18-year-old tennis terror Sania Mirza just beat her second-round U.S. Open opponent, Italian Maria Elena Camerin, 6-4, 1-6, 6-4 (thanks, Sania Fan). Her next draw is 21-year-old Marion Bartoli of France (via desiFans). Mirza won her first round against Mashona Washington of Houston.

The 18-year-old from Hyderabad defeated Italy’s Elena Camerin 6-4, 1-6, 6-4 in a roller-coaster of a match and with France’s Marion Bartoli to follow, she will harbour genuine hopes of reaching the last 16 and a likely encounter with top seed Maria Sharapova.

But she will need to fully recover physically from what was a punishing second round tie if is she is to better her breakthrough third round performance at this year’s Australian Open where she eventually lost to Serena Williams. [Link]

Now ranked 42nd in the world, Mirza is the first Indian woman to win a match at the U.S. Open. She’s got lots of power, but in her last two matches committed plenty of worrisome unforced errors.

The doubles events have produced some interesting desi pairings:

Injuries notwithstanding, Sania Mirza has opted to play in the women’s doubles, partnering Australia’s Bryanne Stewart, at the US Open… Sania has a strained abdominal muscle and is also troubled by bleeding toes…

In the mixed doubles, Leander Paes joins hands with Martina Navratilova, in what could be the 48-year-old legend’s last US Open. Paes and Martina [are] seeded seventh… Mahesh Bhupathi will pair up with Slovakian Daniela Hantuchova…

Paes and Bhupathi are playing with their regular partners Nenad Zemonjic of Serbia and Montenegro and Martin Damm of the Czech Republic respectively in the men’s doubles. [Link]

Sooner or later, just like the world’s first day
Sooner or later, we learn to throw the past away
History will teach us nothing…

— Sting, ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’

India’s coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance, has pushed a quasi-socialist employment guarantee through Parliament:

Parliament on Wednesday night approved the historic Bill for providing employment guarantee to all rural households in the country with Rajya Sabha passing the legislation by a voice vote. [Link]

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2004 promises wage employment to every rural household, in which adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Through this Bill the government, aims at removing poverty by assuring at least 100 days’ employment. [Link]

Like most government handouts, the entitlement was expanded from its original means-tested form to include all rural households, even the relatively prosperous. India needs to build plenty of infrastructure, her villages are very poor, and so I’m all for the UPA’s WPA for a limited period of time. But you do that by first fixing which roads, flyovers and airports you want to build and then figuring out manpower requirements. What you don’t do is guarantee a paycheck regardless of the availability of work, able-bodied individuals in a household or the individual worker’s performance.

The Congress returned to power in last year’s general election largely on its promises of giving the country’s economic reforms a human face and making the process more inclusive so that it benefited the poor in rural areas…

“This bill has been tabled in Parliament without proper preparation. The government does not know the exact number of unemployed people. There were six such schemes earlier, but they all failed due to the same reason,” said Singh, who is chairman of the Parliament’s standing committee on rural development. The bill, when enacted, will cover all rural households, not just those below poverty line, as had been provided earlier. [Link]

So now we know why I can shopping spree like a champion— it’s in my genes. (Thanks, 43 Seconds.)

According to the annual Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations report (pdf)—widely considered the most comprehensive source on global weapons sales—India’s got so many shopping bags full of “tanks, submarines, combat aircraft, missiles and ammunition”, her arms are sore. ;)

India was the leading buyer of conventional arms among developing nations in 2004, a report for the US Congress says. The Congressional Research Service said Delhi agreed the transfer of $5.7bn in weapons, ahead of China. [Beeb]

India was also the leading developing world purchaser over the 1997-2004 period covered in the report, sealing 10% of all such arms agreements.[Beeb]

Yes, yes, the US is the biggest “weapons mall” of them all, with around a third of all contracts. It’s the mall of America, if you will. Oh wait, we already have one of those.

Keeping up with the Wongs’?

India negotiated $15.7bn in agreed transfers of conventional weapons between 1997 and 2004 to top the list.[Beeb]

China overtook India for the period 2001-2004 on the back of a big increase in defence budget, but India was back on top for 2004 alone.[Beeb]

Enlighten me, do you think this is a good thing to be “on top” of?

Remember when much of the coverage of last year’s tsunami focused on the Victoria Secret’s model caught up in the waves rather than the 200,000 dead? And the ToI story which said the real tragedy of the Bombay cloudburst was that customers couldn’t get their ToI?

The Indo-Asian News Service throws its hat into the ring of vacuousness. Remember that in inverted pyramid style, the most salient fact comes first in the headline and lede. So here’s the most important fact about the destruction of New Orleans and the Louisiana, Missouri and Alabama coasts as reported by IANS and quoted in Abhi’s post:

Hurricane Katrina leaves US Congressman man Jindal homeless [Link]

You can contribute to the Red Cross relief effort here. Previous posts: one, two

As I’m sure many of you  have been following, the situation in NOLA seems to be getting worse and worse.  Maitri is continuing her great coverage by trying to separate facts from media hype and B.S.  Among the many people who have been evacuated is one U.S. Congressman Bobby Jindal.  The Central Chronicle reports:

Indian American Congressman Bobby Jindal was among thousands of residents in New Orleans, Louisiana, who were left without food or electricity after Hurricane Katrina pounded the US Gulf coast.

“The events of the last 48 hours have hit us harshly, and the effects of Hurricane Katrina are still not fully known,” Jindal, a resident of Louisiana’s New Orleans that has been submerged under the flood waters, said on his website.

”I know most of you, like my family and I, have spent a restless night, evacuated from your homes and still without power. We are all worried about what we will find when we are finally given the all clear to return,” he said.

As “luck” would have it though, one of Jindal’s first actions in Congress was to get a bill passed which eases the financial burden on victims of natural disaster:

Jindal’s legislative victories on natural disaster compensation in Congress this year are critical for Louisianans as they fight yet another major calamity.

Soon after he came into Congress this year, he began to lobby and successfully got passed legislation reversing an earlier ruling that would have taxed compensation to his state’s residents for monies they got as a result of natural disasters. That law takes on added meaning for Louisianans now as they battle with massive devastation from Hurricane Katrina.

This year’s Wells Fargo New Yorker Festival draws a grab bag of celebs-e-tweed you can pay to rub shoulders with: Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Richard Dawkins, Behnaz Sarafpour and Sasha Frere-Jones. And they’re not alone: Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Roots, yadda yadda. It’s like they swiped the Sex and the City item numbers and invited with abandon.

In a highbrow bow, a gesture of noblesse oblige, the magazine not only ran a feature on the Three Stooges this week, they invited the South Park brats to the fest. But of course the Jhumpa-Zadie axis is sold out. How now, brown cow?

The Aug. 29th issue also ran an excellent Vijay Seshadri poem, ‘Family Happiness.’ Seshadri is an English professor who may have been one of the original 2nd genners, with both a pukka American accent and an incongruous shock of gray hair. He read another poem I dig at the SAJA fest; he’s got a radio voice and a knack for lines of astringent tenderness within the clutches of marriage.

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio… and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing and logging industries, and New York’s Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature… He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. [Link]

New tipster FOBish informs us of yet another way India eats its young: Child Sari Weavers.

It is estimated that there are around 10,000 children in the districts of Kanchipuram and Thiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu work in the silk industry.

There are over 100,000 looms set up in individual homes on which these famous silk saris are woven. Many of these saris cost several thousand rupees…

These children work every day of the week for up to 10 hours a day.

Savarnam, an owner of two looms rejected all accusations of exploitation. Instead he said that they were helping these poor people by giving them employment.

“We make hardly any profit. The cost of raw material is high. Added to that we face competition from cheap copies of Kanchipuram saris,” he argued.

Riiight. Many, if not all these children are essentially bonded laborers working to repay a loan their parents were forced to take. Human Rights Watch reports:

A 14 year-old boy who worked as a weaver’s assistant in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, told Human Rights Watch that he could not leave his loom owner because he was paying off a loan, which in two years he had only reduced from Rs. 2,500 (U.S. $52) to Rs. 475 (U.S. $9.90). “The owner pays [a small salary] but deducts for the advance [loan],” he said. “He deducts but won’t write off the whole advance… . We only make enough to eat.”

Karnataka, in the south, is India’s primary producer of silk thread. There, production still depends on bonded children. Most are under age 14 and are Dalit or Muslim. In 2001, the state government promulgated an ambitious plan to eliminate all child labor, but it was not in operation at the time of Human Rights Watch’s investigation one year later. [link]

A detailed examination of how bonded child labor works can be found here.

Raju Sharma, a money changer in New Delhi, left his office around half-past eight last night carrying a bag filled with around Rs. 14 lakhs. On his way to the car, interception!

four young men on two motorcycles intercepted him and tried to snatch the bag. At this, Mr. Sharma put a stiff resistance and raised an alarm. [linky]

I “put a stiff resistance” whenever I’m approached by four young men, too. ;)

No heroes in all of ND?

However, since one of the robbers was brandishing a revolver, no one came forward. Though he fought with the robbers for about 10 minutes, in the end the culprits managed to snatch the bag as he lost hold of it on being hit on the head with the butt of the revolver.[linky]

That’s gonna leave a mark.

Subsequently, the culprits fled from the spot. Mr. Sharma in the meantime continued to cry for help, which caught the attention of a policeman who was passing by. The duo then gave a chase to the robbers in an auto-rickshaw.[linky]

The Village Voice takes a look at what a white (presumably) candidate has got to do to tread the ethnic waters of the Big Apple:

Money talks, and the Wongs and Muhammads of this world are speaking louder in New York City politics. From 1989 to 2001, the number of contributions to municipal campaigns from those two surnames quadrupled as the population of Asians—a broad category that includes people from the Middle East to the Far East—grew faster than any other group in the city. Yet the ethnic calculus of this year’s mayoral campaign is still limited to blacks, whites, and Hispanics, according to the Marist and Quinnipiac polls, which report results only for those three groups, omitting a tenth of the city’s people.

Yes, merely a tenth. “For us, we’re still not that big,” says John Abi-Habib, a person of Lebanese descent and a vice chairman of the Brooklyn Republican Party, who helped found a Middle Eastern political coalition eight years ago, “but then we have over 50,000 registered voters in this city.” And that number is growing, partly as a reaction to negative fallout from September 11. “The last four years, we must have registered thousands and thousands of people to vote,” Abi-Habib says, “and they see the importance of it because they know their voice has to be heard.”

Despite the obvious cultural differences between the different groups of Asian immigrants in NYC, City Councilman John Liu of Queens says that they do share some basic things in common which might be addressed by a common overall strategy in trying to capture their votes:

Ethnic labels are crude by definition: You’re black whether you just flew in from Senegal or are descended from slaves shipped to U.S. shores centuries ago. Latinos include light-skinned Cubans and Indian-blooded families from Ecuador. But the categories make some sense if common concerns affect the people they cover. And while Asian and Middle Eastern New Yorkers care about failing schools, high rent, rats, and all the usual urban woes, they also worry about things that other groups needn’t fear.

“There are lots of issues that Asian Americans share,” said Liu, “one being the immigrant experience, being relatively recent immigrant arrivals. And Asians also suffer from a perpetual- foreigner syndrome, meaning that you could be a fourth- or fifth-generation Asian American but still somehow it’s difficult to believe that you’re an American. I get that: First they compliment me on my ability to speak English, and often I get asked, ‘Well, where are you from?’ and for some reason people refuse to take Flushing for an answer.”

The whole article has a bit of a slimy feel to it.  I appreciate the fact that Asian Americans are becoming motivated to vote and that politicians are being forced to listen, but here it almost seems like a contest between the candidates to see who is more down with the “brown and yellow.”  The idealist in me wishes they wouldn’t have to try so hard, but maybe we are at least a generation away from that type of city.

Rediff.com is reporting that Sumit Ganguly will soon take over as head of the South Asia Bureau in the National Intelligence Council:

Sumit Ganguly, who currently holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilisations will soon be appointed the first National Intelligence Officer of the newly-formed South Asia Bureau in the National Intelligence Council, an appendage of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ganguly, also a professor of political science and director of the Indian Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the first Indian-American to serve in the NIC.

The NIC is the intelligence community’s centre for mid-term and long-term strategic thinking.

Its National Intelligence Estimates on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence (the head of the CIA) are the most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues.

Yes, intelligence estimates are quite useful (when the analysis isn’t pre-ordained at least). Well good.  It makes sense to have someone of South Asian heritage actually head this new branch.

His most recent work, published by Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press (New Delhi), is entitled Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947. He also recently published The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999). His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Asia Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. He has also been a guest scholar and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London). Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Survey, Current History and the Journal of Strategic Studies. He is also the editor of a new journal, The India Review, published by Frank Cass and Company. [Link]

SM tipster Olinda (followed by several others) sent us this depressing article from the New York Times highlighting corruption at its worst.  Behold:

Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital's ritual of extortion began.

Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm.

Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration.

"The ayah told my mother-in-law to pay up fast because the night duty doctor was leaving at 8 a.m. and wanted a share," she recalled.

Cynic that I am, I could actually imagine a man whisking a kid away and demanding a bribe.  When a woman (who may have children of her own) does it, all hope seems lost.  The article goes on to describe the fact that this sort of corruption has infected basic services that stretch from the cradle to the grave.  The following quote also caught my eye because it sounds like a thing you sometimes hear about the U.S. healthcare system:

"The poor not only are paying much more of their incomes to get the same medical services as the middle and richer classes, but they are also discouraged from seeking basic medical care because they can't afford it," said Daniel Kaufmann, director of global programs at the institute.

The blazing hot publicity machine for Shalimar the Clown rolls out another feature on Salman Rushdie, this time in GQ. The cheapskate mag offers only 2 (out of 20!) sections from the print version online, so despite protestations from the Sepia Legal Dept., I transcribe the juicy bits below. Without further ado, here’s the ever-quotable Salman on:

3. Comics

He liked Batman the most – “because he was the weirdest,” Rushdie says. “Strange thing to do, you know, hang upside down dressed like a bat and go out at night.” He was always happiest when Batman came unaccompanied. “I didn’t like Robin the Boy Wonder at all,” he explains, his voice still leaking some youthful annoyance. “I thought he was completely redundant and had a silly uniform.”

4. Perceptions of his character after the fatwa, and Indira Gandhi bashing

”The thing that happened to me had certain characteristics - it was theological, it was humorless, it was difficult to understand – and all those characteristics got transposed onto me. So because it was humorless, I must be.”…

Some were stung by the account of the previous few decades of Indian history in Midnight’s Children. Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister at the time actually sued him for suggesting that her son Sanjay blamed her for the death of her husband, his father. Rushdie eventually yielded to pressure from his publishers to remove the passage, as long as she agreed that there was nothing else in the book – a book fairly critical of her – that she considers objectionable, and he says that the Indian press concurred with his view that this settlement was more a humiliation for the prime minister than for the author.

[The Iron Lady picked that over the transistors-for-sterilization bit? Color me surprised.]

John Updike reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest in the New Yorker. He moans about Rushdie’s precocious, hyperactive style but has the grace to quote extensively. He slowly dribbles out the master’s words to be set upon by the ravenous she-wolf bitches known as rabid Rushdie fans. Such as, uh, my ‘friend.’

My ‘friend’ here appreciates Updike cribbing from Shalimar. It sounds raw. It sounds risky. It sounds fabulous. Oh, and there’s some famous-author-whining in there too.

In a neat trick both topical and intimate, Rushdie is symbolically returning to Kashmir with this novel. Recall the rapturous prose about Dal Lake, red hair, blue eyes and a distinctive proboscis where Midnight’s Children began. It’s a journey desi authors selling into the West often make in reverse: their first few books aren’t ‘write what you know,’ but rather ‘write what sells.’ Only when they’re comfortable in their bestselling skins, and the wolves of missed rent bay at the doors of younger writers, do they return to exorcise their deeper pains: for Rushdie, the rape of Kashmir; for Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan civil war.

