"Gangster" Fauja Singh (as our much-adored Punjabi Boy dubbed him) is at it again-- he's not content with the myriad marathons under his belt, so the next item on the 94-year old rockstar's "to do" list is some record-breaking. As in, eight of them.

...Asafa Powell might have to watch his back. The Jamaican may have the new 100m record, but Fauja's after eight of them - in one day.

On Saturday, London's Mile End Park Stadium will witness the great man attempting to set world bests for men over 90 in the 100m, 200m, 300m, 800m, 1500m, 1 mile, 3,000m and 5,000m.

The action starts at 10:30BST with proceeds going to charity and the event is in support of the London 2012 Olympic bid.

The Adidas poster boy swears by a regimen of daily training (eight-miles!), smiling, not smoking, avoiding glassy junction and lots of ginger curry. Wonder if that last item meets Manish's stringent definitions for such a dish? Ofo, Vij-ji...if anyone merits an exception, it's Fauja Singh. ;)

Nothing stokes public excitement like "beef". Prepare the vats of ginger curry! Let's get rrrrready to rrrrumble! :

coach Harminder Singh is trying to set up a showdown between Fauja and Japan's Kozo Haraguchi - the new 100m world record holder for the 95-99 age group.

Haraguchi is hard-core...but I think our man Fauja can take him. :D

The BBC article I linked to asked when our running man might hang up his kicks; I totally dig his answer.

"When I die!" he laughs.

A fantastic, detailed, link-filled post from Joe Katzman of Winds of Change on the recently signed US-India mutual defense pact -

...the behaviour of its rising Islamists "is slowly forcing the US and India together over common strategic concerns."

...The United States and India signed a 10-year agreement paving the way for stepped up military ties, including joint weapons production and cooperation on missile defense. Titled the "New Framework for the US-India Defense Relationship" (NFDR), it was signed on June 27/05 by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and India's Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

This is a big deal. A very big deal.

Joe's post covers a fascinating amount of territory and proves that he's no slouch in the Desi current events arena. Heck, he even uses the term Desi rather appropriately.

This post is part of a series of "enthusiastic" coverage on Indian geopolitics that are worth checking out.

In the 80s, whenever I was asked the question, “Who’s the Boss?” I had only one answer: Alyssa! The perfect combination of spunk, smarts, and good looks. Or so I thought. My dream is officially dead. ExpressIndia.com reports:

She’s the fourth sexiest woman in the world according to FHM magazine and popularly known as the seductive Phoebe Haliwell of the witch trio in Charmed. But for the past four days, actor Alyssa Milano has shed her screen image to step into the role of UNICEF’s ambassador to India.

Hair held back with a white crochet band, palms decorated with bridal henna she strolls out of a Chillout session with Cyrus Broacha at MTV’s Parel studio. ‘‘I’ve wanted to come to India ever since I was young,’’ says the Pandit Ravi Shankar fan, who also dabbles in Buddhism and Hinduism.

While in Los Angeles, the actor regularly visits a regression therapist who told her that in a past life, she was friends with Lord Krishna. ‘‘I was also completely at ease with my wardrobe here, because I wear a lot of kurtas back home as well,’’ says the yoga addict who read five books on Indian history in preparation for her visit.

With nine-hour work schedules, this was no pleasure trip. The only party she attended was a small do, attended by Rahul Bose and Farooque Shaikh. ‘‘I couldn’t believe actors from Bollywood were so short,’’ she laughs.

Ugh. Who will I lust for now? I hope Alyssa’s mom doesn’t sue me for this like she has others.

The last two days there has been a bee stuck in my office. I fear nothing in this life except for bees. Everyone has a phobia. Mine can be traced to the honey suckle bushes surrounding my childhood home. The bees traumatized me. While learning martial arts in Tibet I thought of a career as a “Beeman” which would entail returning to the U.S. and fighting criminals as a vigilante dressed in a bee outfit. I would make my fear my enemy’s fear.

With the bee in my office I suffered a classic “fight or flight” response. The hairs on my neck stood up, my pupils dilated and my breathing shallowed. No joke. Coincidentally the same thing happened for an entirely different reason when I saw this obnoxious commercial last night while watching 30 Days.

I can imagine Dairy Queen ad-executives now. “Umm, could you like…try and speak even more Indian-like.” The accents are so over the top and seemingly pointless that it makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking when they authorized this. “The bee concept is funny but do you know what would make it funnier?” In fact, I haven’t seen a caricature this bad since “Ben Jabituya’s” in the movie Short Circuit.

If there’s one thing desis learn to do early, it’s to wait in line. Years of living in crowded countries make sure of that. You’d think Russians under communism would be the world champions of waiting. But Hindu mythology mentions sanyasis who went so deep into meditative penance, they were slowly covered by creepers and anthills.

Sanjai L. Shah knows the meaning of waiting. As Ennis posted earlier, he’s spent the last year camping out at the Nairobi airport waiting for British citizenship:

In 2004, Mr. Shah received a British passport and headed off to London. But he made a critical error. He bought a one-way ticket, raising the suspicions of immigration authorities at Heathrow Airport… Before he was put on a plane back to Nairobi, the ominous words “PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT” were stamped into his British passport. His Kenyan passport had already been cut by British consular officials in Nairobi… [NYT]

He feared if he tried to leave the airport he would be arrested by Kenyan police and imprisoned… His wife, Rashmita, and son, Veer, who have Kenyan passports, have visited him every few days, bringing food and clean clothes. [BBC]

But what’s in a year? To a religion which measures times in yugas, a year is less than the time it takes for Brahma to reach for His electric toothbrush in the morning. Now the Brits have poured a spot of tea, taken a puff from a pipe and said, ‘Really, old chap, is all this quite necessary?’ They just granted Shah full citizenship:

… now Mr Shah has been told by officials from the British High Commission in Nairobi that his application for a full British passport has been approved… A spokesperson at the High Commission said the decision had nothing to do with what he described as the pointless protest that Mr Shah has conducted for the past year. [BBC]

For many in India, their first movie wasn’t in an air-conditioned, terraced, multiplex, or on a TV screen hooked up to a VCR. It was shown to them by a travelling cinema, a truck with multiple aging film projectors bolted to its floor, and a team of projectionists who lived in it.

This was the opposite of a drive-in theater; instead of driving to the screen and watching from your car, the film came to you, but stayed in its vehicle.

Shashwati fondly remembers her experiences with this dying breed of entrepreneurs:

These companies were commercial ventures with ancient 35 mm projectors, they would go to where the audience was, set up a screen and show a movie. When I was in school, that is how films used to be shown to us. Mr. Movie Man (we actually called him that) would come with a projector and usually an ancient Tarzan movie. We would re-arrange our chairs, and take down the partition between the classrooms … 

Once, by mistake, Mr. Movie Man put in a French film, it was fading and probably from 1960. It wasn’t anything special. A woman in a long coat and sunglasses walked into a beach cabin. She sat there, and then a man came in. And he kissed her, on the mouth! After that first kiss, there was either deadly silence or a collective gasp, then the lady took off her clothes, not all of them, but enough for the film to be stopped and reel yanked out. Then we were back to seeing “savages” and a full grown man leaping through trees, something much more salubrious for our tender psyches. [Shashwati]

(But Suresh Venkatasubramanian can): Sunil Laxman says there are advantages to the desi approach of by-hearting your maths. Namely that you don’t look like an idiot when asked to multiply two small numbers.

My wife went to the bank yesterday to make a simple cash deposit… in two $100 bills, and nine $20 bills…

“Hey John, what’s 9*20? There’s some problem with my computer.” My wife’s standing there, and her jaw drops… Meanwhile, John’s breaking into a sweat.

“Uh….I’m not sure….9 times 20 is….”

My wife’s getting impatient… “One hundred and eighty,” she says.

John looks at her in awe, and says, “I think you’re right! You must be really good with numbers…”

I’m in awe of the cashiers in little, obscure banks in India (State Bank of Mysore, anyone?) who count faster than you can key in the numbers into a calculator.

This kind of innumeracy is my father’s favorite story about the American education system, right after ‘we were multiplying six-digit numbers in first grade’ (which he inflicted on me) and a Ramanujan-like story where he nearly solves an unsolvable problem, awing the textbook author over parcel post.

Of course, the genius of America is that its systems are so good, you can run a bank with tellers who can’t do math ;)

This is a followup to Ennis’ post, in pictures (thanks, Sajit). Memos released in ‘02 show that Richard Nixon continued supporting the Pakistani military throughout the genocide in Bangladesh, even sending them fighter jets. During the massacre, the U.S. ambassador in Delhi cabled Nixon:

The U.S. consul in Dhaka also wrote:

And:

The Mistress of Spices and Deepa Mehta’s trilogy finale will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September (thanks, DesiDancer). Mehta’s filming was blocked by protests, but that’s just Water under the bridge:

Filming on Water in India had to be abandoned five years ago after protests over the pic’s subject. It concerns an 8-year-old child bride, sent to an ashram after her husband’s death, who forces the other widows to question their culture and faith. Pic stars Lisa Ray and John Abraham. The Hindi- and English-language film eventually was shot in Sri Lanka under the name River Moon, a moniker selected for its cheesiness, producer David Hamilton said. An “anti-publicist” was hired to keep word of it out of the media…

Now they say desi artists are picking cheesy titles? Here’s one: Mistress of Spices is exoticism buzzword bingo. And Padma Lakshmi’s cookbook title, Easy Exotic, is exactly the two things which desi women don’t want to be known for.

Also making its world premiere will be Mistress of Spices about an Indian woman (Aishwarya Rai) running a spice shop in San Francisco whose magic fails her when she falls in love. Pic is from Paul Mayeda Berges and Gurinder Chadha, the team behind Bend It Like Beckham…

How’s the art film actor with washboard abs doing? Everybody says he’s fine:

Indian filmmaker Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Kaalpurush will world premiere. [The] pic, starring Rahul Bose, follows a man struggling to come to terms with the memory of his powerful father…

The 2005 Artwallah Festival is just one week away. If you are near Los Angeles between July 7th and 10th and have a pulse and a reasonably warm body then you will be labeled hopelessly un-cool if you don’t make an appearance. Why should you come? Let me break this down for you by taking you on a multimedia tour of the largest South Asian Arts festival in the U.S. I have spent a couple hours hunting down the web-links to the works of the artists in this post that will be at the festival. Click on the links to experience something new. I provide samples of the goods only. For the full rush you can buy a ticket from me. That’s right. I’m your pusher. If you have a cousin who lives in California and you’ve always thought they should get out more, send them this post. If your roommate from college subsequently moved into their parent’s basement and still hasn’t left, send them this post.

First up, The Blend. Its on a grass field on the grounds of an art museum overlooking Hollywood. When the sun touches the horizon, the music starts.

THURSDAY (7/7) THE BLEND

FESTIVAL KICK-OFF PRESENTED BY ARTWALLAH AND MTV DESI

An outdoor concert under the stars showcasing a array of South Asian musical talent…

8:00 – 11:00 PM

Anand Subramanian – Retro Pop, Guitar Nourished Electronica

Jason Joseph & Shaheen Sheik – Soulful and Sultry, Funk and Pop-Rock

Lovely – Lush British Indie Sound with a Rock Edge

Calcutta – Electrically Charged Riffs and Guitars

DeLon – Unity Driven Hip Hop that Makes It Crack

The Dhamaal Collective – South Asian Instrumentation, Experimental Beats

Recently declassified documents reveal what Nixon and Kissinger thought about Indira Gandhi, with Nixon calling her a “witch” and a “bitch” and Kissinger referring to all Indians as “bastards.” Gandhi had come to the US in the period just before the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971. At that point, the US had a “special relationship” with Ayub Khan, the dictator of Pakistan, and India was flirting with the Soviets. The US did not want East Pakistan to form an independent Bangladesh.

Here are some snippets of the discussion between Nixon and Kissinger, just after Indira Gandhi left:

Nixon: This is just the point when she is a bitch.

Kissinger: Well, the Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there. It’s—to them East Pakistan is no longer the issue. Now, I found it very interesting how she carried on to you yesterday about West Pakistan….

Kissinger: While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too. You very subtly—I mean, she will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and therefore, in despair, she’s got to go to war.

Nixon: We really slobbered over the old witch. [US State Department]

This wasn’t just about Indira Gandhi herself, they had a pretty low opinion of Indians in general:

Indians are “a slippery, treacherous people,” Nixon said.

“The Indians are bastards anyway,” Mr Kissinger replied. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.” [Guardian]

In a grand jury filing two weeks ago, D.C. prosecutors revealed that Jayant Kadian confessed to killing his mother:

The 20-year-old Great Falls resident told a Fairfax County detective that the tension between them escalated after he was arrested in connection with marijuana possession a third time… his mother, Kiran V. Kadian, told him she wanted him to see a psychiatrist, he told police… “He said at that point, he picked up a butcher knife out of the butcher block, and he said, ‘I … axed her. It was weird.’ ”

… Kadian stabbed or slashed his mother 23 times in the neck and seven times elsewhere… he said… he stabbed her once from behind and she dropped to the floor, Allen said. “I wanted to kill my mother real quick,” Allen quoted Kadian as saying. “I did my best to make it quick.” [Washington Post]

There’s a special pit in hell reserved for this guy, who allegedly did the deed while she was making him food:

KADIAN’S MOTHER, 52, was preparing food for her son when she was murdered, according to testimony from Allen, a homicide detective. When Allen arrived at the Kadian’s house, an untouched plate of food remained on the kitchen counter above her body which was surrounded by a pool of dried blood…

Kadian thought the purpose of meeting with a psychiatrist was to place him in a 28-day inpatient treatment center, according to Allen, who said Kadian didn’t want to go… after the murder, Kadian washed the knife, placed it on the dining room table and went upstairs to get $4, shoes and socks and to put a Band-Aid on two cuts he suffered during the stabbing. He set the alarm to the house and drove to the Great Falls Shopping Center, where he parked behind the CVS Pharmacy, according to Allen. Later he drove back by the house and saw the police cars and “decided he wasn’t ready to be caught and drove to James Madison,” Allen said… [The Connection]

Just a reminder to set your TiVos because Wednesday night FX will air the “30 days” episode that I blogged about a few weeks ago. In the episode a white Christian man will live for 30 days as a Muslim man in America, to see what it feels like when people stop being polite and start getting real. I am a little hesitant to watch this episode because I tend to be very impresionable. During the first season of Alias I was so convinced that I was Sidney Bristow’s CIA handler that I kept meeting her for dead-drops in the middle of the night. She never showed up. Will other viewers like myself suddenly feel like becoming Muslim for 30 days?

Well, it turns out that organizers in Lodi, CA (yes, that Lodi) are planning a million Muslim march. Some would say they are doing so after being manipulated into it by a conservative talk show host. WebIndia123.com reports:

Plans are under way for an anti-terror Million Muslim March in Lodi, Calif., inspired by challenges from a controversial Sacramento radio talk show host.

Since five Lodi-area Pakistani men were arrested for lying to federal authorities about terror camp training two weeks ago, KFBK-AM personality Mark Williams has repeatedly challenged the Muslim community to publicly denounce terrorism.

Mayor John Beckman took Williams up on the offer, and offered to help organize the march in late July, the Sacramento Bee said Wednesday.

Anyways, after tomorrow night’s show I have a feeling that I’ll be drawn north for the march. That might be just what the CIA wants.

India’s first marriage bureau for the HIV + has opened up in Gujurat. This is hard work in India, a country where weddings are cancelled just because one party has an inauspicious birthdate. Nonetheless, Daksha Patel (who is HIV positive herself) has already helped seven couples get married.

Both Daksha and her clients approach marriage with a typical Indian matter-of-factness. They don’t hold wishy-washy “ishq conquers all” sentiments; they know very well that life is hard and money is important.

In one exchange, Daksha interrogates a client who earns 3,000 rupees (roughly US $70) a month:

“You will have to look after yourself and your wife - you are both HIV positive, maybe you will have to spend on medicines,” says a concerned Daksha.

“Will you be able to manage all this with your income?” [BBC]

Similarly, one satisfied client explains:

“I had read about this organization which worked with HIV positive people and ran a marriage bureau. I had come to find out more about the bureau - for the purpose of marriage only … I did not want a very handsome person, or a very rich person. I just wanted a husband who can understand me - and who can provide for three square meals a day.” [BBC]

The shiznit rarely gets weirder than this -

Doctors in Bangladesh say they have removed a long-dead foetus from the abdomen of a teenage boy who was complaining of stomach pains.

They said the foetus would have become the boy's twin had it grown normally in their mother's womb.

They said it was a case of an extremely rare condition where two foetuses are conceived as conjoined twins but one absorbs the other.

..."Apart from the head, all other limbs of the baby were developed."

Ewww. Just plain ewww. The villagers reacted as villagers in da homeland usually do - not content to wait for the Enquirer to put its alien autopsy spin on the story, they flocked to see it first hand -

Hundreds of curious locals flocked to the hospital on hearing a rumour that a boy had given birth to a baby.

Kuato Lives!

News.com just posted photos of the Infosys campus in Bangalore. Wow, Karnataka really can be sterilized so it’s just as boring as Santa Clara. But it’s nice to see homo technorati in their natural habitat.

Their signature building looks like the retro-Jetson TWA terminal at JFK. The landscaping makes it look like those SoCal Spanish-style haciendas rented out discreetly for porn shoots.

Don’t you think you’ll be telling your nieces and nephews to work here someday?

Here’s a surfeit of campus snapshots. Related post here.

Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…

“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”

PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.

Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:

Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries - with SingTel acting as its operating agents.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.

I am all for nudity, but I care even more about trees and the state of our global environment. That is why the following story from India left me feeling conflicted. From Reuters:

Women in an eastern Indian forest are stripping naked to distract police and to help a criminal gang avoid arrest while illegally chopping down trees, the Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday.

Some of the women belong to a timber mafia in the heavily-forested state of Jharkhand while others are paid to strip in front of the police, who are too embarrassed to arrest them or too distracted to hunt the gang down, the daily said.

“It is proving tough to deal with these women,” Jharkhand forest official B.K. Singh said. “It has almost become a regular practice for them to strip.”

The story gets even more absurd when you read the headline of a similar article at Sify.com: Women terrorise Jharkand forest guards. Hmmm. I guess anyone can be a terrorist these days. Fear not though because Chief Wiggum and his posse have a solution: “But the guards are not stumped — they are planning to recruit women guards to deal with the problem.”

Last week Amardeep mentioned the new book by Biju Mathew who organizes and fights for the rights of taxi workers in New York City. The book is titled, Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: A back roads ride through the yellow cab industry of New York City by lead Taxi Workers’ Alliance organizer Biju Mathew.As the point of entry for many of the city’s visitors, the yellow cab has become an enduring metaphor for New York City and its exuberant twenty-four-hours-a-day rush. But just as the city has changed in recent years, so too has the industry that keeps it on the move. Indeed, as Biju Mathew reveals in this highly readable, fast-paced survey of New York’s taxi business, just about everything has been dramatically altered except the yellow paint. Drawing on conversations with the drivers themselves, Taxi! details both the pressures and triumphs of life behind the wheel, from the effects of ex-Mayor Giuliani’s “quality of life” and “zero tolerance” programs and the structure of car and medallion ownership that often results in minimal earnings after a 12-hour shift, to the unexpected ease with which a workforce representing 80 ethnicities—and at least as many languages—organized, culminating in the 1998 strike of 24,000 taxi workers. One of the organizers of the Taxi Workers’ Alliance, Mathew is uniquely qualified to survey the fascinating world of the yellow cab. Buckle up, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

This week’s New Yorker has an article about Biju’s book and the drivers that he writes about.

A book party with no cocktails: ouch. In fairness to the folks at the New Press, which helped organize such a dreaded event recently, at a restaurant on West Twenty-ninth Street, there were a few limiting circumstances. For one thing, almost all of the invited guests were driving. Also, most of them were Muslims and, more to the point, among the city’s best experts on the consequences of excessive social drinking. They were cabbies. The book being celebrated was “Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City,” by Biju Mathew, a business professor at Rider University, and a founding member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a fast-growing labor union.

Compounding the problem was the fact that the party didn’t begin until 1 a.m.—the start of the slow period for drivers working the night shift. Many of the cabbies, at least, would likely have been in the neighborhood anyway. The stretch of the upper Twenties bounded by Lexington and Broadway is their sanctuary—featuring not only the union’s headquarters but also free and plentiful late-night parking, a popular mosque, and several subcontinental restaurants, including Lasani, where the party took place.

As previously discussed on this blog, a woman in Uttar Pradesh was violated by her father-in-law and then ordered to marry him via an outrageous fatwa, much to the horror of sentient beings everywhere. Unfortunately, this story doesn't have a great ending:

"Me and my husband are willing to abide by the fatwa if the Darul Uloom Muftis want us to," Imrana said.

Mufti Habibur Rehman of Darul Uloom Deoband said in a fatwa on Sunday that the Imrana's life with her husband Noor Ilahi has become untenable as per Islamic law after the alleged rape on June 3.

Reacting to the ruling, Imrana, who has been staying with her parents at Kukra village, on Sunday said she has full faith in the Shariyat. Noor Ilahi also said he would take steps as per the fatwa.

