The Varsity Magazine: Networks

The Varsity MAgazine vol. VI | NO. 3 march 25, 2013

NETWORKS Table of Contents

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the VARSITY magazine

Letter from the Editor There were some points when this magazine was on unsteady ground. By the beginning of March a certain mania sets in at U of T, and students either hunker down with their work or do everything possible to avoid it. To get content for this magazine, we looked far and wide, holding the standard pitch meeting, but also reaching out to younger writers, and emailing old friends who left Toronto long ago but have a special perspective on certain topics. To finish their pieces, our writers matched our efforts, phoning distant relatives, contacting artists they’ve been following online but had never met, and sending queries to U of T professors. On the visual side, associate design editor Nathan Watson asked his dad to drive over a piece for drywall from his hometown of Welland, Ontario, which served as the basis for our nail-and-string cover art.

The point is that we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the networks around us. Friends, family, the university, the city, and broader ethnic or cultural communities: we all exist as a link in each of these networks. Within them we stay informed, get and give support, meet new people, and sometimes even argue.

Currently, the word ‘networks’ brings with it the immediate association of social networks, but it’s important to remember these websites and programs are centered around the age-old idea of communication, just as easily accomplished face-to-face.

With that in mind, the articles that follow examine networks ranging from ancient to hyper-modern. Murad Hemmadi looked into his own background to explore how India’s Parsi community is being shaped by immigration (pg 18), while Katrina Vogan focused on the future in her investigation of the networks that could be created by new Brain-Machine Interference technology (pg 8). Elsewhere, writers captured how networks can combine the past with the present, as traditional communities start to communicate on computers and smartphones. As seen in Damanjit Lamba’s piece on the gta’s Punjabi rappers (pg 14), communities may shift locations and evolve with the times, but something remains stable in their networks and core identity.

Of course, the network at the heart of this magazine is The Varsity’s editors and staff. This is my last magazine as editor, so I’d like to expressly thank all of you. Each issue and magazine wouldn’t be possible without your hard work. Thanks also to our readers, who I sincerely hope extend beyond my parents…

The Magazine Team

Simon Frank Varsity Magazine Editor, 2012–2013

Visualizing Networks Our job is to reveal without distracting. Design is always present, but its job is to connect the reader (or viewer, or listener, or user — you get the idea) to the content being presented. It’s invisible in the sense that design, at its best, becomes one with content.

At first glance the idea of a network is one that may seem easy to conceptualize in terms of design. Make a couple dots, draw a couple of lines, and you’re done. But that’s lazy thinking. While those things can be part of a visualization of networks (hell, our cover uses them, and it’s goddamn beautiful), dots and lines alone aren’t enough.

Designing for networks thoughtfully means doing much more than representing connections. It means showing what’s behind them, helping make clear how they form and break, demonstrating when they’re good and when they’re bad. It’s about becoming invisible, and in doing so making what’s invisible about networks apparent.

The Design Team Varsity Magazine, 2012–2013

PHOTO EDITOR Bernarda Gospic photo@thevarsity.ca

MAGAZINE VOL. VI

No. 3

Contact 21 Sussex Avenue, Suite 306 Toronto, ON, M5S 1J6 Phone: 416-946-7600 thevarsity.ca

EDITOR-in-Chief Murad Hemmadi editor@thevarsity.ca MAGAZINE EDITOR Simon Frank magazine@thevarsity.ca DESIGN EDITORS Suzy Nevins Dan Seljak design@thevarsity.ca

Production Editor Alex Ross production@thevarsity.ca Managing ONLINE EDITOR Patrick Love online@thevarsity.ca SENIOR COPY EDITOR Catherine Kabasele copy@thevarsity.ca ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Minhee Bae illustration@thevarsity.ca VIDEO EDITOR Wyatt Clough video@thevarsity.ca ASSOCIATE MAGAZINE EDITOR Damanjit Lamba

ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITORS Natalie Morcos Shaquilla Singh Nathan Watson ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITORS Michael Chahley Carolyn Levett ASSOCIATE Online EDITOR Sofia Luu ASSOCIATE copy EDITOR Catherine Virelli COPY EDITORS Roxanne Leung Heather Pierce Laura Sabatini Tonya Sutherland Shifa Tauqir Catherine Virelli Miranda Whittaker Alec Wilson FACT CHECKERS Catherine Kabasele Heather Pierce Catherine Virelli

DESIGNERS Ethan Chiel Natalie Morcos Suzy Nevins Josh Oliver Dan Seljak Shaquilla Singh Nathan Watson

Ethan Chiel, Wyatt Clough, Simon Frank, Bernarda Gospic, Murad Hemmadi, Damanjit Lamba, Roxanne Leung, Sofia Luu, Josh Oliver, Ishita Petkar, Alex Ross, Andrew Rutherdale, Dan Seljak, Colt St. George, Katrina Vogan, Nathan Watson

Cover Nathan Watson

John and Gabriel Lombarczki, Leslie Barcza and the campus mailroom team, Mark Pesci, Dr. Sheena Josselyn, Dr. Roger McIntyre, Cheeto the office mouse, and the Kazakh consortium that bought us out

PHOTO & ILLUSTRATION Michael Chahley Wyatt Clough Bernarda Gospic Wendy Gu Nancy Ji Janice Liu Dan Seljak Nathan Watson Doran Woo

Writers

Special Thanks

Business Office Business Manager business@thevarsity.ca John Fountas Advertising Manager Tina Yazdi advertising@thevarsity.ca Advertising Executives Victoria Botvinnik victoria@thevarsity.ca Nick Brownlee nick@thevarsity.ca Sofia Luu sofia@thevarsity.ca Maokai Shen maokai@thevarsity.ca

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What's a punk like you doing in a place like this?

Mark Pesci on bringing together Toronto's punk and hardcore communities Article by NATHAN WATSON | Photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

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sk Mark Pesci how he found himself so tightly wrapped up in Toronto’s punk and hardcore community, and he responds, “to a certain extent, it’s punk that finds you.” Pesci is an independent concert promoter who has been putting on events since 2004. He’s now the in-house booker at The Shop, a basement venue underneath Parkdale restaurant Parts and Labour.

He’s also the co-founder of justshows. com, a nationwide website for independent and mainstream concert listings. If there’s a punk show going on in town, you can be confident Pesci either booked it or knows it's happening. The Varsity sat down with Pesci to talk about his role as a central point in Toronto's independent music scene.

THE VARSITY: How did you come to be a booker and promoter?

MP: I got started booking concerts because I was in a band. I’d trade shows with people in other bands in other cities so that when they toured they had a place to stay, and when I went on tour my band had a place to stay and people to show us around.

So after my band broke up I still got phone calls and kept doing it because I had a lot of fun. Around the same time, I was co-hosting a radio show called Equalizing Distort on CIUT, and a lot of bands would contact me that way. Back then, it was hard for a lot of bands to get into Canada legally. Working with the radio allowed us to tell little fibs to Immigration, saying that the bands were only coming in to record sessions for broadcast to

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promote their album — which they did do, but then additionally they were playing shows in the city that authorities weren’t aware of. But you know, somebody would always pitch in and help out. When we toured the States, we were touring illegally as well. So it always came back.

TV: How did you get into punk and hardcore as a fan?

MP: I grew up liking metal, and then hearing bands like Suicidal Tendencies and DRI, who sort of crossed the bridge. I had friends playing records for me over the phone and sort of opening my eyes to the underground things going on, and then from there it was really just word of mouth and trying to research things the old fashioned way. Back in the ’90s there was this thing called the Hardcore Hotline where they would have this phone number you’d call and it would tell you what shows were happening over the next month. At the end of the message there was a beep, so if you were doing a show you left a message with the information, and when they updated the machine your show would be on there. It seems so archaic now to think of, but really, I called that thing twice a week just to find out if anything was going on.

TV: What’s your favourite part of your job?

MP: My favourite part is just getting to meet and see friends. The great thing about doing what I do is that when I travel elsewhere, I can call

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somebody up, find somebody online that I’ve met, and there’s a very good chance — at least in the major cities — that I know people there, so when I travel I get to find people, and then similarly when people come to Toronto I constantly have visitors.

TV: Can you tell me about Parts and Labour, and how The Shop came to be?

MP: Matty Matheson, this chef who’s really built a reputation for himself,

enough money to warrant having live music, whether it profits or not the rest of the week. Obviously it’s better if it does profit... So the idea being four or five DJ nights allow for 10–15 live music nights… At the end of the day, I wanna work with bands I like. Even though I do this for a living, I’m not doing this for the money. The ticket money does not pay my bills. For me to work with a band, there has to be something there that I like: They’re friends of mine, or I like their record, or if it’s something

At the end of the day, I wanna work with bands I like. Even though I do this for a living, I’m not doing this for the money. was opening this big restaurant, and then somewhere in the conversation suggests we should have a room in the basement where we can have shows. And a stupid idea became a reality [laughs]. And certainly, I’m open to hearing criticism of Parts and Labour, it’s certainly warranted at times, but what people seem to neglect a lot of the time is most businesses do not leave room to build community the way Parts and Labour does. It’s not always about the bottom line.

TV: So what are the criteria for choosing which events to hold?

MP: We have our Saturday nights where we have DJs and we make

that’s completely out of left field for me, there has to be something about it that appeals to me…

TV: How have you seen the community change over time? How do you feel about the changes?

MP: I can’t even remember how long ago now, but one of the first shows I came to in Toronto, a friend and I took the GO bus up from Hamilton to see a show at Plastic Studios, which is a long defunct space at Queen and Ossington ... and not being from the city and being slightly overwhelmed … we just went to the club and waited for it to open. So we were sitting by the door and it opens up and Ewan [Exall, now with promotion compa-

ny Embrace] pops out and was like, “what are you guys doing here?” And we just told him, “we’re from Hamilton, we took the bus up.” So surely enough he chatted with us for a good 45 minutes, and 15, 20 years later he’s someone I work with and speak to just about every day.

[Now] it’s great to see people like Greg Benedetto and Ivan from School Jerks and there’s this girl Erika [Supply] booking a lot of shows… It’s great to see people picking up the work that I was doing … [there are] niche audiences where everyone has their niche, and when a certain niche isn’t being met... Greg got his start because he really liked sort of more New York style hardcore ... something that, aside from a couple exceptions, I’m not really into. I got to know him because he was like “Hey, I’m doing these shows, can you help me at all with finding a venue here or there”... And Erika, she does a more crusty style of punk, which nobody has been doing in Toronto for probably five years, if not longer. So it’s great to see people saying, “There’s something missing that I can do myself, and there’s a community here to help me if I need it.” And everybody’s friends, everybody clashes at times, but it’s this idea of passing the baton, and you’re always connected to it. You’re connected through history, you’re connected through community. But it’s also this idea that if you’re 40-years-old and booking diy punk shows ... it’s probably not a good thing.

