A “Good South Indian Boy” Goes to Hollywood

SHRUTI SWAMY • Photo: Russell Baer

Jun 06, 2008

 

Patrons of the Bay Area arts might remember Sunkrish Bala for his breakout role in a stage production of the Mahabharata, where he played the pivotal role of Narada. Then again, you might not, seeing as the production, which took place at “the Hindu equivalent of Sunday school,” Sandeepany in San Jose, Calif., happened in 1990, when Bala was six years old. Nonetheless, the performance triggered his life-long love of acting. “That’s where it started,” Bala says. “I just loved the feeling of being up there.”

Bala, most recently seen as a cast member on the ABC series Notes From the Underbelly, has been acting ever since his first stage performance. In addition to Underbelly, he has also appeared on TV shows like Will and Grace, Grey’s Anatomy, and CSI:NY. Born in India and brought up in San Jose, the actor now lives in Los Angeles, where he spoke with me via cell-phone, en route to a benefit dinner. Bala claimed to be grateful for the absence of a face-to-face meeting on account of his “extreme shyness,” but he had the kind of self-effacing humor and easy familiarity which made me doubt the existence of said shyness. “Seriously,” he said, “if we were in person right now I’d be blushing. Well, I’m too dark to blush, but my ears would be blushing.”

 

Maybe the familiarity comes from the fact that Bala is a Bay Area boy. Before his big move to Hollywood, for college at UCLA and then for his career, he was one of the founding members of A’Shore, a theater group by and for the South Asian community in the Silicon Valley. “It was an eclectic group of people—software engineers from India on their H-1 visas, older people who were retired but had done theater in their youth, and then young people like me.” Many of the shows were written by people in the group in order to communicate the specific experiences of Indians in the diaspora. “These were perspectives that hadn’t been given voice until then, and we really felt like the audiences who came to our shows were hungry for those kinds of stories.” A’Shore had a good run, but couldn’t sustain the loss of its key members, like Bala, who went off to college, and the company ran its course.

 

“Acting was never supposed to be a viable career option for me,” says Bala, “I’m a good south Indian boy, and I had originally applied to colleges as an engineering major—so I just did it because I liked performing. I never did it to be famous.” After a couple years of school, he started auditioning professionally and landed a major role pretty early on in his career, becoming a cast member on Notes From the Underbelly (the show was cancelled in March). Though he has appeared in more serious roles on shows like CSI:NY, Bala prefers comedy: “I think comedy’s hard because as an actor, you’re not trying to be funny. You have to reveal the ugliest parts of yourself in order to get other people to see the comedy. You have to be a little more honest, I think, and be open to revealing that.”

 

As a TV-watching Indian-American, I think Bala’s presence in the media marks an unmistakable shift in the racial landscape of the small screen. Shows like The Office, Heroes, Lost, and ER all have ethnically diverse casts which feature South Asian actors. It’s getting easier to turn on the television and feel that quiet pang of recognition when you see a face that resembles your own. “When I got into this industry, it was unique that I was an Indian-American actor, because we were so rare,” Bala remembers. “But there are a lot of us now—and I think now we’re judged on our work and our vision.” The question of why there are now more South Asians working in the media than ever before is a complicated one; similarly complicated is Hollywood’s treatment of race on the small screen. There still seem to be an overabundance of terrorist roles (for example, Kal Penn’s controversial part in season 6 of 24), but, with increasing frequency, South Asian American performers are being considered for parts that a few years ago would have only been given to white actors. It is in this previously uncharted territory that Bala finds himself taking on roles like that of Eric on Notes from the Underbelly, roles that make no mention of ethnicity whatsoever.

 

While Bala says that his choice to become an actor had nothing to do with the portrayals of South Asians in the media that existed when he was growing up, I feel compelled to point out that it I grew up around the same time, and that I was deeply affected by those images. More than that, though, I was deeply affected by the lack of images of people who looked like me. On some level, it’s important and exciting that there are more brown faces on television today. But the demand we place on these faces to represent their cultures, ethnicity, and background—the burden of representation—is far more complicated. Did Eric, the neurotic American father Bala played on Underbelly, represent a victory of craft over skin color, or a compromised representation of identity? And is someone who hasn’t struggled to find work in Hollywood even in a position to ask questions like that? Bala makes it clear that his first priority is to be an actor: “If in the process of acting, I can be a representative of the South Asian community, that’s awesome, but I am so grateful to be an actor first. I had the privilege of having people come before me who had a harder time, and I have already had the luxury of saying no to things that I didn’t want to do.”

 

In terms of his own background, Bala is weary of positioning himself as too much of an outsider. “I’m very Indian. I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid, and my family is very Indian. It was the Indian-American experience, or whatever everybody had decided that would be, that I didn’t feel was my experience. And I think that’s helped me a lot—feeling like an outsider has helped me understand both. Although,” he adds, “I always thought that these feelings were unique to me, but right now I’m reading [Jhumpa Lahiri’s] Unaccustomed Earth, and I’m realizing that everyone feels a little bit like they don’t belong.”