[Dedication:] … in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents…

In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell… Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete… The world was no longer calm…

… he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood…

What happens when Prides collide? Aishwarya Rai and Colin Firth are filming a $70M sword-and-chappals epic with Sir Ben (via DesiFans). Harvey Weinstein is backing Rai again despite the disappointing U.S. box office of Bride and Prejudice. It’s called The Last Legion:

The Last Legion is an epic adventure based on acclaimed author Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s international best-selling 2003 novel of the same name. The film is set against the fall of the Roman Empire in 470AD and its last emperor, 12-year-old Romulus Augustus…

Over-run with rebellion, Rome is a city on the brink of chaos and destruction. Imprisoned by rebels on the island-fortress of Capri, Romulus, aided by the clever strategies of his teacher Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley) and the heroic skills of his legionnaire Aurelius (Colin Firth), escape the island. Despite the turbulent events around them, this small band of Roman soldiers, accompanied by Byzantine warrior Mira (Aishwarya Rai), are determined to continue their mission to restore the Empire. This resolute group sets out on an arduous and dangerous trek for Britannia in search of the Last Legion, in their bid to make one final stand for Rome. [Link]

Colin Firth …. Aurelius
Ben Kingsley …. Ambrosinus
Aishwarya Rai …. Livia  [Link]

Finally, we’ve got a suitable hero for the queen of mock chastity: not Colin Farrell, but Colin Firth, the serious Darcy in a ridiculous jumper. Though now that I mention it, the other pairing would have been interesting, the louche Lothario meeting chastity princess:

Farrell: ‘You know, I’ve dated a desi woman before.’
Aishwarya: ‘Strippers don’t count.’

Instead we get Aishwarya Jones’ Diary. ‘Aurelius, do these knickers make me look fat?’

Pakistani-Norwegian stand-up comic Shabana Rehman is a burqa provocateur (thanks, Srinath):

Rehman… was born in Karachi but raised in Norway… [Link]

She typically begins her act wearing a burqa, which she then strips away to reveal a tight, red cocktail dress… She notably made headlines in the popular press last week by dropping her pants and baring her buttocks at a film festival in Haugesund, in southwest Norway. “I want to show that in Norway, you can do such things without being lynched or arrested… You can’t do a stunt like this in Karachi or Kabul.” [Link]

She’s pulled both a Madonna and a Demi Moore:

Rehman then went on to kiss vigorously Norway’s female Culture Minister… seeking to make a point about a debate raging in the country’s Pakistani community over a film scene showing a young Pakistani girl kissing a Norwegian boy… [Link]

‘In Norway there are approximately 70,000 Muslims out of a total population of 4 million [1.75% of the population]… My answer to their reactions was to paint my body with the Norwegian flag and pose in the nude.’ [Link]

The 5’4” woman pulled an old Jewish and Punjabi wedding trick upon a fundie with suspected Al Qaeda links who took asylum in Norway. If only he were Jewish, he’d have known what was coming

Rehman came on stage and said she wanted to carry out a “satiric test” to find out if Mullah Krekar was as strongly fundamentalist as some of his critics believe. When he approached her, she grabbed him and lifted him up in the air.

Krekar… became furious, grabbed the microphone and began speaking in Norwegian for the first time that evening. “… she has no right to carry or touch me… ” Krekar said, and promised to lodge a complaint via his lawyer. Rehman… told newspaper VG she also wanted to show that if she could lift him, he could hardly be a danger to national security. [Link]

Well, ain’t this some fabulous reporting from the New York Post (Thanks, Nina):

If you were in Manhattan yesterday, you might have thought an enemy force had taken over the island and severed the East Side from the West.

The invaders were not al Qaeda, but the Pakistani Parade and Festival, which stormed Madison Avenue from 23rd to 41st streets; the Daytop Village Street Festival on Madison from 42nd to 57th; and the Church of the Good Shepherd street fair on Third Avenue from 23rd to 34th.

The occupying armies ate up 45 blocks in the city’s heart from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., plus time before and after to set up and take down.

I’m consumed by a wrath which makes me want to kick something. An enemy force? A festival which STORMED Madison Ave? Are you kidding me?

This little bit of ignorant commentary is all yours thanks to a Real Estate/Opinion writer named Steve Cuozzo. The title he chose for his piece is awesome:

SLEAZY, STINKY, CHINTZY STREET FESTS ARE MORE FOUL THAN ‘FAIR’

Granted, Cuozzo was referring to three different events while frothing-at-the-ass, but to mindlessly lump in another culture’s Independence Day with a mere street festival wasn’t very bright, considering the purpose of the lumping. Celebrating Pakistani Independence is sleazy, stinky and chintzy? Foul? I’ll tell you what’s foul: sloppy writing, ignorant thinking and pure disrespect.

The reason that blogs are so relevant is that you ALWAYS have a woman (or man) on the scene.  In this instance SM reader and frequent commenter, Maitri is at what is soon to be ground zero for potentially the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. in decades (although hopefully she is fleeing as I write this).  Some believe that the entire city of New Orleans may be destroyed on Monday.  Now personally, I don't usually believe in weather.  I don't even check the weather in the morning before I leave my apartment.  I will break-up with a girl if I catch her watching the Weather Channel.  I have long believed that "weather" is a hoax pushed on us by the umbrella and sun-block lobbies.  This one looks like it may be the real deal though.  Maitri breaks it down for us:

Update 3: A gloomy prognosis still. Even Bob Breck isn't feeling the hurricane mojo, and that bodes badly for staying in a 130-year-old house. New Orleanians, board your homes and leave. August 27 21:02

Update 4: Up surveying all animated predictions of our impending local weather pattern. Landfall anon, i.e. tomorrow PM. Dinner in the Quarter last night (tomato, lettuce and Diet Coke with Shiraz chasers - anything the gastrointestinal tract can keep down) saw veteran residents discuss seriously the act, not just the thought, of getting out of here. Then again, there are the brave ones staying such as Mac and KFrye, who plans to "stand out on my balconey and shake my fists at the storm." Good plan - is the webcam all set up? Time for push-ups before hauling stuff to car; hey, the CPUs have got to go. August 28 6:57

Because of what seems to have been excellent planning, the state of Louisiana sent out the evacuation notice in plenty of time.  Really, it seems to have been superbly handled and this will hopefully prevent loss of life.  Get ready for shocking oil prices though.  25% of the U.S.'s refinery capacity is in the center of that green and red blob.  Also, I'm sure we will get to see congressman Bobby Jindal in action around his state.  

A moment of silence:

The Department of Defense announced today [Sat] the death of a soldier, who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Spc. Hatim S. Kathiria, 23, of Fort Worth, Texas, died on Aug. 22, 2005, in Baghdad, Iraq, where an enemy rocket impacted near his position. Kathiria was assigned to the 703rd Forward Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. [Link]

MSNBC has more:

A soldier who called Fort Worth home died in Iraq this week. Hatim Kathiria joined the U.S. Army just months after emigrating to the United States from India.

The 23-year-old had studied to be a software engineer, but work in that field was hard to come by. So, he joined the Army to earn citizenship more quickly and to make money to send to his family.

Kathiria was sent to Iraq in January, the same month he got married and received his U.S. citizenship. He was full of promise, and hoped to advance in the military while saving money for graduate school and preparing to help bring his family to the U.S

…Shortly before he died, Kathiria told his wife that he wanted his body sent back to India to be buried in his hometown. That will happen after a military service in Washington, D.C.

Here are this month’s fallen.

My mom, who works for a department store in the D.C. suburbs, asked me if I would be willing to write a post on SM about her co-worker Smita. My dad sent me an email:

You may want to post this on “Sepia Mutiny” i.e. if this type of things are accepted per your protocols……

Smita’s husband (whose name is Abhi) will die within about two months unless he gets a bone marrow match. The story is particularly sad. My mom told me that the night before their wedding they received a call from the doctor for Abhi, who wasn’t home at the time. Smita told the doctor she was his fiancé and that she would relay the message. The doctor told her Abhi was dying of Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. They went ahead and got married the next day. The two are desperately seeking a bone marrow match and have made this flyer (click on the picture) appealing for help. Many of you reading this post may end up at the annual NetIP conference in Atlanta next weekend to find a love match. If you do attend make it priority #1 to give just 5 drops of your blood for the database. Even if you can’t help save Abhi you might make a difference for someone else. Click the image below for the schedule at NetIP.

The Empire State Building is lit green and white this weekend in honor of Pakistan’s independence. Manhattan’s parade starts at 12:30 pm today and goes down Madison Ave. from 41st to 26th Sts.

The 23rd St. tower’s lighting is still on IST. Maybe it’s reactionary political commentary; maybe it’s a statement of solidarity; maybe, like vegetables and viceroys, it only morphs at the stroke of midnight.

Seen atop a NYC cab: ‘Hum vahan vyavsaya ke liye jaathe hain,’ ‘we go there for business’ (thanks, skk).

I love the non-translation. It’s like the out-joke in Lost in Translation when the enfant terrible director rants at length in Japanese:

Ms. Kawasaki: He want you to turn and look in camera. Okay?
Bob (Bill Murray): Is that all he said? [Link]

On the other hand, they skipped the obvious alliteration: ‘Don’t dilly-dally, Delhi daily.’

Q: So how does a terrorist make money these days to fund his activities? 

A: Porn.  BBC News reports (thanks for the tip Srinath):

Rebels in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura are making pornographic films to raise money for their separatist campaign, officials say.

The information has come from surrendered guerrillas of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), according to police.

They say the rebels are forcing captured tribal women, and some men, to take part in the films.

The films are then dubbed to be sold in India and neighbouring countries.

Come on.  It’s one thing if porn is between “willing” participants, but to force helpless tribal people into it, and then dubbing over their voices is just sick!

“We get a lot more money , much above our normal rates, to process these films and deliver a sleek final product.

“We know the insurgents are behind these films. When we process their raw stock, we can see boys standing around with automatic rifles and revolvers pulling in girls but we are supposed to cut all that out and just concentrate on the sex,” the owner said.

“It is very good money and we don’t think it is right to question the insurgents anyway,” he said.

Check out D’Arcy, a Brit indie pop group with an ’80s fashion fixation (obligatory M.I.A. reference via AiM):

[The band was] founded three years ago by Ashish Dharsi, the band’s vocalist and rhythm guitarist, and Tristan Evans, who plays lead guitar… “When I started as a solo singer songwriter a friend was designing a flyer and wrote my name on it as D’Arcy instead of Dharsi thinking that’s how it was spelt. I liked it and we have stuck with it and it’s attracting a lot of support, particularly from our Irish fans.” [Link]

Well, of course that’s what you get when you pronounce your pukka desi name in that posh Brit accent Ashish makes a much more interesting Dharsi than Martin Henderson.

Listen here (MP3).

Since flawless scores on the SAT are no biggie ‘round this blog— btw, you all make me sick with your disgusting perfection— I thought I’d give you a REAL test to tussle with…

How MUTINOUS are YOU?

Erstwhile guest blogger Amardeep once crafted something similar to have us all put up or shut up regarding our mastery of brown music. I had a blast with the good Professor’s exam, so much so that fellow Mutineer Manish accused me of cheating. Hater. ;)

No need to cheat on my little timesuck; obviously all of your Reading Comp skills are stellar if you made 800s back in high school. This quiz covers information from posts written in the last week. Have at it, SM-heads. And if you like it, I might do it to you again. :D

There is at least one group (above all others) that values the comparative “calm” that has recently settled over the LOC in Kashmir, as India/Pakistan relations have thawed.  The mighty Markhor.  The Independent reports:

The ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir has produced an unexpected beneficiary - the world’s largest goat.

The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to be extinct in Indian-held Kashmir. But a recent joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds - 155 goats - thriving near the Line of Control.

As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian side, but by 1997 they had been driven to near extinction. The main cause was the conflict.

The Indian Express goes into more detail:

”It is really encouraging that we still have a sizeable Markhor population here. The present peace situation is conducive for wildlife. Regular cross-border firing and shelling was a serious threat. But the habitation was improving even before the ceasefire was announced in late 2003. We declared protected areas and were hopeful that the Markhor population would improve,” J&K Chief Wildlife Warden CM Seth told The Indian Express.

J&K Principal Chief Conservator of Forests SD Swatantra also lauded the Army for its role.

”Army personnel have been sensitive to the environmental concerns. Border thaw during the last two years has helped the animals a lot. Earlier, constant presence of the troops minimised poaching and human interference. Now in the absence of conflict, the habitat is improving fast,” he said.

What a noble animal.  A part of me has always wished that humans too had horns.  A lot of petty arguments could be settled by simply locking horns for a few moments…or impalement.  Plus girls would immediately know that you were packing.

A pariah agiary is rushing new pledges in Bombay (via Arzan):

On Khordad Sal, Prophet Zarathustra’s birthday, a group of Parsis quietly inaugurated a new ”universal agiary” or Fire Temple in a Colaba apartment. It was for the first time in the community’s history a temple was thrown open to non-Parsis. Almost a hundred people, both Parsis and non-Parsis, turned up for the agiary’s jashan and the humbandagi—traditional prayers recited strictly for and by Parsis. And supporting the move were script writer Sooni Taraporevala and Smita Godrej Crishna, sister of industrialist Jamshyd Godrej…

The prophet encouraged conversion, but Parsi women who marry outside the fold are pariahs, debarred from fire temples, from converting their families. But dwindling numbers—the census recorded 69,601 at last count—have prompted progressive Parsis to adopt a more practical approach…

Already, half a dozen Parsi priests have started offering clandestine ritual services at Navjots, marriages and funerals for a sizeable number of ostracised clients. Now the Wadias hope the new agiary will voice the unspoken aspirations of 40 per cent of Parsis who married outside the clan. [Link]

The Parsi religion seems to be missing the key meme of those which spread widely, a liberal conversion process. The elders are displeased:

He explains that an agiary can only be consecrated by the highest echelons of the clergy, after three weeks of rituals. ”Needless to say, a group of renegade priests officiating in a cult movement certainly don’t qualify.” [Link]

Former McKinsey chief Rajat Gupta interviews the man in the perenially blue turban in the McKinsey Quarterly (registration required). I bet he pronounces the name right. It’s two free-marketers talking to each other, the benefit of having an economist occupying 7 Race Course Road.

Singh says his top priority isn’t high tech or special export zones, it’s electrifying villages. He’s talking about the basic heavy lifting of a long-delayed national bootstrap:

We have, for the next four to five years, a very ambitious plan to expand… the availability of electricity to all of our villages…

When I look at countries like South Korea, all children who are of secondary-school-going age are in school; our children drop out even before they complete primary school… we are making, for the first time, the most determined effort to ensure that all our children… in the next four or five years have the benefit of minimum primary schooling.

Beyond upgrading airports, his administration is also spending on ports and railroads:

We are working with the Japanese government to draw up a program in which the freight corridors between Mumbai-Delhi, Mumbai-Chennai, and Delhi-Kolkata can be modernized. Our estimate is that that will cost about 25 thousand crore of rupees [$5.7 billion], and that’s our high priority as far as the railway system is concerned… We also are now in the process of modernizing our seaports.

The Indian government’s policy naming schemes are an odd hangover cocktail of faceless socialist, stymied bureaucrat and shudh Hindi or Sanskrit:

The Common Minimum Program, which is the benchmark for us to assess where we want to go, talks about the navratnas. These navratnas are companies essentially in the oil sectors, the power sectors, which are doing really well…

Being a Sepia Mutiny blogger there is one thing I feel guilty about.  With this post I am going to try and absolve myself of some of that guilt.  It pertains to our blog roll.  You know, that list of blogs we have links to in the right hand column of our page.  Many of you who are bloggers ask us all the time to add your site to our roll.  Our policy is explained in our FAQ:

Q: Can you please add my blog to the sidebar?

A: Send us your Web address, and we’ll take a look. We add the blogs we love, are addicted to and read daily. 

We honestly aren’t trying to be blog snobs, it’s just that we feel in order that our readers take us seriously we only include blogs that at least one of us regularly reads and can personally vouch for.  It’s like the mob.  If we vouch for a site that we really don’t know, then we leave ourselves open to being shot by our co-bloggers.  It’s all very Donnie-Brascoesque here in mutinous North Dakota.  The best way I find new blogs is when one of you leave a very interesting comment and I click on the link to your name.

