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Book Offers Controversial Overview of Reena Virk Slaying

Did the media wilfully ignore race as a factor in Reena Virk's 1997 murder?

Yes. Or so suggests a just-published collection of essays: Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder.

The book also contends (rather kookily in my view) that Virk's killing can be defined, at least metaphorically, as a "Canadian lynching." More on that later.

Unlike Rebecca Godfrey's 2005 book on the murder, Under the Bridge, this Canadian Scholars Press edition is a scholarly effort. Edited by academics Sheila Batacharya and Mythili Rajiva, it's a challenging read certainly not aimed at a mass audience. Sample line: "The dichotomy of good versus bad girls produced through the construction of hegemonic femininity is the discursive backdrop that allows for these kinds of contradictions to coexist."

This is the kind of literary style that rankles journalists, who traditionally hold a skeptical view of academic writing (a feeling that is, no doubt, mutual). And, as far as the Virk race issue goes, reporters dislike being informed they have a fundamental bias. We are, after all, supposed to be objective.

Yet for stout-hearted readers and future students assigned this tome as a text, Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives does offer intelligent, wide-reaching -- and occasionally provocative -- observations on one of Canada's most notorious murders.

The circumstances are familiar to most Canadians. Virk, a 14-year-old South Asian girl, was attacked by a gang, mostly female, underneath a bridge in Saanich. Two of the teens, Warren Glowatski and Kelly Ellard, were subsequently convicted of Virk's murder.

Like most, my image of Reena Virk was sculpted by media reports. She was portrayed as a social outsider often picked on by classmates. Her death was a result of so-called "girl violence," a North American trend -- or so the media told us. In this case, the bad girls (and a boy) went off the rails. It seemed, to me, an aberration.

Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives suggests this portrait of a murder is a distortion -- a wrong-headed simplification of a highly complex situation. The writers suggest the media persistently ignored the race issue, instead, embracing girl violence as an easy explanation.

I phoned the co-editor, Batacharya, a PhD in adult education and community development, who teaches at the University of Toronto's Victoria College. Batacharya, who lived in Victoria briefly in the 1990s, says the media's categorization of Virk's murder as girl violence is symptomatic of "moral panic." When a person or group threatens societal order, as with the Virk killing, a knee-jerk response is prompted.

Batacharya said, rather than focusing on the girl-violence explanation or the killers' individual motives, Virk's death ought to be considered in a broader context. Her murder can be viewed as being symptomatic of Canadian society grappling with problems related to racism, gender, social class and our colonialist history.

Batacharya said Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives does not argue that Glowatski or Ellard killed solely because they are white and Virk was South Asian. Rather, the book merely suggests their motives were influenced by social inequalities in Canadian society. In other words, their way of viewing the world -- like those of any Canadian -- was coloured by prevailing cultural attitudes.

"It's the lens we use, the way we look at each other and the way we interact with each other," Batacharya said.

I was particularly interested in the book's leitmotif -- that the media, in reporting on the crime and subsequent trials, consistently disregarded race as a factor.

Writer Yasmin Jiwani, for instance, suggests the national media ignored the fact Glowatski (inventing an explanation for his dishevelled appearance following the murder) said he had picked a fight with a First Nations man. The implication was that this excuse was socially acceptable. Glowatski also spoke about Virk's supposedly excessive body hair, which Jiwani says is "a significant racialized trope evoking a chain of connotation of animalistic connections and savagery."

Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives scrutinized a newspaper database containing almost 3,000 articles on "Reena Virk." Only a few stories mentioned race at all.

There appears to have been -- rightly or wrongly -- a prevailing notion among reporters that the crime was not racially motivated. There appears to be some basis for this. For example, I found a newspaper article in which Virk's father is quoted as saying "race didn't play that much [of a] role in my daughter's killing." And in sentencing Ellard in 2000, the judge stated: "The motive was not racism."

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the media did downplay race as a factor in Virk's murder. Why would this be? I suspect one reason is reporters' general wariness in approaching a hot-button issue. These days, identifying individuals in stories by ethnicity -- for any reason -- is deemed to be racist.

Attitudes have changed. When reporting on a crime in the past, a journalist might have described an apprehended person in terms of race, for example, "First Nations" or "Afro-Canadian." This is no longer current practice.

In Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives, things get considerably wilder when essayist Tess Chakkalakal suggests Virk's murder was a "Canadian lynching."

She attempts to make a case for this designation by invoking the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings (Thomas said an implicit racism behind the proceedings was tantamount to a "lynching") and a 1986 novel by Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing.

Chakkalakal is not at all convincing. What might sound cutting-edge in university courses on feminist post-structuralist theory sounds, outside the classroom, merely hysterical and silly.

Yet overall, Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives is helpful in considering Reena Virk's tragic situation and cases like it. Batacharya says the book's primary aim is to encourage readers to think critically. We must consider -- in addition to the message -- who the messengers are. Noam Chomsky and others have encouraged a similar analytical, long-view approach. It's nothing new. Still, it's something we must not forget.

Written By: Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist

This article first appeared HERE.

Romancing India

Milan Vohra on the journey undertaken to be the first ever Indian author writing for Mills & Boon.

