Reading Room

We fight, we snuggle, we read. Bring it.

[neharaysays]

Nepali names on Panama Paper

Upendra Mahato 

Nawang Dolma 

Uma Devi Singhania 

Arun Kumar Chaudhary

 Survanash K Chaudhary

 Karan K Chaudhary 

Shila Chaudhary

 Reenuka Pradhan 

Rekha Kabra 

Dr. Shyam Bahadur Karmacharya 

Sashi Kant Agrawal 

Harish K Todi

Bijesh Todi Agrawal 

Shatendra K Gupta 

Bimal Kazi Tamrakar 

Bijendra Joshi

 Binu Shrestha 

Bishwa Barsingh Thapa 

Source: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/

[r4adingr00m]

Re-blogging to preserve. Also their listing on these doesn't *necessarily* mean anything (beyond potentially breaking Nepali law, which may also depend on the facts of why they had offshore accounts), I think, but certainly makes one very curious. And want to investigate further.

Good to know the CIAA is super active and was totally on it though. /sarcasm

[r4adingr00m]

These girls are awesome. I love how committed they sound.

[fuckyeahsouthasia]

Moment children shout 'terrorist' at Sikh boy on school bus

A shocking video has emerged showing a Sikh boy being bullied on a school bus by his classmates who chant ‘terrorist’ at him.

The boy sits on his own, filming his abusers on his mobile phone as they hurl racist insults at him in childish voices.

A version of the worrying video, distorted here to protect the identities of the children, has been uploaded to YouTube and has been watched more than 472,000 views since it was added on February 28.

In the short clip the boy can be heard quietly saying ‘kids being racist to me’ while some of the children threaten to ‘sue’ him and take him to court for filming them without permission.

One girl can be seen standing over the seats and pointing at the boy shouting: ‘Terrorist, terrorist.’

They panic when they realise he is recording the confrontation and a girl is heard saying: ‘I never gave you permission to film me, you’re going to court.’

When asked to turn off the camera, the Sikh student reacts defensively by claiming: ‘I can’t if you’re being racist to me motherf*****.’ 

The original video was removed from YouTube but it is thought to have been filmed on the way to a school in the state of Georgia.

[r4adingr00m]

What a vile little girl. What horrible children. What terrible irony to be so sure of your "rights" that you can threaten to sue the person you are tormenting, for violating them. I truly hope they are educated *and* disciplined in an appropriate way. (as long as whatever they have to do keeps them up at night eventually, for what they did.)

Also, what a solid solid kid, to have the presence of mind to film them and keep filming them. Go, you!

[r4adingr00m]

Some of these are tender and sweet, and some are very...weird.

[the-last-night-on-earth]

Bamako (2006), Abderrahmane Sissako

[r4adingr00m]

I need to watch this.

[mysharona1987]

[r4adingr00m]

There's not much more to say.

[r4adingr00m]

Shared by a friend on Facebook, shared by me here because his writing is beautiful and...heavy. I don't know how to describe it; maybe you will.

[deadshayarsociety-blog]

Visit Original Link

Produced and edited entirely by Hassan Muhammad (“Ek Aandhi”)

Lyrics written and performed by Pri

Cover Art by and special thanks to the multi-talented Luv Purohit

This piece was kind of created on the fly (three days) but maybe that’s what makes it sick. The introduction is an original atmospheric composition by Hassan and the sample used is a famous rendition of “Saanson ki Mala Pe” by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The original “Saanson ki Mala Pe” is a bhajan by the legendary Meerabai (also known as “Meera”), a Hindu mystic and devoted follower of Krishna. Born a Rajput princess, Meera endured countless political upheavals, assassination attempts, and kidnappings. Throughout all of these trials she remained devoted to her Lord Krishna and his teachings of righteousness and love. Meera’s love for her Lord often took the form of poetic recitations, public devotionals and dancing in ecstasy. Partly credited with helping shape the bhakti movement of today, she is revered for her devotion to God, her sacrifice for others, and disregard for material desires.

Visit Our Bandcamp Page: You can donate or download the track for free.

Pri would like to dedicate this song to brown girl brick squad, Nino the BPQ, and Keerat Kaur.