I just wanted to give a shot out to some blogs that I am starting to read, and others that belong to dedicated SM tipsters/commenters that may have some promise.

(1) Chocolate & Gold Coins, Michael Higgins- Any blog with the word “chocolate” in the name is a winner.  He also sends us good tips.

(2) Punjabi Boy- Really, need I say more?

(3) Currylingus- I think that is my favorite blog name EVER.  Neha makes me laugh any time I visit her site.  And she’s cute.

Fresh bagels, Starbucks™ coffee, foot massages…??? Turbanhead must’ve had the all-access pass to the North Dakota headquarters. All I see are grey socks and an ant farm. And all I got were a gaddawful hangover and some suspicious bruising.

I am truly honored by the invite to blog. It’s my first time, so please be gentle.

Since fashion-lovers responded so warmly to my sartorially-obsessed MIA review, I thought I’d start things off with the news that Ashish Soni is presenting a collection at New York Fashion Week next month. The first Indian to be invited to do so.

Soni, like all designers, needs money to buy fabric, stitch up samples and hire those lissome young things to stalk a runway. Our man in Delhi, however, seems a bit more enterprising than most when it comes to getting his show on the road:

At an informal press briefing today, Soni announced that his show in New York would be jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Textiles, the Ministry of Tourism and Air-India. And what’s more, all this, as part of the Incredible India campaign. The total sponsorship package would amount to ‘‘around $200,000’’, informed the designer.

We haven’t tapped the huge potential that we hold in the field of textiles,’’ explained Tourism Minister Renuka Chowdhury at the press briefing. ‘‘So when Ashish approached us with his blueprint which would help showcase Indian textiles abroad, we decided to make him an ambassador for the Incredible India campaign,’’ she said.

Exactly how would this help tourism? ‘‘Well, the huge international media presence will ensure that the world gets to see a younger, contemporary and more vibrant side to India,’’ she reasoned. [link]

Last night we had a MOAP (Mother of all Parties) at our North Dakota world headquarters.  We had just finished hazing the heck out of the newest blogger at SM.  After she chugged the 10 beers laid out before her and received two taps with the ceremonial paddle (courtesy of me ), Cicatrix was given a set of keys to “the bunker.”  Also, just a fair warning.  Anyone that calls her “aunty” will be banned.  Please join me in welcoming her [clap clap clap].

Almost two weeks ago, fellow Mutineer Abhi wrote

Really, what kind of a soulless bastard do you have to be to kill someone while they are praying?

when he posted about the tragic murder of Houston-resident Akhil Chopra, which took place on August 11.

What kind of a bastard? Perhaps, this kind? (Thanks, RC.)

This is Howard Dale Bellamy, aka “Peanut”. As in, it takes testicles the size of peanuts to murder a man who is peacefully communing with nature, with his eyes closed. Chopra meditated daily during his lunch break in the park where he was gunned down.

True to his stellar character, Bellamy is not cooperating with authorities. “Peanut“‘s luck ran out when someone else who was using Chopra’s purloined credit card was caught; that person promptly snitched while being interrogated. Six other people who are linked to the robbery-turned-murder are also in custody, under fraud charges.

Houston police, which had earlier announced a award of $10,000 (about Rs 4.5 lakhs) for tip offs leading to Bellamy’s arrest, would soon initiate trial against him for capital murder. If convicted, he might get a death penalty as Texas has provision for this. [link]

The one-man sound bite missile named Rushdie aims His cross-Atlantic test firing at Time and the Times (thanks, Sapna and Karthik):

There’s a line about Klingons on the very first page of Shalimar. Aren’t you worried that a pop reference like that will date the book?

… A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.

Speaking of Klingons, wasn’t your wife… on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise?

Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best. [Link]

Now that Lakshmi’s been on Star Trek, our nerdy readers have official permission to idolize. I love the uncharacteristically autistic, Trekkie honesty here (whereas in the Times Rushdie gives wuvvy-dovey, team player quotes). His wife was on TV, and it was just ‘eh’? Something tells me he’s going to learn about ‘withholding’ tonight, and I don’t mean taxes

The Times delves into his early career, which is always where the critical lessons of history are found — not how a success expands, but how it struggled from obscurity in the first place:

He was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers… and Ian with his first collections of short stories… and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”

His debut, Grimus, was both a critical and commercial failure and despite the huge and continued success of Midnight’s Children, all the more remarkable for it being only his second novel, Rushdie could not forgive the casual dismissiveness of those first reviews… he admits that if he sees people reading it, his instinct is to hide behind the furniture. “… it embarrasses me.” [Link]

Michael H. of Chocolate and Gold Coins points us towards an interesting little blurb on Ananova about brown weddings; apparently, people in India and people in Amreeka have totally opposite problems. I mean, the last time I was at this popular venue for desi receptions, I was a mere speck among 800 other guests. The Mother of The Groom, a former classmate of my Mom’s, bemoaned the fact that she had to cut people from her invite list…to get it down to 800. Maybe she should’ve thrown her bash in INDIA:

An Indian firm which rents out wedding guests says business is booming.

The Best Guests Centre, at Jodhpur in Rajasthan, is looking to expand across the state.

The company caters for families who fear they will fall short of guests at weddings.

Fake guests can be attired in your choice of either desi or “smart” vestern clothes, they also dance and use the right salad fork. The most crucial bit of preparation is probably the briefing these employees receive on the story behind the wedding, so that they don’t botch the illusion of perfect guest-ness.

Why on earth is this even necessary?

He told The Statesman: “The breaking up of joint families and lack of affection among relatives also creates a demand for paid guests.

“Such families need to hire guests to make up for the fewer number of relatives available for attending the marriage.”

Are you kidding me? Problems getting desis to show up for free food and gossip fodder? This HAS to be a joke. Right?

When asked, “Paper or Plastic?” how do YOU answer?

Are you blissfully indifferent to the ramifications of your choice? Angst-ridden because neither option is perfect? Filled with guilt because you are an Alum from the University of California at Santa Cruz or Davis, and thus, you should know better?

While you’re sorting all that out, I’m filling my much-adored Boat and Tote, sans guilt, confusion or consternation. It turns out that if I ever visit Mumbai, I might have to schlep it THERE, too.

The government in the western Indian state of Maharashtra has banned the sale and use of plastic bags.

“Mumbai and various other areas have suffered from the misuse of plastic bags,” state chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said in Mumbai. [BBC]

Perhaps you are asking yourself, “What misuse?” No, you pervs. Not that kind.

“These tend to choke the drainage and sewage systems.” [BBC]

Who’s brilliant enough to guess where I’m going with this?

Mr Deshmukh said plastic bags had added to the problems of the recent floods across the state, which claimed more than 1,000 lives. [BBC]

Exactly. w00t smart environmental choices! :D

I am a Deist.  That means that I believe in God whole-heartedly but reject all religious dogma.  My beliefs are a combination of certain elements from Hinduism, Sufism, and Buddhism and I try to pray and meditate daily and abide by a belief in karma.  During the day I am a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life.  I study the oldest life on Earth (dating back to ~4 billion years) in order to unlock the secrets of life, how it began, and how it evolved until the present.  I am an example of how one can embrace God and still believe at the same time that scientific explanations should always trump religious ones.

Over the last two days Deepak Chopra has been making arguments that basically support “Intelligent Design” on the liberal Huffington Post blog (which is an excellent website).  Such an embarrassing event can occur when you have too many bloggers in one space and can’t keep track of it all.  I am not a Deepak Chopra reader.  I find his writings too…elementary.  I don’t begrudge anyone that does enjoy his writing though.  We all have different tastes is all.  Chopra however has a lot of people that listen to him and take his words as “gospel.”  That is why I was pained greatly to read his post.  Here are some “scientific questions” he poses in order to demonstrate an openness to divine intervention:

1. How does nature take creative leaps? In the fossil record there are repeated gaps that no “missing link” can fill.

Wrong.  It is the rock record that is incomplete.  Tectonic activity is continually resurfacing the Earth and destroying the rocks containing fossils.  Nature does not take “creative leaps.”  The biggest such “leap” occurred around 535 Ma at the Cambrian boundary and over the last 40+ years the “gap” has been slowly filled in with solid fossil evidence showing gradual evolution.

2. If mutations are random, why does the fossil record demonstrate so many positive mutations — those that lead to new species — and so few negative ones?

Because organisms with negative mutations die out sooner making their preservation potential less.  Only a tiny fraction of dead life survives the fossilization process without being destroyed.  That’s why you don’t find dinosaur bones in your backyard.

Plan, the Children’s aid organization, issued a report with the following sobering statistics (Thanks, Al Mujahid):

• Nearly half of Asia’s 1.3bn children live in poverty, denied basic needs, says a new report.
• India has the largest number of poor children in Asia, with 80% of its 400m young severely deprived, it says.
• 600m Asian children under the age of 18 lack access to either food, safe drinking water, health or shelter.
• Of those, 350m were described as "absolutely poor", meaning they do not have access to two or more of a child’s essential necessities.
[BBC]

Though Africa (especially lately) is the continent many of us associate with poverty and desperation, Asia has double the number of “severely deprived” children.  I’m ashamed of my ignorance of this fact.  It’s so easy to focus on Bangalore and Gurgaon, on starbucks-esque “third places”, on “desirable” India.  I heard so much about India’s fabulous new middle class, I forgot that

Despite high growth rates in countries like India and China, millions of families were being left behind, according to the report.

Among the causes, the report said, were the pressure of rapid population growth on scarce resources, lack of access to education, health care, clean water or sanitation, caste discrimination, and weak governance and corruption.[BBC]

Around half of India’s children who are age five or younger are malnourished; additionally, India has more children working than any other country. Sixty percent of India’s youngest citizens are “absolutely poor”.  In contrast, only 13 million or China’s 380 million children are considered “deprived”.

China, the report said, had made "great strides in poverty reduction in recent years".[BBC]

What’s being done?

Child aid organisation, Plan, author of the report, has pledged to spend $1bn on poverty reduction in 12 Asian countries over the next decade.

It also wants rich nations to reduce subsidies given to their own farmers and to cancel Third World debt. [BBC]

Sigh.

Remember that ongoing battle between Sikh employees and the NY Metropolitan Transport Authority [see 1,2 ]?  Basically the MTA wanted Sikhs to wear a logo on their turban identifying them as MTA employees so that no passenger would think the train/bus was being highjacked.  Anyways, I thought of that story when I saw this on the DNSI blog:

IKEA’s new Edmonton branch contacted TheHijabShop.com to design and produce a ‘hijab’ - a Muslim headscarf - that would fit in with their current uniform.

When IKEA first approached TheHijabShop.com, their excited team was impressed that an internationally-acclaimed company like IKEA was making so much effort to accommodate Muslims in its workforce.

The challenge for the team was to create a hijab that had the IKEA branding; that was easy to put on without the need for pins - so avoiding any health and safety hazards; and that was something employees would feel comfortable wearing in a working environment, whether in the showroom or in the warehouse. It also had to be compact, without excess material flowing around, and meanwhile sticking to Islamic requirements. [Link]

Obviously I don’t see any similarity between the motivations of the NY MTA and that of IKEA.  I mean nobody could be worried about terrorism at IKEA…right?  No, I just think this is a clever marketing ploy.  IKEA has stores in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.  I wonder if the hijabs will be for employess worldwide or only in those countries.  Are there other companies that make personalized “religious clothing” for their employees that anyone knows about?  I bet you Abercrummy & Fitch will design some stylish hijabs for their employees next season.  Not.

Between the Ayn Rand discussion Manish’s post kicked off a few days ago and the fisking of Dr. Patnaik cited on IndianEconomy.org, I figured I oughta finally commit to a post that’s been rattling in my head for a few months - the startling parallels between the fictional, dystopian economic world Ayn Rand outlined in Atlas Shrugged and real life Indian history.

Now although I’m one of those Desi dudes who cites Atlas Shrugged as an all-time favorite, I’m far from a Randroid. I readily recognize that getting too literal runs headlong into a more, uh, empirical assessment of the human condition. But, I’m also more than willing to give Rand credit - especially writing in the 1940s and 1950s - for being more right than wrong about some of the biggest issues of the day. Doubly so because, given the intellectual zeitgeist of the time, Rand was decidedly a contrarian. The example of the License Raj - India’s economic regime “progressively” enacted a scant few years after Atlas Shrugged was published (1957), and to some degree of Intellectual fanfare, gives us the latest, almost depressing example of how Indian fact can be more extreme than Western fiction.

In the novel, a key milestone as the world plummets into dysfunction and chaos is the passage of the innocuously titled Directive 10-289 by the government. It opens with a rather lofty goal -

“In the name of the general welfare to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability…

Ananthan recently penned this fascinating post on the Tamil Tigers’ cemeteries (see photos):

The LTTE is a secular organization but up until the early 90s it seems that dead cadres… were all cremated according to Hindu practice. In the early 90s this was changed to burial…

… the use of these graveyards, similar in style to those used by militaries in the west, helps to confer legitimacy to the LTTE. The Tigers are often dismissed or denounced as unthinking, purposeless terrorists; established memorials help to combat that view… Cremation doesn’t leave any tangible, visible evidence of those who have passed, burial does…

The Maaveerar are celebrated on November 27th, officially remembered as the day in which the first Tiger died… in Sri Lanka the ceremonies take place in the Tuillum Illam. [LTTE Leader] Prabhakaran’s yearly speech is delivered and broadcast through loudspeakers in all Tuillum Illam.

… the practice of burial is rationalized with the opposing beliefs of Hinduism…

Read the whole thing.

The daughter of a big-time Silicon Valley VC wed last weekend. In these troubled times, it warms my heart to see that the ultra-wealthy are still meeting and mating over that shared hobby called Indophilia

… each had traveled to India, Ms. Kramlich to ride horses across the desert in Rajasthan and Dr. Bowie to Dharmsala, “to meet the Dalai Lama…” [Link]

Wealthy Westerners… a dusty desert… heaving bodices… it’s The Far Pavilions! For that level of Indophilia, their kids better be wearing turbans. I’m thinkin’ Poon-jab as the child of Daddy Warbucks.

As Ms. Kramlich’s father doubtless has access to a private jet, it may be the last time she and her husband find themselves on horseback out of necessity  The wedding writeup is a peek into the lifestyle of Sand Hill Brahmins:

In 2001 she had abandoned a career in business and product development with start-up technology companies to study acting… They were married in typical California wine-country style on Aug. 13. Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court, a friend of the bride’s family, led the ceremony under a canopy of oaks and a Wedgwood-blue sky on the grounds of the 21-acre Oakville, Calif., weekend house and vineyard owned by the bride’s father, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and her stepmother, Pamela Kramlich, a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The bride looked serene in a form-fitting creamy-white Vera Wang gown as a string quartet, tucked into the greenery, played sweetly. A reception and sit-down dinner for 234 guests followed on the grassy lawns surrounding the votive-lit family pool.

After the couple’s honeymoon, at an eco-resort in Nicaragua, that is part nature preserve and part reforestation project, the bride and the bridegroom, who has no pets of his own, will return to their new horse farm in the Oakland Hills of California with her animal entourage: three Arabian horses and one very happy and healthy poodle. [Link]

All joking aside, congratulations to the newlyweds.

That *$ siren with wavy hair whom you’re ogling is Sarita Choudhury:

British actress Sarita Choudhury has been signed up for a role in M. Night Shyamalan’s next big film Lady in the Water… M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film tells the story of a superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a sea nymph in the building’s pool…

Sarita Choudhury was born in London and spent her early years in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also lived in Mexico for a while…

In a previous interview, she put her variety of roles down to lack of opportunities for Indian actors. “Left to myself I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters,” she said. She is currently working in three other films. [Link]

Wonder if one of those roles is a terrorist.

Over the Mountains is in post-production and will be the first to see a release. It is about a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City who experiences a crisis of conscience. Indocumentados is currently in production, while work on For Real has not yet started. [Link]

Ding ding ding!

