Red Baraat--Bhagra Funk Dhol 'n' Brass Band

 

While in Germany this weekend I happened upon a huge crowd surrounding a band on stage in a Nuremberg city square.  The sound was interesting and I wanted to see what everyone was screaming and dancing around about.  I had come across the band named Red Baraat. They are considered a Bhangra Funk band.  The word Dhol is the type of drum they play and the brass refers to the regular brass instruments such as trumpet and tuba.  The band was pretty great and the Germans seemed to really enjoy them!  

Here is a blurb from their website:

"In just three short years, the pioneering Brooklyn dhol ‘n’ brass party juggernaut Red Baraat have made a name for themselves as one of the best live bands playing anywhere in the world. Led by dhol player Sunny Jain, the nine piece comprised of dhol (double-sided barrel shaped North Indian drum slung over one shoulder) drumset, percussion, sousaphone and five horns, melds the infectious North Indian rhythm Bhangra with a host of sounds, namely funk, go-go, latin, and jazz. Simply put, Sunny Jain and Red Baraat have created and defined a sound entirely their own."

Here is the website where you can find out more about them and listen to some of their music if you'd like: 

http://www.redbaraat.com/news.html

Red Baraat at Montreal International Jazz Festival:

P.S.: The sound was better outside when I saw them than in this video.

Future Blog Suggestions

Doggies increase the readership of these posts.

What to do?  What to do?
We've covered a lot of ground on the blog--some of it surprising.  What's left to talk about?  Here are some suggestions.
You could do a little research and report on it--maybe of a single country and their colonial experience and why/when folks started "coming home" to England.  Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, India. Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.
You could look for some blogs that cover the Black and Brown Brit/European experience and inform us about/ link us to those blogs.
Maybe someone thought of my suggestions for seeing Ireland/ Scotland as colonial/postcolonial nations.
Look for brown subcultural phenomena and inform us.
Comment on the suggestions for further reading/viewing, with your own suggestions--someone mentioned Attack the Block, for instance.
Do some research on contemporary theater and some black playwright/ practitioners.  Kwame Kwei Armah would be a good place to start.
Music.  Food.  Chance encounters.  More Music.  Etc.

If you have an A for blogging, maybe best to leave some of these post topics for some folks who need to catch up--you can always comment on new posts.  Maybe by the weekend the goal will simply be to enhance the quality of the blog.  You could also make other suggestions for blog posts here.

The Queen @ Olympics

Thought this meme was kind of appropriate for our blog, since we've been talking a lot about Post-Colonialism

London - The International City

Wow. What an amazing Opening Ceremony to the 2012 Olympics!

They covered British history and influence while highlighting many of the nation's true tokens. My favorite part was the constantly flowing history lesson. Apart from the amazing set design, something about the actors struck me. During the Industrial Revolution section many of the businessmen were running around in top hats. Did anybody else notice that some of these men were of Southeast Asian or African decent? Something tells me that kind of diversity wasn't present in the 1750s. The ceremony continued with various ethnicities seen in presentations of music and culture of the Great Britain, and of course, culminated with the welcoming of 204 nations from around the globe. All of this made me think of a BBC statement from the pre-ceremony broadcast. The tour guide of London noted that the city is now home to over 300 language groups. At that point I realized London truly is the international city of the 21st century. Not Paris, not even New York, though I consider both to be contenders. There is a reason that London beat out these cities for the 2012 bid.

The overall ceremony reminded me of this course. When the Bangladesh athletes entered the stadium, I thought of Brick Lane. When Jamaica and other caribbean nations entered I thought of The Lonely Londoners. The United Kingdom doesn't exactly have the best history of bringing foreigners to its country, but the artistry of the Opening Ceremony was its symbolism. Of course, part of the peaceful unity concept is fueled by the IOC (International Olympic Committee), but I honestly think it meant more for London. The Olympics are just an exaggerated form of the current city. The games celebrate the city's rich diversity, and I believe that the celebration of diversity is something we risk overlooking in this course. We talk often about the hardships of immigrants, but there is also something to be said about the beauty of London's rich diversity and immigrant population. Yes, there are many issues that face these communities. In fact, we're reading about some now in The Riots. I, however, challenge everybody to take a step back and admire the cultural hub that is London.


Oh, and don't forget to cheer on the 21 competing Longhorns! And Team USA in general.

Reading/ film suggestions

If you are finding a comfort level with this material and would like other facets explored, here are a few suggestions:

Caryl Phillips (Hailing from Guyana) is a prolific writer/intellectual.  A Distant Shore is kind of a masterpiece, with Black and White perspectives on African immigration to England.
Nasdeem Aslam.  Maps for Lost Lovers takes place in a kind of imagined Pakistani community within England.  Powerful plot in a beautifully written novel.  Take your time with this.  His The Wasted Vigil is terrific, as well (but not for this course).
Salman Rushdie.  East/West is a book of short stories.  West is here in olde England.  I'm not the biggest Rushdie fan, (beyond Midnight's Children), but these stories are good.  "The Courter" is hilarious.
I'm not the biggest Zadie Smith fan, either.  Couldn't get into White Teeth.  But a lot of people love it, so I list it here.

My Beautiful Launderette.  A nice film by the writer Hanif Kureshi.
Dirty, Pretty Things.  The refugee underworld, and also the black market for human organs.
Welcome is a very good French film where a North African immigrant trains to swim the English Channel from Calais to reach England illegally.
Masala is a Canadian film that I found hilarious (there's an older woman who can gain access to the god Krishna through her video cassette recorder).