Sleeping with strangers A brief guide to travel networking

Article by Colt St. George | Illustration by Janice Liu

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oo often I hear of people who want to travel but forgo the impulse simply because they’re afraid to go alone. This is sad; very sad, considering solo travel can be more convenient, more affordable, and far more rewarding than a trip taken with friends. Though you’ll go alone, it’s likely that you’ll seldom ever be alone — unless you really want to be. It boils down to knowing your options. Understand that no matter where you are headed, there are easy ways to meet other people who share your desire to roam, and locals who are ready to enhance your understanding of culture and place. Without further ado, here are some tips on tapping into the worldwide network of the hospitable and the adventurous: The CouchSurfing Revolution The website that everybody knows about, but few truly make the most of. Admittedly, the thought of sleeping in a snoring stranger’s dingy bachelor apartment can be a little scary. Then again, so can the thought of a stranger sleeping in your dingy bachelor apartment. Thankfully, couchsurfing.org’s thorough user review and reference system can really take the edge off, and make for a fab-

ulous experience. This is providing you’re considerate, don’t feel entitled to anything but a half-decent place to crash free of charge, and treat anything extra as a bonus. Most hosts don’t have room for more than one person, so surfing is best done alone.

The site isn’t just a means for accommodation either. There are tons of cs users who aren’t hosting or surfing at all, but use the area-specific forums simply to meet up with others for a hang-out, whether they’re both on the road or not. This aspect is occasionally taken to the next level by user-created events. For example, a recent event called for throngs of CouchSurfers in Bali to rendezvous at the Denpasar McDonald’s to kick off St. Patrick’s Day Festivities. Though I can’t think of a worse way to spend one’s time in Indonesia than at McDonald’s, the point is that so long as you’ve got Internet, you’ve got CouchSurfing: a worldwide community of potentially cool people celebrating trust and traveler camaraderie.

The Mutual Friend The obvious all-pervasive realm of Facebook should not be taken for granted. A simple status update stating that I had just moved to Berlin put me in touch with a close friend’s identical twin sister who I’d never met, but who had settled in the city

a few months before me. She, in turn, introduced me to some young expatriates taking an intro to German language course run by anti-capitalists. Next thing I knew, I was attending vegetarian potlucks in Berlin’s coziest anarchist housing projects.

Let your friends know where you’re going, when you’re going, and ask them if they know anyone living or traveling there. It’s effortless, and absolutely worth a shot.

The Backpacker Hostel Staying in a hostel is the easiest way to meet other travelers abroad, so long as you don’t opt to sleep in a private room. Private rooms are pricey and solitary. The dorms have bunk beds full of lonesome travelers looking to make friends, to split the cost of a taxi, and to party. The best hostels are rarely the most expensive, and the majority offer unconventional organized pub-crawls if you want to spend your Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights getting hammered with your roommates.

All it takes is enough courage for a “Hey, how’s it going?” and chances are, you’ve got a new pal.

Some of these friendships might only last a day, but if you keep in touch (i.e. add them on Facebook) they may well last a lifetime. I’ve stayed for free all over Europe with

the people I shared dorms with while backpacking through Southeast Asia. Then I’ve met their friends, who added me on CouchSurfing or Facebook, thereby expanding their network and mine.

Hostelbookers.com is a trusted budget travel network to book through. They don’t charge booking fees, and offer in-depth user reviews. Booking with Hostelbookers is often cheaper than booking through the hostels themselves — especially if it’s a last-minute reservation.

The NGO Volunteering abroad is an increasingly popular option for those seeking an experience beyond the sights. You’ll volunteer alongside likeminded individuals and be immersed in aspects of culture that may otherwise be inaccessible.

There are countless networks advertising unique volunteer opportunities in just about every country in the world. The challenge, however, is finding one that isn’t a gimmick. An expensive program fee or a rigorous travel itinerary often indicates that you’re signing up for an adventure tour, rather than applying for a volunteering position. Program fees will of course vary on the basis of their location

(for example, accommodations will be more expensive in Costa Rica than in Cambodia), so get a breakdown of costs and compare it with others. Application fees and onetime donations are standard.

Try to find grassroots organizations and book directly through them instead of companies like sta Travel, which charge hefty additional fees for their middleman services. But read up to make sure that your charity of choice is indeed legitimate and not exploitive, i.e. isn’t profiting by treating orphans as a tourist attraction.

The Subtle Beauty of Networking Naturally When prearranged meetings become routine, the backpacker party trail leaves you feeling unfulfilled, and Facebook feeds make it seem like you never left home at all ­— it’s time to unplug. There is a certain freedom in traveling without a computer or smart-anything and blazing your own trail.

It gives the many experiences you’re bound to stumble upon a special sense of authenticity, as though you were the only traveler in the world — a delightful delusion. But if you should ever need to reconnect, an Internet café is never all that far away.

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Finding the right piece

Tracing the international connections behind vintage fashion’s supply chain

Article by SOFIA LUU | Photos by BERNARDA GOSPIC

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trendy polyester dress sits on a hanger right in front of a dozen dresses in the exact same style. You take an immediate liking to it, because it looks like something you saw on the runway. Only this will cost you a mere $24.99, rather than $2,499. Paris is the inspiration, but the tag says it’s made in Indonesia. Without even thinking about it, you push aside the dresses and pick out your size. There’s no need to try it on — this is your fifteenth or so time shopping here. You hastily walk over to the checkout before the line gets too long. In front of you, another shopper is clutching the exact same dress. She’s probably only buying it because her best friend wore it a few nights ago. This is fast fashion, and it is what it is: simple, cheap, and disposable.

Vintage fashion is nothing like fast fashion.

There is a unique, even thrilling, experience associated with vintage fashion that you simply can’t achieve with fast fashion. Each piece of clothing hanging on the racks in a vintage store is there for a reason. It’s a labour of love, a result of a vintage picker’s hard work searching for the perfect 1920s beaded gown. Vintage clothing has origins that are much more complicated — and often mysterious — than one could possibly imagine.

In Toronto, there are over 30 stores dedicated to vintage clothing and accessories. Thirty is just a rough estimate, with new spots frequently opening and many multipurpose shops incorporating vintage clothing into their stock.

Many associate Toronto vintage with Kensington Market, but it doesn’t stop there. Most of Toronto’s vintage community exists outside Kensington Market’s boundaries, in neighbourhoods located in Toronto’s west and east end, where rent is cheap and large spaces are still available.

I. It can be difficult to define vintage, as the term is often used to describe a certain movement or aesthetic. For a piece of clothing to be termed ‘vintage’ it must be made before the 1990s. However, the fashion community has recently placed ’90s grunge under the very broad umbrella of vintage. Most importantly, vintage clothing speaks to quality. There is a reason why a 1950s cocktail dress costs $150. It’s because it has over 50 years of life. Back then, clothes were made with quality — not quantity— in mind.

Charlie Irani of Queen Street West boutique 69 Vintage is quick to point out that people often assume vintage is

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While Toronto might not be particularly fashion forward in comparison to the major players like New York, London, Milan, and Paris, many consider it one of the best places to acquire vintage clothing. just a synonym for secondhand and thrift shop clothing. This is just one of the many misconceptions that can cause hesitation towards making the leap over to purchasing vintage. While some thrift store purchases can be vintage, vintage clothing is not thrift per se.

II. Vintage store are diverse in their own right. One store might specialize in fancy prom and party dresses, whereas another might sell Canadiana-inspired work wear. In contrast, Value Village tends to group different types of clothes together. A $6.99 silk blouse at Value Village will most likely be stuffed right next to a row of identical generic brand collared shirts, all going for $1.99 apiece.

With vintage clothing stores, a lot of behind-the-scenes curation that goes on before the clothes make it onto the selling floor.

A combination of media promotion and the accessibility offered by e-commerce websites like Etsy and eBay has led to vintage being considered a trend of its own.

Now, it’s a common sight for magazines to boldly declare ‘vintage Levi’s cutoffs’ as a must-have item for the next season. Contemporary fashion designers tend to delve into the past as points of inspiration for upcoming collections. For instance, it was clear that the oversized flannels and little slip dresses of Hedi Slimane’s fall collection for Saint Laurent Paris were heavily influenced by 1990s California grunge.

III. While Toronto might not be particularly fashion forward in comparison to major players like New York, London, Milan, and Paris, many consider it one of the best places to acquire vintage clothing. Irani says that Torontonians “know how to respect and take care of their clothes,” a sentiment echoed by Colleen Ramage, co-owner of Parkdale store Philistine.

The vintage clothing supply chain is nothing like the fast fashion supply chain. For fast fashion companies, clothes

go through various levels of production before ending up in the customer’s hands. This process is both environmentally exhaustive and expensive — which is why some stores make you pay nearly $50 for something as simple as a white t-shirt. It’s more difficult to map out the exact origins of vintage clothing.

Throughout the gta, there are a number of so-called rag houses located in unassuming industrial neighbourhoods. According to Ramage, these rag houses are independent companies what specialize in “importing clothes from Central America, Europe, and Africa,” regions where the demand for vintage fashion isn’t as intense as here in Toronto.

These clothes arrive at the unmarked warehouses by the truck-full. The few buyers and pickers who have access to these rag houses are then tasked with sifting through mountains of clothing. Not every piece is vintage. Even if a piece is vintage, one must look for serious damage and other signs of wear and tear. Buyers and pickers are well versed in separating valuable vintage from clothes that are simply used. You can spend hours sorting through tons of clothing, only to leave the rag house with a small bag full of men’s sweaters.

The exact locations of these rag houses from which stores like Philistine and 69 Vintage pick clothes remain a highlyguarded secret. Irani, who has been working at 69 Vintage for almost a year and has quite the keen eye for vintage, explains that Kealan Sullivan, the store’s owner, is the sole picker and buyer for both 69 Vintage and its high-end counterpart, V by 69 Vintage. Due to the super competitive nature of vintage clothing and the declining supply of ‘good’ vintage, the last thing any vintage buyer wants to do is reveal their sources.

Jessica, who asked to be identified under a pseudonym, is a picker for an established vintage store in Europe, and is one of the few people in Toronto who has access to these warehouses on a daily basis. On a typical day, she can pick anywhere from 100 to 150 pounds of clothing. Before the clothes are shipped back to Europe, they must be sorted into varying groups based on style and quality.

Just a week ago, Jessica returned from a trip to Houston, where she spent a week picking for the store. Despite the change of environment, she claims, “no matter where you go, you see the same kind of product. Except, in Toronto, there is a lot more Blue Jays merchandise.” This is a clear indicator that special vintage finds are becoming more rare as vintage fashion enters the mainstream. In an effort to stay ahead of the pack, Jessica’s store has started to source some of their clothing from countries such as Nicaragua and India.

69 Vintage doesn’t really scour the globe in search for quality vintage; however, Irani tells me that “[Kealan] does go to America for the Levi’s and the ‘really special’ Americana pieces that are difficult to get here in Canada.” For 69 Vintage, the supposedly declining supply of vintage hasn’t set off any alarm bells yet. As of right now, Toronto’s (and America’s) vintage is serving them just fine.

