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M.T. Karthik

~ works, thoughts, events of 1977 – 2017

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: letter

Summer Issue: Hot Joy! Plexus no. 26 #ALSIce BucketChallenge, Bats, Cicadas, Not as many TripDigit Days

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by mtk in Letter From MTK

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antone, antonio, blog, editor, home, in, letter, netzine, quarterly, San, texas, zine

Hi Everybody and Welcome!

Home in San Antone is a netzine and blog named for the Fred Rose song popularized by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys – video on our About Page.

My name is Karthik. I grew up on the Northwest side in the 1970’s and ’80’s: Locke-Hill Elementary (original and current); Hobby middle; Clark high (’85). I left to do my Bachelors at U.T. (’89), then went traveling, living outside of Texas for many years. I’ve returned to San Antonio at least once a year and often three or four times a year since I left.

I’ve dropped in and out of town, so I’ve observed the rampant development and growth like a skipping stone observes a lake.

This is massive change: people, places and things disappearing, some reappearing. Newness sprouting up everywhere.

Waste, violence, overcrowding and traffic are terrible byproducts of the era, but though San Antonio’s culture has been in tremendous flux, just a few years shy of her 300th birthday, she’s beginning to look pretty diverse, eclectic and vibrant.

Now I find a complex city bursting at the seams.

There are already a few excellent “hyper-local” blogs (Geekette, SAFlavor, Rivard, Dr. Denise Barkis-Richter’s)  in the blogroll. I will add links as I think of them (actually right now I’m going to go add Blue Star, which I witnessed born).

This blog’s just a slow-growing image of our town through my lens; a zine that reflects, documents, journals and archives with photographs and video from the present and past for the future.

I’ll be inviting others to provide content and setting themes for future issues, but for now, here’s Volume 1, Issue 1, of Home in San Antone.

See you ’round San Antone

Karthik aka MTK

@homeinsanantone

Inaugural Post [Soft-Launch Date]

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by mtk in Letter From MTK

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antone, antonio, blog, first, home, in, inaugural, letter, post, San, start

Greetings and welcome to Home in San Antone!

The site is named from the Bob Wills classic and we can be found on twitter @HomeInSanAntone

The headers are rotating panoramic shots by OMM, and this gem, our twitter header:

HiSATXomm1

The others can be found in the flora tab

Welcome to the birth of Home in San Antone!

Wiki Truthiness

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by mtk in social media

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Karthik, letter, m.t., messer-kruse, mtk, new, open, philip, roth, Timothy, truth, undue, weight, wikipedia, Yorker

There were two stories this year that caught my eye for exposing the problems involved in building a collective encyclopedia the way Wikipedia is being built.

Philip Roth’s Open Letter to Wikipedia via the New Yorker

and

Timothy Messer-Kruse discussing the ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia in The Chronicle of Higher Education

I don’t have analysis right now, but wanted to post this comparison because I think looking at these two stories says something about Wikipedia that isn’t being discussed.

more to come …

 

Letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 2007

19 Monday Nov 2007

Posted by mtk in elections, public letters

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2007, Bush, cheney, impeachment, Karthik, letter, m.t. karthik, mtk, Nancy, Pelosi

AN OPEN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI, SAN FRANCISCO 2007
To: U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi:
You are the only person of power we on the progressive left can approach, because of your position as Speaker of the House: you could re-structure the dialogue in this nation, and some would say you could single-handedly save it in a totally unique and American way.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded impeachment in toto.

Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation allow us as citizens to monitor our leadership. They are important tools of state that must be exercised actively to keep balance. We feel you know this, but are being roped into a position of pseudo-neutrality by National and Federal pressures in your role as Speaker, and so, as constituents, here in the Bay Area, we urge you to reconsider, to take a new approach and to save this country from despotism.

Representative Pelosi, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument. You could be the one in Washington who says, “This has nothing to do with the upcoming primaries or the Election of 2008 – this has to do with what this country wants revealed by this Administration now, before another can take over, before they are out of the reach of public accountability.”

Make History: We ask you to have a public change of heart and to step up to being the ethical and cultural conscience of our nation at this tense moment in history when this very unpopular administration has us poised to begin world war against Russia and Iran on bogus intelligence and false claims against another of West Asia’s ancient centers of culture.

