Pranjal profile picture

Pranjal

I am here for Friends and Networking

About Me

I am hungry, you are a potato
Currently being sued by the People's Revolutionary Army New Jersey (Anti-Leninist) for the rights to my name.
"I liked your myspace profile, who knew you were such a loser in person!" - anonymous review of Pranjal, 2006

My Interests

Anti-authority, noises, language, music. China & Northeast Asia, Latin America. Vegan, cooking, reading & writing, libertarian socialism. Futbol, archery, history, comics. Animals, documentaries, horror movies... these days sort of fascinated by gods and their worshippers, monsters and their followers...

Music:

Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Amebix, Amorphis, Asian Dub Foundation, At the Gates, Audible Mainframe, Autechre, Bad Brains, Bathory, Bela Bartok, Bereavement, Bikini Kill, Billy Bragg, Birchville Cat Motel, Black Star, Bluetip, Boris, Goran Bregovic, Burzum, Caninus, Johnny Cash, Cathedral, Cattle Decapitation, Celtic Frost, Coil, John Coltrane, The Coup, Covenant, Crass, Cress, Crucial Unit, Dead Prez, Death, Dekapitator, Discharge, Doom, Drop Dead, Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra, Emperor, Enslaved, Exhumed, Eyehategod, Faithless, Faith No More, From Ashes Rise, Front 242, Otomo Fukushide, Gauze, Henryk Gorecki, Woody Guthrie, Heresy, His Hero Is Gone, Hoods Up 495, Isis, Victor Jara, Killing Joke, King Diamond, Kreator, Lamb of God, Martyrdod, Mr. Bungle, Antony Milton, Ministry, Mogwai, Morgion, Mortiis, Mos Def, Municipal Waste, My Little Airport, Nausea, Neurosis, New Model Army, Nihilist, No Rest For The Dead, Nunslaughter, Krzysztof Penderecki, Poison Idea, Public Enemy, Ratos de Porao, Riff Raff, The Roots, older Sepultura, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sigh, Nina Simone, Skitsystem, Starkweather, Talib Kweli, Testament, Today is the Day, Toussaint, Tragedy, Ulver, Venom

Movies:

Please do not ask me if I like Wong Kar Wai films because I will probably kill you. Otherwise... Sholay, Don, Black Cat White Cat, Battle of Algiers, Motorcycle Diaries, Escape from New York, Escape from LA, Class of 1999, Lagaan, Downfall/Der Untergang, God of Cookery, Battle Royale, Battle Royale 2, My Life as McDull, Tillsammans, Fucking Amal, Fourth World War, Land and Freedom, Dr Strangelove, Aliens Special Edition, Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service (actually all Hayao Miyazaki), Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, Dog Soldiers,

Television:

death note, the wire, the office, extras

Books:

too many

Heroes:

Snake Plissken, Mortiis

My Blog

MPF: What Are You Funding?

While at work today, I got the annual return form for my Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme. For those who don't know, all Hong Kongers who are legally employed have to pay a percentage of their in...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Haiti piece

A piece I wrote on China and Haiti for the International Solidarity Day on May 18 was just put up on ZNet... check it out by following this link, if you can! UPDATE: Pictures from the May 18 demonstr...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Onward Christian Soldiers

A few months ago I was reading a bunch of stuff in newspapers about the rise of evangelical Christian cults in Hong Kong. The mainstream churches have always been fairly big in this city, and have als...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Hong Kong WTO blog

The Hong Kong People's Alliance on WTO (HKPA)-- which is a big umbrella group of unions, NGOs, migrants' groups, and church groups organizing protest events for the week of the WTO ministerial in HK t...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Bangladeshi Migrants' Direct Action in Kuwait

This is a couple of weeks old, but I forgot to post it earlier... seems that hundreds of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Kuwait, pissed off at their exploitation at the hands of employers and governmen...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

The Great Reporters Without Borders Swindle

A quick link to a very important story. Salim Lamrani has a new article up on ZNet with some new information confirming what he calls the "dubious and partisan" work of Reporters Without Borders (RSF)...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Power and... Forensic Science?! (1)

I went to a sort of unusual press conference today on the theme of forensics and human rights. It was organized by a pretty big regional NGO called the Asian Human Rights Commission, but they'd got to...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Some Tools for Media Analysis

Brian Dominick is co-editor of The NewStandard (TNS), a unique media outlet in the US because it is non-corporate and advertiser free, yet manages to produce hard-hitting, original news items on a dai...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Piece on HK Democracy Movement

A December 2004 piece from this blog, on the subject of the mainstream democracy movement in Hong Kong, has been reprinted on ZNet. The piece, along with an author's note, can be seen by following thi...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Migrants

Here in Hong Kong I often work with groups who are doing activism and advocacy around migrant workers' issues. Recently at the May Day march here, the contingent of migrant domestic workers from Indon...
Posted by Pranjal on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST