September 14, 2012

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOOD AND FAITH?
FILM EVENT TO SHOWCASE THE GENEROSITY OF SIKH COMMUNITY KITCHENS  
On Monday, Sept. 17, Chef Vikas Khanna, Michelin Starred Indian Chef, restaurateur, food writer, film maker, humanitarian and the host of the TV show MasterChef India will bring True Business, a film about Sikh community kitchens, or langars, which provide free food to everyone who comes, regardless of belief. The langar has been a part of Sikh tradition since the first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak. The tradition is based in the ethic of equality, sharing, community and inclusiveness.   True Business is the first film in Khanna's Holy Kitchens film series, which visits sacred places, religious leaders, philosophers and devotees of the world's religions to examine the experience of sharing food in a spiritual context. Watch the trailer here!
Ali Asani, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program will chair the event. Harpreet Singh, College Fellow and faculty in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University will introduce it.    
The event is cosponsored by SAI and the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies program. A langar will be served at the film screening. CLICK HERE FOR EVENT DETAILS.
STUDENT UPDATES
This summer, SAI awarded 58 grants to students to South Asia for independent research and internships in South Asia. We are compiling their experiences into a grant report this fall. Click here to read our past grant reports. Here are some previews:

Tara Suri, Harvard College '13
"Save us from saviors. It was a refrain I heard from Indian sex workers throughout the summer, and its pithiness cut through my swirl of questions and struck at the core of my research. Save us from saviors. Prior to arriving, I had read how subaltern sex workers were challenging dominant discourses - most especially, the trope of enslaved victimhood that plagues representations of the Global South - but there was a profound power to being there, to attempting to connect to and understand these women's realities, that reading the literature could not capture." Read more here.  

 

Sivakumar Sundaram, Harvard College '13

"[M]y fieldwork ended up being a comparative case study of two mental health NGOs in Chennai: The Banyan and the Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF). I focused on these organizations' urban outpatient clinics, where people could come, consult with healthcare professionals, get medicines, and leave to go back home, although both organizations include residential care as an important part of their services.... Although both of these NGOs espoused admirably progressive models of care with equal emphasis on medical and non-medical forms of therapy, in practice the cultural status, apparent simplicity, and relative affordability of psychopharmaceutical drugs caused them to dominate the actual provision and experience of care at the expense of other forms of intervention."  Read more here.

 
ANNOUNCEMENTS   
CALL FOR PAPERS   
The Program on the Global Demography of Aging, SAI, the Asia Center, the Harvard-Yenching Insitute, the Harvard China Fund, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (all at Harvard University) and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (at Stanford University) propose to hold a conference March 7-8, 2013 at Stanford on economic aspects of population aging in China and India. Click to read the full prospectus and call for papers.

INDIA: REFORMS, ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION AND THE SOCIALLY DISADVANTAGED    
The Columbia Program on Indian Economic Policies and the Confederation of Indian Industry presents a conference from September 20-22 at Columbia University. Registration is required, please click here.

INTERNATIONAL PHOTO CONTEST
The Office of International Education is now accepting submissions for the 9th Annual International Photo Contest. All undergraduate students who had an international experience in academic year 2011-12 and/or summer 2012 are encouraged to participate. Read more.
  
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