assertion of an alternative future, grounded in an anti-imperial vision.”

The reading/launch event begins at 7PM.

A $5 donation is suggested.

More:
The Darker Nations
The Asian American Writers Workshop
Catch Prashad at the YSS birthday celebration this April

Namesake In Chicago

Apna Ghar hosts a special screening of The Namesake in Chicago this Thursday, February 22, with donations to benefit the nonprofit organization. Mira Nair will take questions after the screening. Taking its name from a Hindi-Urdu phrase meaning “Our Home,” Apna Ghar is a domestic violence shelter serving primarily Asian women and children in the Midwest.

The film’s official North American release is on March 9. Fox Searchlight offers the chance to RSVP for free screenings of the film in selected cities.

Reviews:
Film Journal International
Time Out London
Variety
Salon

Meera Masi For Curious Kids

Sonali Sahni Herrera, Sheetal Sahni Singhal (The Hindu)

“We all need a masi, the person you go to for fun,” says Sonali Herrera. “Someone who can spin tales for you and take you on adventures.” Herrera and her sister Sheetal Singhal founded Meera Masi, a publisher offering children stories on Indian language and culture. (“Sharing heritage with next generation, Immigrants from India write, market kids’ books in Hindi“)

While Singhal had the opportunity to attend boarding school in India and reads Hindi script, Herrera came to the U.S. at age four and does not read the script. Both can use Meera Masi books to read stories aloud to their children because the books include Hindi script, English transliteration of the Hindi script and an audio recording of the text to ensure correct pronunciation.

Watch the interview with the sisters on ABC’s View From The Bay, including “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in Hindi (“Chhote Mote Makade”) from their Khushē Manäo series. Meera Masi also offers a DVD featuring Laddoo the Elephant introducing children ages 6 to 30 months to Hindi, Tamil or Telugu.

Roy Returns to Roots

Roy (FreedomFits.Com)

It has been a decade since Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize.

Roy, who spent the last ten years dedicating herself to issues of social justice and nonfiction writing, now tells reporters she is ready for something different.

“I will be writing a novel. I want to say things where I am not always walking a fine line.”

“I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given,” says Roy, 45.

“I feel very imprisoned by facts, by having to get it right. I don’t want to play these games of statistics any more, I have done that. I don’t want to be imprisoned by that, or by the morality that is expected of activists. I have never been that pristine person, that role model.”

The author did not reveal what her new book would be about, but did hint that it might involve (possibly take place in?) Kashmir.

More:
Arundhati Roy fan site
Roy on YouTube
‘Not Again’