I was just studying. Reading contract law and trying to make sense of how courts calculate damages, how they commodify so an equitable judgment can be reached. No, nix the equitable part.

And then I went to my good friend JP’s site to see what poetry he’s put up of late. He participated in the 3:15 experiment – wake up for a month at 3:15 am, write poetry, and then go back to sleep. I’m usually a ridiculous bundle of ridiculous at that time, which would probably make things easier to write (the theory being that when I’m not a ridiculous bundle of ridiculous, then I have some equally arbitrary divisions between my creativity and my pen). But since I love my sleep, I would probably not participate in such an experiment.

Anyway, I was reading some of his great poetry. And then I went back to my contracts. And that started to read like poetry. It was the weirdest paradigm shift-lag. I suddenly realize that I’m not supposed to do that. That somehow it was wrong; I wasn’t meeting my internal normalized expectations. When I realized I’m not supposed to take contracts in the way I take poetry in, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and thought briefly – Why am I doing this?

Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

I’m an honest believer that what we write both reflects and patterns the ways we perceive, what we believe, how we are in the world. And its not only about what we write, but what we produce, what we choose to put out. But recent experiences have brought these beliefs to a head, forcing me to think about what I write and the effect my decisions to stick thoughts onto paper have on my reality.

My parents’ garage burned down at the end of last year in Texas. Luckily, no one was harmed, but my wonderful cat Neelu passed away in the flames. Our other cat, Shanti, escaped somehow and was only found two days later, her formerly white fur now a dull smoky shade, her little body bruised and suffering occasional nighttime coughing fits. Nothing else survived; all was burnt. The smoke had creeped into the house and anything exposed to it was taken by the insurance company for cleaning. My parents can’t work out at the gym because their shoes are being dry-cleaned. The stuff in the fridge was rotting. Electricity and water, cut off. My sister didn’t want to look at Neelu’s body, which was luckily taken care of by one of the Latino firemen who was wearing a tulsi mala and had pictures of Krishna at home, on his Altar.

Fires in my neighborhood is a subject of a short story that I had worked on (and a piece of it posted here) a few months back. In it, I was driving up to my neighborhood late at night and became quickly concerned for my family when I saw the flames emanating from our slice of suburbia, the Orchard Lakes subdivision. These worries came back to me when I got the phone call about Neelu and the garage. I couldn’t believe it, and after being immensely thankful that my parents were okay, my thoughts eventually turned to my long-standing fascination with natural yet odd things, and how this is the second time that what I write is connected to what happens to me, and my family.

The first was when I was writing another short story about a suburban Muslim family not unlike my own. When thinking about a certain character, my friend Birj came immediately to mind. His irreverence and illogical nature, dedication to social justice, our kinship over bad jokes and puns were a “natural fit” for the character I was contemplating. Once I figured out how to incorporate him, I decided to make the character disappear. Two days later, I find out that Birj had passed. Since then, I haven’t been able to finish that story.

I gradually became afraid that what I write shadows a later reality. I remember my exact thoughts when I decided to make that character disappear – I thought it novel and an interesting plot twist. But more, it just felt natural and furthered the story along in a direction I hadn’t yet thought through but knew was right. That I was fascinated with the giant fire is not abnormal – but when I chose to write about that over other odd things, it foreshadowed what happened a few weeks ago – and another disappearance.

A friend recently said that it could be that I can see the future, that I have the ability to make premonitions. But before that, that same friend told me I should stop writing. My sister said the same. So because of that, I’ve had a tough time writing.

So this is more complex than mere writer’s block. I’m afraid of what I might write in the future because it might turn into something I never expected. Its hard to know where to go from here.

Writing | 3 Comments »

I’m on vacation now in Houston, and as is proper, there are daily, weekly, and annual rituals to observe and in which to participate.

Like going to the movies with my sister, not staying overnight at friends’ places so I can wake up and eat breakfast with the family, running late to any appointments involving my sister, brother in law, and myself in some combination, playing badminton with my mom, spending hours in front of the television which spits out a combination of Hindi and English in unlike amounts.

And infalliably, participating in various Hindu-related prayers and rituals. New Years Day provides the perfect occasion for reminding ourselves that we are Hindu, or maybe a time to re-evaluate my own Hindu-ness. We start the day late – all the sons and daughters are slow in waking. But the parents are punctually shuffling through papers for any department or grocery store sales, for coupons. This ritual seems to prepare them for later prayers.

I wake to discussions of the sale of an air-conditioning unit at Best Buy. I know whats in store and prepare my mind and body for a day of feet falling asleep from hours of sitting and palms together fingertips towards the sky. I’m ready to do pooja.

First stop, our temple at home. We sit, waiting for my sister and brother-in-law, and we start when they take too long. Books and pamphlets with lamp oil stains and tears and gods and goddesses are held again and their contents recited. Cushions are sat on, flames are lit, incense optional. Framed pictures of different avatars of gods and goddesses are gazed at. I sit in back, my parents rock back and forth as they pray, I fiddle with my cushion and my seating position.

