Indians flocked to former PM Indira Gandhi's bungalow in Delhi today on the 20th anniversary of her assassination (thanks, Sapna):

Indira Gandhi lived in the 1,300-sq-ft bungalow on the leafy and wide Safdarjung Road for nearly 20 years... "Till 1971, this must have been the smallest house of any prime minister in the world," says the memorial's curator Vijay Puri Goswami.

On display is Mrs Gandhi's blood stained and bullet pocked sari, bringing back memories of her violent end. Two bodyguards pumped 16 bullets into her when she was crossing a leafy pathway from her residence to the office for an interview with Peter Ustinov. The grassy pathway has now been covered in marble and covered with crystal. A sheet of clear glass marks the place where she fell to her assassin's bullets...

Visitors also flock to see her wedding sari, which was woven from yarn spun by her father Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India... There are gifts from international leaders: a silver and onyx lacquer plate from Ho Chi Minh, a crystal memento from Yasser Arafat.

India: always on the right side of history. A new report on the anti-Sikh riots has been pushed back by two months:

Some of those responsible for the violence had been, and still were, members of the governing Congress Party... Seven government-appointed commissions which had investigated the massacres were either whitewashes, or had met with official obstruction... Up to 1,000 people are thought to have died in riots which erupted across India in the days following her murder, as Hindus took their revenge on Sikhs who were blamed for the assassination.

Despite the tyranny of Gandhi's rule, it's a macabre memory for a ghoulish day.

Economist Tyler Cowen goes Bollycrazy on a visit to Delhi:

If you don't already know Indian movies you should... Don't think that Lagaan (or Satyajit Ray, for that matter) is the real thing, or that Blockbuster will do you any good. Cut to the songs. The use of color, cinematography, and orchestration of scenes will blow your mind. Allow yourself to be mesmerized. Compare them to your dreams at night, not to other movies you know, and pretend it is the only air-conditioned place in town.

I would go much, much further. There are only a couple of quality Bollywood films out every year, you'll kiss a lot of frogs along the way. But the good ones handle emotion in a way far superior to that of the best of American cinema. Hollywood movies are rife with scenes which ought to be laden with emotion, but the filmmakers invariably affect a detached tone. And it's not purposely understated, stoic or ironic detachment; it's incompetent writing, it's wooden and absurd.

You'll often see a mother sending her son off to war or certain death with a stiff 'you must go now,' cut, end of scene. There's a fine line between avoiding schmaltz and copping out on emotion altogether. Mainstream American films often feel hollow, $100M in effects with atrocious writing, the blowdried-fake-tan-colored-contacts version of worship in the darkened temple of cinema. And so even fairly cerebral films with any emotional content at all (Sideways, Eternal Sunshine) seem like blazing, Oscar-worthy paragons of passion.

Is this just cultural? Probably, for the films explicitly pitched as Oscar bait; it reflects a culture with lower emotionality than desi culture. With mainstream films, in contrast, a major part of the problem is market consolidation. When you're chasing high revenues, you inject high investment; when you've committed a lot of money, you target the broadest market; for the largest market, you talk only to the reptilian sub-brain with boobs and bombs. Finely-modulated emotions are too risky an investment.

Sorry, guys. I've already seen Bollywood.

Previous posts on Cowen's India trip: 1, 2

Shashwati remixes President Bush quotes with swaggering dialogue from vintage Bollywood films in a short film called ‘Bollywood Terror.’ It’s like Vinod Khanna channeling John Wayne. I dig it!

Check out the film.

A desi mother from Philadelphia was picking up tickets for her family at a Bush rally when she was ejected because her ride from work had a Kerry bumper sticker. Simi Nischal was picking up tickets for her husband Narinder, their son and daughter:

"The lady came in and said, 'Who's Simi?' " Nischal tearfully recalled Wednesday night, adding that she identified herself and was then refused tickets to the rally and escorted from the building.

Shortly after that, a man wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt confronted Nischal in the parking lot and told her to leave. "He was so rude, he made me feel like a criminal," Nischal said. "I said, 'That's not fair, you are losing a supporter.' [And he said], 'We don't care about your support.' "

Nischal said onlookers cheered and laughed at her as she left the property. But that wasn't the end of the insult, she said. She said another co-worker took her back to the gristmill to try to clear up the confusion, but she was again refused tickets...

Nischal said her daughter has been learning about the political process at school and has been a Bush supporter. She even picked up papers for her daughter to volunteer for the Bush campaign right before she was kicked out of the gristmill, she said.

I only watched a few of the first season’s episodes, and that’s probably why I never noticed that ‘The O.C.’ had a wee bit o’ brown in it.

Navi Rawat, whose father is Indian and mother is German, starred as Theresa, protagonist Ryan’s (Benjamin McKenzie) ex-girlfriend, whom he leaves Marissa (Mischa Barton) for during the season-ending cliff-hanger that 99% of Sepia Mutiny loyalists didn’t give a rodent’s butt about.

You see, Theresa is pregnant, and we don’t know if the baby is Ryan’s, so he’s doing the stand-up thing and leaving a multi-million dollar mansion in Newport Beach behind to go be with his vulnerable ex- during a tough time. The only reason I know this is because I went to the official OC site, and read the episode summary. I’ll bluntly admit that I was part of the 99%. ;)

I normally wouldn’t think that this talented young thespian’s participation in a scalding hot teen soap opera would be Mutiny-worthy, but NYU-alumna Navi has also been on “24” (as Melanie) as well as Angel, The Street Lawyer and Fastlane. Regarding the big screen, she played “Soraya” in the noteworthy celluloid adaptation of “The House of Sand and Fog” , with other bad-ass half-brownie Ben Kingsley.

If you think she looks familiar— but you don’t watch Generation Y’s nowhere near as good version of 90210— you may have spotted her on the USA network’s “Thought Crimes”, a movie that for some reason makes me think of our Abhi. ;) Navi starred as the troubled, telepathic teen Freya McAllister in the sci-fi/spy project;

Driven mad by the din of numerous voices in her head, she is eventually recruited by the NSA as a psychic sleuth.

Anyway, ‘The OC’s season premier is just days away, on November 4th. While I toy with the notion of watching for Navi, I’m frankly more excited about the musical line-up for season 2; three of my favourite groups, including Modest Mouse, The Killers and The Walkmen are guest starring on the show. Yum.

Following the lead of Hooters, Starbucks says it will expand into India soon, trying to reverse hundreds of years of tea plantation history dating back to the East India Company (thanks, Super Jagjit!):

“China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country[,] but we turned them into coffee drinkers,” Schultz told a gathering of analysts earlier this month…

But their Asia marketing director, speaking not to Wall Street but to Indian consumers, is singing a gentler hymn:

“India is a tea-based culture. We””””re not saying coffee is a substitute. We””””re saying Starbucks is a place to hang out, to eat and drink, to see and be seen.”

In other words, a place to flirt. And, in fact, gourmet coffee cafes serve exactly that function in Indian cities today:

“With the liberalization of the economy, there are a large number of young Indians with good jobs and attractive incomes,” said Banerjee. “Many still live with their parents. So their income is largely disposable and they need to spend it on something.”

Methinks the key part of that quote is ‘many still live with their parents.’ Cafes function as extended living rooms in space-impaired Manhattan and as libidinous hotspots in privacy-impaired India. They’re just the place for your silken mocha pick-me-up.

Elections are ALWAYS about money. Getting to know your candidate properly before Tuesday’s election includes gaining knowledge about who supports them monetarily. It just MIGHT be that your candidate is beholden to some special interest that you should know about. As an example here is a list of who got the top donations from the U.S. India Pac.
Looking at a reverse example, here is a list of who is giving money to candidate Bobby Jindal in Louisiana’s Congressional race.

You can use this website in order to follow the money in your own district.

In other news a 1000 Mexicans crossed into Texas…
From the CBC:

American border officials say the arrest of seven people who illegally entered the U.S. from New Brunswick is part of a new trend.

Seven people with Indian passports were arrested in Houlton, Maine on the weekend after crossing the border in a wooded area of New Brunswick.

With major crossing points now under tight security, remote areas of the border are becoming more popular with people who want to sneak in.

How’d they get caught?

The Indian nationals were arrested after authorities noticed them wandering the streets of Houlton in wet, muddy clothes.

Wait, so what you are saying is that brown folks aren’t common in Maine?

I’ve already voted but perhaps its out of my hands anyways. From NeIndiaPress.com:

The planets favour US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and would push him to victory over President George W. Bush in the November 2 polls, say Indian astrologers.

“Kerry is likely to beat Bush in the final verdict,” predicts renowned astrologer Ajai Bhambi, also author of the bestseller “Be Your Own Astrologer”.

“Bush’s horoscope shows Saturn, Venus and Mercury. They are all placed in Cancer Lagna and all of them are seen uncomfortable, which is why his election and his tenure have been controversial.

“These three planets are unfavourable to Cancer Lagna and create problems from time to time.”


Added astrologer Lachhman Das Madan: “I reveal the cosmic writ that George Bush cannot become the president of the US again.”

Wow, that sounded sort of Biblical. I’m sure that will get Bush’s attention.

The South Asian Journalists Association is hosting a live audio webcast at 1pm ET on Nov. 4 after the U.S. election. The first five minutes will survey how 20 South Asian American politicians did, while the bulk of the panel will discuss the election's implications for South Asia. For the webcast link, click here on Nov. 4.

Super Jagjit writes in with a fantastic pictorial series documenting India's body building history

I hope their modern descendants make 'em proud

2 more posts from Tyler Cowen with his humorous / insightful observations from India - here -

5. Favorite Indian joke about the Chinese: How do we know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple, not the snake.

And now India reject's Musharraf's proposal - India unenthused by Pakistan's Kashmir offer

NEW DELHI -- One day after Pakistan's president proposed a demilitarization of the violence-wracked Himalayan region of Kashmir, India's response was notably lukewarm, with an official making clear the proposal should not have been made first to reporters.

The short film 'In Whose Name?' by Nandini Sikand is screening Nov. 7 at the IAAC film festival in Manhattan. Shashwati Talukdar, the film's editor, writes:

It explores the hijacking of "Indian Culture" by the right wing, something very disturbing to those of us who grew up loving the very things that took on a very sinister meaning down the road. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn't learnt classical music and dance, this co-optation would have been as disturbing as it is.

Buy tickets for 'In Whose Name?' here and for the full film festival here.

Two new studies, one done in the U.S. and the other in the U.K., document the systematic discrimination against Indian (mostly Mallu) nurses. From Indolink:

The author says that the [U.S.] study ‘underscores the continuing inequities of our health care system’ and concludes that the challenge is to establish a more just and effective environment for those who provide health care.

As one of the nurses said, “I have proven myself over and over. What do we have to do to get recognized? What makes me mad is I would never have been able to do all the things I have done if I had stayed in India…We own a house, my children have gone to college, and yet…here, I feel like I don’t belong.”

Another commented: “I have not been treated badly, but I know I am not treated the same as the other White nurses…”

An Indian nurse with 26 year’s experience observed: “I think I am in the middle…White is the top and Black is the bottom.”

The British study notes similar conclusions:

The British study by Michael Shields and Stephen Price, and entitled ‘Racial Harassment…Evidence from the British Nursing Profession,’ defines racial harassment as behavior towards the individual nurse that is perceived to be ‘difficult, aggressive or hostile’ on the grounds of race or color.

This study confirms that nurses from South Asia are victims of racial harassment from hospital staff as well as patients. Furthermore, the study reveals that South Asian nurses are likely to experience abuse on a frequent basis. More than half of the Indian nurses reported having been the victim of racial harassment by patients or their families during their working lives.

Fresh off from duty in war-torn Afghanistan as an election monitor, K Jagannatha Rao is headed to the next troubled country to perform similar duties. From the Times of India:

Rao, who returned to India a few days ago after overseeing the polls in trouble-torn Afghanistan, will leave for the US on October 28.

“Ohio will be a challenge because it is more controversial than Flordia,” Rao told The Times of India on telephone from New Delhi.

Rao is among the 14 international observers invited by the Global Exchange International, a NGO, to monitor the US presidential elections this November 2.

Hopefully Ohio doesn’t embarass us. I am a proud American and don’t want us to fail our global test with the whole world watching.

“I will be at liberty to point out any fraud,” Rao said. He has already gathered a background about Ohio which he feels might come in handy during detection of any fraud during polls.

I hope his intelligence dossier includes the fact that Ohio State football sucks.

I usually think its great when some do-gooder American goes to India or Africa to help with the AIDS problem, but not like this. From 365Gay.com:

Police in India are seeking government permission to extradite three Americans for allegedly testing an animal vaccine on Indian patients with HIV 10 years ago.

The indictment names Pierre Emanuel De Gaspe, a Florida-based financier, Dr Bharav Bhattacharya, a veterinary scientist from New Jersey, and AIDS-patient counselor Dr Maya Gogte whose hometown in the US was not available.

All three are charged with medical negligence leading to death.

