The Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program, established in 2009, is held annually at the University of British Columbia to celebrate Punjabi language, culture and history in the province of British Columbia, and in Canada.
This year’s Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program will be held ONLINE through Zoom on 7 April 2021 at 6:30 p.m. PDT
Every year, this event features awards for student winners of an essay contest, an achievement award to a BC-based Punjabi language writer, and talks or performances.
This year, the Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program features two specialists who will present “Perspectives on the Farmers’ Movement in India”: Hartosh Singh Bal (Caravan Magazine) and Dr. Aarti Sethi (University of California at Berkeley).
This year, the UBC Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Writer’s Award will be given to Rana Ranbir, a filmmaker, writer and motivational speaker. Mr. Ranbir has been a part of more than 70 films, not only as an actor (with a background and training also in theatre) but also as a writer and director. For example, he both wrote the dialogue for the iconic film “Munde UK de” (2009) and played the comedic role of “Khoji” in the film. Beyond this, he is a writer: he has written 2 books of poetry–Deeva (2018) and Kin Min Tip Tip (2012)–and 2 books of prose: Zindagi Zindabad (2015) and in the same year, the novel 20 November. He lives in Surrey.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Caravan Magazine. He was formerly political editor of OPEN Magazine. In addition to his extensive experience in journalism and political analysis, he has authored two books, one a travelogue and the other a novel revolving around mathematics.
Dr. Aarti Sethi is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy and the study of South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017, and, before joining Berkeley, had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown universities. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. Her current book manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social and productive relations in rural society, and highlights how the devastating psycho-social effect of debt and suicide emerges from a structural impossibility inherent in peasant production, which could be called ‘cash-cropping without cash’. In her work overall, she is particularly concerned with understanding the specificity of neoliberal agrarian change as a process in which peasant producers around the world have become the subaltern franchisees of international bio-capital.
Please Register for the 2021 Harjit Kaur Sidhu Memorial Program here: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50ld-GhpzoqGNURJV4UnW6Uy7CrY0QT4bn8