paul chaderjian

a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Once there was and there was not … I’ve been thinking about my dad all week. He would have been 80 this year, and we would have celebrated his birthday this week. Shy of his birthday, I received an e-mail Tuesday night from Steven, my best friend in junior and high school. Steven was alerting me that our mutual friend James’ father had passed away and the funeral was Friday, on my dad’s birthday. It’s that time in our lives where our fathers are dying and we are becoming the adults. We are supposedly carrying their legacies, their surnames, their family histories, and their genomes to hand to our progeny, via DNA or via words and stories. But how good of a job are we doing with this singular human directive? With deaths and funerals, I can’t help myself but ask, are we all that our fathers had hoped for us to be? Did they struggle and toil to provide for us to be proud or ashamed of our legacies, identities, stories. Did ...

a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper It’s past one o’clock on a Thursday morning, and “Coast to Coast AM,” my favorite late-night radio talk show is beaming via headphone into my left ear from an AM radio station in Los Angeles. It has just rained, and inhaling that fresh, clean smell of fresh air after a downpour prompted my first thought of gratitude on this day. The Queen of Media, Oprah Winfrey, once preached about keeping a gratitude journal, and since I’ve noticed that focusing on all the blessings we have paves the way for even more blessings to be grateful for. We live in an amazing era and must not overlook the amazing blessings we experience daily. From scientists growing replacement organs for the ill to having water on tap when needed, every second of our modern lives is pregnant with blessings and joy. From the beauty of nature to the miracles of our five senses, from overweight pets cuddling-up next to us while we read a good book to laying in ...

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN It’s 1980 in the Tower District of Fresno, and what kids do in this neighborhood is get into gang fights, smoke cigarettes, and skip school. What I used to do was listen to the radio and hand write my own newspapers. Like many of you, I developed a taste for pop music early in life, and songs became personal sign posts as I navigated through life. Where were you when you heard “Billie Jean is not my lover?” When I hear Adiss Harmandian, I think of my dad taking me to Adiss’ record store in Bourj Hammoud to buy vinyl 45’s. Back then, lyrics didn’t get any better than: “Char lezooneri havadatz eem yareh, artzoonknerov letzvets sev sev achereh.” Now when I hear “Summer lovin’ had me a blast, Summer lovin’, happened so fast,” I remember my friend, the late-Mary Sahatjian, who gave me a copy of the Grease motion picture soundtrack on a cassette tape in 1976. I spent months playing the album on my shoe-box-sized cassette-recorder that my aunt Sirvart bought me so I c...

A column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Everyone is always measuring our worth with units of money. Our employers tell us we are worth this much. We tell our clients we want that much for our time. And some random illogical and unstable marketplace algorithm puts a price tag on the cost of our health care. We’re not just the victims in this scheme but also the victimizers. We’re always trying to guess how much people are bringing in annually. We’re blurting out the square-footage of our homes and offices, guesstimating the price of other people’s rides, assessing their couture and bling, and readily announcing our children’s tuition. We’re always doing the math like TV channels that count wealth all day long. We’re like conglomerates tallying totals at the box office. We’re gauging the successes of our community by the number of attendees at events rather than the experiences of those attendees or the work accomplished through our fundraisers. Armenian life in ...

a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Once there was and there was not … … one moment in our collective history when we came together despite our differences to celebrate our diversified popular culture. On Sunday, December 13, our hyphenated people came from the north and south of the Equator and the left and right of the Meridian to the entertainment capital of the world, to honor the Armenian stars, the modern makers of Armenian Culture, the ones who shone bright center-stage at the Nokia Theatre. At 777 Chick Hearn Court in the heart of Los Angeles were the sons and daughters of Hayk singing their hearts out and celebrating their vibrant, ancient yet modern culture. Their ancestors had witnessed the formation of a new people and a new culture two thousand years before Christ. Their people had ruled kingdoms and celebrated their golden age of literature just a mere 1500 years before the printing press. These descendants of Noah and the Arc had mastered m...

a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Once there were and there were not … .. three Armenian boys climbing the jungle gym in an Armenian kindergarten in Antelias, Lebanon. They were five-years-old, maybe six, donning their requisite red school uniforms, playing under the watchful eye of their teacher, Miss Jacqueline. The threesome were students at Mardikian Elementary, a school named after its American benefactor and located in the walled compound of the seat of the Holy See of Cilicia, a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean Sea. There, in the shadow of the St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral, under the windows of the residence of the Catholicos, across the yard of the Cilician Seminary, and next door to the Holy See’s publishing house, the threesome would play at lunchtime. In their classes, in their short walks to the Cathedral, during the visits by the Cilician priests, these young minds would be impressed with the importance of their Armenian identity...

a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Once there was and there was not … … a neighborhood in a suburb of Kolkata, India, where a tall, pristine white stone wall separates the grounds of a sparkling Armenian church from a modern-day slum and its poverty, smells, refuse, rabid dogs, and noisy rickshaws. Security guards kept the native neighbors at bay as our group of tourists entered and exited the church grounds. We were there a year ago today, a group of Armenians from around the world making a pilgrimage to India on the 300th anniversary of the founding of one of the Armenian churches in Kolkata. My stories of the journey and India are on the Internet, so there is no sense in repeating Indian-Armenian history or reality. Why I write this column is to convey abstract premonitions after my nearly-month-long journey to the once-thriving Armenian community there. While the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin has done a remarkable job of keeping our Indian-Armenian ch...