SACC - South Asian Conference Council - Speakers and Performers

south asian conference council

speakers & performers

mission statement • constitution • contact

» Sindhu Srinath, Organizing Youth! (OY!)

Sindhu Srinath is a founding member of Organizing Youth!. OY! is a volunteer-based organization in California formed to provide radical political education and training to South Asian youth, to empower them to organize for political, social and economic justice. OY! is dedicated to building a vibrant community of South Asian activists who are committed to taking the struggle for global equality and social change back to their communities.

Sindhu, an activist and graduate student, has worked with several non-profits to promote social and economic justice. She recently spent several months working in Southern India, where she helped develop a community-based training program for village health workers. Other areas she has worked in include immigrants rights, women’s rights, communal harmony and community development. Sindhu has also worked as a fundraising consultant and spent two years directing the fund development efforts of a grassroots, low-income housing organization for homeless individuals in inner-city San Francisco. She received her bachelors degree in Political Economy f! rom UC Berkeley and is currently pursuing a Masters of Public Administration from Columbia University, where she serves on the steering committees of the Minority Policy Coalition and Gender Policy Program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

» Nahar Alam, Andolan

Andolan Executive Director Nahar Alam has been an organizer in the United States and Bangladesh for almost 20 years. Nahar works towards a vision in which all workers are treated with respect and their rights are enforced. She has been organizing South Asian immigrant workers in New York City since 1993 through several grassroots Asian-Pacific Islander community organizations. Nahar is an ex-domestic worker and a domestic violence survivor. She works directly with workers and lawyers on Andolan’s cases, and gives presentations and trainings to workers, law students and other organizations serving the community. A key component of her work is community outreach and coalition building. Nahar represented Andolan at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001. She also helped develop the Streetwise Cultural Diversity Curriculum for the New York Police Department in 2001. Nahar has received the Susan B. Anthony Award from NOW (1996), an award from the Petra Foundation (1998), the Union Square Award from the Fund for the City of New York (2001), and the Sneha Award for work in fighting for the rights of Domestic Workers in the U.S. (2002). She was also a Revson Fellow at the Columbia University during the 2003-2004 academic year, where she focused on gender studies. Nahar was instrumental in founding Andolan in 1998 as a community group focusing on organizing low-wage South Asian women workers.

» Feroza Jussawalla, University of New Mexico

Feroza Jussawalla is currently Professor of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With a BA from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, and an MA and PhD from the University of Utah, she first taught for twenty years at the University of Texas in El Paso. Over the years she has found that Spanish, together with her native Gujarati, Hindi, and English, is a natural medium of creative expression for her.

Jussawalla is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English and has also published Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World and Conversations with V S Naipaul, the last of which has been translated into French.

» Hari Kondabolu, SAALT

Hari Kondabolu will be representing South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (SAALT) at the Yale Conference. Kondabolu has been working with SAALT since Fall 2004 as an intern. South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (SAALT) is a national non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the full and equal participation by South Asians in the civic and political life of the United States. SAALT’s work is grounded in cultivating relationships with South Asian organizations and community members around the country, and collaborating with broader civil and immigrant rights movements.

Prior to joining SAALT, Kondabolu served as an intern in the Office of New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton through the Indian American Center for Political Awareness (IACPA). He was also selected to participate in the Youth Solidarity Summer program in 2004, held annually in New York. Kondabolu has written articles on race and identity which have been published in News India Times, and has also appeared as a panelist on TV Asia's Capitol Debates.

Kondabolu holds a B.A. from Bowdoin College with a major in Comparative Politics and a minor in Asian Studies.

» Sonal Shah, Indicorps

Sonal is currently a Vice President at Goldman, Sachs and Co. Prior to Goldman, she worked at two think tanks, the Center for American Progress and the Center for Global Development on trade, outsourcing, and post conflict reconstruction issues. Before that she worked for eight years at the Department of Treasury on various economic issues and regions of the world, including sub Saharan Africa, Bosnia and Kosovo after the conflicts, the Asian financial crisis, and advising the Treasury on World Bank and IMF lending to various countries. In addition, Sonal is co-founder of a non-profit organization called Indicorps, a new, U.S.-based non-profit organization that offers one-year service fellowships for Americans of Indian origin to work on specific developmental projects in India. Indicorps develops projects with entrepreneurial and innovative non-governmental organizations in India with the aim of fostering an exchange of ideas and expertise and cultivating Indian-American leaders in the United States to have a better understanding of India and the challenges of development. For her work with Indicorps, Sonal was voted /India Abroad/ Person of the Year in 2003. The jury honored Shah for creating an organization that had the capability of 'strengthening the Indian community and help build young leaders within it'.