IV. It’s clear that rag houses are vital in the used clothing supply circuit, but they’re not the only way of acquiring vintage.

Many believe a vintage clothing store is simply a platform

for good thrift shoppers to sell their Value Village finds, but one cannot expect to run a sustainable business on thrift finds alone. Ramage does venture over to the local thrift shop every once in a while, but she deems the searches there to be a little bit “unfruitful.” Time is money, and having to go to Value Village with hopes of finding profitable vintage is a task that requires too much effort for a small gain. Similarly, Ramage also takes trips out to smaller communities where estate sales, sweater drives, and flea markets are common occurrences — but, like thrifting, it’s not a sustainable business practice.

V. To the outsider looking in, vintage clothing can be indistinguishable from things you might buy at H&M and Urban Outfitters. It’s hard not to take the easy way out by purchasing ‘vintage-inspired’ garments from clothing retailers. But fast fashion doesn’t come with the history that’s associated with vintage clothing. You can’t go into an H&M and ask the sales associate about the history of the pile of graphic tshirts folded neatly on the table, because chances are, there is no history.

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Mechanical mind meld How brain machines could change healthcare and computing Article by KATRINA VOGAN | Illustration by WENDY GU

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s people become increasingly ‘plugged in’ to the wired world, it’s not uncommon to hear people joke about being surgically-attached to their device of choice. The image at the heart of the joke is old; the idea of a fusion between man and the mechanical exists in folklore that predates the oldest computer — think of ancient Jewish stories of golems, or even the figure of Prometheus in Greek mythology. In the modern age, these stories were reintroduced through the figures of robots and cyborgs. Recent technology in the medical sciences has realized this interconnection between the electronic and biological in way that has the potential to be gamechanging. Devices known as Brain Computer Interfaces (bci) could revolutionize limb replacement and prosthetics.

These interfaces, which are also known as Brain-Machine Interfaces (bmi), Mind-Machine Interfaces (mmi), or Direct Neural Interfaces (dni), are devices that use signals from the brain to control electronics. The science behind bcis is widely interdisciplinary, incorporating elements of psychology, biology, computer science, and engineering. They are most commonly researched by teams led by biomedical engineers and neuropsychologists. Prosthetics are devices that replace or supplement a non-functioning or absent body part. Neural prosthetics, or neuroprosthetics, are prosthetic devices which are controlled by electric signals sent by the body.

These electric prosthetics can serve as a refinement of traditional artificial limbs — neuroprosthetic limb replacements are in development — but also include new technologies, like cochlear implants. Cochlear implants, also known by the slightly more sci-fi nickname ‘bionic ears,’ can provide some sense of hearing to people who suffer from severe hearing loss or deafness due to a damaged inner ear. Unlike traditional hearing aids, which simply amplify sounds so that they can be perceived, a cochlear implant bypasses inner ear damage to directly stimulate the auditory nerve.

Though the terms ‘bci’ and ‘neural prosthetic’ are occasionally used interchangeably, bcis are more accurately identified as a sub-

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type of neural prosthetics. Whereas a neural prosthetic could technically be attached to any appropriate nerve cluster, a bci is, as the name implies, connected only to nerve clusters in the brain.

The word ‘neural’ in neural prosthetics literally means “of the nerves.” For humans, the nervous system is the system by which information is transmitted. Individual nerves are long strings of axons or fibres. These fibres are the appendages of neuron cells, specialized cells that can transmit information electrically to the network that is the human body. Scientists can detect these electrical signals and are capable of determining what information various signals carry. bcis work through the interaction of an electrode with a neuron cluster. These electrodes then interpret and send the electric signals from the neuron to the device. A neural prosthetic essentially connects the biological network with an electrical network; it represents a fusion of biology and hardware.

Though certain neural prosthetics, like the cochlear implants discussed above, are already in active use among the general population, the field is constantly expanding; new techniques and devices are rapidly developing. There is a no-

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ticeable progression in the field.

In 2008, Nature reported that a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh had successfully implanted a complex bci in two monkeys. The team, led by Andrew Schwartz, created a robotic arm designed to imitate realistic movement, and implanted electrodes in the monkey’s motor cortex. This area of the brain controls movement in mammals. After a training process, both monkeys were able to successfully manipulate a robotic arm to retrieve food and feed themselves when prevented from using their biological arms. The experiment was considered a success in part because of the dexterity the each monkey achieved with their bci arm.

When Nature asked Schwartz about the possibility of testing his procedure on humans he was optimistic. “I think we’ll be doing this on an experimental basis in two years,” he said, though he did add that he believed it would take longer before the procedure would be tested on a person with disabilities.

In January of this year, Nature reported that Schwartz had led another research team in a project that implanted two microelectrodes into the brain of a woman who was paralysed in all four limbs. The electrodes were con-

nected to a neural prosthetic arm.

Less than two weeks after the surgery, the woman began training with the arm, and within 13 weeks could grasp and move objects at speeds comparable to a person without disabilities.

Schwartz’s work and other similar experiments represent the necessary first steps before medical science can achieve the wider application and adoption of bmi technologies and procedures.

Though these developments represent a definite advancement of the science of bmis, complications result from the sheer novetly of these experiments. The relatively rapid emergence of new techniques might keep things interesting, but the development and refinement of these techniques present challenges. The systems themselves are quite delicate, and the procedures required to design and assemble neural prosthetics are complex. Beyond the engineering process, the surgeries that are required to properly install a bci or neural prosthetic are complicated and require the utmost precision.

In turn, these factors contribute to the cost of the devices. Even the relatively established and proven cochlear implant costs around $24,000 for the hardware alone,

and the procedure necessitates the inclusion of the additional costs of surgery and support personnel in the budget. The developers of experimental bcis incur even more expenses on top of these costs. bcis are also not without ethical controversy. Some people with disabilities find the idea of bcis or prosthetics designed to “correct” their disabilities to be fundamentally disrespectful. There are also those who question the morality of the procedure, especially given the possibility that a patient’s mood or personality might be adversely affected. bmi supporters counterargue that it is common for medical procedures to have side effects and that some of these side effects are psychological.

Still, the debate over the ethics of bcis does not overshadow the technological advancement that they represent. There are already whispers about the possibilities of commercialization: the idea that bci research might one day lead to a discovery or technique that could be incorporated into personal computing or cellular technologies. But the prospect of a mind-controlled computer hardly measures up to a concrete bci; an elegant fusion of biological and electronic networks that promises exciting developments in medical science.

Endless highway

The world’s longest road networks Article by SIMON FRANK Illustration by NATHAN WATSON We tend to think about long distance communication in terms of electronics — making a telephone call, writing an email, or chatting online. But the technologies that allow us to communicate across great distances are comparatively recent inventions. For most of human history, if you were at point A and wanted to talk to someone at point B, you would need to either go there or send a letter. Even before automobiles, roads served as crucial arteries of communication. Postal services may be declining in importance, but roads and highways still allow people and goods to move easily across countries, bringing with them new ideas, culture, or even a sense of national identity.

The following countries boast the world’s three longest road networks, including both paved and unpaved roads. Some of these roads, like India’s, have ancient origins, but most modern construction occurred in the midtwentieth century, especially in America, where highways have been romanticized through the idea of the classic road trip. China is a late but impressive entrant to the field, having undertaken massive infrastructure expansion over the past decade.

1. USA, 6,506,204 km 2. China, 4,106,387 km 3. India, 3,320,410 km Source: CIA World Factbook

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e h t g n i t t e G g n i r i f s n o r neu

The networks inside our minds Article by JOSHUA OLIVER and ROXANNE LEUNG | Illustration by WENDY GU 10

the VARSITY magazine

It’s

almost like a spark. As I put fingers to keys to write this article, and as you read and understand it, tiny electrical signals pass between synapses within our brains. Although estimates vary, some say there are around one billion neurons in the brain and up to one hundred trillion synapses between these neurons. What makes this number so staggeringly large is the fact that synapses and neurons connect with each other in many different and constantly changing ways, multiplying the total number of patterns. In an interview with The Varsity, Dr. Sheena Josselyn, a neuroscientist at U of T, quotes Richard Morris and colleagues in the Annual Review of Neuroscience: “It is a big leap from the synapse to the behaving animal — and the chasm in between is the neural network.”

These neural networks may be one of the most complex systems we know of, but recent technological advances have lead to significant advances in our understanding of the brain and how it works. Research into neural networks at U of T is helping us to understand how we learn, why we feel stress, and how to treat the causes of mental illness.

Learning and Memory

Amidst the loud music, stale beer, late-night pizza, movie marathons, and time-consuming extra-curriculars of undergrad, it’s often hard to remember that we’re actually here to learn. But as exams loom on the horizon, many of us will need a little insight into how to learn effectively — or maybe just quickly.

In the brain, learning begins as physical changes to the connectivity of individual neurons and overall neural patterns, known as synaptic memory consolidation. This important process occurs in a structure near the centre of the brain known as the hippocampus, and involves changes in the expression of proteins in the neurons within minutes of a learning episode. Over longer periods of time, memories that were first encoded in the hippocampus move into more stable, longterm storage in the pre-frontal cortex. This process is called systems consolidation. Some hypothesize that systems consolidation occurs only while we’re asleep. So pulling an all-nighter may not be the best way to cram all of European history into your head. However, getting a decent night of sleep after a long day’s studying may, in fact, help to lock that information into your neural networks.

Josselyn, a senior scientist in neurosciences and mental health at SickKids research institute and a U of T associate professor of physiology, studies learning and memory, with a focus on fear memory.

“Using a variety of different methods we have been able to identify the precise brain cells within the amygdala that store key components of a fear memory. When we selectively ablate these neurons, it is as if the fear memory is erased! We are very excited about this work and are now examining whether this general principle applies to other types of biologically important memories (such as memory of a food location, etc),” she writes.

Being able to selectively erase certain memories is amazing enough by itself, but Josselyn anticipates practical applications as well. “By being able to identify and then manipulate the small number of brain cells involved in a given memory, we hope to one day help people that either remember too much (or too vividly), such as those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). If we can identify the precise brain cells that make up this intrusive and unwanted memory, perhaps we can decrease just this memory (leaving all other memories intact).”

As for learning, Josselyn has some clear, practical advice for students, which stems from her neural expertise and experience as a professor.

“Don’t cram for an exam, study a little bit over a longer period of time. In flies, slugs, and mice, it has been clearly shown that memory is better when learning bouts are spaced apart. Ebbinghaus, one of the forefathers of psychology, noted this trial spacing effect in his own memory. Studying a little bit every day is one good piece of advice that translates from the lab to the classroom!

A second principle is attending to what is being learned. If you want to learn and remember something, don’t multi-task. Divided attention is bad for memory. We see this in the lab (and I see it when I teach in the classroom). Bottom line: in class or when studying, turn off your phone, shut down your Facebook page, and refrain from following what Lindsay Lohan is tweeting about. You will learn and remember much better.”

Stress For students, stress and learning seem unavoidably linked. From a neurophysiological point of view, however, a stressful exam season may be affecting more than your emotional state and caffeine intake.