When I saw Shyamalan’s Praying With Anger, a student film that was a prototype for the American Desi/American Chai/ABCD wave, I’d never have guessed what would transpire. Over a decade later, Shyamalan tips his lid to one of the original 2nd gen actresses from his throne room in mainstream American film.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

A de Menezes update: police and military radios both were on different frequencies and apparently didn’t work underground. It’s shades of 9/11.

Police marksmen and army surveillance teams following Jean Charles de Menezes onto a Tube train could not receive orders in the vital moments before he was shot dead because their radios did not work underground… The undercover officers sitting alongside Mr de Menezes are understood to have decided he was not a threat, but they could not get this message back to Gold Command at the Yard nor relay it to the marksmen.

As the firearms officers ran into the station they are believed to have been out of touch with everyone else involved in the operation. It has been disclosed that the two groups involved — one from Scotland Yard and the other from the Army — were using different radio networks as they trailed the innocent electrician from his home on July 22. Officers on the train are understood to have decided that from the way Mr de Menezes was dressed, and that he was not carrying a bag, he was not about to blow himself up. [Link]

Active suspects should never have been let onto the tube in the first place:

One of the troops who accompanied the Yard marksmen on to the tube also reportedly told military chiefs that the armed police arrived far too late and should have intercepted their target outside Stockwell Underground station, in South London. [Link]

Over a decade ago, I walked up and down the aisles of the local Barnes and Noble because of an all-consuming curiosity which was ignited by some now-forgotten book review. (I would later work at that very BN during my senior year of college, in case you are unbelievably bored). I had picked up a torch for brown-ish fiction which burns just as brightly today as it did when I was a teenager. I found my quarry, picked it up very carefully and took it to the cash-wrap, where the clerk, on second thought, double-bagged it.

I went home and didn’t emerge from my room for two days; I waved away meals, plugged my ears to my father’s indignant screams about how I was missing class, I think I forgot to bathe, who knows. I couldn’t leave this tome, whose protagonist shared MY nickname. Upon reflection, I think I understand why you Potter-heads do what you do…oh, wait. I don’t. ;)

Vikram Seth’s “Suitable Boy” changed my life. It altered my expectations for literature, my perceptions of my parents’ histories, my conception of myself and what I wanted out of my future. Suddenly, I had a thousand things to ask my delighted father, about newly-free India in the 1950s. I looked at my mother, a freedom baby who was born right after India gained her independence with a new affection and appreciation; if Aparna were alive, she’d be my Mother’s age. I regarded all the other books on my shelves with a supercilious disdain.

I’ve read SB three-and-a-half times. It never left my bedside table; it’s been there for over a decade. My most cherished ritual involved briefly immersing myself in it before falling asleep every night; as soon as I finished the entire tome, I’d gingerly turn the book over and start it again the next night. Suddenly, I’m sad that my treasured font of comfort is dusty and untouched.

Uttar Pradesh has a plan to combat rising crime in the state.  It has decided to deputize some unlikely “lawmen.”  Radio Australia reports:

A pride of lions is to be unleashed in India’s Uttar Pradesh state to help combat crime.

But environmentalists fear the lions might be the ones needing help in the face of sharp-shooting bandits blamed by police for 4,000 abductions and 180 murders in the region over the last five years.

Mohammed Hasan, Uttar Pradesh chief wildlife warden in the state capital, Lucknow, says zoos have already been contacted to assist with the plan.

I am not sure about this.  Lions are known for their excessive brutality during arrests.  That is why they were banished from the NYPD several years back.

A previous attempt to establish a sanctuary in the region of Chandraprabha, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, initially appeared to succeed.

The lion population grew from three to 11 animals, but then the cats disappeared, presumably shot or poisoned.

Nobody likes to hear about a 187 on an undercover cat.  This would be a great way to deal with the Meth problem in rural U.S. states as well.

Okay.  This one is for you dozen tipsters who are jonesing for our take on this article about “”love-cum-arranged,” marriages that appears in today’s NYTimes. 

Yawn.  Haven’t I read this article like a dozen times before?  It’s always half of an article where they drum up the angle that they wanted to write in the first place instead of doing any real reporting. 

These young people may have come of age in an America of “Moonstruck” and “Dawson’s Creek,” but in many cases they have not completely accepted the Western model of romantic attachment. Indeed, some of the impetus for assisted marriage is coming from young people themselves - men and women who have delayed marriage into their late 20’s and early 30’s, said Ayesha Hakki, the editor of Bibi, a South Asian bridal and fashion magazine based in New Jersey.

“That has been the most remarkable trend,” Ms. Hakki said, citing the example of a male acquaintance, who, after dating on his own, turned to his parents for guidance.

As Madhulika Khandelwal, a historian who has studied Indians here, said, “Young people don’t want to make individual decisions alone.”

[cough]-bullshit-[cough].  It’s not that young people don’t want to make “individual decisions alone” and have decided that their parent’s “guidance” is best.  No.  It’s that they are giving up and no longer want to fight “the system.”  Ladies in their late twenties can only pursue self-absorbed or commitment-phobic guys (and there is nothing wrong with being commitment phobic ) for so long before they throw in the towel and opt for “traditional,” by default.  Likewise, guys are forced to deal with women who are too neurotic to date mostly because their parents are breathing down their necks to get married.  We (Indians raised in this country) turn to our families for the exact same reason as someone of another culture would turn to their’s, except for the fact that there is more pressure to turn to them. This article and others like it always seem to dodge the truth in order to accentuate the exotic “embrace” of our culture.  What the article describes is more than just being set up on a “blind date,” which it compares it to.  Lots of cultures practice the art of the blind date, whether through family or friends, and it isn’t particularly newsworthy.  When journalists single out Indians they do so with the implication that the family’s fingerprints are all over the entire courtship process.  If that is the case then explaining it away as a willing “return to tradition” makes my eyes roll.  Here is some more bullshit:

The embrace of more traditional habits is apparent in other ways. Weddings are often elaborate and last three or four days. Families of the betrothed often still consult a Hindu astrologer who schedules wedding ceremonies according to the stars. When Anamika Tavathia, 24, was engaged to a young Indian she met in college, his family visited hers to propose on his behalf and the priest determined they should marry on June 26 of this year between 10:30 and 11 a.m.

This fall is expected to be an unusually busy wedding season in Indian communities, because many couples postponed weddings last year when many days were deemed inauspicious.

Amit Varma, writing at promising new The Indian Economy blog, points to a much needed takedown of an anti-market, left-wing OpEd by a Dr. Utsa Patnaik.   As with many ideas of this sort, Dr. Patnaik starts with a rather broad, well-intentioned need / desire to save the poor -

THE ARGUMENTS for a universal, not targeted, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as well as for a universal Public Distribution System (PDS) are far stronger than most people realise. Rural India is in deep and continuing distress.

National Employment Gaurantee?   Universal Public Distribution?  Eek.  Someone’s been lifting lines from Orwell, Marx, and Rand .  The fisking, authored by Aadisht Khanna, summarizes Dr Patnaik’s argument thusly -

* Rural India is facing an employment crisis
* This is because of the economic policies pursued in the past fifteen years.
* The proof of this is that people are eating much less grain.
* The assertion that people are eating less grain is borne out by data from the National Sample Survey, which measures consumption and expenditure across India.

Aadisht’s response?   An important lesson in economics & statistics - not all products rise monotonically in consumption or production given increasing incomes & productivity -

 There is a decline in rice and wheat consumption, and also in the consumption of dal… But at the same time, the consumption of other stuff has risen- milk, vegetables of all sorts, meat of all sorts (though fish has shown the most dramatic rise), and most notably eggs- the consumption of those has doubled.

And this suggests something that you would expect a Professor of Economics to know- the consumption pattern looks suspiciously like that of Giffen goods.

… What’s the classical example of Giffen goods used in economics textbooks? That when your income rises, you buy less bread and more meat- exactly what we see happening in rural India from 1988 to 2000.

Then again, I suppose that if your goal is to make the case for a “new deal for the rural poor” replete with a messianic role for left-wing econ professors, then perhaps statistical anomalies like Giffen goods are a bit of a godsend.  Too bad for the poor - the bureaucracy and tax burden will have to grow until they go back to the past & eat more dal.

A wee bit of good news:

Police in Bangladesh have arrested a prominent Islamic leader in connection with last week’s wave of bombings.

Moulana Fariduddin Masud, a senior member of the Jamaate Ulamaye Islam group, was detained at the main airport in the capital, Dhaka. [BBC]

Masud was on his way to Dubai when he was busted and dragged off his flight. Well, he probably wasn’t dragged, but you get the picture.

Last Wednesday’s mass-bombing stole two lives, including that of a little boy who was killed when he picked up one of the small, home-made explosives. Over 100 people were injured by the 400 bombs which went off around government buildings in Bangladesh last week.

More raids are happening to find others who may be responsible. One sought-after suspect is Abdur Rahman; he lead the banned fundamentalist group (Jamatul Mujahideen) that left leaflets around bombing sites, taking credit for the blasts. Unfortunately, authorities think Rahman may have succeeded where Masud failed— he has probably already fled Bangladesh. Interpol has been alerted.

Sigh. I’ll close by focusing on the positive, yes? At least they caught SOMEONE:

Moulana Masud was later taken into the custody of the elite anti-crime force, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), for interrogation.

Little is known about him but police said he was among 20 people wanted in connection with the attacks. [BBC]

Interrogate away. I’m haunted by the horrifying possibility that last week was just a “dry run”.

Conflicting reports suggest that NASA may offer an astronaut slot to an Indian citizen in one of the next selection cycles.  The Telegraph reports that an offer is imminent:

After Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an Indian national could soon hitch a ride aboard a US space shuttle. An announcement could be made after the Joint Working Group on Civil Space Co-operation meets in Washington next month.

“The US offered to include an Indian astronaut in its training modules and later on a flight. So, it is their invitation rather than our request,” a source at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said.

“That’s why we cannot say much except that Discovery’s smooth landing means it could happen sooner than expected. We will begin working on the details after the next meeting of the joint working group.”

vs.

To a question on an Indian astronaut being trained by NASA, he [Chairman G Madhavan Nair of ISRO] said ISRO had not received any such proposal. [Link]

The India Daily seems to corroborate though, with an actual attributable source:

In a clear reflection of the newfound bonhomie, Robert Blake, Deputy Chief of US Mission in India, told reporters in Chennai that India’s moon mission would have active participation of the US.

“We wanted to do more in the area of space exploration, space navigation, satellite navigation and launch. We want to launch two US instruments on the “Chandrayan” (moon mission). Finally we agreed to include an India astronaut in the US astronaut programme,” Blake said.

India plans to send an unmanned mission to the moon by 2008, in what is seen as an effort to showcase the country’s scientific capabilities. The mission has been named as ”Chandrayan Pratham” (First Journey to the Moon).”

Now I’m a little skeptical.  Deputy State Department officials don’t usually have sway with NASA.  It’s true that foreign astronauts do fly with NASA (including an Israeli and a Japanese citizen on the last two missions), but in recent years they have almost all been from countries which have a stake in the International Space Station.  India is not one of those countries.  Israel isn’t either though.  Israel is however a strategic partner with whom we share a lot of technology.  Given that Bush is a big supporter of space exploration and a recent supporter of technology transfer with India, maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all.  My personal attitude (obviously for selfish reasons) is that there are plenty of good Indian American candidates already.  Hmmmm, maybe now would be a good time to apply for that dual-citizenship .  On the flip-side the Russians took up Rakesh Sharma over two decades ago.  It may be time for an Indian citizen to make the trip again.

[Hi folks, this is my last Sepia Mutiny post. It's been fun, but it was a one-month guestblogger gig all along (same deal with Turbanhead). I've really enjoyed playing in this sandbox, and doing comments gupshup w/people like Bong Breaker, Punjabi Boy, DesiDancer, Razib the Atheist, Al-Mujahid for Debauchery, etc. etc. Feel free to come play in my smaller, geekier box over here. Ciao, and I leave you with a short post on bioethics, just in case "Versions of the Ramayana" wasn't punk enough for you]

Surprisingly, though India is in some ways an even more religiously polarized place than the U.S., the question of the ethics of this kind of biotech (as well as the ethics of genetic cloning) has not become a bone of political contention. This is despite the fact that passages in Hindu scriptures like The Mahabharata clearly suggest that life begins at conception:

Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul -- the true Self (or atman) -- as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception.

The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in The Mahabharata, the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father's cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother's womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed. (link)

I’m unapologetically modernist. To me, history only runs forward, and yesterday is usually an embarrassing old version 1.0. If you saw my questionable fashion choices from years past, you’d hasten to agree.

Given my technobarbarian predilections, this NYT story extolling the virtues of housing Bangalore tech workers in former tobacco warehouses strikes me as nothing more than the romanticization of poverty:

In contrast to these unabashed clones of buildings in Palo Alto or San Jose is a 37-acre campus in the heart of the city whose granite- and terra cotta-adorned buildings are set among decades-old trees and painted in vibrant Indian shades of brick red and deep green. The buildings have names from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, while the rooms within are named after the ancient books of learning, the Vedas. Every morning the Indian flag is ceremonially hoisted on a central flagpole, an unusual practice for businesses here… most of the streets have been paved with local stone… walls made of hollow terra-cotta blocks, flat stone tables and acoustic-friendly ceilings that are fashioned out of earthen pots. The giant century-old chimney, ancient trees and even an old fire station have been left standing… [Link]

Crappy old clay buildings, unpaved streets, giving buildings names in local languages? In India that’s not called ‘environmentally friendly’ architecture. That’s called all architecture  The NYT’s spin feels to me like the wealthy patting the pre-industrial on the head. It’s a yearning you only get after industrializing:

… Galapagos Bar… reminded me a hell of a lot of a cement factory in India, with a dank pool taking up most of the space, stone walls with hand-lit candles mounted in odd places, not the least behind rows of expensive vodkas. The charms of the torture castle, the provincial, it’s the classic example of art defining itself as other. Even when other means pre-industrial… in developing countries this would not have been recognizable as a chi-chi place in the art sense, handmade is the order of the day and not as admired as standardized and mass-produced… [Link]

The renovating architect drew inspiration from The Fountainhead. Ironically, the illustrations on Ayn Rand’s popular edition covers are not about building for human scale at all. They’re soaring neo-Gothic works which draw inspiration from the spires of Soviet universities, albeit stripped of communist symbols. They’re Rockefeller Center. Skyscrapers move books, even when they contradict the book’s aesthetic

Mata Amritanandamayi, the world-famous “hugging saint” whose charitable trust runs schools and hospitals all over the world, is safe after being attacked yesterday by an unidentified assailant. The attempted stabbing occurred in the Kollam district of Kerala, where the spiritual leader is based.

Reports say her followers wrestled the attacker on to the ground before he could reach the stage where she was leading prayers for 18,000 people.[BBC]

Two of the disciples who rushed to protect their leader experienced minor injuries.

Mata Amritanandamayi, (“Mother of Absolute Bliss”) or “Amma” as she is sometimes called cautioned against revenge:

Ms Amritanandamayi said on Monday she wanted her followers to forgive the attacker.

“All those who are born will die one day. I am going ahead keeping this reality in mind,” she said.

“I will carry on. I will continue to give darshan to the devotees coming here to meet me. I don’t want my [followers] to create any problem for what had happened yesterday.”[BBC]

Hail Lucifer?

The Indian Express newspaper said the attacker may have been a follower who was expelled recently.[BBC]

The spiritual leader’s website had this statement:

August 21, 2005 - Latest News from Amritapuri

Amma is unharmed. She is giving Devi Bhava darshan now. Stranger with a hidden knife rushes to the stage during Amma’s bhajans. Devotees overpowered him and have handed him over to the police. None of today’s Devi Bhava programs were interrupted by this incident.

On IST as always, NYC’s India Day parade was held on August 21 this year. I couldn’t attend, but I hear one of our readers played the nauch girl on stage. Perhaps you’ll chime in with incriminating photos.

