Literary Safari

Today marks the seven year anniversary of the Iraq war. There has been very little coverage in the media.

But I’m still thinking about Nina Berman’s series of photographs “Marine Wedding.” On exhibit as part of the Whitney’s Biennial 2010, they are a poignant reminder of the impact and ripple human effects of the war.

The 2006 photographs on view document the marriage of former Marine sergeant Ty Ziegel, then twenty-four, to his high school sweetheart, Renee Kline, twenty-one. After being severely disfigured in a suicide bomber’s attack while stationed in Iraq, Ty underwent fifty reconstructive operations. … Without any staging or direction, Berman took spontaneous photographs of Ty and Renee in the weeks leading up to their wedding day and accompanied them when they had their wedding portrait taken. Her picture of them at the portrait studio conveys an air of alienation between the couple, who separated a few months after their wedding. …

Read and listen to a PBS interview with Berman here.

Originally published at Sepia Mutiny on February 1, 2009 .

We’ve heard bout Bollywood Obama and I’ve written about the Japanese town of Obama’s boppy theme song “Obama is beautiful world.” Now, a couple of young musicians in Surat, Gujarat—Chirag Thakker, Jayesh Gandhi and Anita Sharma—have welcomed Obama into their hearts with this catchy song that praises our new president.

We have dedicated this song to Obama and uploaded it on Youtube, so that the world could see our attempts to honor him. His down-to-earth personality, faith in Lord Ganesha and great respect for Mahatma Gandhi made us feel that he is very close to us,” said Chirag, adding that they have used names of Lord Ganesha and Gandhi in the song. [full story]

The song has elements of a bhajan, or devotional song, but also features the djembe, which the artists chose to include in honor of Obama’s African heritage (even though the djembe is West African, not Kenyan!). The video is granted, a bit amateur, but it also has subtitles (so that Obama can understand it) and was shot in various parts of Surat, including the banks of the Tapi river and the city’s municipal gardens. Overall, the three artists devoted three months to it from start to finish.

I was going to wrap up this entry, but then found this Punjabi poem by California based poet and singer Pashaura Singh Dhillon. I was moved. But then again, I get weepy pretty easily these days.

Whether or not you’ve personally had your fill of odes to Obama , I can’t help but remain fascinated by the worldwide responses to the idea of his leadership. The way I look at it, for a long time, I felt like people were looking around and saying, “I don’t see a world leader I feel good about” and now, there’s a spirit of optimism and a person who represents possibility that is inspiring art, music, and perhaps, even, action. That’s a good thing, even if it isn’t clear right now whether he’ll live up to all his promises.

Are blogs becoming irrelevant given the ease with which we can post articles and poems and anything else of interest to our facebook profiles? It may be a function of laziness, or maybe it’s a question of ease. But, then something comes along that makes my heart leap and soar and I know that it can only be shared at one destination. Here.

It’s Maira Kalman’s latest column of “The Pursuit of Happiness” at the New York Times and it brings me back after what may have been a longest hiatus ever for me in recent months. I’ve been working long hours, making deadlines, and in all my spare time, hooked to the news which, as one friend so rightly put it, is so fascinating with our new president in office that “it’s like reality television, only better.” She’s right.

Every since Inauguration Day when I sat and stood among a crowd of several hundred adults and school children at Symphony Space on New York’s upper west side, I have felt like I’m looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. No, the economy is not improving; yes, the world still reeks of unfairness and self-indulgence; certainly, it has a fair share of myopic  legislators (don’t get me started). But there’s something else, something new: Leadership that is direct, says it like it is, and is willing to “extend a hand if the other side can unclench its fist.”

It’s so refreshing.

I have read many commentaries about the Inauguration of our new President, but “The Inauguration: At Last,” a visual take from one of my favorite artist/writers Maira Kalman captures the uplifting spirit of these past few weeks in a fresh and honest way … I love it because it captures the feeling of that day and this time through the tiny, mundane details.

It took two weeks to arrive, but it was well worth the wait. Sometimes reflecting on things a little bit later allows us to see them from a finer perspective.

You can read it in its entirety here.

This post was originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

A few weeks ago, I posted “Data Crunching for Obama,” a look at the Democratic campaign’s microtargeting strategies led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at Catalist, Harold Icke’s start-up political technology company that built a national voter database of information on more than 260 million people for progressive groups, including the Obama campaign.

At Catalist, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company’s software products and services. The data banks and web-based tools he helped develop could answer questions such as: “How many Indian-Americans gave money to me, said they were an Obama supporter, voted in the last general election, own their home and live in Baltimore?”

Below the fold is a Q&A with Vijay Ravindran, where he talks about his engagement with politics, the 2008 election efforts, Catalist’s role in it, and what South Asian voter data tells us about the “brown” community.