You do remember why she was ordered to go home, right? To purify her. Tell me, dear readers, how do you "take steps" so that your wife transitions to the role of stepmother? I'd think about it myself, but I can't stop shaking my head and I've gone dizzy.

Despite the disapproval of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the work of women activists, it looks like the local panchayat will win. The victim's own brothers are fine with the fatwa. While at the protest at the Pakistani Embassy last week, I heard activists discussing how Mukhtaran Mai's mother supported her as she commenced her quest for justice. I wish Imrana's family had reacted similarly. If she was brave enough to report this assault to the authorities in the first place, I can't help but think that she has a flicker of defiance within her. If only someone close to her could fan that tiny flame...

It saddens me to the point of migraine that here's where the story ends. Though the magistrate who heard this case denied the alleged rapist/father-in-law's bail, to me, even if he's convicted of the crime he's been accused of, it sounds like his daughter-in-law and future wife will never win.

For the first time, the DC Independence day parade will include a gatka display, featuring the Miri Piri Gatka Dal (Texas) and the  Sikh Gatka Akhara (DC).

Gatka is a (the?) “Sikh Martial Art.”  A fighter swings his or her weapon (usually a stick, sword, or chain) in a fast, fluid, circular, flowing motion, while following a set footwork routine called the Panthra.  The result is both visually captivating and quite effective. Stylistically, gatka is more like kendo than fencing. Fencing was developed to train men for one-on-one duels; it’s linear and episodic, concentrating on lunges designed to penetrate armor. Gatka is designed so that one fighter can hold off multiple opponents and it relies upon continuous motion. The two fighting styles are different in all the stereotypical but true ways that East differs from West.

If you can’t make it, you might be interested looking at some video clips. My favorites include this one of a man with two swords, one man fighting multiple opponents, and this video-game style clip of two guys fighting. And yes, women do gatka as well [Windows Media Required].

At first I was concerned that the athletes demonstrating gatka would get a rude reception. After all, they’re swarthy, mainly male, dressed in salvar kameez, wearing round turbans. The men have long flowing beards. And this is the Fourth of July, a time for both patriotism and bigotry.

But I thought about it some more, and relaxed. After all, who would be dumb enough to mouth off to a bunch of Texans swinging swords like airplane propellers? Now that would be un-American.

At the airport the other day a casually dressed man walked up to me in the security line and said, “you must be active duty or reserve.” Huh? “Excuse me” I politely replied. “Your haircut,” he pointed. Perhaps I had gotten it cut too short. I just love getting haircuts though. Having guessed wrong the man sheepishly walked off. Thirty seconds later he found a group of 3 young men and opened his suitcase to hand them something. Hare Krishna literature. The LA Times reported yesterday on an all to familiar story, but this one isn’t about the Catholic Church:

Leaders of the Hare Krishna faith last week began carrying out the terms of a $9.5-million settlement that closes the books on a long-running child abuse scandal.

Under the plan, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness organization has filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles while it determines how to compensate 535 former students who say they were abused in the 1970s and ’80s by adults at boarding schools run by the society.

The settlement covers abuses at Krishna temples and schools across the United States and India that resulted in a 2001 class-action lawsuit.

Some Hare Krishna devotees and gurus, including at least one in Los Angeles, were subsequently convicted of child abuse, and others were barred from visiting temples, said Anuttama Dasa, spokesman for the society.

Of course, this isn’t an indictment against all Hare Krishnas, just as the entire Catholic Church isn’t on trial for the actions of some of its clergy, but it’s something to be aware of. There is actually a Hare Krishna temple on my block in LA. Once last year I heard blaring rock music outside my window. When I tried to discern the words I realized it was actually Hare Krishna rock.

Schools, known as ashram gurukulas, sprouted across the country, including Los Angeles.

“I hardly ever saw my parents, but when I did, I would ask my mother every two seconds, ‘What time do I have to go back?’ ” said plaintiff Anya Pourchot, now 37. “I was so fearful that if I did not get back to the ashram in time, they would take away my privileges of seeing my mother.”

Pourchot, a Santa Monica beautician, said she was able to fend off sexual advances from gurus, teachers and other devotees in a Dallas boarding school, but she was frequently beaten. She said she saw other children put inside gunnysacks and barrels as punishment. Children were locked in closets and told that rats would attack them if they moved, she said.

We already suspected this but now it’s official. The BBC reports on an accurate stereotype:

Indians are the world’s biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. The NOP World Culture Score index surveyed 30,000 people in 30 countries from December 2004 to February 2005. Analysts said self-help and aspirational reading could explain India’s high figures. Britons and Americans scored about half the Indians’ hours and Japanese and Koreans were even lower - at 4.1 and 3.1 hours respectively.

That “self-help and aspirational reading” line is important. A lot of the reading being done is religious and scholastic and not necessarily independent reading like you’d think. Still, a bookstore in India is a “cool” place to hang out and be seen. Crosswords Bookstores are especially trendy.

R Sriram, chief executive officer of Crosswords Bookstores, a chain of 26 book shops around India, says Indians are extremely entrepreneurial and reading “is a fundamental part of their being”.

“They place a great deal of emphasis on reading. That’s the reason why they do well in education and universities abroad,” he told the BBC News website.

“People educate themselves and deal with change throughout their lives. And the way to do that is to update themselves with books.”

In North Carolina, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is requesting that Muslim court witnesses be allowed swear their veracity with a Koran instead of a Bible:

Ellis said there is concern allowing the Koran could create new challenges. He questioned what would happen if a person claimed to worship brick walls and wanted to swear the oath on a brick. [WebIndia123]

They’re right. What if some lone wacko claimed to worship a stone, such as the Qa’aba, a shivalinga, a laughing Buddha or an engraved copy of the Ten Commandments? Blasphemy! I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, since the scripture use is fairly ceremonial, you can already swear without your personal flavor of holy book, and people lie in court all the time, this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering issue. But it’s important to religious literalists who believe morality requires a warden-deity with night vision goggles.

So, taking the question at face value, it does in fact point to a larger issue of ownership. On one hand, it’s courteous to allow the majority religion its ceremonial religious invocations, which are woven throughout the Declaration of Independence, the currency, national holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance and the invocations of Congress and the Supreme Court. This religion and the work ethic it spawned built a great country over the years, and the American separation of church and state is reasonably good relative to most other nations. Those institutions are far more entangled on the subcontinent.

Did you ever daydream about starring in a movie as an archeologist who ferrets out exotic treasures, the origins of which have been lost in the mists of antiquity? Well, get over it. Hollywood still has no idea how to cast brown people as anything other than terrorists, doctors, and occasionally taxi drivers or eaters of monkey brains. They’re not yet ready to make an Indian ANNA Jones movie, “M.Night” notwithstanding.

Instead, I offer you a far geekier and more glorious pursuit! The BBC and OED have teamed up to find the earliest verifiable usage of words from the unimaginatively titled “BBC Wordhunt appeal list” for the next version of the OED. If you can beat their earliest recorded usage (you need some form of dated evidence) your contribution might be featured as part of a new BBC2 TV series. How’s that for 15 minutes of fame?

Two of the fifty words on their list (4%!) are words of BritAsian origin:

balti
Wanted: printed evidence before 1984; information on the word’s origin

Are you one of Britain’s original curry kings or queens? If so, did you cook or serve Britain or the world’s first balti — or do you know who did? Knocking around at the back of the kitchen drawer do you have an old takeaway menu with a balti on it from before 1984?

The winter issue of Curry Magazine (1984) contains the first printed evidence the OED has for ‘balti’. But where the term comes from (India, Pakistan — perhaps Baltistan) remains something of a mystery at present. They say it first appeared in the Birmingham area in the early 80s. But is there any printed evidence for the term earlier, and can the origin be confirmed?

See the OED entry for balti

tikka masala
Wanted: printed evidence before 1975

Restaurant menus and reviews start to show chicken tikka masala from 1975, according to the latest research from the OED. Despite the dish’s claim to be a great British national dish, the first recorded evidence comes from America. Something wrong here? Or not?

Last year I blogged about the Justice Department’s abuse of material witness statutes following 9/11. For over a year HRW lawyer Anjana Malhotra has been flying around the country interviewing those thrown into jail indefinitely as “material witnesses,” to terrorist activities. Now a full report [Witness to Abuse: Human Rights Abuses under the Material Witness Law since September 11] has just been released on this practice. Newsweek reports:

Since 9/11, the Justice Department has used a little-known legal tactic to secretly lock up at least 70 terror suspects—almost all of them Muslim men—and hold them without charges as “material witnesses” to crimes, in some cases for months. A report to be released this week by two civil-liberties groups finds nearly 90 percent of these suspects were never linked to any terrorism acts, resulting in prosecutors and FBI agents issuing at least 13 apologies for wrongful arrest.

The report cites instances in which agents used what it calls “flimsy” evidence to make arrests. A 68-year-old Virginia doctor named Tajammul Bhatti was arrested by the FBI in June 2002 after neighbors found magazines about flying and a phone number of a Pakistani nuclear scientist in his apartment. It turned out he had served in the U.S. Air Force National Guard and the Pakistani scientist was a childhood friend. Another “tip” led to the arrest of eight restaurant workers in Evansville, Ind., who were shackled and taken to a detention facility in Chicago. The FBI later apologized—but never disclosed the basis for their detention. “The law was never designed to be used this way,” says Anjana Malhotra, the prime author of the report.

The new study sought to catalogue and quantify the treatment of the witnesses, and it found that a third of the 70 material witnesses it identified were jailed for at least two months. The study found that there might well have been more than 70 material witnesses, but secrecy provisions prevented a definitive tally. Of the 70 who were positively identified, 42 were released without any charges being filed, 20 were charged with non-terrorist offenses like bank or credit card fraud, four were convicted of supporting terrorism, and three others are awaiting trial on terrorism charges. More than a third were ultimately deported. None are still known to be held as witnesses.

Few of the material witnesses made national headlines. Among the notable exceptions were Zacarias Moussaoui, recently convicted of terrorism in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks; Jose Padilla, who was later declared an enemy combatant after authorities accused him of plotting to build a “dirty bomb;” and Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Portland who was jailed in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings after the F.B.I. mistakenly matched a fingerprint of his to the scene.

NPR features this on Monday as well.

[disclosure: Malhotra is a friend]

Thievery Corporation and Gunjan from Bally Sagoo’s label roll into a radio studio for a hypnotic, downtempo version of ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ (thanks, Arun and Turbanhead). A later song in this video reminds me of the velvety Bebel Gilberto. Watch the video.

Whoah, these serious-faced sitarists and tabla players look way less edgy than their music. Especially when it’s the soundtrack at a chill lounge with a good rioja at hand. Then again, have you seen Bollywood playback singers? I guess I virtually expect rental silicone in the age of the Black Eyed Peas.

These next two rockin’ videos came out last year (inspired by Amardeep’s quiz). First up is Dum Dum Project with the punny-named ‘Punjabi 5-0.’ There are shades of ‘Mundian To Bach Ke’ in the image mix, it’s much grittier overall than a Bally Sagoo video. The faux lesbian, Asian-exotic groping is very Robert Palmer. An infamous fashion-mashin’ lookalike makes an appearance. Watch the video.

In ‘Supafly Bindi,’ DDP samples ‘OPP,’ which is so acro-apropos. The video rips Soul Train, but the hook is catchy as hell. Watch the video.

More on DDP:

DDP started in my bedroom studio, Lower East Side, NY and now it’s got “branches” in London, Bangkok, and Bombay…

… I love the name of the group. How did you all come up with it?… Took it right off the back of a bunch of old Hindi film records: Dum Dum-India.

… How did… The1Shanti… come to be a part of the troupe?… I discovered him rhyming for loose change at the Atlantic Ave. subway station in Brooklyn.

Update: Here’s the kicker: the group’s founder, Sean Dinsmore a.k.a. DJ Cavo, isn’t desi. And his India story reads like a breathless backpacker’s. Just how badass is this guy that he can just walk into a musical subculture and start innovating?

This tech support parody (warning: sound) has a wild-eyed Sikh wearing an Afghan-style turban surrounded by Hindu icons in southern India (thanks, Avi). The usual bad Indian accent and cow jokes ensue. I supposed we should thank the animator for drawing him in an office instead of squatting on the ground with an abacus. Its dissection of brainless tech support is pretty cute, though.

Screwy Flash animations shouldn’t be politically correct, but they shouldn’t be ignorant either. Team America knowingly poked fun at American stereotyping even while engaging in it, by putting together a Middle Eastern disguise for the protagonist. The ‘disguise’ consisted of stray bits of toilet paper stuck to his jawline and brownface splashed on as if by a 2-year-old. That’s about how well Americans understand the Middle East, the movie was saying.

This animation doesn’t do that — it cheaps out with crude, wildly inaccurate ethnic stereotypes. I’m not saying don’t poke fun at desis. Hell, we do it all the time. I’m saying: Ill Will Press, this creative work is trite and lame. Get it right next time. There are a quarter million of us right in your backyard, the second-largest Asian-American group in NYC, so just ask somebody.

Granted, it might be a strained conversation (‘Say, dude, fact-check this animation and do a bad accent so I can make fun of your country of origin’)… :)

Related posts: 1, 2, 3

Since I myself am a teaching assistant in the sciences I had to jump on this article in the New York Times. Almost everyone whose ever been to college has had some experience with a TA they just couldn’t understand.

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

“He would just say, ‘It’s easy, it’s easy,’ ” said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it wasn’t easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn’t communicate in English.”

Ms. Serrin’s experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

There are several issues here in addition to the focus of the article. First, I have no doubt that Ms. Serrin deserved a C. Foreign TA’s are tougher because they are used to expecting more from their students and don’t understand that grade inflation is the norm in the U.S. This is especially true in the sciences. I have to inflate grades all the time, even at a top rated University like the one I attend. A friend of mine, who is now a Post-doc, told me that when he first came from India he was a mean and ruthless TA because that is what he thought a TA was supposed to be like. He didn’t understand why the students were so sensitive.

This unfortunate baby was born on February 22, 2005 in the tiny little town of Roseburg, Oregon (Population 21,000). Why do I say that she’s unfortunate? It has nothing to do with the dress she’s wearing, that’s really not her fault. And all babies look like boiled aloo when they’re born. Nor was she born too small or too large; at 9 lbs 3 oz, she’s well within normal parameters.

The unfortunate thing about this baby is her name: Aryan Justice. This poor little girl is going to have to go through life with the name of a political cause that frankly, hasn’t been on the winning side of many battles lately. Probably the last time the Aryans won anything was when they invaded India, thousands of years ago. They would have been better off naming her “Christian Right” (assuming they shared those values, many Aryan Nation folks are Pagans [NSFW], and talk about the “brutal dictatorship of Christian tyrants” [NSFW]), at least then she could have been called “Chrissie” by her schoolmates.

Lastly, I love the hospital’s little helpful name explanation guide. Aryan, they tell us, is a name of French origin, and means Holy. Riiiiiiiight. And if you believe that, I have a Reich to sell you. Here’s hoping that this poor baby grows up at least as sane as Moon Unit and Dweezil Zappa ……

UPDATE: Runnerwallah points out that the name was no mistake [NSFW], and that her parents really are White Supremacists. I hope she tells people it’s pronounced “Arianne”, and that her parents named her after the European space program. Then she can move to India when she grows up, where her name isn’t so unusual, and marry somebody of her own skin tone.

Seven years ago I spent a few days on the island of Capri, off the coast of Italy. At the top of the island was a famous hostel where everyone who visits ends up staying. My friends and I got lost trying to find it. Out of nowhere came a very old man who led us down twisting paths, first to a view of the Italian coast and then on to the hostel. I couldn’t help notice that this man, despite being old and short in height, was incredibly fit. His arms were like tree trunks and he moved with the agility of a mountain goat. I decided right then that this was the musculoskeletal system that I wanted when I became an old man. This feeling overcame me again, years later on the Inca trail where the Quechua porters (some quite old) made us a look like pathetic weaklings. If anyone has seen the Motorcycle Diaries they will recall the scene where Che and his buddy are forced to crash out on the Inca trail, just as a Quechua guide runs by them.

Earlier this week NPR had a fun story (MUST listen) about an article that appeared in the June 17th issue of the Journal Science. The paper is titled, Energetics of Load Carrying in Nepalese Porters, by Bastien et. al. [paid subscription required].

Nepalese porters routinely carry head-supported loads equal to 100 to 200% of their body weight (Mb) for many days up and down steep mountain footpaths at high altitudes. Previous studies have shown that African women carry head-supported loads of up to 60% of their Mb far more economically than army recruits carrying equivalent loads in backpacks. Here we show that Nepalese porters carry heavier loads even more economically than African women. Female Nepalese porters, for example, carry on average loads that are 10% of their Mb heavier than the maximum loads carried by the African women, yet do so at a 25% smaller metabolic cost.

Come on. You can’t possibly read that and not want a body like that!

M.I.A. and DJ Rekha spin, grind and wobble at a free concert in Central Park, August 7 at 3pm (thanks, Anna). The suspiciously absent-as-of-late Diplo is still on the bill.

It’s an odd combination, electrogrime and Rekha, and a long way from Simon and Garfunkel and Strawberry Fields. But if the show draws hipsters shedding layers of snitty reserve to blog archly about it later, it’ll rock as hard as the Knitting Factory. And once my fellow bhangraleros arrive, it’ll be ebony ‘n ivory all over again — carefully mussed shabby chic versus the authentically disheveled ;)

I can get squeaky so she can come and oil me at:

Central Park SummerStage is… at Rumsey Playfield… on East 72nd Street off Fifth Avenue… enter the park on 69th Street and 5th Avenue.

Entrance to the SummerStage area begins 90 minutes before the shows start on weekends, and 60 minutes before for weeknight performances… If you’re not into battling crowds and are content to just hear the music, there is plenty of space on the grass outside of the SummerStage area. From there, you can easily hear the concert while lounging on the grass. [About.com]

Also, Missy Elliott gets ‘hur’ freak on with everyone’s favorite Salt ‘n Pepa fan on her new album (via Brooklyn Vegan):

M.I.A.’s… rumored to be on Kanye’s upcoming Late Registration… [and] has a guest spot on the last track of the new Missy Elliott joint, The Cookbook. The cut, “Bad Man”, also features Vybz Cartel and was produced by Missy herself. [Pitchfork]

Most SM readers are news junkies so by now, you've probably come across the latest Pew survey on International attitudes towards the US -

WASHINGTON - The United States' popularity in many countries is lagging behind even communist China.

The image of the United States slipped sharply in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, and two years later has shown few signs of rebounding in Western Europe or the Muslim world, an international poll found...

In Britain, which prides itself on its "special relationship" with Washington, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.

I guess many Brits prefer China's real live gulags to our merely figurative ones. Our ever-polite neighbors to the north had the following 3 word view of Americans -

Rude, greedy and violent

Well then. Personally, I don't read too much into these sorts of polls and they reinforce my view that much of Global Politics basically boils down to one big high school with America being the richest kid on the block.

And we all know how everyone in High School felt about that kid.

In fact, it's even worse - we're not just the rich kid (GNP) but also the quarterback (military), prettiest / most popular (Hollywood) and possibly the overly industrious, know-it-all Eagle Scout (Silicon Valley / Religion / Patriotism / Wide-Eyed Optimism) all rolled into one. Talk about a combo that would make the chess team, literature club, & "trench-coat mafia" seethe.

That's not to say we don't occasionally screw things up in a "careless" Daisy Buchanan sort of way, it's just that it's hard to imagine a world where this measure ever becomes / remains positive for long regardless of our behavior. (Although, in supremely High School-esque fashion, experiencing a 9/11 does appear to replenish global good will).

In the end, this particular global test doesn't feel very falsifiable. BUT, there is one wrinkle here that's actually pretty surprising / interesting - preceptions of the US in India -

This week we’ve received several tips about the case of the two Pakistani men arrested in Lodi, California on charges of being tied to terrorist training camps abroad. DNSI especially has done a good job of following the case. Just to re-cap, here is an excerpt from the Contra Costa times:

Two Lodi men arrested this month and accused of being connected to a Pakistan terrorist camp pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges they lied to federal agents.

Hamid Hayat, 22, who is facing two counts of making false statements to the FBI, and his father Umer Hayat, 47, who faces one count on the same charge, could be sentenced up to eight years in jail for each conviction.

Federal prosecutors say Hamid Hayat attended a terrorist training camp tied to al-Qaida to learn “how to kill Americans” and that his father helped pay for it. After initial denials, the two U.S. citizens with relatives in Pakistan confessed they had done so, the government alleged in an affidavit. They were arrested June 5 and have been held since in Sacramento County Jail without bail.

Local Muslims are worried about a possible backlash toward the community, but Mayor John Beckman tried to calm fears:

Mayor John Beckman said in an interview with KCRA 3’s Rich Ibarra Friday that the community is experiencing feelings of shock, fear, anger and distrust.

“We have 60,000 people in our community, and their safety and security is our priority and No. 1 concern, regardless of what their religion, faith or ethnicity is,” Beckman said.

The Muslim community, which is mostly Pakistani, has been a part of Lodi for decades.

“The Pakistani community is part of Lodi,” Beckman said. “We have a Pakistani Independence Day celebration we do every year. And time and time again, the Pakistani community is a very vibrant part of Lodi.”

The mayor met with Muslim leaders on Thursday to hear their concerns and to ease tensions. He said he sees the events that have occurred in Lodi as possible in any other city in America.

Y’all may be familiar with geeksta rap:

Geeksta rappers… bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code… Nerdcore now refers to artists waxing lyrical about topics as disparate as engineering and Lord of the Rings…

“50 Cent has dance clubs and oral sex, we have awesome video cards…”

“If the genre is to succeed, you’re going to need some females…” [Wired News]

You may have heard of the Northbridge-Southbridge rap feud:

“Feuds between Nas and Jay-Z, Biggie and Tupac and 50 Cent and Ja Rule have… [resulted] in more exposure for both artists, so I decided to bring this to the world of CS gangsta rap by starting a feud with MC Plus+,” Monzy explained. [Wired News]

Well, all the trash IMs and dis MP3s have finally claimed their first real-life victim. A desi script kiddie from an Edison high school commanded a botnet to attack a rival online vintage jersey shop. The attack took down an entire desi-owned ISP in upstate New York as well as an Internet backbone in Pennsylvania:

… on one day over the summer it knocked out a “backbone provider” of Internet service in eastern Pennsylvania for 12 hours… [Detroit Free Press]

Jasmine (Jasminder?) Singh infected thousands of PCs with a Trojan horse by spreading a file called ‘Jennifer Lopez’ over file sharing networks. Victims expecting to see J.Lo in BootyVision actually ended up letting Singh control their computers.

Early last July, with control over ~2,000 PCs, he commanded them to take down his victim’s Web site:

Soumen Das, owner of a small Internet provider in Pittsford, N.Y. … realized he was on the receiving end of… a flood of traffic so immense that a site has no option but to shut down. What Das didn’t know at the time, and wouldn’t know until months later, was that the attacker was a 17-year-old high school student from Edison…

Singh’s target? A handful of merchants that sell “retro” or “throwback” sports apparel - replicas of shirts and caps worn by teams of yesteryear… His motivation? A few sneakers and a watch. That was the payment offered by Jason Arabo, an 18-year-old community college student in a Detroit suburb. Arabo had his own retro sports apparel business and was hoping to steal customers from his competitors… [Bergen Record]

Yesterday I wrote about a protest on behalf of Mukhtaran Bibi; today, over fifty people and half-a-dozen news organizations (including CNN, Dawn and VOA) showed up at the Pakistani embassy. Samia Khan, a Development Manager for MDRI (Mental Disability Rights International) and a NAPAWF (National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum) volunteer who was at the epicenter of today's event agreed to answer three questions for the Mutiny. You have no idea how sweet this woman is-- she had other plans and she shelved them just so you guys could get the latest knowledge on "the movement". Samia, you're my heroine.

Samia speaks:

Was it a success?

It was a success in terms of visibility and raising awareness of the issue and involving different organizations. There were at least 6-7 institutions that got involved, it was a multi-ethnic effort, too. It was a strong beginning.

It would be great if Mukhtaran Mai is free, if she gets her passport and can travel that’s wonderful, but it’s important to remember that she’s one voice, that there are thousands of cases like her, and that if policies don’t change there’s going to continue to be lip service to the international community…but nothing will change things for women.

What’s next?

The follow-up to this needs to involve putting more pressure on the government of Pakistan, the international community as well as the administration here. They need to start holding Mushharaf accountable for having respect for human’s rights, for women. The U.S. is turning a blind eye by giving him aid, but not questioning his policies towards woman and even children.

When I was a kid there were no cartoon characters that looked like me on TV. Well, there may have been one that kind of did, but we won’t get into that.

An anonymous tipster directs our attention to Nickelodeon’s site where a cute round-faced little Indian girl named Maya is on a mission to bring cultural awareness to today’s kids through short animated clips. There are two clips you can click on to enjoy: Happy Holi Maya and Maya the Indian Princess. The animator is Kavita Ramchandran, who I couldn’t seem to find a whole lot about on the web. I presume that these clips run on live television.

In what is surely a symptom of my need to find a woman, I thought the animated mom in the clips was kind of cute.

(via Amit Varma / India Uncut) This just makes me want to scream. An OpEd in the Times of India discusses the trials and tribulations that met a promising higher ed venture in India. Like most stories, it starts with the best of intentions -

Two years ago, I met a distinguished friend in Delhi, who is the president of a prestigious American university that has produced several Nobel laureates. He loves India and he told me with some pride that India is increasingly perceived as a future knowledge capital of the world. He thought he would contribute to this future by setting up a branch campus here so that Indians could acquire his university's degree at a fourth of the cost in America. I was delighted. Here's a chance for a world-class education for our young, I thought.

And like many such endeavors, he ran smack into other (formerly) well-intentioned bureaucrats who are now glued in place by ossified political structures. The natural laws of bureaucracy and public-choice kick in -

Two years later I heard this tale of woe. His university's application to the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) for an equivalence certificate went unanswered despite three reminders. Their meeting with the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) resulted in the demand for a huge bribe. Their efforts with the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Ministry entangled them in miles of red tape.

"[AICTE] will decide our fees, student intake, and even the size of our buildings, and prosecute us like criminals for non-compliance. Even if we get their approval, it's only for a year, and meanwhile the courts could overturn things."

And the university's response? Atlas shrugged -

...India is a hopeless cause and he has decided to set up a campus in China.

Sigh. On the plus side, I suppose the Indian higher ed establishment will be safe from neo-colonial exploitation & Race To The Bottom outsourcing.

Some kind Brit Asian soul has posted a cornucopia of record covers from Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi film soundtracks of the ’60s-’80s (via Boing Boing). Groovy, baby!

Click Continue to see my favorites.

History buff that I am I was shocked to learn from July’s issue of National Geographic Magazine that I had never heard of Admiral Zheng He. His story is movie-worthy and his exploits provide a new lens through which one may view South Asia during what were the Dark Ages in Europe and much of Asia. The article about Zheng He was brought to my attention by my father (because the article that immediately follows it was about the Mars rovers). From the article by Frank Viviano [I transcribed most of the quotes below since the full article is not available online]:

Exactly 600 years ago this month the great Ming armada weighed anchor in Nanjing, on the first of seven epic voyages as far west as Africa—almost a century before Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and Vasco da Gama’s in India. Even the European expeditions would seem paltry by comparison: All the ships of Columbus and da Gama combined could have been stored on a single deck of a single vessel in the fleet that set sail under Zheng He.

Its commander was, without question, the most towering maritime figure in the 4,000-year annals of China, a visionary who imagined a new world and set out consciously to fashion it. He was also a profoundly unlikely candidate for admiral in anyone’s navy, much less that of the Dragon Throne.

The greatest seafarer in China’s history was raised in the mountainous heart of Asia, several weeks’ travel from the closest port. More improbable yet, Zheng was not even Chinese—he was by origin a Central Asian Muslim. Born Ma He, the son of a rural official in the Mongol province of Yunnan, he had been taken captive as an invading Chinese army overthrew the Mongols in 1382. Ritually castrated, he was trained as an imperial eunuch and assigned to the court of Zhu Di, the bellicose Prince of Yan.

…Renamed Zheng after his exploits at the battle of Zhenglumba, near Beijing, he was chosen to lead one of the most powerful naval forces ever assembled.

If reading Vinod's update on the tale of Mukhtaran Mai got you fired up, I've got the raita for what ails you. Heed this post, DC-area mutineers-- a real live brown uprising is going down TOMORROW:

Please join NAPAWF-DC and ANAA for a rally
THURSDAY, June 23rd at 4:30 PM

EMBASSY OF PAKISTAN-WASHINGTON DC
3517 International Court, NW
Washington DC, 20008

Can't this woman ever get just treatment? It's nice that Condi got involved, but I'm a St. Thomas Christian to the bone-- until Mukhtaran bibi is in this country, speaking freely, I won't believe the Pakistani Government's position that she has "permission" to travel. It's unbelievable that we have to remind them not to be stupid about this in the first place (PR disaster much?).

Rallying might interest you for other reasons too, as a member of NAPAWF reminded me earlier this evening, when I mentioned the Secretary of State's intervention

It doesn’t mean anything beyond that she got her passport back. Globally, wherever there is injustice against Asian women and girls there is injustice against all of us.

Remember how you felt the first time you read this story? And how your gut clenched again when we covered the inexcusable punishment meted out to a woman who had been raped by her father-in-law and then ordered to marry him after "purification"? Some of you almost cheered when other groups intervened, when a higher authority decreed that her rapist might actually qualify for the death penalty. That's because justice feels good. Let's get Mukhtaran Mai some, shall we?

I know what you are thinking..."4:30 in the afternoon? There's no way I can make it..." Of course you can. I'm told that this event should go on for a few hours. Any other excuses, objections or obstacles?

Look. This woman was assaulted repeatedly in public and then put through the worst judicial roller coaster I've ever followed. She can't express herself. You can.

A happy development in the on-going saga of Mukhtar Mai - the US Government has stepped in to ensure Ms. Mai's passage outside of the country -

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice secured a personal pledge from Pakistan that gang-rape victim Mukhtaran Mai will be allowed to visit the United States, officials said Tuesday.

The State Department revealed Rice's personal intervention in the now famous case, after The New York Times reported that the Pakistani government still had Mai's passport, despite lifting a ban on her travelling last week.

...State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the issue was raised last Thursday by Rice, in a telephone call with Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri.

"Secretary Rice made it clear that Mrs. Mai was welcome to come to the United States at any time and that we were looking to the government of Pakistan to ensure that she was free to travel whenever she wanted," he said.

"The government of Pakistan has committed itself to that and therefore it is our expectation that should Mrs Mai want to travel, to come to the United States, there will be no obstacles presented to her to do so," Ereli said.

Of course, the Pakistani's felt obliged to make a face-saving "no, we're *really* in charge" statement -

Top Pakistani officials maintained there had been no US pressure in the case of Mai, who was ordered gang raped by a tribal council in 2002, and emerged as a cause celebre for international human rights campaigners.

I watched the FOX series “24” during its first season. I stopped cold after that. EVERYONE watches that show, but I am no longer allowed to follow Jack Bauer and his exploits. You see, I began having paranoid delusions and kept trying to save the world an hour at a time. Even when I did something as ordinary as go to the grocery store, I could hear this clock ticking in my ears. I once freaked out at 6:58 p.m. when there were only two minutes left in the hour and nobody was around to bag the groceries I had just purchased. I swear the guy in front of me in the checkout line was a Muslim terrorist just trying to slow me down. I feel sorry for my friends who still watch the show (now in its third season). They are totally paranoid. If I am talking to them and its like 8:55p.m., all of a sudden they’ll ask me if my phone is tapped and will insist they have to go. ZEE TV is trying to cash in on the paranoia and anxiety with their own rip-off of 24 titled, “Time Bomb 9/11.” FOX isn’t happy. From the FinancialExpress.com:

Zee Telefilms Ltd can go ahead with the release of its Ketan Mehta-produced thriller Time Bomb 9/11 as scheduled tonight [Tuesday night] at 10 pm as the Delhi High Court on Monday adjourned the matter for Wednesday. Hollywood producer Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation had sued Zee for infringement of its copyright on its ongoing TV serial 24 starring Emmy award nominee Keifer Sutherland.

[Fox Lawyers] alleged that concept of Time Bomb 9/11 was based on TV serial 24 and explained how the act of Zee Telefilms amounted to infringement of copyright.

On the other hand, senior advocate Arun Jaitely appearing for Zee refuted the allegations, saying that Time Bomb 9/11 was its original concept and a sequel to its earlier serial Pradhan Mantri, launched in 2001. “Nobody could monopolise on the concept of terrorism,” he said. Senior advocate Gopal Subramanian will be appearing for the producer.

“Nobody could monopolise on the concept of terrorism.” Indeed, I say. Where would society be without the concept of terrorism? The show even has an actor who portrays Osama Bin Laden. Jack Bauer never had to tango with such a malevolent adversary. Mid-day.com reports:

Let’s face it, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi suffers from a severe case of Yoda syndrome. On one hand, he was the moral leader of a subcontinent and delivered a large can of whoop-ass to an evil empire. On the other, he was short, wizened and, in the eyes of many Westerners, just plain funny-lookin’.

Which image will win out in the end? One Aussie fast food chain has cast its vote (via Saheli and Age of Gold). Its logo references Gandhi, the Taj Mahal, ‘curry,’ and a name which is both misspelled and rhymes only when pronounced badly:

On learning that Mahatma Gandhi’s image was being used to sell Indian takeaway food by a franchisee in Australia, his great grandson, Tushar Gandhi, urged the Central Government to take action against the “exploitation” of Gandhi’s image, which “is protected under the Indian Constitution and the National Emblems Act… “I am against such irreverent use of the Mahatma’s image…” [The Hindu]

The chain’s radio ad starts with a Middle Eastern tune. It has some guy doing a supposedly desi accent which lands somewhere between strangled Vietnamese dowager and fuckup. Listen to the ad.

After Tushar Gandhi’s statement, the chain said it now sees the light, doesn’t want to be offensive and has completely revamped its branding. So here’s their new, corrected, stereotype-free logo. Take a look:

Sajit posted earlier about a remarkable Spanish-Hindi fusion track called ‘Mírame’ (Look at Me). It’s by Daddy Yankee, who sings reggaeton, a popular genre of Latino hip-hop:

Daddy Yankee is reggaeton’s biggest crossover contender: He has already rhymed alongside Nas, Lil Jon and Terror Squad, and his brassy, slogan-strewn flow suggests both a quick-tongued thug and a Latin crunkster.

This pounding reggaeton song leads off with ‘Eli Re Eli’ from Yaadein, covered by Hindi singer Deevani. But not only is this a rare Hindi-Spanish mix, Deevani also sings in Spanish. Well.

>> Listen to a clip

The song innovates on several levels by merging similar sounds rather than contrasting ones. A lot of desi fusion has a low hip-hop beat, bass-heavy and distinct from a high-pitched tumbi or bhangra track which soars above. But in this song, the male reggaetonero is almost higher-pitched than the female Hindi singer. Which, to state the obvious, is insane. It’s playing chicken by shriekiness.

Desi remixes often use a smooth-voiced rapper or reggae artist; the rough edges are provided by the Hindi/Punjabi singer. In this song, the roles are flipped. Daddy Yankee’s style is aggressive and cants forward against the honey-voiced Hindi singer.

Remixes usually highlight the differences in pronunciation between the German-influenced English, with its hard, aspirated consonants, and the much softer Hindi/Punjabi. But in this track, Spanish and Hindi flow seamlessly into one another. It’s the same reason why Spanish teachers would always go nuts over desi kids’ Spanish accents. Years of trying to teach a soft language to American kids left them putty in my Hindi-speaking hands.

Remixes often mock the foreignness of the tweeter track. ‘Indian Flute’ by Timbaland & Magoo with Raje Shwari says, ‘Sing it to me, but I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’.’ ‘Rock The Party’ by Bombay Rockers says, ‘I don’t know what you’re sayin’, all I know’s that I came to party.’ But this song doesn’t take the easy out. Deevani sings in Spanish and pulls it off respectably.

...and others go to summer band camp. I and probably at least 1 on other mutineer did some time at Debate camp (I'm a geek and I'm at peace with it, so back off). Bela Karolyi's gymnastics school and Nick Bollettieri's tennis camp have almost legendary records of producing champions. Well, for a new generation of Desi overachievers, it's now the after-school spelling circuit-

An immigrant from Andhra Pradesh, India, Chitturi noticed that language barriers and a traditional cultural emphasis on science and engineering were limiting Indian success to the field of mathematics, neglecting the reading and writing skills that compose a large portion of standardized tests that are crucial to college admission.

Concerned that lower results in these areas were impeding immigrant success in the United States, Chitturi expanded the North South Foundation - an organization he founded in 1989 to fund scholarships for students in India - to include small competitions in spelling and vocabulary for Indian children in the United States.

Since its expansion in 1993, the foundation has spawned 60 volunteer-run chapters across the country that each host annual regional spelling competitions for Indians. The regional winners compete in the foundation's national spelling bee, gaining experience that contributes heavily to their success in the Scripps competition.

Chitturi estimated that half of the Indian competitors in the Scripps bee, the nation's largest and longest-running spelling contest, have passed through NSF, including 2003 champion Sai Gunturi of Dallas.

Now, I dunno about you, but I sorta visualize that underground tournament scene in just about all martial arts flix. The one where fighters from across the country gather while surrounded by hoards of half-drunk Chinese / Thai / Korean day laborers clutching their bets in hand and screaming at the top of their lungs - "Spell! Spell! Spell!" After the contenders duke it out, they present themselves before the previous year's champion who occupies a seat of honor in the center next to his white-haired sansei. With a silent nod and raise of his eyebrow, he assigns the fates of the challengers. But that could just be me.

My Sunday afternoon desi youth program back in the day was a bunch of kids, half of whom managed to get injured in the lowest intensity, uncle-supervised tug-of-war match on the planet. The other group of kids were out behind our toolshed-cum-community center talking smack like they grew up in the projects, splitting 6-packs they smuggled in under their jackets (why else would you wear a friggin' parka in Houston?) and swapping Tupac bootlegs - and that was just the girls.

Perhaps there is hope for the future afterall.

A startup Indian airline backed by the former CEO of U.S. Airways startled the industry with a mammoth, $6B order for 100 planes at the Paris Air Show last week:

The order for 100 Airbus aircraft… is the biggest single order from India and the biggest, as well, for a single Airbus model (A320)… [Rahul] Bhatia may have been emboldened to take the plunge, backed by former US Airways head Rakesh Gangwal, who he has known for 20 years…

… the biggest advantage his IndiGo, designed to be a budget carrier, has, is size. With 100 aircraft, it will be able to touch all airports in the country with multiple connections… IndiGo will be able to connect the lucrative metro routes with flights every half-an-hour… “We will connect every possible destination in India.” [Business Standard]

Gangwal apparently took the phrase ‘aviator frames’ literally :) I love the airline name but am skeptical of the cash-rich naïf story. A high-profile team, unproven in a new market, drums up massive startup funding and makes confident proclamations about dominating the sector. Webvan, anyone?

Even before IndiGo’s buy, India had ordered almost half the world’s output of airliners in the last few months:

In the last nine months, India alone has booked 250 aircraft, nearly half of the orders for the entire industry worldwide. [Deccan Herald]

Besides the budget carriers, a new category of premium airlines is arising. In typical desi style, they don’t want an efficient shortcut, they want the whole experience: a high cost structure, bankruptcy and then a belated turn to the budget carrier model ;)

Paramount, from the Coimbatore-based textile company of the same name, will be a different kind of airline. While all the new airlines starting in the country are no-frills, low cost carriers… Its 70-seater aircraft from Brazil’s [Embraer], will be a business class airline — contrary to the all-economy class budget carriers. Paramount, which plans to take to the skies in August next, believes that there is enough premium traffic to be targeted in the country. [Deccan Herald]

I still question the wisdom of painting on airplanes a name which evokes ‘mountain.’ Those are two things which never should meet.

This one’s for all my keshdhari friends:

[Iranian President Mohammad] Khatami’s friends say he wraps his natty turban by himself, tying one end of a 12-foot-long cloth to a door knob… “It is important in Islam to be elegant,” he said. “In fact, being chic is a religious duty and there are many sayings from Prophet Muhammad, who encouraged his followers to look good and smell fresh.” [NYT]

Are y’all following the edict of the prophet, PBUH, in the interests of ecumenical harmony? Be chic, look good and smell fresh — it’s Muslim Eye for the Sikh Guy. I wonder whether there’s anything in the Sikh canon about waxing the muchha and sharply creasing the pug ;)

The Tampa Tribune has been reporting (thanks to Chaina Turna for the tip) on the case of 22 year old Parita Patel who has been visiting the U.S. and is reportedly staying with some friends (while her husband and family remain in India).

Tears streamed down her face, a few falling to her lime green punjabi before she could wipe them away. Her friends tried to comfort her, patting her back and whispering condolences in Gujarati outside the courtroom at the 13th Judicial Circuit Court.

Parita Patel, 22, just wanted her baby daughter. And she thought Friday she’d walk out holding little Krinna in her arms. She just had to get past a dependency hearing.

A visit with Krinna on Monday, arranged at a Florida Department of Children and Families office, may have given her false hope.

“I have not been sleeping,” she said. “I say to myself, `Tomorrow my baby may come with me.’ I wonder why this situation?”

In a matter of minutes, the hearing was over. Krinna wasn’t there. They weren’t going home together.

So what’s up? Why did the 13th order her baby into the system? Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) accused her of putting her baby in harms way.

Wiki WiFi: The desi-heavy island of Mauritius is turning into even more of a hot spot. It plans to be the first island with blanket wireless Internet (via Slashdot):

From his office window in Mauritius’ new Cybertower—a sleek blue glass and gray stone tower that is the heart of the country’s first high-tech park—Rahim can point out one of five new radio transmission antennas his company has installed in the last month perched beside a Hindu temple on a nearby green mountainside… The antennas now beam his wireless Internet service over about 60 percent of the island and within range of 70 percent of its population… Getting to every last corner, he said, might take a little longer. “We have so many sugar cane fields,” he lamented, tracing the island’s outline on a map.