When you’re stressed, certain hormones are released into your brain and these can negatively affect your ability to form new memories and retrieve existing ones.

One stress-related hormone, cortisol, is known to impair memory formation and retrieval, especially if there are high levels of it for long periods of time. Cortisol is known to negatively affect the functions of the pre-fontal cortex. This area of the brain is where longterm memory storage occurs, and it is also responsible for executive functions such as decision-making and working memory. Working memory, somewhat like ram on a computer, is the information that you are actively using or holding in mind at a given time. Especially when combined with decision-making, working memory is important for handling tasks such as, for example, writing three essays about Shakespeare in three hours. Cortisol in the pre-frontal cortex can also lessen your mental flexibility and reduce your ability to focus.

When you add up the effects of stress on learning and recalling knowledge, it may be more valuable to relax before your exams and between study sessions, rather than using those extra minutes to cram.

Mental Illness For many students, stress doesn’t end after the last exam. Beyond the normal demands of school, work, family, and social life, many of us must also cope with mental health issues. An estimated 3.2 million young people in Canada are at risk of mental illnesses and students are among the demographics most at risk.

Mental illness is widely studied but not well understood. Researchers can detect structural and neuronal changes in the brain that characterize different disorders, but have little insight into causes and remedies. At present, most mental health treatments focus on mitigating symptoms, and are only effective in a portion of cases. For example, only about 50 per cent of patients with major depressive disorder find treatment helpful.

Dr. Roger McIntyre, a professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at U of T, studies persistent mood disorders. In an email interview with The Varsity, he explained some of the flaws in current mental health treatment, and how his work is offering new alternatives.

“Available treatments for depression and dementia are not ‘disease modifying,’ because they do not target the pathology but suppress the symptoms. We hope our work provides a disease modifying treatment and possible prevention for mood and degenerative disorders and possibly a cure.”

McIntyre is currently studying the role of insulin in the brain. Insulin is usually associated with diabetes, but it is also active in the brain — affecting learning, memory, cell survival, and cell death. McIntyre emphasizes the link between insulin’s role in diabetes and the brain.

“It is better to prevent problems from the beginning rather than treating them after they have started, and we also believe that younger people, by living healthier lifestyles and avoiding diabetes and insulin resistance, would be at lower risk of developing depression and dementing disorders, since we know that metabolic problems [such as diabetes] cause [them].”

McIntyre’s work has also shown that administering insulin in the brain via nasal inhalation could be an effective treatment for the cause of these disorders, going beyond merely mitigating symptoms.

Overall, the field of neuroscience is only beginning to explore the endless possibilities of the brain and to what magnitude it affects one’s wellbeing. “Technological advances have allowed us for the first time to answer some very fundamental questions about how the brain works,” writes Josselyn.

When asked what he saw as frontiers for neuroscience in the near future, McIntyre had a lot to say about the dizzying potential of this field: “Major advances will be elucidating intracellular mechanism, mediating brain disease, characterizing brain circuits, and understanding more fully the interrelationship of how physical health affects the brain.” Josselyn concluded more simply, “It’s an exciting time to be a neuroscientist!”

MARCH 25, 2013

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Mistaken culinary identity

Croatian food and its rich regional influences

“H

ow can you even call yourself Croatian?” was a question I was greeted with nearly every time I had to divulge the details of my diet to family friends as a child and teenager. Constantly interrogated, for many years I absolutely hated eating at functions or in someone else’s home. The concept of vegetarianism confused my parents’ friends, who simply could not comprehend my distaste for the food that they so adored. If I was lucky, they’d offer me bowls of chips to munch on in the tv room, for it was a rare

occasion that I’d actually be seated at the dining room table. Having an entire spit-roasted lamb or pig on the table really grossed me out, but since then I’ve learned to accept the overbearing smell of Croatian dietary staples.

In retrospect, it was silly of them to think that food could define just how ethnically-relevant you can be.

I went to Saturday language school, sang and danced folklore, and even played the organ in Croatian church.

But as soon as someone found out that I didn’t eat meat, well, I was deemed a truly Canadian kid who

probably didn’t give a damn about my parents’ heritage. Little did they know, I loved eating every other dish within Croatian culinary culture that my parents had brought with them to Canada.

My mama found ways of catering to my lacto-ovo sensibilities while still staying true to the meatheavy cuisine of the Southeastern European country. She simply made traditional desserts, albeit much more often than the average Croatian woman.

A trip to Europe when I was 19 was an eye-opening experience for

Article and photos by BERNARDA GOSPIC

me for loads of reasons. I started to broaden my dietary horizons and notice dishes that overlapped with Croatian food. While staying in a small town in the Austrian province of Styria, I tried something rather familiar called a knödel. Then in Bosnia, I had something called sirnica, which was known to me as burek. I thought, whoa, Croatian food is everywhere! Brate, was I ever mistaken.

Croatia’s geographical location lends itself to influences that stretch across the Adriatic, just over the Drava, and way past the Danube.

K

nedle (bottom left) are plum-filled potato dumplings that are served as a sweet dish, often eaten as a desserty dinner. Although the spelling is different, they are typical components in the kitchens of Central Europe, popular with the Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Poles, Bosnians, Serbs, Slovenes, Hungarians and Ukrainians, not to mention the Croats.

P

alačinke (top and bottom centre) are a perennial favourite all across the Slavic language speaking world, as well as Central Europe. The first time I had heard of someone else knowing what these delicious, crêpe-like pancakes were was when my Polish friend, Maggie, came to my house and saw that my mom was making “naleśniki!” They can be filled with anything your heart desires, but are traditionally rolled with plum, apricot or

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Because of this, each region enjoys its own culinary traditions. For example, Dalmatian cooking touches upon Italian and French kitchens, whereas Slavonians rely heavily upon Hungarian and Austrian culinary styles. My favourite part of ‘Croatian’ food is obviously the dessert portion of every menu. This can be attributed to my stubbornness and my affinity for sweets, but I’ve happily learned to live with it. And to all those geezers who made me feel badly about not being Croatian enough, have you looked at what’s on your dinner plate?

rosehip jam, or with sugar and ground walnuts. If you wanna get crazy, grab some Nutella or Eurocrem.

B

urek are known as sirnica in Bosnia and burek sa sirom in Croatia and Serbia.

This baked pastry (top left and right) most likely originated from what is now modern Turkey. Burek is a staple in the cuisines of many countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire, especially in Northern Africa and the Balkans. The cheese pie, however, was perfected in Bosnia and is very popular in the cuisines of former Yugoslavian republics. If you come from one of these households, you know it’s going to be a good day when you see phyllo dough stretched across an entire kitchen table.

Rolled with cottage cheese, these spirals are a savoury treat that can also be made with spinach and potatoes. Dobar tek!

Artwork by MINHEE BAE

MARCH 25, 2013

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Sik h

Kn ow led

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n illo h D na e l Se

Article by DAMANJIT LAMBA | Photos by MICHAEL CHAHLEY

Parents, community, hip hop For Punjabi rappers in the GTA where you’re from is important, but so is where you’re going

Y

ou may not be aware of it, but there’s a new music scene on the rise in Toronto, one that’s been taking shape since the late 2000s. Second- and third-generation Punjabi youth in Canada and the gta have been paving the way for an Indian rap scene without any real precedent. If you bring up the topic of Punjabi rappers to the average Torontonian, they’ll likely respond with quizzical expressions, unaware that desis even dabble in the art form. You can roughly trace the movement back to the summer of 2008, when the now defunct partially-Indian Brooklyn rap group Das Racist rose to viral fame with “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Around the same time in Toronto, albeit on a smaller scale, R&B vocalist Selena Dhillon, and her close colleague, MC/spoken word artist Humble the Poet, began independently releasing their own self-recorded tracks through social media channels. These little sprinklings of talent slowly gained steam, creating a network of Punjabi musicians that frequently collaborate with one another on projects addressing the social and cultural issues closest to them. They hail from all across Canada, and credit Toronto’s diversity for cultivating their movement. These artists are diverse, but to quote Dhillon, they’re united by a shared “work ethic, hunger, and a passion to get their music out there.”

A relatively new member of the scene, but already vital to its longevity, is Kanwar Anit Singh Saini, a producer/DJ who makes beats under the moniker Sikh Knowledge. Working and living in Toronto for the past six months, Saini grew up and made a name for himself on the streets of Montréal. He based his decision to test out a new city on several factors: “Montréal was cool but I’d have to say, it was really electro, soul, and funk oriented. Toronto has that red, gold, and green West Indies vibe to it and that’s totally me. That’s a big part of my influence, so I jar well with a lot of what’s going on over here musically.” Amrit Tung, a colleague of Dhillon and Saini, is better known as the rapper Noyz and for his status as a member of the new rap collective, Zoo Babies. Tung is a well-established local who values his suburban roots: “I grew up in Mississauga and Brampton. Both places are very multicultural and home to a lot of newcomers and immigrant families, so I had friends from many different backgrounds. It taught me to be accepting of everyone regardless of what they look like or where

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the VARSITY magazine

they come from.” Dhillon also grew up in Brampton, known for having one of the largest South Asian populations in North America. “Brampton has a lot of South Asians, but it didn’t hinder me in any way, it definitely opened gateways to get involved and familiarize myself with certain groups. For example, the rapper B Magic didn’t live too far from me, and he’s actually really good friends with my brother, so I’ve known him much longer as a friend than as a musical collaborator. It’s a huge community, and I’ve definitely benefited from that.” parental support All three artists grew up conscious of the stereotype that South Asian parents discourage their children from pursuing a career in the arts. Strike up a conversation with any South Asian kid in the gta, and you’re bound to hear a few stories detailing an early love for the arts that either faded because their parents exuded disinterest, or insisted that such activities remain in the realm of casual hobbies. Revisiting the experiences of these three musicians, it’s clear that there’s no set pattern to help measure how any South Asian family might respond to one’s legitimate pursuit of a musical career. For instance, Dhillon happily rehashed details of her history with music. Her parents have been extremely supportive ever since she belted out Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song” at the age of four. Dhillon’s father didn’t take a conventional career route growing up — he played professional soccer — and so, with a good grasp on the courage it takes to follow your dreams, he encouraged Dhillon to do the same.

Saini and Tung on the other hand, revealed that their families initially viewed the music industry as a risky endeavour. However, both of them kept at it until their parents realized how happy music made them. The bonus of bragging rights that came with local exposure also worked in their favour. Tung recalls that his parents were unable to comprehend his place in music until they saw him in his true element on stage: “After that, they were supportive and encouraged me to pursue whatever opportunities I could, but I still don’t think they see art as a viable career. I’ve been doing music while still going to university and fulfilling all my responsi-

bilities at school, which probably makes my involvement in music easier for them to tolerate. I haven’t been in a situation where music is the only thing I’m doing in life, so I don’t know if they would support me to the same extent if that was the case.”