The case dates back to March 1994, when 10 HIV-positive patients were allegedly injected with a Bovine Immuno-deficiency Virus (BIV) vaccine meant for cows during medical trials conducted in Mumbai.

How often do we allow extradition of criminals anyways? Not including for torture I mean.

Sepia Mutiny recently reported The New Hope for settling the decades old Kashmiri situation. Alas, the plan appears to be DOA - CNN.com - Kashmir plan rejected in Pakistan - Oct 26, 2004 -

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan's opposition rejected a formula proposed by the country's president for solving the lingering issue of Kashmir, saying on Tuesday they will never allow him to change the status of Kashmir against the wishes of its people.

The Pakistani opposition's reaction came a day after President Gen. Pervez Musharraf told journalists in Islamabad that Pakistan and India must consider changing their positions on Kashmir to settle a decades-old dispute over the Himalayan region. Both nations claim the Himalayan region in its entirety.

"We have arrived at a stage where ... we have to consider options in a purposeful manner going toward a solution" over Kashmir, Musharraf said Monday.

He said New Delhi and Islamabad should consider making some areas of Kashmir independent, placing them under joint Indian-Pakistani control, or putting them under the administration of the United Nations.

Julie Ann Titus is no longer in the running for America’s Next Top Model. Has-been/Naomi Campbell-successor Tyra Banks sent our girl packing, ostensibly because Julie didn’t “want it” enough. Whatever.

The October 25 issue of In Touch magazine featured Julie in its “Losers of the Week” column. I painstakingly reproduce the extensive three question interview for SMers here: ;)

What have you been doing since getting kicked off?

I’m going to school, and then I’ll start my fashion business.

Are you glad they didn’t cut your hair short (during the makeover segment)?

I have good hair, why mess it up? Women should have long hair.

Are you over wanting to be a model?

Nope. I still want the world to see my face.

.

Word, JT.

Oh, and despair away boys…here’s a snippet from Julie’s exit chat transcript from the UPN website that may be of interest to you…

Julie: I figured my parents would get over it because they blessed me with good genes. I wouldn’t have problems with a nude shoot but a more conservative family would.

.

Julie, we hardly knew ye…or what ye looked like nekkid. ;)

This dude is hard core - New York Daily News - Home - Cabbie's 360G buys medallion & a dream

It cost him $360,000, but Mohammed Shah is glad to be in the driver's seat.

The Queens cabbie shelled out the record cash for a taxi medallion yesterday, mortgaging his East Elmhurst house and laying out a 10% down payment to finance the purchase at a city auction.

"I work 50 hours a week," the Bangladeshi immigrant said with a smile. "Maybe now I just work 40 hours. It's nice to be your own driver."

Shah came to the United States 23 years ago and is married, with two boys and a girl. His second son was born 10months ago. He worked in a restaurant until 1996, when he turned to driving a taxi.

He already had achieved the American Dream of homeownership, and now he's notched the cabbie New York Dream. "Now I own everything, a car and the medallion," he said.

A big Sepia Mutiny BRAVO to you, Mr Shah.

According to the Navhind Times it seems that many Sikhs from Afghanistan presently living in India, want to make their way back to Afghanistan through Pakistan, now that the country is stable enough for them to return to their businesses. What were up to 500,000 Sikhs doing in Afghanistan before the violence of the 90s and 9/11?

Afghan Sikhs and Hindus were predominant in Afghanistan’s unique ‘money market’ working as commission money changers, while others had shops and trading establishments.

However, after the fall of Najibullah regime, the Sikhs and Hindus fell prey to bloody inter-Mujaheddin warfare.

“For the past few years we have been trickling back and trying to reclaim our properties. We are facing lot of hardships,” the Sikh leaders said.

The Indian government however is not receptive to the idea of the Sikhs traveling trough Pakistan.

The Indian government had imposed a ban on overland entry of Afghan Sikhs following warning from intelligence agencies that Pakistani agencies were trying to infiltrate Sikh extremists in the garb of Afghan Sikhs.

Restrictions had also been enforced as after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Afghan security agencies had come across tell-tale evidence of some Sikh youths undergoing arms training in ISI-run camps near Kabul and in northern Afghanistan.

Assuming the article is refering to Al Qaeda’s terrorist training camps, that’s the first time I have heard that there were any significant number of Sikhs in those camps. In any case, it must be seen as a positive sign when people who fled a country start to return.

As the election looms menacingly closer its time to squeeze every last vote out of the electorate. Bush stays true to form by spending his time making insipid commercials starring wolves to scare us, while Kerry panders to every group he can think of. NCM reports:

Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry, who is locked in an epic battle with incumbent President George W. Bush in the November presidential election, says he would “make every effort to involve Indian Americans at the highest levels of my administration.”

In an exclusive Q&A in the Sept./Oct. issue of Indian Life & Style magazine published by India-West, the candidate, who is in a dead heat in the race to the White House, says, “It is long past time that Indian Americans be fully represented in the government.”

But what kind of position?? That is the million dollar question. I would love to apply for the type of position that Karl Rove has in Dubya’s administration. Can you imagine? Abhi as head of propaganda in a Kerry presidency? Oooh, the possibilities.

Displaying a comfortable grasp of the subject of India and Indian Americans, Kerry said: “I also believe that the Democratic Party has long been concerned about Indian American interests. In the last 25 years, only President Clinton and President Carter have made visits to India. From issues of civil rights, immigration, or foreign policy, the Indian American community can find in the Democratic Party a strong and common vision.”

Tyler Cowen, Libertarian blogger extraordinaire is blogging from India - Marginal Revolution: India impressions

Here are some purely subjective impressions of my time so far...

Don't expect a vacation in the ordinary sense of the term, as the main sight is India itself. None of the listed sights are the true highlights.

What was better than I had expected:

1. The overall friendliness, sparkle and wit of the Indians I have spoken to.

Saddest moment: Seeing ultrasound clinics in rural areas.

Delhi's canoodling commandos suffer coitus interruptus: Oddly enough, several religious shrines sit within high-security zones at Indian airports. Claiming they were visiting a Sufi shrine, two security personnel rode a scooter into the path of a flight taking off from Delhi in the early morning (via the Acorn):

Thursday's security breach at the Delhi airport, involving two security personnel who drove a scooter onto a runway as a Royal Jordanian Airlines aircraft with over 200 passengers on board was preparing to taxi along it, has raised eyebrows in intelligence agencies.

The Times of India has more:

Bhat later told the police that he and Kusumlata were going to the Pir Baba shrine located near the cargo building on the other side of the runway... "This is a clear case of negligence as the two did not even bother to check whether or not any flight was scheduled for departure..."

Since the shrine is only open in the afternoon, and only with a special permit, and the female constable was not assigned to the airport, I'm guessing that security was literally screwing around. As the queen of tawdry double entendres said:

In the midnight hour
I can feel your power
Just like a prayer
I'm going to take you there

Sexual repression, religious oddities, slipshod security and Bajajs: only in India.

BBC photo essay on the Dussehra and Durga Pooja festivals (via Mango Latte):

The New York Times (free subscription required), in its Sunday edition has run an interesting take on the role of the Indian/Hindu caste-system in the Indian diaspora in America. I use a hyphen because followers of non-Hindu faiths found in India (Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity etc.) continue to have remnants of the caste system as part of their cultural traditions as referenced in the NYT piece's example of Pinder Paul, who the Times describes as a

"spirited 50-year-old Punjabi Sikh (the Sikh faith absorbed some caste distinctions) who came to New York City in 1985 and worked as a dishwasher at Tad's Steaks. Now he and his wife spend seven days a week running the Chirping Chicken outlet he owns in Astoria. He could cite no instance of outright discrimination, but said looks and gestures sometimes betray upper-caste condescension. "Our friends who came here from India from the upper classes, they're supposed to leave this kind of thing behind, but unfortunately they brought it with them," he said. Yet in a paradoxical demonstration of the stubborn resilience of caste, Mr. Paul is active with a local Dalit group and said he would prefer that his son marry a Dalit. "We want to stay in our community," he said."

As Dr. Das's experience shows, the peculiarly Indian system of stratifying its people into hierarchical castes - with Brahmins at the top and untouchables at the bottom - has managed to stow away on the journey to the United States, a country that prides itself on its standard of egalitarianism, however flawed the execution. But the caste system, weakening for a half-century in India, is withering here under the relentless forces of assimilation and modernity. While it persists, its vestiges today often seem more a matter of sentiment than cultural imperative. Sometimes, the caste distinctions, recognizable by family names and places of origin, linger as a form of social snobbery. Keerthi Vadlamani, a 23-year-old chemical engineer from an affluent Brahmin family in the south-central Indian city of Hyderabad, said, "Some people are stupid enough not to mingle with a Dalit, to cold-shoulder them. "You won't invite them home, you won't go over to their home," he said. Other upper-caste Indians here say that they do not bother to probe someone's caste and that most compatriots will do business with anyone. Few Indians would admit to such behavior as refusing to eat in a restaurant because its food was cooked by an untouchable, something many upper-caste Indians might have done 50 years ago. Mostly caste survives here as a kind of tribal bonding, with Indians finding kindred spirits among people who grew up with the same foods and cultural signals. Just as descendants of the Pilgrims use the Mayflower Society as a social outlet to mingle with people of congenial backgrounds, a few castes have formed societies like the Brahmin Samaj of North America, where meditation and yoga are practiced and caste traditions like vegetarianism and periodic fasting are explained to the young.

Photos of Naveen Andrews on ABC’s Lost (previous post):

What do I mean? Well anyone that has traveled abroad extensively or even within the U.S. knows that no matter where you go, you will encounter a flock of Japanese tourists with cameras slung around their necks. Rediff.com points to trends showing that soon Indians may be the ubiquitous tourists:

But why are countries going all out to attract Indians? “They spend money,” says Edward Chew, spokesperson of the Singapore Tourism Board. Last year, Indians were the highest spending travelling community in Singapore with an average daily spend of S$200-300.

They beat the Japanese who till the year before last were the highest spenders. Singapore recorded 309,383 arrivals from India last year of which 34 per cent were leisure travelers. However, because of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), 2003 was a bad year for tourist traffic. In 2002, 375,000 Indians visited Singapore, which was an increase of 10.5 per cent over 2001.

The fact that Indians splurge on shopping, of course, makes them the favourites of various countries. But shopping isn’t the only thing they spend heavily on.

Great. Not only are we stereotyped as convenience store clerks and cab drivers but now this new potential caricature as well.

About two months ago I participated in a half-hour telephone survey about my smoking history and habits. The survey was specifically targeted for Indian Americans living in California, and I believe it was run by one of the UC campuses. The questions ranged from whether I had ever chewed paan, to how accepting I would be of my eventual offspring dating someone of another race. I do not know for sure if this new study reported by OnlyPunjab.com is associated with that same survey or not, but the results are worth examining:

California’s Asian Americans smoke at a lower rate than the state’s population as a whole, but the better an Asian California woman’s English, the more likely she is to smoke.

“Because one of every three Asian Americans in the United States lives in California, these findings have significance well beyond the borders of our state,” said Moon S. Chen, Jr., professor of public health sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center and principal investigator for AANCART, an $8.5 million project funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Why is it that the more assimilated (I correlate this only with English fluency) an Asian woman, the more likely she is to be a smoker? This is particularly curious when considering the following:

Researchers also found an intriguing relationship between English fluency and smoking rates. “Among Asian American males, high English fluency speakers had significantly lower smoking prevalence when compared to low English fluency speakers — 17 percent versus 25 percent. But the pattern was completely the opposite for Asian women,” Tang said. “Those with the highest English fluency were significantly more likely to smoke than Asian women with lower English fluency — 11 percent versus 4 percent.” English fluency has often been used as an indicator for acculturation in ethnic research.

The original press release can be found here.

Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria was on the Daily Show discussing Iraq with Jon Stewart a couple of nights ago. He's supportive of the initial war aims but critical of its execution. Check out the video.

Here's a previous post where Zakaria compares U.S. tactics in Iraq to Britain's tactics in India.

Theocracy, it's not just for South Asians any more. According to arch-conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, the Texas GOP has developed a jonesing for home grown Sharia law:

The Republican National Committee is employing the services of a Texas-based activist who believes the United States is a 'Christian nation' and the separation of church and state is 'a myth.'

David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders, was hired by the RNC as a political consultant and has been traveling the country for a year--speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. During the lunches, he presents a slide show of American monuments, discusses his view of America’s Christian heritage -- and tells pastors that they are allowed to endorse political candidates from the pulpit.

It gets worse. Barton is on the board of advisers for a Christian Reconstructionist group - people who believe that America should scrap its constitution and go back to Biblical law. When I have described the trend within the GOP as theocratic, I am sometimes criticized for hyperbole. But this is the reality. Barton is the vice-chair of the Texas GOP. Figures.

And you thought the only connections between Texas and the Taliban were their mutual love of big "hats" and pickup trucks. Here is a detailed exposition of the history of American Biblical Law, some (hostile) quotes from a book that argues from biblical law, and the accompanying software (looks like it is just text).

