Ashok and Amrit Go to the Movies

I’m gonna talk about the piece you wrote. Me and my friend years ago went to a community board meeting, and something came up involving Sikhs and the guy kept saying “sick.”

“Sick.” That’s proper pronunciation.

Singh and Das Racist’s Ashok Kondabolu at the Dosa Hunt premiere.

It is.

Yeah.

This is huge.

(Laughs.)

Pronounced “sick” not Sikh.

The interesting thing about that is “sick” means like, “seeker” or “learner student.” So actually “seek” if you’re translating it right.

Right. That’s wild. Well, you wrote a piece after the shooting that—when was that, was that last month?

Yeah, that was last month.

So what prompted you to include that on Stereogum. That’s, like, a music site.

Totally. So that happened on a Sunday, and on the Monday, news started coming out about this dude—Wade Michael Page —news started coming out about his involvement in the hate-rock scene. And I was very feverishly absorbing all the information I possibly could in fits, really distraught fits. But I used my time blogging that day as escape from that. So I would go back and forth between my Stereogum duties and then reading what was going on. At no point when I was reading the hate-rock stuff did I think that this was, like, some sort of an opportunity for me to write about it on Stereogum. My mind wasn’t engaged that way.

Of course, yeah, of course.

It just wasn’t and my employers probably wouldn’t like to hear this, but my mind simply wasn’t engaged in a way—like how can I turn this into page views, you know? And then I saw Spin do something, and I was, like, okay cool—Spin’s doing it. And then I started just thinking about the fact that there were these sites that were speaking to the demographic that I usually speak to—who were saying something about the tragedy and bringing some light to it. And I stopped thinking about it: the fact that there would be a vast commercial angle to writing about it on Stereogum, and I just thought about the fact that, well, people are gonna be getting this information from these other sites.

Of course. Who probably aren’t going to read a news website.

And then I started reminding myself that Stereogum actually is a platform. That it’s a platform that I helped create and cultivate. As a means of expressing opinions. Granted, they’re about music, but ultimately, it is a means of expression. And there was just a moment where I was, like, you know, I do have this platform and there is actually an interesting aspect to the fact that there is music implicated on both ends, on both sides of the equation. The Sikh faith is hyper-musical. All the means of connection and ultimately the path to enlightenment is ultimately predicated and based on vibration.

Right.

And one of the means to attain that spiritual sound is through kirtan, hours of kirtan. There’s gonna be some sermons, there’s gonna be talk about Khalistan, and there’s, you know, the politics… but at its heart, it’s about devotional singing.

Khalistan, what is that?

Khalistan is basically a construct. It exists only in the minds and hearts of certain factions of Punjabi Sikhs, who would like to see that portion of Punjab secede from India and be its own independent Sikh state. Khalistan otherwise doesn’t exist; it’s not acknowledged by the United Nations.

Right.

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