Incidentally, the 34 year old is on a roll. Just yesterday, it was announced that as of February ‘09, Ravindran will be the senior vice president and chief digital officer of The Washington Post Company. Per the press release that went out:

“We are fortunate to have Vijay join the Company as we focus increasingly on electronic media,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “Vijay is widely recognized as one of the top innovators in the field. I am delighted that he will bring his extraordinary skills, talent and experience to our efforts to expand our digital business.” (more…)

The day before the election, I wrote a lesson plan for The New York Times Learning Network [And, the Winner Is: Holding a Post-Election Discussion or Mock Talk Show] on how to teach the election in the classroom. The culminating activity of this lesson was for students to write letters to the newly elected President. The morning after Barack Obama’s historic win, I sat down to do the same.  Here’s my letter.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Barack Obama,

Congratulations on your election to the highest office in the land. I am profoundly moved and heartened by the outcome of this election. Last night, outside my window in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, car horns were blaring, people were screaming and weeping with joy, crowds were chanting your name. On a night replete with the revelry reminiscent of New Year’s Eve—champagne, impromptu parades, Times Square crowds, and even, funky 2008 glasses—I fell asleep thinking: Hope has landed and it’s here to stay.

Though I was born in Ghana and raised in India, I have lived in the Unites States since I was 12. People say that this election is historic because you are the first African-American to be elected president. Yes, that’s true. What’s also true, however, is that your election is of great significance because it has made me feel—perhaps for the first time ever—that just as I call this country home, it too can call me family. Thanks to your vision and “audacity to hope” for change, today, people like me, immigrants, minorities, and people of color—brown, brown, black, yellow, red—we are all brimming with hope for our future in America.

The morning after, I feel like I have woken not just to a new day, but to a new period in history. I keep revisiting your victory speech.

After an election where a certain man named “Joe the Plumber” was touted as the face of America, you addressed and acknowledged our true face and the beauty of our diversity:

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

You broke the highest glass ceiling in this nation’s history—that of race—last night, and thankfully, you didn’t ignore that fact:

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office.

Yet, you reminded us that nothing is too impossible to be possible:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. (more…)

Originally posted at Sepia Mutiny.

This article buried in the Saturday’s New York Times reports that the Obama campaign has invested heavily in microtargeting.

Microtargeting uses computers and mathematical models to take disparate bits of information about voters — the cars they own, the groups they belong to, the magazines they read — and analyze it in a way to predict how likely a person is to vote and what issues and values are most important to him. Often these analyses turn up surprising results; for instance, Democrats have taken advantage of the fact that many evangelical Christians are open to hearing a pro-environmental message.

Though this is technique has long been favored by the Republican party, especially during the 2000 Bush campaign, even Republicans agree that he “Obama campaign has appropriated it and taken it to a new level.”

One of the largest data banks is Catalist, a for-profit company that specializes in providing data for the Obama campaign. Turns out its chief technology officer is 34 year old Vijay Ravindran, former director of the ordering-services group at Amazon.com, where he led a team of about 130 engineers who built and maintained the site’s “shopping cart.

From the Washington Post:

The work being done in Catalist’s McPherson Square offices—which, with its multiscreen computer terminals, resembles a Silicon Valley start-up—is helping revolutionize the fields known as data mining and microtargeting. … Catalist was founded in August 2005 by Harold Ickes, the longtime Clinton deputy White House chief of staff, after the 2004 campaign to address the Democrats’ inability to harness data. One of the first hires was a young engineer, Vijay Ravindran. … “With my hiring, he made a decision that this was going to be a real company,” Ravindran says. As the chief data-architecture guy at Catalist, he’s part of a new trend in political technology: As data become more important in campaigning, candidates are increasingly turning to the tech industry for business-level expertise.

In a feature on political strategists and microtargeting, from fastcompany.com [via the newstab, thanks brijo1], Ravindran says:

“In the political space, I felt it was very important to build a computing architecture that would take in real-time data, get them into a standardized format, and then load them into a place where they could be snapshotted out for particular purposes. That didn’t exist before. Now we have an architecture that scales more than 15 terabytes of data while providing an interface for users to work with. We expect to leave this election cycle with a piece of permanent infrastructure that enables groups to do microtargeting more efficiently than ever before. It all boils down to one principle: Leave no data behind.”

Below the fold is a video where Ravindran talks a little bit about what he does.

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Election fever is on the rise. (I don’t know about you, but none of my favorite TV shows quite have the same appeal these days and anytime I pick up a newspaper or hop on a website or facebook, I’m more likely to read or click on a election story than anything else.) It’s even hitting Anu Garg, the software engineer turned wordsmith and the brain behind the immensely popular (600,000 people in some 200 countries) A.Word.A.Day newsletter.

Garg is asking a simple question this week: What’s in a name (of those whom we call our presidential hopefuls)?