 

Bala does his best to illuminate the work of acting, which is, at its least vague, an extremely mysterious process. “It’s all about getting your body to do stuff that your head wants your body to do,” he says, and then moves into more abstract territory. “The work of an actor is having an awareness of the society you’re in, having an awareness of the people who are in it. Going in, I thought I had it all figured out, because I could act happy or sad or angry, but as I did it for real, I realized that it’s more complicated than that. The work behind acting is more imperceptible. I have trouble explaining to my parents and my aunts and uncles what I do all the time when I’m not shooting. I promise you, it’s hard work.”

 

And so is being a star. “It’s hard talking about yourself,” he says, after changing the subject away from himself yet again. “I guess I’m getting used to it now that I’ve done a few of these interviews, but you know, I grew up humble and South Indian—‘Don’t extol your own virtues! That’s terrible!’”

 

But however modest he tries to be about his acting successes, the enthusiasm in his voice is unmistakable. “I just really believe in what this medium can do, what this work can do,” Bala says. “I’m not saving lives, but if I get to do the kind of work I want to do, then I’ll be affecting people in way that’s really powerful.”

 

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Shruti Swamy is working toward her Masters in Fine Arts in fiction at San Francisco State University.

Hot to Spot

 

SHRUTI SWAMY, Jul 24, 2008

 

I had a band in high school called The Hip Hop Hindus and the Jumping Jew,” admits Goldspot frontman Sid Khosla. “We really ran the gamut of musical genres. We did a lot of covers. I think I might have even rapped one time. Trust me, you really don’t want to hear me rap.”

 

Goldspot is quickly garnering critical acclaim for their album Tally of the Yes Men, which was released in 2007 by Mercury Records. “Friday,” Tally’s single, is a far cry from the Smiths and Police covers of Khosla’s high school band. Elastic and catchy, it opens with the lush strings of A.R. Rehman’s Chennai orchestra—the same orchestra that has recorded countless tracks for Bollywood scores. The album was recorded independently, and therefore on a shoestring budget, but once the band was signed Khosla insisted on this one expense. “It was very important to me to have that sound,” says Khosla. “The record company offered to get the Los Angeles philharmonic, or an orchestra based in the United States to do it. But I had a very specific sound in mind.”

 

Khosla says he never studied music (save a college sitar class at the University of Pennsylvania), but learned to sing from the tapes his parents would play in the house while he was growing up—old film songs from the 1950s and 1960s. The imprint they have made on his voice is hard to pin down, but Khosla’s voice over strings, drums, and electric guitars in “Friday” is almost Hindi-movie heroic in its sweetness and clarity.

 

Goldspot’s unique sound comes from the subtle integration of Khosla’s musical influences—Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, the Smiths, the Beatles, Lata Mangeshkar, REM—and years of practice. (As his non-musical influences, Khosla cites “women who are kind of screwed up in the head.”) After the high school atrocities of The Hip Hop Hindus, Khosla went to UPenn, convinced that he was going to become a doctor, and then later, a civil defender. A few months into law school applications, however, Khosla decided on a drastic career change. He packed up and moved to London to pursue music with his friend Sanjay.

 

“London’s really where I started writing for the first time,” he says. Khosla credits that time as a period in which he, “got a lot of junk out of my system.” He was experimenting, for example, with extremes of fusion. “I was singing ragas over rock music … it was really cheesy. But I had to go through that to figure out what Goldspot’s sound was going to be.” He adds, “I’m proud of what we have right now, the sound we’ve achieved. I would never describe it as fusion.”

 

Khosla can’t explain the mysterious process of songwriting any more than a non-songwriter can: “I don’t want to sound trite or cocky or anything, but it just comes to me. There are these pockets of inspiration I find, and then I can just go. When I’m in it, I’m in it. I’ll feel something, and I’ll pick up a guitar, and just sing.” Some nights, Khosla sleeps with a guitar in his bed, ready for the moment, in the small hours of the morning, when a song arrives. He also carries around a little tape recorder, lest a song sneak up on him unawares. While Khosla doesn’t always know where his songs come from, he knows where they definitely don’t. “I’m not responding to anything [in American culture] with my music,” he say. “And I don’t want to be seen as an Indian musician. I want to be seen as a musician.”

 

Goldspot, which Khosla formed in 1999 in Los Angeles, after meeting drummer and songwriter Ramy Antoun, is in the process of recording their next album, which Khosla says is very close to completion. “I’m making music I really believe in, and we’re having a lot of fun recording it. Ramy and I are trying things that we’ve never tried before. We had a vintage music run, when we were recording in Austin, where we went to a bunch of thrift stores and picked up a bunch of instruments, and put them on the album.” Instrumental experimentation aside, Khosla says he’s getting deeper into his songwriting: “I had a pretty tough year last year, and a lot of the lyrics on the new album come from my experiences. More than any other album I think that this is a very lyrically driven album, and I feel very connected to the lyrics.”

 

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Shruti Swamy is working toward her Masters in Fine Arts in fiction at San Francisco State University.