Like the Poe toaster, only sans macabre, some mystery soul always garlands the Gandhi statue in Union Square with fresh flowers:

For over 50 years since 1949, on the night marking the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious man-in-black has entered the cemetery where the master of the macabre lies buried, and, making his way through the dark shadows to Poe’s grave, he places a partial bottle of expensive French cognac and three blood-red roses there, presumably as tokens of admiration and in tribute to the great author. This ritual completed, he then slips away into the night as quietly and as mysteriously as he came…

The de Menezes case has turned murkier: the stakeout guys now blame the shooters for the mistake. The surveillance team noted that de Menezes did not look Ethiopian like their suspect. And the police say the undercover cops who trailed de Menezes onto the train would not have been there if they thought he was packing heat. So it’s still baffling why the shooters pulled the trigger.

… members of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into Stockwell underground station in London felt that he was not about to detonate a bomb, was not armed and was not acting suspiciously… The two teams have fallen out over the circumstances surrounding the incident, raising fresh questions about how the operation was handled. A police source said: ‘There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device…’

For the firearms officers involved in the death to avoid any legal action, they will have to state that they believed their lives and those of the passengers were in immediate danger. Such a view is unlikely to be supported by members of the surveillance unit. [Link]

When filling out your biodata, remember to replace ‘wheatish’ with ‘IC3’:

The first man who was supposed to identify the suspect admits that he was relieving himself behind a tree but saw enough of Mr de Menezes to tell commanders that he was an “IC1” — the description used for a white North European and nothing like Hussain Osman, the suspected Ethiopian-born bomb suspect awaiting extradition from Rome. [Link]

Thanks for the good times SM readers. It’s been fun, but you and I both knew this would be temporary. Go on, you’re still young, you’ll find someone who’ll treat you like I did. Please, no tears.

Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf are on the cover of the August-September 2005 issue of Audrey, the Asian-American women’s mag. My dream in life is to squeeze into the gap on the cover. Here’s the blurb:

‘Bollywood to Hollywood’: Indians & Indian Americans, like our cover girls Noureen DeWulf (left) and Navi Rawat, are poised to hit mainstream USA.

The story covers Shaista Usta, a Turkish and desi actress who starred in a recent Dev Anand movie, as well as the usual suspects (Gurinder Chadha, Gitesh Pandya). Rawat explains the numb3rs: looking unplaceably ethnic is far more useful in Hollywood than looking desi. On the other hand, Pandya says he’s happy that after 9/11, there are lots of roles for desis playing terrorists.

DeWulf talks about playing a Palestinian in West Bank Story, a film which played Sundance, and being of Indian Muslim origin. She’ll play ‘PooPoo’ with a desi accent in National Lampoon’s Pledge This. She’s also in American Dreamz, an upcoming movie with an intriguing cast: it includes John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog). Guess what she plays? No, really, take a wild guess.

Hollywood producers of the black comedy American Dreamz are reconsidering the script after the London attacks because it involves suicide bombers attempting to assassinate the American president. The film, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, features a group of Pakistani terrorists, who target a mentally frail president played by Quaid… The script has been written by Paul Weitz, who previously worked with Grant on the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. [Link]

Marcia Gay Harden plays the First Lady while the supporting cast finds room for the likes of Chris Klein, Richard Dreyfuss and Willem Dafoe. [Link]

Aghdashloo, the throaty-voiced Iranian-American GMILF who was so good in Sand and Fog, is also playing Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men 3:

… she’s been cast by Ratner and co. as Dr Kavita Rao. This is the woman who, in recent X-Lore, created the Hope serum, which tried to ‘cure’ a mutant of their powers. It obviously set up a huge ethical and moral dilemma among the mutant community, and didn’t go down well with Hank McCoy, or The Beast as he is perhaps better known (this role has been filled by Kelsey Grammer). [Link]

Playing six degrees of Johnny Lever, we find that Rawat and Aghdashloo were both in Sand and Fog, Rawat playing Aghdashloo’s Iranian daughter (and for that matter, Sir Krishna Kingsley playing the father). Now Aghdashloo is repaying the compliment.

And so the circle is complete.

Previous posts on Rawat: 1, 2, 3; and DeWulf.

Express India reports -

New Delhi, August 18: A teacher stabbed a pencil into the head of a four-year-old after she caught him sleeping. An incision had to be made to remove a piece of lead from the boy’s head.

…The incident occurred when class teacher Kalpana Kumari found Anas, a student of Prep I, napping in class. She snatched his pencil and hit him on the head.

This passage brings to mind Maoist Chinese justice where the family of the condemned is charged for the bullet used to execute him -

…The family of the boy alleged that Green Field Convent School did not even provide first aid. Anas, the victim, lives with his aunt as his parents are at Moradabad.

I hate to be the Celebrity Nazi, but this must not pass unremarked. We’ve noted the hackish tendencies of the Times of India web site before. Check out yesterday’s doozy (via Kush): the ToI’s photo implied that Britney Spears’ first husband was Jason Alexander, the rotund comedian who played George Costanza on Seinfeld.

Of course, the young rake they’re really after is Jason Allen Alexander of ‘I was Britney Spears’ love slave for 55 hours’ infamy.

“I never thought the wedding was a joke. I was serious about everything I said. But being married to Britney Spears was shit…” [Link]

Maybe the ToI should hire some of those call center people who watch American sitcoms all day. No fact-checking for you!

In other news, I was married to Carmen Electra for 55 hours. Uh, that’s Carmen Electra of Oskaloosa, Kansas

The Aristocrats is a new documentary about a hoary inside joke in the informal guild of American stand-up comics. The joke, a fraternity-like test of wit and manhood, involves improvising as many deeply sick events you can imagine within the framework of a simple story. Most comics tell the joke only to other comedians. They often begin with incest and pedophilia, delve into scatology and bestiality and finish with a chaser of sadism and necrophilia. This joke doesn’t play in Peoria. The most fun thing about the movie is seeing George Carlin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey and Jason Alexander together on the same reel.

The documentary shows a female comedian doing a throwaway joke about desis. It goes something like this: ‘Maybe we could bring in an Indian guy. The slurpee kind, not the casino kind. He could sprinkle curry all over everyone, make them stink.’ The joke, which takes much more racist digs at blacks and Latinos, is purposely illustrating offensive comedy. The comedian is pointing out that for shock value, race is the new sex.

You’d think the racism joke would be the least memorable thing about a movie which catalogues all the variants of a deeply repellent story. But it was actually the only one in the entire movie that stood out to me as mean-spirited. It proved its point exactly: sex and cartoon violence don’t hold a candle to what happens in real life.

Update: Watch the trailer. Here’s a very filthy, NSFW South Park version of the joke (thanks, Project37). Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach.

Over in the tech world, a debate rages over the naming of Really Simple Syndication, a format which lets you subscribe to multiple blogs and receive regular updates. Some say its orange button is ugly, its acronym too geeky for your grandma to grok. They suggest the simpler word ‘subscribe’ or, perchance, ‘feed.’ Others say that people learn acronyms all the time: XP, BMW, CYA. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a blog editor and prefer non-technical terms.)

What few are saying is that the little saffron RSS button really freaks out millions of desis all over the Net. It’s the flip side of the cultural hijacking of the swastika, and the acronym makes it looks like a donation button for right-wing Hindus. Godse would be proud.

The Internet standards groups are getting ready to roll out their next proposal, Very High Performance. In retaliation, India has released its version, Konsistently Krunk Kaching 

In America, parents threaten truant kids with military school. Or so I learned from an excellent documentary called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But in desi America, the Hindustan Times informs me, they threaten them with banishment to dude ranches in the motherland:

The fees are exorbitant compared to regular schools, ranging from… $700 to $6,000 a year for Indian kids. NRIs pay almost double the amount. Some schools demand hefty down payments for admission in addition to the tuition charges… JIRS, constructed over 125 acres at a cost of Rs 72 crore, offers virtually every sports and games facility including cricket, astro-turf hockey fields, football fields, mini golf course, six tennis courts, a roller-skating rink, horse riding and compulsory micro-flight flying lessons…

Indian professionals abroad want their children to benefit from the same educational system that enabled them to compete with the best in world… “I don’t want snooty kids who think they are above the rest. I want them to learn about humanity, Gandhi and non-violence, about learning to create peace and harmony in the world…”

And horse riding, calculus by first grade, and getting beaten with a heavy ruler

Keval, Ankur and Raj are enrolled into the athletic, academic program at JIRS. Their day begins at five thirty in the morning with meditation and yoga and ends at ten in the night with prayers. One of them even told his mother, “We pray so many times through the day, there is hardly time to talk…”

It’s a Hindu madrassa!

Both his children, Sumit Munjal, 15 and Ronika Nirankari, 16 are in residential schools in Deheradoon and Missouri. Pal is very happy with the way his kids are turning out, “away from the bad influence of American classrooms, drugs, obscene clothes and unmanageable independence…” A beaming Pal declares that his daughter plays the harmonium, sings beautiful bhajans and learns Indian classical dance.

I know a few drill sergeant aunties who turn out kids exactly the same way. You can tell because their kids’ twitchy eyes are tapping out an S.O.S. They have a haunted look as if their souls are silently mouthing the words, ‘Get me out of here!’

Also, I urgently require that you not be so “Jim Crow” (Thanks, Al Mujahid).
This is outrageous, y’all:

Posted On : 17 August 2005

URGENTLY REQUIRED

A leading company in the automotive business requires the following personnel to be located in Abu Dhabi and Beda Zayed city branch

DIESEL MECHANICS
ELECTRICIANS
MECHANICS
PAINTERS
DENTERS
LIGHT & HEAVY DRIVERS

Applicants should have a relative Diploma with minimum 3 years experience in Automobiles industry.

UAE D/L is a must for drivers.

Indians are not preferred to apply.

Fax: 02-6767708
P.O Box 29699 Abu Dhabi

Just one more reason why it’s a part of the world I’m not fond of…the minuscule silver lining is, less jobs for brown people means less brown people in the gulf, which means less stories like this.

A couple of days ago the New York Times had an interview with Dr. Ullas Karanth, a wildlife biologist/conservationist from India who is desperately trying to save the tiger from extinction (thanks for the tip Yamini):

Dr. Karanth, 57, was in New York on a recent summer afternoon to attend a conference at the Bronx Zoo, a subsidiary of the conservation society, on the future of tigers in the wild. In a break in the proceedings, he spoke of his favorite feline.

Q. Do we know how many wild tigers still exist in India?

A. We don’t. The government claims that there are over 3,000. But that figure is based on a flawed counting method that officials developed for themselves. There are preservation groups who claim the number is more like 1,000. It’s probably not that low.

We believe that if India is to have tigers, these wildlife reserves must be rigorously protected.

Josh Dolan of Cornell University publishes a paper in this week’s Nature (paid subscription required) that proposes a solution for animals faced with the same prospects as the tigers in India:

North America lost most of its large vertebrate species — its megafauna — some 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. And now Africa’s large mammals are dying, stranded on a continent where wars are waging over scarce resources. However much we would wish otherwise, humans will continue to cause extinctions, change ecosystems and alter the course of evolution. Here, we outline a bold plan for preserving some of our global megafaunal heritage…

Our vision begins immediately, spans the coming century, and is justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. The idea is to actively promote the restoration of large wild vertebrates into North America in preference to the ‘pests and weeds’ (rats and dandelions) that will otherwise come to dominate the landscape. This ‘Pleistocene re-wilding’ would be achieved through a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations using closely related species as proxies for extinct large vertebrates…

Bold plan?  Are you kidding me! You guys get what he is saying?  They want to reintroduce lions and tigers and…elephants from Africa into North America so that they have a chance to survive the seemingly inevitable extinction they face in Africa (and most likely India).  This is just ballsy.  There are a dozen reasons why this is a very very bad idea but I like big thinkers.

Kingfisher Beer has put its ‘swimsuit’ calendar online. It’s just like the CNN site which annoys me daily (‘we interrupt you with breaking news: Model of the Day!’), but with lotus pads: zen cheesecake, if you will. There are so many floating flowers in the frame, you’d think it was pitching feminine products instead of beer.

The launch party attained this pinnacle of cheese: Salman Khan (1) in a muscle shirt (2) ripping cheetah print (3) off a bikini calendar (4). Behind him are a large contingent of underfed (5), blue-eyed Anglo-Indians, those ubiquitous khakhi-suited, pot-bellied sipahis (6), and Vijay Mallya (7), who’s way too old to be playing Richard Branson.

Beat that, Hasselhoff.

From the same photographer, here’s Aamir Khan whoring out timepieces in Mangal Pandey attire and cornrows, and a very funny wireless campaign with Javed Jaffrey.

BusinessWeek just published a massive issue dedicated exclusively to India and China (via SAJA). I’m talkin’ huge.

… most economists figure China and India possess the fundamentals to keep growing in the 7%-to-8% range for decades. Barring cataclysm, within three decades India should have vaulted over Germany as the world’s third-biggest economy. By mid-century, China should have overtaken the U.S. as No. 1. By then, China and India could account for half of global output. Indeed, the troika of China, India, and the U.S. — the only industrialized nation with significant population growth — by most projections will dwarf every other economy…

The closest parallel to their emergence is the saga of 19th-century America, a huge continental economy with a young, driven workforce that grabbed the lead in agriculture, apparel, and the high technologies of the era, such as steam engines, the telegraph, and electric lights. But in a way, even America’s rise falls short in comparison to what’s happening now. Never has the world seen the simultaneous, sustained takeoffs of two nations that together account for one-third of the planet’s population. [Link]

India and China accounted for more than 50% of world gross domestic product in the 18th century and to my mind, there is no doubt this will be repeated. [Link]

Their sudsing machine is on hype cycle high:

Google… principal scientist Krishna Bharat is setting up a Bangalore lab complete with colorful furniture, exercise balls, and a Yamaha organ — like Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters — to work on core search-engine technology… “I find Bangalore to be one of the most exciting places in the world,” says Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems Inc.’s senior vice-president for corporate development. “It is Silicon Valley in 1999.” [Link]

Today’s reality is more sobering:

Today, China and India account for a mere 6% of global gross domestic product — half that of Japan. [Link]

Anil Gupta, the producer of Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42 and executive producer of The Office and number 5 on the Most Powerful Asian in British Media list is about to come out with an irreverant animated comedy which follows the exploits of three exceptionally naughty girls - Keisha Marie, Natella and Latrina - one maverick headmaster, Iqbal, and a group of desperate, overworked and underpaid teachers.

The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food.  Well so do I.  The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried.  It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:

Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.”

Good God.  What hole have I been living in?  I must have this fruit, I simply must.

Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen—widely considered the “queen of all fruit”—carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head—plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.

Durian looks totally freakish to me.  It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:

We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”

The Village Voice tries to make everything it likes into something sexy, cool, and happening.

They're aiming to do the same with Fareed Zakaria in their profile of him in this week's issue. Joy Press piles on the adjectives, starting with the subtitle to the article: "Muslim, Heartthrob, Super-Pundit." A rather unlikely string of words, isn't it? (Especially jarring is "Muslim" and "Pundit." But we'll let it go.)

Press pushes the sexy button a bit more before Zakaria's anti-sexy, policy wonk energies start to dominate the interview:

Sitting in his airy corner office at Newsweek, Zakaria is the definition of dapper, clad in a pale yellow checked shirt and crisp khakis. He ignores the constant ambient ping of incoming e-mails and phone calls as he talks about his PBS show. Zakaria may be the pundit world's answer to the Backstreet Boys, but there's nothing sexy about Foreign Exchange. It has the standard muted tones of a serious news program, complete with generic set and antiquated electronic theme music. "People ask how we'll distinguish ourselves from the competition," Zakaria says animatedly. "What competition? There's literally not another show on American television that deals only with foreign affairs--you know, the other 95 percent of humanity." (link)

The other 95 percent of humanity is not sexy. Fareed Zakaria is interested in them. Therefore, Fareed Zakaria is not sexy. QED.

For the record, that's just fine with me: the U.S. media needs more unsexy Muslim heartthrob superpundits. And less Botox News, please.