Saini shares a more humourous perspective on the road to acceptance in a traditional South Asian household, offering a critique of South Asian communities that instantly go on the offensive when they are met with the unfamiliar: “I feel like South Asian parents are often ‘attention-whores,’ so if they can get attention from the ‘community’ about something in a positive way, they won’t question it. In my case, I dropped out of engineering for music. But the irony is that our heritage and upbringing as people with a Sikh heritage and of Punjabi background is to inherently say ‘fuck you’ to whatever stands in our way.

“I said ‘fuck you’ to everything and I did it. Of course they were scared, and there was a lot of static from close family and friends for what I did, but I did it anyway. As soon as they started getting peripheral attention from what I was doing, for whatever reason, it was suddenly okay for them, which is a double standard. At the same time, I know they just want me to be happy, and they saw me so much happier in that milieu as opposed to whatever path I was previously following, so that was good for them as well.” more than bhangra All three artists understandably cautious about paying allegiance to any one community, especially since their influences are not limited to Punjabi forms of music. Dhillon admits she didn’t really listen to Punjabi artists or bhangra growing up, instead spending her days surrounded by soul, R&B, and jazz. Saini, however, grew up heavily involved in his community, going to a gurdwara (Sikh temple) with his parents. As a kid at his local temple, Saini took part in kirtans. Kirtans involve chanting religious hymns with accompanying instruments such as harmoniums and tablas. But there was a heavy hand behind his involvement, which over time made the practice distasteful to him: “There were keeners that were way more into it and turned me off from the whole competitive kirtan vibe. At one point I remember as kids, it was a big deal

who knew the most hymns and one kid knew 100 hymns, but 70 of them were in the same melody. It was just very ugly to me.

Although I loved it, l left it alone.”

Tung also didn’t grow up with a strong awareness of mainstream Punjabi artists, apart from the few playback singers that dominated the Bollywood film industry. Instead, he relied on his older cousins for guidance in the world of Western pop and hip hop. “I would always go through their CD’s and cassettes when I visited them and borrowed the newest album they got, or whatever cover artwork caught my eye. I started writing because I loved the music and wanted to try my own hand at it.” Similarly, Saini credits older family members for exposing him to hip hop: “I have siblings that are much older than I am, so growing up I was always bombarded with mixtapes and new hip hop and reggae as a kid.

I went to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour in grade three. My sisters took me to that, so I was always very lucky that way. And so it was quite natural for me to think about these things all the time. I had mixtapes in my pocket regularly as a kid and I was beatboxing on my way to school. It’s just the way it was.”

The most striking fact about these musicians is that they are all self-taught. Beyond some important early influences, inspiration wasn’t necessarily forthcoming from close family and friends, but they’ve managed to emerge fully-formed and independent. This quality may account for their hesitance to stick to a single genre of music, or make music solely aimed at the Indian diaspora. Dhillon reiterates not wanting to box herself in a particular culture or religion: “My music does have a political aspect to it, but it carries through with the other work I do. I am currently doing my masters in International Affairs and I spent a couple months in South Africa with a grassroots organization last year, so again, I’m a voice for those that are not privileged. I have been speaking to the South Asian community with more recent songs like ‘Bang Bang,’ but I hope to cater to more groups, to break out of that single mold.”

Saini also insists that his music has a universal appeal: “It’s really meant for anyone who can get down to it. It’s nice that my fanbase is pan-cultural. There is a South Asian appeal to it, but when I make something I try to make sure you can nod your

I have my stuff that I do on the side that is heavily Punjabiinfluenced. But other than that, my roots, my foundations, are old-school hip hop and oldschool reggae.

—Sikh Knowledge

head to it regardless. Of course I have my stuff that I do on the side that is heavily Punjabi-influenced. But other than that, my roots, my foundations, are old-school hip hop and old-school reggae.”

Tung also cites old school, confessional-style hip hop as a major influence in his writing, especially east coast acts like Wu-Tang, Nas, The Fugees, and The Roots. These Punjabi musicians grew up listening to their musical heroes, evolving in a sort of vacuum in which they gradually learned and perfected their craft. community helps — and hurts Being labelled a Punjabi artist creates mixed feelings for this sampling of the desi movement. Association with a genre can feel limiting, but then again there is constant demand for their brand of music. The Punjabi community is small enough that word will spread quickly, and these artists can be assured of a dedicated audience for their work. Tung’s latest project, Zoo Babies, made up of himself, plus members Villa, Young Fateh, B Magic, and Babbu, is a prime example of the countless opportunities available in the scene: “Zoo Babies initially came together when a mutual friend to us all asked us to make a song for his birthday, ‘Supreme Duffle Bag.’ A lot of the lyrics contain references about him and inside

jokes that only our friends would understand. The song was never meant to be taken seriously, but when we put it out, people seemed to really like the track and our group dynamic. The song generated over 250,000 views on YouTube, so we decided to put more effort towards making music as a collective and just have fun with it.” Tung claims this network has been advantageous in the sense that he’s become friends with incredibly talented individuals, their shared Punjabi heritage aside. Dhillon likewise points to the fact that the demand for their music is a huge motivation for her to keep going.

The community has provided her with many opportunities for collaboration: “I haven’t put anything out in almost a year, which drives me a little crazy. I’ve been working on my latest project over the last year. There is definitely a hunger for it, a lot of people want the music. Even if I’m not putting my stuff out there, I can still feature on other tracks. Last year, I only put out a couple of tracks on my own, but I had the opportunity to feature on Degrees of Freedom, Tung’s album, which in my opinion is a masterpiece.”

Acquiring an audience overseas is also easier when one is tagged along with this budding movement. Dhillon and Saini are happy to share that the response from the South Asian communities in the UK, Australia, and the US has been very promising, and fans far from Toronto are really paying attention to their development.

Tung agrees, stating, “We often connect with what is most familiar to us, which is why I feel we’ve been able to generate so much support from the South Asian diaspora.”

Although support has been monumental, the community label is a double-edged sword, and clear disadvantages arise when assumptions swoop in about these musicians being the voice for all South Asians. As an openly queer Sikh man, Saini has come up against members of the Sikh community that resent the presence of ‘Sikh’ in his stage name. Saini used the metaphor of a mob to convey the negative effects that come with cutting off from the possibility of multiple identities: “It works to my disadvantage because you’re constantly trying to convince the mob of who you are. If the mob doesn’t agree with you, you might feel their

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MARCH 25, 2013

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Dance and dedication The connections created between teammates and rivals at the North American Culture Show

Article by ISHITA PEKTAR | Photos by BERNARDA GOSPIC

T

he end of February marks the beginning of a flurry of nerves, endless sleepless nights, and intense practice for South Asian Alliance Dance teams across Ontario. In anticipation of one of the biggest inter-university dance competitions in Canada, these teams have been preparing for months for their chance to take home the title of champion and the $5,000 prize that comes with it.

This is the North American Culture Show (nacs).

The nacs is a show of tremendous size and proportion. The 10 competing teams, comprised of 30 people each, are mostly old hats at this game. Teams from Brock, Guelph-Humber, McMaster-Mohawk, Ottawa-Carleton, Ryerson-George Brown, University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, UOIT-DC, Waterloo-Laurier, and YorkSeneca participate. The rules are straightforward: each school must portray a theme in their 10 minute performance. No props.

No sets. And most importantly, the dances must fit into four different genres: Bhangra, Bollywood, Classical Indian, and Fusion. Simple enough, right?

That’s what I thought too.

When I auditioned for the University of Toronto St. George team in my first year, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Sure, it was a dance competition, but how intense could it really be? By

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the time the competition swung around, I no longer suffered from any such delusions. nacs was intense, nacs was what we were dancing our hearts out for, and as the underdogs, nacs was our opportunity to shine.

This year, things went a little differently. For the first time, the University of Toronto decided that strength was in unity, students from all three campuses joining to create one powerhouse: Team U of T. As a choreographer, I knew the game was upped — schools were expecting big things from us, and we planned on bringing it.

By this time, I was well-acquainted with the strange cult-like following the nacs inspires, in some cases being the sole reason for a student to take a fifth or sometimes sixth year of undergrad.

With even alumni dancing on the team, there was no question that we wanted to win.

We started pulling all-night rehearsals a little after reading week. There came a point where I began to dream about when I had actually had time in between classes and dance for something else. But there was a f lip side. If the nacs had become my life, then so had my team.

Going through this trial of fire together, we formed a bond over our shared love of dance and our desire to win. Within the team, I found a group of like-minded individuals devoted to dance,

some of whom were part of external dance organizations and companies. Entering the competition on March 8, I knew that no matter how we placed, I had built a strong network of people in the dance world that I could rely on. nacs itself was a larger-thanlife experience. While we ended up placing fifth, we won ‘Best Artistic Design’ and ‘Best Theme.’

However, what really stood out to me this time was the strong display of interconnectedness that was evident between the teams.

Although rivals, veteran dancers knew other dancers from different schools, and even cheered each other on. I was approached by a student from York at the end of the nacs, awwwsking if I wanted to be part of a team he was putting together for another competition at the end of June. This sense of camaraderie pervaded the entire event, and even extended to the judges, professionals in the dance world, with whom students could network with in the future.

The platform the nacs provides for students to foray into the professional dance sphere, connect with talented students at other schools, and create lasting bonds within a university itself, is undeniable. In the end, it’s about so much more than the dance or what you win — it’s also about the people you meet and the relationships you form.

When I auditioned for the University of Toronto St. George team in my first year, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Sure, it was a dance competition, but how intense could it really be?

I interviewed two veteran dancers, Tahir Ali Rana and Kishan Chouhan, from Team U of T, to further exploring the kinship that the nacs creates.

THE VARSITY: Do you see nacs as connecting people, both within and in between teams?

TAHIR ALI RANA: Within a team, you have 30 dancers ... and they have to spend practically almost the whole school year together, and they have a common goal, and they know that they have to build towards that goal together and that each of them is an elementary part of that production. It connects them in that sense that each of them are dependent on one another, and it connects them in that everyone is in different years of study so you come to realize that you’re there to dance.

But there’s other foundations from which people can seek assistance ...

you take more away from it than you initially assume to.

KISHAN CHOUHAN: Well, within a team I believe you definitely build a unity. Definitely closer to the competition where [practices run] after classes, or even into the next morning you really get a sense of family with your team. With other teams, there are events such as socials and formals where you get to mix and mingle as well as the competition itself...

TV: How do you see networks being formed within the competition?

TAR: A lot of students who participate in this organization are actually from certain dance teams. By interacting with those individuals, they’re able to recognize your talents as a dancer, and they are able to look to you ... if they have competitions outside of nacs, if they have gigs or performances where they

need additional dancers. There was the halftime show for the Raptors where a lot of dancers from many different campuses got together and created the halftime performance.

Personally speaking, [with] last year’s Bollywood judge Puja Amin ... this year we went to her seeking costume rentals for the show... You get recognized being on that stage, and you get to meet and introduce yourself to these judges... You’re creating a profile for yourself as an excellent dancer and getting recognized for that.