Patchwork Cohesion

SHRUTI SWAMY, Aug 06, 2008

 

Mixing languages, genres, and mediums, Rupa Marya’s San Francisco-based band, Rupa and the April Fishes, is adding to their ever-growing fan base with raucously upbeat music and carnival-like performances. Their music, described by SFStation as “extraordinary, romantic, whimsical and surreal,” is at once intensely political and dreamy, with songs in French, English, and Hindi. Marya spent her childhood in the Bay Area, with extended stays in India and France, and now divides her time as a musician and a doctor of internal medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

 

Extraordinary Rendition, Rupa and the April Fishes’ debut album, was released by Cumbancha Records.

 

Where do your songs start?

 

Songs start through stories, from my own life and from the people I meet, especially though my work in medicine. They’re amazing people, at amazing points in their lives.

 

I know that you had a very international childhood, and your music has a very international sound. I wonder if this made it difficult to navigate the concept of home. How do you define home? Do you see your music as an exploration of that concept?

 

Definitely. For me, my music is my way of asking myself “where is my home, where do I belong, who am I?” The sounds that come out are inherently beautiful and confusing, because that’s what it feels like to be a part of so many different cultures. The reality is that you can find yourself at home in so many different places and in no place in particular. For me, home is shared with the people I call my family; my artistic family, my partner, my family of origin. The emotional connection to place, to people who are important—that’s where home is for me.

 

Have you always used music as a tool for this kind of exploration or is this recent?

 

I think it’s recent. It was really my father’s death, and what happened on September 11th—both events happened around the same time and were critical in raising those questions about life and identity. I had thought about these questions my whole life, but I had never used music to explore it. What’s important is the asking of the question, not necessarily an answer.

 

Would you consider your music to be political?

 

I consider everything political. We’re living in a time that’s incredibly political. So I think that if music comments or doesn’t comment on world issues, that is a political act.

 

Do you consciously put messages, political or otherwise, in your songs? If so, I would wonder about the tension between wanting to convey a message with your music, and also maintaining a level of emotional honesty.

 

That’s a really good question. Most of my music is not directly about political issues, unless you consider love political. Political awareness effects how I write. I’m not trying to embed a message in my music—I write from my point of view, from my human experience, and I’m a politically engaged individual.

 

I’m looking at wars: who’s died, who’s killing, who has what, who hoards what? And questions: Who is this war for? Who benefits from keeping immigrants without rights? Who is harmed? These kinds of questions are very interesting to me, and I think the emotional honesty of my music comes from the asking of questions. I don’t sit around and think, “How do I get this point across?”

 

The song “Poder” on the album is about what can and can’t cross the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s an emotional song; it’s realizing that a bird can cross, money can cross, an ice-cream can cross, but I can’t. And it’s realizing that human beings are the things being controlled, whereas everything else is very natural moving back and forth across the border. It’s a song about a global issue, but it’s being told through a very human experience. Political issues are human issues.

 

So I don’t think, “How am I going to remind people that we’re all going to die?” Because that’s one of the most thoughtful of my messages: how do I get across to people that our time here is precious? That’s what I hear at work every day at the hospital. “Our time is limited, our time is precious.” How do we get people to remember that and treat each other with dignity?

 

How do you resolve the tension between the intellectual content of lyrics and the emotional aspect of melody?

 

One of the reasons I started writing in French was because I felt that English was a very tired language for me. It was hard to convey emotion rapidly because I was so hung up on the words. So I gave myself an exercise: write 10 love songs in French. Then people could hear the natural rhythm and melody in the language itself, and make that secondary to what was happening literally. I wanted the emotional integrity of the music to be more important than the language I sang it in. And doing that I think has made me a more compelling writer in English, after writing for five years in mostly French and Spanish, because I feel like in I’m the process of loosening my attachments to words, and I’m rediscovering the inherent musicality of the language—and using that as the first priority. And because I was trying to convey it to my primarily English-speaking audience, the task became extremely important. How can I show them that what they don’t understand is not to be feared? Even though they might not understand linguistically, they understand emotionally.

 

The biggest surprise to me is that people get it. People will come up to me after the show and tell me that they don’t speak French, but they’ll tell me they understood, and they’ll tell me what the song reminded them of. And it’s exciting to me, because it just shows how connected we are with people across what seem like cultural divides.

 

That’s really beautiful.

 

Thank you. It’s exciting! We’re living in a time when people want to divide things up and say, “this is you, this is me,” and then feel fear because of it, and kill because of it. I was actually so angry with the Bush administration and the rhetoric they were using after September 11th. I was consumed with anger. And I was thinking about Mahatma Gandhi’s words: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” How could I create that change?

 

I had so much hatred, and I felt just as bad as the people who were pushing to go to war with Iraq. So that’s where the music started. I thought, okay, I’m going to write about love. And not about romantic love; not, “Oh, I love you so much, please come and kiss me.” Intoxicating love. Love that requires surrender. Love that exists outside of borders and boundaries. Love in a time of fear. I guess I have to thank George Bush for that.

 

Did you construct this album to have a cohesive sound?

