Cosmopolitan Vista

Not another Slumdog Millionaire. The San Francisco South Asian Film Festival is full of surprises.

The festival also showcases "Herman's House." Director Angad Bhalla is South Asian, but the film is about an African American prisoner imagining his dream house with the help of a Caucasian artist. Unusual subject for a South Asian? Not really, Bhalla says. "We rarely wonder why a white filmmaker makes a film about South Asia, or anywhere else, because we assume they have a valid opinion on the subject."

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Happy Camper

(Not.)

I spent the hours
between 11:30 p.m.
and 4:30 a.m.

in a sleeping bag
in a tent
in the backyard

because the other doggies
were so excited/insistent.
Do I have to do it again ?

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Where to start?

From Sonia Faleiro's article in the NYT For India's Children, Philanthropy Isn't Enough:

What’s most galling about this corrupt behavior is the fact that the current government is making an unprecedented effort to confront poverty. In 2011, according to a World Bank report, India spent over 2 percent of its gross domestic product on poverty alleviation. Over the past 11 years, India’s government has sought to provide free midday school meals, a guarantee of 100 days of employment annually to the rural poor and free primary education. But endemic corruption, from the very top down to the ground level, prevents them from being implemented effectively. A lack of transparency and a leakage of subsidies to the nonpoor means that poverty isn’t falling nearly as fast as it should be.

The free hot meal is the reason Meena goes to school. But her teachers routinely skip school, three days a week. When teachers don’t come, the school stays shut, and there’s no meal. A well-funded, well-intentioned program created to educate and feed poor children fails on both counts: Meena not only learns nothing, she also goes hungry.

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Time Out (But Cute!)

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Shiny New Middle School

Dancer. 

Once, twice

Your place is inside someone.
the closing of their heart
a landscape scaled to story

what if you knew everything
About why my sister looks like
my sister, the slap of silence;

the beating that is the phone ringing
The lament of memory in all
the half-remembered childhoods

what if those habits are only errands
dead from scorn; like butter asking
to be left out, sleepy in the sunlight

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Dropping Nu off at school this morning,
I saw a woman in the opposite lane
I guess she'd just dropped her kids off?

Her face was scrunched up, red, angry.
She was sobbing. She wore a scarf
on her head that sat flat like she had no hair.

I instantly know what her story is
Imagine I know how she feels
about dropping her kids off at school

About the rest of us undeserving fools
who don't bother thinking about
school drop offs next year

Although we probably should.
I want to be told what to do for her
Big A says, it's not about you.

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