KC: Definitely, since I have been in this competition for five years, I have had the opportunity to network with some judges. They would notice the work that I did, and they would contact me and ask me to help them or dance with them... Specifically last year the classical judge had a gig she needed dancers for, and she called upon our school... It was a great way to network and to get further opportunities because she still is in contact with me for other shows, to the point where she is able to fund professional classes to brush up on the dances for her shows, which is really nice...

Also with other South Asian people in the gta, [nacs] definitely brings you together and makes you more aware that ... there are a lot of other people, and you get to find out where you fit in. Networks always impact your life... I believe you are nobody without the people you know because they inevitably will get you where you want to be.

MARCH 25, 2013

17

Outside the homeland, inside the community?

From Mumbai to Toronto, Parsi identity is no simple matter Article by MURAD HEMMADI | Illustration by NANCY JI

T

he Parsi story starts with an exodus. My ancestors left Persia a thousand years ago, fleeing religious persecution, and finding a new home in the coastal trading cities of the Indian subcontinent.

The exoduses of Parsis have continued since that first move. “The Parsis in the 1800s — more than the other Gujarati people, more than the other Bombay people, more than other Indians­­— travelled around the British colonies in the world for work because they were more skilled,” explains professor Enrico Raffaelli, who teaches courses on Zoroastrian history and culture at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga and St. George campuses. “And that movement was even more noticeable in the 1900s, so they went to Aden, Arabia or to Hong Kong or East Africa and England.”

Meherab Chothia is part of that tradition in a very direct way. “I am a chartered accountant from India, and I got an opportunity to work with the Toronto office on a six-month secondment. They liked my work and they wanted to have me on a permanent basis. They asked me if I was interested, I said yes, they processed my work permit and that’s how I ended up in Canada.”

Numbers and the quest for a higher birth r ate According to the rough numbers that circulate on websites dedicated to the community, there are some 150,000–200,000 Zoroastrians worldwide. Nearly half that number live in India, concentrated largely in the country’s commercial capital (and my hometown) Mumbai. But Leilah Veivana, a PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York who studies land rights and the Parsi panchayat (community government), says it’s hard to be sure that those numbers are accurate.

“The demographic question is still so open,” she says. “For instance, I want to know if when a census worker comes to the house, and someone has their children in college in North America, for example, are they counting those children as the household? Maybe those children will come back, maybe they’ll never come back — who knows?

“In the diaspora, to my knowledge at least, no one is counting us, unless we’re members of organizations. I think my name is on the Zoroastrian Association of California’s rollbook, because that’s where my parents live.

So the numbers are really unclear to me, especially with how many people are lost to immigration and whether intermarried people and their children are counted or not counted — it’s very unclear.”

Whatever the numbers really are, there’s no doubt that the number of children born to Parsi couples is dwindling every year. Intermarriage is a significant topic of contention for the community. The panchayat, an elected body in Mumbai that administers vast plots of real-estate left to the community by wealthy Parsis, has a strict definition

18

of ‘Parsi’ — an individual born of two Parsi parents, or whose father is Parsi.

Because my mother is Parsi and my father is not, I don’t fit that definition, even though I’ve always strongly identified with the community and had my navjote — a religious initiation ceremony — in 2005.

The young people of today Nozer Kotwal has seen several generations of Canadian Parsis. “I have done navjotes of kids, then I did their weddings, and now I do their kids’ navjotes,” he says. “And actually, in the last couple of years I’ve even done their [the kid’s kids’] weddings — so you know how old I am!”

Kotwal is a dastur, a Parsi priest, one of a handful who performs navjotes, lagans (weddings), funeral prayers, and jashaans (ritual prayers) for the large Toronto Parsi community. The present generation of Toronto Parsis, he says, is less connected to the community’s religious and cultural roots. “I know the kids who are born over here, and especially those who have never visited India or Pakistan, they have a totally different disconnect. When we first came over here, the first generation was too busy settling down, so there was not too much attention paid to religion.”

Perry Baria is a first-generation Canadian; her family moved to Toronto from Mumbai when she was two. “I wouldn’t say my parents brought me up very Parsi, there were definitely some influences in terms of the food, I understand the language, I understand the culture, I had my navjote, we went to other people’s navjotes, we went to Parsi weddings,” she recalls. “We knew our relatives, but apart from that we didn’t really have a lot of interaction with the community.”

Baria has been back to India frequently, but she fits Kotwal’s description of the new generation of Toronto Parsis. “I haven’t really been part of the community, ever since I was little,” she says. “I stopped going to religious classes when I was 10 or 11 or something. And after that I didn’t really participate in any of the Zoroastrian functions.”

Centres of community There is no agiary, or fire temple, in Toronto. The community does have two community centres, one in North York and the other in Mississauga. “Let’s call them ‘religious centres,’” says Rafaelli, who has attended ceremonies at both locations. “You can’t call them agiaries, because they don’t have professional priests.”

Kotwal thinks establishing an agiary is crucial, and it needs to happen soon. “I honestly believe that if we do not establish something like an agiary over here, it’ll never get done,” he explains. “The kids have absolutely no concept whatsoever. But the other side of the coin is [that] you want to leave it for them, but if they don’t want to use it, what’s the sense?”

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It’s part of the broader difference Kotwal sees between generations. “The kids’ attitude over here is that they would rather see something happen socially, rather than religiously. That’s the big disconnect between my generation and their’s — their priorities are very different.”

Chothia thinks that disconnect is a normal consequence of the differences between life in Canada and India. “In India, it’s more community-based, because there are so many events happening. The North American-Canadian lifestyle is ... I wouldn’t say a lonely lifestyle, but everyone does their own thing…

“At an event at the [Parsi] Gymkhana [club] in Bombay, there will be hundreds of people who show up. That’s just a factor of being in a crowded place with 50,000 Parsis — any Navroze event, 5,000 people show up, as against 500 in Toronto.”

‘Parsi’ usually denotes a Zoroastrian from India or Pakistan. There are however, Toronto Zoroastrians who immigrated directly from Iran, without the thousandyear detour through India. Some attend events at the Toronto religious centres, but Chothia points out that they don’t necessarily form part of the Parsi community.

“When I meet the Persians, obviously you see so many differentiating factors. They speak a different language. The only common thing is that they practice Zoroastrianism, but other than the culture and the custom is very different.”

Who gets in?

Most of the younger generation of Toronto Parsis are only dimly aware of the political battles being waged in Mumbai. “I really don’t know at all — I know about this Parsi panchayat, but I don’t really have any idea of who runs it, what it’s all about, who gets what from it,” Baria admits.

Rafaelli’s interaction with the community is itself a sign of the ‘reformist’ bent of Toronto Parsis. “I would say in both associations the majority are people who are open — I myself could attend the ceremonies in both centres with my students, and no-one protested about that.”

Marriage outside of the community is not as hotly contested in Canada either. “It is accepted more over here than in India,” says Kotwal. “In India also, it’s galore. I would say probably over there — mind you, I’m just guessing — but I think it is at least 5050 over there, people marrying in and marrying out [of the community]. Whereas over here I would say it can go as high as 75-25.”

Both Veivana and Kotwal note that changes in gender equity have also affected the way Parsis in India see marriage. “Some young people say, ‘I’m just tired of all the fighting, I don’t know if I can find a Parsi person [to marry],’” Veivana notes. “Especially the young women I talk to — I don’t know whether it’s just a stereotype, but they say that the Parsi men in Bombay are not as educated as them.”

Kotwal also believes education plays a big role. “This generation is more educated.

Before, with the girls, they went up to high school, and then their parents got them married, and many of them became housewives,” he says. “But these days, the women are welleducated — I think they are better educated than boys these days in India — and they realize, ‘Why should I settle down with this ignorant guy?’ They work, and they meet people at work, and they fall in love. It’s natural.”

The increase in marriage outside the community and immigration from India has led to some fascinating questions of access and belonging. Agiaries are closed to anyone who is not a member of the community, and only Parsis can benefit from the subsidized housing administered by the panchayat.

Baria recounts an experience at a Mumbai agiary, when a priest stopped her from entering because she wasn’t wearing a sadra and kasti, the religious vestments that Parsis are supposed to wear following their navjotes. “ I didn’t really have any chance of going in there because: a) I didn’t speak the language, b) I had a Canadian accent, and c) I didn’t have a sadra and kasti.”

I’ve had my own difficulties entering agiaries. The most frequent tactic used to keep outsiders out is to ask their names — if it’s not Parsi enough, you don’t get in. ‘Murad’ is a Parsi name, and I’ve made do by using my mother’s maiden name (Antia) in place of my own surname. But Veivana notes that immigration and outside marriage is making it harder to delineate who is and is not a ‘Parsi.’

“The allowing in is so arbitrary,” she says.

“I have Parsi friends that don’t look typically Parsi, and they get stopped and asked, ‘Who’s your father? What is your father’s name? What is your surname?’ But it’s completely arbitrary. It’s within some range of what people expect Parsis to look like.

“I wonder when people come back to visit Bombay from the diaspora, from Australia or wherever, and if they’re from mixed parents, if that’s going to change somehow, there’s going to be more criteria to allow people in, or [for] showing some kind of identification.” what’s the attr action?

Perhaps immigration is more of a pronounced phenomenon in the Parsi community because the community itself is so small — the less people there are to emigrate, the more significant each act of migration becomes.

Kotwal originally moved to Montréal. “It was a fascination with the Western world,” he explains. “You watch Hollywood movies, and North America fascinates you. I said, ‘let me try,’ and I got in.”

When Kotwal arrived, he was one of a handful of Parsis in Canada. “We were 25 altogether, when I first came. The first three months when I was in Montréal, I didn’t meet a single Zartoshti [Parsi].”

There are now several thousand Parsis in Canada, most in the Toronto and Montréal metropolitan areas, according to the community’s own numbers. Chothia says the presence of a tight-knit, large Parsi community in Toronto made the decision to move much easier. “The reason I decided to come to Canada is I went down to the darbe mehr [the community centre], in March, during the Navroze functions, and I saw so many Parsis, and so many Parsis from Mumbai.

So I felt a connection, and that was one of the major factors that helped me make the decision to move to Canada.”

I suggest to Rafaelli that the original exodus from Persia created a nomadic impulse for the modern Parsi. He isn’t so sure. “I wouldn’t relate the fact that they’ve travelled around the world so much to the fact that they are a diaspora community in the

first place,” he says. “I would more closely relate it to what’s happened in the contemporary modern times in the last century.”

THE CLASS QUESTION Veivana points out that immigration is almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. “It’s very class-based,” she says. “Poor Parsis who live in sanitaria [panchayat-run shelters] don’t have relatives that are going to college abroad.”

The Parsis in India are associated with names like Tata and Wadia, titans of industry who own multi-national corporations with brands like Jaguar and Tetley Tea. But there are still poor Parsis. “I think it’s very consciously embarrassing for the panchayat when things about very, very poor Parsis come out — and for the community, it’s very embarrassing when people write about that,” Veivana says.