“The effect of the actions of a president last for years and eponyms (words coined after someone’s name) enter the language that reflect their legacy, such as Reaganomics and teddy bear (after Theodore Roosevelt),” Garg wrote earlier this week in his daily newsletter. And, although the five words for this week’s A.Word.A.Day all appear to have been coined after this year’s presidential candidates (Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin). they have been in the language even before these candidates were born.

The first word for this week: obambulate

PRONUNCIATION:
(o-BAM-byuh-layt) MEANING:
verb tr.: To walk about.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.
USAGE:
“We have often seen noble statesmen obambulating (as Dr. Johnson would say) the silent engraving-room, obviously rehearsing their orations.”
The Year’s Art; J.S. Virtue & Co.; 1917.

[In case you’re wondering, the image to your right was generated using the above definition, courtesy of Wordle, a wonderfully obsessive site that generates word clouds for a chunk of text, url, or RSS feed.]

The remaining presidential words will be posted here everyday for the rest of this week. And, my Q&A with the Seattle-based software engineer turned wordsmith Anu Garg follows below the fold.

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After all the talk about Joe the Plumber in last night’s final presidential debate, I thought folks might want to meet another plumber this morning. To do that, we’ll take a trip to the seaside town of Obama, Japan (250 miles west of Tokyo; population: 32,000), where Obama mania has been in full swing for months. Obama means “little beach” in Japanese and it is in this town that a plumber friend of the mayor (I tried, but couldn’t find his name) has sculpted this bust of Obama, microphone in hand with a traditional Japanese sash around its head.

The bust stands at the entrance to the support group’s war room, a coffee bar and souvenir shop whose wares include Adachi-designed T-shirts, along with chopsticks, kites, and steamed cakes filled with sweet adzuki beans. Grill marks on the bean cakes depict the back of Obama’s head. “We thought it was not appropriate to have Mr. Obama’s face without his consent, since these are for sale,” [Mayor] Fujihara said. So far, thirteen hundred of Obama’s thirty-three thousand citizens have signed up for membership [in the Obama for Obama group]. [see "Talk of the Town" column in this week's New Yorker for complete article]

Members of Obama for Obama have recorded a boppy theme song “Obama is Beautiful World” whose refrain has been replaying in my head all morning.

More Obama art at Literary Safari:
The Annotated Obama
Obama Madonnari

This post originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

I’m playing a new online video game today. It’s called “Homeland Guantanamos” and it has transformed me into an undercover journalist whose task is to unearth clues about the mysterious 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a Guinean tailor who was held at a detention center in Elizabeth, NJ for overstaying his visa.

“Homeland Guantanamos” is the latest multi-media offering from Breakthrough, the human rights organization which uses media and popular culture to raise awareness here and in India. [Abhi covered their video game “I Can End Deportation” or I.C.E.D. earlier this year. ]

We’ve all heard stories about immigrants (illegal and residents) being detained without explanation or for prolonged periods of time. At the website, I got to see what life might be like on the other side of the fence. I took a tour of a simulated immigration detention center and collected clues to help solve the mystery of Bah’s death (he died of a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages). Along the way, I saw other detainees (eg: a pregnant woman kept in shackles during labor) and witnessed conditions of the facilities, including the solitary confinement room, the bathrooms, and the dining hall. Though this is a simulated experience, the content is based on factual sources such as news articles, court documents, and interviews.

Why call the site “Homeland Guantanamos”? According to Malikka Dutt, executive director of Breakthrough, “the Department of Homeland Security is violating the human rights of legal and undocumented immigrants” and some of the inhumane conditions of detention centers where these immigrants are being held are not all that different from the facility at Guantanamo Bay.

A few facts:

Last year, more than 300,000 people were held in detention centers on mainland USA.
The cost to tax payers last year alone was $1.2 billion to tax payers.
Since 2003, 87 detainees have died in detention centers.
There are over 100 detention centers throughout the country. [ A map of detention centers is available here, searchable by zipcode. The most detention centers seem to be clustered in the Northeast. ]
Between January 2004 to November 2007, nearly a million people passed through immigration custody.

As with I.C.E.D., response to this project has not been all warm and fuzzy. In a Times article published this weekend, Kelly A. Nantel, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the video game was “a work of fiction that dehumanizes the individuals depicted and grossly distorts conditions in detention facilities.”

Dutt maintains that the Dept. of Homeland Security’s enforcement measures are “increasingly draconian” and hopes that this game will serve as a platform for increased support of the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, proposed by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Edward Kennedy (D-Ma.). More in the NYT article.

The Homeland Guantanamos site features compelling video testimonials from detainees. Breakthrough went “live from jail” and interviewed several long time permanent US residents who face possible deportation because of unfair immigration laws. It also has an action guide and a memorial wall. Most certainly worth checking out.