An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links… Many of the country’s 1.2 million people—a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants—are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable…

But the government’s telecom monopoly made it reluctant to issue the permits:

Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom’s profits, even though the country’s National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for “positive discrimination” by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.

Mauritius really does sound like India ;)

Related post here.

Note to self: The next time that you are granted a Press Pass to an event as a representative of Sepia Mutiny, at the very least you should bring a pen to take notes. That way you look more legit.

Yesterday I attended the North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA) conference in D.C. I had to sheepishly admit to people who asked that I was not in fact an attorney like one of them. My “personal injury lawyer” cover was totally blown as evidenced by one very cute district court clerk from Chicago who called me out on it. No longer would I be able to walk amongst the lawyers and speak legalese with the reckless abandon that had served me so well in years past.

The general buzz at the conference was that the most compelling panel from Friday had been the one titled, 9/11 Commission Effects on the South Asian Community. Unfortunately I arrived in D.C. too late to attend. The panel that I was most looking forward to was the one titled, Politics, Identity, and Mobilization: South Asian Lawyers in Election 2004. This panel consisted of Democrats Reshma Saujani and Ro Khanna, as well as Republicans Dino Teppara, and Suhail Khan. The moderator was Deepa Iyer. I sat in the very front row and made eye contact just long enough to try and make the two Republicans feel uncomfortable. I kid, I kid. If I was a jerk I would have brought my laptop and started typing furiously whenever someone said something provocative or something that I disagreed with. I even thought about putting a sign on the cover of my laptop that read “I’m blogging about YOU right NOW,” but I needed people to trust me in order to get the story and cultivate future sources.

Three months ago, I met some friends of friends for drinks in a dimly-lit Times Square hotel lounge. The group included Nusrat Durrani, who runs MTV World and is now launching MTV Desi. Like the Bombay Dreams team, Durrani bemoaned his casting issues. Everyone and her mom had auditioned for VJ, but nobody looked ‘authentically’ desi American, whatever that is.

Until I met Durrani, my only image of a rocker past his 30s was of the dyed-haired, aging rockers showing off studded belts and butt-cracks at the gym or in the West Village. You want to throw an arm around their shoulders and say, ‘The ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s are over, man. Let it go.’

Durrani is nothing like that. He’s the most punk fortysomething I’ve ever met. He’s got a wife and kid(s) and a spacious Brooklyn loft, but he still dresses like a rock star. In person he’s a shorter, desi version of Mick Jagger: the lips, the shaggy hair, the dog collar around his wrist.

But I still feel bad for the guy. Charismatic though he may be, we all know MTV has a terribly difficult time creating buzz ;) So I was greatly relieved to hear that the NYT covered Durrani’s VJ auditions (thanks, Arun and Sachin).

Mr. Durrani said that he worried that Ms. Taufiq was too much of an Indian-American stereotype (beautiful overachiever) and that Mr. Usman would be straitjacketed in a V.J. role. Ms. Desai had no experience in front of a camera but she was cute, hip and sassy, and this captivated, as she put it, the Man… [NYT]

No shit — look at how these three are dressed. R&B singer Reshma is vamped to the max, MTV India-style. Comedian Azhar Usman is kitted out for the burbs. But video editor Niharika Desai’s look has Brooklyn artist all over it. Her site’s called Post-Punk Kitchen (hot PoPu, come ‘n get it!), for chrissake:

Niharika graduated from the University of Pennsylania… Some of her editing credits include… Alanis Morrissette Live! and SHARKS! (a series pilot on female Poker champs). [Post-Punk Kitchen]

Her female rival, Reshma, has a day job y’all might be familiar with. Ah yes, HP, the paragon of parking cushily. A college friend chose HP as his day job because they don’t make you work more than 8 hour days. He built and sold night job, a tech startup, for gobs of money, so who looks silly now?

Ms. Taufiq summed herself up: R&B artist who is bilingual in English and Hindi… and, well, chemical engineer now working in software development at Hewlett-Packard. [NYT]

Sometimes we run across artistic works so breathtaking that we wonder whether in all the preceding years we have actually lived. Sometimes we find übermenschen who leap cultural chasms in a single bound. These artists have an intrinsic Goodness which translates in all cultures: Márquez. Rushdie. And… Mehndi?

For your amusement, I offer Daler Mehndi’s ‘Tunak Tunak Tun’ in Flash (via Freedom Shock). There’s some charm in this badly-drawn boy (doesn’t Daler deserve a full beard?), but the original was even more craptastic. ‘East Indian,’ flying carpets and comments about bin Laden, check. Hello my crazy-eyed future girlfriend!

Here’s the white boy version, bhangra moves and all, by SUNY Buffalo. I think my family owned a buffalo by that name once. It sounds Punjabi.

Here’s a disturbing industrial version, proving that there’s nothing so saccharine that a German can’t make it depressing.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

I think we have another entry into the annals of really bad writing on South Asia. This entry comes from perennial favorite, our friends over at Condé Nast Traveler.

Those of you who have been to the region understand my initial surprise when I received my June 2005 issue to see on the cover a piece entitled Driving India. I mean, there is a reason that Hertz and Avis car rental companies aren't on every corner (I believe there are 16 Hertz locations for the entire country of over a billion people). Ever wonder why no ingenious Indian business person hadn't created the rupee car rental company? Perhaps because it isn't safe for those unfamiliar with the country/roads to drive there. Like any good mutineer, I immediately flip to the story entitled "Accelerating Mayhem," and began reading to see how crazy the writer, Stephan Wilkinson must be to take on the Indian roads. Instead I was left wondering how his article got published.

Well as soon as I flipped to page 92, I began to see the signs, not so much that he is crazy, but for bad and clichéd writing on the region. What are these warning signs you ask? Let's have a looksee:

1. Required discussion of arranged marriage, check. I have no idea what this has to do with a travelogue or driving India, but yes, people in India have arranged marriages. It has been written about, TMBWITW Aishwarya has explained it, and some (gasp) even prefer it.

2. The requisite mention of the "Indian head shake," check. To be fair, Wilkinson describes it as "a vague cock of the head." I think we should formally rename it here as the South Asian head shake because I know they do it in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as well.

3. Use of the word "the" before mentioning the state of Punjab, check. I never understood how this trend started, to say "the Punjab." Writing, "From Delhi through the Punjab" is the equivalent of saying from Washington D.C. through the Pennsylvania…

The FBI has revealed one facet of its antiterrorism strategy by its handling of the high school girl deported (‘voluntarily returned’ under duress) to Bangladesh. They’re finding neoreligious Muslim kids, those who turn to religion as a way of rebelling against their more liberal parents. They’re zeroing in on those who listen to radicals like Omar Bakri Mohammed, an infamous North London imam.

Up to this point, I agree with their strategy. Here’s where I think they go wrong: they’re deporting them under any pretext without distinguishing between actual extremists and those who are just rebellious teens.

From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day - and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil… Her parents… rejected… an arranged marriage to an American Muslim man… When Latif suggested an elopement to Michigan, Tashnuba impulsively agreed…

… she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed… What mainly drew the agent’s eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word “suicide” - her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said…

Tashnuba said she believed she was singled out precisely because she is a noncitizen - allowing investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing the familiar limits of criminal and juvenile proceedings. [NYT]

The most interesting part about this story is that the FBI agent who gets credit for the takedown of a confused 16-year-old is herself familiar with the North London fundies. Thirty-seven-year-old Foria Younis was raised a British Muslim:

Armed with her knowledge of three continents, and fluent in Punjabi and Urdu, she flies the globe with FBI teams… Younis won’t go into specific details of her work, which is often undercover, but admits to travelling to “South Asia” on missions, and to co-operating with officers from Scotland Yard. Flanked by an FBI press officer, she is allowed to confirm she has been involved in the arrests of several Islamic extremists…

She knows that when she enters a Muslim household, even on a raid, the sight of her has an electrifying effect, especially on the women and girls of the home. In many households, women are “held hostage” by their men’s radicalism, she says… Britain has changed in 20 years, she says, especially the corner of the East End in which she grew up. “I grew up in a very South Asian community, so I didn’t get full exposure to all of what England had to offer…”

The situation in Uzbekistan utterly frustrates me. After 9/11 people asked, “Why do they hate us?” Uzbekistan is a perfect example of why. The Uzbeks are ruled by a despot who does not believe in Freedom (which is supposed to be the one value that we are trying to spread). Uzbekistan however has an airbase that is of vital importance as a staging ground for combat operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. makes the choice to support a government that massacred its own people. American dollars keep that regime in power, thus setting the stage for the possibility of blowback. It would be a mistake to think that this most recent massacre is just a one time thing that surprised our government. Over a year ago I blogged about this article (a MUST READ) reporting on a prison in Uzbekistan. Gulags are “in” right now.

Time Magazine’s Asia edition features Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, “Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World,” which offers other reasons to explain how we squandered our once glorious reputation, and what we can to do change our course (although this second part is reportedly not very substantive):

Some of the ground Mahbubani covers is familiar enough, but much is not. One of his arguments is that the loss of trust between the U.S. and the rest of the world started years before George W. Bush invaded Iraq “unilaterally.” Mahbubani is particularly astute about how the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 damaged America’s image overseas. He writes, for example, about how disillusioned Thais were when the U.S. did not bail them out after it had bailed out Mexico during a similar currency crisis in 1994. The reason the U.S. spurned Thailand may seem obvious to a lot of Americans—”you’re not on our border,” one U.S. Treasury Department official supposedly told the Thais. But for a country that had followed the global financial rules as dictated by Washington—opening itself up to large capital flows from abroad, only to get hammered as that same money flew back out in a matter of days—the truth hurt in ways that most Americans still don’t get. The perception was that the U.S. would prop up another nation if threatened with a massive wave of illegal immigration, but otherwise cared only that big American banks should be able to get their money out of Thailand ASAP. Is it any wonder, Mahbubani writes, that China—the one major country that didn’t play by Washington’s rules back then—now sees its influence gaining steadily, probably at America’s expense?

Vinod ended his post on the poor woman who was ordered to marry her despicable, rapist father-in-law with a "We'll see" regarding the Indian police's plans to get involved with the outrageous situation.

Have a look:

Police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have arrested a man accused of raping his daughter-in-law.
The arrest follows reports that a Muslim council of community elders had ordered the victim to marry her father-in-law.
But the order was criticised by a top Muslim body which said it was not valid under Sharia (Islamic) law.

According to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the council that issued the bullshit verdict was NOT authorized to do so.

India's National Commission of Women has also become inovlved, by requesting a report from the UP government and declaring that

"We have requested the government to take action against the guilty and also pay compensation to the victim," NCW president Girija Vyas told the BBC.

The original ruling in the case stated that the victim should marry her rapist and transform her relationship with her husband to a maternal one, after being exiled for seven months and ten days for purification purposes.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has a better idea, one which it derives from Islamic Law:

"Under the Sharia law, whatever happened with the victim is wrong and if her father-in-law has raped her, he should be sentenced to death," the representative, Zafarab Geelani, said.

That's more like it.

The Shinnecock Indian tribe said on Wednesday it was seeking billions of dollars for 150 years of back rent on land it inhabited for 12,000 years in New York state… The Shinnecock tribe… said they have inhabited the shores of Long Island for 500 generations and were swindled in an 1859 deal they say was forged with a group of unnamed private investors, wherein members of the tribe signed over their claim to the disputed land. [CNN]

[Scene: Big desi guy with a Brooklyn accent walks in. He approaches a flat and starts pounding on the door.] ‘Queenie! Hey, Queenie! You owe me back rent! Yeah, for India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. You’re 58 years overdue. What, eviction didn’t teach you anything? Fuggedaboutit. I know you’re in there. I’m slidin’ a bill under the door. It’s for damage to the place. You gotta pay me back for the gems you stole from the Taj Mahal. That’s right, tack that onto the back rent. Yeah, I know you added permanent fixtures. But that was with my money, labor and materials. So don’t go gettin’ all holy on me. I’m taking my chicken tikka masala back. And my Farokh Bulsara records. What? You actin’ like you nevah heard of an Indian giver before. My lawyah will be comin’ by in the morning.

‘Lemme let you in on a little secret. Yeah, you stole a lot of stuff from the place before leavin’. It’s a pretty long list. Truth is, I only want one thing, and it ain’t even on the list. So listen up before the lawyahs get involved. It’ll save you a lotta grief. Here it is:

‘All I really want is… an apology.’

Sadly for the Shinnecock, the account books of history are kept in a palimpsest, not a journaling file system.

Instapundit reports that Amit Varma of India Uncut has a piece in the Asian Wall Street Journal today. For the benefit of non-subscribers, Varma has the full text available on his blog.

In his piece, Varma comes down pretty skeptically on India fabled market liberalization -

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is due to visit Washington in a few weeks, and editorialists and commentators have already started writing about the emerging economic power of India. New Delhi’s decision to start liberalizing its economy in 1991 is touted as a seminal event in India’s history, the moment when it threw off the shackles of Fabian socialism and embraced free markets. It is the stuff of myth--and to a large extent, it is exactly that.

Entrepreneurs can expect to go through 11 steps to launch a business over 89 days on average, at a cost equal to 49.5% of gross national income per capita.” Contrast the figure of 89 days with two days for Australia, eight for Singapore and 24 for neighboring Pakistan.

...In Bombay, for example, an urban land ceiling act and a rent-control act make it virtually impossible for poor migrants to rent or buy homes, and they are forced into extralegal housing. The vast shantytowns of Bombay--one of them, Dharavi, is the biggest slum in Asia--hold, by some estimates, more than $2 billion of dead capital.

Varma fingers the 2 usual suspects -

Liz Hurley and Arun Nayer are finally getting hitched. The wedding is planned for February of next year, and will be held in Rajasthan. This will be a “spectacular affair with no expense spared to show the world how much she loves Arun,” and she has warned guests that they should keep the entire month free.

Liz, who turned 40 this weekend, is whole heartedly embracing the whole mirch-masala desi spirit of her wedding even though

… she gets horrifically ill whenever she sets foot in her lover’s country. Liz said she was sometimes left so weak doctors put her on a drip for days and has to take special care when eating, drinking - and even showering. She said: “I have a dry flannel right across my mouth like a gag when I take a shower. When I take my make-up off at night I don’t let water touch my lips. ” [cite]

Despite her Howard Hughes like ordeal in India’s five star establishments, she is very enthusiastic about the ceremony. She’s ready to trade in safety-pinned dresses for red wedding saris and to show up at her wedding riding an elephant. An elephant?

Liz has made up her mind that she wants an Indian princess-style wedding. She loves the colourful traditions of the country and wants to embrace them…. [and] is very keen to involve elephants in some way and hopes to arrive on one … It wouldn’t be the first time Liz and Arun have used an elephant as part of a celebration. The couple arrived side by side on one at his 40th birthday party last year. [cite]

While this same source also claimed that the use of elephants “depends on logistics and whether it actually fits in with the ceremony,” I’ll bet this is actually the first line of the pre-nup. You want me to get married in your germ-ridden country? I’m riding an elephant or we can call the whole thing off! Oh, she’s a real Indian princess already …

Ahh, the famous Dilli Haat. Everyone who has either lived in or visited India’s capital knows it well. The shopkeepers and artisans that inhabit the Haat are rotated out every few weeks to make room for new talent. It’s basically an outdoor mall that you have to pay a fee just to enter. This keeps the wealthy Delhi-ites and NRIs in, and the “riff-raff” out. I know I’m a hypocrite for sounding scornful since I too shopped there, but the whole paying for admission thing never sat well with me. Sitting inside with my shopping bag containing the goods I just purchased I felt dirty looking out the metal gate at the people outside. Now it seems the Haat is taking its show on the road: to London’s Trafalgar square. The Hindustan Times reports:

London’s Trafalgar Square will wear an Indian look over the weekend with the arrival of Delhi’s famous Dilli Haat, the only difference being Lord Nelson will watch over the celebrations.

Marking its arrival London Mayor Ken Livingstone said at a press conference today: “London is home to the largest Indian community in Europe. We have established a warm relationship with Delhi symbolising the importance of the economic, cultural and social ties, which link our two great cities and our countries.

“We buy each other’s goods and services and invest in each other’s businesses and markets. There is a thriving exchange of tourists between our countries. Dilli Haat will offer Londoners a wonderful display of the vibrancy and diversity of India’s arts and crafts.”

Somehow I just don’t believe that the artisans that make it to London will be very authentic. Then again I’m not sure what “authentic” is anymore. No word yet on how many rupees the pigeons will be charged to enter.

One of the best-selling books at your local store right now is the philosophical essay titled, On Bullshit. Philosophy is HOT right now, as are the philosophers who are philosophizing. That leads me to five year old Shruti Indiresan from the Bay Area. The SJ Mercury reports (thanks for the tip Runnerwallah):

Shruti Indiresan has been surprising people all of her life.

As a toddler she buzzed through books and slapped together puzzles developed for much older children. Today, at 5, the kindergartner at Faria Elementary School in Cupertino reads and writes at a fourth-grade level.

Shruti’s latest stunner: winning the Most Philosophical Kindergartner in America title with the essay she composed for the third Kids Philosophy Slam. Several thousand students across the country in kindergarten through 12th grade submitted essays on which is more important in their lives: truth or beauty.

“I feel happy when I am telling the truth,” Shruti wrote in her essay. “I become beautiful when I am truthful.”

Her mother was a bit baffled.

“She’s very fond of princesses,” Rohini Indiresan said. “So I figured she would choose beauty.”

So what was Shruti’s winning essay? Behold:

Truth means not telling a lie. It is good to tell the truth. You are telling the egzact thing that you did. I feel happy when I am telling the truth. I become beautiful when I am truthful. Beauty comes from your good behavior. You can find out you are telling the truth by the size of your nose. Truth means to me good behavior. Because truth is the only way adults will be proud of you. Everyone will like me.

Between Mukhtar Mai and now this gal, it's been a bad week for South Asian women -

An Indian rape victim is being forced by village elders to "marry" her rapist - her father-in-law, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

...Holding a special council on Sunday, village leaders ordered the mother of five to leave her husband, Noor Mohammed, and live with her parental family for seven months and 10 days and make herself "pure" again, reports said. It did not say how she becomes pure.

After that, she must "marry" her father-in-law and live with him, along with his legal wife.

Freud would also have a field day with the Oedipal Complex this sick, twisted verdict sets up for her former husband, Noor -

"She... will then be like a mother to Noor Mohammed," the local cleric Shamim Ahmad was quoted as saying.

The cops plan on intervening & arresting the father-in-law while somehow respecting the sensitivity of this religious situation. We'll see.

An interesting little surprise comes to light after an Indophile President has a meal at the magnificent Bukhara, Maurya Sheraton's much-lauded restaurant in Delhi:

"Clinton was very careful while ordering from the menu. Post-surgery, he has become very conscious of what he eats and is trying to become vegetarian. However, he still prefers chicken," says US-based hotelier Sant Chatwal, who hosted dinner for Clinton. Clinton's signing-off line to the chef: "It was a great meal. I simply love Indian food. It's the best thing about coming back to India."

I know Bengalis who insist that they're good wegetarians despite their fetish for fish. ;) If they get special dispensation, perhaps we can let ol' Bill have his chicken? While y'all think on that, I'll tell you that erstwhile-"First Daughter" Chelsea Clinton is already an herbivore; I'm almost sure that she had a birthday party or two at D.C.'s exclusive, mirch-free, pretty-but-not-pleasing Bombay Club, which is conveniently located near a certain large white edifice.

Salon's War Room take on Bubba's new diet choices made me snort with glee:

Oh my God. What?

Bill Clinton not eating meat? A man whose very name brings to mind the word "pork"? Who has never met a nitrate he didn't like? Whose all-night bull-and-barbeque sessions were sent up hilariously in "Primary Colors"? The man who once, after having consumed a 3,300-calorie lunch with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1994 that included meats, cheeses, seafood and veal-stuffed ravioli, ordered a piece of chocolate cake to go?

...The thought of Bill Clinton spurning meat is like the thought of him spurning blow jobs. Simply not possible.

I mean, doesn't that just make you GUFFAW? He orders the chocolate cake...to go! That Bill. :D

I think I can also speak for mutineer Manish when I say that we gladly welcome the big dog/Slick Willy* to our exclusive club of people who smell better and otherwise rule the world. ;)

:+:

*I use nicknames that are pro- AND anti- the Bill because we at SM are TOTALLY non-partisan when it comes to snarfing down the world's best Dal Makhani. Mmm, daaaaal.

Fauja Singh is a stud. The man is 94 and he just finished yet another marathon, this time in Edinburgh. There he led a team (named “Sikhs in the City”) of five Sikh runners with a combined age of 397 years between them. Said Fauja Singh:

I hope we will inspire young people to keep going and older people never to give up [cite]

If this is the first time you’re hearing about Fauja Singh, here’s the (very) skinny:

• He rediscovered running at age 81 (because he was bored sitting around his son’s house) and ran his first marathon at 89.
• The next year he set a world record for 90 year-olds
• He has been getting faster as he has gotten older!
• He’s a poster boy for Adidas (like David Beckham) and he gave a large chunk of the money to charity
• He’s a vegetarian, and has been in a PETA ad

Honestly, I’m amazed that he ran even one more race. My father met him recently, and from their conversation I had gotten the impression that Fauja Singh was considering hanging up his sneakers and calling it a day. If he had been thinking about retirement, it looks like the idea suited him around as well as it did Michael Jordan. I’m pretty selfish about this - I hope he stays healthy and competes for years to come. I need all the inspiration I can get.