“Of course in terms [of] contemporary Mumbai, Parsis are not poor like other people are poor… They’re just not; according to the census, no Parsi is living in slums,” she notes. But the panchayat sets out a higher standard of living than the Indian government. “The panchayat last year said the criteria for a poor Parsi was someone who makes less than 90,000 rupees [about $1,700] a month. That’s about 14 times what is considered poverty in Bombay.”

Still, Veviana says, there’s a distinct difference between the class of Parsis who can afford to immigrate and send their kids to universities abroad, and those that live in subsidized housing on community land. “There is still a huge divide between the poorest Parsi living on the panchayat dole and someone who’s living in a highrise flat somewhere, with connections to Parsi diaspora elsewhere.”

It’s an immigr ant thing I ask Rafaelli whether the act of immigration has made Toronto Parsis more open, or whether it’s possible that the reformist sections of the community are more likely to immigrate. He’s not sure. “I think that they’re forced to become liberal when they come here, because I don’t think the situation is such that they would leave in order to find more liberality. It might be if we studied sociologically and psychologically that people who are more liberal are open to leave one’s country. But that is a type of analysis that would apply not only to Parsis, not only to Zoroastrians, but to all diaspora groups.”

Chothia points out that immigration is a challenging experience for anyone, Parsi or not. “It’s not easy to move countries; it’s a big change.”

MARCH 25, 2013

19

Winnipeg

Their

Years on, intangible connections still tie together a scattered community of Manitoban Jews

Article by ETHAN CHIEL | Illustration by DORAN WOO 20

the VARSITY magazine

L

ate in the summer of 1957, a rabbi, his wife, and their four kids left Winnipeg to move to Tuckahoe, a village just north of New York City. This isn’t the beginning of a joke, I promise. Before he left, the rabbi spoke with an elderly congregant, who joked with him in Yiddish, “Rebbi, fun unz iz noch kainer nit avec a laybedikei!” Roughly translated, “No rabbi ever left us alive!”

The rabbi moved to Winnipeg as neither a total foreigner nor a native. Born to a northeastern Pennsylvanian Jewish family in 1920, he went to rabbinical school at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, where he met his wife, a student at New York University. After having one kid in New York, the rabbi received offers to serve as the director of three different Hillel organizations. One of these organizations was in Puerto Rico, another was in Berkeley, and the last option was Winnipeg, his wife’s hometown. In 1949, the family moved to Winnipeg so the rabbi could take up the job at the University of Manitoba.

The rabbi had first been to Winnipeg in the summer of 1945, and “liked very much” what he saw of the Jewish community there. In 1950, he was involved in the founding of the University of Manitoba’s Department of Judaic Studies, in which he was the only instructor. In the eight years he lived in Winnipeg, and for a few years afterwards, he produced a series of popular histories on the Jews of Manitoba, and two slim academic volumes on related topics. The first publication was a book of short essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin Disraeli to the history of the Rosh Pina synagogue in Winnipeg’s north end, a congregation where he served as rabbi. The second was a more substantial history entitled The Jews in Manitoba: A Social History. It was the first history of the community, and was issued by University of Toronto Press “under the auspices of The Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba” a few years after the rabbi had departed Winnipeg for warmer climes. The book has been criticized for minimizing some important aspects of the history of the Jewish community in Manitoba, such as anti-Semitism and left-wing political involvement, but it was still the first of its kind.

The rabbi became a minor celebrity in Winnipeg.

He was young, involved, and interested in the Jewish community. His wife was involved too, helping to organize events, and aiding him in his scholarly work (in the acknowledgments of his shorter book of essays he refers to her as his “severest critic”). She had moved to Winnipeg from a small town in what was then Poland when she was four years-old. She grew up in the Winnipeg Jewish community, went to school there, and eventually left on a scholarship to New York, wanting to broaden her horizons.

After eight years back in Winnipeg the rabbi’s wife felt the need to broaden her horizons again, and so did the rabbi. So they left. It was unusual, since, as the old congregant’s joke suggests, Winnipeg’s Jewish community was a community of lifers.

Nonetheless, they headed south. Their kids would return to Winnipeg for summer camp, the family would visit and stay in touch with friends and family there, but they left.

The rabbi died of a heart attack in 1983. His name was Arthur Chiel, Art for short. I never met the guy, but he was my grandpa.

***

Last time I visited Winnipeg, I was so young that I barely remember it. I was there for the Bar Mitzvah of someone I hadn’t met before and haven’t met since, though I do remember his Bar Mitzvah seeming very long. I vaguely remember a rainy day at a hotel, where a babysitter with a broken arm took care of me, and we were allowed to order pizza. I remember being very excited about the pizza, so at least I know some things don’t change much.

Despite my long removal from Winnipeg, I do know a handful of members of the Winnipeg Jewish community, stretching across a couple of generations. None of them live in Winnipeg, but they keep in touch with each other. My grandma Kinneret has a best friend, Alisa, who also went to nyu on a scholarship and now lives in Toronto. Alisa’s son, Etan, who is one of my dad’s best friends, also lives here. Etan is married to Judy, another Winnipegger.

In case it seems as if I’m drawing too strong an inference from a case of family and friends keeping in touch, let me tell you another anecdote. Recently, I was speaking to a psychiatrist who practices in Toronto. He has lived here for many years, and has also spent time in New York, but he’s originally from Winnipeg and he’s Jewish. I spoke to him about Winnipeg, and he explained to me that there are actually quite a few Jewish psychiatrists from Winnipeg in Toronto, who make sure to keep in touch with one another and have done so for some time. They have a name for their group: the Winnipeg Mafia.

It isn’t as though every community in Winnipeg is this way. Mark Kingwell, the U of T philosophy professor, spent his junior high and high school years in Winnipeg. As a military brat, Kingwell may not necessarily have been best situated to be part of an established community in the city — most military postings are only a few years. Kingwell lived there though, once for a year and then for seven years. He went to a Catholic high school, and that school and the Catholic community became the centrepoint of his experiences. After high school, he left Winnipeg for Toronto to do his undergraduate degree at U of T. He’s in touch with almost nobody from his high school years in Winnipeg, though he does note that he tends to find that upon meeting Winnipeggers, there’s “an instant connection.”

*** There’s a tension among most of the expatriate Winnipeg Jews I know. They got out of Winnipeg physically, but in some sense they’re still there emotionally. This emotional connection is maintained amongst them by staying in touch. Some of them ardently reject the physical Winnipeg — the most cited reasons seem to be the winter and the mosquitoes. But sometimes the reasons seem superficial. As a friend of family friends (who isn’t Jewish, but still lives in Winnipeg) said to me at a dinner not too long ago, they seem to be masking something deeper. Regardless of whether or not they have strong feelings about Winnipeg, they stay there. Etan, who’s lived in Toronto for 44 years, through university and law school, work, and hav-

ing two kids, still considers himself a Winnipegger.

Judy told me about a group of people who used to exist in Toronto — a sort of Winnipeg club — who would gather to talk about Winnipeg and its goings on. I’ve read stories, few and far between though they may be, of similar organizations existing in LA and elsewhere.

Whether the tension will exist in future generations is a mystery to me. When my grandma left Winnipeg to study in New York, it was a big deal.

At the time, she felt the city had grown too small for her. It was very isolated back then, and traveling wasn’t the norm. Most people who went to university went to the University of Manitoba. She had to get a scholarship from the community to go to New York. She and Alisa both claim the same story about the moment they were inspired to go for the scholarship — but I’ll let them work out for themselves whose story it actually is.

Today the case is not the same. Some members of younger generations love the city, and staying there doesn’t preclude traveling or living elsewhere for a while. Sean, whose Bar Mitzvah was the reason for my last trip to Winnipeg, came to Ontario for university, but has since moved back to Winnipeg and started practicing as a doctor. His sister Sara lives in Toronto, where she’s doing a master’s degree in urban planning. When I asked her whether she would consider moving back to Winnipeg she seemed unsure (most of her family still lives there).

The connection between her and her Winnipegger expatriate friends seems the same as in other generations, though. She said that in many ways they’re simply very different people, and don’t necessarily see each other very often, but they’re united by their Winnipeg connection.

The best explanation of why this widely-sown community exists was offered by my grandma. For her particular generation, one full of immigrant kids, the Jewish community in Winnipeg offered nourishment, a place to grow in a new home. For some, it was too small after a while: Winnipeg felt isolated, provincial, and far from the rest of the world. The city may not be so provincial anymore, but it may still not be enough. And just as the sense of lacking is there in younger generations, so too is the nourishment, even if it’s harder to find. It’s there in later generations too, whether in fond (or not so fond) memories of summer camps, or the promise of a friend in a far-flung city whose couch you can crash on. The nourishment moved, but it kept its centre.

*** For the real evidence of this gestalt Winnipeg, look to dinner conversation. When I sit with my dad and his friends when he’s in town, there is a process I notice over and over. They catch up on what the same people are doing in a way that isn’t methodical but feels meticulous. They shoot the shit about parts of the past and sometimes go over the same damn stories. I’m always on the periphery of it, and usually end up sitting in silence through a lot of it, but it’s always an interesting communion to watch.

It goes on through dinner, and on into dessert, and sometimes beyond that. Eventually there’s silence, but it’s comfortable.

MARCH 25, 2013

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SoundCloud | Sound, and noise, of all kinds.

StumbleUpon | Curating the random pages you stumble upon on the web.

Twitter | Microblogging platform. Posts are limited to 140 characters.

Vimeo | YouTube for artistes.

Yelp | ‘Helpful’ ‘reviews’ of community venues, by the community.

LiveJournal | Where you wrote all your emotions and no one judged.

MySpace | Tom’s place.

Orkut | Owned by Google, popular mostly in Brazil.

Pinterest | Picture-based microblogging platform.

Flickr | A shutterbug’s paradise.

Friendster | The butt of every joke.

Gaia Online | A forum network featuring cartoon avatar identities.

Goodreads | A safe haven for avid readers, away from fists and cruel words.

2012

LinkedIn | Business networking for the professionally inclined.

2009

Facebook | The social network so big, it gets its own movie.

2006

Sina Weibo | Chinese micro-blogging. Posts are limited to 140 characters

2004

Habbo | A cool hangout place for kids, or teens, or child-like adults.

Launch date

2001

deviantART | An artists’ community.

1998

Qzone | Chinese blogging platform

1995

dated, or their funders never quite find a way to monetize human interactions and end up bankrupt. Whatever happens, an abandoned site is rarely taken fully offline; it becomes a virtual ghost town where the only interaction between users are crude offers of free porn to inactive accounts from spambots unhindered by the site’s out-of-work moderators…

Google+ | Was supposed to be the next Facebook, but it didn’t quite work out.

1993

when isolated to their offices or homes, users of these sites are dedicated to connecting with others through online networks.

Yet despite the siren call that causes people to periodically join social networks in droves, these sprawling online empires eventually collapse. Social networks tend to implode when their users are seduced by the novelty of competitors, site infrastructure isn’t up-

Tracking the evolution of social networks

Classmates | One of the earliest social networks.