Update: In his Democratic National Convention address, Barack Obama said, “All across America something is stirring.  What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me.  It’s been about you.” This line somehow reminded me of this painting. 

Down on the corner of Stone Street and Coenties Alley, not too far away from the New York Stock Exchange, I came across New York portrait artist Geoffrey Raymond and his acrylic painting of Barack Obama. “The Annotated Obama” is an impressionistic work that screams for public participation. Raymond has been standing next to it all week long, encouraging pedestrians to inscribe their thoughts about Obama and the presidential race on the canvas, using color-coded magic markers (Blue for Democrats; Red for Republicans; Black for Independents). At the end of the week (Sat., i.e. the end of the DNC). , the artist will close his current auction on eBay.

Passersby, including me, were curious and tentative when they were first approached, but quickly warmed up to the idea of placing their personal touch on the work of art. People who haven’t grown up in democracies–and there were some that I did see–always ask, “Do we have to put our names on it?” To which the artist answered “no.”

Right now, the handwriting is mostly in blue but comments are in many languages. (Raymond said that he thought Republicans didn’t feel it was appropriate to write, and expects that more of them will come forward when he unveils his portrait of McCain during the Republican Convention).

This is not the first annotated portrait Raymond has created. His piece on ex-Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne fetched $12,000 on the eBay bid. And, his annotated Eliot Spitzer got a good deal of attention as well. [check them out here]

So, what do we call this? Citizen artistry? Public art? Democratic Impressionism? Whatever it is, I like it. Made me feel a bit closer in my own city to the goings on in Denver this week.

It rained heavily this morning, but this portrait of Obama and Hillary by Jordan-born sidewalk artist Hani Shihada can still be found on Broadway and 109th Street.

Hani has been making public art in NYC since 1985. He can be found all over New York City from April to October. Part of the Italian tradition of madonnari, street painters who typically use charcoal, white chalk, and bits of roof tiles, he started his career in Perugia, Italy. His works last for this long because he makes his pastels himself and then, applies a thin film of acrylic to the finished work. Yet, like the Tibetan sand mandala, his works also eventually fade and vanish.

I’ve been enjoying walking by this particular work over the last several weeks. Though I didn’t get to see Hani work on the painting, it was interesting to watch people’s responses as Obama began to appear next to Hillary (she was there first), how they make sure to walk around the art, to not step on it. (Granted, this is the liberal, left-leaning Upper West Side!)

I checked in with Hani. If you want to catch him at work, he is currently creating an outdoor mural on 10th Avenue and 40th Street, from now through the 17th of August or thereabouts. (Incidentally, it was a commission he received from someone who had seen his Hilobama piece.)

Read an interview with author Shenaaz Nanji here. 

In 1972, military ruler General Idi Amin gave all 80,000 Asian Indians living in the Uganda 90 days to pack up and leave the country. As the BBC reported on August 7, 1972, “Asians, who are the backbone of the Ugandan economy, have been living in the country for more than a century. But resentment against them has been building up within Uganda‘s black majority. General Amin has called the Asians “bloodsuckers” and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth.”

In her first young adult novel Child of Dandelions (Front Street, 2008), Canadian author Shenaaz Nanji sheds much needed light on the upheaval of Asian Indians in Uganda. The protagonist of Child of Dandelions is fifteen year old Sabine, a girl whose comfortable life is torn asunder on August 6, 1972, the day that Idi Amin issues his expulsion order for all Indians in Uganda. Shaken by the protests she encounters while window shopping in Little India, Sabine turns to her parents for protection as the 90 day countdown begins.

Her mother is eager to leave Uganda, but Sabine’s father, a wealthy Ismaeli businessman and landowner, is determined to stay:

“Nonsense!” Papa laughed his conch-shell laugh, and her little brother echoed it. … “We are even more Ugandan than the ethnic Africans. Not only were we born here, but we chose to be Ugandan citizens when other Indians remained British…

Sabine agrees with her father. Her family is different after all. She is not like the other Indians. Her best friend Zena is African. They’ve grown up together like “twin beans of one coffee flower” and Zena is just like her sister, even if others don’t see it that way.

Narmin …Nasrin … Sabine’s hands clenched at the names of her classmates. They were prissy prunes. She’d had a big fight with them after they called Zena goli. Mixing her African and Indian friends was like mixing oil with water.

As the 90 day countdown continues, however, the growing chants of “Muhindi, nenda nyumbani! Indian, go home” drown out Sabine’s optimism. Amidst reports of violent attacks against Indian families, the mysterious disappearance of her favorite uncle, and strained relations between her and Zena (whose uncle is a general and crony of Idi Amin), Sabine’s bubble bursts and she is forced to reexamine her understandings of race and class. (more…)