By Vidya Pradhan  “Deejaying?” asks the better half, “isn’t it all about putting some songs into an iPod playlist?” The high profile, high octane professionals in the DJ business would beg to differ. The world of a DJ is about finding the right songs, remixing them to sync the beat and keeping the tempo of the party from flagging. Purists may balk, but adding dance beats introduces old Mukesh, Rafi and Kishore numbers to a generation that may otherwise have dismissed them out of hand. And as it turns out, for the privileged few who make it, being a professional DJ can be both creatively and financially worthwhile. WNI spoke to 2 DJs in the Bay Area to get their take.

By Vidya Pradhan While Indian Americans have been quick to form groups that deal with the social, cultural and economic implications of being in the diaspora, there is one important aspect where we have lagged behind. Politically, our involvement has been mostly relegated to fund-raising for our candidates and making disparate attempts at having our voice heard with respect to Indo-American relations; this, despite the fact that our affluence and education labels us a model minority group in the US. Started with the mission of encouraging and empowering Indian Americans in politics, iForum (previously known as the Indo-American Council) is a non-partisan organization that attempts to remedy this state of affairs. An inaugural conference in October 2007 invited prominent members of the Indian American community, from elected officials to entertainers, to speak about their experience with politics and offer suggestions on how to participate in the political process. That conference was a huge success with over 600 attendees.  This year's conference takes advantage of the charged political climate of the primaries and features representatives from the Obama, Clinton and McCain campaigns elaborating on the theme of Indo-US relations. A panel discussion with distinguished guests like Prof. Sumit Ganguly and Ray Vickery is also included. WNI spoke with Kamil Hasan and Talat Hasan, two of the trustees of iForum. Kamil Hasan, who is a charter Member of TiE, also happens to be a superdelegate to the Democratic convention in August this year. Talat Hasan, who is a Trustee of AIF and a charter member of TiE, is also the Chair, Board of Trustees, of the India Community Center.

For those of us without satellite TV and needing a Bollywood fix on weekends, our only choices have been Showbiz India, anchored by the enterprising Reshma Dordi and to a certain extent, Namaste America, which covers weekly India news and entertainment. Now a local mother-daughter team has put together a show ...

By Vidya Pradhan Reading a short story is like watching a compartment in a passing train or looking a set of pictures in an album; you get just a snapshot of a larger narrative and if done well, you get a real sense of time and place and character. In Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories and novellas, Jhumpa Lahiri  returns to the metier that won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000.  While Indians may lay claim to this celebrity, Ms. Lahiri considers herself an American, having been raised here in the US since the age of 3. The Indian American characters in her story are as assimilated; there is only a mild cultural hangover that comes with having grown up in a semi-Indian home environment. Most of her characters are married to Caucasians( I was tempted to re-title the book "Mixed Marriages"!) and are comfortable in their American skins.

By Gaurav Rastogi Summer's almost here, and it's time to think of new ways to pass the time. Earlier this year, I read an excellent book called An Exaltation of Larks (Bay Area readers can get it from the Alameda County Library), which is essentially a collection of nouns ...

By Vidya Pradhan  Do your kids get excited when they see dark haired children in their picture books? Are you tired of reading Barney and Elmo stories? Wish you could find books that spoke to your children’s multi-ethnic experience? Like the Little Engine that could, a small blog called ...

Reader Seema asks: My students mess up in their writing using capital M for Mom and D for dad in all places. How can I teach them (first graders) when to capitalize mom and when not to. How can I make it easy for them? Geeta Padmanabhan answers:  Family relationships ...

By Vidya Pradhan Another year has gone by and despite your best intentions, the barren lines 16 through 19 on Schedule A of your 1040 form are staring back at you accusingly once more. You want to give back; you mean to give back, but doubts over which organization is most deserving, how your money is going to be used, and the potential impact of your offering have led to unwilling procrastination when it comes to charitable donations to India. Now GiveIndia, a non-profit venture conceived by Venkat Krishnan in December 1999, makes it easy for the charitable impulses that we all have to find a suitable home.

By Barry Shatzman Something wasn't right. The woman filled out the forms to start receiving Social Security benefits, and the money began to flow into her bank account. Yet she still was borrowing from friends for her day-to-day expenses.     Not understanding English well, she didn't realize that she could withdraw the money.   By the time Pragna Dadbhawala, a member of the city's Community Ambassador Program for Seniors (CAPS), stepped in to help, things had gotten even worse for the woman. The Social Security Administration noticed she wasn't using the money, so they cut off her payments altogether.     "She was depressed. A volunteer had helped her fill out form to get the Social Security, and then this happened. I helped her with her appeal. I spoke in her native language," Dadbhawala said.

By Enakshi Choudhuri Do you find yourself staring at your third graders math homework wondering what it is all about, even though you have an advanced degree in mathematics? Does your child jump from topic to topic in math without ever being able to master anything?  Do the words spiraling, lattice multiplication, everyday math or conceptual math seem familiar? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of those questions your child may be part of one of the most lamentable education experiments ever conducted in the past 25 years. An experiment, that has parents, students and teachers up in arms in multiple states across the nation. Yet, for many years, no one thought to conduct a randomized controlled study to understand whether this new ‘fuzzy’ math actually helps children learn mathematics. That is, no one until Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues at Ohio State University decided to challenge the common practice in many classrooms across the country of teaching mathematical concepts and facts by using “real-world” concrete examples.