The Cheney/Bush agenda for tactical nuclear strikes on Iran is aggressive, frightening and – exactly like the agenda against Iraq was – illegal, unconstitutional and against our country’s fundamental values. Yes, Ms. Pelosi, I am accusing them of lying and deceit in the engagement of their war in Iraq – the Persian Gulf War Two. I accuse them of great, staged manipulations in their idiotic War on Terror. Many at home and abroad fear greatly that they are engaged secretly in practices to do this again, thus: If we do not impeach Cheney and Bush then they will bomb Iran … with or without our sanction.

The only way to regain control of the U.S. American government from this kind of despotism is to actively promote transparent investigation of every single corner that Bush/Cheney has labeled “National Security,” to do the same with this War on Terror.

Demand the Administration open these to Members, in private or a special committee, if not publicly. Look into the requests of Constitutional scholars and others who see criminality in their behavior. Yes, definitely Investigate and Impeach Cheney; and be proud of taking this Bush government up loudly and on the record, because future generations will vindicate you. The lies, conflicts of interest and criminal acts are provable, apparent.

Bush, Cheney and the Neoconservatives:  Rumsfeld,  Ashcroft, Perle, Wolfowitz et. al., must be questioned. They have lied to the United Nations and our own people, and are universally being condemned for this. Our only hope is to show the rest of the world that our system here in the United States does have in place the means to check itself, when it is so obviously occupied by despots. That is what Impeachment and Censure are for. The world waits for us to take these people to task. Congress must open up the Bush/Cheney administration before it leaves office.

It is imperative to the future of our country that we force them to testify and tell us what has been going on in our name in their so-called war on terror. The successes they trumpet turn out to be staged and often involve terrified innocents. Their failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are riddled with criminal activities in prisons, in the field of battle and in the streets. There are hospitals and villages where our soldiers are feared and despised.

Please, Representative Pelosi, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well. Stand with your colleagues in the House who cry for Congressional Investigation of Cheney/Bush – that includes Impeachment and Censure, if necessary. It is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle.

No, Ms. Pelosi, Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation of Bush/Cheney have nothing to do with the Election of 2008. They have everything to do with the soul of our nation.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

Letter to Senator Boxer Protesting Election 2004

26 Friday Nov 2004

Posted by mtk in elections, Los Angeles, public letters

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2004, 90.7fm, angeles, Barbara, Boxer, Bush, contest, director, election, federal, fraud, investigation, kerry, kpfk, L.A., LA, letter, los, los angeles, miscounts, missing, news, problems, protest, Senator, statistical, vote, votes

Senator Boxer:

Let me begin by saying I voted for you. And that you may now be the only person that we on the progressive left can approach, because you are in many ways a part of power and the ruling class in the United States and you are a well-respected member of one of the major parties.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded this election as accomplished fairly and to independently look into the matter.

Please, Senator Boxer, take up the call for Investigation of the Election of 2004. Do it now; before the Electoral College votes and before the Inauguration of the President.

At this moment – as in 2000 – colleagues of yours in the House are prepared to contest and investigate the election for fraud. One Senator willing to ask is all they need to achieve such a request. Only one single Senator who is politically safe, who has the support of a Progressive community, and who has the courage of conviction to stand up and say simply that:

decisions regarding how we vote and for whom are being made too quickly, and as a result carelessly, and perhaps erroneously;

that our democratic processes are being rushed and hurried by the Republicans led by Karl Rove [called the “architect” of the re-election by Bush] and;

that democracy in the U.S.A. is suffering terribly, if not critically.

As a woman and a progressive Democrat, you have won re-election easily. People here support you for your ideas and values. You are in a safe state among people who share your beliefs.

After hearing four weeks of testimony from key states [especially Ohio] and after reading horrifying stories from around the country as to what happened on Tuesday, November 2, I and many of your other constituents believe that the results of the 2004 election are significantly riddled with errors, many of which circumstantially point to the STRONG possibility of FRAUD and vote fixing.

Senator Boxer, changing the outcome of the election is NOT our interest in asking this of you.

The desperate and fundamental need for a fair elections process and real democracy DEMANDS a slower, more measured, piece-by-piece investigation – conducted by Congress – of the Election of 2004 and in particular of the votes cast via electronic voting machines.

It is now clear that George W. Bush’s falsely named Help America Vote Act written to address the many issues that resulted from the 2000 election, served only to rush US counties and states into purchasing machines that have become black holes for American votes.

California’s Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was admired by people across the State for standing up to the manufacturers who were clearly complicit in rushing these devices past proper standards and though now he is being attacked within the system by the powers that be, it is clear he has TREMENDOUS public respect for his forward-looking actions on e-voting over the past year and a half.