Several of the Mutineers are fans of Tyler Cowen over @ Marginal Revolution. The authors of Marginal Revolution are ostensibly Libertarians but have enough intellectual honesty, spark, and insight to draw a broad audience across the political spectrum.

Tyler is perhaps best known for applying the lessons of economics to the global culture industry and has published multiple books on the subject (my reviews are here and here.) In a nutshell, Tyler argues that far from the bland Disney-fied vision of corporatized culture pushed forth by anti-globolists of all stripes, Economics and Culture are actually rather natural allies and responsible for far more cultural creation than homogenization.

Today, Tyler posts on Marginal Revolution: My favorite things Indian and it appears the man is rather erudite on the Desi diaspora -

My favorite things Indian

Being here is number one at the moment, but here are a few specifics:

1. My favorite Indian musician - I have to go with Zakir Hussain; yes the CDs are wonderful but they do not compare with seeing him live. Honorary mentions go to Ali Akhbar Khan (sarod) and L. Subramaniam (violin).

...3. My favorite Indian novel - Rushdie is the obvious favorite, but I will opt for Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. Better than any Dickens but Bleak House. And did you know that he was an errant economics Ph.d. student at Stanford when he wrote the manuscript?

Ever since last month, when the taking of two French hostages in Iraq “had (the) unintended consequence” of uniting France in favour of the headscarf ban, i’ve been following how this affected le brown, specifically French Sikhs. here’s an update:

A French administrative court has ruled on an appeal brought by three Sikh boys who have been excluded from classes for wearing the under-turban.

However, it referred the matter back to the boys’ school, and said the issue should be resolved by further mediation between the school and its pupils.

The court recommended mediation in order to prevent setting a legal precedent that Muslim students could use.

France introduced its new law banning the wearing of all religious symbols from state schools from September.

France’s small Sikh community says the under-turban is a valid compromise.

…The French authorities admit that when the law was drafted, nobody consulted France’s small Sikh community.

This lack of planning has resulted in significant confusion, since some schools accept the “under-turban”, while others refuse to appear hypocritical, since the ban affects ALL religions, not just Muslims. Yarmulkes and large crosses are also not allowed, though fear about increasing Islamic Fundamentalism among French youth is what inspired the law in the first place.

A South African film titled, “Surf and Bhoondi” has just won the 2004 Hartley-Merrill National Screenwriting Prize here in the U.S. From iAfrica.com:

‘Surf and Bhoondi’ tells how a young Indian girl has to overcome family pressure and fight racism at the hands of white surfers in order to ride the waves. Set in South Africa, the film deals with issues of change within the one-million-strong Indian community and their relationship with other communities.

It also looks at the bond between father and daughter and how that has also changed for modern Indian families. In public the father is puts on the face of a modern liberal man in the new South Africa, while at home he struggles to maintain his orthodox values.

Sounds very Whale Rider-ish. I hope to check it out.

Georgia’s Khabar Magazine, profies Irfan Kalvert, an Indian-American soldier who served in Iraq:

So what inspired Irfan to join the Army when most of his peers in the community were planning medical or IT careers, if not envisioning a successful entrepreneurship? “Even though I was making $4000 a month as a young man starting out, I wasn’t happy with just making money. After September 11, I realized that we must do something to better the world, and I wanted to help. I wanted to experience new things, go out there and make a difference. I was 25 at the time and thought about all the men and women who have stood up for what they believed in, and about those in the armed services who gave up their freedom and even their lives ? for our freedom, for our way of life. The choice was clear.”

And so began Irfan’s life as a soldier two years back. His Iraq tour-of-duty started on February 18th of this year. After a couple months of orientation in Kuwait, he entered Iraq on March 15th. His unit was assigned the challenging task of taking over the Iraqi National Guard (ING) post at Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad.

In particular, he talks about one mission when things went very badly and his infantry unit suffered serious casualties. What went wrong?

[Khabar]:How did this attack happen? What went wrong?
[Kalvert]:We had general after general coming to see us because it was such a big deal, since we had people die inside a secured compound. Our battalion commander had informed his superior officer that the compound was secure, and it turned out it was not. Basically what we did wrong was that we had the ING running the gate while we were doing security for everything else. We always had an armored Humvee parked in front of our door where we slept in the building. On the day of the attack, it was not parked there for some reason. There had to be a leak from inside the ING people that gave it away.

These are the same 120,000+ ING soldiers whose numbers are increasing and who are being trained to take the burden away from U.S. forces (according to Bush during the debates). What does Kalvert think of the war in Iraq?

[Khabar]: Do you concur with the reasons America went to war?
[Kalvert]:Yes. I believe that if we hadn’t gone over there they would have eventually come over to fight us. We are not fighting just Iraqis ? there is an influx of people from other countries who have come just to fight against us.

The Sepia International photo gallery in Manhattan (how apropos) is hosting a Raghubir Singh retrospective through Dec. 30. Singh, an Indian photographer who worked in brilliant color, did for the humble Ambassador what Austin Powers did for the Mini.

"Unlike people in the West, Indians have always intuitively seen and controlled colour... My artistic sense was shaped early by the culture of the Rajputs of Rajasthan."... it was the dazzling colours of his native state, its hawelis... clothes... and sand dunes that impressed and inspired the budding artist.

Singh eventually settled in the U.S. and was awarded one of India's highest civilian awards, the Padma Shri, for his photography in 1983. He passed away in 1999.

Our own Seshu has more.

India’s most famous tourist attraction turns 350 this year, and quite understandably, it’s tired:

Earlier this month, two Indian historians warned the Taj Mahal may already be tilting and could crumble or sink if the government did not pay immediate attention to its ecological setting.

“Dangerous tilts in its minarets, first noticed in 1942 and mentioned in various reports, have continued to increase over the years,” Ram Nath, a former head of history at Rajasthan University, told the Hindustan Times.

“They are caused by the dry river bed.”

Another historian, Agam Prasad Mathur, said the dry Yamuna river bed must once again be filled if the monument was to be saved.

“Yamuna used to be full of water to maintain the monument’s balance and absorb tectonic shocks. Now that the river bed is dry, the Taj is exposed to the elements,” he said.

Mughal emperor Shah Jahan constructed the Taj in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died during childbirth. According to the BBC article that was linked above, this threatened “symbol of love” attracted over three million tourists to Agra last year.

Koose Muniswamy Veerappan’s funeral took place on Wednesday, at a family burial plot in Moolakudu, Tamil Nadu.

The BBC’s Sunil Raman says the police decided not to bury Veerappan in his native village in neighbouring Karnataka state fearing trouble from the large crowds that had gathered there.

“We have been orphaned,” cried the bandit’s wife, Muthulakshmi, as she clung to her teenage daughters Prabha and Vidya Rani at the funeral.

The following sentence made me pause, and wonder if something similar would’ve occurred in this country. Though the gesture was touching, I think not:

The bandit’s elder brother was allowed out from a life term in jail for aiding Veerappan to attend the rites. He laid a garland as he was closely guarded by police.

I’m also insanely curious about why he was buried vs cremated. Would anyone more knowledgeable care to edify a girl who gets curious about the most pointless things? If so, please leave a comment. :)

Though some professed relief about the bandit’s demise, others experienced an opposite set of emotions; said Ravi, a man who went to view Veerappan’s body before its burial,

“God will punish those policemen. Veerappan was a good man and he helped the poor,” he told the BBC.

Quick MSNBC article on a topic we've covered before - MSNBC - India draws 'medical tourists' -

NEW DELHI - Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.

So he outsourced the job to India.

...Total bill: about $10,000, including roundtrip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Booker Prize winning Author Arundhati Roy will be awarded the Sydney Peace Prize on November 3. Roy will deliver the City of Sydney Peace Prize lecture on the same date, while also launching her newest book, "The Chequebook and the Cruise Missiles: Conversation with Arundhati Roy."

While many disagree with Roy's politics and her foray into journalistic activism, I have to admit her ability to move minds through her amazing prose is quite impressive.

As a result of her activism, she is now probably better known for her critiques of the coalition of the willing in Iraq, for criticising the giant US corporation Enron for exploiting and sacking Indian workers, and her critique of globalization, which she has called "a process of barbaric dispossession which has few parallels in history," than for her prize winning novel, "The God of Small Things."

Apparently Indians don’t get sexual harassment training at IIT. The Washington Times reports on this growing public concern:

For example, we have many Indians who say, “Can I make a move?” when they mean they would like to take leave of someone. But if that is uttered in the US, to a lady, it could be taken for a sexual request,” says Dholakia.

That’s not funny. When I use that line women usually just walk away from me. I have always wondered why.

Savitha Nayak and Sunil Dholakia, who train employees of multinational corporations in soft skills such as dealing with conflict, negotiating and communicating, say they have added the basic dos and don’ts of interacting with the opposite sex to their curriculum.

Someone sign me up.

India NewEngland sheds light upon an issue that links a partticular immigration status to domestic abuse:

The study’s author, Boston University School of Public Health Professor Anita Raj, says current U.S. immigration policies preventing women on spousal visas from working and self-petitioning for change of status may constitute human-rights violations.

“H-4B visa holders are legal residents of the U.S. who are being denied the right to work and the right to self-petition for legal permanent residency in the U.S.,” Raj said. “These policies violate basic human rights and must be changed for the U.S. to demonstrate a commitment to eliminating policies that increase women’s risk for violence.”

The study, released this month, determines that abusive husbands use immigration-related abuse - threats of deportation, refusal to file for change of visa status and withholding of immigration paperwork - to exert extraordinary personal and economic control over their partners.

There seems to be so many immigration loopholes that can be exploited in unconcionable ways. Since this one affects the South Asian community, I thought I’d point it out.

“I don’t want to imply that if you’re on an H-4 visa, you’re going to be abused,” Raj said. “If you are in an abusive relationship and you are on an H-4 visa, you are at so much greater vulnernability for abuse.”

Leslye Orloff, director of the Immigrant Woman Program at the women’s right organization Legal Momentum, is leading a national effort to secure legal protections for immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

Orloff said Raj’s research proves for the first time that it’s not just U.S. citizens or permanent residents who use control over a partner’s immigration status to lock their victims in abusive marriages.

Hijra heaven: The title of Miss Gay Universe, a pageant that's quite a drag, has been won by Miss Gay India Lidia Zaray (thanks, 'Me'). India's hijra community always provides stiff competition, and this year it duct-taped the traditional cross-dressing powers into submission.

And so India turns out another beauty, emphasis on the queen. If you overlook the Adam's apples, these ladies can sashay. But Zaray is brown, not Snow White. If Zaray had assistants, they'd be called Hairy, Lazy, Cheap, Nerdy, Pious, Chubby and Doc. And their parents would want them all to be just like Doc.

For future reference (?), here's how international queens gussy up:

Shaving is only the beginning of the female process, which also involves applying duct tape to produce cleavage and many layers of pantyhose for leg tone and shape. Pads, made of foam or rubber, are added to instantly create the illusion of hips and buttocks. Other tricks involve using necklaces or feather boas to elongate the neck and hide the Adam's apple, high heels for longer legs - and then there's makeup. Foundation, powder and blush are used to contour the masculine shape of the face. "There's a reason why we call it painting our face," a drag queen named Jamie says.

Giuliani would've been proud.

No, that is not the name of my newest novel. You think childbirth is painful? Imagine passing stones through your tear ducts. From The Independent:

A 15-year-old girl called Savitri been admitted to hospital suffering from tiny stones that emerge from the corners of her eyes. Doctors say they have never seen anything like it, and they cannot explain it.

At the girl’s village in Jharkhand, they have two explanations. Either she is possessed by an evil spirit, or she is an incarnation of a goddess. But for Savitri, the condition is anything but a blessing. Before the stones emerge, she suffers from excruciating pain in her head. Tiny stones emerge from her ears, nose and mouth as well.

There are verses in the bible that fortell events like this in the End Days. With Nov. 2nd fast approacing, I am afraid.

Savitri and her family are desperate for a cure. Her bedside at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Science has been overrun by reporters, but the family say no one has been able to offer medical help.

Where is Dr. Sanjay Gupta with his house calls when you need him?

Vinod, who's apparently a closet leftist 'anti-globo protester' (who knew?), inspired this Veerappan shirt :)

Manish already posted about the assassination of notorious bandit Veerappan, but I thought I'd follow up by telling SM readers about this article from the BBC, which discusses how a "leading" South Indian human rights group is unhappy with the tactics employed in exterminating the dacoit.

...the killing could have been avoided, according to the human rights group, People's Watch.

Its head, Henry Tiphagne, asked in an interview with the BBC Tamil Service: "Why could the 100 armed police officers who surrounded Veerappan not have forced him to surrender or simply wounded him?"

Veerappan had many times told journalists how he had bribed police and politicians, and had made clear he would give details if he was ever tried.

Mr Tiphagne said, with Veerappan's death, the allegations of his links to leading figures in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka could not be examined.

After gazing at that picture, what I want to know is, what happened to his meesha (moustache)? Am I looking at an insult added to (final) injury?

