Join us in transitioning ASATA to new leadership

ASATA focuses on the challenges of racism, exploitation and communalism. Our actions emphasize our connection to the South Asian community, but our vision of change and solidarity is cross-group and communities. Photo by Eric Mar.

If you’re in the SF Bay Area, have any familial, coincidental or other relationship to South Asia, are politically inclined, understand and engage with the haves and have-nots of power, then join us in taking the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA) to it’s next phase.  We’re meeting on Sat Mar 28th at 11am, and then again to continue transition conversations on Apr 7th at 7pm.  If you’re interested in joining, re-joining, re-engaging with a San Francisco Bay Area institution – especially if you’ve got some time to devote to a leadership position - drop me a line at miniATbrainbytesDOTcom  

ASATA, the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, is a San Francisco Bay Area group working to educate, organize, and empower the Bay Area South Asian communities to end violence, oppression, racism and exploitation within and against our diverse communities.

Bulgarian Musings

My most excellent sis-in-law has begun not one – but two! – blogs. The first, about her life in Bombay/Mumbai as a bulgarian expat living with my charming but handful of a brother. The second, about a shared passion – food food food!

Bulla & Everyone Else

Everyone sings in India. Birj mentioned this in passing. I had forgotten it. This is the song, he said, that all the kids on the streets were singing when I was last there.

Friday morning, I put on Rabbi in the car. Bulla streams out as the sun glances off downtown San Francisco. I’m approaching the city, on the bay bridge. Rabbi’s sound, Bulleh Shah’s words, kids with nothing who keep singing the words of a Sufi poet from the mid-18th century.

Nor did I create the difference of faith
Nor did I create adam-eve
Nor did I name myself
Beginning or end I know just the self
Do not acknowledge duality
There’s none wiser than I
Who is this Bulla Shah
Bulla! I know not who I am

America as Gillespie & Ali

It dawned on me recently that while I was growing up in Calcutta, a series of introductions to America were all black.

Two key informers of my vision of America, both mediated through my father, were Dizzy Gillespie (and jazz in general) and Muhammad Ali’s autobiography. The former as a live interaction under Calcutta skies, the latter, read off family bookcases, but reinforced and regurgitated as ‘Elocution’ at my school, La Martiniere. More on these soon.

Tomb’s Day

Artist: Atul Dodiya
I saw a show of Dodiya’s in Mumbai many years ago – that show was one that reimagined Gandhi. This piece though reimagines my head and points a laser-focused light right at it’s most discombobulated moments.

Gandhi, Truth & Me

“What I want to achieve – what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years – is self realization … I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal. All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end. But as I have all along believed that what is possible for one is possible for all, my experiments have not been conducted in the closet, but in the open; and I do not think that this fact detracts from their spiritual value. …

… Far be it from me to claim any degree of perfection for these experiments. I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist, who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them. I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analysed every psychological situation. Yet I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusions…”

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the introduction to “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”.

There is a lot that both amazes and disturbs in stories of the Mahatma (“often the title has deeply pained me”). But of every person, time and situation there is something to be taken and to be learned. Gandhi as scientist, and as artist – this is what I take from him.

“I am not a seer or a guru of non-violence. I am an artist of non-violence” *

Gandhi’s science in entirety is not mine. His vision is one of ‘the truth’, the one truth, in his words “the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God”.

I veer away from that philosophy of truth, and indeed of science where one is continually on the path to achieving this singular thing. I see that there is a beauty in this vision, indeed, an inspiration in it – as well as a potent balm for the realities of our conflicted and seemingly patternless lives. So I see and appreciate the role of this version of “Truth” in guiding us down the paths on which we choose to embark and even in the “doing” of science, full of uncertainty and noise as it is.

But moving away from that utilitarian perspective on truth, I think science is about a continual progression of guestimates. How unassuring that sounds! In this view, we do well at any one point – any spatio-temporal moment – to make educated guesses; the more ‘educated’ the more successfully they can contribute to predictions for the state of some future window or for a differently positioned window in time and space.

* (as published in Dodiya’s monograph for his Gandhi show)

Born into Commerce; Dead at Birth.

Met some great folks the other day. Walked into a home, crowded with pieces of a long life waiting, it turns out, to get out. My hosts, Peter and Juthika Stangl, were moving and their life needed to be off the walls and floors of their Palo Alto home to make sure that others could reimagine their own lives in the space.

First, Peter and Juthika warmed me immediately. In short order I learned more about the foundation they’ve been running for a while now – Shadika – my Saturday blind date for volunteering hours. Not that I did any volunteer work that Saturday, but I did a lot of volunteer basking in the glow of something very very good.

Shadika garners funds from the SF bay area, and delivers it to the door of projects that serve sex workers and their children in Kolkata (the Calcutta of my past). I thought – aha ! isn’t this the same domain as the film ‘born into brothels’ that just won the oscars? So up I piped with (the obviously obvious) tip – why not use the publicity around the film, and screenings of the film, to help fundraise? The depressing answer: we contacted the film maker, but after what seemed like a positive start, we were told, that a deal was made with a distributor, and when the time was right we should talk to the distributor.

I stood aghast. I know I know there are multiple complex politics on who represents, who uses, who gives back to the represented, academic articles, activist tomes, many hours of many peoples lives discussing – but this was just very simply unbelievable. A film made to highlight the plight (and creativity from disaster) of the children of sex workers in Kolkata was not available to those who have worked to serve these people for more than a decade. I can think of many well-meaning ways to explain the mindset of those behind this travesty, or the series of small decisions made, and larger ones never considered, that brought us to this point, but the thing of it remains too hypocritical to comprehend. Perhaps its because I’m immersed in a world where we already understand the implications of default copyright, restrictive distribution agreements, etc. But help me, anyone, to understand how this makes sense.