See more Zakaria SM posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Apul informs me that Fortune Magazine has released a list of what it considers the 50 most influential people of color.  The real name of the list is, Diversity 2005: People with the most clout.  Why such a wishy-washy title?  Anyways there are three Indians that made the cut:

Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf Publishers

Mehta is arguably the most admired editor in book publishing. In his stable: Michael Crichton and Toni Morrison. Also helped President Clinton’s My Life break nonfiction sales records. [Link]

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Printing Group at Hewlett-Packard

Restructuring aside, Joshi is still the straw that stirs the drink. Despite rival Dell’s push into printers, his unit alone would rank No. 79 on the Fortune 500. [Link]

and Indra Nooyi, President and CFO of PepsiCo

The executive is known as a skilled strategist. She has engineered tens of billions of dollars in acquisition deals. [Link]

Who do I have to sleep with to make this list next year?

Documents leaked last night from the police investigation contradict almost everything the London cops have said about the de Menezes shooting (thanks, Vijay). The current London shoot-to-kill policy now seems like a loose cannon.

The docs say that de Menezes was captured on tape walking into the tube station at a normal pace, picking up a free newspaper, using a tube card to enter and only breaking into a jog at the platform to catch a train. He was wearing a lightweight blue denim jacket (see photo) and was not carrying a backpack. Before getting onto the tube, he took a leisurely, 15-minute bus ride from his apartment to the station, not noticing that he was being tailed by cops. He did not look at all South Asian. Witness statements corroborate the tape.

It’s not clear whether the cops even identified themselves to de Menezes and warned him not to enter the tube. If the leaked docs are accurate, it appears that the only reason the cops killed him is that he emerged from the wrong apartment building. But it’s easy to understand the mistake:

The documents… suggest that the intelligence operation may have been botched because an officer watching a flat… was “relieving himself”. [Link]

One officer reportedly said he “checked the photographs” and “thought it would be worth someone else having a look”. However, he was unable to video the man for subsequent confirmation because he was “relieving” himself at the time. [Link]

Smells like a coverup. What it all means for people with brown skin living under an ill-defined shoot-to-kill policy:

“… he was just unfortunate to be living in a block of flats that was under surveillance and to look slightly brown-skinned…” [Link]

Be careful out there. Details below.

Two people are dead and 115 people remain injured after 350 bombs detonated in or around government buildings all over Bangladesh today. (Thanks, Rahul.) The explosions which were apparently the work of Islamic militant group Jamayetul Mujahedin affected 63 of the country’s 64 districts. [link]

The bombs exploded in rapid succession between 10:30 and 11:30 in the morning, local time. From the BBC:

…timing devices were found at the scenes of blasts but most of the bombs were small, homemade devices - wrapped in tape or paper.

One of the deaths was a young boy in Savar, near Dhaka, who was killed when he picked up a device. [link]

The group responsible for the blasts was banned by the Bangladeshi government earlier this year; previously, the government had insisted that Bangladesh didn’t have a problem with Islamic Militancy, so this policy change was significant.

Leaflets from the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh have appeared at the site of some of the blasts.

“It is time to implement Islamic law in Bangladesh” and “Bush and Blair be warned and get out of Muslim countries”, the leaflets say. [link]

Developing…

[For people who don't know The Ramayana at all, here is a short version of the story you can look at to gain some familiarity.]

I've been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.

But in the Malayalam version Anand's father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand's father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn't enough to clear Sita's honor, and persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:

"What the society thinks is important. The Gods too look down upon ill fame, and fame brings respect everywhere. Does not every noble man yearn for it? I fear dishonour, oh, learned men, I'll even renounce your company and my own life, if needed, for the sake of honour. Sita has to be deserted. Understand my state of mind, I wasn't sadder on anyday before. Lakshmana, tomorrow you take Sita in Sumantra's chariot and leave her at our border. Abandon her near the holy Ashram of Sage Valmiki on the banks of the Tamasa river, and get back here soon."

You might be surprised to see a post about Niger on a blog with a South Asian theme, but there is a connection.  The same global aid system that worked so well in getting aid to countries in South and South East Asia after the Tsunami, failed to react fast enough to prevent a disaster in Niger.  It is even argued that the outpouring of generosity that was shown the people affected by the Tsunami, deflected attention away from this other preventable crisis.  The Washington Post reports:

“We always are hearing, ‘They have given something, they have given something.’ But on the ground, we have not seen it yet,” said Ibrahim, his words tumbling out in rush of frustration. “We are crying, ‘Why are they not giving to us? Why are they not giving to us? Our children are dying.’ “

Actually, international donors are giving to Niger — $22.8 million has been contributed so far to ease its food crisis — but the help is arriving too late for many children here. The reasons, said aid workers and analysts, have more to do with miscalculation and hesitation by the international aid bureaucracy, which initially underestimated the severity of the crisis, than with the reluctance of the world to pitch in once the extent of suffering became clear.

“This is not a story of donors being mean,” said Paul Harvey of the Overseas Development Institute, a research group based in London. “This is a story of a failed system.”

Although the hunger crisis was brewing for many months, it was not until the BBC aired several dramatic reports from Niger in July that major donations began to pour in. Moreover, officials of the U.N. World Food Program said they initially tapped only $1.4 million from their emergency reserves for Niger, fearing a larger commitment would leave them unable to respond to other crises.

Not everyone was taken by surprise.  Remember during the Tsunami when Nobel Peace Prize winners MSF took the unusual step of declaring that they had received enough aid, and that all incoming donations would be used for other causes?  People kept giving to them anyways, perhaps because of their great reputation.  They lived up to their pledge:

The contrast between the U.N. response and that of Doctors Without Borders, which is privately funded, is striking.

At clinics run by Doctors Without Borders in Niger, doctors saw cases of severe malnutrition surge in January and triple by March. In April, the group put a $13 million plan into action that enabled it to set up more clinics and feeding centers and send triage teams into the worst-hit areas. Almost all the money had been raised since the tsunami, when the group used the huge outpouring of donations to create an emergency fund for less visible crises.

The disappearance of Indian revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose has always been shrouded in Amelia Earhart-like mystery. Adding to the intrigue, a history professor from Ireland just reported that British intelligence planned on assassinating Bose in Istanbul (via arZan):

The British Foreign Office had in March 1941 ordered the assassination of freedom revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose after his escape from house arrest in Kolkata, an Irish scholar said. Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College, Dublin, made the stunning revelation on Sunday evening while delivering the Sisir Kumar Bose lecture at the Netaji Research Bureau.

A history professor, O’Halpin said the British Special Operation Executive’s plan to assassinate Bose, popularly known as “Netaji” (the leader), on his way to Germany was foiled as he changed his route and went via Russia.

O’Halpin said he had handed over the classified documents backing this to Krishna Bose, a former MP and wife of Netaji’s nephew Sisir Bose… Netaji’s relative Sugato Bose, a professor of history in the Harvard University, said he had already informed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about the matter. [Link]

O’Halpin said the British Special Operation Executive (SOE) (formed in 1940 to carry out sabotage and underground activities) informed its representatives in Istanbul and Cairo that Bose was thought to be travelling from Afghanistan to Germany via Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The orders had come from London.

“They were asked to wire about the arrangements made for his assassination. Even in the midst of war, this was a remarkable instruction. Bose had definitely planned a rebellion to free India, but the usual punishment for this was prosecution or detention, not an assassination. He was to die because he had a large following in India… If British agents could get close enough to kill him, they surely could have attempted to capture him. The fact that any trace of London’s orders to assassinate Bose remains in official records is just as striking.” [Link]

Related posts: 1, 2

Update: The Beeb has more:

Describing the decision as “extraordinary, unusual and rare”, Mr O’Halpin said the British took Bose “much more seriously than many thought… Historians working on the subject tell me the plan to liquidate Bose has few parallels. It appears to be a last desperate measure against someone who had thrown the Empire in complete panic.”

India’s airport modernization rolls into Bombay with a spanking-new domestic terminal at Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport, designed by an Indian architect, no less (via Etcetera):

The new aluminium and glass-fronted terminal will house the operations of all major private domestic carriers and will cater to seven million passengers a year.

From July 28, all private airlines such as Jet Airways, Air Sahara, Spice Jet and Air Deccan will move into the upgraded building.

The two-phase upgradation of the domestic terminal costs Rs. 83 crores [~$19M, or $~60M PPP]. Construction on the second phase, which is expected to start once this new terminal is in operation, will take four months. [Link]

With new carriers coming in, the terminus needed major expansion… Mumbai airport, said Kumar, was the first and 30 airports were likely to will follow this pattern… the revamped portion of the terminal building has an all-new look: Aluminum composite panels, a glass roof, a skylight, a 1,575-sq metre pillarless check-in area, 38 check-in counters and a 1,651-sq metre security hold. [Link]

This is the first time I’ve seen reports about Indian buildings paying attention to handicapped accessibility:

Facilities for disabled persons, including ramps and toilets [Link]

Desis immediately begin enjoying the national sport of caviling

More than 12 hours after the revamped Terminal 1B was opened… while it sports a swish international feel, with wide open, naturally-lit spaces and a thought-out design effort — the quality of the experience is some way from being truly world class. At the end of a rushed schedule to get the facility ready in time, the entrance has three men perched on bars, painting them white… ”Looks like they’re still building it. The signboards for toilets are not up yet and there are no food counters…” [Link]

See photos of the new terminal.

Earlier we posted about how prayers have been outsourced to India. Now Indian priests have even found subcontractors (via India Uncut):

After toys and dolls, communist China — where there are strict curbs on religious practice — has flooded Indian markets with images of Hindu gods and goddesses. And the religious-minded are bowing before their superior quality.

“Containers are landing in Mumbai by the dozens every month. Not a single idol goes unsold; there’s a mad scramble for them. I’m struggling to cope with the demand,” said Balwant Singh, who runs a gift shop in Mohali. “The buyers come and ask for images of different gods and goddesses, but will accept only those made in China. Not many buy Indian-made idols now.”

What makes the Chinese idols so attractive? “Their finish is excellent. They are made of synthetic material and are very colourful,” said another gift shop owner in Chandigarh, Inder Kumar Sethi. “The customer would take one look at a Chinese idol and immediately settle for it… There is also more variety in these idols… They are unbreakable and can be washed. The Indian ones are heavier and not as well polished. Their shelf-life is very short but the price is cheap.” [Link]

As Clayton Krishnasen might say, only the high end is safe from this market disruption:

For the moment, though, Kumartuli with its heavy, custom-made idols seems safe enough. [Link]

You know which god the communists churn out? Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. Amit Varma wisecracks:

And you know what they’re made of? Irony. [Link]

I leave you with the hilarious lyrics to ‘Plastic Vishnu,’ a banjo song:

Plastic Vishnu, plastic Vishnu
Riding on the dashboard of my car:
Ride with me and you’ll be safer,
You needn’t bother with any wafer
Bow to Plastic Vishnu, in my car…

If I run over little old ladies
And the police think I might have rabies
They’ll never find my hashish, though they ask;
plastic Vishnu shelters me,
For His head comes off, you see —
He’s hollow, and I use Him for my stash…

A few months ago, my wife started a job that entails a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.

A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said ‘hey, what’s the big deal? We already have one of those at home.’ Oops. In some spaces, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one such space (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).

Worldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it’s only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they’ve now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.

Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)

The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn’t that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can’t be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities…

Yahoo India has the story of returning Army doctor Major Raj Butani:

They could see the buses rolling out across the airbase tarmac but were not sure their soldier son, Iraq returnee Major Raj Butani of the US 2nd Brigade, was in one of them.

But Chandru Butani’s account of his son’s experiences is immediate, raw, throbbing and is perhaps the first authentic, first-hand account by an Indian American of life with the US army in Iraq.

Sleeping on top of an ambulance… gazing at the night sky in a steamy, dark desert… seeing friends blown to pieces…

Butani and his wife had heard from their son sparingly, once in a while when he could send an email or talk over the phone, but army regulations did not allow him to give much detail.

Butani explained why they had been ‘on the racks’ all the while. Raj had been posted in Ramadi, which forms part of the Sunni Triangle, an area with the highest resistance to US presence.

The “first authentic, first hand account” part is wrong of course, but a doctor does provide a different perspective than a tank commander.  My own cousin was a Devil Doc in the group of Marines that sped toward Baghdad during the opening week of the war.  Having to care for friend and foe with equal vigor is a difficult situation from what he told me.

Said father Butani, ‘One of the worst incidents happened when his Physician Assistant and closest friend, who shared room with him at the Ramadi Base, was slain when an IED blew his vehicle to smithereens. I remember Raj being devastated for several weeks. Being his closest friend, he read out the eulogy, and he completely broke down.

You can read more about this Lehigh University Alum here.

This morning, the Los Angeles Times gave the most behind the scenes story to date (that I’ve see at least), about the second bomber cell in London, the one that failed to carry out it’s mission:

The suspects had sharpened their radicalism in the streets, mosques and housing projects of rough ethnic neighborhoods, investigators, witnesses and friends say. They were brazen voices in an unsuspecting city, marginalized East Africans who lived by their wits, dabbling in street crime and reportedly manipulating the immigration and welfare systems. During workouts at a West London gym, they channeled their private rage into public diatribes.

Brothers Ramzi and Wharbi Mohammed sold Islamic literature and recited religious verses on a gritty North Kensington street of antiques stores and cafes, skirmishing with a shop owner who chased them away. Hamdi Issac, now jailed in Rome, belonged to a gang of extremists who waged a belligerent campaign to take over a mosque in South London. Roommates Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar were loud militants, praising Osama bin Laden to neighbors at the rundown building where Ibrahim is accused of preparing five backpack bombs.

Their agitation allegedly gave way to action after July 7, when four young British Muslims, three from the northern city of Leeds, ignited bombs on three subway cars and a bus, killing themselves and 52 others. Issac claims that his group struck two weeks later in an improvised, independent tribute to the dead bombers. Despite similar methods and targets, British authorities say they have found no link between the two plots.

That last sentence is the most chilling.  This wasn’t a second Al Qaeda cell activated and timed to strike a couple weeks after the first.  The second group was simply “inspired” by the first to act on their own.  In case there is any doubt as to what they claimed their motivation was, Italian investigators provide the answer:

“He’s calm — he seems scared,” said the Italian official, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “He’s open, gentle, polite; he doesn’t get mad even when you provoke him. But when you ask him why he did it, he starts with the speech about Iraq: They are killing women and children, no one’s doing anything about it, on and on. That’s when you can see there has been a brainwashing.”

Calcutta will soon ban hand-pulled rickshaws. Is this a move to liberate the oppressed from their yoke, or just a clumsy attempt by the communists to eliminate an eyesore that is also a highly effective market based response to current transportation inefficiencies?

The Chief Minister claims his motives are humanitarian, and says that he will look after the interests of all those affected:

Mr Bhattacharya said: “We have taken a policy decision to take the hand-drawn rickshaw off the roads of Calcutta on humanitarian grounds.  Nowhere else in the world does this practice exist and we think it should also cease to exist in Calcutta.” 

The chief minister said the authorities were thinking of alternative modes of transport so that the transition did not affect either the pullers or the riders. “This involves money and training. It will be about the end of this year when the rickshaws are finally gone,” he said. [BBC]

This will be no small order. Rickshaws have been around for a while and fill an important role in the city:

The hand-pulled rickshaw came from China in the 19th century. A recent study …  put the number of hand-rickshaw pullers at 18,000 with more than 1,800 joining the pool every year. Many Calcuttans are uncertain whether they will be able to move around the city’s old lanes without the hand-pulled rickshaws - particularly during the monsoon. “When we have to wade in chest-deep water during rains, no other transport works but you can still find the hand-pulled rickshaws taking people from one place to another,” says Dipali Nath, a housewife in north Calcutta. [BBC]

Happy Independence Day, y’all.

(Manish says he planning to do a full review of Mangal Pandey: The Rising soon, so this is a post on just one aspect of the film, not a general review.)

The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I’ve seen in any other Hindi film. There’s more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors’ roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: “darvaaza khul!”.)