By setting an aggressive calendar for hearings and for public and private input, Secretary of State Shelley was able to decertify machines and to put out a detailed list of 23 conditions for the use of other machines to make them safer and more accurate for Californians. He said when doing this that cheating wasn’t going to happen on his watch.

He then testified before the Election Assistance Commission and at both the Democratic and Republican Conventions, that other states should earnestly learn from California’s experience and institutionalize protections … but it was too little, too late.

Other states and indeed Bush’s White House and the GOP-controlled Congress diminished the significance of Secretary of State Shelley’s very hard work.

Senator Boxer, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument.

As our Senator won’t you chastise them for what they did to our Secretary of State? Won’t you stop their stampeding toward re-election for long enough to examine the facts and the data? Won’t you please tell the rest of the country that Californians were very relieved to have had a Secretary of State who cared enough to demand protections against problems suffered in other parts of the country?

Please, Senator Boxer, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well.

Stand with your colleagues in the House who believe a Congressional Investigation into the Election of 2004 is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle.

Only one Senator is required … it would make us all proud if you were first.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

originally sent to: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
26 November 2004

Letter to Salman Rushdie

01 Monday Mar 1999

Posted by mtk in appeals, Letter From MTK, maturation, NYC, thoughts

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City, family, help, henry, Holt, Karthik, letter, m.t., new, NYC, request, rushdie, salman, story, thyagarajan, york

Salman Rushdie

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011

1 MAR 99

Sir:

I am an Indian-American man, 32 years old, unmarried, living in Brooklyn, New York. My father was among the first post-independence Indians to emigrate to the United States – in 1957 as a post-doctoral fellow in Organic Chemistry at Northwestern University.

He went back to India in 1959 and then worked to bring his family to the US in the years that followed. My mother, sisters and I immigrated from Madras to the US in 1969, four days before the first lunar landing.

My father struggled to bring us here only to have his family disintegrate in a bitter divorce. The story is still whispered among our society of Ayer Brahmins in Madras. The bitterness in our family has been taxing.

My father is an old man now and I’m his only son. I believe that telling our story will bring some peace to our broken lives and help other immigrant families who face similar difficulties. I seek help in this matter.

My eldest sister chose to return to India and lives in Madras. She married into a Punjabi family that had emigrated to our city from the North in the forties. My sister was, by the magic between two Indian newlyweds in the autumn of 1958 in Evanston, Illinois, born an American citizen.

She was taken back to India at two, brought back to the US at 12 and then returned to Madras at 15, back again at 20 and finally returned to India in 1982 to marry.

The repeated trans-continental travel at a young age reduced her emotionally and exacerbated the divide between my parents who had very different views on raising Indian children in the US.

Both my sisters and my mother are now estranged from my father. They have exchanged a handful of words in fifteen years. I am the only person who speaks to everyone, though I have not been back to India since 1991. There is a sadness among us all.

My father moved us to San Antonio, Texas in 1974. My second sister and I were raised Texan. She is now a converted Baptist living in Denver, Colorado. Three years ago she changed her name to Kate. She has assimilated to an American life.

I live in the New York metropolitan area among the largest population of Indians in the US, but I am lonesome and not close with the community here. With my eldest sister being in Madras and my parents divorced in Texas, we are a wholly divided family. Separated by geography and our anger.

My father was born in a hut with a dirt floor in South India with five sisters, while my mother was raised by a wealthier Madrasi family. Both families were orthodox Hindu Brahmins. The forebears in our patriarchy were strong-willed, powerful men. My fathers father was an idealist, a Gandhian who was jailed during the pre-Independence days when he marched the salt satyagraha. My mothers grandfather was a Congress member and a barrister, esteemed in Madras society circles. His sons were raised as anglophiles. My parents were a “love match” that went terribly wrong in the US. My sisters and I were raised in a chaotic and discontinuous way.

In 1981, the year I became an American citizen and you wrote “Midnight’s Children” there were perhaps 200,000 South Asians in the US. By 1989, when I graduated from University, there were more than 800,000. By 1995, when I finished Graduate School we numbered more than one million. My father was among the first 1,000 to arrive and I was among the first 40,000. That’s my generation.