200,000,000

400,000,000

600,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

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Article and Illustrations by DAN SELJAK

The web grows up

Approximate current Member Population

Rewriting your favourite universe Fan Fiction and its vibrant community

P

opular book, film, and television series offer fans huge worlds to explore, with plots that can span several volumes and episodes, and casts of memorable characters whose hopes, dreams, and desires have been absorbed by hundreds of thousands of people. So, what happens when the original creators stop creating new instalments in their series, or there are other latent possibilities in the text that are ready to be pulled out and explored, fleshed out, or brought to light for the first time? A fictional universe never truly dies; its threads are always taken up by a new generation of creators, ready to transform them into something exciting, different, and even dangerous. These new creators are often the same fans who have been reading or watching with intense passion the exploits of their beloved heroes in their favourite universes. Fan fiction is not only an avenue for fans to explore their own creativity, but also a chance for them to collaborate and connect with others.

“I think it started back in middle school. It would have been grade six or seven when Lord of the Rings came out. I was looking up random stuff about Lord of the Rings and I stumbled on it,” my friend Sara Patterson says of her first encounter with fan fiction. “I think it was fanfiction.net, which was new and exciting 10 years ago. I started by writing it script-style, where you

24

would have the character’s name and then dialogue. It wasn’t actual written prose... Lord of the Rings was the first big one... Then the second big thing I started writing for was Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Now posting her fan fiction online under the moniker “oneinspats,” Sara has stories set in the universes of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (specifically the “City Watch” series with Vetinari and Vimes), and Les Miserables.

“For me personally, it’s because I really liked the characters, and usually the series, or film, or TV show was done. It’s kind of a way of continuing the adventures, when the producers, authors, or creators have finished.

You’ll be sitting there and you’ll be like, what if x, y, z happened? How would the characters react to that?” Sara says.

Fan fiction has become more accessible, and come to the attention of a much wider audience since the advent of the Internet. However, fan fiction predates the Internet. In fact, amateur press associations, which first flourished in the early decades of the 20th century, provided a way for aspiring writers to put together and share their own magazines and works of fiction. A distribution manager or official editor would collect the magazines and letter publications and send them to other members of the association. In the 1930s, fans of science fiction magazines

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Article by ALEX ROSS | Illustration by NANCY JI printed their own mimeographed or hectographed works which contained their own reviews, printed fiction, and even art. Prominent fanzines such as The Fantasy Fan and The Science Fiction Digest even contained articles, fiction, and commentary by notable fantasy, horror, or sci-fi authors of the day like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

Zines dedicated to sci-fi tv shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who, and movies like Star Wars were produced by fans well into the 1990s.

Fandom quickly adopted the Internet. Fanfiction.net started in 1998 and gave fans one of the first central locations to share, rate, and review their pieces, known as fanfics. However, the site fell into disfavour when it started cracking down on “fics” that featured sexually explicit material.

“If you’re writing an explicit sex scene it can’t go on there. They’ll shut your account, they’ll delete everything.

It’s heavy censorship because of child pornography problems around the fact that people were writing Harry Potter smut. Because even though they are fictional characters, they are underage for most of the books,” Sara explains.

Fans migrated to Livejournal in the early 2000s — one of the Internet’s earliest social networks — but left around 2006 after Livejournal began to crack down on material it deemed inappropriate. Many fans now use the microblogging site Tumblr to share and tag

their own stories, or post stories to the fanfic database Archive of Our Own. Writers of fanfic range in age their mid-teens to late-30s. The audience and social network of a fanfic is largely determined by the fictional work itself.

For example, Les Miserables — especially fans of the original Victor Hugo novel — tend to be older. My friend Carla Mesa Guzzo, who writes fanfic for the bbc tv series Merlin under the name “bulfinch,” reads fiction that is often written by younger fans, many of whom may still be in high school.

Stereotypes about fan fiction being merely “bad writing” sometimes stem from the participation of younger audiences of shows like Merlin, or the Harry Potter series, but this is often an unfair characterization. “You have a lot more people writing for it, and you have to wade through a lot more stuff. They’re not bad writers, they’re just undeveloped. It’s just a matter of volume. You’re going to get some not so great stuff and you’re also going to get some quite literary work as well,” Carla explains.

The sheer volume of fanfic means that there’s a lot of creativity in how fans reconstruct their favourite fictional universes. A fan vernacular has evolved over the years in the fan community, which easily categorizes the fiction that someone is reading.

‘Crackfic’ is fanfic written solely for the amusement of the author. ‘pwp,’

short for ‘Plot? What plot?’ is, according to Sara, just meant to denote porn.

‘Slash’ is the sexual pairing of two male characters (there is also “femslash”).

‘Altu’ is short for an alternate universe written for a fictional world in which whole plots are rewritten or characters are changed. This can involve everything from Harry Potter being adopted and raised by Voldemort to Sherlock Holmes being transformed into a master criminal. ‘Altcanon’ often sticks close to the canon of the universe but deviates slightly from the original.

Sara, for example, had the Black Death visit the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork in Prachett’s Discworld.

“Essentially, I wondered: ‘what if you killed off a third to a quarter of the population? How would the city deal with it? How would the city’s infrastructure deal with it?’ And because this happens a lot in the series I made the plague an anthropomorphic being,” she says with a slight laugh.

Fan fiction represents a continually burgeoning area of creativity and community on the Internet.

Despite hostility from some websites and even occasionally from the creators of the original series being referenced, it continues to flourish, sustained by the close associations built around the simple love of an imagined world and its memorable cast of characters.

“Rappers” CONTINUED from pg 15 wrath. So the trick is not to make music for any one group of people, but just make music. So you’ll notice on my fan page, I’m getting more and more non-desi fans, which is great.

But I’m not trying to please the mob at all. Sometimes people who see the page Sikh Knowledge ask, ‘what is this page about?’ ‘What are these pictures about?’ ‘I want to know about Sikhism,’ etc. Just read up on me, I’m an artist, I’m not here to teach you about faith and heritage.” Tung agrees that non-desi listeners tend to be more skeptical when approaching their music. “They might expect us to sound a certain way, or assume that we only talk about things Punjabis will relate to… Any label we put on something can limit its potential reach. That just means we have to work harder to break people’s perceptions and misconceptions about who we are and the music we make.”

THE toronto advantage All three recognize that Toronto’s geographical location and diverse makeup have played a huge role in their success, allowing for the seeds to be sown for an exciting musical movement. Growing up as an AngloQuebecer of South Asian origin, Saini knows what it feels like to be a visible minority. Despite being fluent in French, he still came up against

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rampant discrimination while living in Quebec: “French Canadians, Quebecers, I feel aren’t exposed to our background as Ontarians are. Ontarians rub more elbows with people who grow up saying ‘My neighbour growing up was Punjabi,’ or ‘We went to their wedding,’ etc. You’ll get more of that here than you will in Quebec.

In Quebec people are still kind of, ‘Who are Punjabi people? Who are Sikh people? Why are people wearing a turban?’ In Quebec, the generic term for an Indian is Hindu or Indou.

It’s just not an exposed culture.”

Dhillon points to long-held friendships as another characteristic of Toronto’s standout Punjabi scene.

“A lot of these relationships were established before we got into music.

With some relationships, we reconnected when one of us knew another person, and it has created this huge web.” Noyz brings it back to the simple fact that quality hip hop has long simmered in Toronto. “There is a huge Punjabi population here, but I think it comes down to the quality of the music. It’s straight up rap and R&B with no gimmicks. We may incorporate Indian instruments in some songs, and some of us might dabble in fusion music, but we don’t let that define our sound. The music is true to the hip hop culture and can stand on its own.”

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MARCH 25, 2013

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Dark Precursor Project

Ocean Ecosystems Article and illustrations by ANDREW RUTHERDALE Andrew Rutherdale is a Visual Studies student at U of T and a participating artist in “Afterword,” the thesis exhibition for this year’s graduating class.

Systems ecology is an interdisciplinary field of ecology that is distinguished by its holistic approach to the study of ecosystems. It focuses on the complex and emergent properties of ecosystems, examining the networks of human and non-human agents that influence them. sete’s Dark Precursor Project aims at a comprehensive study of the ecosystem of exoplanet Perl 26b. Presented here are three species of the turian class that inhabit many of Perl 26b’s oceans. The project aims to reveal the discovery of new turian species on Perl 26b to the public.

Cipher serpentina Cipher serpentina is a member of the family Cipheron that is comprised of 28 genera and contains over 88 species. Current population estimates range from 150,000 to 180,000. Typical weight ranges from 30 to 45 tonnes. They have been observed at depths of up to 900 metres.

They occupy most of the Pacific, but are particularly prominent within its central and western regions. Like most members of the Cipheron family, Cipher serpentina employ electromagnetic pulses released from their skin to both navigate and communicate. They are a social species, and typically travel in groups of 50 to 200. They are carnivores and their diet mostly consists of small Lapacians.

Cipher terribilis

Galeocerdo akallopisos

Cipher terribilis is another member of the family Cipheron. Current population estimates range from 2,800,000 to 3,000,000. Typical weight ranges from 10 to 15 tonnes.

They have been observed at depths of up to 1,200 metres and can be found throughout the Pacific. The spikes covering their body provide a strong defense against predators.

For movement, Cipher terribilis employ a number of fins on both the front and back of their bodies. As a group species, they typically travel in groups of 180 to 300. Like Cipher serpentina, Cipher terribilis are carnivores and their diet mostly consists of small Lapacians.

Galeocerdo akallopisos is the solitary member of the family Galeocerdo. Current population estimates range from 300,000 to 320,000. Their typical weight is 2,260 kilograms. They dwell above the depth of 300 metres. Their populations are concentrated around the southern hemisphere and they are attracted to coastal areas. Their skin is coloured and textured to blend in with their habitat, making them nearly invisible to prey. The eyes of Galeocerdo akallopisos are positioned very high on their heads, helping them locate prey swimming on the surface. Galeocerdo akallopisos are solitary animals. Interaction with other members of their species is largely restricted to mating and birth.

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the VARSITY magazine

See the mailroom team at work: broadcast.thevarsity.ca

Sorting it out Behind the scenes at the campus mailroom In the early hours of each morning, a small team assembles on the eastern side of Spadina Crescent. In just a few hours, they sort, stamp, ship, and deliver almost every piece of mail heading to or from campus. By 3 pm, the mailroom’s valuable work is mostly done, allowing the campus to function smoothly. The team’s intimate knowledge of the streets, alleys, and buildings of the St. George campus allows them to deliver mail quickly and efficiently. More often than not, mailroom staff are able to track down a recipient on campus by name only. To learn more about the mailroom team and their everyday experiences, check out broadcast.thevarsity.ca.

The Video Team has been working on a new series in which we explore underappreciated jobs on campus. Far from the obvious headlines, we’re searching for the people that make this campus tick. If you know of any departments that go unnoticed all too often, please shoot us an email at video@thevarsity.ca.

Article and photos by WYATT CLOUGH

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Visit thevarsity.ca to get involved.

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