Ask Milan Vohra what does it take to be a Mills & Boon writer and she replies, “The attitude to have fun and not take life seriously.” Milan, we have heard is a die-hard romantic as well and perhaps this aspect of her nature has also contributed to her being the first ever Indian Harlequin Mills & Boon author. And now Milan's first book “The Love Asana” with the 100 year-old publisher, which is a world leader in romance fiction, has hit the marquee.

Making her romantic side quite evident, in the author's note, Milan writes, “And Vivan? Well Vivan is the kind of man we've all found ourselves irresistibly attracted to, infuriatingly confounded by, and who we want to be able to understand…..I was lucky to find my Vivan years ago. If you haven't already, believe that you will too.” Milan, now, a mother of two, met her husband when she was 17 and got married at the age of 24.

Milan, a 45 year-old advertising executive from Bangalore had reached a stage where she was looking for opportunities to do something “purely for myself”, found out about a short story writing contest ‘Passions — Aspiring Author Auditions' announced by Harlequin Mills & Boon to search for writing talent from India. Actually, it was a friend who had forwarded an e-mail to Milan regarding the same and then as it turned out, she spent her wedding anniversary night writing “The Love Asana” at a frenetic pace trying to meet the deadline.

Being an advertising professional, writing in any case was an integral part of Milan's life and thus didn't require any struggle. And then it was Milan's yoga practice, which gave her the plot of a young yoga instructor who falls in love with a dynamic handsome man who walks into her class one day. A practitioner of Sivananda Yoga, she quips that it is only in this book that a unique asana like Love Asana exists and nowhere else and even here the readers won't find it until they reach the end.

Set in New Delhi, Milan wanted her story to be uniquely Indian and yet international. And yoga, a powerful element of Indian culture and heritage render the story exotica just like way Mills and Boons readers want it to be. The aspect of romance, the way conflict exists between the two main characters and how romance develops between the two, the author feels is in tandem with the set pattern of Mills and Boon stories.

Her story found favour with the jury and that's how she has joined the “talent pool of 1300 authors” as Manish Singh, Country Manager, Harlequin Mills & Boon India points out. Referring to the popularity of romance as a genre and the publisher, Singh says, “We received more than 500 entries out of which 40 per cent came from South India. Though 95 per cent of them were women but interestingly, the second-runners up was a man Mr. Ramamurthy Nagarajan.

Inspired by the contest's success, we decided to have its second season. Romance is very strongly embedded in the Indian psyche. The “Kamasutra” was written here and Taj Mahal, a significant symbol of love is in India.”

Mills & Boon, irrespective of its popularity and strong market worldwide, is still considered to be lightweight but Milan is not bothered. She cites the example of Nora Roberts, who she says has been associated with Mills & Boon and has also churned out best-sellers. “What you write has to be worth reading,” she concludes.

This artilce first appeared HERE.

The Emperor of All Maladies

“Humankind,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future, point to one end, which is always present.”

In the starkest terms, this omnipresent reality, which we so struggle to bear, is, of course, death itself. And aside from war and natural disaster, there is one phenomenon more powerful, more inexorable in its death-bringing than any other, which has been the case across centuries, even millennia of human experience, as Siddhartha Mukherjee makes clear in his brilliant new book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Mukherjee, an oncologist-cum-writer based at New York’s Columbia University Medical Center, has written a magnum opus treatment of cancer that is a testament both to the relentlessness of this multi-faceted disease and to the equal relentlessness and many-sided efforts to withstand, survive, understand and defeat it.

The book was undoubtedly the most unexpected non-fiction triumph of the season, a triumph owing, in no small part, to the ubiquity of cancer awareness in contemporary society — a situation that, among many others related to the ongoing story of cancer’s deep-rooted place in human experience, Mukherjee accounts for in his pages.
The grim irony here is that cancer’s rise to pre-eminence in the modern consciousness is the unexpected result of 19th- and 20th-century cures for other diseases, among the broader improvement of human life in the modern age itself: “In most ancient societies,” Mukherjee writes, “people didn’t live long enough to get cancer. Indeed, cancer’s emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: It becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed.”

We have reached an age, in other words, when more people than at any other point in human history live long enough to die of cancer.

To explain how we reached this point and explore where we have gone since, with a focus on the impressive, at times discouraging progress made against the disease, Mukherjee brings together a vast array of cultural, political and historical material. This research documents the diverse responses people around the world have made to avoid the realities of cancer (around smoking, for instance) or to deal with the ravages of the disease (likewise with smoking, eventually).

More specifically, these range from a 4th-century-BC Persian Queen named Atossa who, upon falling ill with a bleeding lump upon her breast, wrapped herself in sheets and retreated to isolation where she had a trusted servant cut her breast from her body, to a cute, blue-eyed, baseball-loving kid from Maine who, after being diagnosed with lymphoma in 1948 by cancer-research pioneer and Boston doctor Sydney Farber, became, literally, the poster child for the Jimmy Fund, the first-ever national campaign for a cure for cancer.