The issue of Toby Stephens’ use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He’s on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual “Baar aa jao!” type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions — tenderness, ambivalence, regret — a tall order even in one’s first language. I personally thought Stephens’ Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he’s not emotionally convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I’m possibly being overly gentle on this score.)

So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I’m not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.

(The film might fail for other reasons too, but we’ll save that for another discussion…)

How very karmic. Our chikna brother Turbanhead is relaunching his highly graphic, Bollykitschy blog today. The new version has all the greatest hits, but redesigned and with comments finally turned on again. Mosey on over and update your feeds (RSS).

Don’t miss his cheeky felicitations on our one-year anniversary.

Boys, the era of “uh-huh” is over and you have one of your own to thank for it {Thanks, Srinath + Anon}.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people — on a scale of 0 to 100 percent — on how engaged they are in a conversation.

Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master’s degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts.

HA. You’re all busted. No more mindlessly muttering, “uh-huh…yup…wow.. .huh” while your significant other chatters on— the Jerk-O-Meter is listening! Thanks to the magic of mathematical algorithms, the program can measure stress levels, how often one speaks and how empathetic a person’s voice sounds…if it doesn’t hear dulcet tones, the Jerk-O-Meter admonishes users to be nicer via pop-up messages on their phones. This isn’t all bad news, though. The Jerk-O-Meter could be a boon to the back, since its use could prevent a night spent on the couch.

“Think of a situation where you could actually prevent an argument,” he said. “Just having this device can make people more attentive because they know they’re being monitored.”

A penguin was involved:

The prototype version of the program runs in Linux on a phone plugged into Voice over Internet service. Once the Jerk-O-Meter is completed, in six months or so, Madan envisions selling it as software that could be downloaded off the Internet — a potentially useful tool for focus groups, telemarketers and salesmen.

Pish posh. It’s such a useful tool, it’s going to become a best-seller with pissed off girlfriends, trust me. ;)

William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:

It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…

As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…

In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”

It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience - they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…

… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…

May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere.  The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by  Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:

Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques. 

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

Wicked!  It’s like Franken-food.  Oh come on.  You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too.  The Guardian has more:

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

Kuldip Nayar (long time advocate for the victims of the 1984 pogroms) reviews the Nanavati Commission report and finds that it does not go far enough:

I find that the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission Report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is not a fair document. The judge traces events more or less accurately, yet he does not come to the obvious conclusion.He goes as far as to say: “The systematic manner” in which the Sikhs were killed indicated that “the attacks on them were organised”. But he holds back when, as a judge, he should have gone further to probe who organised these systematic attacks. [cite]

Nayar illustrates how Nanavati illuminates the role of powerful political actors in setting the 1984 Delhi pogroms into motion, but he does not inquire as to who these political actors were.

Nanavati says there is evidence to show that on October 31, 1984, the day Mrs Gandhi was killed, “either meetings were held or the persons who could organise attacks were contacted and were given instructions to kill Sikhs and loot their houses and shops.”  Nanavati also says that attacks were made “without much fear of the police, almost suggesting that they were assured that they would not be harmed while committing those acts and even thereafter.”

On that command, hundreds of people went to the streets of Delhi with weapons and inflammable material like kerosene oil, petrol and white powder. According to the Nanavati report, “the male members of Sikh community were taken out of their houses. They were beaten first and then burnt alive in a systematic manner. In some cases tyres were put around their necks and then they were set on fire by pouring kerosene oil or petrol over them.”

Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Dharam Dutt Shastri, named by Nanavati, could only be operators. At worst, they could have conveyed instructions. But who gave the instructions? Who were the ones who did it? Where did they gather to hatch the plan? Who were these shadowy figures, behind-the-scenes, confident that their instructions would be carried out? [cite]

The NYT smiles upon Mangal Pandey: The Rising:

“Mangal Pandey: The Rising” … [has] important messages about global trade, corruption and martyrdom… the film takes you somewhere, teaches you something and inspires smiles in a way that few retellings of the anti-imperialist revolts of 19th-century India ever have before…

The crux of the epic is Mangal’s on-again, off-again alliance with a Glaswegian military officer who is in the employ of the East India Company… They both comprehend the fraud that the mercantile class perpetrates, and they both abhor the bigoted ugliness embodied in one British soldier who indulges in prostitutes and lies about it in polite company, who uses the power he has over servants to unleash some deep-seated cruelty…

At times, the racial hatred seems rabid and cartoonish, the political discussions of the opium trade become preachy, and the romance feels more like a cause for dance-offs… But the movie meets its grand incongruous aims with the exaggerated smiles and scowls of two gifted principal actors.

The camera drinks in gorgeous landscapes and trawls through high-end bordellos… [Pandey’s] biography is the basis for this spectacle of splash and meaning… “Mangal Pandey” proves that warfare mixed with winking sexpots can be a bloody good show. [Link]

I enjoyed the movie, will post a review later. The Friday late show in Times Square was completely sold out. Lines of dejected buskers tried to buy spare tickets off showgoers. The last time I saw that was with Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, and never before in Manhattan.

Some time ago we posted about a young woman, Pia Awal, who needed a bone marrow donor to fight her leukemia. A 20-year-old Pakistani woman from London matched and saved her life.

Awal and her fiancé, Apratim Dutta, just had their long-delayed wedding. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through in the meantime. The NYT reports:

On June 30, 2002, Mr. Dutta’s 31st birthday, Ms. Awal was feeling feverish and bone tired. They went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, expecting that she would be given some antibiotics for the flu… she was found to have acute myelogenous leukemia…

… weeks before their July engagement party, Ms. Awal’s doctor said the leukemia had returned… Mr. Dutta began searching for a South Asian donor whose white blood cells were a genetic match for Ms. Awal. He started a Web site, matchpia.org, to find donors. He made a DVD about Ms. Awal’s situation and tried to get television stations to broadcast it. Finally, through an international donor registry, they found a match in a 20-year-old Pakistani woman living in London.

Mr. Dutta, who loves steaks and red wine, began to eat vegetarian meals with Ms. Awal… As part of her recovery this time, she started eating meat, which gave her the sense of being fully fused with Mr. Dutta…

They were finally married on July 30 in Manhattan at the Tribeca Rooftop… Ms. Awal, who cannot have children because she has had so much chemotherapy, is working on a children’s book about cancer.

Congrats to the newlywed couple.

Click here to add yourself to the South Asian bone marrow registry. There are several booths at India Day parades in the next ten days. In NYC, go to 27th & Madison on Sunday, Aug. 21, from 12-6pm for a simple, painless blood test.

Some desi guy posted a hilarious rant to Craigslist on dealing with suspicious looks from fellow passengers while riding the DC metro (thanks, midnight toker):

… after the London subway bombings, i have been getting “the look” on public transportation and at airports. To put it mildly, my days of picking up girls on a plane are over…

I don’t have an accent, a dot or a large cobra wrapped around my head (except on Tuesdays). I’m your typical poser hipster Indian living in DC, trying to get my hands on as much smoke, beer and ass as i can. But step on the metro… and suddenly i transform into Allah-kazam bin Laden…

… open your book bag at least 3 times. As soon as you reach for the bag, look at their reactions. Kodak moments all over the place.

My dream is to go on a plane, act crazy suspicious… basically inviting some white folk to beat the shit out of me. Then when they open my bags, it will be full of Bibles and medicine for sick children. Then i’ll sue all the muthafuckers and go live on some island with all my money and broken bones. Now that’s the American dream.

… i gotta deal with this bullshit everyday on the metro… It’s not even a cool subway like NYC or in Paris. The lame ass DC metro.

The DC metro reminds me of BART. The New York subway is to DC’s what a fastback is to a station wagon: it isn’t wide and cushy, but it’s a hell of a lot faster.

Read the whole thing. See Anna’s related post here.

Standup comic Aziz Ansari recently did a sketch about how the ‘gasam blew him off at her Knitting Factory show. He re-enacts several far-fetched scenarios about what he wishes had happened instead:

M.I.A.: ‘Actually, I have a lot of experience with hard disk recoveries on Macs…’ (Lowers eyes seductively) ‘Maybe tomorrow I could come by your place…’

It’s a cute schtick, but overly long as a video. On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard Tamil spoken in a comedy sketch and the first time I’ve seen a tall, pasty white guy stand in for Aziz’ ‘Sri Lankan princess’

Does Ansari merely want to jump M.I.A.’s bones, or is it also a great publicity gimmick? I surrender. Watch the low-budget video. Here’s the site.

The one who remembers the Supreme Being exclusively even while leaving the body at the time of death, attains the Supreme Abode; there is no doubt about it. (8.05)

Remembering whatever object one leaves the body at the end of life, one attains that object. Thought of whatever object prevails during one’s lifetime, one remembers only that object at the end of life and achieves it. (8.06)

Therefore, always remember Me and do your duty. You shall certainly attain Me if your mind and intellect are ever focused on Me. (8.07)

-Bhagavad-Gita

Phrases like “senseless tragedy” just never seem like enough.  Bagels 4ever sends us the type of tip we hope to never receive:

He began each morning with prayer and meditation before a small shrine in his southwest Houston apartment. During the workday, he might step outside for a moment of silence and calm, his friends and co-workers said. They believe the 28-year-old Hindu community leader was meditating in a park near his office when he was shot and killed Thursday. Chopra may have been so deeply concentrating that he did not notice his killer, said Ramesh Bhutada, president of Star Pipe Products, the company Chopra had worked for since 2002. “I think after lunch he went there for a moment of quietness,” Bhutada said. ”

… He probably didn’t hear it.” Star Pipe employees held a Friday morning memorial service for the young man many had come to view as family. The workers, some of whom talked of preparing feasts for his birthday and marveled at his commitment to faith and community service, placed yellow roses on the bench where Chopra died…

…Chopra had a gunshot wound to his left temple and a bullet appeared to have grazed his forehead. His wallet was missing and no gun was found at the scene, Torres said. At the time of his death, Chopra’s life in America had just started falling into place, friends said. [Link]

Abhi posted earlier about The Bollywood Beauty. If you’re in the mood for a light, pulpy read, here’s what’s currently on the chick lit shelves at my local bookstore. While we’re at it, let’s play Orientalist buzzword bingo!

Bollywood Confidential by Sonia Singh

Raveena isn’t having much luck in Hollywood as an Indian beauty, so when her agent nabs her a starring role in a Bollywood film, she jumps at the chance and relocates to Bombay.

The Village Bride of Beverly Hills by Kavita Daswani. Exotic!

… Priya… finds herself the one chosen for matrimony and life across the seas in Beverly Hills… Luck lands her a position as a receptionist at the tabloid Hollywood Insider, and her exotic politeness wins over the red carpet community.

Singh previously wrote Goddess for Hire. Curry-scented!

A hip chick from Newport Beach… discovered she’s the incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali… Saving the world, though, may prove to be a curry-scented breeze compared to dealing with her extended Indian family.

Daswani also wrote For Matrimonial Purposes. Cardamom-flavored!

… the Prada-loving fashion publicist still finds herself “oddly drawn to the age-old system of arranged marriage…” The only flaw in this heady, cardamom-flavored confection is the rushed happy ending…

All my bindaas desis, both words just made the dictionary of record for the Queen’s English. U-S-S-A-A! This is the giant dictionary every would-bee spelling prince and princess lugged around as their sole form of exercise. It was the only one which had all the words in it, and at $50, nine inches thick and 30 lbs, it was a sizeable investment.

On Wednesday, the Oxford Dictionary of English… revealed its new cache of linguistic treasures, including ‘bindaas’, ‘tamasha’, ’ mehndi’, ‘desi’ and ‘lehnga’. Lollywood… finds honorable mention. So does ‘kitty party’, the chaat-and-chatter mainstay of bored Indian housewives for decades.

It even includes feather-to-dot crossover:

The dictionary’s co-editor Catherine Soanes told TOI she was particularly pleased to have been able to include the Indianism ‘tom-tom’, defined by the ODE as “verb (chiefly Indian) proclaim or boast about.” [Link]

The Statesman points out words still missing (hello, Mumbaikars? Bindaas sans jhakaas?)

“What’s your good name?”… “Let’s go have some chai-vai” (tea, obviously, with snacks thrown in) or, “There’s a lot of this fighting-witing happening here every day…” A proud mother announcing to all and sundry about her ladli beti getting “cent per cent” (meaning 100 per cent) marks in math or an executive having to “prepone” his meeting… “business-baazi” or “cheating-giri…” “freak out…” In Kolkata, “enthu” replacing enthusiasm is old hat as also “sentu” for sentimental… “Funda” for fundamental, “intro” or “appo” for appointment are freely used… “Tux” has no relation with the tuxedo — who wears it in our country, anyway? — but with a baldie which must have originated with the Hindi word “taklu”… “timepass” for whiling away the hours… “hawala” (illegal financial dealings), “badla” (revenge) or “eve-teasing”… [Link]

And those already added:

India-origin words have dotted the English language for a long time. Words like bungalow, cashmere (from Kashmîr), cheetah, coolie, cot, cummerbund, cushy (from the Hindi khush), dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut (from Lord Jagannath’s huge rath-yatra, perhaps?) jungle, khaki (dusty), loot, punch (the drink made from paanch or five ingredients), pajamas, shawl, verandah, etc. In the latest Oxford English Dictionary, words like Angrez (Englishman) and Badmash have already figured. Earlier, it had added adda, bundh, dal puri, bandobast, chutney, bandana, chamcha (aren’t we familiar with them!) neta and dhaba. [Link]

We just don’t show enough love to our peeps down-under.  SM reader Sibyl sends us an excited tip about first time author Shalini Akhil, a Fijian-Indian living in Austrailia who’s just had her first book published. It’s titled Bollywood Beauty.

Kesh: born and bred in Australia: drinks at the pub; studies feminist theory; a fun-loving gal of Fijian-Indian background.
Rupa: born and bred in Fiji; scared to leave the house; makes own roti; the full-on ‘Bollywood Beauty’.

When Rupa comes to stay with her cousin Kesh, it’s a complete culture clash. And, the chai hits the fan when Rupa has to decide between new-found passion and the ways of the past.

In this delicious and highly spiced novel, Shalini Akhil dishes up tears, laughter, music and food, with a truly scary dinner dance thrown in … and a final scene to make you laugh and cry.

What got Sibyl especially excited was that not only did a draft of Akhil’s novel win a state literary award, but Shalini has two blogs.  In addition to the one on her website she has this more personal one on blogger, much of which catalogs her experiences as a newly published author. 

…last week thursday, mid mid-afternoon-browse i spied a copy [of my book] in mary martins southbank’s australian fiction section. i yelped audibly (the sales person near me turned around suddenly, presumably to see if i’d stepped on a chihuahua, or turned into one) and ran out the store bellowing ‘mark! maaark! come here!’. then i pointed at the shelf from across the store. he went over, knight in shining armour that he is, and fetched it off the shelf. my knees were seriously jelly… i blushed and ran to hide behind the greeting card shelf in a move i later recognised as cheap imitation of a classic bollywood over-reaction. then the bubbles subsided, and in a moment of classic mood-swingery, a voice in my head said:

hang on! one copy, spine-out? does that really warrant a bollywood duck-and-cover?

then the knight came through again, gathered me up in his muscular arms and whispered, i found the other four. face-out, new release section. and that was it, i had to leave.

Ahhh yes.  I think someday many of us working class bloggers would want to see the above scene play out in our lives (without the Bollywood ducking of course).  The story doesn’t end there.  Shalini is also a stand-up comedian:

In 2003 she entered ‘Raw Comedy’, run by radio station Triple J, and went on to become a national finalist.

Recently, Al-Arabiya television broadcast a segment showing a white Australian who had joined Al-Qaeda. The Australian government followed up by admitting that a “small number” of Australians were members. But the tape showed more than just this one blonde man in a balaclava:

The executive editor of Al Arabiya, Nabil Khatib, … was surprised by the ethnic diversity of the jihadists in the video - from Central Asia, including Uzbekistan, as well as Europeans, Pakistanis and Saudis. [cite]

We’ve always known that A-Q is diverse in its membership, especially if you include allied groups. There are East Asians (mainly South East Asians, like the Bali Bomber), Africans, various Brown people, and yes … light skinned people as well. Still, people kept ignoring the part about white people in the group, even though they were previously documented. Maybe these photos will help change some minds. Then again, it’s not clear that the African London bombers have made Brits any less fixated on South Asians.