Story via DNSI. Thanks to SM reader dot for the tip!

Who cares about "tall" desi guys on Amreekan Idol who go on to make us cringe ("Eye of the Tiger"? while pretending to run?)-- Canadian Idol shall redeem us!

On June 8, on the third episode of Canadian Idol -- the, well, Canadian version of Indian Idol -- 2005, Devika was one among 32 contestants given a ticket to the next round to be held in Toronto.

I tripped over that last sentence...I always thought Canadian Idol and its North American cousin were inspired by Britain's "Pop Idol". I guess I'm mistaken. Apparently, so is wonderful Wiki:

Canadian Idol is a reality television show on the Canadian television network CTV, based on the popular British show Pop Idol and its US offshoot American Idol.

Hmmm. Well, whatever. The point is, a soulful version of The Righteous Brothers'"Unchained Melody" rocketed Devika Mathur (a.k.a "Rinku") to the top 32. By the way, the judges love her. Check out this fawning action:

After comments like, 'Your sense of pitch is fantastic and your sense of artistry is really lovely,' 'Your a-capella is unbelievable' and 'I don't think you could be more beautiful if you tried,' Devika was seen running with delight towards the judges who handed her the ticket.

Some time ago, a group of Net trolls by the kitschy but startlingly offensive name of Gay N* Association of America put together a remix called ‘Punjabi Extreme.’ It’s a set of crank calls to an AOL call center in India, set to a funk beat. Listen to a clip here (warning: NSFW + sound).

The humor is in hearing the group’s name repeated by an unsuspecting customer service rep with a desi accent. It’s the inverse of the My Big Fat Greek Wedding joke, teaching your mark a Greek phrase which actually means, ‘I have three testicles.’

The group takes its name from a low-budget Danish porn parody called Gayn* from Outer Space. I can’t decide if the group’s name is purposely over the top, like the pointlessly graphic ‘Aristocrats’ joke, or if it’s just autistic racism — whether it achieves the requisite level of wink.

There’s a similar urban legend about a credit card scammer who issued fraudulent charges using an unmentionable, NAMBLA-like business name. The theory was that victims would be too embarrassed by the name to dispute the charges with their banks.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

I am not a happy blogger. Every day on Sepia Mutiny I give some of my suga’ away for free. Don’t get me wrong. Blogging is a lifestyle. Wannabe bloggers sell out to the man and go all corporate. I believe in the small but dedicated following, playing the backroom internet cafes around the world where people log on even in the dead of night. Still, it would be nice to see some perks once in a while. A bigger dressing room and some bubbly every now and again wouldn’t be insulting to my sensibilities. Last week I mentioned that this guy got a $100,000 salary for staying at home all day and watching Dukes of Hazards re-runs and blogging about it. Where is my 100K for blogging about meaningful things? Also, last week I read that the Pennsylvania State Tourism Office hired several bloggers to road-trip around the state, have as much fun as possible, and blog about it to attract tourists. What the f*ck! What is this? Where is the beautiful struggle? Where is the sweat, blood, and tears? Blogging shouldn’t be about getting paid to roadtrip. I had just begun to calm down when Patrix sent us a tip. Two of the Pennsylvanian bloggers were desi girls. Meet Manisha and Preethi:

Vikrum Sequeira, a desi American who’s spending some time teaching kids from Bombay slums, unpacks the desi head wiggle:

Affirming your Indian identity: … Since I was wearing sunglasses and talking to foreigners, many of the Indians wondered about my identity: was I a foreigner, an NRI, or an Indian? To answer their question, I made eye contact and waggled at them. No further explanation was necessary…

Making friends: … When I finally bought a phone card from him (after weeks of reciprocal wiggling), I realized that the weeks of waggling had paid off. Sagar, the phone-wallah, gave me a giant smile and treated me like an old friend…

Disarming people: … Once I was walking in a slum near Colaba and a few men gave me a look signifying, “What are you doing here?” I gave them the wiggle and they smiled and let me pass without a problem.

Here’s another gem: a commenter explains why religious tiles festoon Indian stairwells.

You will find these kind of tiles [stuck] to stairwalls [throughout] the country [in] almost 60-70% of govt. offices, apts, commercial complexes… [Paan] eaters used to spit on the walls instead of dustbins… so you may find red colors on the stairwalls where there are no tiles.

On a more serious note, Sequeira contrasts street crime with riots in Bombay:

In August 2003 in San José, Costa Rica, a seventeen year old was stabbed to death near my apartment because he refused to give his cell phone to the assailants who mugged him… Bombay is not like that… I have seen women casually walking through poor areas adorned with thousands of dollars of jewelry. A woman can walk through Bombay wearing gold earrings and a diamond ring and not be in any danger…

… While the Bombay volcano does not spew lava on a regular basis, it is an enormous volcano… What is scary is that many people believe that an eruption is imminent.

It's probably not a surprise that I'm a big fan of Free Market Environmentalism (FME). FME is caricatured by detractors as laissez faire oil refineries sitting on wetlands. But in the real world, it (like much of Libertarianism) should instead be understood as recognition that for many ends - in this case environmental - applying / directing market forces can be a better means of achieving that goal.

FME often stands in stark contrast to prevailing currents in conservation / ecology which attempt to use government & regulation to eliminate markets altogether. FME advocates assert that this approach is a recipe for potentially even more destructive black markets - especially when coupled with rampant public sector corruption as is found in India.

TCS's Barun Mitra has a great little article on India's dwindling tiger population & how FME could be applied -

...in the US trade of live tigers is permitted, tiger numbers are in excess of 15,000, where in India, their numbers have dwindled to around 3,500.

The problem is that Indian wildlife is seen as nationalised property and placed outside the discipline of the marketplace. While many call for more stringent action to stop the illegal trade in wildlife and for more prosecutions of poachers, this ignores the fact attempts to stem supply have merely driven up price through illegal trade...

Under the present system of prohibition, forest dwellers have no interest in protecting tigers, poachers and traffickers have a field day. Unscrupulous traders profit from selling spurious tiger products. The high profitability attracts the criminal mafia.

...The babus wielded the power, smugglers oiled the wheels, blackmarketeers made a killing and the law enforcers took their cut.

Mitra includes the following stat which many, admittedly, might find repulsive -

The tiger, top of the food chain in its ecosystem, would also be at the top of the economic ladder because of its market value. There is a demand for virtually every part of the tiger. The total value of tiger parts from its nose to its tail could easily come to USD 40,000.

Distateful, perhaps, but it may be the best way to save Simba.

Got a desi young’un in your house who loves reading, or one who’s brown-friendly? Author Pooja Makhijani has put together a great bibliography of children’s literature with desi connections (disclaimer: she’s a friend). Check it out.

How these series come back to haunt me now, with their sense of ownership over the world, with the ways in which they defined a world… With all the ways in which they owned words. Strawberry blonde. We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. [Betsy, Stacy, Sejal, Tib by Sejal Shah]

Sadly, this plot summary of a picture book for drooling infants could just as easily be a blurb for the books of the mango/mehndi genre ;)

Chachaji’s Cup
Uma Krishnaswami, Illustrated by Soumya Sitaraman

A boy learns about his family history and the Partition of India from his great uncle, through stories told over a beloved old teacup.

Previous posts: Haroun, Ghee Happy

In Egypt, near the ancient city of Alexandria, in the year 1911, on a day in late June, an event occurred that you won’t find in most history books. Those who give their lives in the pursuit of science are never as remembered as those who die during the waging of war. Human society may never properly evolve until such wrongs are corrected.

It was approximately 9a.m. in the morning and our forgotten hero had probably just gone out for a walk or finished sniffing some butts. Suddenly, from the morning sky fell 10 kilograms of rock that had broken up into several pieces as it fell through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Scientists later recovered approximately 40 total pieces. One of these rocks struck our hero, the dog, and killed it. To date it is the only mammalian fatality ever recorded at the hands of a meteorite. The dog’s true sacrifice wasn’t fully appreciated until it was discovered that the meteorite was actually a chunk of the planet Mars. The meteorite was named “Naklha”, in honor of the region in which it landed. The dog’s name is a casualty of history. Millions of years earlier the meteorite had been a basaltic rock that had been blown off the surface of Mars at escape velocity, when a larger meteorite had impacted Mars. It was propelled into a heliocentric orbit where it lingered for several millions of years. The irresistible attraction of gravity finally pulled it towards Earth, and its fatal encounter with our dog. Studying the meteorite and comparing it to data streaming back from Mars, beginning with the Viking Mission in 1976, has helped us to unravel many of the secrets of the Red Planet. If you think that I am making all this up and simply suffering from another delusion, then feel free to look it up.

Although the above story has only the most tenuous link to the following one, I just felt it was a story that needed to be told. OutlookIndia.com reports:

…NASA has given Indian names to certain types of rocks on Mars, a senior planetary geologist at the space agency’s Mars Mission said today. “…NASA has given Indian names to a number of rocks. We shall disclose the names soon after NASA gives a clearance to make this classified information public,” NASA planetary geologist Amitabha Ghosh, currently on a three-city tour to India, told PTI today.

Ghosh said the rocks were named in consultation with Indian geophysicists and astrophysicists.

For the first time, a four-member team from NASA, including planetary geologists Ghosh, Dr Michael Wyatt, astrogeologist Dr James Rice and Dr Nicole Schultz are in India to further space science research.

“The idea is to hold talks at scientific organisations and planetaria to create awareness about space science research,” Ghosh, the only Asian on the mission, said.

As members of the Mars Explorer Rover Mission, the four have been witness to the activities of Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars.

Of course this is just a publicity and excitement building stunt. There are countless rocks on Mars. Giving some Indian names isn’t that big a deal. More importantly the team has created a website called Tharsis India to further awareness of Mars exploration in India. The Tharsis region on Mars is known for its supermassive volcanoes.

The visit to India comes at the same time as the Paris Airshow where NASA mentioned that it is shooting for after 2015 to put humans back on the Moon.

Some of you might remember the amazing story of Mukhtar Mai / Mukhtaran Bibi who fought back after having been savagely raped on the orders of her village jirga. Instead of staying silent, she took her rapists to court, and used the compensation awarded by the government to open a school for girls.

Mukhtar Mai's bravery made her a cause celebre. Time Magazine (Asia) profiled her as one of "Asia's Heros." She was recently invited to the United States to speak by Amnesty International, and had an American speaking tour scheduled as well.

Last week, the Pakistani government decided that she was drawing too much attention. First they banned her from travelling, then they put her under house arrest, then they kidnapped her and detained her incommunicado.

In phone conversations in the last few days, she said that when she tried to step outside, police pointed their guns at her. To silence her, the police cut off her land line... Ms. Mukhtaran continued her protests by cellphone. But at dawn yesterday the police bustled her off, and there's been no word from her since. Her cellphone doesn't answer.

Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she had learned that Ms. Mukhtaran was taken to Islamabad, furiously berated and told that President Pervez Musharraf was very angry with her. She was led sobbing to detention at a secret location. She is barred from contacting anyone, including her lawyer. [NYT]

The US government has made it clear that it doesn't care:

... on Friday, just as all this was happening, President Bush received Pakistan's foreign minister in the White House and praised President Musharraf's "bold leadership." [NYT]

Meanwhile, the GoP (Government of Pakistan) baldly lies (surprise!) and tells the world that its actions are designed to protect Mukhtaran Mai:

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told reporters in Islamabad that any security measures in place were for the protection of Ms Mai. [BBC]

A trademark dispute between the excellent Jet Airways and an American shell company has turned nasty, delaying Jet’s debut in America (via The Acorn). Jet, the #1 Indian airline, is on the verge of starting a Bombay to NYC route. Jet Airways Inc., the American shell, is spewing some incredibly inflammatory bullshit:

Nancy M Heckerman, the chief executive officer and president [of] Jet Airways Inc… [said]… “As an American citizen, I felt this airline should never be allowed to enter our airspace.” In her petition, she alleged: “… we will once again have Al-Qaeda flying and controlling aircraft over American cities, and this time the officials who issue these permits will be held accountable for knowingly allowing these aircraft the entry.

“… those aircraft are paid for by an international Al-Qaeda organization. Some of the passengers on those aircrafts are not Indian citizens, but Al-Qaeda fugitive, and with the aid of the Al-Qaeda’s own airlines, those who have entered India and easily obtained false identities and passports can board those aircraft and enter this country and complete the mission that they started on September 11, 2002.” [HT]

“… it is still an enterprise which is used to launder money for Al-Qaeda and is still an Al-Qaeda airline… such funds are commingled with the original black money from the Al-Qaeda… Secretary Mineta would never welcome Jet Airways (India) if he was made aware of Naresh Goyal and Dawood Ibrahim’s plan to inflict real and imminent danger on the United States.” [HT]

“Naresh Goyal is trying to enter the United Stats to fulfill his obligation to his Al-Qaeda creditors. Jet Airways Inc is fighting to protect the United States from another invasion by a well known Al-Qaeda Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” [HT]

Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism! Oh yes, if those hordes of desi grandmas start flying into Jersey, they won’t be bringing just Parle biscuits and sweets.

Little Jet uses a shared office suite as an address, owns no planes and has no airline license. Big Jet asked the trademark office to cancel Little Jet’s service mark because Big Jet began using the mark in the U.S. in 1995. That’s when the tatti really hit the pankha:

Stratpage's ever excellent Kaushik Kapistahalam (check out his body of work!) provides an excellent & probing article about the lawless western provinces of Pakistan, the hunt for Al Qaeda and a disastrous battle in Waziristan -

June 13, 2005: Few things have captured American imagination in the war on terror like the idea of soldiers chasing terrorists in the mountainous "tribal areas" near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. However, US media coverage of the Pakistani operations has been clichéd and superficial. Analysis reveals that the performance of Pakistani troops against small bands of foreign and tribal fighters has produced mixed results...

As usual, stratpage.com has no permalinks so I'm gonna excerpt some large chunks of the article below. I highly recommend visiting the site ASAP to get the rest of the meat....

[Warning: Numerous links in this post are Not Safe for Work]

Friday night, after his outstanding comedic debut, I met up with Apul for a drink.

“I had a story left that I hadn’t got around to blogging on SM,” he whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone as his eyes darted anxiously around the bar. What had Apul come to learn that had shaken his normally unflappable demeanor? In the din of the Irish pub, which would have been smoke-filled if not for California’s strict anti-smoking measures, only three words penetrated to the heart of my blogger mind: “Escort,” “Indian,” and “blogger.” Could such a thing be? Is conservative brown society ready for a woman amongst their population who works simultaneously in the world’s two oldest professions? More importantly could she entice one even as jaded and hope-deprived as I have come to be with her blogging? Could time spent at her website, reading her blog, get me to halt the life of vice and heavy drinking that has ruled my nights since I was denied my one chance at happiness, when I was torn away from my true love and she consented to marry another? Let’s allow the story of Kama (and my own) to unfold…

My Grandmother was a Devadasi, but in earlier generations, my Devadasi ancestors broke with tradition and having left their place of origin, had been able to marry, enabling them to live more normal lives. I decided to become a practicing Devadasi so I could gain sexual and financial autonomy, and live independently of the South Asian patriarchy.

While studying in London I had become sexually active and I decided in that my dealing with men I could commercialize many sexual exchanges while still enjoying genuine intimacy and friendship. These relationships were often very temporary and transient, but they were also transparent, honest and allowed me to maintain my own independent identity. So having been born a Devadasi I finally came to place where I could reclaim and live a Devadasi identity.

Kama is a college student in London who works as a “Devadasi”, which others would refer to as a call-girl or a prostitute. The outstanding magazine Ego has previously interviewed Kama.

EGO: Historically, how do Devadasis learn to please a man? Is there a special training Devadasis must undergo? In other words, how do you learn your gift?

KAMA: I do not believe that it so much about learning sexual techniques or physical bouncing around, as offering sexual intimacy with genuine affection. Many sex working women must feign affection because they have no particular feelings for a man with whom they might only meet once for a couple of hours. However, the Devadasi is married to the Gods, and our love and affection for the Male Deities is genuine. As each man is in someway an incarnation of the Male Deity, we can truly express affection for any man. So while I am a very capable lover, my gift was not learnt, but is the consequence of my genuine relationship with the Gods.

The Hinglorati are delighting in the return of Dick & Garlick, a Bombayite’s lingoblog which had gone on a six-month hiatus. D&G dissects neologisms in Hinglish, Indian English, Bonglish, Tamlish and other lingual collisions, some apt, others just hilarious. Here’s D&G on ‘Vitamin M’:

Vitamin M: An Indian English colloquialism in which the M stands for money. It can be used as a nudge-nudge-hint-hint euphemism for bribes and speed money, or to cynically acknowledge the factor that makes the world go round. A phrase for greasy babus and elderly Uncles…

“We are all craving too much for Vitamin M,” says a bright, cool kid. `M’? Money of course! (The Hindu, Jan 6, 2003)

On being called a vern. This one even works in American English because of the Ernest Goes to Camp movies (‘Hey Vern?’):

‘Vernac’ is Bombay college lingo for a student schooled in an Indian regional language, a slang abbreviation of the word ‘vernacular’… Like its North Indian equivalent, HMT (Hindi Medium Type), vernac can be used to dismiss someone as a country bumpkin, as provincial, unfashionable, or unsophisticated… in the 90s, they labelled the starlet Mamata Kulkarni a ‘vern’ and frequently mocked her Maharashtrian accent.

On ‘hazaar fucked’:

… she claims that ‘hazaar fucked’, that classic expression from English, August is ‘one of the phrases that, along with Yeh Dil Maange More and We Are Like That Only, ushered in the rise of Hinglish’…

“… Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American,” Agastya laughed, “a thousand fucked, really fucked. I’m sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease.” (Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August)

I have no hesitation recommending the blog, but someone with the ontological talents of R. Devraj shouldn’t use a title evoking a German cannibal :)

My favorite resident Desi @ the WSJ - Tunku Varadarajan - felt compelled to explain to his colleagues & readers the improbable desi performance at the Spelling Bee -

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week--the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest--my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.)

...For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation.

But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to use a clumsy anthropological term.)

So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words and then committing them to memory probably taps into an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how, in his childhood, he'd had an Indian boy home for a sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his guest poring over the host family's Random House dictionary. "I own an Oxford dictionary," the boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal explanation. "This American dictionary is so different!"

Heh, an interesting argument but, admittedly, only a partial explanation.

Nevertheless, I do whole-heartedly concur with Tunku that there's a deeply inscribed Indian respect for purely mental and somewhat eccentric pursuits at the expense of more practical, physical ones. Many, many strands of desi philosophy & culture take a rather extreme position on the age-old Mind-Body problem. Long before Plato himself, Desi philosophers were advocating the basics of Platonic Forms and that it's the physical which taints the mental ideal.

It's pretty darn hard to envisage an activity more concerned with esoteric forms and less physical than a spelling bee.

The Washington Post features an article on the coming apology from the U.S. Senate (on Monday), when it will vote on a resolution to apologize for the failure to enact an anti-lynching law that was first proposed in the year 1900.

“The apology is long overdue,” said Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), who is sponsoring the resolution with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). “Our history does include times when we failed to protect individual freedom and rights.”

The Senate’s action comes amid a series of conciliatory efforts nationwide that include reopening investigations and prosecutions in Mississippi. Advocates say the vote would mark the first time Congress has apologized for the nation’s treatment of African Americans.

African Americans weren’t the only ones lynched though. Consider the 1907 Anti-Hindu Riot in Bellingham, Washington:

“On September 4, 1907, a mob of about 500 men assaulted boarding houses and mills, forcefully expelling Hindus from Bellingham (Washington)in what is now known as the Anti-Hindu Riot.

It began as an attack on two East Indian workers on C Street and turned into a rock-throwing lynching, to ‘scare them so badly that they will not crowd white labour out of the mills.’ The small police force was overpowered. The next day about 300 Hindus fled Bellingham in fear.

The press, some civic leaders and churches denounced the riots. Threats were later made to other groups, though no major riots occurred.”

A London TV presenter and former Bollywood Star contestant upstaged Nicole Kidman at the UK premiere of The Interpreter last month. Not only was Sofia Hayat not wearing any underwear, she decided to prove it. One can only admire her dedication to the scientific method. Click to see picture (marginally NSFW).

… Bollywood Star is a four-part series following Channel 4’s search for the first British Bollywood star: an unknown who will go on to win the prize of a lifetime - a part in a Bollywood movie, directed by acclaimed director Mahesh Bhatt.

I hear Hayat is expanding from TV into politics. Yes, she’s been nominated for a position in Britain’s rump cabinet. Unlike most politicians, she lets her better half do the talking.