I SWEAR its not a rat. From NBC10:

Her name is “Tiny.” How tiny is she? A mere 7.2 inches long.

If Guinness authorities confirm the measurement next week, she could be confirmed as the world’s smallest dog.

The dog is owned by an Indian couple, both doctors, who filed for the record after looking at a Web site that showed a 7.4 inch Chihuahua from Slovakia as the world’s smallest dog.

Dog lover’s can view a clip of Tiny here. Personally I would have named her “Killer” or “Cujo.”

Abdullah Mehsud, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner released by the U.S., turned right around and kidnapped two Chinese engineers in Pakistan:

The former prisoners include Abdullah Mehsud, accused by Pakistani authorities of overseeing the recent kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, one of whom was killed. On Friday, Pakistani soldiers began a massive search for Mehsud, 28, who returned to Pakistan in March after about two years' detention at Guantanamo. Pakistan officials said he has forged ties with al Qaeda since then.

This blunder reminds me of the 1999 incident when India released three Kashmiri militants in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines jet, IC-814. One of the men released, Maulana Masood Azhar, then masterminded the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

Wacko Jacko is hiring a very special personal chef when he visits London in November; Kenyan-born Raj Bajwe is the talented man behind Cafe India, Britain’s best Indian restaurant.

Reports say that Raj, manager of Glasgow’s award-winning Cafe India, will prepare Jackson’s favourite vegetarian dishes including ‘Saag Paneer’, ‘Allo Golu’, ‘pakora’, fried rice dishes, ‘chapatis’ and ‘naan’ breads.

Raj told the media: “I know Michael is facing serious charges but I can only judge the man as I find him. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

“He loves his Indian food, particularly the way we do it in Scotland. Michael doesn’t drink and washes the meal down with iced water.

“His favourite Indian dish is ‘Saag Paneer’, which is spinach cooked through with cheese. He just loves that. He also likes ‘Allo Golu’, which is a spicy potato dish.

Bajwe has cooked for other bold-faced names, including the Governator of my home state:

Cafe India’s other celebrity customers include Sir Sean Connery, Hugh Grant, Keanu Reeves, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rod Stewart, Billy Connolly, Lionel Richie and Emma Thompson.

Sick, sick, sickening:

Driven by acute poverty, a mother in Orissa sold her 20-day-old daughter to a neighbour for Rs 600 (about $13), media reports in Bhubaneswar said on Friday.

Kusum Majhi, 27, of Palisipada village in Kalahandi district, hit by drought and famine several times over the past decade, sold her second child to Dhanu Naik, a middle-aged labourer on Thursday, the Oriya daily Samaja reported.

…Kusum and her mother Sebati, 60, searched for a buyer in the village over the past few days, and Dhanu Naik showed interest in buying the child for Rs 600, the newspaper said.

…The sale of the baby was formally executed on Thursday in the presence of several other villagers, with Naik and Kusum submitting a document to the village council to avoid “future legal complications”, the report said.

How is this POSSIBLY legal?? :(

Veerappan, a notorious Tamil bandit with a truly impressive handlebar moustache, has finally been found and shot dead by police (thanks, Ennis). Veerappan was the Indian D.B. Cooper, an elusive fugitive whose freedom haunted law enforcement for years. His fame ranked with that of Indian-Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

Veerappan, a Tamil, was accused of more than 100 murders - as well as kidnapping, smuggling and poaching - and had been on the run for 20 years...

He was involved in the kidnapping two years ago of former state minister of Karnataka, H Nagappa, who was found dead after three months in captivity. He was also involved in the kidnapping for a famous film star, Rajkumar, four years ago. The film star was released after 108 days of captivity, allegedly for a huge ransom.

The Acorn has more:

India's very own October surprise: Towards the fag end of his career, Veerappan did try to diversify into the new business model -- terrorism -- but couldn't quite find the right sponsors in time... it is still good to see him sent off the field by a bullet paid for by the Indian tax-payer. For a time it looked like nature would claim him first.

I'm in Sao Paulo for a biz meeting and the local sales team took me out for a grand sushi dinner (Sao Paulo has the largest single overseas Japanese population with just shy of 1.5M of the 18M Paulisanos ). I was far from my small town / farm homeland. Nevertheless, I took a certain comfort that the local radio station the Japanese restaurant played for us diners featured the track Tu Tu Hai Wahi by DJ Aqueel.

Freaky.

What’s with my provocative title? Remember a while back when I posted this entry about a group called Democrats Abroad trying to register expats in India so that they could vote absentee in the U.S. election? Well its not just India. Several articles recently have followed this phenomena. I covered this on my own blog a few weeks ago but the issue keeps surfacing in the media so I thought I would bring it to the attention of SM readers. Here is an excerpt from Newsweek:

With polls projecting a tight race, Americans abroad know just how much their votes could count. A recent tally of two Democratic Web sites, OverseasVote2004.com and OverseasVote.com, shows that 75 percent of the total number of voters has registered in the last 10 weeks, and more than 40 percent of those voters are from swing states. Although they did not give the exact figures, Republican organizers outside the U.S. claim the number of voters signing on with Republicans Abroad in Europe has skyrocketed 400 percent since 2000. The number of chapters of Democrats Abroad has risen from 33 to 70 since the beginning of this year. “Based on our figures, 5.3 percent of overseas voters are from Florida [and] 4.4 percent from Pennsylvania. Washington, Michigan and Ohio all tie for about 3 percent,” says Americans Overseas for Kerry’s Jim Brenner, who is based in Boston. Ironically, the real battleground states of this election could end up being countries like Canada, France and Mexico.

Slate magazine however, recognized another angle to this new movement which is quite interesting:

While Americans who go abroad to kill people vote Republican, Americans who go abroad to do just about anything else vote Democratic. This is the logic behind the unprecedented effort to get out the vote among U.S. civilians overseas, and the reason that effort is overwhelmingly Democratic.

How have they formulated this dubious theory?

Supplesomething forwarded me an interesting NPR piece on Manjul Bhargava, 28, a professor of number theory at Princeton who discusses how the Fibonacci series pops up not just in mathematics but also in the arts.

The Fibonacci series is the set of numbers beginning with 1, 1 where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The series begins with 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. They were known in India before Fibonacci as the Hemachandra numbers. And the ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers approximates a ratio, ~1.618, called the golden section or golden mean.

It's long been known that the Fibonacci series turns up frequently in nature. The numbers of petals on a daisy and the dimensions of a section of a spiral nautilus shell are usually Fibonacci numbers. For plants, this is because the fractional part of the golden mean, a constant called phi (0.618), is the rotation fraction (222.5 degrees) which yields the most efficient and scalable packing of circular objects such as seeds, petals and leaves.

My college roommate Tushar, asked me if I would start an LA phonebank operation for John Kerry. Basically I would get a bunch of fellow Dems together and we would use our unlimited weekend cell phone minutes to call likely South Asian voters in Florida. We would plead Kerry’s case and get them to turn out to vote. A very smart strategy I think. Usually with me the ends justify the means. Bush must be defeated at all costs. Yet in this case, its hard for me to commit time to a candidate that I am not crazy about. I haven’t yet taken him up on his request, but I may still. From India West as reported by New California Media:

Last weekend, from both the east coast and west coast, phone calls went into the homes of registered South Asian voters in Florida with a simple message from callers: Vote for John Kerry.

With pollsters predicting a razor-thin election still too close to call, and Florida once again a toss-up state, the calls may well have a decisive impact. The Kerry supporters hope to reach 20,000 registered South Asian voters in Florida before they are done.

In what could be a first for the community, young South Asian supporters of the Massachusetts senator are getting involved in the nitty gritty of grass-roots campaigning in a U.S. presidential campaign.

“We think for the first time in the history of American politics, it was a phone bank targeted specifically to South Asian American voters, and phone calls made by South Asian Americans,” Tushar Sheth, a 28-year-old New York-based attorney, told India-West.

If anyone does want to be involved in a phonebank operation you can get information at SAKI2004.

Strategy Page reports - military news about India-Pakistan -

October 18, 2004: Pakistan has offered to divide up Indian Kashmir according to the wishes of the Kashmiris. The would likely mean that the most valuable part of the province, the mostly Moslem Kashmir valley, would go to Pakistan, while the Hindu and Buddhist areas would opt for India. But maybe not. The Kashmiri Moslems are aware that India has a real democracy and a growing economy, versus dictatorship and economic chaos in Pakistan. There is much less corruption in India. Over a decade of Islamic terrorism, even if technically on their behalf, has left many Kashmiri Moslems fearful, if not outright hostile towards Islamic radicalism. Putting it all to a vote would be unpopular with nationalists in both countries, but is one solution that would end the fighting, or at least reduce it. However, India has a point in that Pakistan's tolerance for Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistani Kashmir is the main source of the violence in Kashmir. That said, half a century of fighting over this province is wearing out a lot of Indians and Pakistanis, especially since both have nuclear weapons. This means a battlefield solution is no longer possible.

Seeing Econ Opportunity create the motive for peace warms my little libertarian heart ;-)

The UK is trying to encourage more Sikhs to join the British army. Why?

... at the time of First World War, Sikhs formed 20 per cent of the British army. That meant 100,000 Sikhs.

"In the 100 years to 1945, there were some 14 Victoria Crosses awarded to Sikhs. On a per capita basis, given the size of Sikh regiments, that must be a record for the entire British armed forces,"

Background:
Right now there are only around 100 Sikhs in the British armed forces, which is more than the US or Canadian militaries, but still not much in light of past levels of recruitment.

Only 1,354 Victoria Crosses have been awarded since the first in 1856. The Congressional Medal of Honor is the US counterpart to the VC; it's the highest award given out by the British.

p.s. No, I don't buy into notions of "martial races."

This is something deep from my dusty archives. At Ohio University, where I studied visual communications for a year, we were asked to illustrate a concept. I took the legend behind the Buddha and his transformation from stately prince to the high priest of a new ideology – perhaps even a religion – as my concept. Given that Buddhist art is already so beautifully, how do you go about illustrating that?

I found an Indian ornament lying around in my apartment; a puppet of a man wearing a sparkling turban riding on a legless horse. I used his face alone and intentionally lit him in the background to appear overbearing, ominous and perhaps even violent. Notice the direction of the light. It's from below. Ever see this technique in a horror flick?

Several years back, my mother sent me a handpainted scroll from Bhutan depicting the Buddha. If you can believe it, the six Buddhas in the bottom are all from that same image. Ideally there should be eight of them to symbolize the eight-fold path in Buddhist theology, but I couldn't get them all to fit (this time).

The images were shot on film, scanned at a high resolution and then brought into Photoshop where there was quite a bit of manipulating (something I wouldn't ever do to an editorial image). Each of the Buddhas were sent through a bunch of Photoshop filters. Each filter tweaks the image to a specification that I was happy to see on my screen. I really wasn't sure what they would look like before I got started and I was pleasantly surprised by what the results looked like in the end.

The exercise was a grand departure from what I usually do – wedding photojournalism. It was really a time to experiment and have fun. I am not really sure I have conveyed the principal premise of the image clearly. Let's just call this a work in progress, shall we?

I’ve always hated korma; I’m not sure what that says about me, but the next time I order Aloo Vindaloo at Gaylord’s Ghirardelli, I’m going to smirk as I think of this survey from England:

One fifth of men questioned for Sky digital and Star Plus’ National Curry Week (October 17 - 24) survey said, they had eaten a vindaloo curry to impress a lady or their friends! When it comes to impressing friends or members of the opposite sex Lancashire has the toughest taste buds with over 20 per cent who have braved a vindaloo in the face of peer pressure. Whilst those in Newcastle seem to have the puniest palette and are least likely (7 per cent) to indulge in hot and spicy dishes to win over friends and lovers!

Women seem to be tongue-challenged when it comes to vindaloos. The findings show four in 10 men like their curries hot or extremely hot compared to only one in 10 women. Two-thirds (62 per cent) of women questioned admit they like mild curries, such as a korma.

Star Plus’ spokeswoman, Suruchi Sthalekar said: “The results are hilarious, I can just imagine the scenes in curry houses and homes across the UK. To think men measure their sexual prowess against the spiciness of their curry. And I would urge all woman to go out there and try vindaloo today to prove we can handle it.”

Handle it? I consummately require it. ;)

As a life-long vegetarian, I’m thrilled to learn that for the third year in a row, Amitabh is India’s hottest herbivore, according to your favourite animal rights outfit:

The veggie voters have spoken, and it is official – the Big B is again the Big V, and breaking the Bollywood monopoly, Clueless star Alicia Silverstone has won PETA India’s Hottest Vegetarian Alive Contest for 2004. More than 50,000 Web surfers cast their votes this year.

This year, the contest was even hotter, with vegetarians like Shahid Kapoor, Pamela Anderson, Pierce Brosnan, Yana Gupta, Avril Lavigne, Mandira Bedi, Tobey Maguire, Shania Twain and Esha Deol as nominees.

