Yearly Archives: 2005

It is Christmas Eve in the world. I am at home with my family after many months. I finally have a moment to reflect.

Since September, I have lived a split life. On weekdays, I am in Boston keeping up appearances as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity, and on weekends, I am a filmmaker in Los Angeles, working in a tiny editing room on our documentary. We are in the final phase… Continue Reading

Today, California’s first Spinning Wheel Film Festival was held in Orange County, California. On the eve of the festival, the Sikh Center of Orange County held a gala banquet and organizer Bicky Singh invited us to offer a SNEAK PREVIEW of Divided We Fall. Our director/editor/producer extraordinaire Sharat Raju cut together a brand-new seven-minute trailer, weaving together voices and faces from the film with music from the film’s original score created by composer… Continue Reading

Today Dr. Diana Eck and the Harvard Pluralism Project hosted a screening of the rough cut of the documentary at Harvard University (pictured above). We first screened the rough cut to a Sikh audience at the Spinning Wheel Film Festival in Toronto. This screening would be different. At an invitation-only event, we gathered classmates, friends, professors, and staff at Harvard to watch the cut and offer feedback.

When introducing the… Continue Reading

Since finishing production at the end of August, the team has been slaving away in the editing room in Los Angeles. Director Sharat Raju is co-editing the film with Scott Rosenblatt. Sheepishly, I had to return to school in Boston (for my masters program at Harvard Divinity), but I’ve been flying back to LA almost every weekend to witness their amazing post-production speed to meet our first deadline: this… Continue Reading

To commemorate the four-year anniversary of the murder of Balbir Sodhi, Arizona’s East Valley Tribune ran a front page article about his story and our film Divided We Fall.

On a Saturday in 2001, less than two weeks after the S ept. 11 terrorist attacks, thousands gathered at Phoenix Civic Plaza to honor a man most had never met.

(Gaurav Singh, a… Continue Reading

Four years ago today, BALBIR SINGH SODHI was murdered in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona. His murderer Frank Roque yelled upon arrest, “I am a patriot.” Sodhi (pictured) was the first person of as many as nineteen people killed in the thousands of hate crimes that followed 9/11.

This summer, I have traveled across the country to meet with families in targeted communities to find out how much has changed.… Continue Reading

Today was the final day of our summer film production. We spent the day filming b-roll (images of people and places) around our nation’s capital, and then we ended our summer journey with a celebration dinner. And yes, even a shameless dance of joy. Today’s pictures speak louder than words, so I invite you to glimpse moments from our day– and our joy at the day’s end!

We began at the Lincoln Memorial, and… Continue Reading

August, 26-2005- Today was our very last day of interviews. It was only appropriate that our final two interviewees held opposing positions on how to defend American democracy in the post-9/11 era: one believes that we need to target undocumented immigrants and use racial profiling in security searches, and the other believes that such state policies are a form of public violence that encourage private hate violence. Both were intriguing.

We first interviewed CLIFFORD… Continue Reading

Today we interviewed SHER SINGH (pictured) who was arrested on September 12, 2001 as the first suspected terrorist after the 9/11 attacks. He was riding a Boston-bound train when it stopped in Providence, Rhode Island. He was wearing a turban and kirpan, both articles of Sikh faith. His ‘suspicious’ appearance had caught the attention of the FBI who sent federal agents and local police with bomb-sniffing dogs to the station to intercept him.

Officers… Continue Reading

After the London bombings, the debate on racial profiling was everywhere, on television and in newspapers. As the film crew and I traveled around the country, interviewing victims of prejudice and profiling, two New York legislators announced an upcoming bill that “called for racial profiling” on subways. While this announcement was met with signs of protest (like that pictured), it still gave me chills. I saw the way that racial profiling… Continue Reading