Tuesday, 16 April 2013
Sunday, 14 April 2013
Friday, 8 March 2013
International Women's Day Post: On 'Choice' and 'Luck'
Of late, I have found myself getting a tad edgy and defensive when explaining why I entered academic life at 'such a young age'. Surely, she must be a careerist, one on those who will step on anyone's shoes to become a professor before the age of 40 - these are the undertones I feel I have to address even though they are never openly uttered.
Even as I am enormously grateful to all my mentors, peers, and the opportunities that I have been given, I know that I have made many personal sacrifices, and that I never set out to be a career academic. I also know that while it remains an important and meaningful part of my life (with some ups and downs), I don't worship my career and wonder if I would need all these disclaimers if I were a man?
In the summer of 2004-2005, I ploughed my way through a part-time job at Coles, an internship at a university publication, and a research assistantship on an African diaspora project. This was shortly followed by a difficult house move, a laptop theft, and being diagnosed with RSI in my right wrist and a slipped disc around the time of my 21st birthday. I am aware it sounds dramatic now, but at the time, it felt as though the Reuters cadetship application I had been drafting, and the foreign correspondent gig I had been dreaming about were nothing but cruel jokes. Consciously or sub-consciously, I moved towards a research pathway (with short stints in media monitoring and all manner of part-time jobs to pay the rent) and also made peace with being 'stuck' in Adelaide.
Almost eight years later, I have none of those health constraints, and have been craving to live the life I never lived at 21. I am not referring here to drunken nights and/or backpacker's hostels, but just that youthful spirit that lets one experiment with leisure activities, hobbies, and generally living more in the moment. My mapping skills work perfectly at work, but I am using my freedom in other parts of my life to create, re-create and be a cartographer without a compass. Frightening, yes, but I am feeling the fear and doing it anyway!
Friends joke that this is almost a Benjamin Button story, albeit a female one. Need I add that it has its perils, not to mention the biological clock warnings from all and sundry. There are also those who cannot undo the categories they put you into, no matter how much you try to show them the 'other' side. So this women's day, I promise to stop showing and apologising, and start doing and celebrating!
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Ethnography over a Candle-lit Dinner
You speak to the dainty blonde waitress
And let me pick the wine
I show off my knowledge
Say 'tis the season for whites
You still opt for a red
I notice it is organic
You make a joke about compost
And pass me the mains menu
Both of us order pizzas
Yours gleams with pink prawns
I forget the taste of mine
But recall the pine nuts
You and I walk through the rain
And settle on a hot chocolate
Yours is spicy too
I explain my hot food aversion
You nod and gaze at your cup
And walk me to my car
I rev up the engine and the heating
And picture the exotic tea leaves
Patiently awaiting my return.
And let me pick the wine
I show off my knowledge
Say 'tis the season for whites
You still opt for a red
I notice it is organic
You make a joke about compost
And pass me the mains menu
Both of us order pizzas
Yours gleams with pink prawns
I forget the taste of mine
But recall the pine nuts
You and I walk through the rain
And settle on a hot chocolate
Yours is spicy too
I explain my hot food aversion
You nod and gaze at your cup
And walk me to my car
I rev up the engine and the heating
And picture the exotic tea leaves
Patiently awaiting my return.
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
CFP for India Australia Symposium
CFP for ‘Gondwanalandings: Indian-Australian Perspectives on Cultural Understanding’
(First symposium of the Indian Diaspora in Australia)
Sponsor
Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne
Venue
Village Show Theatrette
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Date
Summary
This symposium aims to reinforce the work being done by the Australia India Institute (through its tiffin talks, public seminars and conferences) in boosting Australia’s cultural literacy about South Asia, as well as in facilitating Australia-India relations at both the cultural policy and people-to-people levels. It is also expected to play a key role in generating a framework for cultural understanding between the two nations that capitalises on the strengths of the vibrant South Asian diaspora in Australia, and addresses the following goals:
1. Enabling the discussion of the social-cultural as well as the political issues faced by the vast array of people of Indian origin living in Australia.
2. Showcasing Indian-Australian artistic talent, whether in the form of writing, film, music, or other forms.
3. Sharing research and stories that shed light on the benefits of inter-cultural dialogue, and the hurdles encountered in facilitating the same.
4. Finding ways to engage the broader Indian community in the mainstream Australian arts sector to encourage stronger social cohesion and more vigorous political cooperation between Indian communities and mainstream Australian communities.