 

The sound of this album is as cohesive as my identity. I was talking to my friend today, and I was wearing this ridiculous outfit. And he said, “Oh my goodness, you’re such a patchwork!” And I thought how funny that was, because that’s what I think of when I think about the music. It’s a quilt, a mosaic, anything that makes more artistic sense when looked at from far away. For anybody who finds their identity in more than one culture, and I feel like increasingly that’s more and more people, I’d say they’d find it cohesive. We contain so many contradictions within ourselves.

 

Of course, for me, to see the band live is the most important thing. The music on the album is fine, and I love it, but seeing the way that the instruments talk to each other is what’s most exciting. What’s amazing about what’s going on in San Francisco right now is that there’s this movement of musicians who are unbelievably talented when playing live. That’s something that hasn’t happened after the post-electronica era. There’s a re-emergence of real, beautiful, artistic talent.

 

You frequently collaborate with other musicians, visual artists, and dancers. What draws you to collaboration, and what are the challenges of that work?

 

I majored in biology and theater in college. I started off acting, and I ended up directing, and I loved creating something for people to walk into, spaces where people would be moved, transformative spaces. So I’ve always collaborated with set designers and writers and dramaturges. I love the collaborative process.

 

I’m deeply inspired by visual art—a lot of my music comes from images or paintings that I’ve seen—so it makes total sense to me to be working with these people. There’s a real collaboration that happens in the artistic community up here in the city. We’ll sit together, I’ll be playing music, they’ll be drawing, we’ll be cooking dinner. Food, art—it’s a sensory, sensual experience. I love it. It makes me want to write more songs.

 

When did you start writing songs?

 

I really started writing songs when I was about 19. Before that, though, when I was eight, I was the most undisciplined piano student the world has ever seen. I’d spend about 15 minutes practicing my lesson, and two hours just fooling around. But what I was really doing was making up songs. Experimenting with sound. I am very grateful to my mother, who was on her way to being a concert pianist before her marriage was arranged to my father, for never stopping me. She just let me play; I was literally playing the piano.

 

Changing tracks, do you think medicine and music are complementary careers? What root is common to both?

 

Both are ways of exploring the curiosity I have about humanity, about life, about being human. Being a musician is much more a sensual experience. It’s also a very emotional, spiritual experience. Being a doctor is very intellectual, though most doctors I know have an interest in the humanities, because that’s what we are, we’re humanitarians—we’re interested in people. So being a musician helps me stay open and not be desensitized to things I should stay sensitive about, and being a doctor is what makes me write. The fact that I’m around people and their families and their lives—it inspires me every time I’m in the hospital.

 

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Shruti Swamy is working toward her Masters in Fine Arts in fiction at San Francisco State University.

On the Road

SHRUTI SWAMY, Sep 10, 2008

Ever since Jack Kerouac hitchhiked his way across America and wrote his mythical narrative on a single sheet of typewritten paper, artists seem to have decided that the soul of country can be found on its roads. From Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the hero’s journey through America encompasses landscape and local color in addition to serving as a vehicle for the author’s self-transformation. By default, these narratives, whether explicitly or implicitly, ask questions about America, American values, and American citizens. In the new documentary, Divided We Fall: America in the Aftermath, filmmaker Valarie Kaur asks these questions in light of the most staggering tragedy in recent American history: September 11.

The story of how Divided We Fall was made is the story of the film itself, with the filmmaker cast as the unwitting star. In 2001, Kaur was an undergraduate at Stanford, ready to travel to India on a research grant to record oral histories about the 1947 partition of India. A week before her flight was scheduled to leave, two planes crashed into the twin towers in New York City. The trip was cancelled. Kaur felt stunned not only by the enormity of the devastation in New York, but by America’s misplaced anger and aggression in the aftermath toward Sikhs, South Asians, and people who vaguely resembled the media’s terrorist stereotype. Kaur is Sikh, and she felt particularly alarmed by the ways her community was demonized and discriminated against by the media and in daily life.

Divided We Fall follows Kaur and her cousin Sunny as they drive across the country with a hand held camera—interviewing people affected by the rash of hate crimes. Kaur is the first to admit she is not a filmmaker, and had no idea what she was doing. Slight, with long hair and dark eyes, she still looks as young as she did in 2001, when she was 20. “My mother bought me a London Fog trench coat like reporters had on TV to make me look older,” she says in a voiceover. Much of the footage from this trip is shaky and has the grainy handmade quality of home movies. You can see America in the intervals between the interviews, the long stretch of asphalt and desert on all sides when they drive to Phoenix, the site of the first fatal hate crime perpetrated after the towers fell, the rainy subway ride out the window from Queens, NY, the home of an elderly Sikh man who was badly beaten hours after New York lay in chaos. Kaur emerges as central to the narrative in reflective voiceovers and (often hilarious) moments with Sunny. “Who,” she asks, “counts as American?”

Interspersed with Kaur’s footage of the initial interviews, many of which took place only a few weeks after the towers fell, are interviews with academics, which provide a broader context for the film. After Kaur graduated from college, she met filmmaker Sharat Raju at a film festival; Raju was intrigued by the project. What started as an academic endeavor which would culminate in a final thesis then became something bigger. Raju decided to take on the film. Together, he and Kaur added the interviews and broadened the scope of the project, looking at the violence against various communities of color as part of a larger cycle of racism and oppression in America. The film as it is now is a constant balancing act, treading between outrage, humor, analysis, and emotion.

