Nick Denton’s flagship timesuck Gawker said “pinne kannam” to their perma-intern Neel Shah today (Thanks, Amit)— wait, you totally didn’t even know they HAD a brown intern, did you? What’s that? We are your timesuck of choice? Awww. That kind of loyalty is worth a solid kundi-grab at the next meetup, kids.
It’s so hard to see the little ones grow up and take wing; you nurture them, tutor them in the ways of righteousness, and then send them out into the big, scary world, hoping that the values you’ve imbued somehow help them through life’s most trying tasks, specifically, working for Maer Roshan. As Eat the Press reports, our own Intern Neel (whose tenure here at Gawker exceeds that of the four current editors combined) has taken the position of Assistant Editor at Radar.[link]
See? Told you he was the perma-intern.
Neel, whose party dispatches were legendary and who elicits a flood of “Is he single?” e-mails to the tip line each time we print his photograph, will write front of the book stuff for the magazine (remember, there’s going to be a magazine component) and Fresh Intelligence work for the website. Sorry as we are to see him go, we’re thrilled for him, and we look forward to reading his work in the two issues of Radar they put out before the inevitable loss of funding. Congratulations, kiddo.[link]
Is he single? The comments section to the post quoted above had certain gawker stalkers wondering if he was teh gay. Whichever way he plays, he is a little bit of brown adorable, yessiree Babu.
Gentlewomen (and teh gays), start your matrimonial engines— he’s got the following standard-issue brown-privileged background, according to this blurb which I lifted from a Gawker post on Kaavya, which used Neel’s insights to provide an insider view in to her plagiarism fustercluck:
Gawker Intern Neel Shah thinks he understands. Hailing from picturesque Port Jefferson, Long Island, Neel is a first generation Indian-American who took the SATs in 7th grade, went to the same dorky summer program at Johns Hopkins as Viswanathan, and recently graduated from Dartmouth. His father is a doctor, his family drives a Range Rover, and he played tennis in high school. In some small way, Neel knows where Kaavya’s coming from. His culturally specific analysis of her hell and humiliation follows.[link]
One tiny problem with his analysis, if the part I’m about to call out is actually his— he needs to get his geography sorted:
Whatever dubious subcontinental wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan did write, didn’t write, had ghost-written, cribbed, subconsciously borrowed, telepathically stole, or else was brainwashed into doing by a bunch of Pakistanis hell-bent on subverting India’s credibility in the burgeoning Southeast Asian chick-lit genre, at least one thing is clear: shit like this is the reason brown kids should stick to quantitative math and organic chemistry. Ms. Viswanathan, after all, had all the hallmarks of future i-banker or doctor.[link]
Uh…I am brown and I never took chemistry, not even in high school (w00t Earth Science!); let’s not discuss the relationship I have with Math, since it involves a story about an angry nun and a flying textbook. Hmmm…no wonder I am not a rich and over-worked I-banker/MD. Anyway, I await the inevitable “I totally know him! My cousin’s Uncle’s kids were in the same Montessori class as him!”-comments from you lot, since every brown person in Amreeka is connected to another via two degrees or less. The next time you see your cousin’s Uncle’s kid, tell them to convey our heartiest Congratulations to Neel. Well-done.