At the same time that Mukherjee offers hundreds upon hundreds of such culturally packed anecdotes, he provides an eloquent, often-moving first-person account of the always difficult, occasionally uplifting doctor-patient encounters that he experienced as a young physician working in the cancer ward of Massachusetts General Hospital.

To this impressive combination of the personal and the encyclopedic, Mukherjee further adds a great deal of detailed (at times overly so) explanations and analyses of research, experimentation and particular surgical, chemical and biological actions, effects and behaviours that, comprehensively, form an oppositional pattern of hope and despair, bold experimentation and exceeding caution, while following unending cycles of insight, success and failure. This is all focused on beating back the “malignant proliferation of cells” that, in their rate of growth, adaptation and resilience, makes cancer cells, according to Mukherjee, “more perfect versions of ourselves.”

To anyone who’s suffered from cancer, or suffered alongside someone with cancer, such formulations might be remarkably offensive in the gratuitous poetic licence they would seem to take with such a potent source of death and misery, and yet, as Mukherjee makes clear in the range of references he brings to his work, people have sought analogies and metaphors and symbols to make sense of cancer from ancient Egypt and Greece to Victorian England and modern America.

Indeed, the cancer symbol itself, a crab, owes to Hippocrates’ efforts, in the 4th century BC, to find a creature that, in its tenacity, manoeuvrability and toughness reflected the full range of the disease’s powerful exertions upon the human body. Through that striking contextualization, among many others, Mukherjee corrects an understandable but facile conception of cancer itself, observing that “cancer is not merely a lump in the body; it is a disease that migrates, evolves, invades organs, destroys tissues and resists drugs.”

Nevertheless, as this book abundantly documents, billions upon billions of dollars, and tens of thousands of lab experiments and patient trials and therapies, have been expended to combat it, and will continue to be.

“With cancer,” Mukherjee writes, with sobering clarity, in his final pages, after explaining its inherent position in human genetics, “where no simple, universal, or definitive cure is in sight — and is never likely to be — the past is continually conversing with the future.”

As for the present, this remarkable book will be our best guide.

 
This article first appeared HERE.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda's 'Secret Daughter' Soars to Success

If there’s been one runaway success story in Canadian publishing this year, it’s got to be Secret Daughter, written by a first-time author born and raised in Toronto that explores the cultural divides between India and North America.

The book, published by HarperCollins Canada, has sold 225,000 copies since March, a remarkable feat in an industry where sales of 5,000 to 6,000 copies would be considered a triumph.

“We could not do this intentionally,” acknowledged Leo MacDonald, vice-president of sales and marketing. “It’s rare that you get a book that sells 100,000 copies. For this to sell 225,000 copies in seven months is extremely rare.”

Shilpi Somaya Gowda, who has started writing a second novel in California, where she lives with her husband and two children, is equally astonished.

“It’s been fantastic. (The book) has basically exceeded everybody’s expectations and come out of nowhere. The most gratifying thing for me is that the book has found an audience. I’m hearing from readers and meeting people who have been touched by the book, and that’s been a wonderful, unexpected benefit because, as a writer . . . it’s a very solitary thing,” Gowda said.

The story centres on a poor Indian woman who gives up her daughter for adoption. The child goes to a couple in San Francisco, a white American woman married to with a husband who comes from India. As the girl, Asha, reaches adulthood, she longs to know why her parents gave her up while her mother, Kavita, never stops longing for the daughter she was forced to abandon.

MacDonald said issuing the book in trade paperback format helped keep it affordable and it received a boost by being among the selected “picks” of Chapters/Indigo’s Heather Reisman. The rest, MacDonald surmised, was positive word of mouth from one reader to the next.

Gowda said the story was partly inspired by her volunteer work one summer at an orphanage in Mumbai.

“The summer in the orphanage was the first time I was exposed to and immersed in the other side of India. It was an eye-opening experience for me and the children that I met there really stayed with me, the memories of them stayed with me for many years,” Gowda said.

The other part of the story came from Gowda’s own experience living in two worlds.

“There was the India my parents were comfortable in and then there was the school I went to where there were few if any non-Caucasians. I think it’s a little more diverse now. But I was very aware I was traversing two different cultures, one at home and one outside,” Gowda said.

“Luckily, it was drilled into me since I was very young that Canada was a multicultural country and a mosaic and not a melting pot. I grew up thinking these differences were celebrated and not something to be ashamed of. So I think I grew very comfortable early on with this idea of two different worlds and two different cultures co-existing without any real dissonance,” she added.

The preference given to boys over girls in Indian culture is another important part of the story, but Gowda insisted that the issue of gender is more complex.

“People know that women are discriminated against in India, people know there is more advancement in the West. I was trying to complicate that a little bit (to show) that women do have an incredibly powerful role in elements of Indian society. It might not be as evident and it might not balance out all the terrible things that happen to them. But there are ways in which women exercise control and power in their own families,” she said.

Gowda also wanted to show that, despite the difference in affluence between India and North America, both cultures have much to offer.

“There are wonderful, great things about growing up in the West. But at the same time, there are things that feel like they’re missing here, the richness of the culture, the extended family, that deep and rich network of family and friends and village that a lot of people grow up with in India that is missing from our nuclear family.”

This article first appeared HERE.