Divided We Fall tells the stories of Sikh-Americans in New York chased down hours after the attack for wearing turbans (one, a surgeon, was actually going into the inferno to try and rescue survivors) and victims of hate crimes in California, Phoenix, Texas. It is a sad testament to the film’s subject matter that Sunny, a turban-wearing Sikh American with a dry sense of humor, is harassed on more than one occasion on camera.
If all of this sounds depressing to you, you’re not alone. It’s quite a task to psych yourself up to watch a film that you know you’re going to be crying through, even if the screening includes a delicious luncheon. The Society for Art and Cultural Heritage of India (SACHI) brought Divided We Fall to the Bay Area earlier this summer, where I was able to view the film and meet the filmmakers. Despite the fact that the film deals with material that inspires outrage and hopelessness in its audience, I walked out of the screening feeling hopeful, and even more so, changed, transformed, deeply moved.

Kaur explains it this way: “It’s one thing to be aware of the cycles of violence—how violence begets violence. But that’s only half of the picture. The other half is that acts of forgiveness, courageous acts of forgiveness, can change those cycles of violence. The act of seeing yourself in another is what made me feel hopeful.”

She tells a story about how, after screening the movie in New York, a man stood up at the question and answer session and said, “Just as I have to fight for gay people to come out of the closet, I have to fight for Sikhs to wear their turban.” At another screening, before an all white crowd in Nebraska, the audience stood up and applauded at the end of the film, many with tears in their eyes. “It’s not that we don’t want to connect with people,” Kaur says. “We just don’t have the opportunity to. Change is being built from the ground up, but we will never get there until people can tell their own stories.”

Telling stories is a natural response for Kaur, who says she grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories about Partition. That background was coupled with her childhood in a largely homogenous small town in California, where, she says, many of her close relationships were marred by misunderstandings of her religion and ancestry. Kaur became interested in storytelling as a medium for change: “Whether historically, politically, ethnically, or religiously, I am very invested in raising up the stories of people who have been silenced. The nature of the media right now is to present stories and soundbites that resist complex thinking, and I think that our generation right now has the power, more than any other generation before it, to change that.”

Kaur and Raju are now building a campaign to screen the movie in as many cities as possible in the next couple months, both to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 and to open up a vital dialogue about race in America before the November elections. Instead of a traditional release, where the film would be shown in a few theaters before going straight to DVD, Kaur and Raju want to put the film in the hands of educators, high schools, colleges, middle schools, and community centers. They have also developed an educational curriculum that along with the film.

Maybe Kerouac was on to something. Indeed, Divided We Fall confirms that the best movies are always journeys. The filmmakers open the car door, and we, the audience, step inside with them. We fasten our seat belts, look out the window. Through questions we find answers, and more questions. What is America, they ask, pointing out wide, endless landscapes filmed with handheld cameras, voices telling American stories, people with dark skin and light. “This,” we think afterwards, blinking in strong afternoon sunshine. “All of this.”

To bring Divided We Fall to your community, contact tour director Jodi Elliot at < language="Java" type="text/java">jodi [at] dwf-film [dot] com. For more information about the film, and to reserve your DVD of Divided We Fall, visit www.dwf-film.com.

Dard-e-Disco

Amandeep “Deep” Jawa celebrates cities through disco fever

SHRUTI SWAMY, Oct 26, 2008

People can surprise you. Case in point: a person who rides a bright blue, adult-sized industrial tricycle dubbed “the trikeasarous” around San Francisco blasting Jackson 5 and Panjabi MC from the attached speakers in order to instigate impromptu dance parties and generally make people smile is someone you’d expect to be a bit wacky in person, an expectation further compounded by the fact that you have seen a picture of said person wearing a giant discoball costume and sparkly pants on Halloween. But while Amandeep Jawa, iTunes software developer and weekend dance-party-starter, certainly has a sense of humor, he has a decidedly un-wacky demeanor.

“I started flashdance to share the things I feel and love,” he says. “But unconsciously, I think it is also an expression of my politics. Flashdance is all about bringing people together.”

Flashdance is Jawa’s monthly free dance party, voted “best of the Bay” by the SF Guardian, and held in various public locations around the city. Jawa alerts potential dance party goers via email about a week before the event—soliciting music choices and convenient flashdance times. At the appointed hour, people show up to dance, and Jawa supplies the tunes. Jawa says he got the idea from visiting Paris and participating in salsa filled proto-flashdances: “I thought, ‘why not in San Francisco?’” The fact that he is very picky about music also led him to want to play DJ for the public. He calls this DJ tendency “musical imperialism.” Thus, Jawa’s 3rd discoball Halloween costume (perfected in four different iterations: Discoball 1.0 through 4.0) contained speakers built into its Styrofoam interior that had the ability to turn its wearer into a “tiny, roving dance party.” The public dance party seed had been sown, and there was no going back.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that, due to illness and bad timing, I have yet to actually attend a flashdance, though I am itching to. Jawa’s accounts of the events, told both during our interview and on his blog, are an intriguing mix of the unexpected,

the deeply silly, and the profound. “There are tons of memorable moments,” he says. “It’s hard to choose a few.” He recounts the reaction of tourists (flashdances invariably take place in very public locations in San Francisco, like the Civic Center, Ferry Plaza, or 16th street BART station) stopping and staring with a “what the hell is going on here?” look on their faces. “After a while, it’s like, ‘Get in here!’ and they join in.” At a recent flashdance, Jawa remembers breaking it down with a really old lady and a group of Filipino breakdancers (“People bring their moms!”). A woman had just come from a funeral with her friends, and she “needed a night out. She said it made her feel alive, and she was weeping by the end of it.”

