ZAHIR JANMOHAMED, The Hindu, February 2, 2013
A radical walking tour in Berkeley shows that South Asian activism in the U.S. pre-dated 9/11.
Anirvan Chatterjee stops at the corner of Dwight and Telegraph in Berkeley, opens up a four-inch binder and asks us to come closer. A group of about 15, mostly South Asians, huddle around him on a clear California Saturday morning.
“See that?” he asks. […]
Barnali describes how she came to Berkeley as a student from Bangalore, wary of participating in San Francisco anti-war protests for fear of being under surveillance or deported.
“I wish I had known these stories,” she says. “Perhaps I could have worn a mask, just like the protestors of the 1970s.”
When Anirvan and his wife launched their walking tour in late August, they hoped to draw about 30-40 people, the $12 charge being donated to Bay Area Solidarity Summer, a summer camp for politically active South Asian teenagers.
Fifteen sold-out tours later, Anirvan and his wife have guided over 250 people and there is talk about turning the tour into a UC Berkeley class.
“The response has been overwhelming. Most people don’t know about this history,” Anirvan says. “We didn’t know this history. But when we learned it, we realised we had to share it.” […]
Anirvan was born in Ottawa, Canada, to Kolkata-born parents and moved to northern California when he was eight years old. He attended UC Berkeley from 1995 to 1998 and had “a typical desi tech success story”. He dropped out of graduate school in 1999 to launch a company, BookFinder.com, which became a subsidiary of Amazon.com in 2008. But activism was his passion.
“I would organise to support others, but never really focused on my own community. Then 9/11 happened and, suddenly, people who looked like me were the targets. Suddenly I realised the most important work I could do was within the South Asian community.”
It was a film that set in motion a trajectory of events that led them to start the South Asian walking tour. After Anirvan and Barnali watched An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, they decided to calculate their carbon footprint.
“We were shocked. We didn’t own a car. We composted. Yet in 2006, our carbon footprint was bigger than 90 per cent of Americans, bigger than the typical owner of a gas-guzzling Hummer,” Anirvan says. “We were confused, until we realised that our flights to India and around the U.S. were responsible for inflating our carbon footprint.” […]
So Anirvan and his wife decided to take a green sabbatical; circumnavigating the world during 2009-10 without flying. They hitched rides in shipping containers, took trains and buses; any mode of transport other than the plane. They interviewed fishermen in Bangladesh, explored Vietnamese climate movements, and met organisers who built a green fiscal conservative coalition to stop the expansion of Heathrow Airport in London.
The experience gave Anirvan and Barnali a tremendous amount of hope. They also learned the importance of what he calls “slow travel”. “Our trip made us realise the importance of experiencing things at a small, local level. When Americans think of taking a ‘stay-cation’, we still tend to fixate on spending the weekend at a fancy hotel near home. But we started thinking; what if you could travel within your city, on the very streets you walk everyday.” […]
And in Barnali’s native Bangalore, the Walk’s Green Heritage Tour of Lalbagh Gardens with Vijay Thiruvady blends human and ecological history.
Source: The Hindu : Arts / Magazine : South Asian stories from Californian streets
Address : http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/south-asian-stories-from-californian-streets/article4365073.ece
Date Visited: Sun Feb 03 2013 15:03:44 GMT+0100 (CET)
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