The Long Kiss Dubai

On last night’s episode of The Daily Show, Aasif Mandvi told us about the benefits of moving your company’s HQs to the Khaleej:

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A man called Mandvi
Halliburton moves offices to Dubai

Telug(h)umor

Stand-up star Hari Kondabolu’s late-night debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live made waves last week (Sepia, The Stranger , NerdNYC).

But the comedian’s day job is actually far from being “funny.”

Kondabolu, a Bowdoin College graduate, recently spoke to his alumni magazine about working in Seattle for Hate Free Zone, a non-profit, founded after 9/11, to help immigrant communities cope with intolerance and backlash. Kondabolu describes the work as “depressing and tiring, but inspiring when it works out.”

Kondabolu’s routines are often based on what it means to be desi in America. Check out his take on speaking Telugu:

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.

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

Tharoor On Colbert

Former UN Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor rolls through The Colbert Report. Hilarity ensues.

Total Denial: Doe vs. UNOCAL

Shot in Burma, Thailand, Europe, and the U.S. courts between 2000-2005, Total Denial documents the story of a historic lawsuit: Fifteen villagers from the jungles of Burma bringing suit in U.S. courts against a giant oil corporation for human-rights abuses committed in the mid-1990s by soldiers providing security for Unocal’s natural gas pipeline in southern Burma.

The plaintiffs achieved victory in Doe vs. UNOCAL after 10 years of fierce legal battles. John Doe IX, who had done back-breaking forced labor, said, “I don’t care about the money. Most of all I wanted the world to know what Unocal did. Now you know.”

Producer/director Milena Kaneva documented the abuses of villagers with help from Ka Hsaw Wa, a member of the Karen, an ethnic minority discriminated against by Burma’s military regime. Award-winning environmentalist and human rights activist Ka Hsaw Wa was also one of the leaders of the Burmese student democracy movement in 1988. In hiding in the jungle for more than seven years, he gathered the evidence of thousands of victims. At the federal court hearings, Kaneva’s camera was the only one allowed.

Total Denial is part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2007. Other films running at the festival include the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country, and Black Gold, an exploration of the the global coffee trade from Ethiopian bean growers to multinational companies to U.S. coffee consumers.

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HRW 2007 International Film Festival

SAALT Summit

SAALT Rally in DC (SAALT.Org)

DC-based non-profit SAALT, the South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow, will be hosting the South Asian Summit March 16th through the 18th.

“It will be an opportunity for organizational leaders and community members around the country to engage with policymakers, federal agency representatives, South Asian advocates, and funders,” says SAALT’s Executive Director Deepa Iyer.

Workshop topics range from the practical (how to effectively build a grassroots movement) to sessions that focus on emerging policy issues (“restoring civil liberties” and “worker rights”).

For more information, and to find out how you can register, visit SAALT.org.

Shiite Continues to Happen

Vandalized diner in Dearborn. NYT (Fabrizio Costantini)

The Shiite and Sunni communities of Dearborn, Michigan (home to 30,000 Arab Americans) aren’t getting along.

The New York Times reports that the town’s commercial artery Warren Avenue has now seen at least a dozen of its businesses vandalized because of sectarian tension.

Strained relations between the two groups have been more marked lately–in what appears to be a carry-over from the on-going violence in Iraq.

But such discontent is not reserved to the hookah bars of Dearborn, as Shiite college students report feeling left out and even “formally barred” from Sunni-dominated campus student groups.

“A microcosm of what is happening in Iraq happened in New Jersey because people couldn’t put aside their differences,” says Sami Elmansoury, a Sunni and former head of an Islamic student association at Rutgers.

And Azmat Khan, a student at the University of Michigan, talks about the what it means to be a Shiite American on campus today (“To some extent, the minute you identify yourself as a Shiite, it outs you. You feel marginalized.”).

Go here to read the whole article (and let us know what you think).

Shia Revival Author Gives Lecture

Vali Nasr speaks on the topic of “How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape The Future” at the World Affairs Council of Northern California on Wednesday, January 31. He is Professor of Middle East and South Asia Politics at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Senior Adjunct Fellow on the Middle East.

Nasr’s Shia Revival has been described as worthwhile reading for those seeking a primer on the second-largest Muslim sect. His account offers an introduction to the history and theology of Shia Islam and its relations with the dominant Sunni strain. Nasr also argues that the so-called Shia Crescent—stretching from Lebanon and Syria through the Gulf to Iraq and Iran, finally terminating in Pakistan and India—is gathering strength in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, cementing linkages that transcend political and linguistic borders and could lead to a new map of the Middle East. The author believes that the sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni will come to play a large part in determining our collective future. (Publisher’s Weekly)

More:
World Affairs Council
Dr. Vali R. Nasr
Nasr’s interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Hillary Brings Tanden On Board For ’08

Neera Tanden

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has appointed Neera Tanden as her campaign policy director for the 2008 presidential primaries. Tanden will join the campaign in the next few weeks. (Hindustan Times). As a top aide to Hillary Clinton for nearly 15 years, she has served as Senator Clinton’s legislative director and as deputy campaign manager for Clinton’s senate race. Other positions held include issues director for the Democratic Congressional Campain Committee and senior policy advisor to the NYC Schools Chancellor.

The Yale Law grad and mother of two “began her political ascent by volunteering for then Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign in 1988. At age 18, she was a precinct leader…Tanden went on to be a press aide for the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1992 and this enabled her to work for the Clinton administration.” (IACPA)

In “Campaigns Are Destiny,” a January 2006 article for The American Prospect, Tanden offered an analysis of President Bush’s low approval ratings as the result of the intensely negative type of campaign he ran.

Responding to questions about balancing family and political life as a South Asian American woman, she has said, “The White House is just a pressure-filled environment for anyone. There is so much scrutiny. Hillary’s office, where I worked, was very supportive of women in this balancing act. She was a mother too and that made her very compassionate about such issues…very few people left Hillary’s staff.” (IACPA)

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“Hillary names Indian-American as chief policy advisor”

You So Outlandish!

Outlandish (Wiki)

Their sound is deliciously unconventional—mixing electric Amazigh, desi and Latin beats and rhythms with great creativity.

But for the Danish hip hoppers Outlandish, it’s about more than just making good music.

Group members (Isam Bachiri, Waqas Ali Qadri, Lenny Martinez) boldy go where other artists won’t—taking on issues of social injustice (Guantanamo), tension (American foreign policy re: the Israel/Palestine issue),
and taboo (the AIDS epidemic in South Asia).

They call their brand of music a “special type of fusion cuisine in which the fundamental ingredients (are) clearly American” but have “samples and snatches of Arab pop, Bollywood soundtracks as well as Latin American rhythms.” The men rap in English, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish and Danish.

Outlandish will be performing on January 31st at the Scala in London. Check out the group’s video for its hit song Walou:

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Outlandish on Myspace
Official website