• Meet Saru Jayaraman — a labor activist who’s ruffling the feathers of heavyweight restaurant industry lobbyists by working to increase the minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers. Below is a clip of Jayaraman discussing the restaurant protests on MSNBC’s The Cycle from January. You can read one of her articles here. [India West]
• India is home to 70 billionaires. Think of all the pakoras they could buy if they pooled their resources together. Mmm…staggering wealth disparity. [Times of India]
• Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the kind of capital Indians are seeking is political. So far, 10 Indian-Americans have entered races for the 2014 elections. [Economic Times]
• You may have heard that Pakistan has had a ban on YouTube in effect since 2012 because of reasons — so a collective of some rad musicians and activists have put together this video and chucked it up on Vimeo (take that, oppressive government!) to protest such ridiculous censorship. They previously issued this viral video, too.
• But hey, at least there’s justice somewhere in Pakistan: For the first time ever, the murder of a journalist — a TV reporter — has resulted in the conviction of the five men found guilty of murdering him. [Reuters]
• FILE UNDER: Things That Shouldn’t Surprise Us, But They Do and Therefore We’re Disappointed in Humanity. It turns out that many hiring managers across the U.S. let something as trivial as an unpronounceable name affect a job candidate’s prospects of being hired. I guess “The Others” weren’t just a group of mysterious folks on a fictitious island lifted out of J.J. Abrams’ imagination, but also a construct regularly used by people who should know better. [BBC]
• We all know that Indian politics tends to be among the world’s most corrupt, but your friends at The 545 have compiled an “incomplete list” of the Top 12 scams to have been uncovered — along with bribe information, where available. [The 545]
Rohin Guha is a contributing editor at The Aerogram. Follow him on Twitter @ohrohin. Find The Aerogram on Facebook or on Twitter @theaerogram.