Celebrities cite many reasons for forgoing flesh foods, from avoiding the cruelty to animals that is inherent in meat production to improving their health and energy levels to helping the environment by not contributing to hog- and chicken-farm pollution.

Amitabh is just one of many stars who probably taste better. Upon perusing the list of esteemed nominees, I was surprised to find that “Lord of the Rings” star and blazing-ball-of-awesome-hotness Orlando Bloom is also an herbivore. As if he wasn’t fantastic enough already. Stothrum!

Sadly, Mutineer Manish wasn’t nominated, or he would’ve surely killed Big B’s shot at a three-peat. ;)

Exorcism: it’s not just for Bobby Jindal (see liberal blog DailyKos) any more. Faith healers in the UK are fleecing depressed Muslim women by vending talismans and djinn exorcisms:

A victim of exorcism, eighteen-year-old Sureha Begum, from Manchester, attended the conference. She suffered from chronic depression and was self-harming after an arranged marriage in Bangladesh. When she became ill her parents were told that she was possessed by jinns. They spent over £3,000 on faith healers and exorcisms…

Said Sureha: “Faith healers told my parents that I was possessed and the more my mental health deteriorated the more these faith healers convinced them it was the work of the jinn… These faith healers know your weaknesses as soon as you open your mouth and they use it to con people out of hundreds of pounds.”

If I were to be the property of a djinn, let that djinn be Barbara Eden.

You guys probably know or can guess that I travel quite a bit for work. When you're the lonely business traveller, you end up spending a fair number of your jetlagged hours channel surfing the local TV. In between dubbed reruns of TJ Hooker in various languages, one ofthe things that's surprising me more and more is how much Desi culture I'm running into in random countries.

I was impressed, for ex., with the Desi quarter of Singapore (one of the cleanest cities in the world, and yet, Desi's have managed to make an entire street smell like Garam Masala ;-). But I think most folks generally expect to see (and smell?) the Desi presence there.

The spate of more surprising examples began about a year ago when I was in Stockholm and flipped out when I saw the video for Mundian To Bach Ke on Swede MTV.

A little over a month ago, I was in Amsterdam and Russell Peters was on TV (with Dutch subtitles). He appeared to be delivering his usual desi-themed material to a UK audience and the show was rebroadcast on a local TV station.

And now, I'm in Sao Paolo, Brazil and just a few minutes ago, a total 3rd tier ABCD movie - Bollywood/Hollywood was on the boob-tube complete with Portugese subtitles. The movie still sucked but it was sorta interesting to see a Brazilian announcer say something about the flick afterwards with a headshot of Lisa Ray in the corner of the screen.

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says Americans need to emulate Asian and desi nerds:

The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

If I believe what I am told then the Republicans support outsourcing and the Democrats are against it, right? That’s not entirely true as we all know. The Dems are exploiting outsourcing as a wedge issue, sometimes unfairly as Vinod pointed out in a previous post. How many times did we hear during the debate, “we outsourced the Tora Bora fight to Afghan Warlords.” The Dems know that use of the very word can exploit the anger many Americans feel, and they use this to their advantage. I doubt there would be huge differences in the policy either man would pursue as President.

What is happening in New Jersey’s 6th Congressional District is sort of backwards however. The Indian American Republican challenger Sylvester Fernandez, is going after the Democrat incumbent Frank Pallone with great vigor using outsourcing as the wedge issue. From the Ashbury Park Press:

Sylvester Fernandez, the Republican challenger in the 6th Congressional District race, blames incumbent Democrat Rep. Frank J. Pallone Jr. for the outsourcing of jobs to India.

But Pallone, of Long Branch, insists his voting record in the House of Representatives reflects his anti-outsourcing stance. And he pointed out that jobs are outsourced to countries other than India, which appears to be his opponent’s singular focus.

Let me get this straight. A first generation Indian American is attacking a Democrat for supporting outsourcing of jobs to India? Does this seem backward to anyone else? Looking at Fernandez’s platform on his website we see what his main issues are:

Playbill.com reports that singer Tamyra Gray, who shot to stardom in the first edition of TV's "American Idol," will make her Broadway debut in the struggling Bombay Dreams on Nov. 9.

Gray, who placed fourth in the hit TV singing competition in 2002, will assume the role of Priya, the earnest film director in the Bollywood-themed musical, for a limited engagement of 12 weeks. Priya is currently being played by young desi actress Anisha Nagarajan.

"I have been an admirer of Tamyra Gray from the start and am thrilled she's joined the Broadway Company of Bombay Dreams. She's going to be wonderful", said the composer of the show, A.R. Rahman.

Playbill.com is also referring to a Variety story that suggests Bombay Dreams is
headed for celluloid. Variety reports that the musical, originally produced on the London stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber, may make the stage-to-screen leap via Really Useful Films. In fact, a motion picture is currently being developed, and shooting will most likely be done in India. Austin Shaw, the managing director of Really Useful Films, told the industry paper, "It's effectively a Bollywood film in a Western style, so it makes sense to shoot it in India." Farah Khan, the co-choreographer of Bombay Dreams, is in the running to helm the motion picture.

Indiandating.com / Shaadi.com / etc. members beware - Delhi man dupes Indian girl in US - Sify.com

New Delhi: A Delhi-based computer salesman who duped an Indian girl, working with Motorola in US, of 39,000 dollars by contacting her through a matrimonial website has been arrested, police said...

But, that Delhi-based supermodel who contacted me said she *really* did need the $3000 for a ticket to visit on my b-day. It was just that her mother was sick so she had to postpone and then there was her PhD dissertation defense in Neuroscience, followed by...

A story about Northern Ireland must deal with the IRA or Protestant/Catholic violence right? That was the old Northern Ireland. Is this indicative of the new? From Scotsman.com:

Politicians today slammed thugs who targeted members of the Turkish and Indian communities in the latest act of racial violence in Northern Ireland.

Police were trying to hunt down those responsible for damaging cars and daubing racist slogans such as “Turks Out” on their victims’ homes in Comber, Co Down.

The ironic part is that it seems from this article that many of the Indian and Turkish immigrants in this community work in the medical services industry. Thus, these criminals are committing violence against a people that can be of aid after the fallout of a Protestant vs. Catholic clash.

“This sort of activity is reprehensible and it is seemingly happening everywhere in Northern Ireland.

“Many people from abroad are living in the Province and working in vital jobs like medicine. I am confident the Health Service couldn’t cope without them.

“This is supposed to be a free society and everybody ought to be free to live where they want no matter where in the world they’re from,” he said.

Visitors to The Museum of London will now be treated to two brand new paintings that have been described as two of the most important works of mid-Victorian England. From 24hourmuseum.org:

Painted by Henry Nelson O’Neil, Eastward Ho! (1858), and companion piece, Home Again (1859), show soldiers boarding a ship bound for the Indian Mutiny (1857-1859), and returning to their families again over a year later.

Ahh, yes. That is the same Sepoy Mutiny (or Rebellion depending upon which side you were on) that our blog’s name took inspiration from.

“As well as being exceptional examples of O’Neil’s work,” explained Sue Bowers, Regional Manager for the HLF in London, “these paintings are important for the stories they tell about Victorian London, when the Thames held world status as the gateway to the heart of the Empire. ”

A picture of both paintings can be seen on the Museum’s website.

The New York Daily News runs a story on the success of immigrant children. This sounds all well and good but I personally was left with a sense of glass-half-full dismay. Here is how the story starts:

Ask 13-year-old Amarnath Kuppannan and his 10-year-old sister, Aarthi, what they want to be when they grow up and they respond in unison: “A doctor.” Both youngsters, the New York-born children of Indian immigrants, spent their summer at the Elite Academy on 39th Ave. in Flushing.

I fought back nausea at the fact that yet another generation of immigrant kids would be brainwashed down certain paths, and I continued to read trying to focus on the overall positive message in the article.

Starting at 8:30 a.m. and some days finishing as late as 2:30 p.m., the youngsters were drilled and quizzed four days a week in higher mathematics and the complexities of English grammar and composition.

But who am I to judge these parents’ ambitions for their children? As the article points out the father is from a rural Indian village and didn’t get educational opportunities. The article lauds the success of New York’s immigrant children:

A dramatic 62.4% of New Yorkers younger than 18 are foreign-born - the so-called 1.5 generation who come here as children and are reared and educated here.

“These immigrants and their children are the future,” said Prof. John Mollenkopf, director of City University’s Center for Urban Research. “How well they do is critical.”

It seems that the future is in good hands.

“Foreign-born students outperform native-born students on traditional measures of academic achievement,” according to a 2003 study by New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center. “Immigrants have higher reading and math scores … despite their higher poverty rates, limited English skills and newness to the U.S. schooling system.”

Sad but true article over @ TCS (TCS ROCKS!) about the latest instance of economic idiocy coming out of India - TCS: Tech Central Station - Wheels of Fortune?

It is rare to find a single story that illustrates, in exquisite detail, all of the varied pro- and counter- arguments for free trade as opposed to managed or protected trade. I am therefore grateful to Peter Foster who filed this piece in the Daily Telegraph from New Delhi. In a nutshell, the Indian Railways Minister, a Mr Prasad, has refused permission to import railroad wheels into India, preferring to establish a factory in his home state of Bihar to make India self-sufficient in their production.

Outsourcing & IT might make the headlines but when it comes to the nitty-gritty improvement of per-capita GNP, lifestyles, health, and so on, it's the boring stuff like logistics that make all the difference.

The cost of not allowing imported train wheels? Well, one of the many costs is quantified -

Analysts predict that it will be many years before India can produce enough wheels to meet demand. The shortage has left 20,000 carriages awaiting wheels, and a similar number of old ones requiring replacements."

This makes my blood boil on so many levels. Idiots.

Mira Nair's Next venture, the making of Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake onto celluloid, is holding a casting call for Bengali/South Asian actors.

Shooting in Calcutta and NYC December/February 2004 - 2005.

Seeking the following roles:
GOGOL - 4-7 years old to play 4. Born in the United States, his parents are
from Calcutta. Speaks English and Bengali

GOGOL - 16-21 years old to play 17. Born in the United States, his parents
are from Calcutta. Speaks English and Bengali.

SONIA - 12-15 years old to play 13. Born in the United States, her parents
are from Calcutta. Speaks English.

MOUSHUMI - 15-20 years old to play 16. Plump and intelligent. Has a British
accent.

If INTERESTED IN BEING CONSIDERED FOR THIS FILM, please send snapshot and letter (non-returnable) to:
Cindy Tolan
"The Namesake" Casting Search
145 Sixth Avenue, 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10013

"Stolen," British Asian Pop-Star Jay Sean's next single drops on October 18th. This will be followed by Jay Sean's full length album entitled "Me Against Myself." The video for stolen made some headlines in India, as it features Bollywood Hottie/Provacateur Bipasha Basu.

Click here to see the video

Jason Alexander must be really really desperate. He acted in a completely unfunny (by any standard) sketch called "Outsource This!" It's a video clip on the whiny Outsource Outrage website.

It plays to all sorts of nasty, parochial predjudices by saying the names of foreign countries like they're nasty, just because they're not in America (at one point a kid asks him where Uzbekistan is, and he points to a map, and says it's not in "here" gesturing to North America). Another time he gestures to Iran and North Korea, waving his hands over the intervening countries, saying "Axis of Evil," like all of Asia is inside the Axis.

The only good thing about the clip is that they don't single out India. Watch it, be prepared to be both bored and repulsed.

I used to go from Birmingham to Amritsar by foot, but it was a very slow walk!

Birmingham International Airport (BIA) has celebrated the launch of a new non-stop long haul charter service with specialist tour operator, Midland Airways. Travellers are now able to fly direct to Amritsar, the City of the Golden Temple, from Birmingham each Friday. This service will increase to two flights per week before the end of the month and will see a third weekly departure in early December.

The flights are operated by a new airline to Birmingham, Slovak Airlines, using a 215 seater 767-200 aircraft. Although the service is operated as a charter flight, passengers have a choice of two classes - economy (203 seats) and first class (12 seats). Prices start from GBP299 return.

Currently, the weekly service departs from Birmingham each Friday at 21:00, arriving the next morning into Amritsar Airport at 09:30. The return flight leaves Amritsar on Sunday at 13:30 and arrives into Birmingham at 20:00 the same evening. These flight times will change as new frequencies are added.

A reader (who goes by C&C) on my other blog sent me a link to this hilarious bit done on the best of late night talk shows. Its rather long but worth viewing. Check it out.

Thanks for the heads up C&C!

Last week, the European Patent Office revoked agricultural conglomerate Monsanto's patent on a variety of Indian Nap Hal wheat, widely used in chapatis because it doesn't rise when baked (via Boing Boing). Indians had cried biopiracy, reacting the way we would if France had patented apple pie (Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri).

The wheat's low gluten content gives it low water absorption and elasticity. One scientist elaborated on how the patent's central claim was not novel:

The Indian wheat patent by Monsanto has lower gluten, which is responsible for its lower elasticity... This is the trait that is the core of Monsanto's patent and it is a trait evolved by farmers breeding in India. Introducing the trait into a cross... is an obvious step any breeder familiar with the art of breeding can undertake. Monsanto's claim is clearly not novel. This is a clear case of piracy of India's indigenous knowledge of breeding and cooking.