Soon I will have to move back to Texas as my father is alone at 70 and will need care. I have come to New York to ask for help to write (and in many ways reconcile) the story of my family. I believe the telling will be a healing experience for us and a literary work of significance for other immigrants to the United States. I turn to you as a student seeking a teacher. Can you help me?

with utmost respect,

Karthik Thyagarajan

Brooklyn 718/ 383-9621

Letter to the Editor of the New Yorker, 1997

10 Sunday Aug 1997

Posted by mtk in essay, NYC, public letters

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1997, City, editor, Karthik, letter, m.t. karthik, mtk, new, york, Yorker

The idea called India today affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people.  This idea is embodied by a geographic area which has ever-changing borders in the minds of those who name(d) it.  We who were born on Indian soil know it.  Those who were not but who are related to India in some way feel a very powerful relationship between themselves and India.

Those born at this moment, in these hours, weeks and months fall into a different category.  They are the contemporaries of nations and countries named.

They will come to call places India, Israel, Ecuador, Panama, America, Europe & etc. There is lessening influence from the time when they were not named as such.  As the years pass those who called other names, or fought for other names or fought naming, grow older and eventually die.

When a person who thinks carefully about names has a child, it is a moment of great importance.  For many, naming a child is an important act, but for many others naming does not stop there.  The act of teaching names to a child is equally important.  Because the names one teaches may live for at least another  generation through this act.

Early in his essay, “Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!” (New Yorker, June 23 & 30, 1997, p.52) Salman Rushdie makes use of a newborn name: Indo-Anglian literature.  And in so doing teaches the many children of his revolution a new name.  Whether this name lives for another literary generation depends upon its use and its use, as with all language, is a function of its necessity. Indo-Anglian literature is, by the parameters of its creation, a contemporary art.  Contemporary arts throughout history are marked with factors that distinguish them from previous movements. Among these factors perhaps the most impressive is risk.  In contemporary arts risk may become more valuable than endurance.

History is dying.

The era of the written word as a valuable and trustworthy guide to understanding is yielding itself to other processes by which we come to estimate the world around us.  The diversity of the tools and media we have available to estimate and distribute estimations of events and acts around the world are affecting literature in unprecedented ways.  The historical word, first spoken, then written and now reduced to an accompaniment to images in both written and oral forms, is dying.

In its place a concert of word and image and sound and space and portrayal and metaphor are being utilized to represent truth.  The modern citizen of the physical world must deal with this as the ideological world shrinks to the size of a p-nut in the palm of an Indian boy running the aisle of a plane travelling a tres grande vitesse on 16mm film, 24 frames per second.

The greatest contemporary artists in the written history of the arts have been brave.  In the face of change and alteration of beliefs, they have sought methods by which they can represent truths.  These artists exist today.  They seek trust.  They try to represent hope.  They are as Gandhiji, conducting “My Experiments with the Truth.”  In this way we are living in a very complex time for an artist or writer who wishes to participate at the most important, the most global, the most contemporary level.

Indo-Anglian writing and arts share, with the arts of other ancient cultures (Afro-Anglian?  Chino-Anglian?  Sino-Anglian?) the new joy of working in the Post-Colonial Era.  Indeed, the joy of supporting the end of the colonial era in an effort to support the whole one-ness of the human species.  At his wonderfully unifying musical concerts, the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti used to say, “You can say many things with English, but in order to say many other things which are true you must break it, which is why we speak broken English.  This next song is in broken English. You must break your English to understand it.”

In this country, we are faced with a unique set of problems as artists and writers trying to represent truth with the tools available to us.  We are subject to the philosophies of the dominant culture in the United States of America, which paradoxically represent the Colonial Attitude in a different aspect.

To be an Indo-Anglian writer in the United States is to choose to be a contemporary artist working in a contemporary arena to represent truths which affect millions of people using the tools available in the most powerful country in the world, an awesome task.

The writers who represent post-colonial Indian thought in literature in English are dedicated to many similar topics, but writers who are Indo-Anglian face the same difficulties with naming as anyone who wishes to express: we do not want to be grouped.  And yet we are all tied to this land mass which, as an island something like 45 million years ago smashed its way into the continental spread of Asia forcing up the formation of the tallest mountain in the world and the twisted masses of mountainous geography in the North of India.  Such a violent, willful act of inclusion seems so contradictory to this desire for independence.

Choosing to be here in the US, I struggle to represent the truths I experience despite this. In the United States the way in which the cultures relate has been poisoned by the specter of racism.  The complex way in which racism was born, named and now has insidiously changed itself into a thing which can exist despite the stated collective desires for freedom, peace and equality is a direct function of the way this country has been created.  It is something for which everyone who lives here is responsible.

In conclusion, I care about where you are from … but how we behave now that we are all here is what concerns me most.

M.T. Karthik, Harlem, August 10, 1997
[did not appear in the New Yorker magazine]

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

a minute of rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLHNRS8ik4

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