5. Building partnerships between Indian businesses and cultural projects in Australia so that the voices of Indian Australian communities may be heard in mainstream Australia.
Background
According to the 2011 census, India is the biggest source of recent migrants to Australia. Mainstream and community news outlets quickly picked up this statistic, with the Indian-Australian publication Indian Herald reporting that Hinduism is Australia’s fastest-growing religion, and Melbourne’s The Age claiming that the city’s one in five Asian-born residents are making it a more socially conservative place. However, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ quantitative research is yet to be backed up by a qualitative dimension, and the media stories only provide anecdotal (and sometimes suspiciously simplistic) perspectives on this development. It is important to more accurately consider the composition and migration histories of the growing numbers of Indian-Australians, to explore proper ways to assess their immediate and future needs, and to examine the quality of their interactions with the wider Australian community.
Therefore, critical, creative or community-based presentation proposals that address any of the following questions are welcome:
Who represents the Indian community when there is a crisis, or an important issue on the table?
What is the history of this group, its current activities and everyday practices, and its aspirations for the future?
What does it mean to be Indian-Australian? As a new diasporic group, this needs in-depth research and discussion. It cannot always be grouped together with Indian expatriates living in comparable nations such as the US, the UK and Canada.
How can inter-cultural dialogue be promoted, especially through arts and community initiatives?
Please send a 200-word proposal and a 50-word bio by Monday, 25 March 2013 to:
Organising Committee: Sukhmani Khorana, Roanna Gonsalves, Ana Tiwary, Devaki Monani
Dr. Sukhmani Khorana
School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication
Faculty of Arts
University of Wollongong
NSW 2522, Australia
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Watching MasterChef Australia in India
When we think of MasterChef Australia in our cozy suburban abodes, we momentarily forget monetary and lifestyle woes - it conjures up images of beautifully-plated food, of tears followed by happy endings, of cuddling up in front on the telly on a cold and windy southern evening. What we can barely fathom is that the aforementioned plating and pathos wins equal traction, and perhaps even more coolness points in an unlikely part of the world - India.
I first encountered season one on a popular lifestyle channel while visiting family in India a few years ago, and was more than a little amused that George's Greek-Aussie aphorisms had been lost in translation (the program was dubbed in American-accented English for the nation's urban youth audience). While conducting fieldwork for a television project last year, I shared an apartment with female undergraduates in Bangalore who were glued to the show, and even watched the kiddy version.
This year, I was pleased to note that the Australian Government had looked beyond cricket to source cultural ambassadors for the inaugural OzFest in The subcontinent. When a picture of MasterChef Australia judges Gary and George riding a motorbike on Delhi's streets appeared on my Facebook feed (as part of OzFest's updates), I realized this was a transnational meme worth examining, and tapping into further for understanding and facilitating inter-cultural communication. Star World, the English-language channel on which MasteChef Australia airs in India has arguably 'localised' the content by designing promos with ordinary people talking about their love of food, bringing judge Matt Preston to India to speak with clients, promoting Indian-origin contestants on the show, as well as showcasing ingredients and dishes at specialist stores. Still, my interviews with the Bangalore-based group of young females, as well as conversations with friends and family uncovered something beyond a simple appreciation of culinary skills or identification with participants of the same ethnicity. I knew all those high school mates suddenly carving time out of their busy Indian metropolitan schedules to blog about baking were telling a cultural tale potentially more interesting than the details of their recipes.
What I am suggesting here is not just Australia and Australian food have become overnight successes in contemporary, middle class, urban, youthful India. Rather, a very particular cultural product, by being representative of the diversity and tastes of its body politic (but not necessarily being politically correct, possibly due to its commercial format) seems to have transcended the geographic boundaries of popularity precisely due to its particularity. Most of those I talked to liked MasterChef despite the fact that many of the dishes plated by the contestants were unheard of in India, and a number of ingredients were either unavailable in smaller cities or just hard to find in corner stores. Perhaps they were seeking 'international' cultural capital by watching successive seasons, but their engagement with social media and support for participants is also indicative of an affective response and a building fandom.
Some of my respondents suggested that their male friends and colleagues were also watching the show. I found this of interest because gende roles remain entrenched in most sections of Indian society, and are often only marginally changed by increasing levels of education and economic growth. It remains to be seen whether future generations of urban and semi-urban Indian men will embrace a role in the home and the hearth, and if their female counterparts will encourage this shift. If the popularity of Julia Gillard's 'misogyny speech' amongst career-oriented Indian women is any indication, there may already be a wave of unrest that is likely to find voice as these women fight for, and win battles for equity and justice in both the personal and public spheres.