Yes, breeding and cooking: the desi core competencies. The patent opposition was filed in conjunction with Greenpeace.

Monsanto denied the patents would be used to block Indian farmers from using their Nap Hal seed. "Indian users can use Nap Hal for chapatis or whatever else, now and just as they've always been used to," McDermott told The Scientist. "The idea that Indian farmers would have to pay royalties to use Nap Hal, that's just inflammatory and ridiculous."

The controversy echoes the neem patent case in 2000. Neem leaves are widely used in ayurvedic remedies. The EPO revoked this patent, held by the U.S. government and W.R. Grace on a neem-based fungicide.

Here is the patent text.

Dr. Meena Bose, 34, is an assistant poli sci prof at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a frequent pundit on American politics (thanks, Ennis). I've seen her on TV discussing the presidential election. She comes across as earnest, fair, wonkish yet accessible. She's clearly intelligent, clearly high-bandwidth. But she lacks some of the swagger you need to hold your own on a panel of pundits or with decorated military men. It'll probably come with age.

She is a petite woman in a pageboy haircut who looks barely out of her teens... Her expertise and evenhandedness have made her an increasingly sought-after television pundit, most recently for "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.'' Ms. Bose is one of the few female scholars... asked to provide historical context for American politics.

But Ms. Bose, whose heritage is Bengali Indian, touts neither a feminist nor immigrant American viewpoint... Her father, Nirmal, is an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, where Ms. Bose was an undergraduate, and her mother, Chandra, formerly history instructor in New Delhi.

Bose earned her doctorate from Princeton and wrote Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy.

All those years, that all those teachers mispronounced my exotic name by accident has irrevocably scarred my delicate psyche. However, apparently that isn’t as important as what employers think of my name. Before working for Sepia Mutiny I applied to several other blog jobs and they all rejected me. I always thought it was due to my inferior blogging skills, never suspecting something more sinister was afoot. Finally, upon joining Sepia Mutiny I was among my own kind. Names like Vallloooopillliillli and Peedidiliakalli and…Vij, are common around this outfit. Now, at last, the plot that held back one with my talents has been revealed. As exposed in the San Jose Mercury News today:

Asian women are near the bottom of the heap when it comes to responses to résumés sent to California temporary agencies, according to a new study.

One Cal student was so disturbed by the data, “I called my father and asked if I should change my name?”

“It really bummed me out,” the unidentified Chinese-American student wrote in e-mail feedback to her professor. She would be graduating in a few months and heading into the job market.

The study, released last week by the Berkeley-based Discrimination Research Center, found that having an Arab or South Asian name — like “Mohammed Ahmed” — in California meant having fewer responses than whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians when it came to seeking a job at temporary employment agencies.

Aishwarya Rai's star rose over Britannia last weekend as Bride and Prejudice premiered at #1 in the UK (thanks, Ennis). The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, sold £1.67M ($3M) in tickets and topped Saw, Wimbledon and Resident Evil 2.

Adjusted for population, that's the equivalent of a $15M U.S. opening, pretty decent since the UK film industry doesn't produce many blockbusters. The UK's most successful opening of all time, Bridget Jones' Diary, did £5.7M ($10.2M) its first weekend, or the equivalent of $51M in population-adjusted dollars.

Rai follows in the illustrious desi footsteps of Queen and curry as the UK's most popular. The film opens in the U.S. in limited release on Christmas Eve.

Bride and Prejudice is the first English-language Bollywood musical to succeed in a mainstream market, Lagaan (Rs. 375M in India) and Monsoon Wedding ($30M worldwide) notwithstanding. The UK audience was probably drawn by its affection for Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham. It's been a year of crossover firsts: the first desi Broadway musical, the first Indian-American Olympic medalist, and now the film.

Previous posts on Bride and Prejudice: 1, 2. Also see newly-released film clips, the reviews, and the trailer.

A new novel by Goan psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar re-imagines the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Miraben, one of his most committed disciples, a British admiral’s daughter who ‘went native’:

[N]one stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade… She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial… He gave Slade the name of Mira, after a mythical Hindu princess, and elevated her to the status of his foremost disciple, sitting with her every evening for an hour of quiet conversation while Slade massaged his feet with oil. Over the next two decades, he would write her nearly 500 letters…

[H]e does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy… [Gandhi wrote,] “May God remove what I consider is your moha,” a Hindi word for infatuation.

The book’s approach echoes the Freudian analyses of Indian mythology, such as that of Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna, by non-South Asians. These analyses’ obsession with sexuality almost always provokes controversy. In this case, Kakar is adopting a classically Western approach to explore the obvious implications of a retroactively sainted man’s personal relationships. Of course, Gandhi admirers are up in arms:

Kakar’s implication that the deep emotional connection between Gandhi and Slade had something other than a purely spiritual basis has raised eyebrows in a country accustomed to hagiographic portrayals in school textbooks and movies such as “Gandhi”…

Here’s Ennis’ previous post on canonizing Gandhi.

Rediff has an interesting pair of exclusive interviews with George Bush & John Kerry on their India policies -

Are Chicago nursing homes actually grouping residents by ethnicity? I shudder to think of what could happen if segregation in nursing homes mimics segregation in prisons. We might have different ethnicities forming gangs on the “inside.” From the AP wire at ABCnews:

Mid America Convalescent Center is one of a growing number of Chicago-area nursing homes that assemble residents by ethnicity. Asians live on one floor, Hispanics are on another.

Each group has its own traditional food, activities and a staff that speaks its language. Within a few miles are other facilities doing the same for Poles, Russians, Indians and Koreans.

There have long been nursing homes that cater to certain nationalities and religions, or become popular with different ethnic groups. But in Chicago, with the third largest number of foreign-born residents in the United States, that sort of specialization is becoming increasingly common and formalized, said Kevin Kavanaugh, spokesman for the Illinois Council on Long Term Care.

At first this sounds kind of bad. Segregation is something you must always remain vigilant against. But…when you are that old you may want to revert to what you are most familiar with. I can’t fault that logic. All the different groups have their own customs and quirks.

Specialized ethnic care can be helpful, advocates argue. Nursing homes must be aware, for example, of elderly Jewish residents for whom a trip to the shower may trigger memories of the Holocaust.

They also must be aware of customs and rituals, said Rosemary Gemperle, executive director of the Coalition of Limited English Speaking Elderly, an organization of community-based ethnic agencies in Chicago.

“Indian people, Hindus, won’t eat before they are bathed,” Gemperle said, offering an example. “They will starve first.”

Some Koreans won’t drink cold water, believing it can cause disease. A nursing home that doesn’t understand that can create a life-threatening situation if residents refuse to take medications because they are given only cold water, said Susan Duda Gardiner, director of clinical services with the Illinois Council on Long Term Care.

Want an H1-B visa? If you applied by Friday, October 1 of this year, you might have a shot. If you didn’t, well, best of luck next year.

Congress set a cap of 65,000 such visas per fiscal year. By the end the work day Friday, Citizenship and Immigration Services already had received enough applications to meet the limit.

Agency spokesman William Strassberger said applications filed by Friday will be considered. For any after that, “It’s too late,” he said.

In this age of Outsourcing, Congress is predictably wary about raising that figure even though “those that use the program say they can’t find enough Americans with the necessary math, science and engineering skills.”

The “65,000” figure is a bit misleading, since 6,800 visas are already reserved for workers from Chile and Singapore, thanks to free trade agreements the U.S. has with those nations.

A few Republicans in Congress are trying to introduce legislation that could be construed as favourable to South Asians:

Employers hope to get relief from a proposal being pushed by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. They are proposing that foreign students graduating from master’s or doctoral programs at U.S. universities not be counted against the H1-B limit. Such students often are recruited by U.S. businesses and could end up working for global competitors when H1-B visas are unavailable.

It is unclear whether Congress will consider the proposal before adjourning.

The French have been bitter ever since English replaced French as the must-know language for anyone wanting to do business abroad or have an easier time while traveling. Have the winds of fate turned again, though? Might English soon be replaced by something…else? From the Washington Times:

A British language expert predicts that “Hinglish,” or Indian English, will overtake standard English as the most common spoken form of the language globally.

Already one-third of Indians, over 300 million, are speaking the language, according to linguist David Crystal. With the Internet spreading English more rapidly than ever, and Indians at the forefront of the IT revolution, Indian English is spanning the globe and taking over from British and American forms, Crystal told a lecture audience at the British Council in New Delhi Saturday.

This is most disconcerting. I hardly know any Hindi and my English is not the greatest either. Will there be a place for me in the new world order?

There is a new sergeant with the Chicago Police Department now making sure nobody sleeps on trains. From NewKerala.com:

Tomi Methipara, the first Indian American to join the Chicago Police and also be promoted to the rank of sergeant, does not let racial epithets flung at him get in the way of his job.

Methipara, who grew up in Kerala, India, and worked in a bank in Alwaye in that state and in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, before immigrating to the US and joining the 14,000-strong Chicago Police in 1990, said he has had quite a few culture shocks as a new recruit.

“Initially, I was shocked at how they treated dead bodies. We (Indians) give a lot of respect to the dead. But in the police, you realise that a dead body is like a log - it has no feelings.”

“We (Indians) give a lot of respect to the dead.” Are you joking? I can think of at least one religious Indian city where dead bodies lie here and there. I don’t think Indian culture gives any more respect to the dead than any other culture. That’s not really the point of this story but it caught my attention so I thought I’d call it out.

So Tomi, run into any discrimination?

As a rookie, Methipara would also be upset by racial epithets flung at him when he went to investigate a crime, or make an arrest.

“Over time, you learn not to take it personally. Even back in Agra, there were people calling me a ‘stupid Madrasi’. You learn to put it in perspective.”

This story has given me an idea for a television pilot about an Inspector Sahib, recently having come from India, who will show up to work for the NYPD. Hilarity ensues.

Gurinder Chadha is directing a $90M prequel to the TV series I Dream of Jeannie:

This is, after all, the series that made the line ‘Yes, master?’ famous and kept the busty, blond Stepford djinn in a bottle at home. I suppose her omnipotence makes up for it, but Jeannie’s long since been overtaken by the winky, S&M version of magical subservience at costume shops. Can you still parody a parody?

Continue reading…

Not so long ago I brought you the story of Gaurav Bhatia, a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, who fell asleep on a Chicago Transit Authority train and was given a ticket for sleeping dangerously. Seems that our hero has beaten the odds and gotten the ticket overturned. From the Washington Times:

Bhatia was interviewed by a number of local television and radio stations, and his story appeared in newspapers from Chicago to Europe and Asia.

“At this time, the city makes a motion to nonsuit this matter,” Senior Counsel James McIsaac of the city’s Law Department told the administrative hearing officer. The hearing itself lasted less than 45 seconds.

THE SLEEPERS—UNITED—SHALL NEVER BE DEFEATED!

20 year old Beenish Tariq from Flushing, NY just hit the jackpot. From the New York Lottery website:

“I held onto the ticket for so long because I knew I wanted to get everything in order before I claimed it,” said Tariq, a finance major. “I knew right away that I would share with my family; I just didn’t know how to split up $5,000,000.”

Tariq, who plans to graduate in May of 2005, said she will re-invest at least part of her prize in her continued education. “Now I’ll be able to go on to get my Masters and pay for my sister’s tuition too; she’ll be a freshman next year.”

Damn, I just realized what a horrible person I am because if I had won $5 million I would have funded an insurgency on some small island nation in order to put myself in charge, instead of sharing it with my family. Beenish if you are reading this, I am VERY single.

Not much coming out of the Ashcroft run Justice Department has given me much satisfaction of late, but this announcement last week certainly deserves praise. From the Times Ledger:

The Justice Department last week filed a lawsuit against the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York City Transit Authority, charging them with discrimination against Muslims, Sikhs and other employees whose religions require them to wear head coverings.

The complaint alleges that the transportation agencies engaged in discriminatory practices by enforcing uniform policies that do not accommodate certain employees’ religious practices, according to a Department of Justice press release.

“Public employees should not have to sacrifice their religious beliefs to enjoy the same benefits of employment as their co-workers,” said R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. “While public employers have the authority to set reasonable dress standards, they cannot selectively apply them at the cost of civil rights.”

What were the allegations exactly?

According to the Department of Justice, the MTA and the Transit Authority began enforcing uniform policies against employees who wear turbans or head scarves in early 2002. Some employees were transferred to yard or depot jobs where they would not have contact with the public. These jobs provide diminished seniority benefits and fewer overtime opportunities. Prior to the uniform policies, Muslim and Sikh employees had been wearing head coverings without incident.

DesiTalk-NewsIndia Times provides further details as well.

That is the question that an article on Indolink.com poses:

…East Indian or Asian Indian, or Indian American or Indo-American or Desi. Or, to remove the slightest doubt, it may even require a mouthful as in “East Indian American” or “Asian Indian American” or “South Asian Indian American.”