What else?

Bangladeshi Actors

While watching Brick Lane I suspected that the actors in the film were not from Bangladesh, and found myself wondering about the extent to which Bangladeshi people have interacted with Western film, and even film in general. Here's what I've found out:

According to IMDB, the three main actors in Brick Lane are not in fact Bangladeshi. The woman who plays Nazneen, Tannishtha Chatterjee, and the man who plays Chanu, Satish Kaushik, are both Indian. (Satish Kaushik is also a writer, producer, and director of films). The actor who plays Karim, Christopher Simpson, was born in Dublin to an Irish father and a Greek-Rwandan mother.

As for Bangladesh actors in Western film. I found a few articles claiming that Sumalya Ahmed is cast to be the first Bangladeshi actress to play a heroine role in a Hollywood movie "Humble River", which is supposed to come out in 2013 (although it should be noted that most of these articles were from slightly sketchy-looking sources).  It seems that Bangladeshi actors are quite integrated into Bollywood movies, though. If you go down Wikipedia's list of Bangladeshi actors, probably about eighty percent of them have the word "Bollywood" next to their name.  I found a few who have dappled in some Western works, mostly TV, such as Lisa Ray(who guest-starred in Psych, apparently!).

My third curiosity-- the presence of a Bangladeshi film industry-- turned up results, although it is interesting that initially typing "Bangladeshi film" into Google gave me a bunch of hits for sites where I could download "Bangla movies for free!" Bangladesh does have its own thriving film industry, sometimes known as "Dhallywood" (as in Dhaka + Hollywood), and according to good old Wikipedia produces about 50 movies a year. There is a Bangladesh Film Archive that can be accessed online here: http://www.bfa.gov.bd/ 

9/11, european xenophobia and the misuse of the word "random"

Recently, I have heard a lot of talk about 9/11. Some locals were talking about it at the Peak District hotel and now we discussed it in class, so I thought I'd talk about a experience I had on my way to Paris. It is impressive that an event that happened almost 11 years ago still has enormous consequences throughout the world.

So, my train schedule was tight and I had to run to check in. The train security is not nearly as crazy as airport security, but there still a protocol to be followed, and a lot of time was lost while having bags scanned and going though the line to the metal detector. With less than 15 minutes to spare, I found myself in a very short line. That special line for people in risk of losing their rides. I calmed down a little bit because there were only a couple of people in front of me and Addison and I still had 13 minutes to go. That is when I realized them man right in front of us was Middle Eastern (and wearing tradition clothes, complete with headgear). For one microsecond I though "Oh, shoot, they are going to stop this man and I'll love my train" (very selfish, I know), but then I rationalized: we are in a rush, this is the fast line... The border agents aren’t stopping anyone, why would he stop that man? The discrimination towards Muslims and Middle Eastern people has subside throughout the last year. The boarder agent is only going to stamp his passport and let him go.

But surprise! the man was stopped. The young lady organizing the lines changed me and Addison to another queue as soon as she saw the man, trying to reason with the agent (which, it seems, stopped him for no reason). That other line had 5 people in it already, but how long does it take to stamp a passport, really? So when I cross the English/French boarder, with some 8 minutes to spare, I looked back and saw the Middle Eastern man still there.
The good part to this story is that I didn't lose my train to Paris, the bad part is that the consequences of the prejudice institutionalized by the post 9/11 security measures are still humiliating, demeaning and annoying a lot of people. It gets you thinking. That "terrorist" attack, supposedly planned by Muslim extremists (I have my doubts, but I'm not gonna get into conspiracy theory right now) really backfire on your average Muslim, who is a good and respected member of his community, has children, pets, hobbies and doesn't own guns or any explosive device.

It is no secret that the richer European nations (mainly France, England and Germany) do like their xenophobia, and that things have been hard for middle eastern, asian and african immigrants around west Europe for a while before the twin towers tumbled down in a pile of dust and fire, but the 9/11 "terrorist" attack just made things worse for everyone. It basically allowed a bunch of nations to institutionalize racism, specifically in boarder control points.

On 9/12, it was perfectly okey to stop a man in immigration just because he had a longer beard and a "muslim name" (by muslim name, I mean names taken from the Qur'an and other muslim religious texts). "Are you dark skinned, are you from the middle east? so why, sir, you must be a suicide bomber".

I am not opposed to airport security (or to security in general) in any way. I don't mind having my documents and personal belongings checked, if that means I'll be less likely to be killed in an airplane (or any other mean of transportation/place, actually), but I do mind when some people get checked more than others.

They call it "Random selection" in the US, but it is a method used in many nations. The boarder police is allowed to stop any person they want, and it is completely "random", of course. Those "randomly" selected people are subject to monetary losses due to lost airplanes/trains/boats, humiliation and the temporary sanction of their rights. Of course, it is a right of every sovereign nation to allow or deny the entry of foreigners in their territory as they may, but it is still alarming that today, almost 11 years after the attack to the World Trade Center, muslims or non-muslim middle eastern people have to suffer through the drag of being "randomly selected".

FYI for the PR people that coined the term "random selection": it is not random if it's base on what a person looks, what's the person name is or where a person's passport was emitted. It would be random if every boarder control agents had an electronic device (an app, who know) that biped at random intervals, based on a logarithm unknown by said agents.