Siddhartha Deb wins colored author PEN award; Anand Veeravagu and Dave Chokshi White House Fellows

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Siddhartha Deb is PEN 2012 author of color with $5000 award

It appears that Siddhartha Deb and/or his publisher Faber & Faber must have identified Deb as an Asian minority in the US when submitting his memoir "The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India" for the PEN award. The submission form for the PEN award states, "To be eligible, candidates must be writers of color who have not received wide media coverage."

Further, "The PEN Open Book Award, formerly the Beyond Margins Awards, celebrate outstanding books by writers of color published in the United States during the previous year.

Sponsored by the Open Book Program, this award is one of the many ways in which the Open Book Program encourages racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. The Open Book Committee works to increase the literature by, for, and about African, Arab, Asian, Caribbean, Latin, and Native Americans, and to establish access for these groups to the publishing industry. "

The news from PEN about Deb's award:

"Fiction and nonfiction writer Siddhartha Deb won the PEN Open Book Award for his memoir, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (Faber & Faber, 2011). The $5,000 prize is given for a book by an author of color published in 2011. Alexander Chee, Mat Johnson, and Natasha Trethewey judged."

http://www.pw.org/content/pen_american_center_announces_winners_of_2012_literary_awards?cmnt_all=1

Dave Chokshi of Baton Rouge, La and Anand Veeravagu of Palo Alto, Calif. White House Fellows.

The two Indians were amongst the 15 fellows selected for 2012-13. Here is their information shown in a White House press release.

 Dave Chokshi, Baton Rouge, LA, is a primary care physician with interests in public health and innovation in health care delivery.  He recently completed internal medicine residency at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  He practiced at the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, where he was a member of the Youth Health Equity Collaborative.  Dave's prior work experience spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including positions with the New York City Department of Health, the Louisiana Department of Health, a startup clinical software company, and with nonprofit organizations seeking to advance global health.  Dave helped grow the nonprofit Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), dedicated to improving access to medicines in developing countries; he was a founding member of UAEM's Board of Directors.  He has done clinical work in Guatemala, Peru, Botswana, Ghana, and India.  Dave has written extensively on medicine and public health in journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Health Affairs, and Nature.  He is a Rhodes Scholar, a Truman Scholar, a Soros Fellow, and a Gamble Scholar.  He received his M.D. with distinction from Penn, an M.Sc in global public health from Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Duke.

Anand Veeravagu, Palo Alto, CA, is a Neurosurgeon in training at Stanford University SOM. He most recently served as Chief Neurosurgery Resident at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Hospital caring for soldiers returning from Afghanistan with traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. Anand is focused on advancing minimally invasive diagnostic and surgical techniques for diseases of the central nervous system. In 2006, Anand developed a novel radiotherapeutic to treat Glioblastoma Multiforme, a malignant brain tumor. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and has written for the Huffington Post. In 2011 Anand staffed the CURE Neurosurgical Hospital in Uganda and organized medical relief missions for the Tsunami of 2004. Anand has received over 30 awards for his leadership, research and promotion of healthcare access to underserved populations. In 2012 Anand received the Gold Foundation's Humanism and Excellence in Teaching Award for his commitment to mentorship. Anand’s research employs national databases to evaluate trends in health resource utilization to provide guidelines for policy reform. Anand has been accepted to the Stanford GSB MBA program, received his M.D. from Stanford University and graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University with a B.S in Biomedical Engineering and minor in Multicultural and Regional Studies.


http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/04/white-house-appoints-2012-2013-class-white-house-fellows

Will Rajiv Goel, like ex-McKinsey director Anil Kumar, get lenient sentence for informing against former class mate Raj Rajaratnam?

Anil Kumar, the former McKinsey director got no jail sentence for his part in the insider trading case in return for helping prosecute Raj Rajaratnam.
Federal prosecutors have written a letter asking the judge to be lenient in also sentencing Rajiv Goel this Wednesday in the same case. The letter, the news report below, states “Goel substantially helped the Government secure a conviction in one the most significant and high-profile insider trading trials in history,”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/a-key-witness-in-rajaratnam-trial-is-set-to-be-sentenced/

Hyde Park Corner: An Open Forum

Indians should press Harvard and other top US universities to abolish 20% Asian quota

Good education is very important to Indian parents since a degree from a good college, preferably a professional one, largely determines income and perhaps even eligibility for a good "catch", as in marriage. But Indians and other Asians are finding their avenues for success limited by the Asian ceiling - unstated quota limiting total Asian admissions to a maximum 20% as apparently is the case at Harvard and other elite Universities in the US. According to article below, while Asian students at the University of California Berkeley has risen to 40% that at Harvard has stayed stagnant around 18% for the past decade.

So Indians in the US, especially those donating money and holding influential posts, should voice opposition and team up with other Asians to press elite universities to abolish the Asian ceiling.

"Admissions officers deny capping the number of Asian-American students at schools, but a 2009 book called No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal posited that Asian Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores to gain entrance to a top private university ........".

Ivy League Discrimination? Harvard's Asian student admissions static around 17% while Asians at UC Berkeley have risen to 40%

Khan Academy: effective and free online education help 

How to do better at an exam or just improve your knowledge? 

Thanks to Salman Khan, you have free access to learning methods that Microsoft founder, mega billionaire and major philanthropist Bill Gates uses to teach his own kids. 

"With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
A free world-class education for anyone anywhere."
 www.khanacademy.org/

edX, backed by Harvard and MIT and headed by Anant Agarwal, is the Future of Online Education - For anyone, anywhere, anytime

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of set up by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed for study via the web. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning—both on-campus and worldwide.The University of California, Berkeley also joined edX. There is a rival set up as a for profit entity, which has the backing of Stanford, Duke and some other universities.

https://www.edx.org/

  

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