Okay, I am already confused. I thought I knew my identity but now I am not sure. Labels matter to me. But…it gets even more confusing:

The ultimate dilemma is that in Britain and East Africa he is an Asian. In Russia, Southeast Asia, and Europe and Fiji he is still an Indian. In the Caribbean he is an East Indian. In Canada he may be an Indo-Canadian. But in America he can never be “Indian,” while at the same time his Asian identity is oftentimes suspect – thanks to the average American’s geographic illiteracy.

Whoa, can somebody please stop the room from spinning? Let’s go to the history books and see how it came to this. What were we “originally?”

DJ Nitin Sawhney is all set to debut a musical next month. From BBC News:

The artist has been commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia to write The Classroom, which is about "expanding the imagination and exploring ideas".

Expanding imagination and exploring ideas? What the heck does that mean? Sify.com translates for us:

an expose about his difficulties as the only Indian pupil at school, which will debut in London along with his earlier works.

Okay, that I can understand.

As reported in a previous SM post, it seems like India is serious this time about their moon mission. It is healthy to be skeptical because they have balked at various space exploration ventures before, but this time it appears to be legit. Science magazine reports that western scientists are now clamoring to get their experiments on board:

Western researchers often beat a path to developing countries to study endangered species, ancient civilizations, or traditional medicine, among other subjects. Now it’s time to add planetary science to that list. Five scientists from around the world are jostling to get their experiments aboard an Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, that is slated to fly to the moon in September 2007.

“Chandrayaan offers a very cost-effective means to gather critical and unique data on the moon while forging new cooperative relationships in lunar exploration,” says one of the finalists, Paul Spudis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Another finalist, Manuel Grande of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, U.K., says he welcomes “the increasing opportunities for flying experiments on emerging space-nation launch vehicles and satellites.”

There were 30 scientists from 11 countries vying for a spot on Chandrayaan, but the list has been narrowed to five. Several other countries including the U.S. are planning robotic moon missions toward the end of this decade. However, with NASA’s budget always in flux and space science cuts looming, even American scientists were looking for a spot on the Indian spacecraft.

Given these uncertainties [in the funding of other nation’s space programs], space researchers say they welcome the chance to vie for a spot on the Indian probe. And the benefits cut both ways. The competition is designed to ensure “maximum scientific knowledge about the moon,” says ISRO chair Gopalan Madhavan Nair. Former ISRO chief Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan says it should also “enhance India’s status as a potential partner in future space exploration.”

The U.S.' biggest Navratri celebration, a 15-year-old, 20,000-person raas-garba under a large tent in Edison, New Jersey, has been canceled (via SAJA). The event's tent supplier shipped all its stock to Florida in the aftermath of the hurricanes, and the new vendors wanted more money than the organizers had on hand:

"We are the richest per-capita community, and they are calling it off because of money?" said Sylvester Fernandez, an Indian-American engineer from Edison and Republican candidate for Congress. "That's just wrong, that's just pathetic."

Yes, Gujarati teens will be deprived of their most efficient flirting grounds this year, forced to gather in small high school gyms. Dandia's counter-rotating circles are like a socialist dance club, everyone has to dance with everyone else, and (bonus!) they're parentally-approved. So if you're a respectable New Jersey parent and your child runs off with a circus freak, you know who to blame. I'm just sayin'.

In the past, the celebration has faced tensions over noise levels with uncalled-for religious overtones:

[T]he Edison Township Council... are paying them to break the law so they could bang their heathen drums in obeisance to their heathen gods until 4 a.m. on the Sabbath... --The Rev. Kenneth Matto, Edison

 The preeminence of the Gujarati community in New Jersey did not come without a fight:

[I]n September 1987, a group calling itself the 'dotbusters' wrote a letter to a Jersey City newspaper. The letter read: "We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I'm walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her." A couple of weeks after that, an Indian doctor, Kaushal Sharan, was beaten up by three white men. And three days later, in the neighbouring town of Hoboken, an Asian Indian, Navroze Mody, was beaten to death by a gang of 11 men.

Financial news and information giant Reuters announced it would shift 50 per cent of its data operations to India and add 860 workers by the end of next year. [source]

[Reuters] will eventually employ up to 10 per cent of its workforce in India ...The move is part of the information giant's "Fast Forward" programme, which aims to cut staff numbers by 3,000 to 13,000 in a bid to drastically reduce costs. [source]

The Bangalore centre will also employ a small number of journalists who will report on company news coming out of the United States, though Reuters has stressed that the 20 Indian journalists are not replacing any US workers. [source]

Razib @ the ever excellent Gene Expressions links to a story on the genetic structure of the Kannada-speaker - Gene Expression: Genetics of Karnataka populations

For South Asians readers, Genetic structure of four socio-culturally diversified caste populations of southwest India and their affinity with related Indian and global groups:

The microsatellite study divulges a common ancestry for the four diverse populations of Karnataka, with the overall genetic differentiation among them being largely confined to intra-population variation. The practice of consanguineous marriages might have attributed to the relatively lower gene flow displayed by Gowda and Muslim as compared to Iyengar and Lyngayat....

Standard caveat, don't read too much into one study!

Consanguineous was word of the day a little while back. ;-)

Though not exactly the type we want many to follow - Saddam cited Indian, Pak tests to justify WMD pursuit - The Times of India

WASHINGTON: Deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain used Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests to justify his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the chief US weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told a US Senate committee on Wednesday.

''Saddam observed that India and Pakistan had slipped across the nuclear weapons boundary quite successfully,'' Duelfer told a Senate panel following the submission of his report.

I don’t know, because I don’t have a subscription to The Economist. Their online edition does however post the first paragraph of what must be a good read about the recent accusation that Indian scientists were passing nuke information on to Iran. The Economist usually gives more behind the scenes coverage than most of the press.

MIGHT Iran secretly have succeeded in winning the co-operation of both of those arch nuclear rivals, India and Pakistan? The father of Pakistan’s bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted earlier this year that he sold uranium enrichment secrets to Iran, Libya (which says it got a bomb design thrown in) and North Korea. Now the United States has fingered two senior Indian scientists…

What kind of help did India provide, and how significant is its impact? The Asia Times does give us some insight into the story:

The State Department did not detail the specific offenses by the two scientists, but officials said it involved alleged assistance to Iran’s nuclear program during the first half of 2003. Analyst Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, was quoted by news agencies as having speculated that the sanctions may relate to India’s breakthrough development of an economic way to produce tritium, a radioactive isotope used in nuclear bombs. The US and other Western countries accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.

Salon is blogging a conference called Web 2.0, about the future of the Web. Entrepreneur Brewster Kahle (Alexa, Internet Archive, WAIS) just said something interesting. Kahle wants to offer all books and films ever created, online:

Moving images. Isn't that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It's a few more bookshelves, but it's doable.

Take that, Hong Kong and China! You may have some stylish martial arts and crime films, but we've got scads of third-rate melodrama under our collective belts, and we 'make it up in volume.'

Stories like this are why I blog. From NewKerala.com:

A group of Indian scientists here are pouring over a bunch of photographs they took in the northern Himalayas depicting a mystery object that could be either of the two but are nowhere near cracking the mystery.

“The object was about four feet in height with a red balloon and many white ones. It hovered around for about 45 minutes some 200 metres from us. We were curious to know more and took photographs,” said Anil Kulkarni, a marine and water resources scientist with the city-based Space Application Centre (SAC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

He was part of the team that spotted and photographed the object during a just-concluded study trip to the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, bordering China.

But did the UFO have special chameleon like technology?

“Interestingly when it was exposed to the sun, it turned black and in the shadow of the hill, it became white,” the scientist said.

As the article acknowledges, it was more than likely a spy device. Still, am I the only one suspicious of the “balloon” excuse? Isn’t that what they told us about Roswell? Let’s see how Indian fighter plane handle this new threat.

The funeral of al-Qaeda suspect Amjad Farooqi has taken place overnight at a village in Pakistan's Punjab province.

....Farooqi ... [claimed that he] had been a personal guard to Osama Bin Laden and had recruited up to 400 men from his own district to fight a jihad, or holy war.... Farooqi had been wanted in connection with two assassination attempts on President Musharraf last December. Farooqi was also indicted for involvement in the kidnapping in 2002 and subsequent beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl [BBC]

Wired has a piece on how online businesses roll up niche markets into a larger, virtual whole. Here's my take:

Netflix claims that, unlike Blockbuster, 99% of its extensive catalog is rented out every single year... people are wired differently from birth and then actively fragment their interests. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's skimmed the morass of offbeat personal Web sites... [or] readers of Sepia Mutiny or one of its spiritual ancestors, the Usenet group alt.culture.us.asian-indian in its heyday.

But what does surprise new Netflix members is the service's extensive selection of Bollywood films, which it apparently rents out profitably... Outside Netflix... the situation is grim:

An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India's film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon's Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

Continue reading...

Reminder: Kal Penn, DJ Rekha and the muy caliente cast of Bombay Dreams are hosting a New York party tonight, with proceeds going to the John Kerry campaign. See Abhi’s post for details.

Military junkies may have heard about a recent training exercise b/t a US Air Force fighter wing against the Indian Air Force. The Americans apparently got their buts whipped.

One of my favorite military blogs - Strategypage.com - has more of the backstory on what really went on (quoted in full here cuz Strategypage's permalinks don't work) -

October 6, 2004: More details have come out about the "losing" performance of U.S. F-15Cs (from the Alaska-based 3rd Wing) against India's air force in the Cope India air-to-air combat exercise earlier this year. The Air Force and some members of Congress have used the "failure" to justify the need for new F/A-22 and F-35 fighters. Some are calling the results a demonstrated weakening of American air combat capabilities

Anjali from over at to the teeth has utilized the Sepia Mutiny Tip Line and alerted the Mutineers to some interesting information out of India (you can read her take on the site). As reported at CommonDreams.org:

Film activists in the Indian capital have strongly protested the country’s censors holding up release of the award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

“Fahrenheit 9/11”, vehemently anti-US President George W. Bush, won the Palme Ór best film award at Cannes this year. It can be downloaded off the Net and its pirated copies are available across the country.

“The censor board takes these senseless decisions because as a body it is irrelevant and completely behind times,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta at Sarai, the media and research foundation.

“The censor board itself should be done away with,” Sengupta, a researcher on issues of censorship, told IANS.

The Michael Moore film, which has become a pillar of the Democratic presidential campaign, was supposed to be released in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Pune on Oct 15.

But what in the movie could possibly offend Indian censors? India isn’t part of the coalition of the bribed an coerced that Moore makes fun of in the movie. Then what?

Several reasons are being offered on why the censors are worried about the film. One of them is to avoid offending the American authorities.

We wouldn’t want that. I for one think that the censors are simply trying to suppress the film because they found out from the Detroit Free Press that Moore is a criminal.

Badmash strikes again! Read the whole thing.

The mountain comes to Muhammad: You’ve probably heard of the FedEx-like reliability of tiffinwallas of Bombay. Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. This six-sigma error rate puts Indian bureaucracy to shame. And, as Forbes reported, all for just 150 rupees/month:

Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.

Well, one tiffinwalla who cooks his own food is expanding into New York, via a friend:

My cousin just recommended this guy (Krishna) in NYC who delivers packed Indian vegetarian lunch or dinner boxes for $5 a meal. He only works Mon-Fri, so it’s $25 a week (this includes deliver). Apparently, each meal includes 2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney. My cousin is very health conscious and swears that Krishna’s meal is cooked with very little oil. Though I would share the number with you - 212 945 ####.

And let’s not forget the dosa guy at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park (weekdays at lunch):

[Designer Alpana] Bawa does admit a lunchtime weakness for dosas found at a cart in Washington Square Park (New York Dosa, 917-710-2092), made by Sri Lankan Dhiru Kumar. “I’m on my way,” she tells Kumar on her cell phone, not even identifying herself. “Can you have a Pondicherri dosa ready for me in a few minutes?” Bawa asks… When we arrive, Kumar hands Bawa a Styrofoam container with her dosa — spicy potatoes, carrots and peppers in a thin crepe made from rice and lentil flours.

The Asia Times recently weighed in on how the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election might affect the politics in India. Who should India desire as the U.S. President?:

Indians in India generally see Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry as a thorn in India's side. Many more in India's money-spinning outsourcing industry see him as a business process outsourcing (BPO) party pooper. Even New Delhi - seat of the Indian government - sees greater advantage in a second term for George W Bush in terms of strategic partnership. But a huge number of Indians based in the US believe that Kerry may bode well for India. And remarkably, though Kerry's strong anti-outsourcing stand has emerged as one of the biggest sources of discomfort for India, many Indian Americans support Kerry for that very reason.

This issue may get into the whole question of where loyalties lie. Many first generation Indian-Americans perceive outsourcing as an unequivocally good thing. Any money that goes back to help the economic situation of a society or even family members that they have recently left behind is a good thing. Second and third generations Indian-Americans however may perceive outsourcing as a bad thing. Many of them after all are the very tech workers whose jobs are being sent abroad. Now whether outsourcing is good or bad is not as relevant as the perception of whether it is good or bad.