The author of that excellent Spiderman review was recognized for his talent in March. We’re slow over on this side of the pond:

Writer and journalist Sukhdev Sandhu won best critic at the British Press Awards… Currently the chief film critic for the Daily Telegraph, Sukhdev (pictured) also writes for the London Review of Books and Modern Painters… Sukhdev was educated at Oxford and has taught at New York University… He told AiM he was “a bit embarassed” about the award, as there were “tons of more deserving writers” than him.

“I wish there were more British Asian films I could rave about. They’ll come in time, I’m sure,” he added…

Don’t we all, Mr. Sandhu, don’t we all. Here’s a great passage from his review of the Indian Spiderman comic in New York magazine:

… people used to scoff at Japanese anime. Aside from the absurdity of being a purist about one of pop culture’s most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms, those carpers, if they’re to be consistent, should bemoan the popularity of Indian religious iconography and henna motifs among Western fashionistas. Cultural exchange is a two-way process…

Hindi cinema has a long history of borrowing and adapting from Western sources, be they Busby Berkeley dance routines in the thirties, Chaplin-like heroes in the common-man social epics of the fifties, or Dirty Harry, a major influence on the wildly popular revenger tragedies of superstar Amitabh Bachchan… Hollywood animation companies have begun to outsource creative work to the subcontinent, where they can rely on a steady pool of ex-street painters whose former livelihoods waned because of crackdowns in illegal advertising and the rise of photography in film posters…

Sandhu’s the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. You couldn’t find a more recursive book topic, nor a more politically correct one ;)

Abhi’s previous post here.

Queens is hosting a big cultural festival this evening and all day tomorrow showcasing the desi cultures of Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in New York (thanks, Saurav). Kitchrie 2005 features food, music, dance and theater at the Rajkumari Cultural Center in Richmond Hill.

The festival runs from 6-10pm tonight and noon-10pm tomorrow, followed by a concert and afterparty. (I’m diggin’ the alternate spellings — kitchrie, Ramnarine, Baboolal, Bisham…) Click here for details.

Mutineers across the pond appear to be far more successful at embracing and extending the Queen's English than their US-based brothren -

Badmash, changa, chuddie and desi are the latest Indian-origin words to enter the English language, courtesy the Collins English Dictionary.

...the latest edition of Collins, to be published Thursday, goes a step further by officially acknowledging the role of Hinglish in the evolution of English.

The edition is full of unusual and unexpected Indian words - this time thanks to popular Asian culture rather than colonial collision. Many words have a distinct Punjabi flavour.

Hinglish words figuring in the dictionary this year include aunti-ji and uncle-ji, freshie (a new immigrant), gora (White), kutta (dog) and kutti (bitch), haramzada and haramzadi (described as bastards or obnoxious/despicable) and yaar (friend).

Personally, I prefer the terseness of "FOB" over "freshie" and, at least us poor Mallus (and possibly Tamilians too?) reserve "kutta" and "kutti" as terms of endearment for baby boys & girls. Remind me to be careful with that word next time I'm at a Bhangra blow out whoopin' it up with 8' tall Sikh dudes.

Previous SM coverage of Hinglish - here.

[a big SM hat tip to Francis Assisi!]

For years those silly Mentos commercials ruled the television airways as the most annoying and obnoxious commercials ever. They’d plant themselves in your head while some ad exec somewhere smiled diabolically. Recently that honor was emphatically stolen by Fanta softdrink and its stupid television commercials where a bunch of Fem-bot looking women ask you (or shout at you) “Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta, Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta…” until you break down and submit to their will, hoping that it hurts so good. Well SiliconIndia.com has this headline today: U.S. FDA rejects Indian consignment.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has rejected consignments of MNCs Coca-Cola India, Hindustan Lever, Procter & Gamble and Britannia from India on the grounds that they are ‘unsafe’ or not conforming to U.S. laws.

According to information sourced from the USFDA, a shipment of Fanta sent by Coca-Cola India from Mumbai to the U.S. was rejected on May 19 on the grounds that it contained ‘unsafe color’. The regulator said the ‘article appears to be, or to bear or contain a color additive which is unsafe’. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been under fire in India for allegedly allowing higher pesticide content than permitted internationally.

Hmmm. I wonder if that unsafe color was yellow#5. Seems like the Fantanas evil plot has been thwarted and I shall never taste Lol…errr, I mean “Pineapple” on my lips. There were other items rejected by the USFDA as well. This one REALLY caught my eye:

A shipment of “decongestant vaporizing ointment” sent by the Indian subsidiary of U.S. FMCG major Procter & Gamble was also rejected by the USFDA on May 25 on multiple grounds including the grounds that “the article appears to be a new drug without an approved new drug application” and “the article appears to be a non-prescription drug and fails to bear the established name of each inactive ingredient…”

Come on. By a show of hands now, how many of you got rubbed down with some sort of ointment from India when you were a kid, that was supposed to cure the area in question whether you had a cough or a broken leg? The USFDA doesn’t know what it is talking about.

Last Monday, I went to hear Sachal Vasandani croon jazz at a hole-in-the-wall, basement club in Manhattan. He’s friends with my cousin the conductor. The bar was packed with University of Michigan music alumni, a more raucous crowd than the usual jazz audience. Vasandani and his band had the early show, the 7pm show before the headliner comes on.

Because of the friend connection, I wasn’t expecting more than a pleasant evening out. And though I love jazz classics, I’m not fan enough to dig the dissonance of an improv jam session. Vasandani emerged from the gloom of rear stage. He was tall and floppy-haired and stood a bit stiffly, like a pre-makeover John Mayer. He wore a blazer, but he wasn’t as natty as chart-topping young fogies like Harry Connick Jr. and swing band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. We plunged into our sidecars and lemon drops and waited for the show to begin.

When Vasandani opened his mouth, we utterly forgot about the drinks. The first time you hear a magnetic singer pull from his bag of vocal tricks, it’s like falling in love. Those who hadn’t heard him before were shocked. I wore a silly, involuntary grin and told my cousin, ‘He’s really good!’ He smiled smugly. Listen to Vasandani singing ‘Embraceable You’ (thanks, Ankush; warning: it’s a crappy, mono WAV clip that doesn’t do him justice).

After a few standards, Vasandani cut loose with a couple of original compositions by the band and one by a friend. His voice seems to emerge via ventriloquism; it’s bigger than his body can sustain and more classic than his look. He’s like Charlotte Church in terms of the surprise factor. He has a very mainstream, full new jazz sound; he’s won a slew of awards, and the NY Sun has compared his sound to Connick Jr.:

Sachal Vasandani was a total surprise: He looks like the leading man in a Bollywood musical but is a very traditional jazz crooner…

Need something to do this humid evening in swamp city? I'll be at Chorduroy's concert in Clarendon, but if rockin' covers of songs like "Float on" and "A Little Respect" which sound even better than the real thing aren't your thing, I've got an alternate bit of lovely for your friday night.

Your parents will be so proud:

Friday, June 10, 2005

PERFORMANCE
Ramesh Misra, sarangi; Nitin Mitta, tabla
7:30 pm, Meyer Auditorium

Enjoy this rare opportunity to hear a solo recital by Ramesh Misra, a master of the sarangi, the traditional fiddle of South Asia. Misra was a student of Ravi Shankar and has played before worldwide audiences for more than forty years. This concert is made possible in part through support from the Parnassus Foundation.

Just imagine how pretty the Mall will be, with the sun setting over the befuddled tourists:

Freer Gallery of Art - Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Auditorium
12th Street and Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20560
Phone: 202-633-4880
Metro: Smithsonian (Orange, Blue lines)

Hmmm. Chorduroy aren't on 'til 10ish...wonder if I could hit both. I love me some live tabla. Did I mention that this event is FREE? You can't beat that with a bat.

via DCist. They helpfully suggest that you get to Meyer Auditorium early if you want some music. Free stuff goes fast, you know. ;)

The CEO of the dominant page layout software company has suddenly parted ways with his employer after a two-year reign. Kamar Aulakh was a 10-year Quark veteran and former VP of R&D:

“… effective immediately, Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company,” read a statement. Aulakh became Quark’s president in 2003 and ultimately succeeded Quark’s mercurial CEO Fred Ebrahimi in February 2004. [Macworld]

Hailing from Aulakh village in Gurdaspur district in Punjab, he is a product of Punjab Engineering College (PEC) here. Remembering his school days in Shimla, he says with a sense of pride, “I went to Bishop Cotton School, which helped me develop strong foundation. After doing graduation in mechanical engineering from PEC in 1974, I went to the USA where I did Masters in Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois and MBA from Indiana University…” Based in Switzerland, he visits India and Denver regularly. [Chandigarh Tribune]

The unexplained departure could have to do with declining sales. Quark is privately held and doesn’t disclose its financials, but it’s struggled in its move from Mac to Windows. It could be a clash with the emotional chairman, Farhad ‘Fred’ Ebrahimi. Or it could be something else entirely.

QuarkXpress is the #1 page layout program by market share. Aulakh put Quark’s 1,300-person development center in Mohali, a Chandigarh suburb where Dell has also invested. That center is Quark’s main campus, larger than its Denver campus in headcount:

… along with the Chairman, Mr Fred Ebrahimi, a team from the company visited Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon, Delhi and Hyderabad. Since I knew the city, I convinced him to visit Chandigarh as well. To my surprise, he was bowled over by the planned location and cosmopolitan lifestyle of the city and decided to opt for this location. [Chandigarh Tribune]

In India, Ebrahimi will soon start building a dream city in Punjab, spread over 5,000 acres, bringing state-of-the-art construction technology to the country.  Quark City, will boast India’s biggest shopping mall, a host of technology campuses ranging from IT to bio-tech and the works, and housing apartments each worth a crore. To make things happen, the Punjab government has eased archaic building restrictions. It also plans to give the SEZ status to Quark City. [Economic Times]

It's no secret that I adore Wikipedia, after all, I inflict my preference for it on you whenever I can. ;) SM tipster bl00t sends me somewhere that looks and feels familiar, but only in structure. Confused? Let me quote from the "wiki" on India:

Under Culture:

India has a rich cultural Heritage, but it doesn't really matter because it is quickly being displaced by the more evolutionarily fit American Culture. The Taj Mahal, a burial plot for some woman who died a long time ago, is important because it is featured in many American Saturday morning cartoons.

Under Origin of Name:

Christopher Columbus named India after the Native Americans who first colonised the region. Some people claim that the Vikings discovered India first, but they aren't really an oppressed minority so we can ignore them.

Because India's name had to rhyme with Pakistan, it was given the name Hakistan in the finest tradition of Hackensack, NJ. (It is also called Hindustan by some ignorant fools).

Under Trivia:

Indian food is known internationally for its spiciness and funny names such as sari, salwar kameez, Buddha, and condoleeza rice.

Under Economy:

India is currently involved in a takeover bid for the region of Kashmir, a key garment district which is home of the famous sweater.

Right.

Now after reading all that, I can't decide if it was funny, slightly amusing or almost insulting. If only it had some Asian-looking Orcs in it to make it obvious for me. Alas, it lacks such glaring evidence of prejudice. What say you, dear readers? Did it tickle your phunny bone? Do any of you feel like editing it?

There is a controversy brewing at the Tulsa Zoo in Oklahoma. Zoo officials there want to display an exhibit that explains the creation of animals by means of the biblical account. We all know that creationism is on the rise at an alarming rate in school districts across the country. Now they want it in the zoos as well? Why? Well it turns out that the impetus for this stupid idea might be one Ganesh. USA Today reports:

The Tulsa Zoo will add a display featuring the biblical account of creation following complaints to a city board about other displays with religious significance, including a Hindu elephant statue.

The Tulsa Park and Recreation Board voted 3-1 Tuesday in favor of a display depicting the account in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

The vote came after more than two hours of public comment from a standing-room-only crowd.

Zoo employees, religious leaders and others spoke in opposition, saying religion shouldn’t be part of the taxpayer-funded scientific institution.

But those who favored the creationist exhibit, including Mayor Bill LaFortune, argued that the zoo already displayed religious items, including the statue of the Hindu god, Ganesh, outside the elephant exhibit and a marble globe inscribed with an American Indian saying, “The earth is our mother. The sky is our father.”

Is this merely a petty attempt to counter the Ganesh statue with some Christianity? Lord knows we don’t want decent God-fearing Oklahomans to go to the zoo, get converted, and turn Hindu on us when they see a Ganesh statue in front of them. We might as well battle that possibility with some Genesis. So why was the Ganesh statue there anyways?

Zoo officials argued that the zoo, as a scientific institution, does not advocate religion and that displays like the elephant statue are meant to show the animal’s image among cultures. The same exhibit includes the Republican Party’s elephant symbol.

And of course I have to finish with a quote that will make you smack your forehead in disgust:

“I see this as a big victory,” said Dan Hicks, the Tulsa resident who approached the Tulsa Zoo with the idea for the exhibit. “It’s a matter of fairness. To not include the creationist view would be discrimination.”

Honestly, you just have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky punk? SM tipster Sabeena alerts us to this story at the BBC.

At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.

Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India’s central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.

He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.

There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.

Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.

Rest assured, Saurabh has been known to strike fear into the dark hearts of criminals:

He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.

All joking aside this is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. There are a number of children in predicaments similar to that of Saurabh’s who are covered in the article. The money they bring in is a necessity for their poor families, but it comes at the expense of their childhood. Some human rights groups are raising objections to the system:

Subhash Mahapatra, president of a human rights organisation called Forum for Fact-finding, Documentation and Advocacy, goes further.

According to the Geneva Convention, he says, employing children as police officials and making them work at such a young age is against Indian and international laws.

“It is very similar to the definition of child soldiers as outlined by the United Nations,” he says.

Jun Choi, the Asian-American mayoral candidate for Edison, NJ who was dissed by the Jersey Guys, upset the incumbent mayor 55%-45% in the Democratic primary (thanks, Saurav). That virtually guarantees the 34-year-old’s victory in November:

It is the first time in Edison history that the mayoral candidate backed by the Democratic Party was defeated in a primary… [Home News Tribune]

… [The incumbent] said he could think of two reasons why he didn’t win: The flap over the 101.5 FM “Jersey Guys” show when one of the hosts made a derogatory comment about Choi and Asian Americans, and a feeling that voters simply wanted a change after nearly 12 years with him as mayor. [Newsday]

I’d like to say it’s pretty clear what happened, that Edison resoundingly voted against anti-Asian racism. But it seems the Jersey Guys’ complaint that Choi was targeting minority voters was accurate, not that there’s anything wrong with that:

Choi’s primary victory is seen as a sign that Asian-Americans have arrived as a political force in the state’s fifth largest municipality, where nearly one in three voters is of Asian descent. “It shows the graduation of the Asian-American community to a level of sophistication, where they can impact an election,” said Edison Council President Parag Patel, the first Indian-American elected in the township…

But Asian officials and others say what pushed Choi over the top in Tuesday’s election was his campaign’s decision to target the burgeoning Asian-American population with literature printed in Asian languages and ads in ethnic media… a strategy Patel said helped him get elected, too… The New York-based [AALDEF]… found nearly 10 percent of the respondents were first-time voters. “This is a very high number, particularly in a primary election…” [Star-Ledger]

And the Jersey Guys, jockeying with Paris Hilton for the Chutzpah Stakes, took credit for the win. Unbelievable:

A massive Methamphetamine bust went down in Georgia recently. Close to 50 people were charged. GG2.net reports:

Around 50 Indian American convenience store owners and employees have been arrested, in Georgia, and charged with selling substances used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine (meth), a highly addictive stimulant.

An indictment unveiled in a US magistrate’s court, on Monday, said the arrests were made in six Georgia counties over the past month under an operation to hunt down peddlers of meth ingredients. Several of those arrested have been released on bonds ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.

Some of the defence attorneys have accused the investigators of targeting immigrant merchants, most of them of Indian origin. Attorney Steven Sadow, who is representing six defendants, said he will investigate if officials singled out Indians in their “Operation Meth Merchant”.

“I want to know why they went after the Indians to begin with,” said Sadow. He proposes to file a motion to “dismiss all charges based on selective prosecution”. One of the defendants also asserted that the charges stemmed from stereotyping and generalisation.

A list of defendants can be read in the DOJ release. There are a lot of Patels up in there. It doesn’t immediately strike me as “selective prosecution.” I mean Indians do own a lot of convenience stores, and convenience stores do sell drugs. Of course a quick news brief doesn’t give the full story, especially the “convenience store demographics” of the area.

Rohan Weerasinghe is the chosen one-- chosen to head a major New York law firm, that is. Weerasinghe is now the Senior Partner at Shearman & Sterling. An American of Sri Lankan descent, he becomes the first brown person EVER to ascend such great heights.

From the firm's press release:

Weerasinghe, 54, was previously head of the Capital Markets Group, and is a member of the firm’s Policy Committee. He joined Shearman & Sterling in 1977 and was elected to the partnership in 1985. Born in Sri Lanka, Weerasinghe was educated in the United States and holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. Weerasinghe earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College summa cum laude.

Do you think the Harvard Annual-giving people call him three times as much? I'm just asking...

Still wondering why this is a big deal? According to Columbia J-school Prof Sree Sreenivasan,

This is a major achievement for a desi lawyer (and on par with Rajat Gupta's becoming head of consulting company McKinsey & Co. in 1994).

In fact, this may be a larger opportunity for glee that we thought:

Weerasinghe...is believed to be the first non-white senior partner at a top New York firm.

See? It's huge!

:+:

Oh, like you could resist using that title. Pffft.

We have been getting a bunch of questions as to what became of Apul since he left Sepia Mutiny. Here are a couple of examples:

I’m outraged by Apul’s resignation. Why is he resigning in Nixonian disgrace? What are these new projects? How can Sepia Mutiny be respected as a serious outlet for online blogtastic journalism when its cherished contributors is uncermoniously swept under the rug? [link]

Where is Apul going!? We have to know so we can follow his career! [link]

Well now we have our first word of what became of Apul since his exile. Like many others before him, Apul has decided to leave an ensemble cast and go solo. He’ll be performing his stand-up act this Friday night in Hollywood. Sleuth that I am, did he really think I wouldn’t be able to hunt him down? Tickets can be purchased here. I will be in the audience to check out his act, as well as Sanjay Shah, Nikki Chawla, Reggie D., and Tarun Shetty. They will be filming at the show for a broadcast on desivision TV. I would LiveBlog from the event but then I’d just be a freak.

As an aside, after reading this I have been considering going solo as well.

The Times of London reveals that Salman Rushdie narrowly escaped a bomb attack in 1989, only five months after Iran issued its Valentine’s Day fatwa (thanks, Abhi). A Lebanese militant building an RDX bomb in a hollowed-out book made a bid for the Darwin Awards just a couple of miles from Rushdie’s London home:

The radicalised Lebanese citizen, born in the Guinean capital, Conakry, had joined a local Hezbollah… cell while in his teens… Mazeh… [took] a train to London on July 22, 1989. He checked in to Room 303 at the Beverley House Hotel, a five-storey building in Sussex Gardens, Paddington.

On the afternoon of August 3, a large explosion killed him in his room, destroying two floors of the building. Anti-terrorist squad detectives later said that he had died while trying to prime a bomb hidden in a book with RDX explosives. A previously unknown Lebanese group… claimed in a letter to a Beirut newspaper that Mazeh, whom they referred to as Gharib, died preparing an attack ” on the apostate Rushdie”. [Times of London]

In 1998, protesters in Tehran praised the would-be assassin:

After the rally, the militants unveiled a huge wall portrait of Mustafa Mazeh, who was killed by a bomb explosion in London in 1989, which Iranians believe was intended for Mr Rushdie. [BBC]

Die Gazette reports [in German] that an Iranian village gifted Mazeh’s parents with a house on the Caspian Sea, 1.2 acres of land and ten carpets. In Tehran, Mazeh got a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-style shrine:

“Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh… Martyred in London, August 3, 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie.” [Times of London]

This actual plot against Rushdie’s life is slightly more disturbing than Lollywood’s assassination fantasy. I preferred it when poison-pen literary reviews took the form of Michiko Kakutani.

Apache Indian resurfaces as a dreadlocked auto mechanic in a remix of Desmond Dekker’s 1969 Jamaican hit ‘The Israelites’ (thanks, Ashish). His heroines, like the cutie in ‘Pyaar Pyaar,’ used to be fly Punjabans; this one’s a standard-issue, Wonderbra-chested blonde. It’s a smooth tune, but he looks all grown up now. Watch the video.

The Black Eyed Peas just sampled Asha Bhosle (thanks, Harish and Umang). The first 15 seconds of the lead single off their new album, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart,’ are a sped-up version of ‘Yeh Mera Dil Yaar Ka Deewana.’ Listen to the original and the new version. Watch the video.

The song from Don is pure masala western. Bhosle also starred in a remix of that song a couple of years ago. The video, with a woman taking revolver-revenge upon her cheatin’ man, was ubiquitous on MTV India.

Here’s a review of the Peas’ new album, Monkey Business:

Other guests of note are… Sting on “Union” (sonically inspired by the former Police-man’s “Englishman in New York”), while funk legend James Brown contributes to a scorching soul track dubbed “They Don’t Want Music.”

Update: Manoj and iTwofs point out that the rest of the melody is lifted from Apradh’s ‘Aye Naujawan Hai Sub Kuchh Yahan’ (1972), also by Bhosle. Listen to the original.