Next stop, Meenakshi temple in Pearland, TX. A miniature of the beautiful Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai, India. We visit deity upon deity, taking turns walking around the deity. There are throngs of people around so we wait in lines to pray, to give alms, to get blessed by the priest. It is dark by now, but there are plenty of lights and lamps. Inside the main temple complex, we wait in more lines, but we are strategic and travel together, ensuring that our turns come together. And we take prasad and sit down for a moment before leaving.

My brother-in-law was ahead of us in all of this; he was always one deity ahead. When I was at Ganesh, he was at Meenakshi. Of course, I tried to keep up, but couldn’t. He even laid prostrated in front of some deities. But he drove all of us in and out of the temple; he epitomized speed pooja-ing. I was familiar with this technique, having done it myself on many occasions. The image that most pops into my head from that day now is my brother-in-law’s laced fingers accompanying his shoeless feet moving across brick and stone, eyeing the next deity to worship and preparing to convert his fingers to point to the sky, from laced to parallel.

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Here are the lyrics to Lali Puna’s Crawling by Numbers, a song I just listened to:

You’ll be charged a hundred dollars
if you can’t pay back the debts
Work your soul and work your lifetime
without money you can’t buy
Can’t you see
six feet underground?
Identify the system
Identify the system
Watch your neighbours
and their big dreams
Silent envy on your face
A life deluxe, it would be easy
What would you give to join the club
Can’t you see
six feet underground?
Identify the system
Identify the system.

I think identifying the system is merely the first step.

Economics, Music, Politic, Resistance | No Comments »

Admittedly, I’m drawn to stories about South Asian characters and exploring themes that seem to fly with such characters. I was reading the story Our Lady of Paris by Daniyal Mueenuddin and wanted to see what other people thought. If you care to, read the story, and then tell me what you think.

Oh, this is a half distraction because I haven’t read the whole story yet. I’m a slow reader and I have to study for final exams.

I promise, though, that when someone does comment, I’ll promptly read the story in full. Click here for story please.

Desi, Writing | 2 Comments »

At the edges of the semester, I start to reminisce. A knee-jerk reaction, conditioned through the many times I’ve been forced to cut loose from something old and into something new, more than often unwillingly. Spending spots of time in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Georgia while growing up, times when my father’s job was unexpectedly taken away from him and forcing our family to bop around the country has a bit to do with my tendency to take temporal looks back and forth.

I tab pieces of time through the music I listen to, the people I meet at certain moments, the work I do, the things I read, the ebbs and flows I notice. These markers are there for convenience, but they are also framed by a strange neurosis – that at any moment, things could be taken away, that at any moment, things could be drastically different, that at any moment, things are no longer the same. Its as if the gargantuan processes of change that move the planets, that make our worlds work, were siphoning their energy specifically into me and my life, into my developing mind, my itty bitty heart. As if I was singled out to realize that things are always changing.

But then, I have always had a penchant for drama.

This might explain why I have this love-hate relationship with change. I often welcome it, and lately I realize I thrive off of it. But I have historically dreaded it.

Seeing as how my first semester of law school is coming to a quick end, I am looking back. And here’s what I realize: some people I’ve met I will know forever, some only for another few years; some ideas I’ve encountered will serve as the bedrock of my working life, some will be irreconcilable and plague me; some potential relationships will come to fruition, some will not; some conceptions about social justice I will latch onto, some I will discard; some simple things I will remember that I love, some I will not; sometimes I will cry, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will laugh, sometimes I will not; sometimes I will make someone else laugh, sometimes I will not; some people I will respect because of their politics, some I will respect because of the way they teach, some I will respect because of the way they act, some I will respect because of who they’re not, some I will respect because they need it, some I will respect because they’re just good people.

In other words, I haven’t seen much new or much old. Maybe its because change has its way of staying the same, and that it may be possible that I don’t dread it as much as I thought I did.

Law-ing | 4 Comments »

Munnabhai MBBS is arguably one of the funniest Bollywood films I’ve seen. And one of my favorite Bollywood actors, Arshad Warsi, is in it! And no, I haven’t yet seen the new Munna Bhai, but I will!

But I’ve never been a huge fan of Sanjay Dutt’s acting or fashion sensibilities. Now I have another reason to sway away. He was recently convicted of his participation in the Mumbai bombings earlier this year. According to the BBC, he is the most controversial Bollywood star around. He has spent some time in jail for his involvement in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

Now, this brings up a tricky situation for that space between the personal and the politic. I love most of his films, especially the recent ha-ha-laugh-til-you-hurt films but my stomach starts hurting a different way when I think of his complicity in the blasts designed to kill hundreds of people in strings of eyeblink moments.

