The newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly in India was the site of an eventful brawl when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers prevented Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi from taking his oath of office in Hindi: as soon as he began taking the oath, the workers snatched his mike and attempted to shred the [...]

This evening, Sunehri Market, the local bazaar, was awash in green, white, and deep saffron, the colors of the Indian flag. There were tricolor kites, delicate (miniature) paper flags, exercise wristbands, streamers, paper caps, garlands, towelettes, artificial flower bouquets, and cloth flags. Tomorrow is Independence Day, the 62nd anniversary of Indian freedom from [...]

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 [...]

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the [...]

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” [...]

Living in the United States for the past five years, the extensive circulation of the word “sorry” is something I generally take for granted. However, I was revisiting some of the stories I collected while with some kids at an orphanage in a suburb of New Delhi, India, when it struck me how odd, or [...]

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, [...]

गूगल मेरा भगवन है. गूगल की मैं पुजारी हूँ. हर काम के लिए मैं गूगल का इस्तेमाल करती हूँ. (क्या गूगल पुलिंग है?). जब मुझे खबर पढ़ना हो, जब किसी गाने की लिरिक्स चाहिए हो, जब कभी कहीं जाना हो, जब किसी आर्टिकल की ज़रुरत हो, किसी चीज़ की छवि की ज़रुरत हो, [...]

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 [...]

So instead of writing a post inspired by a rereading of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I thought I would have a little more fun with my iMovie, and “vlog” instead of blogging. Here’s a short reflection on habitus through the scripts I have inhabited….and which have inhabited me.

Music: Jacques Dutronc, “Les cactus”

Habitus from [...]

In reading On Phenomenology and Social Relations, I was struck by some glorious lines Alfred Schutz (1970) penned on language. You find these lines in the chapter entitled Social Means of Orientation and Interpretation, which begins by situating language in the context of culture:

“In order to command a language freely as a scheme [...]

अनाथ
अकेले
क्या
वे
मेरा इंतेज़ार करते हैं
कहीं मुझे बुला रहें हैं
उस अंधकार में?
वह एक गुफा है-
जहाँ वे
खेलते हैं
हंसते हैं
हर रोज़ उनकी सच्चाई
एक दर्द है
आशा का अंत है
जहाँ न माँ का प्यार
ना पिता का आशीर्वाद.
आज कल में बदलता है
कल परसो में.
क्या वे मुझे बुलाते हैं?

Last night, I was interviewed in a radio segment for a show entitled “Four Elements,” to discuss the importance of “Fire” in Hinduism. The idea behind the show is to explore the importance of the four basic elements-earth, wind, fire, water-in different cultures. First off, Hindus recognize five elements: the four listed above, and sky. [...]

Here’s a guest post from Maya Smith in the beginning stages of her voyages across the globe. She’s in India now and as I’ve been pestering her to write about it for FIT she posted this to her blog “Big Bang 2009” and let me cross-post here…amazing stories from a fluent speaker of [...]

An article by Neelabh Mishra entitled “An Awadhi Lilt For Obama: Let’s realise that language bridges make for creative cohesion,” appearing in this fortnight’s issue of Outlook, an Indian news magazine, caught my attention today. The title was immediately interesting to me: I was curious about how Awadhi (अवधी), a dialect of Hindi [...]

A recent post on Lexiblog has a list of the top ten languages hardest to learn, according to “language enthusiasts”:

1. Icelandic
2. Russian or Mandarin
3. Arabic
4. Mandarin
5. Hungarian
6. English
7. Hindi
8. Cantonese
9. Chinese
10. Tamil

What are some of the hardest languages YOU have acquired? What made them hard?

One of the most fascinating aspects of my ethnographic work in a orphanage in a Hindu ashram in a satellite town of New Delhi, India, is the multilingual setting. The kids, to recap quickly, are first language Bengali speakers, second language Hindi speakers, attend an English medium school, and take part in mandatory 4 hour [...]

ए. आर. रहमान को बहुत बहुत बधाई हो. उनकी वजह से आज बहुत लोगों की ज़बान पर हिन्दी है.

जय हो!

This past Thursday, I attended Language Matters: Strengthening Asian and Pacific Islander Language Education at Berkeley. The stated aim of the event, according to the program brochure, was “to promote the creation of majors and minors for marginalized API languages like Korean, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc, and to promote labor equity for [...]