Maybe we need a HollyCat. Although the Peas should credit the composers, it’s hard for the Indian creative industries to take the moral high ground here.

Not customers but rather, business partners -

In 1998 a California porn princess commissioned a 25-year-old Indian computer wiz to write a piece of software...She had sold all her porn interests and it was time to invest the proceeds. Online gambling was the new buzz and she found a friend of a friend, Anurag Dikshit, a computer engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, to create a programme for casino games such as roulette.

The outcome -- the newest Sabeer Bhatia -

The extraordinary result of that meeting was seen yesterday when PartyGaming, the company they created, announced plans to float on the London stock market. Its PartyPoker website is the dominant force in the explosive online poker market and the business will be valued at up to $10bn, or a shade over £5bn - only a little less than Marks & Spencer, or the combined value of British Airways and EMI.

At the top price, Mr Dikshit, who owns 42%, will be worth £2.1bn at the age of 33. Ms Parasol, in her late 30s, and her husband, Russ DeLeon, each own 20%, worth £1bn apiece. Billionaire status has rarely been achieved so young or so quickly.

Actually, given that he's a multi-billionaire, Mr Dikshit will actually be worth several Bhatia's (who's estimated to have pocketed only ~200M off Hotmail). My big question for those in the know, don't most folks with his last name transliterate it to Dixit?

In April, Abhi posted about two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers. The girls were held under Orwellian secrecy, but the case seemed dubious from the start:

“Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers,” the [FBI] official added… “We’re not spun up about this case,” said a Homeland Security Department source. [NY Daily News]

After six weeks virtually incommunicado in detention, one girl was released, and the other is being deported to Bangladesh:

… after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family… Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed FBI declarations, and orders barring attorneys from disclosing government information. [NYT, reprinted in Kansas City Star]

So that’s what happens under the USA FASCIST Act if you’re a 16-year-old Muslim girl who writes a school essay about Islam. Like Guantánamo Bay, you can be jailed without charges for life, and nobody will confirm that you exist. The same behavior by King George III sparked the American Revolution; the same behavior by Cuba, North Korea and Iran lands them on our various axes of evil.

Now what happens if you’re a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned, non-Muslim murderer with a criminal assault record, and you show up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor?

You get served coffee and let into the U.S.

Have a nice day!

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest… Mr. Despres… has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back… Mr. Young said the U.S. customs agents appeared to be joking around… “When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee,” he said. “He got processed faster than I did.” [Ottawa Citizen]

U.S. customs agents… let him into the United States… The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom… On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August. [CNN]

Previous posts: 1, 2

I’m still a little upset that some hypersensitive individuals dared to criticize the Lord of the Rings as being “too white.” In my opinion that is just like saying that the Ramyana is “too brown.” In order to head off a future discussion along these lines I felt as if we should get it all out of our systems now. With that in mind I wanted to point out that the upcoming film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe WILL have minorities in it, and YES, they will be beasts. Narniafans.com reports:

…several short Indian actors have been casted by Indian based casting director Sameer Bhardwaj for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Bhardwaj had earlier also helped in casting for The Lord of the Rings. The role of these actors is currently unknown, although speculation would lead us to believe that it is for many of the Talking Beast roles in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Well isn’t life a bitch? The casting director is Indian, and we’re still bound to get complaints. Not to fear though. Minorities have yet another chance in a Bhardwaj project (from last year):

As snarky desis, we use mirchi constantly, in both our writing and our food. However, there is a human face to all this heat:

In temperatures of over 45 degrees, 80 year-old Rajima sits under an asbestos roof preparing chillies for export to Britain.

For eight hours at a stretch her aching fingers pluck the stalks from the red chilli pods, releasing a pungent dust that fills her nose and throat making her cough and sneeze.

For this, she earns 30 rupees, the equivalent of 40 pence, or less than a third of the cost of a small jar of chilli powder in a British supermarket. Rajima and her 50 co-workers are the hidden face of India's spice trade. [BBC]

Think about the effects to Rajima's health from all of this exposure to pepper. Pepper farmers and processors go through alot and earn very little:

Watching his produce weighed at Warangal market, one farmer complains that the 800 rupees he's getting for each 40 kilo sack is too little to cover the growing costs.

"I took huge loans for agricultural investment - mostly pesticides," he says. "Now there will be no alternative for me but to commit suicide". [BBC]

Furthermore, demand for pepper is down, due to a recent food scare concerning a food coloring carcinogenic additive. Bad weather has spoiled much of the Indian pepper crop, causing desi farmers to lose business to those in other countries. It's a rough life for farmers from Andhra Pradesh.

According to state records, 4,500 farmers have killed themselves in the past seven years, driven to despair by poor harvests and financial worries, and that figure would be far higher if other family members were included.
The epidemic of suicide started with cotton farmers but it is now spread to spice growers. Ironically, most die by swallowing the pesticides that have helped get them into debt.[BBC]

CNN reports that:

Two giant toads were married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in eastern India ... Some 400 people cheered and blew conches as women put streaks of vermilion on the female toad's head while a band played music and priests solemnized the marriage to the chanting of Hindu hymns.

According to our top secret source (call him Deep Croak) the groom spent the whole time surreptitiously checking out the bride's legs and wondering if she could cook as well as his mom. The bride, on the other hand, complained that she had no interest in brown toads since they were all chauvinists who cared about nothing other than amplexus and food cooked the way their mother used to. The mothers of the bride and groom spent the entire time coming up with names for all their future tadpoles, and planning their weddings out too.

SepiaMutiny sends the newlyweds a copy of the uncut Harold and Kumar DVD and a year's membership in the South Asian Sisters. We wish them our mutinous best.

What do you do if you’re an aspiring European desi pop star with a catchy yet disposable sound derivative of Jay Sean? You find a producer from Cøpenhagen and put out a stoned vision of a video. The Bombay Rockers are neither rockers nor from Bombay. Discuss.

24 year old Indian Navtej Singh Rehal is the central musician behind Bombay Rockers. Navtej is born in Denmark (Copenhagen), but has his roots in India. He grew up at Nørrebro and has gone through the whole public system - from nursery to gymnasium in Denmark, except for two years, where he went to school in India… Together with the two Danish producers, Janus Bosen Barnewitz and Thomas Sardord, Navtej is the core of Bombay Rockers. [Culturebase]

The Hindu shows why you don’t turn to a paper called The Hindu for music reviews:

The twosome have innovatively mixed an evergreen Punjabi folk song called “Ari Ari” in two versions… one only wishes that they had done away with the slang in the lyrics. [The Hindu]

Their first single, ‘Ari Ari,’ was the rage in Danish dance clubs, & their latest single, ‘Rock tha Party,’ was a hit in Europe & the CD has spent 10 weeks at #1 in India. [Beautiful Atrocities]

Except for the bass, their version of the old bhangra song ‘Ari Ari’ hews pretty closely to the original, there’s no Jay-Z breaking in. If unsweetened, traditional bhangra can make in Europe, could it make it in the U.S.?

Punjabi Boy reviews the ‘Rock tha Party’ video for you, though I’m guessing the state in which something’s rotten is actually Denmark:

The Punjabi dude and the Swedish hero pick up a couple of blonde chicks in Stockholm and have a groovy one night stand with them…. But the Swedish chicks are vexed because they got played. So they call this assasination hit squad of giant teddy bears…

Pretty people being chased by ridiculous assassins? Bad guys subtitled with silly monikers? Wonder if Punjabi MC’s ever done something like this.

Watch the supremely silly video. Sajit’s previous post here.

After stating what very well could be a fact while on a trip to Pakistan, BJP leader LK Advani has asked his party to "relieve" him of his duties. Or, to put it bluntly, he's resigned after much drama.

A chief architect of the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990's and the current opposition leader in Parliament, L. K. Advani, resigned today as head of his party, amid a storm of criticism from within his own ranks over remarks he made while in Pakistan.

Last weekend, on a visit to Karachi, where he was born, Mr. Advani stood at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and praised him as a "secular" leader.

Now I was raised to hate on Jinnah like most good, slightly perplexed toddlers were; my father vividly remembered an "India" that still contained an unbroken Punjab and like many of his generation, he bitterly resented Jinnah for "what he did to us".

I never really thought of or questioned this until today, when I started to see these stories on NYT and the Beeb. I went to trusty Wikipedia to see about Jinnah. What if Advani was right, and *gasp* he WAS secular?

A common view, especially in India, is that it was Jinnah who was responsible for "the division of India", creating Pakistan. The portrayal is that of a religious leader completely committed to his community having a country of its own. Jinnah himself, however, was a very secular person. Most of his career till about 1930 was spent trying either to bring the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to work together or getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. When the League was founded in 1905, he was probably the only major Muslim personality to refuse to join.

New California Media, partnering with The Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund have just released a poll that they claim shows that nearly half the country’s Hispanics, Asian Americans and other minorities prefer ethnic newspapers, television and radio to mainstream media. The poll is titled, The Ethnic Media in America: The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight. Several news organizations including Yahoo report:

Overall, ethnic media reach approximately 80 percent the groups studied — about 51 million people, or a quarter of the U.S. adult population.

“This is something that is growing like a giant hidden in plain sight,” said Sandy Close, executive director for NCM, a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media groups.

Many turn to foreign language newspapers and broadcasts because English isn’t their native language. Additionally, minority media often do a better job covering news from the homeland and other issues the community cares about.

“We have a multicultural society with multimedia choices, so people pay attention to media that pay attention to them. That’s the bottom line,” said Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

-The national reach of ethnic media was calculated by including all adults that watch ethnic television, listen to ethnic radio OR read ethnic newspapers on a regular basis.

-This group includes the 29 million “primary consumers of ethnic media” and another 22 million “secondary consumers of ethnic media” that prefer mainstream media but access ethnic media on a regular basis.

-The reach of Asian Indian, Filipino and Japanese newspapers is smaller but still impressive - more than half of the adults in these groups read an ethnic newspaper a few times a month or more.

-Access to the Internet is very high (67 percent) among all Asian Americans and half of them prefer ethnic websites to mainstream websites. Asian Indian adults access the Internet more often than other Asians.

Spamalot and The Light in the Piazza were the big winners at Sunday’s 59th annual Tony Awards. Any early favorites for next year? From April’s Detroit Free Press:

The next big thing in theater, the musical version of “The Lord of the Rings,” is scheduled for its world premiere in 2006 in Toronto. Previews won’t begin until Feb. 2 and the show has yet to be cast but producer Kevin Wallace offered a preview Thursday night to tour operators and other invited guests at the Renaissance Center.

Emphasizing “LOTR’s” human aspects before he mentioned its special effects, Wallace called the show “as powerful and emotional a story as you’ve ever experienced in the theater.”

Some particulars: The show will run 3 1/2 hours, including two intermissions; the music is by Indian composer A.R. Rahman (“Bombay Dreams”) and Finnish folk group Varttina, and there will be Hobbits mingling with playgoers before the show.

Playbill.com recently noted that advance tickets are already being snatched up:

In the first week of sales toward the February 2006 Toronto world premiere of the musical The Lord of the Rings, theatregoers snapped up $7 million (Canadian) in tickets, a spokesperson for the Toronto producers confirmed.

One might cringe imagining a quirky show tune of sweet admonition from Frodo called “Oh, Sam!,” about hobbit pal Sam’s dogged faithfulness. Don’t expect it: Traditional musical theatre is not what India’s most popular composer, A.R. Rahman, and the Finnish group Värttinä, collaborating with Christopher Nightingale, write.

What would the elves sing? What is the sound a hobbit dances to? Can an orc carry a tune?

Expect varied Asian- and European-influenced sounds to suggest the many tribes of the story.

No word yet as to whether or not the Orcs will dance Bollywood style in the background.

The SJ Mercury dissects the conflict between Indian American technocrats and religious/cultural leaders in the Bay Area. This may well be a microcosm of what we’ll soon see in other areas of the country where large Indian American communities exist:

When Dr. Romesh Japra was building his cardiology practice at Washington Hospital 25 years ago, Hindus wanted their own temple. Fremont’s then-mayor, the late Bill Ball, told the doctor the Seventh-day Adventists were moving out of their church. Japra wrote a personal check for $10,000 to cover part of the down payment and the Fremont Hindu temple was born. The first in the Bay Area, it became part of the bedrock for Silicon Valley’s Indo-American community.

Since the late 1970s, when Japra established himself as a leader in the Indo-American community, thousands have arrived from India, many armed with engineering degrees. The 2000 census revealed that 40 percent of all Bay Area high-tech workers were Asian, and many high-profile Silicon Valley companies were founded or co-founded by Indians.

Despite their land of common origin — which they remind outsiders is a complex mix of more than 1 billion people — the high-tech engineers and the Indo-Americans who preceded them are not united. Some old-timers say the technocrats care more about making money than about the grass-roots community. And to some highly skilled high-tech workers, Japra is a maharaja — Hindu prince — who reflects a past they came to America to escape.

The rift has played a part in preventing the community from realizing its shared goal: gaining political power.

“We have to stop backbiting,” said Mahesh Pakala, 40, a Fremont entrepreneur who is friends with both groups. “We’re killing ourselves. We have to think big. We have to get ourselves a politician.”

We’ve all observed this sort of thing before. It’s the classic old world mentality vs. new world mentality that we see in discussions with our parents. The technocrats have an organization that they claim to run like a “start-up” and the old-timers put on their yearly fair for networking and building community ties. In theory the former is run with business-like efficiency and thus can influence big time politics with money and connections. The latter relies on “who you know” and a turning-out-the-vote model.

A peeing baby is costly in Kerala (thanks, Turbanhead):

The parents of a baby who urinated on his mother inside an Indian temple have won an appeal to overturn a stiff fine imposed by temple officials. Anil Kumar was told to pay 1,001 rupees… to fund cleansing ceremonies when his baby son urinated during prayers at the temple at Trichur in Kerala state…

“I respect the views of the temple priests. But this penalty business is very pre-historic,” KC Venugopal, Kerala state minister responsible for temple affairs, told the BBC. “If they want to conduct a cleansing ceremony, let the money be taken from the temple funds. It should not be taken from worshippers…”

“I am always so nervous to carry my two-year-old son to a temple… What if he throws up or urinates?”

… according to tradition, it is considered unclean if babies urinate or vomit inside temple premises. A purification ceremony must be held to restore the sanctity of the temple…

I have two adorable baby nephews. We also ‘consider it unclean’ when they spit up or pee. Our own ‘cleansing ceremony’ involves paper towels and soap and costs Rs. 0. It has more to do with the sanctity of the hardwood floors than the sanctity of the temple though.

Speaking of desis in jazz, check out jazz vocalist Sachal Vasandani tonight in Manhattan:

“Sachal Vasandani’s singing reveals emotion and intellect,” says Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Versed in the blues, standards, and modern jazz… his sound is consistent and unique…”

After being named Collegiate Jazz Vocalist of the Year by Downbeat Magazine in 1999, Vasandani moved to New York and, after a year of working on Wall Street, quit his job to begin his career as a singer… Vasandani’s debut solo album is due out later this year.

Writer Ranbir Sidhu just finished a novel while locked in an architect-designed habitat for 30 days, 22 œ hours each day. The publicity stunt by Queens artist collective Flux Factory resembles another mentally focusing experience known as ‘poverty.’

The novelists lived in the gallery, in individual habitats built for them by architects and designers who, like the writers, entered a competition. Evenings, they ate together, meals served by local chefs. In addition, they could leave their pads for 90 minutes a day to shower, do laundry or walk on the building’s roof… There were nice writerly touches, like the two empty Scotch whiskey bottles perched on a shelf and a stack of books - including Strunk and White as well as Kafka - lined up near Mr. Bailie’s computer… “I liked the boundaries here… I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to stay in my room a month and write a book.” [NYT]

Here’s an excerpt from the rough draft of the novel he wrote while on the hamster wheel:

“Here, check this out.” Cyrus clicked on a couple of pull down menus. “This sorts into gender. It compares violence against male body parts to violence against female body parts and plots them both against hits. Do you see?… It’s the violence against women that’s really getting us our customers…

“One thing we found that’s strange is this. Violence against dicks. Our readers don’t like that. You cut off balls, interest falls through the floor. You cut off the dick, and man, you lose the whole fucking stadium. There is silence out there.

“Our characters get to keep their dicks,” Cyrus said. “Unless they’re black or brown.”

Here’s Anna on National Novel Writing Month. For speed writing, few compare to the prolific Robert Louis Stevenson, who supposedly wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in under a week while binging on cocaine. (I assume he believed in method writing.)

The United States and the UK always seem to be trading the hottest new trends. Could the following be one of them? The Telegraph reports:

The traditional image of the British family doctor as a serious, besuited white middle-aged man is out of date. As far as patients are concerned, the ‘perfect’ general practitioner is his polar opposite: young, female and Asian.

A study of hundreds of patients, which asked them to rate doctors on a scale of one to five for perceived expertise, put women doctors - both white and Asian - first in almost all categories, while white, male doctors over the age of 50 languished near the bottom.

Female doctors under the age of 35 were judged to have a preferable personal manner, superior technical skills and superior powers of description.

Patients also stated that they felt more at ease with young, female doctors giving physical examinations, were more likely to have faith in their diagnoses, and were more likely to follow their medical advice and prescribed treatment.

See, I just don’t know about this trend for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about young female Asian doctors in general, I just think I’d be too embarrassed though. Plus I am strange when it comes to finding the right doctor. When I lived in Houston, after weeks of searching for a general practitioner, I ended up selecting a doctor with the same first and last name as me (not an easy task) except his last name ended in a “y” instead of an “i.” Given that fact, I found it strange that the receptionist asked if we were related.

“It could be a ‘halo’ effect: if somebody likes the look of one aspect of you, such as your looks, they will rate you highly across other areas too.”

The study, called “What’s In a Face” and to be published in a scientific journal called Patient Evaluation and Control, gave white male doctors over the age of 50 an average score of 40 out of 60. Young, white female doctors got 44 while young, Asian female doctors received 47.

Dr Rupal Shah, 31, from Pimlico in London, was taken aback to learn that she fitted the ”perfect” GP’s profile.

“How strange! I had always imagined that an older white male had the most authority. It’s very nice to hear, because I have sometimes felt that people look at me and think: ‘Gosh, she’s a bit young. Does she really know what she’s talking about?’”

Director Vimukthi Jayasundara this past May became the first Sri Lankan to ever win the prestigious Camera d’Or award for Best First Film, or any award for that matter, at the world reknowned Cannes Film Festival for his Sinhalese language film Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land).

Jaysundara, who was trained trained at the Institute of the Cinema and Television of Pune, in India, shares the award at Cannes with an American, Miranda July for her work, Me And You And Everyone We Know.

When asked to talk about the film, Jayasundara said,

"If The Forsaken Land has something to do with my country's history, it is especially through its conveyance of the suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace – in between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere... For me, filmmaking is an ideal vehicle for expressing the mental stress people experience as a result of the emptiness and indecisiveness they feel in their lives. With the film, I wanted to examine emotional isolation in a world where war, peace and God have become abstract notions."

Thankfully, getting to see this film will be made easier by his win at Cannes as his film has found distribution in the U.S and in his native Sri Lanka.

More on Jayasundara and his win here, here, here, and here.

My mom is forever insisting that my blogging activities are going to inevitably get me into all kinds of trouble and ruin many potential career paths. In today’s internet age it seems that everything you do leaves behind web footprints. You can Google almost anyone to find dirt on them. For example, any of the following searches can (and have) led internet surfers to my innocuous little blog:

-new haircuts for wide faced brown haired girls

-dr sanjay gupta honeymoon

-ecstasy induced trance and subliminal messaging

-Why los angeles sucks

-kissinger + cia + chile + allende + cockroaches

-worlds mosts sickest pictures

-bad thinking inside the mind

And of course SO MANY people have at least one atrocious picture of themselves embedded somewhere it the bowels of the internet. It’s a picture that they took (for example) right after they had to walk a half mile on a very humid day when it was drizzling, which in turn made their hair all puffy and chia-pet like. The New York Times Stephanie Rosenbloom writes:

IN the winter of 1996, back when I was a brunette who wore sensible shoes, a photographer snapped my picture during a rehearsal for a college musical. The production mattered; eating and sleeping did not. The resulting portrait showed a pasty, gaunt girl being swallowed by a XXX-large T-shirt.

The only thing more unfortunate than the photo is that nearly a decade after it was taken - a decade in which I became a blonde and graduated to stilettos - it is still the definitive image of me on the World Wide Web, the one that pops up every time my name is entered in a Google search. It even has the dubious distinction of being in the top 10 hits in a list of several hundred, most of them articles I have written.

The photo caption says that as the show’s director, I was working “behind the scenes.” I beg to differ. I am center stage in cyberspace. Never mind that the photograph accompanies an article about my theatrical achievements. If a prospective date were to encounter the virtual me before the flesh-and-blood me, he would not be moved to schedule aperitifs.

But if misery loves company, then there is solace in knowing that many people bristle at the mere thought of being Googled because of the photographs, news clippings or blog entries that they feel do not reflect who they really are. Such is the plight of the Google-ee.

