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South-Asian student group welcomes comedian
ENTERTAINMENT
BY JESSE TRIMBLE
jtrimble@kansan.com
A college student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be performing stand-up for students on campus this weekend.
The KU South Asian Student Association, or SASA, has invited comedian Prasanth Venkataramanujam, or Venkat for short, to perform Saturday at Woodruff Auditorium.
Seema Amin, Shawnee senior and SASA president, said the group first heard about Venkataramanujam after attending a 15-minute act at the University of Missouri last spring.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
"What's unique about him, first of all, is that he is Indian." Amin said. "Not many comedians out there that are Indian are well known."
Amin said that because Venkataramanujam performed his skits in English and made a few jokes about the Indian culture, he inspired SASA to invite the college student to perform at the University.
Venkataramanujam's act on Saturday will be filmed and sent to Comedy Central. The comedian said he and members of his group called "The Brown Man Group," were currently working on pieces to put together for a spot on Comedy Central.
Venkataramanujam is a senior majoring in neuroscience and said stand-up took a lot of hard work and effort and also took a lot of time away from his schoolwork.
"I didn't really know what I wanted to do my first two years of college, at all," he said. "Of course my parents wanted me to do medicine or dentist school."
Venkataramanujam said the neuroscience major fell in his lap because of the credits he acquired toward the major, but ultimately, his passion was acting and stand-up.
One thing about Venkataramanuiam's comedy act that he emphasizes is that you don't have to be Indian or Asian to enjoy it.
"I'm Indian, but I don't think I'm an Indian comedian," he said. "I'm just a comedian that happens to be Indian."
Prashanth Venkataramanujam will perform his comedy routine at 8 p.m. Saturday in Woodruff Auditorium. Venkatanujam was invited to campus by the KU South Asian Student Association, or SASA.
"Some of my jokes deal with the quirkiness of my parents' personalities," he said. "Parents are just weird sometimes."
The college-aged comedian also finds it easier to perform for student audiences, considering he is still similar to them in age, workload and stress.
The comedian has been performing for the last five years, all while juggling classes, exams and papers.
The hardest thing for Venkataramanujam as a comedian and a college student isn't the work load, he said, but the balance between the two and writing material at the same time. He said finding his own personality as a comedian was tough, and because he was just starting out he hadn't found a topic that audiences were paying to see him for.
"Performing for college students, for me, is just like performing for your friends all the time," Venkataramanujam said.
One other reason the show was free, he said, was because he's a student and he understands finances with students.
"Which is why the shows are free," he laughed.
"I don't like to charge students partially because I'm a student and I don't have money," he said.
He gets paid for travel and a little more on top for food along the way, but for the most part, that was it. He said if he charged students it would be like charging his friends.
Sumeet Patel, Topela senior and treasurer of SASA, said that before
the performance on Saturday, SASA would pass around a donations can for the bombings in Mumbai, India.
"Some members of SASA could be affected," he said. "Many of our group members have family there."
After the event SASA will keep the donations can open for anyone in their office on the fourth floor of the Kansas Union. Venkataramanujam will perform at 8 p.m. Dec. 6 in Woodruff Auditorium on the fourth floor of the Union.
Edited by Kelsey Hayes
SPEAKER
Lecturer examines the obligations of affluent countries
rmcgeeney@kansan.com
BY RYAN MCGEENEY
What, as people, do we owe one another?
These are the root questions Richard Arneson will be addressing at 4 p.m. today in his lecture titled "What Does a Liberal Society Owe the Disadvantaged?"
Specifically, what do we as Americans, along with other relatively affluent countries, owe to the people of less-fortunate countries?
Arneson, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, will be speaking as part of the Hall Center Lecture Series.
Ryan McGeeney/KANSAN
strong duties of distributive justice that doesn't hold across national borders," Arneson said. "I want to knock down those views."
"There's almost a philosophical consensus, a strong movement among people who work on these issues nowadays regarding
Arneson said that the argument he will put forth will propose a simple cosmopolitanism (the idea that all of humanity shares a common moral responsibility to one another) that operates on dependent factors such as individual capabilities, the consequences of individual sacrifice and the possible benefit of actual contributions.
"The position I want to hold, with respect to global justice duties, is brutally simple," Armenon said. "Roughly, it's 'justice as beneficence'"
"Beneficence here doesn't just mean a helping hand; it may mean changing institutions or interacting with people in various ways," Arneson said. "But the basic idea is, 'What produces the best outcome?' and 'What is the best outcome for people?'"
According to Arneson, one of the fundamental philosophical problems facing the world is the reticence of nations to apply the same sense of responsibility they feel for their own citizens to citizens suffering in other countries.
Richard Arneson, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, shares his thoughts on philosopher T.H. Green with graduate students in Wesco Hall on Thursday afternoon. Armeson will speak at 4 p.m today in Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. His lecture is entitled "What Does a Liberal Society Owe the Disadvantage?"
Arneson said that this philosophy shouldn't necessarily be construed as anti-capitalist, but rather an ethical guideline for decision-making.
"I've got no purritical hostility to consumer expenditure," Arneson said. "In principle, there can be expensive goods that make possible great activities. I have nothing against shopping at Neiman Marcus or Saks 5th Avenue — I would love a world where everybody could do
that. It's not that I hate fancy mink coats, or that it's not good that people have them. It's that the money could be better spent on stuff that people need a lot more elsewhere. It's a comparative question: Where are resources going to do the most
good?"
Arneson will speak in the Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The event is free and open to the public.
Edited by Kelsey Hayes
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NATIONS Auto makers seek $34B in aid from 'chilly' Congress
WASHINGTON — U.S. automakers are returning to Congress for high-stakes hearings they hope will persuade skeptical lawmakers to save their troubled industry with $34 billion in emergency aid, but a top Senate Democrat wants to hand their problem to the Federal Reserve.
Two weeks after a botched attempt on Capitol Hill, repentant leaders of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC were appealing to the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday with three separate survival plans that include massive restructuring, the ditching of corporate jets and vows by CEOs to work for $1 a year.
But they could expect a chilly reception on Capitol Hill. Even a top Democrat, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., in charge of evaluating their aid requests made it clear he was eager to avoid voting on a bailout.
Associated Press