Jawa’s antics might seem like just a bit of good natured silliness, which of course, they are, but flashdances are about more than that. An avid bike lover and urban dweller, Jawa sees the future of human life in cities: “I think cities are the only way we’re going to make this world work, and the only way cities work is by making them interesting, joyous places to live. Cities are creative and intellectual centers—that happens when you put a diverse group of people close together and let them stew. Flashdance is a celebration of what I love about people and cities.”

This has also been a more personal journey—flashdances have helped Jawa express himself and his political views in an interesting and joyful way. “There was a point when I realized, ‘No, this is just who I am. I am going to do this.’” He has been overwhelmed by the response flashdance has received. “There is such generosity,” he says, “a communal sense of joy. It brings it out of people.”

I just moved to San Francisco, after having lived in fairly rural areas for most of my life, and for me, these last few months of city living have really underscored Jawa’s emphatic city love. Late afternoon one Sunday I am walking around the Haight when I hear the telltale sounds of “Raspberry Beret” blaring through speakers somewhere behind me. I turn—it could, of course, be coming from car speakers—but there he is, Indian summer sun glinting off his electric blue adult-sized tricycle and a straw hat shading his eyes. People on the street are stopping to watch, people in their cars are honking their horns. All of us are grinning.

Is this what it feels like to fall in love with a city? I think so.

Yes, We Can

SHRUTI SWAMY, Feb 02, 2009

We might as well start with Obama. Since his election, a number of my family members have suggested I chuck the idea of being a writer and go into politics, where I can “make a real difference.”

Barack Obama has profoundly illustrated how far a person can come if s/he works hard enough, and politicians, non-profit founders, social workers, and many others are working to change the world in similar ways that can been observed, measured, and analyzed. Don’t get me wrong; I think that’s wonderful. But Obama’s triumph has got me wondering about those people who are working just as hard to fight injustice and bring about change, but in ways that are harder to measure.

Yes, change can come from “the outside,” from people organizing and protesting, fighting unfair laws and societal practices, and running for office in order to make the big structural decisions that will affect our world. But change also comes from “the inside,” when a person sees a painting and something shifts within them, when they open up to a different perspective. It comes from listening to the voices of dissent, the critical and funny and outraged voices of our artists.

This article is about three people who are working from the inside to change our collective consciousness. People who start discussions, who provoke thought, who raise hell by raising issues. The individuals featured are working in a variety of mediums; each takes a unique approach to the project of changing the world. What links these individuals is not commonality of subject or genre, but rather a fierce commitment to transforming the world views of their audiences, readers, and viewers.

Schandra Singh is a visual artist tackling trauma and apathy in our media saturated society. Hari Kondabolu, whose stand-up comedy is smart, scathing, and fiercely political, has been featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, and was featured in the 2007 HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. And Samhita Mukhopadhyay, writer for the widely read blog Feministing.com, explores the intersection between feminism and race.

The Seer

A graduate of the MFA program at Yale, visual artist Schandra Singh has had her work shown in the United States and internationally, including at the Saatchi gallery in London. She currently has a solo show at the Galarie Bertrand in Geneva. Singh’s heritage is both Indian and Austrian, and she says she draws on each culture’s rich artistic history for her own work.

It is clear from talking with Singh that painting is not a hobby or even a career, but rather a way of seeing the world; she describes so many of her thoughts and ideas in deeply felt images. Singh experienced September 11 firsthand, and describes the changes she experienced after living through the event: “Even if I lie on a beach, all day, and I’m happy, the color of the sky is not the same blue as it was on September 10.”

In “Untitled,” Singh confronts September 11. In the intricately detailed painting, she depicts two towers made up entirely of people—the left is comprised of all 2,915 people who died in the attacks. The pattern she uses is of Muslims at prayer—the left tower is made of people with their arms open and faces lifted, the right of people kneeling in prayer and bowing their heads so their faces are obscured (this and other paintings can be viewed on Singh’s website; “Untitled” will be having its first ever public viewing in March at the VOLTA fair in New York). The painting took a year to complete, and Singh worked in solitude for most of that time, not allowing anyone to look at the work in progress. She surrounded herself with photographs of the victims of the attacks as well as biographies that their loved ones had written about them; each of their faces is rendered in the piece.

“Every day I’d go into this room and I’d paint,” Singh says. “These were people—I’d watched people fall. It’s not like I didn’t see anything. I smelled it … It took me a year to get up the courage, but I think if I never did that painting, I would never be a painter. I had to do it.”

