It was a packed audience at the Minetta Lane Theater, an intimate off-Broadway house in Greenwich Village. Everyone was waiting for the show to begin; the lights had been dimmed. A man with a suitcase suddenly strutted up the aisle, wide-eyed and with an innocent, open smile, waving to the audience.
It was Azgi, immigrant restaurant worker from India, on his way to the America of Dreams.
Browsing: Muslim
India’s Freedom at Midnight – Sixty Years later. This piece was written in 2007. Now…
Duru Massand, Slade Malhotra, Amrita Ghosh Douglas and 21 others like this. 6530 people reached…
Aasif Mandvi is the quintessential immigrant – he belongs nowhere and everywhere. He has knocked around three continents – Asia, America and Europe – and appropriated a bit from each of his hometowns – Dhule in Gujarat, Brampton in the UK and Tampa and New York in the US. Being brown, being different, being Muslim, he’s had a tough time and so many of us will identify with his story because in many ways it is our story too.
Dr. Eboo Patel is a man of peace in a time of violence. At a time when a Muslim name automatically gets equated with terrorism and Islam itself is misunderstood, this young Muslim Indian American shows the power of interfaith dialogue.
Recently he was honored in New York with the 2012 Guru Nanak Interfaith Prize, established by Hofstra University with a gift by the Bindras, a prominent Sikh American family in New York. This award has earlier been given to the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Religions for Peace.Patel has been successful in propagating the very commonsense yet outrageous idea that given a choice, young people of different religions will prefer love over hate, peace over violence.
On 9/11, 2001 all hell broke loose from the sky in Lower Manhattan, and America and Americans have never been the same again. A human trust was broken, and now there’s always a chasm, a looking over the shoulder, a wound which never completely heals.
That brings us to the proposed Cordoba House community center/mosque near Ground Zero. Not a handful of soil has been turned nor a brick has been laid, yet this mosque-to-be has caused angst, debate and anger. Like a phantom, it has entered into conversations, both real and virtual.
Do Hindus eat monkey brains? You would think so if you saw the film ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’. Of the western viewers who might have taken this with a pinch of salt as Hollywood excess, many still have the most vexing perceptions about Hinduism from the horrors of caste to the burning of widows. Yes, and don’t forget rat worship, arranged child marriages, female infanticide, dowry and the killing of young brides.So who will set the record straight in the West?
Enter the Interpreters of Dharma, the Myth-Busters.
We know about halal chicken and kebabs but halal pasta and salad dressing? Halal Guacamole and halal Swedish Crab Canapés?
The tragedy of Partition is almost Shakespearean in its fallout. It’s been over sixty-three years since this catastrophic event occurred yet its effects continue to unfold, like seismic aftershocks. No one on the Indian sub-continent has really escaped its scathing wounds as the two countries carved out of undivided India in 1947 – independent India and Pakistan – reel even today from the legacy of hatred and suspicion unleashed by the Partition. In reality, one people, one culture, today stand on opposite shores – We and They – talking in tongues which neither understands.
One would think that everything that had to be said about the Partition has been said but along comes Sarah Singh, an intrepid film-maker who has boldly gone into this troubled, calloused territory.
Krishna the Blue God and the Beautiful Names of Allah are both the work of the same artist, and each painting is suffused with a spirituality which cannot fail to move viewers. For Salma Arastu there is but one god and one humanity and she reiterates this belief in painting after painting.