Obama

In 2006 and 2007, I spent several months in Ahmedabad while on a fellowship from my university in the US. During my time in Ahmedabad, I interacted with the mostly-Hindu NGO staff where I was based, residents of the largely Hindu shantytown where the NGO was working, and professors at Gujarat University. Less than five years had passed since the city had gone through its nightmare: vicious riots involving saffron-clad men entering urban neighborhoods and brutalizing, gang-raping, and burning other human beings. Some 1,500 Muslims were killed.

Yet the ranks of the Islamophobic phalanx goes beyond the evangelical right and the Tea Party movement. Among their cadre are fixtures of the security establishment, the foreign policy elite and the academy.

I have just characterized the killing of our lifetime’s Public Enemy Number 1, as an act of violence. The association is disconcerting. It does not readily compute. But what else does one call an act that requires the raiding of a home, and the shooting of an unarmed man, and others, until they are dead?

Barack Obama and the Progressive Agenda

A South Asians for Obama organizer explores what an Obama presidency would look like, explains what's in it for progressives, and asks what is the future role of this country.

Looking through the alphabet soup of financial instruments such as Collateralized Debt Obligations, Asset Backed Commercial Papers, Credit Debt Swaps, are you feeling like a commoner back in the day, disallowed from reading holy verses in the sacred language, while being made to feel like a sinner for questioning the high order? Ali Mir explains the collapse and considers the Obama victory and the next Act in the struggle.

Obama's landslide victory marks the beginning of a new era, a moment of enormous possibility and for those of us fed up from the past eight years, long overdue prospect of change. But the change needs our continued efforts and work, unless we are willing to settle for another version of the Clinton years.

If there is one unmistakable difference between Bush's wars and Obama's wars it boils down to this: we now have a president who can almost perfectly pronounce the names of the cities and villages US troops will occupy and bomb.

Adapted from a talk at a conference titled "Obama's Occupations" held at Pomona College, December 4, 2009.