Singh describes her work as political, but not pointedly so. “I paint very honestly,” she says. “I do think about major world issues, I’m very up to date, and I’m talking all the time about politics. I’m going to coin a phrase ‘the politics of the human condition,’ the politics of knowing about politics. It’s about … knowing what just happened in India (11/26). How do you know this is going on in another country and sit and eat your turkey?”

“I choose the exact opposite of politics to talk about politics,” she continues. “I paint people who are in relaxing situations, but the way I paint them—something is not right, something isn’t comfortable.”

In an early series, Singh depicts grotesquely distorted vacationers lounging around in pools and on beaches, oblivious to their surroundings. There is a sense in all of the paintings of the larger world which is being ignored but cannot fully be suppressed. In “The Dreamer,” three men lie with their eyes closed in a blanket of cerulean water, which opens in one spot to reveal the dark eyes of a tiger. “People really expose themselves when they are on vacation, in a lot of different ways—they show more skin, they act differently than they would when they are at home.”

Singh is always looking for the moments that will trigger her paintings and has found many while on vacation: “The painting starts before I pick up a brush. The painting starts for me with my eyes, with seeing a moment. The moment where I can recognize ‘there’s something to be said here.’ I get the moment, I draw it, I do an initial composition, and then I allow my emotions to take over. Then it becomes about the painting itself.”

Singh joined the Peace Corps after college and has always been committed to community service. She relates a conversation she had with a friend about her work, during which she expressed her frustration with sitting in a room and painting while there were so many problems in the world that still needed to be addressed. “My friend said, ‘I think that you struggle with the feeling that you need to go do something, but you don’t see that your paintings are doing something.”

“You are doing something,” she said.

Part A

Yes, We Can

SHRUTI SWAMY, Feb 02, 2009

The Sayer

While Singh’s work addresses politics through the absence of politics, comedian Hari Kondabolu’s work seeks to directly challenge audiences to see their own lives and the world differently. Kondabolu addresses the political issues that outrage him, and as an artist, he thinks deeply about the messages he is presenting and the ways in which he is presenting them. His comedy moves away from the paradigm of South Asian comics before him in terms of both material and a larger outlook on comedy. For example, Kondabolu rarely makes jokes about his family, which for many comics, South Asian or otherwise, would be a rich vein to mine.

“I used to talk about my family much more,” he says. “But I realized after a while that a lot of those jokes were ‘my family is different from your family.’ I want there to be some depth to their stories and lives. They are not just immigrants with thick accents who say goofy things. They are not caricatures.”

Kondabolu became interested in stand-up during his mid-teens, and he started performing in high school. After college, he worked in Seattle for an immigrant rights organization before going to graduate school in London to study human rights. Many of his jokes speak to the issues that he has worked on in those capacities: jokes about racism, racial profiling, and the myriad of political injustices in America. In his comedy, Kondabolu talks about immigration detention and deportation, post 9/11 hate violence against brown people, inequality and poverty, colonialism, and neo-Colonialism (with a bit of pop culture and sports thrown in for good measure). These are grave issues, and when listed like that, they hardly sound funny. Even more, they are difficult topics to bring out into the open, never mind broaching them in a forum that’s not exactly a meeting of your local anarchist knitting group.

This is the miracle of good comedy. “Because people are there to be entertained, people are willing to listen,” says Kondabolu. “People are willing to see where things go because of the expectation of a laugh.” Kondabolu cites comedian Paul Mooney as inspiration for using stand-up for more than just entertainment. He describes Mooney, an American comedian who at one time was a writer for the legendary Richard Pryor, as “aggressive and honest about race. He really showed me the potential and power in stand-up that I never saw before.”

We live in a world of comedic discomfort. Shows like The Office or 30 Rock revel in the awkward moments of every day life, when the invisible, but ever present factors of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class become suddenly, rudely visible. Skillful comedy lets us laugh at things that make us uncomfortable, brings things to the surface that would otherwise remain hidden and never talked about, lets us explore the outrageous or painful in a way that is bearable, interesting, and even entertaining.

Kondabolu has struggled with the balance between entertainment and raising issues that really matter to him without alienating his audience. He admits that some of his material is quite challenging, and that many people are still not open to the kind of work he wants to do (he has encountered fairly blatant racism at some of his shows, but was reluctant to talk about it). But, he says, “I like the way I write, I like my material. I’m proud of what I’ve put out.”

Kondabolu’s latest project is a short film, “Manoj,” a mockumentary about an emerging and wildly popular Indian comedian whose jokes are stereotypical and offensive. (“Manoj” has been shown in various film festivals around the U.S. and Canada, most notably the “Just for Laughs” festival in Montreal. View the film online.). Kondabolu plays two roles: Manoj—who sports a beard, wears a kurta, and speaks with an Indian accent—as well as himself, clean shaven and bespectacled (many people have watched the film without recognizing Kondabolu as Manoj.) Some of Manoj’s comedy routine is shown in the film, along with commentary from white fans, behind-the-scenes footage, and disgusted commentary by Kondabolu as himself. It is possible to watch the movie just for the jokes and have a good time; Kondabolu intentionally wrote Manoj’s jokes to be funny. However, for Kondabolu, the film is about minstrelsy—the idea of making a caricature of your background, or playing into stereotypes, not to challenge them, but to reinforce them.