I mean seriously! The caring, sensitive individual that I am (who really just wants to be held) doesn’t come through at all if you Google me to find out who I am. Instead, there is talk of Henry Kissinger and the cockroaches he used in some alleged coup attempt. Any sane person would be scared off. Is it any wonder I can’t get a date?

These gals could kick my scrawny little Mallu butt anyday. The The Times of India reports -

Indian Army's women mountaineers created history by becoming the first women's expedition to scale the Mt Everest.

Captain Shipra Mazumdar, Captain Ashwini Pawar, Cadet Tshering Ladol and Trainee Dechin Lhamo scaled the 8848-metre high peak between 0615 and 0939 hours.

Alas, upon reaching the summit, the team discovered they'd been beat to the top by Hrithik and Priety Zinta & a movie crew who, inspired by nuptials on the peak, were seeking the biggest, baddest alpine love chase cum Monsoon Wedding in the history of Bollywood. Captain Mazumdar and her team were invited to participate as background dancers but respectfully declined.

Japan throws its national muscle behind making vibrating toilets and Hello Kitty phones the size of a Tic-Tac. Venezuela and India dedicate themselves to making globally competitive beauty queens. Hodiernally, what do desi Americans do?

We make 12-year-olds in braces with salutatory spelling skills, says the NYT:

For many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week’s national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers… All were of Indian ancestry. In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants - less than 1 percent of the population - have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year…

Crunching the numbers, desis are 16x overrepresented in the national spelling bee.

Excellence in a number of fields has always had a cultural tinge - consider the prevalence of Dominicans in baseball, Jews in violin playing, Kenyans in long-distance running. In 1985, when a 13-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Balu Natarajan, beat out his competitors by spelling “milieu,” it had an electrifying impact on his countrymen, much as Juan Marichal’s conquest of baseball had for Dominicans…

It’s not quite the same as Sabeer Bhatia’s adoring fans, but ok. I can personally confirm that desi parents dig rote drills for toddlers:

Indians are comfortable with the rote-learning methods of their homeland, the kind needed to master lists of obscure words that easily stump spell-checker programs. They do not regard champion spellers as nerds.

It’s not that Indian parents don’t see spellers as nerds. It’s that they don’t even know the meaning of the word. (Vinod is in the habit of saying, ‘Malayalees are the nerds of India. Of India!’) In a country with an insane level of competition for a vanishingly small number of good college slots and government jobs, being studious wasn’t an epithet, it was a necessity.

A 37-year-old desi woman from Ronkonkoma, Long Island admitted phoning in a fake bomb threat on a PIA flight because her boyfriend’s sister was being deported on that plane:

[Samina] Faisal… was charged… with telephoning in a false report of two bombs on Pakistan International Airline flight 718 bound for Pakistan on Feb. 13. Federal agents said the 911 call was made from a pay phone located on the second level of Terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport. As a result of the call, airline officials had the plane, which was already en route [to Lahore], return to the airport. Officers using K-9 units then conducted a search, but didn’t find any bombs on the craft, the complaint stated…

During her interview, Faisal told investigators that her boyfriend, who understands Urdu, overheard two unidentified men speaking in the language at the airline terminal discussing that there were two bombs on the aircraft, according to the complaint. Faisal said she sought out airline and security personnel to report the information but couldn’t find any, investigators said.

However, the complaint said the airline terminal had nearly 100 uniformed employees of the Transportation Security Administration on duty, as well as nearly 50 Customs and Border Protection inspectors on duty when Faisal claimed to have made the call.

Faisal is a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan. It’s apparently not the first time she’s cried wolf:

State court records show that Faisal, also known by the surnames Lodhi and Rasheed, has two pending cases involving charges of criminal impersonation and filing false incident reports. She also has a pending motor vehicle case involving a charge of unlicensed driving and what was described in court records as “criminal personation.”

One of my favorite things about visiting South Asia, in recent years anyway, is the unique (despite overly repetitive) playlist of MTV India. Sure, some really awful Bollywood songs are included, but where else will you hear a track with such poignant lyrics like "just chill chill, just chill" repeated over and over again, right? So after being in Sri Lanka for over a week, I have added some of the following to my iRiver music playlist. And if you want to have this argument, I like the iRiver better than the Ipod, but lets not make this post an iRiver vs. iPod one.

Bombay Rockers-- Rock The Party. This Danish duo, includes one desi and one gora exactly and approximately. The gora sings in English, and the desi of course sings in Hindi. How novel of an idea? The song is catchy, but the track's music is not original, the lyrics are not really intricate, and it seems like the Rocker's are trying a little too hard to be Europe's answer to the Neptunes (trucker hat, bandana around the wrist and all).

Daddy Yankee--Mirame. To be fair, I actually put this on my playlist before I left the states (along with Raje Shwari and Beenie man's Below the Waist and her track Country Style with Petey Pablo), but this spindi (Spanish + Hindi) reggaeton track is hot, so I had to give it a plug.

Abhijeet Sawant--Mohabbatein Lutaaunga. India's answer to Kelly Clarkson, Reueben Studdard, and Clay Aiken, all rolled into one. Sawant was the winner of "Indian Idol" and can really belt out a tune. It is a little corny, and in the video of this song he does some weird forehead pointing thing, but some of his tracks are catchy, this one in particular.

The Rishi Rich Project--Dil Mera.—This track is on the Kya Kool Hai Hum Soundtrack. I haven't seen the movie, but the trailer makes it look hip, and having the Project participate, makes the film even hipper. I was actually pleasantly surprised to hear a lot of Raghav and Jay Sean tracks all over the radio here in Sri Lanka.

Sonu Nigam, Jayesh Gandhi and Amrita Kak-- Just Chill. I had to put it on, just to laugh. This is apparently the opening track for David Dhawan's new movie Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya, starring Salman Khan and Sushmita Sen. Remember to "just chill chill, just chill."

Blaaze--Bunty Aur Babli. This is the lead track for the movie of the same name starring Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee. The song is a rap song and the video has Amitabh lip-synching, quite ridiculously, along to the lyrics. Its unfortunate because the movie looks good.

There are a number of theories as to why otherwise normal people blog. In my opinion they can be boiled down to two:

(1) They are attention whores

(2) They are trying to get lucky

The rare individual (and I thankfully am not one) blog for both reasons.

With that in mind I want to bring a couple of things to your attention. The South-Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) 10th Anniversary Convention and Job Fair will be held in New York City on June 16-19, at Columbia University - Lerner Hall & Columbia Journalism School. Our very own Manish Vij will be on one of the panels disseminating his considerable wisdom. He will do so with a number of puns that he is preparing even now. I have read an advance copy. Very funny (even the ones that confused me). The panel name is The Ethnic Press in 2005 (SATURDAY, 3:15-4:45 pm). If you have ever even thought about becoming a journalist or might want to date one, you should totally sign up.

Coincidentally, that same weekend (June 17-18) is The North American South Asian Bar Association (NSABA) Convention in Washington, D.C. I went to the convention in Los Angeles last year and had a blast while learning a great deal about various lawyer things. I pretended to be a personal injury lawyer as a matter of fact. This year the convention is granting me a press pass and I will be attending once again. If you have ever even thought about becoming a lawyer or might want to date one, you should totally sign up. In addition the NSABA conference will play host to many South Asians who will one day make a run for office. Its good to network now so that you can turn them away from the dark side. Since I am press, it is entirely possible that I will approach attendees for a quote for this website. I may even ask for your number for follow-up questions.

Two Nepalese lowebirds who had participated in the Rotary Centennial Everest Expedition this week got married atop Everest; yes, it's a first. Sadly for you, Abhi was not around HQ for comment.

Other climbers were understandably floored by the event...or ceiling-ed, rather, at the simple, ten-minute ceremony.

They briefly took off their oxygen masks and put on plastic garlands, while the groom symbolically applied red powder on the bride's forehead.

They kept it on the downlow:

Mr Dorjee said other couples had wanted to do the same in the past, but none had managed because they could not get up on top of the peak together.

Fearing the same possibility, they had kept their own plan secret.

Did you catch that? Before this couple, no one else had been able to use the world's most exclusive location for their nuptials because apparently, they couldn't get to the top of Everest at the same time as their intended. What did they do, ditch their slow beloveds in the snow? Stay with them and nurse resentment? Rethink the viability of marrying them on the long way down? I ask too many questions?

So, there's more to this union than a unique location; Moni Mule Pati and Pem Dorjee Sherpa's bond is extra special because it crosses caste and ethnic boundaries. In a statement regarding this aspect of his marriage, the groom, in an understated, black, backwards-facing baseball cap wisely quoted Depeche Mode:

"If some people are loving each other they have to get married," Pem Dorjee told the BBC. "That's why we want to give all Nepali people [the message] that people are people so there's no problem about caste."

Indeed. It's been quite a week for Everest, besides this marriage made and/or "solemnised" in heaven, two Iranian women became the first Muslim females to make it to the top. No word on whether they left slow fiances in their dust. Snow. Whatever.

Like that VW ad, NYC sometimes has moments of spooky synchronicity. Like the time two weeks ago when I hailed a cab to SoHo. The fellow who picked me up was an uncle crooning along to Hindi ghazals in the direction of his steering wheel. After crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, we passed a Sikh guy with a black pug and a cute Punjaban walking toward chic bar Mecca. A block later, a group of desi high school kids sounded their barbaric yawps over the sidewalks of the world. The louche lounge turned out all Arabic and Hindi tunes, Turkish lanterns and Bombay tones; ‘twas hookahs and wine, you know the kind.

Similarly, both major movies released last weekend, Madagascar and The Longest Yard, had desi influences. In the animated film Madagascar, a major character speaks in a comical desi accent mouthed by Ali G. His Julian the lemur king is pompous and faintly ridiculous, though aside from the accent he’s funny in his own right. The sound isn’t exactly Sellers, but this movie confirms the cycle of immigrant visibility: first ignored, then laughed at, then accepted. (And finally The Man? Only in spelling bees.)

The hilarious thing is, American movie reviewers couldn’t place the accent. It was clearly a desi parody, though rounded off via the West Indies or just the fertile mind of Sacha Baron Cohen. Reviewers guessed all over the map: Eurotrash, Middle Eastern, Caribbean. Here’s what the director said:

We had this two-line character, Julian, and we got a tape of the show “Ali G” with Sacha Baron Cohen. He came in and he invented this Indian accent. We gave him a couple of lines and he turned them into eight minutes of dialogue. We were just in tears on the floor and thought, “This guy has to be the king.” So that was just a two-line part that he invented and it turned into that role.

Screw blogging. I need to become an agent. SHOW ME THE MONEY! From ESPN’s Page 2:

Everyone is talking about it but no one can believe it. No one wants to believe it. Ninety million dollars? For a teenager? For a snot-nosed kid who’s never even competed at the college level, let alone the pros? Utter insanity.

Yeah, well, I’m the agent for that snot-nosed kid. And I’m here to tell you, this endorsement contract makes so much sense that I guarantee within five years, $90 million will seem like a damn bargain for the winner of the National Spelling Bee.

Why, the revenue from his personal line of pocket protectors and “You are here” solar system T-shirts will cover the $90 million nut, easy. After that, the sales from the “Got Paste?” campaign will be pure profit.

Besides, this kid isn’t going to embarrass anybody down the road. His name is rock solid. There aren’t going to be any paternity suits. There aren’t going to be any bling-wearing posses getting pulled over in his Escalade for smoking weed. He’s a spelling bee champion, for God’s sake. He doesn’t have any friends, let alone a posse. And even with $90 million drawing interest in his savings account, I doubt if there are any girls out there who want to spend an afternoon watching “Matrix Reloaded” over and over with him. Let alone have sex.

Whoa. That last line was excessively harsh. My boy IS gonna’ get some play now that he’s famous. I can’t spell worth crap (as evidenced plenty of times on this blog) or else I’d be living the thug life just like he’s about to.

That’s just the way this business works. I’m not proud of it. Blame it on television. Ever since they began broadcasting the National Spelling Bee on TV, everybody wants a piece of the action. And why shouldn’t the kid get his slice, just because he’ll wind up blowing it on Clearasil?

Trust me, you don’t know the half of it — and you don’t want to, either. I’ve seen parents send a six-year-old to timeout for three hours just because she didn’t know whether “catsup” or “ketchup” was the accepted spelling. The sad thing is, both spellings are.

Gotta’ get rich or die trying.

Preparations are already underway for when Indian Prime Minister Mano-a-mano Singh comes to town next month. Rediff reports:

Co-chairs of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans — US Representatives Gary Ackerman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — have written to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, urging him to convene a joint session of the US Congress (both the Houses of the American parliament) for an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his visit to Washington July 17 to 19 at President George W Bush’s invitation.

Dr Singh will be on his first official visit to the United States.

It will be the first visit by an Indian prime minister in nearly five years.

Ackerman and Ros-Lehtinen, senior members of the House International Relations Committee, wrote that ‘an official invitation to address a joint session of Congress will send an unequivocal message to the government and people of India that the US stands in full support of their commitment to democracy, peace, and prosperity for all; and it will show the American people the enduring significance of the relationship between our two great nations.’

‘For this reason,’ the lawmakers said, ‘we would encourage a joint session of Congress to allow Prime Minister Singh to share his thoughts directly on India’s role as a regional power, its economic development, its progress toward religious tolerance, and the benefits of increased economic, security, and cultural cooperation between India and the United States.’

USINPAC’s website has more:

Sanjay Puri, Chairman of USINPAC said, “the first State visit to the United States by Prime Minister Singh has already generated excitement among the Indian American grassroots and on Capitol Hill. We are also pleased by the Bipartisan support.”

All out efforts are being made to ensure that Prime Minister Singh’s address to the Joint Session of the United States Congress becomes a reality. In this connection USINPAC is working closely with the House International Relations Committee (HIRC) and has briefed senior members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.

Folks, the Spelling Bee is coming down to the wire. Three of the last four All four contestants left in Round 14 were Indian. Now only one two remain.

I can’t handle the pressure. I can’t watch. Someone let me know how it ends.

For an interesting retrospective of the lead up to the Spelling Bee see this ESPN article by Amar Shah.

Thanks for the reader tips on this event.

Update: Oh hell I cracked and refreshed for another update. I think we have… a winner?

Today President Bush announced that Republican Congressman Christopher Cox would be replacing outgoing SEC Chairman William Donaldson pending approval by the Senate. Reuters and many others report:

President Bush on Thursday named Rep. Christopher Cox — a champion of curbing investor lawsuits — as the White House’s choice to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, prompting academics to predict a major shift in the market-regulating agency’s focus.

Rep. Cox’s current job is as Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. The House Republican leadership has not yet announced who will take over Cox’s empty seat. Bobby Jindal is part of the House Committee on Homeland Security. He is in fact Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on the Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attacks. Now I am not ready to think that the Republican leadership would consider offering the chairmanship of the full committee to a freshman Congressman, but if John Linder of Georgia gets promoted to fill Cox’s seat then it could well end up that Jindal would take over chairmanship of the Subcommittee. Imagine that: A brown guy in charge of overseeing efforts to prevent nuclear and biological attacks against the U.S.

The BBC reports that the Bangladeshi government's nabbed their guy but couldn't get the charges to stick -

A court in the northern Bangladeshi city of Bogra has acquitted a two-year-old child accused of adultery and theft, officials say.

The infant appeared in court on his mother's lap to seek bail.

...The case is not the first in Bangladesh to involve infant children facing serious charges.

In March, Bangladesh's High Court stepped in to halt the trial of four infants - all members of an extended family - who were accused of looting and causing criminal damage.

The defense? The kid claims he was framed by an uncle & that his motive was old fashioned theft -

A report in the Daily Star newspaper said that the charges against the child and seven others were filed by Jahangir Alam on 9 February.

He alleged that Saiful Islam, other family members and his neighbours were all complicit in stealing gold ornaments and clothes worth between 3,000 Bangladeshi Taka ($47 ) and 13,000 Bangladeshi Taka ($204) from his house.

Mr Alam also alleged that the named parties lured away his wife, Mabia Khatun, to marry another man even though she was not properly divorced.

Yeah right... we've heard that one before. If the booties don't fit, you've gotta acquit.

I don’t know why more people aren’t fans of jazz music. Is there anything better than sitting in a dark corner of a jazz club with a whiskey on the rocks in one hand and a melody that sounds different to each listener tapping out through the fingers of your other hand? Agastya directs us to Indian American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.

Named a Rising Star of the alto saxophone by the 2003 and 2004 Downbeat International Critics Poll, Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the most innovative young musicians in jazz today. By incorporating the culture of his Indian ancestry, Rudresh has fused myriad influences to create a truly groundbreaking artistic vision. As a performer, he leads/co-leads five groups to critical acclaim. His most recent quartet recording Mother Tongue on Pi Recordings has been named one of Top Ten Jazz CDs of 2004 by the Chicago Tribune, All About Jazz, and Jazzmatazz to name a few and also received 4 stars in DOWNBEAT. This CD reached #8 on US jazz radio charts and reached #1 on Canadian jazz radio charts.

The saxophone is just cool. I wanted to play one in elementary school but they stuck me with the tuba, and according to my therapist it’s still a relevant issue. My hope was to learn how to play one and then marry a girl that played the violin so we could make lots of talented babies together.

Listen to a bunch of Mahanthappa’s recordings here. If you want to see him live there are a number of upcoming dates.

Check out the lyrical stylings of desi rap group Raja Wilco, about whom I can find damn near nothing on the Net except that they’re from Jersey. Fobio Patel says:

These tracks were ripped from Raja Wilco’s CD “Raja That!”, the 10-4 Sampler… May I draw attention to the fact that tracks 9 and 10 are missing. All of them, especially Raj Makhija and Raja Wilco should feel shame for even including those tracks on their CD. They had such a good thing going, and then tracks 9 and 10 totally fucked them up. It made my ears bleed. I’m bewildered by their extreme lapse in good judgement.

Notable tracks:

• ‘Chalo Chalo’ and ‘That’s Life’: great filmi and bhangra samples (can anyone name them?)
• ‘Peter Pank’: interesting syncopation and a reference to a Spanish punk comic:

… the anarchic 80s trash culture comedy PETER PANK, mixing JM Barrie with Johnny Rotten… The best Peter Pan adaptation ever created wasn’t Spielberg’s, or Hogan’s, or even Disney’s. It was made in the 80s, in Spain. In comic form. And it featured sex, drugs and enough rock and roll to get Elvis out of his secret retirement and send him on tour with zombie Sid Vicious and the ghost of Eddie Cochran.

• ‘Maharaja’:

Yo, I enter the picture like Shah Rukh Khan
Puffing a sto’ like Salman Khan…

From Oldbridge, Edison…
home of the desis…
Brunswick… Cherry Hill…
Freestylin’ under the Brooklyn Bridge
with Crooklyn kids…

You can listen to all the tracks, except the ones Fobio despises, at his site.

It is with heavy hearts that we would like to say thank you and good luck to SM blogger Apul. This past weekend Apul resigned from SM to move on to other projects. I should have guessed something was afoot when I noticed that his desk at our North Dakota HQ had been cleaned out and that the contingent of monkeys he employs to scour the web for stories of interest had been unfed in days. Coincidentally, since Apul’s sudden departure, we haven’t seen Super Jagjit around either. Should he decide to give up his new found mortality, there will be a place for him here. Below is a recap of Apul’s Greatest Hits on SM. Click on the links and pour some out for him while you read.

-Everyone’s having sex but you

-Justice Department distributes tutorials on head coverings (click on the link that says, “Common Redneck Head Coverings”

-Jagjit is da man

In other news the three individuals pictured below were seen snooping around our North Dakota neighborhood. They look like bad news to me.

Otto von Bismarck apocryphally joked, ‘Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made,’ and we all know what happened to him. So here are snapshots of two yet-to-be-completed movies as they’re fed through the meat grinder.

The Namesake: Kal Penn photoblogs a day of shooting The Namesake at Calcutta’s Howrah Station:

The press had somehow found out that May 29th had been secured as the day we were shooting at the station, and they saw fit to publish that as news. So in addition to hordes of reporters, photographers, and camera crews, we also had a lot of people standing around watching. I don’t mean “a lot of people” as in 80 people on some street corner in midtown. I mean thousands…

See the photos, watch the video.

Life of Pi: M. Night Shyamalan has dropped out of the Life of Pi film project to focus on his mermaid tale. Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the excellent, dark, third installment of Harry Potter as well as Y Tu Mamá También, may now fill the director’s chair (via Anangbhai):

Fox appears to be breaking with Shyamalan over his decision to make his next picture Warner’s Lady in the Water instead of Pi, an adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning bestseller by Yann Martel. Unwilling to wait a year and a half for Shyamalan to finish Water, Fox was happy to take a call from Cuaron’s reps at William Morris offering his services.

I finally got around to reading the religiously syncretic yarn which starts in Pondichéri and stars a piscine Patel. The Booker book is solid, quality writing, though old-fashioned in style. I do like writers who break the rules of language when required, but that’s not the complaint here. The book’s psychotropic island scenes and its entire narrative arc remind me of Jules Verne and other 19th century adventure authors. There’s also a genteelness and reserve which belongs to an era when women wore corsets and men wore fedoras. It’s an oxymoron, a survival tale that’s not in-your-face in any way. Like Shyamalan, it’s Hitchcock in a De Palma age.

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