[r4adingr00m]

Why I love technology, but it makes me uneasy. Why I distrust kindle and iTunes/music files.

[aganglionoflightnings-deactivat]

"When someone who is Dalit, Bahujan, or Adivasi speaks, LISTEN. Listen before you bristle, listen before you challenge. Listen before you bristle, listen before you challenge.And more specifically, listen before you dismiss. Don’t try to dismantle our point of view, before being open to how it might change or expand your own. If you felt it was annoying when white folks did it to you because of  your South Asian identity, then imagine how we feel when we have to experience white supremacy, on top of dealing with caste privilege. Trust us when we say it is exhausting and tiring.That is the reason why many Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi activists skipped over postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars and writers from India, and chose to ally and identify with other theorists of color like Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and more. We had more in common with the experiences of marginality that these writer activists spoke of than with Savarna writers from our own nations, because of the exclusion, co-option, appropriation, and dismissal of our own experiences illustrated by them."

[r4adingr00m]

This semester is *rough*. Books unread but stacked by my pillow like diffusion-osmosis is going to relay their contents to my mind while I sleep. Also, she was even better in the talk than I could have expected.

[think-progress]

3 Muslim Students Were Gunned Down In Possible Hate Crime. How Muslims And Atheists Are Responding

Three young Muslim students were gunned down in their North Carolina family home Tuesday evening in what is being investigated as a hate crime.

[r4adingr00m]

heart. o heart.

i believe in the "first amendment" more than i used to. but when, when, WHEN will people accept that permitting hatred in media and political discourse has direct effect in the physical world? that these are connected? 

[r4adingr00m]

WATCH THIS SPACE

For bits of Amy Poehler's biography that I really really liked and appreciated. Also for this great Deepak Thapa piece. And some thoughts on the work of people like anthro profs at Y*** who have tremendous bearing on Nepali movement politics (I think) but whose long term stakes are tied to...well not, it seems, Nepal. Maybe I'm been unfair. ANYWAY, you see how exciting this space will become??

[r4adingr00m]

Some people think this creature looks "fluffy and cute". Some people are either more badass, or more deluded, than I had previously suspected...

[r4adingr00m]

He reminds me of my torts professor! Which fits, in that - it's not as sappy as you think. 😉

[r4adingr00m]

How to smuggle a country through customs

Are you ashamed of your cinnamon skin? The taste of cardamom on your tongue? The blaring of your traffic jam heartbeat? Are you ashamed of the cacophony of street merchants in your bones every time you move? The sweet scent of warm coconut oil lathered into your scalp, between strands of midnight on the roof listening intently to your grandmother's stories? Are you afraid they will hear the gentle strums of sitar when you sleep? Are you afraid someone else will see the country you tucked away in your chest when you left? Or are you more afraid that you perhaps never left at all?

- Naveed A Khan

Motherlands: Issue one

[atane-deactivated20200604]

Police murdered Rwandan activist

Two Rwandan police officers have been jailed for 20 years for murdering an anti-corruption activist investigating cross-border mineral smuggling.

Gustave Makonene, who worked for Transparency International, was killed in July 2013 in Rubavu, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Prosecutors said the accused killed him as he was aware of their involvement in the illicit mineral trade.

Transparency International said the sentence was too lenient.

"We followed the trial carefully and the convicts had been saying that the murder was a planned… we expected that they would get the heaviest punishment in the Rwanda penal code," the group’s executive director in Rwanda, Apollinaire Mupiganyi, told the Reuters news agency.

On Thursday, the judge said the police corporals, Nelson Iyakaremye and Isaac Ndabarinze, did not get a life sentence as they had both confessed, pleaded guilty and co-operated with the authorities, Rwanda’s pro-government New Times paper reports.

Eastern DR Congo is rich in minerals - many used to make computers and mobile phones - which has fuelled unrest in the region.

Funding for the Congolese M23 rebel group was alleged by the UN to have come from minerals smuggled to Rwanda.

The Congolese army and a UN brigade defeated the group in November 2013 - Rwanda has consistently denied backing the rebellion.

[r4adingr00m]

Very scary. Glad they was convicted, but obviously this leads to the question of how one actually deters this type of violence, and what it would mean to actually dismantle the system that lead institutions in power to even think that they could get away with this type of thing.