“I didn’t make [the film] for a specifically South Asian audience,” he says, “This is for all artists of color.” To me, the film also speaks to the larger discomfort that comes along with being an artist from an ethnic or cultural minority; the expectation is always that you be representative of your entire community. At 13 minutes, the film is densely layered with ideas of a kind of modern racism. The ways in which Manoj’s white fans talk about him and his material are sharply observed and subtle enough to ring true without being outlandish. Like much of Kondabolu’s material, it is the kind of thing that is no more outrageous than real life.

But somehow, you’re laughing.

Part B

The Troublemaker

Samhita Mukhopadhyay has always been something of a troublemaker. Feminism and punk rock helped. “When I was fifteen,” she says, “my parents went to temple, and we got in a huge fight, and I thought, ‘I’ll show them’ and I shaved my head into this totally punk rock haircut and dyed it purple. To this day, my mother says, ‘your brother was bad, but there was nobody as bad as you!’”

Now Mukhopadhyay is a blogger for Feministing.com, a website dedicated to promoting the discussion of feminism. The site provides sometimes funny, sometimes outraged commentary on a broad rage of women’s issues. In the past, Mukhopadhyay has written posts alerting readers to new music, discussing political events like California’s Proposition 8, analyzing movies and advertisements, as well as discussing her personal life. “All of us at Feministing do that, weaving between the personal and the political. I would call what I do ‘journalistic feminism.’”

Mukhopadhyay, currently at work on a book about feminist dating, has also written articles for print publications like Colorlines, New America Media, and The Nation. She notes, however, that there is something particularly dynamic about the medium of blogging: “It’s allowed me to build a community very quickly in a way that I think would have taken years on the ground, through means of traditional publishing.” Sexism is so ingrained in all parts of society that the flexibility and immediacy blogging offers seems a particularly effective way to address its various manifestations in our lives.

Much feminist work these days involves recognizing the sexism latent in the media. After becoming aware of underlying sexist, racist, or other offensive messages, we can choose to accept or reject them, and much potential damage is diffused. Blogs like Feministing take advantage not only of the flexibility of the medium, and the ability to respond quickly to current issues and events, but also the interactive nature of the internet. Discussions on Feministing are often passionate; some threads might include over 200 comments. Mukhopadhyay sums it up: “[Blogging has] given me a very powerful microphone to break down books, movies, the media.”

As a South Asian American feminist, Mukhopadhyay has thought a lot about her role in her own community. “A lot of my work has been in the area of cross-cultural tension,” she says. The intersections between race, culture, gender, and privilege are tricky to navigate, and I can vouch that many Indian Americans (especially those of us who are American-born) find ourselves on the edge of two cultures, feeling unsure of our place. Awareness of the principles of feminism can lead one to turn a critical eye on our parents’ homeland. We are caught between politics and a desire to defend “our own” culture. Who hasn’t been swept up into an uncomfortable discussion on how repressed and oppressed women in developing nations are, where sati and arranged marriages are trotted out to underscore the point? You find yourself sputtering, “Well, it’s quite complicated, it’s not really like that” to the pitying looks of your fellow (often white) conversationalists.

“White feminism has shown itself to overlook women of color,” Mukhopadhyay says. “Understanding that tension has really affected how I interact with the Indian community. I used to be really judgmental—‘You’re all just really ignorant, you support arranged marriages.’ I didn’t have the vocabulary to really talk about it. But looking at the pattern of colonization, the way cultures like India’s are talked about [in the West], it makes more sense. It’s far more complicated.”

Mukhopadhyay knows there is no easy solution to questions of gender injustice and cultural difference. Ultimately, she says, “We are entitled to our opinions, as long as we are conscious of what affects and informs those opinions.” And, she asserts, “Feminism exists very powerfully in Indian culture. Many major feminist scholars are Indian, and there’s a huge, thriving feminist movement in India. It’s not a foreign concept.”

Mukhopadhyay started raising hell early: “I recently looked at my high school yearbook, and I guess I had started calling out privilege even then. A lot people wrote things like, ‘I know I’m just a lowly white male, but I had fun knowing you…’ I thought, damn, I must have been crazy already!”

She’s not quitting anytime soon.

Visionary artists see, create, and depict worlds into which their viewers or readers can enter. Much of the art that captures us, that truly holds our imaginations, whether a painting, a performance, or a piece of writing, is the art that shows us the dark corners of our society and ourselves. Art that brings what’s darkest in our world into the light, and invites us to imagine the world that could be. The worlds that these artists dream for us are as different and distinct as their art forms, some nebulous, some clearly defined, but they are all urgent, driven by the same questions that drive our political figures.

Can we set aside our differences? Can we work through issues of race, gender, and class? Can we find the common thread that connects us all? Can America be better, can the world be better, can we be better?

Yes, we can.

Part  C