Yeah, didn't have a selection for August. But Tiffinbooks is back. This month we are highlighting Mary Anne Mohanraj's book, Bodies in Motion. Buy it, read it, love it.

Also, on September 9, Breakthrough presents a performance celebrating Bodies in Motion. Click this link to find out more.

The Tiffinbox Photo Fund has received its first donation. The donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted me today to say this:

“I applaud you for starting this revolving fund. I will copy your appeal and send it to my friends.”

I urge you all to consider a small donation towards this project. Once we have $1000 collected, I can begin distributing it to worthy photojournalists from South Asia. The green donation box in the upper right hand corner of this site is where you can quickly make your donation. No amount is too small.

Directly connected to this cause is some great news – Abir Abdullah, a photojournalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, informs me today that his image has been selected as one of the finalists in the annual Gordon Parks Photography Competition.

Images from South Asia, like Abir's, can see the light of day only if we in the West step up and help photojournalists there enter contests and exhibit their work on websites like Tiffinbox. Let's do this together!

Via Ashok Parameshwaran

There is a brewing controversy over two very similar images, showing people from two different racial backgrounds.

Black people loot, White people find. Two photo agencies with obviously shitty copy editors.

The caption for the image of black people reads:

A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

The caption for the image of white people reads:

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.(AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen)

The controversy has spurred commentary from other well known bloggers such Romenesko and Gothamist.

What do you think? Was the difference in reporting intentional or unintentional?

Via Radhika Singh

Breakthrough presents:

A performance celebrating Mary Anne Mohanraj's debut book, BODIES IN MOTION.

Marian Yalini Thambynaygam and Varuni Tiruchelvam incorporate theater, spoken word, song, dance, and music to dynamically explore issues within the Sri Lankan Tamil community–war, detention, the tsunami, etc.–using gender and sexuality as a lens. The journey they take us on is rife with profound questioning, moments of loss, and a resurgence of hope and love. Thambynayaygam and Tiruchelvam collaborate with Mohanraj to create a powerful performance to the text of ‘Bodies in Motion'.

September 9, 2005, 7:30 pm
The Listening Room @ Caffe Vivaldi
32 Jones St. (off Bleecker st. near 7th ave)
Suggested Donation: $5

For as long as I have been blogging, I have used Bloglet to automatically send updates to your email inboxes. I just checked my account with Bloglet and there are 358 subscribers to this blog, Tiffinbox.

Three-hundred-and-fifty-eight! GAWD! Really? WRONG! Well, a closer inspection revealed that many [hopefully not most] subscribers are those with fake or false email addresses. “admin@flash.com,” “card@game.com” and “info@amer.com” are some examples. Either spambots have found a way to enter their email addresses and take over the Bloglet system or there is one very bored hacker who has nothing better to do.

With Six Apart's authentication service TypeKey, I have kept most comment and trackback spammers at bay and have required those of you who want to leave comments to register with the service. I understand that this has discouraged many of you and I regret that you find it a PITA [pain in the arse] to leave your thoughts on this site. But life is short and I didn't want to spend any more time batting away those nefarious emails that we all receive from time to time.

So, with TypeKey in place Bloglet's unreliable and perhaps buggy service is getting the boot. I am bouncing it out of here. In its place I will be using FEEDblitz. Look for the FEEDblitz form in the same place you found the Bloglet form. Subscribe to this blog [yes, still free] and continue to receive all the posts in your email inbox. For those of you who used Bloglet, I have transferred over legitimate email addresses to the new service. The rest didn't make it. It's still a whopping 315 subscribers so Thank You!

And this is as good a time to let you know about Feedburner, my choice of service to publicize and optimize RSS feeds. If you don't know what RSS stands for [in the non-desi sense], fear not. If you are set on receiving all my posts here in your email inbox and your are happy, let's leave it at that.

If some of you have ventured into the world of aggregators like Bloglines, FeedDemon or NetNewsWire, then you can receive my posts as an automatic feed; posts that magically appear in your choice of aggregator along with other weblogs that you read. You don't have, though I wouldn't recommend it, visit this site directly. If for instance, I post images on this site, you are unlikely to see them in an aggregator.

If you do use an aggregator set up, I urge you to use the following FeedBurner feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tiffinbox – to receive it without any interruptions. There are many advantages for doing this; everything looks consistent and clean and is an easier, enjoyable read. I welcome you to give it a whirl.

And, here is list of alternative RSS readers.

As always, please send me feedback at tiffinbox [at] pipalproductions [dot] com.