Hubbard Speakers Series 200910 South Asia: India, Afghanistan

Hubbard Speakers Series 200910 South Asia: India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tibet Mira Nair Filmmaker, Producer October 6, 2009 From her debut film, the Oscar‐nominated Salaam Bombay!, to her recent triumph, The Namesake, Mira Nair is one of the most formidable directors working today. Raised in India, schooled at Harvard and now living in New York, she uses her natural grasp of identity conflict to make films that deal with the issues of race, class, gender, inter‐ generational strife, cultural appropriation and displacement. Films that, according to Entertainment Weekly, are "funny, rueful and sexy." Of The Namesake, Nair says, "it encompasses in a deep, humane way the tale of millions of us who have left one home for another, who have known what it means to combine the old ways with the new world." Her company, Mirabai films, recently established Maisha, in support of screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. A skilled director, Mira Nair is equally adept talking to an audience; she began her career in front of the camera, not behind it. With sophistication, she discusses the craft of filmmaking as well as the issues she so passionately explores in her films: the tug of competing worlds felt by millions of immigrants, and ways to bridge the gap between cultures. In the process, Nair shows you how film can challenge racial and gender stereotypes and generational assumptions. Steve McCurry Photographer February 16, 2010 (with a lecture open to the public on February 15) Steve McCurry is renowned for his evocative and moving photographs of Asia and its people. His career reached a turning point in the 1980s when, disguised in native garb, he crossed into Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. And in 1984, while visiting an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, he took his famous “Afghan girl” photograph, which became a National Geographic icon after it was published on the cover of the June 1985 issue. Eighteen years later, after the fall of the Taliban, an extensive search effort relocated the previously anonymous refugee, Sharbat Gula. McCurry has covered numerous conflicts around the globe, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Tibet and its people, 9/11, and Afghanistan. His work is driven by an innate sense of wonder and curiosity about the world and its people. He has an uncanny ability to cut across boundaries of race, religion, language, and culture to capture the human experience. Ali Sethi Journalist. Author of The Wish Maker March 25, 2010 (with a lecture open to the public March 24) Ali Sethi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1984. “I grew up watching a lot of American television,” he says. “I had American magazines and books, alongside a British colonial education, plus the Urdu and Punjabi cultures of my family. I grew up inhabiting many people’s cultures simultaneously.” He attended Aitchison College in Lahore, a school founded by the British for the sons of the aristocracy, but which now enrolls students from diverse backgrounds and all parts of Pakistan. A trained vocalist in the North Indian classical tradition, he originally intended to be a musician. Sethi was an indifferent student in his younger years, but resolved to excel in high school and won admission to Harvard University, where he was the only Pakistani in his class. He threw himself into literature and creative writing, taking courses with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh, as well as the critic James Wood. In Ghosh’s course, Sethi wrote a short story that became the basis for The Wish Maker, his debut novel. “It was nostalgia that led me to write it,” Sethi says. “I was thinking of home on a cool March night in Massachusetts, and the songs and sights all came rushing back.” Ironically, it was at Harvard that Sethi also rediscovered South Asian history (heavily colored by politics in Pakistan) and the Urdu language, which he grew up speaking along with English. Sethi is the son of newspaper publisher Jugnu Mohsin and editor Najam Sethi, founders of the influential Pakistani newspaper, The Friday Times. As pro‐ democracy journalists and activists, Sethi’s parents were constant targets of government surveillance during his youth and frequently ran afoul of the authorities. Through the prism of his family’s experiences, Sethi witnessed the political turmoil and creeping Islamization of the 1990s that form the backdrop for The Wish Maker. Sethi has contributed to The Nation and op‐ed page of the New York Times, where he has written recently about the rapidly shifting political situation in Pakistan. He lives in Lahore. Healing the Earth: Sacred Art by the Tibetan Lamas of Drepung Loseling Monastery April 14‐17, 2010 Convocation on April 15, 2010 From all the artistic traditions of Tantric Buddhism, that of painting with colored sand ranks as one of the most unique and exquisite. In Tibet, this art is called dul‐tson‐kyil‐khor, which literally means "mandala of colored powders." Millions of grains of sand are painstakingly laid into place on a flat platform over a period of days or weeks. Formed of a traditional prescribed iconography that includes geometric shapes and a multitude of ancient spiritual symbols, the sand‐painted mandala is used as a tool for re‐consecrating the earth and its inhabitants. On previous US tours the lamas have displayed this sacred art in museums across the country. After an opening ceremony, which includes traditional singing the lamas lay the colored sands by pouring the sand from traditional metal funnels called chak‐pur. Each monk holds a chak‐pur in one hand, while running a metal rod on its grated surface; the vibration causes the sands to flow like liquid. Traditionally, sand mandalas are destroyed shortly after their completion. This is done as a metaphor of the impermanence of life. At the closing ceremony, The sands are swept up and placed in an urn; to fulfill the function of healing, half is distributed to the audience at the closing ceremony, while the remainder is carried to a nearby body of water, where it is deposited. The waters then carry the healing blessing to the ocean, and from there it spreads throughout the world for planetary healing. .

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