Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Valez are two young entrepreneurs in San Francisco that came up with one interesting business idea.  In a business ethics course, Arora and Valez learned of the use of coffee grounds in the production of mushrooms. The two teamed up with Berkeley’s ecology department and received a $5000 social innovation grant.  They quickly achieved their goal and began taste testing their home grown mushrooms. Arora and Valez eventually established BTTR Ventures (pronounced “better” ventures and stands for “back to the roots”). BTTR Ventures reuses coffee grounds from Pete’s Coffee and is a no-waste business that donates left over coffee grounds to local parks in San Francisco. For more information, check out this article in South Asian Journal Association Forum.

What do you all think about business ventures with social good dimensions?  Can we call these new models “philanthropy” or are they something different?

Check out this great piece by Arun Venugopal about the South Asian Philanthropy Project at the SAJA Forum!  We are so excited to see the conversation we’ve been having here at SAPP reach a wider audience of South Asians – welcome, new readers!  Please chime in with your thoughts…

Vasugi (popularly, V.V.Ganeshananthan was in Chennai recently to promote her first novel, Love Marriage. I interviewed her on one of my most maddening days (don’t even ask me to elaborate). And this was the first time I was actually interviewing someone in my age-group (that can be quite unsettling: you have so much of respect for their work, but the desire to be a fan is at war with your desire to be a friend, so you end up being neither), so I am not sure how this interview has actually turned out.

This interview appeared in today’s The New Indian Express, i.witness. (I was unable to find a link on the Indian Express homepage. However do check up the e-paper if you want to be doubly sure of this!) Do read the novel, it’s lovely. The review might be carried here in a few more days. Sometimes, I feel this review should be read alongside the interview, just so that things are in context, and everything makes greater sense. 

The average writer shies away from politics. What made you choose such a political theme like war to tell a family’s story?

People’s personal lives are affected by politics in any country, and at any time. I was aiming for a certain level of realism, and people’s personal lives don’t exist in a vacuum removed from politics or the news. 

Why do so many varieties of marriage populate the book?

I have written about marriage partly as a metaphor for choice. A marriage can involve two people—or a person and an idea, or a person and a community, etc. Here, the range of marriages shows the range of choices. 

I was lured by the fragmented narratives, by chapters that are, sometimes, three sentences long. Why did you choose this literary technique?

No one learns the story of their family in strict chronological order. People learn about their families in fragments, in bits and pieces. The currency of the family story is the anecdote. 

Tamils in Sri Lanka often despair that the roots of the war lie in the cultural genocide that is being carried out against them. Is this one of the reasons why culture is accorded such a place of prominence in Love Marriage?

I never sat down and made a conscious decision about culture’s role in the story . The story is about what is important to the people within it. I was just thinking about them. That said, Yalini is certainly interested in exploring her family’s history and its meaning to her. 

Do you think you would have given your novel a much different ending if you had written it in these turbulent times?

I am sure I would have. I started writing the book before the tsunami, before 9/11. I didn’t put those bits in until much later. Even the militant uncle didn’t figure in the first draft of the novel. But the characters ended up being affected by the world around them, which makes sense. 

As a responsible journalist, who’s once been the Vice President of South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), how do you think the global media views the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis?

I hesitate to identify the global media as some sort of collective, and to make generalisations about it. That said, right now, there is a lot more media coverage on the conflict than earlier, and hopefully that is helpful. Of course, it is also hard to get information in these difficult circumstances. I’d like to see more American news organisations putting resources into covering international news, but unfortunately , in this economy , many media organisations have been forced to cut back. It’s a critical time for this kind of coverage.

The South Asian Journalists Association hosted live discussions with experts and journalists about the terrorist attacks. Click here to review some of the organization’s coverage, which included assembling lists of sources and freelancers in Mumbai.

The South Asian Journalists Association is hosting live discussions about the coordinated terrorist attacks on hotels and other places in Mumbai. The schedule for the Web casts:
Every 12 hours!
Webcast #2: Wednesday 10–11:30 pm NY time (8:30-10 am India time Thursday)
Webcast #3: Thursday 10 -11:30 am (8:30-pm 10 pm India time Thursday)
Webcast #4: Thursday 10–11:30 pm NY time (8:30-10 am India time Friday)

To listen to talk radio show

Guests for the live discussions include: Guests include: Nisid Hajari, foreign editor, Newsweek
Benjamin Piven, former Fulbright Scholar in Mumbai, currently a student at Columbia Journalism School Suketu Mehta, author, “Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found”
Mira Kamdar, Asia Society fellow and author, “Planet India”
Anirudh Bhattacharyya, senior US editor, India’s Network 18 (CNN-IBN and CNBC-India)
Madhu Bhatia Jha, US correspondent, India’s Star News – and many others

There are also blog posts and updates via Twitter and e-mail updates.