"Outsourcing is a major issue that has to be dealt with," says Selma D'Souza, president of the Indo-American Democratic Organization, a lobby for the Indian American community on social issues and hate crimes. "Most Americans, including Indians, don't like outsourcing because many of them are concerned their children's jobs are being outsourced, especially in the IT field. I don't think this is an India-US issue, it's an issue about employment in the US."

There should be other issues to consider beyond just outsourcing argue some:

Some also hold that India's concerns are narrow and partisan. "It seems to be foreign policy-focused and not people-focused," says Tanzila Taz Ahmed, director of the South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), another US-based lobby that's trying to push South Asian American issues to the forefront of US politics. "Sure, Indians in India may want Bush because of his more liberal stand on outsourcing, but that view doesn't take into consideration the persecution their fellow Indians have to suffer living with him."

Guerrillas in her midst: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., is a 26-year-old British Asian DJ who raps in the garage/grime genre (via Tablatronic and our own Sajit). For song material, she mines her family’s flight from the Sri Lankan civil war.

The new arrivals were not exactly welcomed with open arms by London’s Sri Lankan community… “They are really obsessed with impressing the British. They want to be doctors and engineers and go to Cambridge, buy leather couches to match their encyclopedias, have a sitar in the corner and whip their saris out once a year for a wedding. They’d look at us and go, ‘We don’t want them hanging round with our kids, they’re into rap, they think they’re black.’… I’ll go to LA and be black: it’s better than being in Britain and being brown.’

Check out the video for ‘Sunshowers,’ a bouncy track which makes frequent and incongruous reference to guns, bombs and the guerrillas of Colombo.

Update: Nirali magazine has a great profile of Arulpragasam:

She never knew her father, one of the founding members of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militant guerrilla group formed in 1976 with the goal of gaining political independence for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil population. “We saw him once a year, for 10 minutes at a time. My mum said, ‘That’s your uncle—your dad is dead.’ It was to protect us,” she explains… “We lived in hiding for so long. We were just moving from village to village and from house to house. Nobody wanted to put us up; we were untouchable. Everybody knew about us in Sri Lanka, and nobody wanted to deal with us because we brought so much heat. The army would follow [us wherever we’d go]. We were living in big-time poverty, stealing mangoes off someone else’s tree,” she remembers.

Update: M.I.A. just spun in New York (photos) and landed on the cover of Fader magazine. Here’s the layout.

The Troy Michigan Democratic Club sponsored a forum last night called, “At Peace with Politics: Yoga for Kerry.” According to the Detroit Free Press:

“People who practice yoga are almost always Democrats,” said Priyanka Shanbag, a yoga teacher from Bloomfield Hills who will instruct at the event, which will be at Troy’s community center.

“There’s a lot of compassion there. It’s about doing the right thing.”

Ouch. The head of Troy’s Republican club is NOT going to like that at all. What’s Goray Mookerjee got to say?

“We need a real truthful commander in chief who has the guts and determination to do the job,” Mookerjee said.

“He doesn’t need any yoga training.”

And his party argues that yoga will persuade its practitioners to vote for George W. Bush.

I think we need to find a master Yogi to weigh in on this debate or things could get messy in Troy.

Well not yet. But it could become one if a proposed Hindu temple is erected there. That was at least one of the reasons residents tossed around before San Bernardino County protested vehemently against construction. From KTLA.com:

It was proposed as the largest Hindu temple and cultural center in Southern California, an ornate structure with the kind of religious status held by the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

But when a nonprofit Hindu organization selected Chino Hills farmland for the project, residents in this wealthy bedroom community of San Bernardino County protested vehemently, saying it would generate too much traffic, ruin the city’s rural atmosphere and become an unwanted regional attraction.

Objections also surfaced from opponents who said the project would turn Chino Hills into a “Third World city” and a haven for terrorists. One petition to stop the project said the temple would play a role in “changing the city’s demographics forever.”

Gee, I wonder if the proposed building of a large church would have caused such a reaction as well. That, I bet would have been touted as being good for the local economy. The chairman of the city’s Planning Commission, supported the Hindu project, calling it an asset to the city. “It’s a beautiful building with wonderful landscaping and water features,” he said. Still, many folks don’t like the idea.

Some of the opponents also seemed worried that the temple would draw Hindus to live in the city. “Unless you want the current demographics to look a bit like New Delhi, don’t do this,” said an e-mail dated Aug. 9, 2003. Another letter suggested Muslim extremists might blend in among Hindu worshipers, making the temple a “hiding place for terror.”

An early Diwali in New York yesterday at the South Street Seaport:

It's one of the most upscale Diwali settings I've ever seen, tall ships and a fireworks barge bobbing beneath skyscrapers of robin's-egg blue... Ashen wrappers smelling of gunpowder drifted onto the heads of desi elders who had splayed themselves across the wooden pier steps... A dance troupe on the pier practiced ballroom with shells whistling overhead, a scratchy violin track playing in the background.

Continue reading...

The Chicago tribune reports on the addition of a Gandhi statue to the Chicago suburb of Skokie (where this blogger was born). In addition to simply discussing the statue they also discuss the demographics of the suburb:

Once an icon of the Jewish community, Skokie since the 1980s has become something of a north-suburban United Nations, where 80 languages are spoken in the homes of its public school students. In May, the annual Festival of Cultures drew an estimated 25,000 visitors.

And three years after Kamaria and a citizens group proposed the idea, Skokie again celebrated its rich cultural diversity by dedicating an 8-foot-tall statue of Gandhi on Saturday, the 135th anniversary of his birth.

Of course the other ethnic communities there want statues of their heroes as well:

So far, at least three groups—representing Skokie’s Korean, Filipino and Swedish ethnic communities—are toying with the idea.

“Who knows? Maybe we could find a great figure of sports,” said Jin Lee, director of the Keumsil Cultural Society, which promotes Korean-American culture. “Or [it might be] best to have a scholarly figure who did great deeds for the country.”

Might this great gesture honoring Gandhi eventually stir up a controversy in the community? At least some local politicians think so:

Michael Gelder warned fellow members on the Skokie board of trustees to consider “the quagmire we might be creating for ourselves.”

Although it might be easy for Skokie residents to agree on the worthiness of someone like Gandhi, Gelder said recently, “it strikes me that there’s very little consensus among the various ethnic groups or nationalities about [what constitutes] a great leader.”

“… One person’s liberator is another’s terrorist,” Gelder said.

I really loathe how people now so casually throw the “T-word” into every situation.

Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters, an unfairly funny man, has taped a hilarious 45-minute Canadian TV special (via Half the Sins). Watch the video: torrent (57 MB RealVideo file).

First get an easy BitTorrent downloader:

• For Windows: ABC
• For Mac: Tomato Torrent

Then click here. The download will start automatically.

Newsweek details the growing trend of going abroad for medical care, in this case to high-tech hospitals in India:

The trend is driven in part by long waiting lists and high costs in countries like Britain and Canada. Like software outsourcing firms, Indian hospitals offer quality at Third World prices. The number of foreign patients seeking treatment in India—now 100,000—is growing by 12 percent to 15 percent a year, says the Indian Healthcare Federation.

I have heard of people increasingly combining their vacations with some type of medical procedure as well (often times cosmetic).

The private sector already sees medical tourism as an industry with tremendous potential for growth.

Travel agents, tour operators and hotels are vying to make their presence felt.

And by next year, the Indian medical industry will be ready to move into outsourcing to relieve overburdened medical institutions in Western countries, which are facing severe staff shortages.

Parrots from India are wreaking havoc on Israeli crops. It is so bad that authorities are calling them “the number one enemy of the fruit growers in the country.” The green Indian parrot, commonly called “Dhara,” slipped into Israel some thirty years ago. From India Express:

The beautiful green Indian parrot called ‘Drara’ has undergone an “incredible multiplication” during the last few years as its predators have rapidly decreased in numbers, Dr. Yossi Lasham, an ornithologist, was quoted in the Yediot Ahronot daily.

The rich and natural food available all over northern Israel has aided its growth and they have wreaked havoc on the date plantations in Amakim, necessitating authorities to issue directives to adopt measures to control or even reduce their numbers, Lasham told the paper in Jerusalem.

To report the facts of this story correctly for SM readers I contacted the head parrot. He has been forced to remain in his cage for some time now under threat to his life. He told me that he does not recognize the right of Israeli date plantations to exist. The Israeli government is reportedly considering building a large cage around the entire country to curb the devastation to their crops.

"The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford has put together an exhibition of film posters to mark ten years of its Bite the Mango film festival, including Aan (Savage Princess) from 1952." [BBC]

According to family history, my grandfather was a co-owner of the only 4 color printing press in Delhi after Independence. It was across the street from Jama Masjid, and is still in operation (I've been to see it). My father has fond memories of all the posters he collected as a child, and reflects that they would have been worth a pretty penny had he managed to keep them.

Who made the following remarks?

"I believe that caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration. But like every other institution it has suffered from excrescences. I consider the four divisions alone to be fundamental, natural and essential."

"I am inclined to think that the law of heredity is an eternal law and any attempt to alter that law must lead us, as it has before led [others], to utter confusion.... If Hindus believe, as they must believe, in reincarnation [and] transmigration, they must know that Nature will, without any possibility of mistake, adjust the balance by degrading a Brahmin, if he misbehaves himself, by reincarnating him in a lower division, and translating one who lives the life of a Brahmin in his present incarnation to Brahminhood in his next. "

"Caste is but an extension of the principle of the family. Both are governed by blood and heredity "

"I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system.... A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization...."

"[The] hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.... It will be a chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin. The caste system is a natural order of society.... I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system."

Even the Catholic Church has gotten into the act:

With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing.

American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India.

Here’s a great photo gallery from the April premiere of Bombay Dreams in New York. Celebs in the photos include A.R. Rahman, Padma Lakshmi, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Meera Syal, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Claire Danes, Edie Falco (The Sopranos), Kenneth Cole, Donald Trump and hydraulically-assisted girlfriend Melania Knauss, Ivana Trump with boy-toy, and former Miss USA Shandi Finnessey. And it’s interesting to see, out of costume, the guy who plays Sweetie the hijra. Salman Rushdie and Bill and Hillary Clinton have also seen the show.

The U.S. presidential election is just a month away on Tuesday, Nov. 2. If you’re an American citizen, you can register to vote or update your address.

This is the most important election in over a decade. Registration deadlines have almost passed (15-30 days before the election), so register now if you haven’t done so already.

I couldn’t beleive this one, but Stanford sophomore Rohan Verma has created a Mapquest type service for Delhi called, MapMyIndia.com. Never again will a rickshawallah take me for a crazy trip. How the heck can you possibly make a map of Indian roads? When I lived in Delhi a couple years ago I was at the mercy of drivers who didn’t understand my horrible Hindi when I told them where I wanted to go. Well I guess it wasn’t so bad as long as I stuck to main roads. From IndiaWest:

…Rohan Verma has been working day and night in New Delhi to put together the sort of Web site that’s mundane for U.S. Web surfers but unheard of in India - a navigational tool that produces printable maps to provide directions to destinations in India.

The result - after three-and-a-half months of work leading a team of 10 people -is Mapmyindia.com. “My role started from conceptualizing it, managing and execution of it, and deploying it, which we did on Sept. 10, and also marketing,” Verma, who is all of 19 years, told India-West.

My senior year (1997) at the University of Michigan, The Indian American Students Association (IASA) had a novel idea. Why not create a Gandhi Day of Service where people perform volunteer work in honor of his birth anniversary? The next year the idea was picked up nationally and is now in its sixth year. Tomorrow, schools and organizations around the country will participate. From the NGDOS website:

MISSION: National Gandhi Day of Service (NGDOS) is an annual event sponsored by South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (SAALT) to inspire and empower people around the world through civic engagement and community service. Participants will be united through Gandhi’s common values of equality, tolerance and nonviolence, regardless of ethnicity, racial or religious background.

VISION: To establish NGDOS as a widely recognized and well-respected event that fosters involvement in community service and civic engagement. NGDOS will provide the platform for meaningful service that highlights the universal beliefs of compassion, selflessness, and unity.

HISTORY OF NGDOS: The First Gandhi Day of Service took place on October 4, 1997 at the University of Michigan. Organized by the Indian American Student Association (IASA), their vision was to unify people through the common goal of serving communities in need. On that day, 200 students throughout the campus collaborated for a day of speakers, group interaction, and a range of volunteer projects. The tremendous response received for Gandhi Day of Service led to its expansion in 1999. The First National-level Gandhi Day of Service was a huge success, involving 20 universities and 2000 students nationwide.

Last year, over seven thousand volunteers from over two hundred universities and organizations contributed over twenty five thousand hours of community service in memory of the teachings and spirit of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Join us this October and help make the sixth annual Gandhi Day an even bigger success!

Please check out their site and volunteer if you can.