Latest Posts
“I’m Only Human”, Goodbye Michael Jackson
I thought it only fitting that I write a few words on FIT about Michael. He meant so much to me, my family, African American people, American people and culture, and the world. I’ve decided not to talk so much from a place of pain as an emotion but rather in terms of it as [...]
The Accidental Warrior
My father once told me about a mountain in Isfahan, Iran that took about four hours to summit. As a boy, he would make several trips to this point within any given week. Once at the top, he would emote a victorious shout. Poetry would flow from his lips and he would make several decrees [...]
Learning 2 languages at once: English in 한글!
여러분, 안녕하세요? (Hi, everyone!) I’m writing this post for anyone on this blog, Found in Translation, but want to give a special shout-out to the summer language classes at Cal. And since I’m in Korea right now, and since I started studying Korean many years ago in a K1 summer language class at Berkeley (now I’m [...]
Some thoughts on Wordcamp SF
Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be one of the participants at “Wordcamp San Francisco”, one of the many gatherings/conventions being held around the U.S. and in a bunch of other countries for users, developers, and fans of the open-source blogging platform Wordpress. Of course, a week and a half is about [...]
The Knife Juggler of Harola
In an effort to buy chairs in bulk from a warehouse for my project in a city in North India, we ended up in a rather remarkable part of town that I have never had occasion to visit before. We didn’t have the exact address when we started; my mother’s friend’s daughter’s husband had “heard [...]
FIT in May: in Video
Here’s my video take on life on FIT in May 2009. I used word clouds from blog posts in the May archive (from all the different writers on FIT this month), from the About page, screenshots of videos and images posted on FIT, and images, and then edited them in with my trusty iMovie. FIT in [...]
Am I a…Cyblog?
My days begin and end on blogs: charged, electrified, inter-active textscapes that are like no other…chaotic, always-in-motion, dynamic “journals” where it isn’t the processed, polished product that’s of value, but the product-in-formation, the process, the processing. Here are the confessions of a blogaholic. Their hyperlinks, like branches curling out into endspace, send us hurtling across [...]
Rolling over the city in Examined Life
Two nights ago I went over to the Red Vic on Haight St. in San Francisco at a friend’s recommendation for a screening of Astra Taylor’s Examined Life. It was an immensely pleasurable experience – a compelling movie, tasty pizza next door (yes, pizza lives on on FIT!), fog sweeping in over Golden Gate Park [...]
Indian Sign Stores
This afternoon, I had occasion to visit some “sign stores” in a neighboring village in a New Delhi suburb. We needed stamp pads (it’s a long, dull, inconsequential, and utterly irrelevant story why), and so, this hot afternoon-it was around 104°F, with 25% humidity-we trekked over to the village. The “LADIES TOILET” (or, the “Ladies/महिला”/”Women” [...]
All Someone Else’s Words?
Today’s Op-Ed column in the New York Times by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Maureen Dowd, entitled “Cheney, Master of Pain,” is the talk of the blogosphere. The big story is that Dowd plagiarized the following section which appears in today’s column: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture [...]
我們一起BIKE吧! (Let’s ride together!)
Since biking has been on the pages of FIT recently, I thought I’d share my experience yesterday of finding out about the very cool language outreach work being done by Matt at Warm Planet bikes and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. According to this week’s cover story in the SF Bay Guardian, biking as a form [...]
No Qualification Necessary?
A couple of days ago, I chanced upon a very provocative piece entitled “I’m In Ur Base, Imitatin Ur Doodz!” posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog at The Atlantic Online, where he’s a contributing editor. Here’s what caught my attention: Often when a white person wants to give his opinion on something racial, he’ll [...]
As I ride
Today was my last day of my first year of graduate study at CAL. I was thinking about how to express in words the emotions that I feel. I think there is a sensation of excitement, and relief, both are qualified by the tension that still lies in my shoulders. If there is one place [...]
Everyday borders
Last week on FIT, David Malinowski wrote about public discourses about the so-called swine flu and the ways these reconstruct borders between countries and people. (The construction of these borders, it should be noted, is not just a U.S. American phenomenon. A New York Times article from May 4 documents some of the many ways [...]
Dan Choi, latest victim of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
Many of you may have seen this or even written about it (wink) but for those who haven’t, it seems backwards thinking of the 20th century has carried well into the 21st: There’s been coverage recently of the U.S. Army’s recent dismissal of Lt. Dan Choi, an openly gay Arabic “linguist” who had served in [...]
एक चुटकुला
मैं दिल्ली में एक अनाथाश्रम गयी दो साल पहले. वहां कुछ बच्चों के साथ मैंने बात की. मैं उन्हें अंग्रेजी सीखने के बारे में पूछ रही थी. सब बच्चे बोल रहे थे की वे सोचते थे कि अंग्रेजी सीखने से ही वे कुछ बन सकते हैं. इंटरव्यू के बीच में एक बच्चे ने पूछा, सुमित: [...]
An Indian State to Ban English?
Samajwadi Party (a regional Indian party) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s campaign promise to abolish the use of English, “angrezi hatao” (Remove English) in UP (Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state) has been causing quite a bit of tumult. Mulayam specifically promised “to ban English in education and computers in new projects.” My parents live in [...]
I ♥ Berkeley
A friend of mine, let’s call him Edinho, just sent me an article entitled Cities and Ambition by ace programmer and essayist Paul Graham. I think he sent me the article in continuation of a conversation about a very close friend of ours (”Tim”) who just decided to head for doctoral studies at Harvard, choosing [...]
Sincerity, one of my favorite words
I just wanted to follow up on my recent post regarding a complaint I filed with Delta Airlines. I told a few friends and family members of mine that more than anything I wanted a sincere apology. I felt most offended by the fact that the original Delta response placed a monetary value on the [...]
YELLOW SUBMARINE
I feel that for too long Asian Americans have been taken advantage of without having any say. To me, this is the most obvious in our media. Chyng Feng Sun wrote the article Ling Woo in Historical Context: The New Face of Asian American Stereotypes on Television, and in it, the author mentions two far-reaching [...]
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