Speaking of the personal, the latest Aussie television export to India is the family drama series, Packed to the Rafters. The promo for the series, airing at the time of writing on Star World, shows well-known Bollywood director of transnational family sagas, Karan Johar talking about his own mother and siblings. It would be simplistic to jump to conclusions here about the universal trope of the family, but perhaps the Rafters may just become a household name in middle class India. We can only hope that Australian television audiences will similarly begin to welcome contemporary Indian cultural products without expecting it to be about Bollywood, curry or cricket. Many talented people of Indian origin currently calling Australia home, such as journalist Sushi Das, may just be the perfect intermediaries. As Das writes of British and Australian attitudes to migration in her recently-released memoir, 'Deranged Marriage', 'Multiculturalism is all very well, but if feel-good policies that promote the so-called melting-pot theory of people living side by side, sharing each other's cuisine, is all that it has to offer, then it's not much'. It looks like those of glued to MasterChef, whether in Australia or in India, may just have to get off the couch to at least invite our foreign-born neighbors or our male family members to watch with us. It may just lead to more.
I first encountered season one on a popular lifestyle channel while visiting family in India a few years ago, and was more than a little amused that George's Greek-Aussie aphorisms had been lost in translation (the program was dubbed in American-accented English for the nation's urban youth audience). While conducting fieldwork for a television project last year, I shared an apartment with female undergraduates in Bangalore who were glued to the show, and even watched the kiddy version.
This year, I was pleased to note that the Australian Government had looked beyond cricket to source cultural ambassadors for the inaugural OzFest in The subcontinent. When a picture of MasterChef Australia judges Gary and George riding a motorbike on Delhi's streets appeared on my Facebook feed (as part of OzFest's updates), I realized this was a transnational meme worth examining, and tapping into further for understanding and facilitating inter-cultural communication. Star World, the English-language channel on which MasteChef Australia airs in India has arguably 'localised' the content by designing promos with ordinary people talking about their love of food, bringing judge Matt Preston to India to speak with clients, promoting Indian-origin contestants on the show, as well as showcasing ingredients and dishes at specialist stores. Still, my interviews with the Bangalore-based group of young females, as well as conversations with friends and family uncovered something beyond a simple appreciation of culinary skills or identification with participants of the same ethnicity. I knew all those high school mates suddenly carving time out of their busy Indian metropolitan schedules to blog about baking were telling a cultural tale potentially more interesting than the details of their recipes.
What I am suggesting here is not just Australia and Australian food have become overnight successes in contemporary, middle class, urban, youthful India. Rather, a very particular cultural product, by being representative of the diversity and tastes of its body politic (but not necessarily being politically correct, possibly due to its commercial format) seems to have transcended the geographic boundaries of popularity precisely due to its particularity. Most of those I talked to liked MasterChef despite the fact that many of the dishes plated by the contestants were unheard of in India, and a number of ingredients were either unavailable in smaller cities or just hard to find in corner stores. Perhaps they were seeking 'international' cultural capital by watching successive seasons, but their engagement with social media and support for participants is also indicative of an affective response and a building fandom.
Some of my respondents suggested that their male friends and colleagues were also watching the show. I found this of interest because gende roles remain entrenched in most sections of Indian society, and are often only marginally changed by increasing levels of education and economic growth. It remains to be seen whether future generations of urban and semi-urban Indian men will embrace a role in the home and the hearth, and if their female counterparts will encourage this shift. If the popularity of Julia Gillard's 'misogyny speech' amongst career-oriented Indian women is any indication, there may already be a wave of unrest that is likely to find voice as these women fight for, and win battles for equity and justice in both the personal and public spheres.
