Fifteen years ago an art exhibition in New York was presented by a nascent organization called South Asian Women’s Collective (SAWCC). The exhibition was appropriately enough called (un)Suitable Girls. Fast forward fifteen years and I’m once again at an art exhibition, this time called ‘Her Stories’ commemorating 15 years of SAWCC. It presents the creative works of more than 100 diasporic South Asian women artists, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, and writers, with an installation of archival photographs, publications, and ephemera.

Hard to believe but true – a whopping three billion cups of tea are consumed daily worldwide. Indeed, if there’s one drink that no South Asian can resist, it’s a cup of steaming hot desi chai! Festive snacks and sweets need the perfect sip to magnify the celebrations. Now Lufthansa has brewed just the perfect holiday campaign – a dedicated micro site which is a platform to bring together family and friends for the holiday season.

Here are the top 10 reasons for visiting Lufthansa’s Virtual ChaiLounge…

(Sponsored Post)

Some days just begin with news that delivers a powerful kick to your gut and the world seems to stop for a minute.
Sonia Rai, the young woman who gave a human face to the South Asian bone marrow drive, lost her fight against Acute Myelogenous Leukemia today.
You feel saddened and quite helpless.
So we pause and think of the beautiful life lost and what she would have liked us to do, what efforts she would like us to make.
The battle may have been lost but the war goes on.

‘The ‘Emperor of All Maladies’, subtitled A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. This week it won the 2011 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. An interview with this award-winning author about the writing of the book.

The challenge of ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ was that in taking on such a formidable foe, Mukherjee had to create a complex tapestry which was by no means linear. It went all over the map, backwards, forwards, even sideways, zig-zagging between the impersonal and the very personal, between a clinical trial with 10,000 patients to the emotional tale of one particular patient. “The challenge was to take all that and make narrative out of it – it really is the most invisible thing in the book, it is the bones of the book,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee.

As Galleon co-founder Raj Rajaratnam’s trial

Insider trading scandals have been a staple of the American landscape for decades and while the more sensational ones like those involving Michael Milken and Martha Stewart are legendary, they are only symptoms of a larger disease that is the true bane of the business world – The Old Boys’ Club mentality.

Guest blog – Sanjay Sanghoee

Life can change in the blink of an eye. It happened to Sonia Rai, 24, a risk analyst in Boston, when a routine visit to a dentist turned into a nightmare scenario. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and is desperately seeking a match.
Did you know that if you are a South Asian and get Leukemia, your chances of survival can depend on a bone marrow match from another South Asian? While 30 % of patients will find a matching donor within their family, the remaining 70 % have to search for a match from unrelated donors.The hard fact is that only 1% of South Asians are registered with the National Marrow donor program.

Joel Stein wrote about ‘My Own Private India’ in TIME Magazine so I thought this Fourth of July maybe an Indian immigrant should write about ‘My Own Private America’ – and how different it seems to be from the space inhabited by Stein.

I came to the US in the 80’s, as an immigrant via India, Hong Kong and Africa, and landed in Astoria, a gritty Greek neighborhood in Queens. I fell in love with the prosaic neighborhood with its heart of gold, and it was here that I discovered my own private America.

By now you’ve all probably read Joel Stein’s ‘My Own Private India’ in TIME magazine – his tirade against Indians in Edison, NJ and heard of the big hullabaloo that’s ensued. The bloggers, Indian media as well as regular folk are quite upset about Stein’s seemingly bigoted views.

“All that needs to be done is Indian merchants should stop selling TIME in their news-stands, and c-stores,” fumes Nayan Padrai, a reader of this blog. “Indian doctors should cancel their subscription for waiting room copies, and Indian CEOs of Fortune 500 companies should instruct their marketing managers not to advertise in TIME! Joel is surprised at the ‘non-Gandhian’ response on Twitter. So please send a ‘Gandhian’ response of boycott!”
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Are Hollywood movies going to be a cash cow for Indian-American producers? Generally you have NRI filmmakers making movies with Indian themes or Indian actors but Naveen Chathapuram of Chicago has just ventured into mainstream territory, by producing ‘CA$H’, a psychological thriller with Hollywood stars Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings), Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Star Trek) and Victoria Profeta (Push, The Drew Carey Show). The film is written and directed by Stephen Milburn Anderson (South Central)

How do Indian-Americans connect to this momentous event? Imagine this: Lord Ganesha, beaming benignly, with a fierce tiger perched on one hand – and a cell phone in the other! This is the photograph on the cover of Shashi Tharoor’s new book, “The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cell Phone: Reflections on India, The Emerging [...]