» Chandra Bhatnagar, ACLU, formerly of Asian American Legal Defense Fund

Chandra Bhatnagar has used a human rights approach to advocate for social justice since college, helping to organize community groups around the country to participate in "Freedom Ride '96", a tribute to the 30th anniversary of the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he did immigrant's rights work and anti-police brutality organizing. For the past two years, he has worked as a Skadden fellow for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, directing the South Asian Workers' Project for Human Rights, a community-based project providing legal assistance to low-wage workers from South Asia using a human rights perspective. Previously, he was the Assistant Director of Columbia University's "Bringing Human Rights Home Project," and worked on human rights issues including conditions affecting post 9-11 detainees and efforts to organize a coalition of human rights defenders in the United States. Previously, he has worked with an NGO in India applying human rights standards to their anti-child labor/bonded labor campaigns. Chandra was on the advisory committee for the ACLU's landmark "Human Rights at Home" conference last October. He received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania law school in 2001, and an LL.M. in international human rights from Columbia in 2002. Chandra Bhatnagar is currently completing a Skadden Fellowship at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). Mr. Bhatnagar directs the South Asian Workers' Project for Human Rights (SAWPHR), a community based direct legal services project that combines litigation, community organizing, advocacy, education and outreach, and seeks to serve low wage workers from the South Asian diaspora.

Before joining AALDEF, Mr. Bhatnagar served as the Assistant Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, where he worked on a number of human rights issues including conditions affecting post 9-11 detainees; efforts to organize a coalition of human rights defenders in the United States; and a campaign to have the New York City Council implement the principles of the two key international anti-discrimination treaties, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Mr. Bhatnagar has previously worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he did immigrants' rights work and anti-police brutality organizing, and served as the interim Director of the Ella Baker Summer Intern Program. He has also done human rights work in India working with Bandhua Mukti Morcha (BMM), an Indian non-governmental organization based in New Delhi that provides educational and economic alternatives for child laborers and bonded laborers and uses legal tools to hold employers accountable for worker abuse.

Born in New Delhi, India, Mr. Bhatnagar came to the U.S. at a young age and has lived in New Jersey, New York City and New Delhi.

» Saru Jayaraman

Saru Jayaraman is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 1992 she founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (W.Y.S.E.), a national non-profit organization dedicated to providing young women of color with the resources, information and support necessary to think critically and take leadership in their communities for change. As Attorney/Organizer at the Workplace Project, a Latina/o immigrant worker organizing center, she created The Alliance for Justice, a law and organizing program that organized custodial, factory, and restaurant workers to fight for workplace justice. Most recently, together with workers from Windows on the World, the

restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, she founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), an immigrant workers' center focused on organizing immigrant restaurant workers all over New York City, particularly those displaced from the World Trade Center, and the families of restaurant worker victims of 9/11. Among other things, ROC-NY has organized workers to win workplace justice campaigns and launch their own cooperatively-owned restaurant. As a Professor of Political Science and Labor Studies at NYU, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Cornell University, Ms. Jayaraman is also co-editing a book on Organizing Immigrant Workers in New York City. Her constant fight is for racial and economic justice domestically and globally.

» Vijai Nathan, comedian

In 1997, Vijai mortified her parents by giving up a career in journalism, canceling her wedding, and becoming a stand-up comedian- and she hasn’t looked back since!

NBC chose Vijai as one of the Top 10 Comedians in the nation for The NBC Stand-Up For Diversity Showcase in L.A. Sept. 2004. Back Stage Magazine named Vijai one of the top ten stand-up comics to watch for in 2003. She was chosen as one of two comics to represent America at the Smirnoff International Comedy Festival in Cape Town, South Africa in September of 2003. Vijai’s TV appearances include: ABC News’ 20/20, PBS, The Oxygen Network, and the BBC.

Vijai’s irreverent humor springs from her experiences of growing up as a “foreigner” in America- despite the fact she was born and raised in a suburb of Washington D.C. Much of her stand-up comedy is about growing up as an Indian in America, cultural clashes with her parents, and the racism she’s dealt with as a child and now as a comedian (sounds heavy- but really it's funny.)

Her latest adventure is her new one-woman show, “Good Girls Don’t, But Indian Girls Do,” a funny and poignant exploration of the struggle to discover, create and claim an Indian American identity. Vijai breaks every taboo as she exposes the underbelly of an Indian American family. She takes you through growing up Indian in a Jewish community; her discovery of sex in a repressed Hindu household; and how she finds herself along the way. It's "Gandhi" meets "Pretty in Pink."

Contact: vijai_comedy@yahoo.com, www.vijaicomedy.com, 212-330-7025