Speaking of the personal, the latest Aussie television export to India is the family drama series, Packed to the Rafters. The promo for the series, airing at the time of writing on Star World, shows well-known Bollywood director of transnational family sagas, Karan Johar talking about his own mother and siblings. It would be simplistic to jump to conclusions here about the universal trope of the family, but perhaps the Rafters may just become a household name in middle class India. We can only hope that Australian television audiences will similarly begin to welcome contemporary Indian cultural products without expecting it to be about Bollywood, curry or cricket. Many talented people of Indian origin currently calling Australia home, such as journalist Sushi Das, may just be the perfect intermediaries. As Das writes of British and Australian attitudes to migration in her recently-released memoir, 'Deranged Marriage', 'Multiculturalism is all very well, but if feel-good policies that promote the so-called melting-pot theory of people living side by side, sharing each other's cuisine, is all that it has to offer, then it's not much'. It looks like those of glued to MasterChef, whether in Australia or in India, may just have to get off the couch to at least invite our foreign-born neighbors or our male family members to watch with us. It may just lead to more.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Racism and Narrative, Diversity and Food
A list that clearly reflects my democratic taste:
1. Simon Sheikh, National Director of GetUp!, collapsed on Q&A
2. Sophie Mirabella, Federal Liberal MP, was slammed for not assisting Sheikh
3. 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' continued to get love and hate mail (feel free to correct me on this one)
4. 'The Shire' trended far more than 'Abstudy' on Twitter
5. Amina, the headscarf-clad MasterChef contestant, was eliminated from the Kitchen
If you notice implicit or explicit links between any of the above listed items, you would have guessed that underlying my democratic taste is a culturally diverse palate. This palate is in turn shaped by reading vast tomes of race, postcolonial and globalisation literature, and through sharing difficult and enriching 'identity' anecdotes with friends and colleagues. At the same time, most of the academic sessions on racism and multiculturalism that I have attended over the last couple of weeks have convinced me of the need to approach these issues via narrative rather than theory. Slamming 'white privilege' in the face of someone who comes from a working-class suburb or has just been retrenched will not go down well without context, history and experiential telling.
Case in point is the last item on the list, which happened to coincide with the large number of papers I heard on transnational versions of MasterChef, national cuisine and identity, and food and inter-cultural relations. Reality shows such as MasterChef, or films featuring central characters making beautiful food, or the experience of visiting a kebab shop in the middle of a riot are useful tools for broaching the subject of race in classrooms and public forums. Moreover, they function as clues and cues for large sections of the national and international media on representing diverse populations. Of course there will be plenty of hate mail, offensive online comments, and perhaps even a 'that was brave' remark or two from fellow storytellers. Empirical evidence, another kind of narrative, may come in handy on such occasions!
Take, for instance, the results of the 2011 Australian Census. I will not reiterate here what are now widely known statistics about the rise in Mandarin, Korean, Arabic and Hindi-speaking members of the Australian community. What did come as a surprise, however, is the subsequent assumption in the editorial of 'The Weekend Australian' which stated that these numbers are a testament to our tolerance, and prove that 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' is a tabloid documentary. A News Limited publication referring to an ABC-comminissioned series as 'tabloid' is more than just a case of the pot calling the kettle black. What is more significant, however, is that it signals a popular perception regarding cultural and religious diversity.
The integration idea of the 1970s has clearly given way to ghettoisation (on all sides), and the rhetoric of tolerance. We don't seem to have moved beyond displaying our cosmopolitanism by eating butter chicken, or occasionally buying the sauce at Coles. My own experience of this dates back to my undergraduate days in the Adelaide University Union - interaction between local and international students was recognised as a glaring issue, but one that no side was willing to take a lead on. Almost a decade on, I heard the same problem discussed at the recent Asian Studies Association of Australia conference, where Dr Ken Henry shared thoughts on his 'Australia in the Asian Century' white paper. Let's hope this report is a narrative of policy as well as hope, and that it gives us both a framework for future action, and also a dose of much-needed initiative.
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Enforced Televisual Domesticity
Was it just me, or was there a rather large dose of the Indian sub-continent on Australian television in the last month or so? Admittedly, I was much more of a couch surfer than usual due to a petulant viral infection that took its own sweet time to leave my body. In any case, I counted 'Bollywood Star' on SBS, a Hindu wedding-themed team challenge on Channel Ten's 'MasterChef', a long leg in Rajasthan on Channel Seven's 'Amazing Race Australia', and a still-going documentary titled 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' on ABC2 that is centred around the experiences of four middle class Indians visiting Down Under. Perhaps this recent India overload is just fortuitous and I shouldn't over-think it. Still, if it is documenting Aussies visiting and sampling the new India, and Indians seeing Australia through their own eyes (not those of the increasingly tabloid news channels), then it is a welcome development.
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Contemporary India and the Woman Question
A number of happenings in India of late, as well as reading Rama Bijapurkar's best-selling, We Are Like That Only is making me wonder if entrenched attitudes towards the fair sex, and women's own mindsets in the new middle classes are taking an adequately progressive turn. Before I carry on, I must admit that by virtue of growing up in the nation when it was transitioning to a global, capitalist modernity (and hence being on the cusp of the pre and post-liberalisation generations), I am both personally and politically invested in the woman question. It continues to be contested territory in many a developing society, and globalisation brings social and economic aspiration with a grain of human development index-defying salt.