Australians will probably respond to this news by trying to profile Muslims more thoroughly, rather than trying to screen for suspicious actions. Remember, there are still plenty of non-Islamist groups that still pose a threat. Consider, for example, the ironically named “Brown Army Faction” who were busted two years ago:

The threat to Germany from neo-Nazis has risen to a new level, Interior Minister Otto Schily has warned. The discovery of a suspected plot to bomb a Munich Jewish centre during a visit by the German president has “dramatically confirmed” the danger to society, he said on Monday. At least 10 suspects were held and up to 14kg (31lb) of explosives seized in police raids last week. The suspected attack would have coincided with the anniversary of the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht attacks, when thousands of Jewish targets were attacked and dozens murdered. A “hit list” detailing other possible targets, including mosques, a Greek school and an Italian target, had been recovered, said Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein. [BBC]

More news on the double-standard front. In March of last year, the feds arrested somebody who had the components for both hand grenades and ricin in his basement. The perp lived in Hyattsville, Md, just a few miles from the DC border:

The manhunt, according to court documents and investigators, led last year to a suburban home in Hyattsville, Md., its basement stocked with parts for makeshift hand grenades and ingredients for ricin, one of the most potent and lethal biological toxins….. has since pleaded guilty to charges of extortion and possession of toxic materials. [NYT]

How deadly is Ricin?

If injected or swallowed, the toxin penetrates the body’s cells. It then knocks out the cells’ protein production machinery, leading to cell death. If ricin is inhaled, acute respiratory collapse occurs as the fragile lining cells of the air passages and lungs are destroyed. Once a person is exposed to ricin, there is no known antidote. Minute quantities of ricin are lethal, and they vanish from the victim’s body in hours with barely a trace, making it a notorious stealth murder weapon. [cite]

However, this guy wasn’t brown. His name was Myron Tereshchuk. He was a 43 year old white guy, a tech entrepreneur. If his name had been Sandeep Patel, with the same profile and biodata, you can bet that his mug shot would have been plastered all over the evening TV news shows. As is, it got buried below the fold.

I hate moving. I hate moving so much that when I left Manhattan in 2003, I hastily shoved everything in storage near Chelsea. It’s still there.

I think my reluctance to pack a suitcase might be related to the sheer panic and anxiety I experience whenever I have to move. Something about carefully folding and arranging items in boxes freaks me out, man.

This is the explanation I gave my long-suffering Mummy last week when I was at home in California. I was scheduled to leave for the airport at 7pm and I hadn’t packed as of 6:15. Of course, I ended up hastily tossing everything in, cringing at how my clothes were getting abused, how my jewelry would be a tangled mess by the time I got back to DC, how I would surely forget something. I threw everything on my bathroom counter in my cosmetics bag, zipped it and hoped for the best.

8pm. Security. I’ve padded through the gate barefoot and I’m trying not to think about what sorts of germs I’m walking on while I wait for my bag to leave the X-ray…

“Ma’am? Would you mind coming with me?”

Nope. I don’t mind at all. I’m brown, but I have nothing to hide. It’s been years. I know to just expect this routine. I grab my prrrecious iBook and follow him to a table. He’s poking my carry-on gingerly, a worried look distorting his face.

Do I even need to say it? Mangal Pandey / The Rising, the film about our namesake rebellion, comes out in the U.S. today. It stars Aamir Khan, Toby Stephens, Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel. A.R. Rahman did the music, Ketan Mehta (the director of Mirch Masala) directs this story. Watch the trailer and do your mutinous best

In 1857 Mangal Pandey (Khan) is a sepoy, an Indian serving under the command of Britain’s East India Company, which by then had controlled the subcontinent for a century with its own laws, military and government. Mangal’s a close friend of the sensitive British captain William Gordon (Stephens), but the introduction of a new gun cartridge drives a wedge between them. Greased with cow and pig fat, it’s deeply offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. And a small standoff develops into a full-scale indigent rebellion. [Link]

It’s the McDonald’s beefy french fries scandal writ large!

Gordon’s character has been written with great care, so as to present a saner side to the British who would all otherwise fall into the stereotypical category of moustache-twirling villains. [Link]

Check U.S. showtimes here. American prints are usually subtitled.

Here are photos from the premiere in Bombay. Here’s the movie’s official site.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

Nwo thye wnat ot renmae Delhi (via PPP):

The Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India. They have launched a campaign to correct the “mis-spelling”, which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.

K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: “For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn’t manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the city later came to reflect this.”

I presume the city would be called Newer Dehli. It isn’t a new idea:

What the British knew as Cawnpore is now Kanpur, the northern city of Muttra is Mathura, and the Ganges is known once more as Ganga… In 1995, Bombay became Mumbai after pressure from Hindu-nationalists to reinstate the original Marathi name. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a corruption of the British name but almost certainly derives from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, meaning Good Bay.

A year later, the southern city of Madras - possibly a corruption of the Portuguese Madre di Dios - reverted to Chennai, the name that had been used by Tamils throughout the British period. Then, in 2000, the spelling of Calcutta was officially changed to Kolkata after pressure from the Communist state government to revert to a spelling that more closely reflected the Bangla pronunciation.

I’ve got no fondness for badly Anglicized names. Even old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam. But the new name wouldn’t be entirely accurate either:

… even Dehli was a corrupted word. The pre-Mughal name was Dilli, which was derived from Dhillika, a Rajput name for the area which dates back to the 8th century.

I have the rename to trump all renames: let’s call everything Gondwanaland. It’s an Indian name after all. Problem solved.

From fliping through the AP pool photographs of the British Airways catering employees strike (which just ended), you’d think that it was the Salt March or something.  What gives?  And talk about girl power.  Yahoo News reports (thanks to several tipsters):

BA baggage handlers and loaders represented by the same union as the catering staff — the Transport and General Workers Union — stopped work in sympathy with their colleagues.

Some Gate Gourmet staff were astounded at the scale of disruption.

“I didn’t expect the BA staff to join us, but we are very happy about it,” said Gary Mullins, 37, a loader for the company.

“We don’t wish to cause them any more (aggravation) than we have to,” he said of the passengers. “But it’s something that has to be done.”

Wait a minute.  From that sea of brown they picked a guy named “Gary Mullins” to get a quote from? CNN International has more:

The Transport and General Workers Union [TGWU] said it went on strike because Gate Gourmet, a firm that caters meals for British Airways, had fired workers.

Tony Woodley, TGWU’s general secretary, issued a statement Thursday saying he had contacted Gate Gourmet in an effort to reinstate workers and “restart talks without prejudice.”

“Unfortunately, the management of Gate Gourmet has responded intransigently. They are preventing employees reporting for work. This is causing chaos at one of the world’s biggest airports at the busiest time of year,” the statement said.

“The company has told us that ‘this is a community we cannot work with.’ The employees concerned are almost all low-paid, Asian workers, and such an approach is utterly unacceptable.”

The union’s national officer, Brendan Gold, told PA he was continuing to seek legal advice over the “sackings,” which he added had left workers feeling “angry, confused and in a state of shock.”

Great.  Now even more people will be pissed off at Britain’s South Asian population.

Perhaps the Tamil Tigers are showing their cuddly face (thanks, Abhi):

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was shot in the head Friday night just outside his private residence in Colombo and died an hour later after emergency surgery… The assassination is bound to further strain the shaky cease-fire agreement between Sri Lanka’s government and the Tamil Tiger rebels. The truce, in place since February 2002, has been threatened by recent violence and the suspension of talks in 2003. [Link]

Earlier this month, two LTTE members were arrested outside Kadirgamar’s official residence — about a kilometer away from where he was shot — after conducting surveillance and videotaping the area. Kadirgamar had just returned to his private residence late Friday for a swim, after attending a function for the release of his new book, police said. As he walked toward the house from the pool, a sniper fired three shots, striking him in the head and chest. [Link]

… Kadirgamar, 73, who is from the ethnic Tamil minority and a close aide of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, was taken to the National Hospital for emergency surgery after being shot in the head… Kadirgamar, a Tamil Christian, led an international campaign to ban the Tigers as a terrorist organization. [Link]

Kadirgamar’s background:

He was educated at Trinity College, Kandy, and obtained a Bachelor of Laws… from the University of Ceylon… He also has a B.Lit. from Oxford University. He practiced law at the Ceylon Bar and in London until 1974, when he became a consultant to the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

Kadirgamar is a long-time supporter of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)… Despite being himself a Tamil, he strongly supported the Bandaranaike government’s policy of not negotiating with the Tamil Tigers insurgents in northern Sri Lanka. [Link]

Grinchness continues to cut its green swath across the subcontinent. First Pakistan and Afghanistan banned Indian films. Then, just a couple of months ago, the idyllic Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan banned Indian entertainment channels (via Desi Flavor):

Telecast of some Indian news and entertainment channels has been barred by cable operators in Bhutan, after local media labelled them as a threat to their cultural values, the Lok Sabha was informed on Thursday. “… the above decision was taken by the cable operators themselves, following a series of articles, which appeared in the media in Bhutan,” Reddy said. He said it was alleged in most of the articles that some of these channels were “culturally degrading and were undermining Bhutanese cultural values, besides distracting students from their studies…” [Link]

“Bhutanese kids… suddenly saw these big men [pro wrestlers] beating each other up on television,” he added. “They couldn’t understand it. There were several pained letters from kids saying ‘why are they doing this?’… “[Young people] want and need what they see on television - the fashion, the clothes, the whole changing lifestyle, going to bars, drinking,” Kinley Dorji said. “A lot of these ideas have come from television. And they want more now.”

Others, though, see the whole debate as largely irrelevant. They point out that the vast majority of Bhutan’s population - 70% - do not even have electricity, let alone television. [Link]

You’d think if Bhutan really cared about moral degeneracy, they’d ban public drunkenness and penis art. ‘Culturally degrading’ and ‘distracts from studies’ is kind of the whole point of watching TV. I’ll grant the argument if the Powers That Be take crappy reality shows off air. Leave Beauty and the Geek — that isn’t a reality show, it’s fantasy

Author Sujata Massey writes hapa mysteries set in Japan (thanks, tilo). Her Bengali father once lived in Cambridge — alert Jhumpa Lahiri!

Her mother is from Bonne, Switzerland. Her father is a Calcutta-born Bengali. They met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she grew up in Philadelphia and Berkeley… she spends each day writing about a half-Japanese, half-American antiques dealer cum detective living in the seedier streets of Tokyo. [Link]

Her books’ titles (‘pearl,’ ‘kimono,’ ‘samurai’) pitch Asian exoticism, which, to be fair, is common in mass-market mysteries. One booster disagrees, but the name of his bookstore undercuts his argument

“Sujata really evokes a modern, quirky Japan that most Americans aren’t familiar with,” said Joe Guglielmelli, co-owner of The Black Orchid mystery bookstore in New York City. “She’s the only mystery writer out there who’s doing modern-day Japan…” [Link]

Massey chose a Japanese father and an American mother for Shimura to go against the grain. So often, Massey explains, it’s the other way around: The wife is Asian and the husband is American. “Asian women are exoticized,” she sighs… [Link]

She writes about the baffling and often funny Engrish popular in Japan (Hinglish ain’t no slouch either):

She prefers collecting the details of Japanese life… a “Milk Pie Club” sweat shirt; a brand of chocolate pretzels called “Pickle”; the “That’s Donald!” slogan on another passenger’s clothes. [Link]

The New York Times follows up (tip from Angana) on those Kids with their Cameras [see previous posts 1,2,3]:

The children’s story is by now well known, thanks to the sad, beautiful film that Ms. Briski and Ross Kauffman made about the youngsters’ pinched lives in Sonagachi, the largest red-light district in Calcutta. Their world opened up when Ms. Briski, a photojournalist struck by the children’s plight, decided to give them cameras and teach them photography.

Avijit actually makes his observation in “Born Into Brothels: Reconnecting,” a short three-years-after addendum to the original film that shows the ecstatic reunion of Ms. Briski and most of the children. They were between 8 and 12 when “Born Into Brothels” was shot; they are entering adolescence now, taller, more mature and, thanks to her efforts, attending boarding schools. They appear to have been rescued.

Ms. Briski’s life has changed, too. In 2002, she founded Kids With Cameras, an international nonprofit organization that is building a school for the children of Sonagachi, partly with money from the sales of her students’ photographs. (Kids With Cameras has also established programs in Haiti, Jerusalem and Cairo.)

There were several comments following one of our previous entries that didn’t quite like the message this movie sent or the idea that Briski was “rescuing” these kids.  Most comments however were positive.  Anyone who has seen the movie can attest to the fact that their story is powerful.  If you live in New York then you can decide for yourself this weekend at an exhibit of their work.  I’m curious as to what became of the children:

Open to the public, Kids with Cameras: Calcutta will be presented at ICP, 1114 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd St., Aug. 10 through 14 from 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm. The CINEMAX Reel Life presentation Born Into Brothels debuts TUESDAY, AUG. 16 (7:00-8:30 pm ET/PT), exclusively on CINEMAX. In tandem with the premiere, Born into Brothels: Reconnecting, a short update on the children featured in the documentary, will be available on CINEMAX On Demand beginning Aug. 11; Born Into Brothels will also be available on CINEMAX On Demand beginning that day, in advance of its CINEMAX debut.

Taking a page from inane metro surveys in the U.S., India Today just published its third annual ranking of best Indian states to live in (thanks, Razib). Comparing cities would’ve been just as inaccurate, but much more entertaining. Subscription required, but here’s the raw data (XLS).

A big balle balle! for the breadbasket state, proving that tractors beat coders, at least for now. Gujarat is tops in economic freedom (XLS), Kerala in education (XLS), Bengal ranking surprisingly low.

Large States

1. Punjab
2. Kerala
3. Himachal Pradesh
4. Tamil Nadu
5. Haryana
6. Maharashtra
7. Gujarat
8. Karnataka
9. Uttaranchal
10. Jammu & Kashmir
11. Andhra Pradesh
12. Rajasthan
13. West Bengal
14. Madhya Pradesh
15. Chhattisgarh
16. Assam
17. Uttar Pradesh
18. Orissa
19. Jharkhand
20. Bihar

Outrageous, bold and deadly…no wonder the media loves it. Every single time I turn on the TV or glance at Google News, I catch the latest development in the saga of Jennifer and George Hyatte, the outlaw married couple whose adventurous last few days read like a gangsta rap wet dream.

A US inmate has escaped after his wife shot dead a guard who was escorting the prisoner outside a courthouse in the state of Tennessee, authorities say.

Police say George and Jennifer Hyatte fled the scene in Kingston in a vehicle which was later found abandoned.

A hunt is under way for the former prison nurse and the escapee, who is described as “extremely violent”.

After that daring escape, the terrible twosome was on the run; they headed to Ohio (said, A, O, way to go Ohio) and got in a cab with one deliciously skeptical Mike Wagers. Wagers, their driver, made small talk that would later lead to a dramatic capture:

“The cover story they gave me didn’t really seem to wash too much,” Wagers told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith Thursday. “I mean, I could kinda see through that. But I had no indication that these guys were really dangerous or they were on the run.”

They claimed they were heading to a sales conference of Amway, the household goods manufacturer. But, says Wagers, “They didn’t strike me as the Amway type, because, to be honest, they weren’t very pushy about their product. And I’ve dealt with (Amway salespeople) before. So that was my only real suspicion.

Genius.

What about you? Have you enjoyed the fervent courtship of an Amway-ite? I know they’re everywhere but I was never approached, annoyed or harassed until I moved back to DC this year.

The first thing I’ve always noticed is how she feels to my touch.  Even if left out all day, there is some warmth left at her core that rises up through my fingertips.  A person’s true bea