But thats the essential rub of all the pieces of our lives. They’re filled with contradictions, of scattered remnants connected in some ways to someone being oppressed, having to die, somehow, somewhere.

He states that he’s some kind of chosen one. I wonder what kind of chosen one he’s trying to be.

Bollywood, Politic | No Comments »

Janitors win! And I’m wondering what it all comes down to. What does it mean when we say a campaign wins, when the workers are framed in pictures – hands up in jubilation, union leaders clapping still. I am still absorbing this victory and yet, I have my reservations about the US labor movement in terms of actually building worker power. But we’ll have to see what happens.

Responses to the tazing incident two weeks ago have multiplied. I’m involved with a few graduate student groups across the UCLA campus trying to re-frame the issue as one of police brutality and race and take some action so that these kinds of egregious abuses of power don’t happen again.

Politic, Race, Resistance | No Comments »

Last night, after I posted about what happened at UCLA, I got a text from a friend — “Police Brutality against Houston Janitors!” Eyes widened, I took a breath, and propped myself up against a wall.

I am not startled that such brutality spans from UCLA to Houston and back. But I am startled that this is happening in my tiny world. I spent more than a year working for the Houston Justice for Janitors campaign and feel connected to the pound of flesh I left there. A friend had told me the other day that he was considering participating in the civil disobedience to support the Janitor strike. I was immensely supportive and tried to make him do it. So when I got that text, my fears about an impersonal, courtesy-of-you-tube police brutality – a political set of fears – became intensely personal. This tangled mess made me, well, a bit of a mess.

I went to the Houston Janitors website and watched the video – people I knew in the video were getting arrested but I couldn’t see my friend. I made phone calls and didn’t hear back. No one was picking up. No one would answer.

I eventually got a call from him and he reassured me that he’s OK. He had decided not to participate in the civil disobedience. I exhaled.

But after attending the protest today at UCLA, where the messaging was around public safety rather than police brutality and race, I realize that we do not have much time. We don’t have time to obfuscate, to skate over the issues that dig deep into us and threaten to rip us all apart.

If we don’t call things as they are – that Mostafa was targeted because he was a Persian male, that he was cuffed and then tazed more than four times because he was a person of color, that the UCPD’s actions have created a climate of fear for people of color all over campus, that ’safety’ as a message only means more cops and no change in accountability – then we all suffer.

We don’t have time to call things otherwise because eventually we all are going to be hit by this. And it will hurt like hell when it happens to us or to someone we love.

Update:  My blog posts have been picked up by WireTap, an excellent on-line magazine run by AlterNet.  Please visit and post!

Politic, Race, Resistance | 5 Comments »

Police brutality is not exactly abnormal. Its seems to have become part of the normal run of things. It happens often and with regularity. As if the state mandates it. Just as KRS-One put it.

But my severely optimistic head never expects it. I would never expect it at all. And everytime I hear about when it, I feel disgusted angry victimized angry mad lost hurt.

This is how I felt yesterday when I first heard about what happened at UCLA at the Powell Library, which was mere minutes from where I was studying. UC cops were checking undergraduate students at the Powell Library’s computer lab for IDs. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a Persian UCLA student, did not have his ID and after some time, the cops were tasering him repeatedly because of his ‘non-compliance.’ They were asking him to stand up but kept tasering him (which immobilizes muscles and often prevents control of one’s body for up to 10 minutes). Students gathered round and many people recorded the incident through their cell phones. After being tasered several times, the cops took Mostafa to a holding cell and later released him.

Mostafa was never asked for an alternate means to show he was a student. Is it justifiable that a person should suffer massive electric shocks for not having a small piece of plastic? How much power should police be given in regulating a computer lab?

The video can be linked to here through the Daily Bruin. Be careful, its really disturbing. I couldn’t watch all of it.

There is much more that needs to be done about this. A google news search of “Mostafa, taser, UCLA” will uncover more than 100 news articles, including a few indicating that Council of American-Islamic Relations is justifiably calling for a deep investigation into all of this. The LA Times calls this a third incident in a recent wave of cell phone videos documenting police brutality.

While this was happening, Mostafa was yelling “Here’s your Patriot Act…here’s your abuse of power.” Those who are at UCLA, pressure the UC Police Department and anyone else who has abused their power at the UCs to conduct a full, thorough, and impartial investigation into all of this.

Update – Here are some things you can do:

Contact the UCLA Police Department and express your disapproval of how the situation was handled: http://www.ucpd.ucla.edu/

Contact UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams About the Incident at Powell Library:

Dr. Norman Abrams (Interim Chancellor) – chancellor@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Daniel Neuman (Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost) – evc@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Maryann Jacobi Gray (Assistant Provost) – mgray@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Robert J. Naples (Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students) -
dean@saonet.ucla.edu

Politic, Race, Resistance | 6 Comments »