L: Artist Mel Chin; R: Cover of good, designed by Mel Chin (2000) I met Mel Chin twenty-two years ago when I was invited to submit an essay for...
Read more11 Jun, 2021
19 Mar, 2021
say their names. . .
19 Mar, 2021
Four days after six women of Asian descent were murdered by a white supremacist in Atlanta, the mainstream media is barely releasing the women’s names. Few details about the...
Read more01 Feb, 2021
south asian writers resist…
01 Feb, 2021
zoom screenshot featuring: (top row L to R): Beyond Baroque Executive Director Quentin Ring, me, Shreerekha Subramanian; (middle row L to R): Mahmud Rahman, Torsa Ghosal, Neelanjana Banerjee; (bottom...
Read more28 Dec, 2020
IGTV conversation with ali zaidi…
28 Dec, 2020
On Thursday, December 17, Ali Zaidi and I engaged in an IGTV conversation about memory versus truth in which we revisited our intersection 33 years ago in Lahore. For...
Read more21 Nov, 2020
memory versus truth . . .
21 Nov, 2020
February 1987: Posing at Hiran Minar, outside Lahore “These photos were taken when we went to Hiran Minar,” artist Ali Mehdi Zaidi told me via a WhatsApp call after...
Read more12 Nov, 2020
farewell, asmi sahib…
12 Nov, 2020
Veteran activists gather for a visit (from L-R): SM Shahid, Saleem Asmi, Zawwar Hasan, ABS Jafri, Dr Haroon Ahmed, Iqbal Jaffery My sister, Beena Sarwar’s remembrance about our family...
Read more16 Sep, 2020
burning up…
16 Sep, 2020
More than 30 fires are burning up along the Pacific coastline. Closer to us, the Bobcat fire started up on September 6, and expanded from 33,000 acres to 45,000...
Read more27 May, 2020
week 11: honoring legacy…
27 May, 2020
Yesterday, more than 50 invited family members and friends from around the world signed in on Zoom to celebrate my father and share stories about him. The baithak was...
Read more24 Apr, 2020
“the present is a transit lounge…”
24 Apr, 2020
Arundhati Roy talking with Imani Perry on YouTube; organized by Haymarket Books Yesterday morning, I disrupted my schedule to listen to Arundhati Roy’s conversation with Imani Perry, The Pandemic...
Read more10 Apr, 2020
end of week 4: lockdown & discrepancies . . .
10 Apr, 2020
staying home; enjoying California blood oranges Two weeks ago, once LA county closed hiking trails, beaches, and parks, my family and I have maintained sanity by walking in our...
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