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What do the blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire, Booker Prize winning novel White Tiger, out-sourced call-centers, urban bomb blasts, nuclear brinkmanship, and missile attacks by unmanned aircraft all have in common? The answer spread over the front pages everyday is: South Asia. Then there is another South Asia, continuously steeped into movements of resistance and self determination or terrorism – depending who you talk to: Kashmir, Tamil Tigers, Naxalites, Maoists, Talibans & Madrassas to name a few. And yet again there is another South Asia marketed or smeared through the images that jump between Himalayan serenity, Gandhian non violence and wife burning rendering almost one fourth of the world population invisible. The reality being that the scale of South Asia is quite over whelming. With over 25% of world population, nearly one in every fourth person in the world is a South Asian, covering a wide area comprised of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives. Well over a 100 million South Asians live around the world including an estimated 5 million in the United States. With such scale, South Asia and South Asians are bound to play a critical role in the new turn of things. From the financial meltdown to the escalating war in Afghanistan; from the global movement of people, to jobs and capital South Asia finds itself at the epicenter of things. The change of administration in the US raises new questions, new hopes and new possibilities about all this.

GUESTS: Deepa Iyer,Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) in the Washington DC area, Tayyab Mahmud, Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Seattle University School of Law, his research papers are available at SSRN.com, Vijay Prashad, George and Marthe Kellner Chair of South Asian History, Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, author of eleven books, including “The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World