Hearing about and watching the first episode of Aamir Khan's Satyamev Jayate on the issue of female foeticide via the Facebook posts of India-based friends has not been quite the mass solidarity high, but it nonetheless vindicates my choice to be an independent woman in the diaspora. While incredibly fortunate to be born into a family that values girl children and their education, I occasionally bear witness to pangs of nostalgia from parents and grandparents about 'simpler' times when they didn't have to worry about their daughters' marriage prospects and subsequent familial roles. This has often translated into implicit pressure to find or arrange a spouse since my early 20s, in the hope that the constancy of their pleas (and my own imaginary body-clock) will eventually make me relent. A number of women living in India would probably make pragmatic rather than romantic choices in such matters, and Bijapurkar labels this phenomenon a kind of 'womanism'. I am not sure if it is my exposure to western feminism, or my eternal idealism, but such an apologetic assertion of women's rights seems less than desirable to me. What stings even more, as Khan pointed out in his research for the program, and as Mitu Khurana (a doctor who was harassed by her in-laws into aborting her twin daughters, but stood her ground) makes evident in her blog, is that a better than average educational and social standing seem to make matters worse.
A piece in The Guardian on the Aarushi murder case, and what it says about the warped values of the new Indian middle class, is worrying. It is not my intention to steal the aspirational thunder of this particular yet heterogenous group, but exposure to the world of consumption and opportunity (primarily via satellite television) comes at a huge moral cost in a nation with a) a large population that bolsters a competitive attitude towards material and social wealth; and b) a historically huge income gap that make take centuries to be bridged, even at the current rate of annual GDP growth. That these personal/political battles are played out through the popular media on the bodies of women is a key issue that needs institutional and grassroots consideration beyond ephemeral news cycles highlighting particular crimes only until the ratings are favourable. I think India's middle classes are in need of a more open dialogue on gender issues; this would be a real test of their respectability.
Hearing about and watching the first episode of Aamir Khan's Satyamev Jayate on the issue of female foeticide via the Facebook posts of India-based friends has not been quite the mass solidarity high, but it nonetheless vindicates my choice to be an independent woman in the diaspora. While incredibly fortunate to be born into a family that values girl children and their education, I occasionally bear witness to pangs of nostalgia from parents and grandparents about 'simpler' times when they didn't have to worry about their daughters' marriage prospects and subsequent familial roles. This has often translated into implicit pressure to find or arrange a spouse since my early 20s, in the hope that the constancy of their pleas (and my own imaginary body-clock) will eventually make me relent. A number of women living in India would probably make pragmatic rather than romantic choices in such matters, and Bijapurkar labels this phenomenon a kind of 'womanism'. I am not sure if it is my exposure to western feminism, or my eternal idealism, but such an apologetic assertion of women's rights seems less than desirable to me. What stings even more, as Khan pointed out in his research for the program, and as Mitu Khurana (a doctor who was harassed by her in-laws into aborting her twin daughters, but stood her ground) makes evident in her blog, is that a better than average educational and social standing seem to make matters worse.
A piece in The Guardian on the Aarushi murder case, and what it says about the warped values of the new Indian middle class, is worrying. It is not my intention to steal the aspirational thunder of this particular yet heterogenous group, but exposure to the world of consumption and opportunity (primarily via satellite television) comes at a huge moral cost in a nation with a) a large population that bolsters a competitive attitude towards material and social wealth; and b) a historically huge income gap that make take centuries to be bridged, even at the current rate of annual GDP growth. That these personal/political battles are played out through the popular media on the bodies of women is a key issue that needs institutional and grassroots consideration beyond ephemeral news cycles highlighting particular crimes only until the ratings are favourable. I think India's middle classes are in need of a more open dialogue on gender issues; this would be a real test of their respectability.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Uncertainty
Beckoning to live
LIFE
Recognise this moment
This barely-there breath
And the syllable it brings forth.
Transition is better than an airport lounge
You get to have your own home
Your very own view
At least for a while.
You rent a space in yet another city
Which lets you be
And may just shape your heart
As for the aching shoulders and long lists
Those too are temporary
Easily ameliorated
By a bowl of steaming pho
And its lasting flavour in your veins
Its textural memory forever yours
To keep and to give away
In your next breathful sentence
That befriends Uncertainty.
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